"A duck, my dear. Gentlest, sweetest thing you ever met. Why?"
"I'm thinking of a scheme," Adam said. "But it can wait."
"Money?"
"Money."
The mist writhed as though in agony, its ribbons butting without sound against the Goodwill, turning away baffled. It did not blot out objects—Jeth Gardner in the Moses was visible—but it blurred and distorted them. It was not fog; you don't get fog off Jamaica. As near as Adam could make out it must have been a ground mist wafted out from the low mucky land back of the plantation at the foot of the hills, the swamp into which slaves sometimes escaped. Yet it didn't smell of rotting vegetation. There was an acrid nip to it. Pearly —for this was before dawn—it was tinged with blue.
". . . twenty-two," Jeth called. "Twenty-one and a half . . ."
The lead flashed high, tumbling mist away from it, and fell after a clean lone loop, "sploosh!" into the water.
"Twenty-two . . . twenty-two . . ."
"What's the bottom?" Adam called.
"Sandy. Gray."
Across the deck, trailing mist, creating tiny whirlpools of it, a whispy wobbly wake, came the Honorable Maisie. She wore a long, light blue mantua, and her hair was caught behind with a yellow ribbon. She said no word to Adam but leaned, as he was doing, on the larboard gunwale.
". . . twenty-three and a half. . . twenty-three . . ."
Goodwill barely moved. The whisper at her bows was the sort of "shush" made by somebody who holds a finger to his mouth.
"Adam—"
"Yes, dear?"
"I hope you ain't counting too much on Horace lending us money. You know, he—he's a very hard man."
"I know that."
The mist wandered past. It could have been smoke now. Adam shook an impatient head. Danged if he wasn't obsessed by the thought of smoke, always seeming to smell some, ever since he'd boarded that brig.
"He'll drive a hard bargain."
He smiled a little, and put a hand over one of her hands.
"I'm used to hard bargains," he said.
"But I mean—maybe he'll ask for security?"
Where was the profit in trying to explain to her? On the not infrequent occasions of the past when she'd needed money she had of course obtained it by simply taking it, or else by giving in exchange a smile, a glib promise, the wave of a hand. The idea of working for it had never occurred to her.
But nobody had ever given Adam Long anything for nothing. Nobody, that is, until Maisie Treadway gave herself—wholly, gladly—and the thought of that gift humbled him, clobbering his throat.
"And I've no jewels left at all, Adam. What could we offer?"
"The derelict, if the admiralty will clear her in reasonable time. If not, and if I have to, my share of the schooner here."
"Adam! It would hurt you horribly to risk that!"
"It would."
"Why mightn't you collect on the derelict right away?"
He hawked, and spat.
"Admiralty courts don't work like that. But if you was just to speak to your friend Benbow—"
"I'll speak to him."
"Eighteen and a half," chanted Jeth Gardner. "Seventeen . . ."
The shore was visible now, a broken blue line not far away. The first rays of the sun were jabbing the mist, striving to scatter it.
"Sixteen and a half . . . fifteen foot!"
Adam slightly squeezed her hand.
"Soon," he whispered. "It may take us a little while to get everything cleared up, but we'll do it. And we'll be together—soon."
The sun then suddenly succeeded in prising up the white-blue stuff that floated in the air. As if by means of a stage trick, the shore, fuzzy a moment earlier, became clear in all its details. It was as though a gauze curtain had been lifted.
Just at first, for half a minute there, Adam supposed that he had somehow found the wrong cove. This made him angry. He had a shore-line memory that he liked to think was infallible; and the very act of putting into such a small obscure place without waiting for sunup was a bit of bravado that might have backfired.
For this could not be the Treadway plantation. Where was the house? The kitchen kiosk, slave quarters, mill? What had happened to the lovely gardens and the orchards? The warehouse? Well, yes, there was something there yet, where the warehouse had been. Not one stick of the building itself remained, but some of the cane that had been stored in it still smoldered sullenly.
Now they knew the nature of that "mist." Now they knew why no pirogues had put out to guide them through the pass.
Adam turned quickly to his companion and tried to get her away from the gunwale, but she'd already seen.
"We— We've got to go there," she said in a small voice. "He may still be alive."
"He won't be," muttered Adam.
He wasn't. They found his grave, a cleared space in what had once been his garden. Somebody had stuck a wooden cross over it:
"Horace Treadway, Gntlmn. Bn. 1668 Kid. 1702"[2]
While Maisie knelt, sobbing, Adam looked around. Decay and desolation lay everywhere. Near what had once been the house a large mass of charred chunks of furniture and scraps of bedding and of clothing had been piled, stuff that had long since ceased to send out smoke. The same men who had buried the planter—neighbors? soldiers from the capital?—clearly had made some attempt to clear up the garden. The flowering vines, representing years of loving work, had been slashed, uprooted; and the trellis over which they once trailed had been torn down. The rose bushes were flattened. What had been a hedge of hibiscus, the bushes so spaced as to alternate the different-colored flowers—ivory, pink, salmon, white, red—now was no more than a jagged trench. Even the seed sheds had not been spared; and the very garden gate had been ripped from its hinges.
Over everything hung the dank smell of death itself.
Adam looked back at the hills, which suddenly spoke.
WUMP-wump-wump! WUMP-wump-wump!
The Ashantis had paid their visit at last.
Even Kingston, close to the stroke of midnight, with only a few lights showing, could look lovely. Four-fifths of the time the town was dust, the other fifth it was mud; but right now it was moonlight.
The garden was fragrant with jasmine, and shadows were packed into it like jackstraws in a bowl. Flagstones zigzagged down to the gate in the wall. Even while Maisie and Adam stood there on the veranda, arms around one another, clinging, reluctant to part, a quartet of marines click-clacked past just the other side of that wall. The marines had been particularly active since the fleet under Admiral Benbow cleared out, the very day Goodwill to Men returned to town. The departure of that fleet, it had been accurately predicted, would lure down from the Blue Mountains and in from distant plantations deserters who hoped to sneak away in unconvoyed merchantmen.
"I'll make it back a-booming, you can count on that," he promised. "But there's a heap of things to do first."
"Not including, I hope, sir, the solacing of some dewy-eyed Newport beauty?"
He turned. He looked at her in amazement, and after a moment he laughed. He drew her to him, very gently.
"The man that has you ain't a man to go around looking for somebody else," he said. "You've got everything that's good and fine and beautiful and true, right here"—he shook her affectionately—"so why should I go out seeking a smitch of it here and a smitch there, when you've got the whole thing? Even if I didn't love you already, that would be reason enough to."
She didn't answer this with words, but looked up, her lips trembling, eyes shining with tears; and they kissed for a long time.
After the kiss: "If there's any worrying to be done, I reckon it's up to me. You'll be bored here. Kingston ain't London."
2
"Horace Treadway, Gntlmn. Bn. 1668 Kid. 1702"
«Горацио Тредуэй, джентльмен. Род. 1668 Убит 1702».