“It’s just like you to ask. Er, I believe it was after we sailed from Jamaica, but before the pirate attack.”
“What were you doing in Jamaica?” Eliza asked suspiciously.
“Worked my extensive military connections to stow away on a ship bringing balls and powder to His Majesty’s fortifications there.”
“Why?”
“Port Royal. I wanted to see Port Royal, which is to pirates as Amsterdam is to Jews.”
“You wanted to become a pirate?”
“I wanted freedom. As a Vagabond, I have it-so long as I keep my wits about me. But a pirate is (or so I thought) like a Vagabond of the seas. They say that all of the seas, put together, are larger than all of the dry land, put together, and I supposed that pirates must be that much freer than Vagabonds. Not to mention a good deal richer-everyone knows that the streets of Port Royal are paved with Spanish silver.”
“Are they?”
“Very near, lass. All of the world’s silver comes from Peru and Mexico-”
“I know it. We used pieces of eight in Constantinople.”
“-and all of it must pass by Jamaica in order to reach Spain. Those Port Royal pirates siphoned off a goodly fraction of it. I reached the place in seventy-six-only a few years since Captain Morgan had personally sacked Portobelo and Panama, and brought all the proceeds back to Port Royal. It was a rich place.”
“I’m pleased that you wanted to be a buccaneer… I was afraid you had ambitions of being a sugar planter.”
“Then, lass, you are the only person in the world who esteems pirates above planters.”
“I know that in the Cape Verde Islands and Madeira, all sugar is cultivated by slaves-the same is true in Jamaica?”
“Of course! The Indians all died, or ran away.”
“Then better to be a pirate.”
“Never mind. A month aboard ship taught me that there’s no freedom at all to be had on the high seas. Oh, the ship might be moving. But all water looks the same, and while you wait for land to crawl over the horizon, you’re locked up in a box with a lot of insufferable fools. And pirate-ships are no different. There is no end of rules as to how booty and swag are to be collected, valued, and divided among the numerous different classes and ranks of pirates. So after a bad month in Port Royal, trying to keep my arsehole away from randy buccaneers, I sailed for home on a sugar-ship.”
Eliza smiled. She did not do this frequently. Jack did not like the effect it had on him when she did. “You have seen much,” she said.
“I’m more than twenty years old, lass. An old gaffer like me, in the twilight of his years, has had plenty of time to live a full life, and to see Port Royal and other wonders-you’re only a child, you’ve a good ten or, God willing, twenty years left.”
“It was on the sugar-ship that you were thrown into the brig?”
“Yes, for some imagined offense. Then pirates attacked. We were holed by a cannonball. The ship’s master saw his profits dissolving. All hands were called on deck, all sins pardoned.”
ELIZA WENT ON WITH FURTHERinterrogations. Jack heard not a word of it, as he was making observations of this pond, and of the mostly abandoned village that crowded along one shore of it. He paid particular attention to a gossamer-thread of smoke that rose and piled up against some invisible barrier in the atmosphere above. It was coming from a lean-to thrown up against the wall of an old collapsed house. A dog whined somewhere. The scrub between the pond and a nearby forest was scored with various trails cutting purposefully toward water’s edge, and the forest itself trapped in a miasma of smoke and vapors.
Jack followed the pond-shore, fish-bones crackling beneath the soles of his boots, until he’d come to the village. A man was dragging a faggot as big as himself down a road toward the lean-to. “No axes-they therefore must burn twigs, instead of cordwood, all winter,” Jack said to Eliza, significantly patting the axe that they’d taken from the chamber beneath Vienna.
The man was wearing wooden shoes, and was dressed in rags that had gone the color of ash, and he shimmered in an oily cloud of flies. He was staring lustfully at Jack’s boots, with an occasional, sad glance at the sword and the horse, which told him he would never get the boots.
“J’ai besoin d’une cruche,”Jack offered.
Eliza was amused. “Jack, we’re in Bohemia! Why are you speaking French?”
“Il y a quelques dans la cave de ca-la-bas, monsieur,”said the peasant.
“Merci.”
“De rien, monsieur.”
