Buccaneer (23 page)

“There is nothing along the Main for us, then?” Aurelia asked.

“No, nothing,” Whetstone said bluntly. “The Dutch have a monopoly of the smuggling.”

Diana said: “Why don’t you come to Jamaica with us? Change your names, carve a new name on the ship – no, you’ve no need to do that; no one in Jamaica will know the
Griffin
.”

“Yes,” Aurelia said, “we would like to do that, wouldn’t we Edouard?”

As the island of Curaçao dropped below the horizon astern and the
Griffin
followed the
Pearl
on to a north-westerly course at the beginning of a long voyage to Jamaica, Ned felt thankful that he would be having no more dealings with the Dutch. He found them close and secretive; their manner towards strangers reminded him of the time at the Godmersham estate when as a boy he had accidentally come across half a dozen poachers setting a trap for deer: they were sullen, frightened and yet, to a young boy, menacing – until he found they had expected him to shoot at them with his sporting gun, which was loaded with bird shot.

Whetstone had no liking for them either, but he grinned and slapped their backs and was cheerful with them because for the past few years he had had to rely on them and, he admitted, although they drove a hard bargain they could generally be forced to keep their word, because more than most they looked to tomorrow, so today’s bargain was kept because it could lead to bigger bargains in the future.

Both Saxby and Whetstone had complained that they were putting a great deal of faith in Mr Wagstaffe’s skill as a chartmaker: they had found that Curaçao was nearly thirty miles further south than marked on the chart. Had Wagstaffe placed Jamaica correctly?

Ned had been startled, listening to Whetstone and Saxby discussing the navigation: to him it seemed a black art, something that should be approached with suitable awe, but they were speculating whether Jamaica, like Curaçao, had been placed too far south, or too far east or west, and Whetstone had finally rolled up his own copy with the comment that if they sailed past it they would soon know because they would reach Cuba about one hundred miles to the north, whereas if they allowed too much for the west-going current they would find the end of Hispaniola.

“Never trust charts myself,” Whetstone declared. “This fellow Wagstaffe never sailed these waters; he relies on information from the masters of merchant vessels. I could tell him a few things about the Main coast, seven hundred miles of it, but I never would: I don’t think even the Dons have a proper chart of it – I’ve never found one in all the Spanish ships we’ve captured. They seem to rely on copies of Wagstaffe. Most of them looked like copies of copies of what someone remembered when he sobered up!”

Once Whetstone had gone back to his ship Ned tried to force himself to think of her by her new name,
Peleus
, and Whetstone by his new name of Whetheread. The
Pearl
’s carpenter, so Whetstone said, was pleased with the choice because it left him the first two letters unchanged but it was even more fortunate that one of Ned’s men, hearing of the
Pearl
’s carpenter’s task, had mentioned to Saxby that if Sir Thomas needed any changes in the certificate of registry, he could perhaps be of assistance. Saxby had brought the man to Ned to discover that Edward Hart, formerly employed on the Kingsnorth plantation as a labourer, owed his transportation to his skill at forgery landing him in the Bridewell.

“All I need is a sharp knife to scrape a layer off the parchment,” he explained, “that way the
Pearl
vanishes, and the names of the original owners. Then I need a quill and some soot to make fresh ink. The new name for the ship is good,” he added. “Means I have the first two letters to give me the style, and the new name having an extra letter means I can make a good job fraying the parchment. If the carpenter has a nice piece of shagreen, I can get the parchment really smooth and I guarantee no one’d ever spot the change.”

“If he hasn’t,” Yorke said, “it won’t take long to catch a shark and skin it. It’s time we had some shagreen at work,” he told Saxby. “I keep getting splinters in my hand from the woodwork. A good rub with shagreen and then a few coats of boiled linseed oil…”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Saxby, wondering where Mr Yorke had picked up that information and guessing, without any particular regret, that it would not be long before his own role in the ship would be that of the mate, not master.

