“They spared me nothing,” he said.
His uniform was spattered with blood, too. At his waist dangled an empty scabbard; his sword was missing, and as they turned back from the waterfall they could see it — it was in the hand of one of their captors, who was standing waiting for them. He was short and square and heavily built, not entirely Negro, possibly as much as half white. He wore a dirty white shirt and loose, ragged blue trousers, with dilapidated buckled shoes on his splay feet.
“Now, Lord,” he said.
He spoke with the Island intonation, with a thickening of the vowels and a slurring of the consonants.
“What do you want?” demanded Hornblower, putting all the rasp into his voice that he could manage.
“Write us a letter,” said the man with the sword.
“A letter? To whom?”
“To the Governor.”
“Asking him to come and hang you?” asked Hornblower.
The man shook his big head.
“No. I want a paper, a paper with a seal on it. A pardon. For us all. With a seal on it.”
“Who are you?”
“Ned Johnson.” The name meant nothing to Hornblower, nor, as a glance showed, did it mean anything to the omniscient Spendlove.
“I sailed with Harkness,” said Johnson.
“Ah!”
That meant something to both the British officers. Harkness was one of the last of the petty pirates. Hardly more than a week ago his sloop, Blossom, had been cut off by the Clorinda off Savannalamar, and her escape to leeward intercepted. Under long-range fire from the frigate she had despairingly run herself aground at the mouth of the Sweet River, and her crew had escaped into the marshes and mangrove swamps of that section of coast, all except her captain, whose body had been found on her deck almost cut in two by a round shot from Clorinda. This was her crew, left leaderless — unless Johnson could be called their leader — and to hunt them down the Governor had called out two battalions of troops as soon as Clorinda beat back to Kingston with the news. It was to cut off their escape by sea that the Governor, at Hornblower’s suggestion, had posted guards at every fishing beach in the whole big island — otherwise the cycle they had already probably followed would be renewed, with the theft of a fishing boat, the capture of a larger craft, and so on until they were a pest again.
“There’s no pardon for pirates,” said Hornblower.
“Yes,” said Johnson. “Write us a letter, and the Governor will give us one.”
He turned aside and from the foot of the cliff at the back of the shelf he picked up something. It was a leatherbound book — the second volume of Waverley, Hornblower saw when it was put in his hands — and Johnson produced a stub of pencil and gave him that as well.
“Write to the Governor,” he said; he opened the book at the beginning and indicated the flyleaf as the place to write on.
“What do you think I would write?” asked Hornblower.
“Ask him for a pardon for us. With his seal on it.”
Apparently Johnson must have heard somewhere, in talk with fellow pirates, of ‘a pardon under the Great Seal’, and the memory had lingered.
“The Governor would never do that.”
“Then I send him your ears. Then I send him your nose,” said Johnson.
That was a horrible thing to hear. Hornblower glanced at Spendlove who had turned white at the words.
“You, the Admiral,” continued Johnson. “You, the Lord, The Governor will do that.”
“I doubt if he would,” said Hornblower.
He conjured up in his mind the picture of fussy old General Sir Augustus Hooper, and tried to imagine the reaction produced by Johnson’s demand. His Excellency would come near to bursting a blood vessel at the thought of granting pardons to two dozen pirates. The home government, when it heard the news, would be intensely annoyed, and without doubt most of the annoyance would be directed at the man whose idiocy in allowing himself to be kidnapped had put everyone in this absurd position. That suggested a question.
“How did you come to be in the garden?” he asked.
“We was waiting for you to go home, but you came out first.”
If they had been intending —
“Stand back!” yelled Johnson.
He leaped backwards with astonishing agility for his bulk, bracing himself, knees bent, body tense, on guard with the sword. Hornblower looked round in astonishment, in time to see Spendlove relax; he had been poising himself for a spring. With that sword in his hand and its point against Johnson’s throat, the position would have been reversed. Some of the others came running up at the cry; one of them had a staff in his hand — a headless pike stave apparently — and thrust it cruelly into Spendlove’s face. Spendlove staggered back, and the staff was whirled up to strike him down. Hornblower leaped in front of him.
“No!” he yelled, and they all stood looking at each other, the drama of the situation ebbing away. Then one of the men came sidling towards Hornblower, cutlass in hand.
“Cut off his ear?” he asked over his shoulder to Johnson.
“No. Not yet. Sit down, you two.” When they hesitated Johnson’s voice rose to a roar. “Sit down!”
Under the menace of the cutlass there was nothing to do but sit down, and they were helpless.
“You write that letter?” asked Johnson.
“Wait a little,” said Hornblower wearily; he could think of nothing else to say in that situation. He was playing for time, hopelessly, like a child at bedtime confronted by stern guardians.
“Let’s have some breakfast,” said Spendlove.
At the far end of the shelf a small fire had been lighted, its smoke clinging in the still dawn in a thin thread to the sloping overhang of the cliff. An iron pot hung from a chain attached to a tripod over the fire, and two women were crouching over it attending to it. Packed against the back wall of the shelf were chests and kegs and barrels. Muskets were ranged in a rack. It occurred to Hornblower that he was in the situation common in popular romances; he was in the pirates’ lair. Perhaps those chests contained untold treasures of pearls and gold. Pirates, like any other seafarers, needed a land base, and these pirates had established one here instead of on some lonely cay. His brig Clement had cleaned out one of those last year.