“You have to look at the shoes,” Jack explained airily, after allowing a minute for Eliza’s embarrassment to ripen. “No one but a Frenchman wears those sabots.”
“But how…?”
“France is a worse than normal place to be a peasant. Some pays especially. They know perfectly well there’s empty land to the east. As do our dinner guests.”
“Guests?”
Jack found a great earthenware jug in a cellar and set Eliza to work dropping pebbles into its open neck until it was so weighed down as to sink. Meanwhile he was working with the contents of his powder-horn, which had been useless weight to him since the destruction of Brown Bess. He tore a long thin strip of linen from a shirt and rolled it in powder until it was nearly black, then sparked one end of it with flint and steel and observed a steady and satisfactory progress of sputtering and smoky flame. The Frenchman’s children had come over to watch. They were so infested with fleas that they rustled. Jack made them stay well back. The fuse demonstration was the most wondrous event of their lives.
Eliza was finished with the pebble work. The rest was simple enough. All the remaining supply of gunpowder, plus a piece of new fuse, went into the jug. Jack lit the fuse, dropped it in, jammed a warm candle-stub into the neck to keep water out, and hurled the apparatus as far as he could into the pond, which swallowed it. A few moments later it belched-the water swelled, foamed, and produced a cloud of dry smoke, like a miracle. A minute later the water became lumpy and thick with dead or unconscious fish.
“Dinner is served!” Jack hollered. But the murky forest had already come alive-queues of people were moving down the paths like flame down the fuse. “Up on the horse, lass,” Jack suggested.
“Are they dangerous?”
“Depends on what’s catching. I have the good fortune to’ve been born immune and impervious to plague, leprosy, impetigo…” but Eliza was up on the horse already, in a performance of a scampering nature that no man alive (excepting sodomites) would not have enjoyed watching. Jack, for lack of other occupations, had taught her what he knew of riding, and she backed Turk off expertly and rode him up onto a little mossy hummock, gaining as much altitude as possible.
“’Twas the Year of our Lord sixteen hundred and sixty-five,” Jack said. “I was coming up in the world-having established a thriving business of sorts with brother Bob, providing special-ized services to the condemned. My first clew was the scent of brimstone-then heavy yellow smoke of it hanging in the streets, thicker and fouler than the normal fogs of London. People burnt it to purify the air.”
“Of what?”
“Then it was wains trundling down streets piled with corpses of rats, then cats, then dogs, then people. Red chalk crosses would appear on certain houses-armed watchmen stood before them to prevent any of the miserable residents from breaking out of those nailed-shut doors. Now, I couldn’t’ve been more than seven. The sight of all those blokes planted in the brimstone-fog, like hero-statues, with pikes and muskets at the ready-churches’ bells sounding death-knells all round-why, Bob and I had voyaged to another world without leaving London! Public entertainments were outlawed. Irish even stopped having their Popish feasts, and many absconded. The great hangings at Tyburn stopped. Theatres: shut down for the first time since Cromwell. Bob and I had lost both income and the entertainment to spend it on. We left London. We went to the forest. Everyone did. They were infested. The highwaymen had to pack up and move away. Before we-the Londoners fleeing the Plague-even came into those woods, there had been towns of lean-tos and tree-houses there: widows, orphans, cripples, idiots, madmen, journeymen who’d thought better of their contracts, fugitives, homeless reverends, victims of fire and flood, deserters, discharged soldiers, actors, girls who’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock, tinkers, pedlars, gypsies, runaway slaves, musicians, sailors between sailings, smugglers, confused Irishmen, Ranters, Diggers, Levellers, Quakers, feminists, midwives. The normal Vagabond population, in other words. To this was added, now, any Londoner fleet enough to outrun the Black Death. Now, a year later London burnt to the ground-there was yet another exodus. Same year, the Naval Pay Office went into default-thousands of unpaid sailors joined us. We moved around the South of England like Christmas Carolers from Hell. More’n half of us expected the Apocalypse within a few weeks, so we didn’t trouble with planning. We broke down walls and fences, undoing Enclosure, poached game in forests of some extremely worshipful lords and bishops. They weren’t happy.”