Heart of Steele (5 page)

“Was when I left, ma’am. More eggs, please?”

“What? Oh, yes, eat up.” She dished another mound of scrambled eggs onto my platter with a look of pleasure on her face. In truth, she was about the best cook I had ever run across, and even a homely dish of scrambled eggs tasted the better for her touch. She beamed as I began to eat, and said, “You just missed Jessie and dear Miss Fairfax….”

I almost choked. “I thought Jessie and Helena, uh, Miss Fairfax had returned to England?” Jessie was Mrs. Cochran’s daughter. She was a brown-eyed, brown-haired girl a little older than I was. The best I can say of her is that she tended to make life interesting everywhere she went. For that matter, so did Miss Helena Fairfax.

“No, bless you, the lady is living at her great-uncle’s house in Spanish Town. That would be Sir Reginald Fairfax who sits on the council—frankly,
because Governor Molesworth had to put him someplace.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Sir Reginald has lived in Jamaica in perpetual disgrace for as long as anyone can remember. He’s the living definition of an old rake, he is, and thrilled to have someone as respectable as his grandniece to run his establishment for him. Quality folks are calling on him that haven’t set foot in that house for thirty years. Or so I’m told, since I’m not a gossiping woman like some I could name. …”

Mrs. Cochran rattled on like that until I was through with all the eggs and bacon and had sopped up what was left with half a loaf of freshbaked bread. Finally, stuffed full as a Christmas goose, I asked the question I had been sent here by Captain Hunter to ask.

“Beg pardon, Mrs. Cochran, but I’ve been sent back with a mission to complete. I have to learn what the feelings are toward Captain Hunter and the rest of us that sail on the
Aurora.
What do they think of us here in Port Royal?”

Mrs. Cochran sat there in silence for a moment, her lips pressed together in a tight little line. Even
before she finally spoke, I knew the news would not be to our liking.

“I’ll not lie to you, Davy Shea. It’s not good, not good at all. In fact, it’s as bad as it can be. At least two English ships have been found plundered and left as derelicts.”

“Aye, the
Lord Marlborough
and the
Princess of Wales.”

“True, but there are others that have not reached port. They now are weeks overdue. And there were …
things
found on the derelicts that point straight and true at William Hunter and your uncle. Things were done to, well, to the bodies of some of the dead … and … and there were … there were …”

I finished her thought: “There were messages and signs that plainly said ‘Mad William Hunter.’”

She sat back and stared at me. “If you know the answers, Davy, why are you asking the questions?”

I told her about the
Elizabeth Bingham
and what we had discovered on board her before we had sent her to the bottom of the sea. She nodded sadly. “That’s the rumor we have had swirling around Port Royal for the past weeks. And you are
telling me on your honor as a Christian that there is not a short ounce of truth to them?”

“On my honor and hope for salvation, Mrs. Cochran, we had nothing to do with those horrors!”

“Then that’s enough for me.” She smiled. “Not that I could’ve believed it to begin with. Folk don’t change like that. I’ve had your uncle here in this house off and on for more than five years and William close unto death in it for more than five months. And my Jessie can no more keep a secret than she can flap her arms and fly to the moon. I know what the lot of you are doing out there and it has nothing to do with slaughtering fellow Englishmen, and that’s the end of it!”

And with that final stern statement of support, I was hustled up the stairs to our old rooms and told to go to bed before I dropped off from exhaustion. Stuffed full of a good English breakfast and tired beyond belief, I tumbled into my own bed and was dead to the world in a manner of moments, no matter how much sunlight came streaming in through the dormer window.

“Only a mooncalf would go to bed at dawn and wake at dusk!”

That argumentative voice met me with full force as I staggered back down the stairs later that day. At the foot of the stairs, hands planted on her hips, was Jessie Cochran staring up at me. In a world of constant change, she alone seemed to stay the same.

“Hello, Jessie,” I said with a great yawn. I had just reached the foot of the stairs when I was caught up in a strong hug that took my very breath away.

