"I must seek advice," he said. "Excuse me."
Nobody made a move to stop him when he went aft. They watched him in wonder, but said nothing.
He paused at the scuttle, and looked around. Only the top half of the sun showed now, and the sea was gold. Goodwill to Men rocked and rolled, groggy, the tiller lurching like a drunkard. Scarcely a cable length away the sloop stood with flapping jibs, her deck crowded with watchers who no longer troubled to look ferocious, being by now just plain impatient.
Adam sighed, and pushed the scuttle fully open.
"Will— Will they kill us?" Maisie whispered.
Her voice wavered but it did not break.
Adam was impassive.
"Come up," he called gently, "and do just as I tell you."
She had been prepared. She must have readied herself to the last fluffy ruffle. How she could have done it in that small space—and having done it, how so garbed she could climb the steep ladder and emerge on deck with a genuine smile, a vision of loveliness in yellow and blue, ribbons and laces and furbelows, the neck of her bodice low and frilly over bare powdered shoulders—here was a thing that no man could know, a secret between the ladies and the Lord.
Adam Long made a leg. She dropped him a curtsey.
He took her hand and held it high as he turned her to face the men amidships, properly proud of her. They, and especially Major Kellsen, were all eyes.
"My wife and I," Adam announced, "have decided to join you."
PART FOUR. Life Among the Cutthroats
Is there anything dirtier than dirty snow, or more clumsy than a swan out of water? The man who called himself Carse had only two things to remind him, physically, of what he once had been: his right hand and his left.
With a sword he was lithe and precise, grace's very epitome combined with strength, brain running into muscle running into steel, so that no man could say where one left off and the other began. Let him scabbard that blade, however, and Carse became what he customarily was—a fellow with a slouch, a leer, shifty eyes. There was no spring in his step. Indeed he shambled. True, he avoided bluster, a negative virtue which yet in itself marked him off in Providence, a place where loudmouthed-ness was the rule, where men seemed to feel an obligation to wallop themselves on the chest, bellowing about their unbeatableness, and where a stranger might have assumed, with reason, that courage was measured exactly by the volume of the voice. When he spoke at all Carse spoke low. There were times when he even lisped.
Except for those hands, then—long, slim, exquisitely tapered—he was, when not fencing, a singularly repulsive person. Though long, he looked squat. You believed that beneath his clothes, in little crevices of his body, in his armpits, in his crotch, there were pockets of stale air. He was not more than twenty-five or -six, but he looked overripe, prematurely rotten. His hair, his eyes, held no color: his face was a watery pink. He looked as though he couldn't grow a beard. He is best described, if it be description at all, by a sound: he looked like the noise that your heel makes when you draw it up out of the mud.
"Now this is what Marcelli used to call a mezza cavazione. You're resting too much weight on your left leg. Captain. Now watch. I'll disengage from above down, in either line. And keep that foot pointed this way."
"I feel like a fool, holding a position like this!"
"Very well. Stand any way you wish."
Adam hunched his shoulders. He took a stronger grip on the rapier, easing his forearm by not being so careful to keep the palm up. He let his left foot get further back. He left his right toe steal inward.
"Now," he cried. "Now I can fight!"
"Good—we'll fight."
Emotionless, saving his breath, the Englishman called the touches. He came back into guard position and saluted after each. Then he'd say "Now!" and attack again. He did not press. He moved with a sweet smooth supple regularity, perfectly in control of himself.
"Now—touch!" The blades were buttoned, but nevertheless they were stiff steel—not just foils from an academy—and when they hit they hurt. Carse did not seem intent upon what he was doing, but casual, almost negligent; and surely he didn't bunch his puny muscles, or pant, or roll his eyes; yet each touch was the apogee of carefully collected, inswept strength, and it stung.
"Now—touch!"
Adam Long tried every engagement he knew—not many, truly—but he could not catch the other's steel. He even tried, in desperation, what Carse had called the "universal parry," a heavy sweep in seconde, from a high quarte, executed at full arm's length as he retreated. He swished only air; and then Carse's padded point rammed his ribs—"Touch!" and Carse dropped back into guard position, saluted, and began to attack again.
Panic slipped its hot fingers over the man from Newport. He had already learned that you cannot depend on your eyes—that a great deal of your awareness of combat with rapiers lay in the way you felt your opponent's steel against your own, whether you pressed or he did, or whether the contact was so light and silvery as never to be noticed by an onlooker. That tingle of touch that passed between the blades and into your arm and all down and up your body, was an absolute requisite. Without it you were lost—as Adam was lost now. Was this a wraith he faced? He couldn't catch Carse's weapon, even for a brief click, much less parry it.
" Now—touch!"
Adam was getting more and more up on the balls of his feet, a natural nervous reaction Carse had warned him against. He was gripping his weapon with a fury of intensity, as a man might grip a club. He leaned forward, his face streaked with sweat.
Then it happened. He never did learn how. He did not feel the other's steel, yet without being conscious of it he must have answered with his eyes and immediately afterward with his weapon a false lunge, a feint. He was wild, of course, by this time. He tried to recover, and teetered. He waved his arms. He sat down—sat with a resounding thump on the hard sandy earth of Providence—he could even feel the sharp small chunks of coral dig through his breeches and gleefully get at his skin.
"Touch," said Carse quietly, without touching. He regarded a puffing opponent for a moment, then helped him to his feet. "And do you still fear to look like a fool, Captain?"
"All right," said Adam, who ached in every joint. "After this I'll keep my palm up, I'll keep my toe out."
"And that left hand—high, high."
"All right, I'll even do that. Now let's have that mezza cavazione again."
When he put his sword aside, Carse became not merely a different man but a different sort of man. It was a re-transformation not at all comparable to that of coach-and-four back into mice-and-pumpkin, since pumpkins, mice, too, are homely, familiar things; whereas Carse the bladeless would have repelled a jakes-farmer.
The first half-dozen lessons did not include any bouts but were devoted to posture, irking Adam, who cried that what he sought to learn was how to fight with a rapier, not how to strike poses with one. Carse paid no heed to this. He must have heard it before, often. "I don't think it will be necessary to teach you to fight, Captain," was as near as he came to comment. "I think you know too well already. Rage and a rapier don't go together."
More recently they had been having bouts, and for these they wore plastrons. Carse always laced his plastron carefully. Once, with some bitterness, Adam said that for the life of him he couldn't see why.
"The best swordsman in the world is not afraid of the second best swordsman," Carse replied gravely. "Nor is the sixteenth best afraid of the seventeenth. But any one of them would be frightened to face a man who'd had only a few lessons."