His lips began to move in great travail. Forth came a voice that seemed from a vast distance, speaking words sacred to me that I had never repeated to a human soul.
"Fight on. . . till. . . Cap'n's gone."
Lord Tarlton had raised his free hand to strike me when he saw the pallor of my face. The iron he had held dropped clanging on the stones of the hearth.
CHAPTER 29
Parry and Thrust
Shortly after my home-coming at Tavistock I had had Alan call upon Lloyd's in London on the matter of buying an American ship. The great association of underwriters had the inside track in the news and gossip of shipping; and one of its agents offered to pursue the inquiry for a reasonable fee. Since autumn I had been told of several vessels being available and had looked at two.
I had hardly returned from Elveshurst after Lord Tarlton's visit there when the agent sent a commissaire to my house on Charles Street. I was to meet him at once at Blackwall to see something pretty. Since he himself loved ships, I was sure he would not disappoint me, and on arriving there, I was surprised only by the moderation of his language. No palace in England was more beautiful to my sight than the long, low, sharp brig not long from Boston.
Her master and owner had died two days out from Land's End, and her competent mate, Mr. Blain, had brought her into port. He was of the opinion that his widow, English-born and accompanying her husband for a visit to her old home, would like to sell the ship and remain in her native land and never take to the seas again. So Jim and I surveyed her with great care.
She was of three hundred and ten tons, rather large to come down a New England ways considering she was built to fetch and carry, but small compared to an East Indiaman. The flare of her hull and her clean lines and her deck plan represented the best Yankee shipbuilding unsurpassed, if equaled, in the world; her masts were sweeping, in a style so new that Lloyd's had never seen it; her timbers were hand-picked, and if it came to outriding a hurricane, I would trust her before a great ship of the line five times her tonnage.
Her price was twenty thousand American dollars, which I paid without question. Appointing Mr. Blain to brevet captaincy, I bade him sail her between French and English Channel ports in what was little better than packet running, putting into London whenever handy until further notice. "And de good Lawd make de time pass soon," Jim prayed.
It might pass sooner than we had thought, bequeathing us dire defeat. Before the week was out. Lord Tarlton sent word to me at my house in Charles Street that he had business with me of signal importance, and could he wait upon me, accompanied by two gentlemen, within the hour? The message was brought, not by a respectable servant or commissaire but by brutal, murderous Pike, which fact alone heralded his master's mood of arrogance, and whose leer was arrogance's grotesque reflection. I was sitting down to dinner when the tidings came. As Jim carved me a final slice of venison roast, a footman announced my visitors' arrival.
"Since I haven't quite finished and don't want to keep them waiting, invite them in here for a glass of brandy," I replied.
"Cap'n, do you want me to stay and serve 'em?" Jim asked when the footman had left the room. "I don' mind."
"No, old shipmate. I know you wouldn't mind, if it was needed, but I don't want to see it. Besides, if you stay here, they might guard their words. But take a good look at them through the port hole."
This last was Jim's word for an aperture, about three feet square, between the butler's pantry and the dining room, through which dishes and trays could be passed. It afforded a straight view of the table, but since it opened at the end of the immensely long room-actually a banquet hall—the distance was nearly thirty feet from my chair and too far for easy hearing of low-voiced conversation between diners.
Jim set a brandy decanter and glasses on the table and went to his pantry. Lord Tarlton entered first, leaning a little on his cane, walking not like an eagle, as Sophia had once said, but like a phoenix. He was beautifully dressed, his hair silver, his lips pursed thoughtfully, a meditative expression on his small, beautifully molded face. Behind him strode a tall man whom I recognized as Sir Edwin Thatch, an official of considerable elevation in the Foreign Office. In the rear came a gross figure in resplendent dress, boozy and close to sixty, whose coarse, malign face caused me to see ghosts. I did not yet recognize it. It was associated in my mind with the Sepulcher of Wet Bones and those who had died there; but it was not the face of the quarry master or the foreman or any of the guards whom I could recall. I would place it in a moment, though—my memory was moving in great surges—and meanwhile I was grateful for the flint of my own face.
"We meet again, Mr. Blackburn, and I owe you an apology," Lord Tarlton said in his softest voice when I had risen and bowed.
"You needn't apologize for coming at this time. I'm through my meal, and hope all of you will join me in a glass."
"'Tis in regard to another matter, which I'll unfold when I've introduced these gentlemen, but I fear we've not time for tippling. Perhaps you've met Sir Edwin Thatch."
"No, my lord, I've not, but I know of his eminence."
"The other gentleman is Captain Henry Holmes, a former sailor like myself, but now home from the sea, and staying in Lincolnshire. You may be surprised to know you've met him before."
"I can't for the moment recall him to mind."
"You will in a minute," the man answered, with a knowing glance at the little lord.
"Meanwhile, will all of you sit?"
"Yes, while I convey my apology."
"And while you're about it. Lord Tarlton, why not accept the glass that Blackburn offers us?" the man introduced as Captain Holmes asked, with a longing glance to the decanter. "The weather's right for it, and we might as well make the business pleasant. If no one will join me, I'll help myself."
"Pray do."
"Wait one instant, Captain Holmes," Lord Tarlton ordered, at which the reaching hand stopped still. "You can positively identify this gentleman, our present host, as Holgar Blackburn?"
"Beyond all question of doubt."
"To be plain with you, Blackburn, there was a time I doubted it. You see, you didn't sound West Country to me, as I mentioned to you, and I was half-persuaded you were a Yankee traitor, taking that guise for purposes I couldn't guess. But Cap'n Holmes spent nigh half his lifetime in North Africa, and he saw you at the town of Nulat, some two hundred miles from Tripoli, about twelve years ago."
I looked once more at this Captain Holmes, and now I remembered our meeting. It was not at Nulat, where I had never been, but on the deck of a Barbary pirate not far from the Aegadian Isles. At Tripoli I had seen the last of him until now. If his name were ever Henry Holmes, it was the one he had borne as an American Loyalist serving under Captain Godwine Tarlton on Our Eliza against his native land. I had known him as Murad Reis.
Although I heard grapeshot swish again over the Vindictive's deck and saw my shipmates fall again, one by one, my face, my voice, and my least movement gave no sign.
"I don't recall the occasion," I answered Lord Tarlton.
"You don't?" Murad Reis broke in, in vicious mockery. "I guess when you got gold fever it fogged your memory."