These last three months had seen a big change in Mr Yorke. Had it come from inside or had it been forced upon him? Saxby was far from sure, nor was he very certain what caused it. Back at Kingsnorth Mr Yorke was always quiet, going his own way, not mixing with his neighbours. No one could blame him for that; they were a hard-drinking and vicious gambling crowd and, from what Saxby heard, once they had the rumbullion inside them and the dice were rolling, likely as not the night would end up in a fight and, once a month, sometimes more frequently, a duel. So Mr Yorke spent his evenings in his own home. He had more books than anyone Saxby had ever heard tell of; he read so much Mrs Wilson worried about his eyesight.

As an employer, no man could wish for a better: he had come out to Barbados four years ago to take over the Kingsnorth plantation from a scoundrel who had ingratiated himself with the old earl, Mr Yorke’s father, and he had spent exactly one month apparently doing nothing. In fact he had been listening and looking. The scoundrel – Saxby even now would not think of the man’s name, let alone speak it – had tried to poison Mr Yorke’s mind about most of the people employed on the plantation. Meanwhile Mr Yorke had met Saxby, an under-foreman at an estate in St Philip’s parish, at the other end of the island.

Then one day he rode over, offered Saxby the job of running Kingsnorth, paid off Saxby’s employer, paid off the scoundrel and told him that if he was still on the island in a month’s time the provost marshal would be after him with a warrant for massive peculation, and that was that: Kingsnorth was, one could say, under new management!

Yet Mr Yorke had made no bones about his own personal position: Saxby could remember their detailed talk almost word for word. Mr Yorke had said he knew nothing about farming in the tropics, but he felt something was badly wrong with the crops grown at Kingsnorth and most of the other plantations.

“The soil is so rich here that if you throw down a splinter of wood today, you’ll have a tree tomorrow. Yet this plantation loses money – and I’m making allowances for the peculation that’s been going on.”

Saxby was proud of the next sentence spoken to him. “Saxby,” Mr Yorke had said, “I don’t know what we should be growing but I have an idea you do, so speak up and let’s start planting!”

That was when Kingsnorth had changed to sugar. They had to build the
ingenio
. Saxby recalled that he had even had to explain to Mr Yorke that that was the word for the sugar mill, with a boiling house, filling room, cisterns, stillhouse and so on. He had stood by his word that Saxby should plan the best as he would get it.

All of which made it more of a tragedy that by the time it was all built and working overtime, and the crops were growing well, they had to make a bolt for it in the
Griffin
. Four hundred acres under sugarcane, a hundred of pasture, another hundred left as woodland and forming a windbreak to the eastward, five acres of ginger, fifty of cotton, and fifty growing provisions for the plantation…

Several other plantation owners used to call after the first year to inspect the plantation; several had made Saxby tempting offers to go and work for them, but there was no money or promise that could tempt him away from Mr Yorke. He was the master, yes; but it was not like that. More as though Mr Yorke was the senior partner.

Saxby could remember the day he mentioned Mrs Judd to him. He had waited for the right moment and then started off, oh ever so tactfully, to find Mr Yorke smiling and saying it was high time Saxby fell into the arms of a good woman! So Mrs Judd had moved in, and without either she or Saxby realizing it was happening, Mr Yorke had employed more women about the place. Certainly the plantation house needed a few servants to keep it tidy and make sure Mr Yorke ate proper meals – and Mrs Judd ruled over them like an empress.

It was Mrs Judd who first said that Mr Yorke was a lonely man who walked alone. When Saxby had laughed at her and said it was like calling a black man black, she had rounded on him. Some men were lonely, she said, because they did not like people or because people did not like them or because there were no folk to keep them company. Some men walked alone because they did not need other people to lean on; they could decide which way to walk and what decisions to make without discussing it with everyone. Mr Yorke was lonely because there were no people to keep him company, but he walked alone because he could decide for himself.

How right she was! For example, the morning Mr Yorke received the warning letter from his father – he had collected Mrs Wilson, closed down Kingsnorth and sailed, all within how many hours? Twelve or so. And he had not abandoned anyone who wanted to come with him, even paying off those scallawag new indentured servants who stayed behind, reckoning they could claim to be the same as time-expired and ask for the lump sum. Little did they realize that the ships now regularly coming in with all these negroes from the Guinea coast would soon put an end to white labour out here. For £20 a man, a plantation owner could buy a young slave and have him for the rest of his life, eating simple food and working a lot better in the heat than some scoundrel dragged out of the Bridewell or sent out here by Cromwell, prisoners of war who knew nothing but how to hate and sulk and dodge work. For £15 the plantation owner could buy a negro woman and start breeding from her, like a horse or an ox. In a dozen years he would have half his investment back; in thirteen, providing both the children were boys, he would get the whole.