“Oh, Davy, it is so good to see you alive and well!”

Miss Helena Fairfax, who had spent most of our acquaintance disguised as a British naval officer, was much different as a woman. For some reason she seemed smaller and smelled … different. Mrs. Cochran smelled of baking and good hard English soaps. Miss Fairfax smelled of exotic flowers and vanilla and clean red hair.

“Hello,” I said as she let go of me. Jessie was glaring at me, so I judged it wise to add no more than that.

“Dear Mrs. Cochran has told us of your mission. I know that it is most important. I spent some time with Captain William Hunter, and I know he is not capable of the horrible crimes attributed to him!”

Her cheeks had turned very pink, and her eyes flashed. I stammered, “Th-thank you, miss, it would make him feel good to hear it.”

“It would? Really? How delightful. Still, that does not change the fact that nearly everyone else considers him the most feared and hated freebooter in the West Indies. Captain Steele seems to have been quite successful in that.”

“Yes, miss. That’s why I plan to spend my time roaming the streets in hopes of hearing more of these cruel rumors.”

“Why would you do that?” demanded Jessie. “You know what they are saying out there! How many times do you have to hear it? That’s not what’s important, you mooncalf!”

I gave her a cold look. “Oh, and it’s a better idea you’d be having, Jessie Cochran?”

“I’d be hard pressed not to! Why go wandering the streets when all of Port Royal now comes to the King’s Mercy?”

For a second or two, I stood blinking at her. “But I thought no one came to the King’s Mercy because pirates had stayed here!”

“That was before you became famous bloodthirsty
pirate murderers! Now everyone has to come and have a drink in the famous King’s Mercy!”

“’Tis true,” said her mother in a guilty voice. “Business has been rather brisk of late.”

Miss Fairfax was tapping a finger on her chin. “That is a clever idea, Jessie.”

Jessie beamed at her.

Then Miss Fairfax turned her startling eyes on me. “I would strongly suggest that you abandon your idea of wandering the city, Davy, and instead settle yourself here to gather information for the good Captain Hunter.”

“As opposed to the one everybody’s talking about,” muttered Jessie.

I sighed, for I know when I’m outgunned and outmaneuvered. They were right, and arguing would not change that. So that afternoon I started to help Mrs. Cochran as her new potboy, running back and forth with food and drink for the guests and boarders of King’s Mercy. No one would notice me, for people never notice the folks who wait on them. I would run and fetch and go.

And listen.

The Drunkar’s Tale

I SWEAR, HAD I
known that my spying would take the form of being a servant at the beck and call of every rough customer who tottered in the door of the King’s Mercy, I would have had second thoughts. For days I ran my legs to stubs, fetching and carrying. Through it all, for my pains I got mainly curses and abuse, though at an odd time a sailor would toss a halfpenny piece my way. It was a small enough reward.

But to top off my misery, Jessie Cochran had come to stay with her mother for a spell while Miss Fairfax was away visiting her cousins in Port Maria, away on the north shore of Jamaica. Now that girl
had ways of tormenting me that her mother would never dream of. Somehow she had yet to forgive me for having shown up months and months before at the front door, alone, orphaned, and friendless.

On that occasion she had flung a basin of dirty water squarely into my face and had called me a thief and a runagate. Never mind that from the pity in my heart I had taught her to read, or that I had rescued her from captivity on the island of Tortuga. To be sure, I did have my uncle’s help in the rescue, and some from Captain Hunter as well, but to hear Jessie tell it, you would have thought she had planned the whole thing herself and that our coming with the very ship she had sailed away on was just part of her scheme.

Be that as it may, as the owner’s daughter, she naturally outranked a mere potboy, and so she was forever ordering me to do this or that, to scrape and wash dishes, to mind the fire, to chop stove wood, to run to the market for more molasses, for four good fat chickens, for this or for that or for the other. Pillar to post it was, so that by the third day I began to dread the sun’s peeping in my window, for it brought with it sixteen hours of harder
work than I had ever known aboard ship.

