Captain Crossbones. Donald Barr Chidsey

       Captain Crossbones

      Copyright © 1958, 1986, by Donald Barr Chidsey.

      All rights reserved.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidepress.com

      CHAPTER I

      THE LIGHT of a leprous moon swathed Fort Nassau, a pile that, while by no means old in this year 1718, had been so often and so savagely sacked by the Spaniards that it had about it the air of a ruin whose very ghosts have crept away. The ramparts were rubble, the gun platforms pocked with craters. Dismounted cannons were strewn like jackstraws across the bailey and along the base of the walls: spiked as they had been, their touchholes torn open, their muzzles plugged with lead, they were not worth their weight in junk, and nobody had even troubled to steal them.

      Yet this fort was manned. A torch spluttered in its iron cresset. Sentries stood at the gate, from time to time apprehensively eyeing the town beyond, where many a rumshop still glowed, though it was near dawn. There were sentries, too, on the walls, which they paced with uncertainty, leaning forward like men wading waist-deep in water.

      There was even a flag—the black flag of death.

      The flag had not been raised above any part of the fort proper, but rather over a structure that stood at the base of the wall on the bay side. The last carpenter’s hammer had sounded against this structure but a few hours ago, so that now it stood ready for its burden. It was strong. It could support all of the weight about to be suspended from it. A platform about four feet off the earth was supported by three large but empty hogsheads. Each of the hogsheads was encircled by at rope, and by means of a master-rope connecting them, these platform supports could be jerked away all at once. Other ropes dangled from a crossbeam, nine of them, and each one ended in a noose.

      Silence hung heavy in that place. The sentries scarcely grunted when they turned. No word of command came from the lighted chamber atop the guardhouse where the new governor, who had staked his career and quite possibly his life on this mass execution, could have been pictured counting the hours, even the minutes. Nor in the cell where the nine convicted men lay was there much conversation.

      Moonlight seeped into this lugubrious place through a couple of gratings, and it was smeared hesitantly across the ceiling. The straw was clean, and so on the whole was the cell itself. The men were gyved, each by his right ankle, to a long and exceedingly strong steel chain. The ends of this chain were fastened to staples at the two ends of the cell. The prisoners could rise, stretch, and make their way in turns to and from the pail. They could hear the pacing of the guards, the challenges, even the slap of wavelets against the shore; but the gratings were high, and the men could see nothing that lay outside.

      They were a motley crew.

      The leader was John Augur, who had been serving under Jennings when the buccaneers first took over this island of New Providence. A middle-aged and flatulent man; he had hair that was greasy and gray. He stank. He belched. He scratched himself. Unspeakably the brute, he filled his last hours with expressions of outrage that he and his pals should have been tried at all, much less convicted.

      “What kind of a cove is this? All the others always divvied with us. Does Rogers think he’s better’n them?”

      “Maybe we didn’t offer enough?” suggested Will Cunningham, a small goat-faced man in his forties.

      “We offered every dollar we had! Ain’t that enough?”

      These two were old and tough and fit to die. The others were young.

      Two of the younger men were Irish

      Dennis Macarty didn’t know the meaning of tears. Piracy had been just another lark for this light-hearted lad.

      “I always said I’d die with my shoes off. D’ye suppose they’ll let me kick them off when the time comes?”

      “Shut up,” said William Dowling.

      Dowling was the other one from Ireland. Handsome in a dark way, he was morally a monster. He alone had put up no sort of defense. Far from showing remorse, he had boasted in court that the reason he’d left Ireland was that he murdered his own mother: he had beaten her to death, the brave boy.

      Tom Morris, George Bendell, William Ling, all were under twenty. They said nothing, but their eyes were open and sometimes their lips moved as though in prayer. They were badly frightened.

      “The only one I feel sorry for is Rounsivel here,” said William Lewis, cocking his head and squinting at the contents of the bottle he held, to measure the amount left.

      A giant, Lewis was amiable when drunk but at no other time. Once, in London, he had been a promising pugilist, but now his hand wobbled and his step was not steady.

      “He never was on the account, yet they’re going to stretch his neck the same as us.”

      “That’s because he’s a lawyer, and they hate lawyers,” Augur put in. “He told ’em, didn’t he? He said that Rogers’ commission don’t authorize him to make up no court of vice admiralty. We should’ve been sent home. Our trial was illegal.”

      “Which will help us,” chuckled Macarty, “when they knock those planks out from under our feet.”

      “Shut up,” said William Dowling.

      “Illegal,” said John Augur, “that’s what it is.”

      The ninth man, the one to whom reference had been made, was in his lower twenties. Long, lean, hard, but not coarse, sartorially, perhaps because he’d had the furthest to fall, he showed the poorest of the lot. His salmon-colored drugget coat was smudged. The buckles were gone from his shoes—stolen. He had succeeded in keeping his holland shirt and colebatteen ruffles tolerably clean, but he had no manner of cravat left. He’d been obliged to throw away his periwig, so infested with lice had it become. Now, like the others, he wore his own hair: but his, cropped, made his head shine baldishly in the eerie light of the moon. It was a long, slightly equine head, and the absence of hair made his face show even more saturnine than would normally have been the case.

      George Rounsivel, not because he meant to be aloof but only out of weariness, spoke no word. He had done as well as he could for the others, shifting at each chain-change, waiving his turn at the pail, even from time to time trying to cheer them with a story. But now he uttered no sound, for he was sick of them and their kind. It was not the least bitter of his reflections that he, who a month ago wouldn’t have known one of their sort, soon would hang with them in the last great ghastly companionship of death, unidentifiable from the others save perhaps by the quality of his shirt.

      Arms around his legs, chin on knees, he sat and stared at nothing, brooding. Oddly—for in every other way no two men less like one another could have been conceived—he resembled John Augur in that it was not grief that consumed him in this his last hour, but indignation. Damn it, that trial had been irregular! All of George Rounsivel’s professional training was outraged, all his sense of decency as well.

      Time was what he had fought for. If these prisoners had been sent back to England for trial, as they should have been, George Rounsivel would have been able, if only by post, to establish his bona fides. He could have proven that he was a gentleman, a member of the Pennsylvania colonial bar, and that he had been dispatched to the Bahama Islands by financiers who had commissioned him to study the possibilities of cotton planting there He could not prove this now; the pirates had destroyed his papers. But in England he could have proven it. He might have spent some months in a noisome jail, and it was unlikely that he would ever have gotten his belongings back, but at least he would live.

      In