Saxby found himself grinning. That scoundrel Wilson was always going on about what a great man this Oliver Cromwell was, and how the New Model Army had swept the Royalist troops from the battlefields. The prisoners transported were always badly treated, jeered at, severely punished for the slightest thing – the Bullocks were a good example. But it had been Cromwell – Parliament anyway – that had finally lost Wilson his wife and, at the same time, from what the Bullocks said, turned that bully into a very frightened man.

So Mr Yorke (the Yorke family, rather, because of course Kingsnorth belonged to the family, not to Mr Yorke alone) had lost a plantation and gained – well, not exactly a wife but a remarkable woman: he would rate her as a Mrs Judd of the aristocracy. If only Mrs Bullock had known which side a man’s heart was on, Mr Yorke would be married to Mrs Wilson by now.

Still, this Miss Gilbert, or whatever her name was, might cause that to end up happily. She was not married to Sir Thomas and they made no bones about it: he had left a wife in England, but Saxby did not get the impression that Miss Gilbert had ever been married. What a woman! Another Mrs Judd! And perhaps Mrs Wilson might one day follow her example.

Mrs Wilson, though, had a quick brain. She was not a great talker – the fact that she was French might make her shy – but when she did say something it usually brought them up all standing. Mr Yorke listened to her, but in the last few days Saxby had the idea that she was making him talk more, explain his ideas, drawing him out. Giving him more confidence, in fact. The trouble was that once Mr Yorke knew how Kingsnorth should be run, he had gained plenty of confidence. Now at sea he was starting all over again.

It was lucky the man he chose to be the manager of Kingsnorth had served in the Royal Navy; even luckier that he had deserted! It had meant that the
Griffin
was used to fetch and take from the other islands, so that Saxby had been able to train a dozen men as occasional seamen.

Mr Yorke, though, was in the same position as the day he first arrived in Kingsnorth from England, knowing nothing about running a plantation in the tropics. Now he had his men (and women!) on board the
Griffin
and though luckily he knew the rudiments of seamanship, he was having to learn smuggling, buccaneering, piracy, how to fight sea battles… And Saxby remembered how he had been scared for Martha Judd’s safety when that
guarda costa
came out from behind that headland. Mr Yorke must have felt the same for Mrs Wilson – and it was just as bad for the Bullocks.

So they had all had their share of good and bad luck! Mr Yorke had lost Kingsnorth and gained Mrs Wilson: Saxby had lost an interesting job at Kingsnorth but gained command of the
Griffin
and finally got a hitch on Martha, who sometimes hinted she would fly the coop; and the Bullocks reckoned they had made a good exchange.

Martha in those breeches! And then Mrs Wilson, and very becoming too. Women being women, it would be interesting to see if Martha and Mrs Bullock and Mrs Wilson rigged themselves out in the same sort of split dress as Miss Gilbert, or whatever her name was, or whether she would copy their breeches. As long as they undressed before they went to bed he doubted if their men would mind much.

Jamaica. It was a stroke of luck when they sighted the
Pearl
’s sail on the horizon. The
Peleus
, he corrected himself. This Sir Thomas Whetstone seemed to know most of the answers. Mr Yorke said he was a Royalist, even though he was Cromwell’s nephew. Well, from all accounts Cromwell was a country gentleman before he took to treason and killed the King, so it made as much sense as anything did these days.

To have been buccaneering along the Main for three years – he could see why the Dons would like to get the garotte round Sir Thomas’ throat. And they did catch him once and sentenced him to a lifetime in the saltmines, but they thought he was just another English seaman; they did not realize – until he had escaped and found the
Pearl
and rowed out to her in a stolen canoe – that they had “Don Tomás” in their hands!