And the devil a word did I hear of Steele. Drunken sailors babble and yarn, much to Mrs. Cochran’s disgust, but none of them babbled of Steele or told stories of his whereabouts. They did speak now and again of Captain Hunter. For months after our escape from Port Royal, the King’s Mercy had suffered, for the honest sailors avoided the place where the notorious doctor-pirate Patrick Shea had lived.

But somehow that had worn off with the passing of time, and now the drinkers at Molly Cochran’s tables seemed rather proud of the place’s reputation. “Aye,” one sailor had roared the first night I was waiting tables, “Bill Hunter’s a man, so he is! Snatched a neat sloop from under the guns of the fort, got clean away, and sinks Spaniards by the shipload! A health to him, says I!” No one joined in the toast, but I saw several men nod at the words.

As the days and nights passed, I began to despair of learning any real news. On my trips to market, or whenever I could get away from the King’s Mercy for half an hour all together, I kept my ears open. For all I could tell, though, Steele had not yet left
enough derelicts with his vicious calling cards on them to make a very terrible impression at Port Royal. Nor did it seem likely that I would fulfill the second part of my mission and learn something of the hiding places that Steele might have in this part of the world.

Finally, though, my luck changed on the unluckiest day of the week for sailors—a Friday. That was the first night that I was to sail out and rendezvous with the
Aurora,
at midnight. Long before then, however, a stumbling, grizzled old sailor blundered into the King’s Mercy, squalling for rum.

He was bald on top, with a long, unkempt fringe of iron-gray hair. His face was all scarred and battered, his nose so broken that the tip of it almost touched his lower lip. He wore no shoes, pantaloons that might once have been blue, and a raggedy calico shirt with a blue-and-white pattern. He had lost all his teeth in front, and he spoke in a hoarse, mumbling roar. “Rum! Rum here for a sailor man! Be quick about it!”

I got him seated, and it was then that I noticed all the tattoos on his sinewy arms. Mermaids and spouting whales, compass roses and anchors
crowded the flesh, most of them sun-faded and ancient. But on the back of his right hand, where it must have hurt like blazes as it was being done, was a laughing skull above two crossed cutlasses, picked out in red. It looked more recent than the others.

And the image was the same as the one that Jack Steele flew on his bloodred pirate flag.

As I drew a measure of rum, I told Mrs. Cochran that this might be the very man who could answer at least some of our questions, and I begged her to let me hover in his corner as much as I could. She agreed, but warned, “He’s a rough-looking customer, Davy. Be ye careful, hear?”

The old fellow drank the rum greedily and called for another. I brought him another measure, a double one, and when he had finished that, yet another. By then he was staring and snorting, and I felt bold enough to ask, “New in these waters, Captain?”

He glared at me with a bleared brown eye. “Shut your gob, cabin boy!” And he snatched the latest round of rum from me as if he feared I would take it away from him.

By and by he began to talk, in a muttering, grumbling undertone. He was not speaking to me, but to
himself, or perhaps to companions he only imagined to be sitting by his side. “Call ’emselves pirates. These don’t be pirates nowadays,” he said in a thick voice. “None of ’em is a patch on old Morgan. Bunch of lily-livered landlubbers, the lot of ’em!”

You may be sure I kept the rum flowing, and I hung about to hear as much as I could of his rambling. The old man stared down at the glass in his hands and talked to it. After a time, as I took away one glass and set down a fresh one, I again spoke to him. “They say Jack Steele’s a man.”

“Aye!” he snapped. “Steele! There’s a right gentleman o’ fortune for ye. Strong as a ox, mean as a snake, that ’un. Sailed with ’im once on a time, did I.”

Since he had not snapped my head off, I said in a low voice, “I’d give a lot to run away and join him, I would. This is no life for a lad of spirit.”