They practiced under a sizzling sun, some distance inland and blocked from prying eyes and the jeers of the camp by dunes. Now Carse as they sat down for a rest untrussed himself, for he was sweating. Not that it made much difference. He stank anyway.
"Beats me how a man like you is in a place like this, with all your skill," Adam said.
Carse shrugged.
"I am not so skillful as you think. I only seem so, here. I lack the most important quality of all."
"What's that?"
"Courage."
Adam stared at the man in amazement. Carse, forearms on knees, was gazing quietly at the ground. He waggled his long, beautifully kept hands in a gesture of hopelessness.
"That's a strange thing for a man to confess," Adam said slowly. "And to hear it from a Brother of the Coast—"
"Rapier fighting is lonely fighting," Carse said. "You are on your own. And I have always been afraid of my own company. I embarrass myself, and sometimes frighten myself. You think a pirate needs to be courageous? Not at all. Truly, Captain, not the way we of Providence here practice piracy anyway—and it's the only kind I know."
"But you board!"
"It's usually all over by that time. We've won before we started—or if we weren't going to, we wouldn't start. Let us get a sign of real resistance and we shy away. And even when we do board, we're shoulder-to-shoulder, all waving out weapons and yelling bloody murder. It's part of our technique. And I don't mind it, because there's a crowd. Then it's all over. And we're busy stealing everything we can lay hands on and telling each other what brave lads we are. Besides, I'm usually drunk then. That helps. But when you fight with a rapier you fight alone."
There was some silence.
Then: "Yet you like it well enough to teach bunglers like me."
"I like it well enough to teach bunglers like you, yes. It —It reminds me of certain other times."
"Where'd you come from, Carse?"
The pirate did not answer immediately, and this pause, though his face was expressionless, in itself was a rebuke.
"On Providence, Captain, we do not ordinarily ask such questions," he said at last.
"I'm sorry."
"It's forgotten. And my faith, I have to ask you a question—though it's about the future, not the past. I must know in what way to teach you. Now I take it that you are doing all this work for two reasons—correct me if I'm wrong. One reason is not because you are bored. We are seldom that here, eh?"
Adam grinned. This sink Providence, into which had been poured halt the human garbage of the Caribbean, this crowded hot rat-hole, where escaped slaves jostled deserters, where pimps wheedled, corsairs swaggered, whether English, French, Dutch, Danish or what, and the purveyors of rum and the purchasers of fine silks plied a noisy trade night and day, where every man carried at least a dagger, which he was embarrassingly eager to use—this place Providence might do many things to a visitor but it was not likely to bore him.
"Seldom," Adam agreed.
"I take it then that the two reasons are, first, that you want to be a gentleman—"
"My blood, sir, is every bit as—"
"Now don't be touchy! Nobody's questioning your pedigree! But you know as well as I know, Captain, that a man who carries a sword and knows how to use it is far more likely to be accepted as a gentleman than one who might boast a whole bushel basket full of certified quarterlings."
"Go on," said Adam.
"The second reason—and this is the one I'm interested in—is because there is a man you want to meet some day with no buttons, right?"
Adam nodded.
"He's not here in the camp, that I know. Excepting me, nobody here can fight with a rapier at all. They esteem it silly. When they brawl here they use whatever's handy, and when they duel it's with pistol and cutlass. What I am teaching you won't help you a bit with a cutlass, Captain. You know that."
"He's not here," Adam said.
"I won't ask you his name. I don't care. But this I should know—is he a good swordsman?"
"I don't know. I've never even seen him."
Carse rose.
"In that case we had best assume that he is." He laced his plastron. "Now I'm going to teach you how to riposte. And I don't mean parry and then half a minute later lunge. I mean tic-a-tac! right away! at what Marcelli used to call the tempo indivisibile, you see?"
"No," said Adam.
"Well, get up there and I'll show you."
It was his custom after a lesson to saunter around the camp, stopping for a jaw here, a drink there, nodding, sometimes spinning yarn, now and then putting a discreet question about followers of the late Captain Thomas Hart. He'd check a few prices. He'd look over, from the beach, any craft that had recently arrived, being careful not to seem to study Goodwill to Men with any special attention. And at last, almost as though by chance, he would find himself back at the shack he shared with the Honorable Maisie de Lynn Treadway-Paul. Tarpaulin Hall they called it.
In truth it was not as fortuitous as all this, his walk. He was careful never to leave Maisie alone for long.
There was this to be said about the camp: no matter what its population—which indeed might shift from three hundred to three thousand and back again within a few hours—it must have been the noisiest place, per capita, on earth. It suggested an enormous turbulent outdoor tavern, where somebody was always drunk, and there was ever present, if not a brawl, then at least the boisterous beginnings of one. Night and day made no difference. The bay could be silent at night, and usually was, no matter how many the vessels there; for the Brethren of the Coast preferred to quit their ships as soon as possible and go ashore, where there was life and movement—and rum—and by habit they left not even watchmen, excepting always half a dozen cannoneers stationed at the fort overlooking the entrance of the bay. But among the tents and huts and in the marketplace there was an unceasing hubbub which knew no clock. Wine and bumbo flowed pauselessly; women wailed or shrieked in rage; men cursed their luck at the dice games and card games, bellowing, snorting like porpoises. The auction in the marketplace never faltered. Always somewhere somebody was singing, while somewhere else men quarreled.
There were no streets in the camp, which was a heterogeneous and messy agglomeration of tents made of sail and houses fashioned from odd ship parts—spars, planks, sections of mast—lashed together with tarred rope. There was no beginning or end, no set boundary. Even the platform that made up the marketplace, the community's only semi-stable structure, from which all sorts of articles were raucously offered for sale, was moved three times, and twice because of carelessness was partly burned, in the four weeks Captain Long and the Honorable Maisie Treadway had spent on Providence.
Nature alone was orderly there, and gentle. The bay, wide, deep, glittered a glorious blue. The sand, though so light and bright as to sting the eyes, was smooth, and it sloped and rolled languidly. There wasn't much vegetation—clumps of dry juiceless sun-scorched grass that clittered anxiously in the breeze, and everywhere, as trees and as scrub, the flashy twittering palmetto. There were no hills, but neither were there any low spots. The air was dry. The sky, kindly, leaned close. A breeze was always blowing, carrying away the stench of the camp.
So Nature was good, Man bad.
Woman was even worse.
It had astonished the Goodwill prisoners to find women at this outlaws' retreat, and for an hour Adam had fondly supposed that this might make the place safer for and more acceptable to Maisie. He was soon disillusioned. The women of the camp were all shrill, all thoroughly vicious. Not many belonged to pirates, though a few were pirates themselves, who went to sea in search of prizes. Most of the women were there for business —of one sort or another—and were attached not to buccaneers but rather to hangers-on, men who bought and sold, who haggled and cheated, the furtive men of labored jocularity, parasites, but astute in a low way.