He rolled his head. In the larboard bunk, so close that he could have reached out and touched her, lay Lady Maisie. She had an air of sweet childishness, the girl he'd first known. Her mouth was a little open, she was sleeping well. This was natural. They'd had considerable of a quarrel here last night, but it had been followed by an unforgettable making-up.
Adam watched her for some minutes, thinking how lovely she was, swearing that he would always protect her.
He remembered Deborah Selden, as sometimes he did when he lay like this, and he was glad, again, that'd he'd eluded her ruse. He supposed that she was getting ready to have her baby by now, and he wondered whether she had been able to trick or bribe some other man into playing the part of a father. Well, no matter. Adam had almost heard the clack of the cage door closing on him that night. Just when he'd been freed to grab his place in the world, too.
As though to remind him of this, his freedom suit, hanging from a peg above his head, swung with a movement of the schooner and brushed his face. Maybe it wasn't as easy as all that—just getting handed a statement that your apprenticeship had expired and stepping into a linsey-woolsey suit? Maybe there was a heap more to it? He was not so sure that he was free, even now.
Maisie moaned a bit, stretching. The movement brought out the curve of her hips under the sheet, and Adam, swiftly stirred, for a moment was almost in pain. He reached out. But tenderness overtook him, and he fished for and found his Book instead.
It fell open to the Song of Solomon; but clearly that wouldn't do, if Maisie was to be permitted to slumber; and he leafed back a bit, coming to rest at last, as he so often did, on Job. He didn't know how many times he'd read Job. Sometimes he read it, as you should read any part of the Book, with devout attention, going back over certain parts that he wasn't immediately sure of, pronouncing each word in his mind, pondering the meaning of that whole story. At other times he would read it rather with his ears than with his eyes, caring nothing for pronunciation and not at all concerned with what God was getting at, but just plain enjoying himself, the way he might have enjoyed himself if he'd leaned back against something and listened to lovely music.
When he put the Book down, then, he felt better; but still he deemed it prudent not to venture another peek at Maisie. He picked up his ledger.
It was Adam's habit not to enter anything in the ledger until he had rehearsed it in his mind. The figures he finally set down were no more than a recording. The calculations themselves, by steps and in the whole, were mental. Adam was not quick at figures but he was thorough.
So that now he did not touch a quill, only stared at the pages, while his mind weighed possible insertions and amendments.
On the whole, he was proud of the report so far. He recapitulated. He'd lost a couple of jibs, the longboat, the foremast boom, a great deal of molasses.
The widow of Eliphalet Mellish would be paid his wages up to the day he died, of course. Adam already had this money put aside, in a place the pirates had not found. Seth Selden, carried as a stowaway, never rated wages, and Peterson and Waters had quit all claim on theirs. The new man, Willis Beach, would not have to be paid until he was officially signed on—if he was. To be sure, this left the Goodwill seriously undermanned, and Adam would have to pick up some hands. But even allowing for this, he was keeping the payroll down first-rate.
Thanks in part to the weather, in part to his decision not to run all the way down to the Leewards, but chiefly to good stowage, very few barrels of eels had gone bad. And he had sold the rest at a record price.
Only a quarter of the one hundred pounds he had taken as passage money for Maisie had been spent for Seth Selden's share of the schooner, a notable bargain.
He'd had another purely personal windfall—those twenty-nine hogsheads of gunpowder the pirates had piled on his deck. Gunpowder was something you could always sell. This rated as a fortune of the sea, something like an act of God. It was, legally, all Adam's. It had been put there by pirates, who enjoyed no standing, being outlaws; and this was the same, in the eyes of an admiralty court, as if it had been thrown up there by the sea.
Well and good. But there remained the matter of the missing molasses.
The hoops and staves and the fish had been paid for in cash, and this he had still, hidden away. But of the molasses from Horace Treadway's plantation fewer than fifty barrels remained. More than three hundred had been rolled into the sea.
Adam feared that he was going to have to ask somebody for a loan. He shook his head, clucked his tongue.
"Are you bankrupt, too, my chick?"
He grinned, slapping the ledger away, slipping out of his bunk, and knelt beside her, and they kissed. They kissed for some time.
"La, what an importunate lover," she laughed when she got the chance. "I do declare, I think you'd beg me for it if we was in a hurricane."
"It'd be a delight then, too."
"Damned undignified though. Not that it ain't always. The position, I mean.
He sighed, with a seriousness not wholly mock.
"Some day, sweet, we'll be alone. And we'll do whatever we want, as many times as we can, without worrying about storms or mutinies or pirates or anything else. Some day."
The smile slid off her mouth, which desire now was tugging tight.
"Some day," she whispered as she pressed closer. "And in the meanwhile, my Adam—"
While he was dressing she said lazily that she supposed they were at last making a course direct for New York? No, he replied, they were heading back to Jamaica. She sat up.
"Why?"
"Different reasons," he replied. "Get more for the gunpowder there. It's no safe cargo anyway. Best to get rid of it as soon as possible. Then we need a real boom. And a longboat. And a couple of hands. In Kingston we can get niggers or deserters from the Navy for next to nothing. But most of all it's credit I'm after. To replace that molasses. I'd thought, uh, of going back to your cousin."
"Oh— Horace again, eh?"
"I'd hoped maybe you might talk him into taking my note, on my share of the schooner.
"I see. Well, I'll try, Adam."
He was about to start up the ladder when she spoke again.
"Adam-"
"Yes, dear?"
"What my poor weak womanly mind still can't encompass is: why do you have to make up for that jettisoned cargo? You were lightening the ship in the hope of escaping, isn't that right?"
"That's right."
"Well, wasn't that your best judgment? You're bringing the boat itself back, which is more than most skippers would do."
"The Providencers should never have been allowed to get so close. The man on watch should have spotted 'em earlier."
"Who was the man on watch?"
"Me."
"Oh."
"And I was the only one. And I was down here."
He turned back to the ladder.
"But, Adam, who knows that you were down here?"
He looked at her, open-mouthed. He had been about to blurt: "Why, God does." This seemed to him perfectly natural. It might not seem so to Maisie. It might sound sanctimonious to her. Some folks had odd notions about God and how you should think of Him.
"Well— Well, anyway, that's how it is."
The slide was pushed back. Resolved Forbes was there, discreetly upright, not bending forward to thrust his head in.
"Sail on the starboard quarter. Over Cubic way. A two-sticker."