When Adam Long was ushered into his presence, van Bramm was puffing on a long pipe, and the clouds of smoke that blurred his features lent him an additionally diabolical aspect: he might have been some overfed fiend, spikily asmile, who peered up through the smoke from the brimstone while he greeted a freshly damned soul into Hell. In that light the smile, never amiable, seemed rather a leer.
The man was stripped to the waist, which waist, a large one, was enwrapped in four or five heavy, raw silk sashes of various colors. It was not stuck with daggers and pistols, in the Providence mode: there were no weapons about van Bramm at all. He wore short black flannel pantaloons, very wide, which did lend him a Dutch air. He wore soft slippers, red leather exquisitely tooled, somewhat Moorish in manner. His ankles were bare. The torso was tremendous, but though there was fat, it was not sloppy fat: van Bramm would never have waddled. His head was large—and as bald as an egg. He had so thick a neck that it seemed no neck at all. There were many rings on his fingers, even a ring on one of his thumbs. A plain flat band of gold encircled his left arm just above the biceps. A heavy chain, the links of which were thick gold triangles, hung against a chest as innocent of hair as the head. From his ears were suspended silver crescents set with small diamonds, rubies, emeralds. These quivered as he puffed on his pipe, and the gems, shaken, caused a swarm of tiny bright reflections to swing back and forth on the top of each massive, slightly oily, satin-muscled shoulder.
With it all, Everard van Bramm's most compelling feature was his eyes. They were the eyes of a snake.
Adam's first thought was one of gladness that he'd refused to bring Maisie with him. She had pleaded to come, bring afraid for him. Well, Maisie had a strong stomach, and especially for a young woman seemingly so slight; but Adam doubted that she could have looked upon van Bramm without swooning.
Resolved Forbes was keeping an eye on Maisie; and this need was regrettable, for Forbes had a great many other things to do today.
"Sit ye down, Captain. Rum? Bumboo? Madeira?"
"Thanks," said Adam, and flopped upon a cask and spread his legs, the sword hiked around to fall between them.
Nobody mentioned the sword, but it was certain that they all saw it.
For there were others in the room, four or five others, though van Bramm was the only one who counted. A man named Cark did a great deal of the talking, but he watched van Bramm's face all the while as might an interpreter.
There was no palaver, as Adam had expected. They went right to the point.
'You come armed, Captain—" with a waggle of his pipe to indicate the sword. "Are you a prisoner here or one of us?"
Adam chuckled.
"That's just what I was going to ask you."
Van Bramm chuckled. He raised a blond eyebrow toward Cark, then returned to his pipe.
"The late 'Major' Kellsen, so-called," Cark said sententiously, "had given us to believe that when you and your shipmates and your esteemed wife were captured. Captain, you expressed a willingness to go on the account. Did he get this straight?"
"He did not. I expressed a willingness to go with them."
"But there was nothing else you could do!"
"That's right."
"Kellsen reported that you had agreed to join us."
"I said nothing about going on the account."
"That was his understanding."
"I can't help it what his understanding was. His understanding up till yesterday was that he knew how to fight with a cutlass, but it seems he was wrong there, too."
Cark was deadly serious, but van Bramm here took the pipe out of his mouth and chuckled. Van Bramm looked appreciatively at Adam.
"What about the others?" he asked Cark.
"Sclden, Peterson and Waters will join. Gardner, Rellison, Bond and Forbes will do whatever the skipper says."
"So you see, Captain, how many lives you take when you refuse to become a pirate."
"I didn't say I refused to become a pirate."
"You will join us then?"
"I haven't made up my mind yet."
"Bloody well time you did," somebody muttered.
Now this was true. What Adam had been banking upon was the Providencers' clear propensity to let things slide, their slovenliness, laziness, lack of attention to details. The very phrase, "go on the account," meaning to become an out-and-out pirate, an avowed pariah, was an odd one—or was it ironic?—to apply to these men who couldn't keep anything straight, in their minds or on their books. What Adam had hoped was that he and his fellows from the Goodwill after a while would be taken for granted, more or less forgotten. Then when the right time came they could slip away. He wished to do everything he could to give the appearance of settling down, not talking about the outside world, never letting himself be seen to gaze wistfully at the Goodwill. However, being inconspicuous was difficult when you were paired with a woman like Maisie Treadway. And since the fight on Cucaracha he might as well resign himself to the fate of being a folk hero, a still-living myth.
Van Bramm leaned toward him. There was never a moment when the man didn't smile.
"We have your cargo, which we don't want. Captain. We have your vessel, which we do. We'd like to have you. What's your decision?"
Adam paused.
"After all. Captain, you're a man of sense. You have your fortune to make. Well, join up. The way they feel about you out there"—with a wave of the pipe toward the door—"you're sure to be elected captain of any enterprise you undertake. That's a double share."
"If I get it."
"I think you'd get it. I think you're the kind of man who would. And remember there's a war going on. We're free to roam the seas and nap anything we can nap."
"And remember this, too, that the war ain't going to last forever. And once it's over they'll be looking around for people to hang—people they didn't have time to hang while they were fighting."
"Afraid?"
"Not of hanging, no. But maybe I am a mite afraid of going into a business I've got no control over and can't say how it might end. If we had a guarantee that this war would last so-and-so-many years, that would be something else again. But we haven't. We didn't know when it was going to start, any more'n we knew why. And we won't know when it's going to end—not until they tell us it's all over—and we won't know why then either."
"Meaning you think piracy's bad business?"
"Well, there's a power of folks don't care for it."
"When the pirate's small, yes. But look at Drake. He was the one said, 'Who ever heard of being a pirate for a million pounds?' "
"Well, a million pounds, that's different," Adam conceded.
"Did they hang Drake? No, they knighted him."
"That was a long while ago."
"Henry Morgan wasn't such a long while ago," one of the other men said. "And they knighted him, too."
"They didn't knight Brandish. Or Kidd."
"Kidd was a fool."
"And what about Thomas Tew? Blown to bits. And Avery? Buried in a pauper's grave after they stole all his money from him and he didn't dare squawk. And Tom Hart? He hangs in my home town right now. Been hanging there two years. It hasn't done him any good."
Van Bramm shook a reflective head.
"Witness Tom Hart's turning-off, did ye. Captain?"
"Aye. Did you know him?"
"I was his sailing master. And Newport—never thought they'd get him there. We had a good agent in that town. Man name of Evans."