He stood, with the noose finally around his neck, and looked out over the noisome crowd. He had arranged for some few remaining friends to stand below the gallows and witness his departure. Theirs was a mission of mercy. Since the drop itself seldom did the job, his mates were there to leap up, grab his heels, and yank down to end Blackhawke’s agony quickly.
As it happened, the rope parted, and Blackhawke tumbled to the ground with little more than a bad rope burn round his neck. The dazed man had to be carried once more up the steps to repeat his agonizing departure.
By now, however, the rum fog had dissipated a bit, and it was a much-sobered Blackhawke who had one final revelation. Standing once more upon the precipice, he felt suddenly alive, breathing, conscious. Even the sting of the rope burning around his neck was something to be cherished, and, oddly, the crowd ranged below him now seemed to be cheering. A joyous sendoff for one last epic and uncharted voyage! Yes!
His mind allowed him to stand once more on his quarterdeck, shouting orders fore and aft. Lines cast off, sheets loosed, sails filled with an evening breeze. Bound for the far horizon. Men scrambling like monkeys in the rigging, all color and glory. Bound for that fat yellow moon floating just over that far, far horizon.
Farewell.
Well. This is it then. Torches burning along the riverbanks. The dusky glow of London Town shimmering across the water. Lovely night. Been a good life, hasn’t it, after all? Strongly lived. Well fought and well rewarded. Left the treacherous Caribee and tedious humdrum of the New World’s penny-pinching merchants far astern, hadn’t he?
Been a young man then, still, when he’d taken up the pirate’s adventuresome ways. Loved the endless roll of the boundless blue sea, he had, really. Loved every league and fathom of her, for all his life.
A small sigh escaped his lips and his mates below drew forward, hushed now. All the crowd below quiet now. He would go into the next world unarmed. But he was unafraid and had no doubt he’d conquer the next as he’d done the present.
He’d given some serious thought to his parting shot, looking for a defiant farewell, and he uttered those words now, raw and raspy, but still strong.
“The man without sword is oft the deadliest enemy,” Blackhawke bellowed. “Hear me, Death, and lay on!”
There was a resounding huzzah from below.
He brought the curtain down on this world, squeezing his eyes shut and remembering just as hard as he could:
And the cannons’ thunder, too, and the blood, and the plunder. Loved it all and no regrets now, none save the sweet wife’s face hanging out there in mid-air now, beckoning, all her tears falling like soft rain on the upturned faces below. His wife, his children, lost to him, too, and all that buried booty and —
He sucked one last draught of sweet air into his lungs and then—stepped off into forever.
The next morning they hung Blackhawke’s corpse from a post on the riverbank, in plain view of the passing river traffic. It rotted there for some months, sloughing off flesh, blacker and smaller with every sunrise, a stern and daily reminder of the fate awaiting those foolhardy enough to consider the pirate’s adventuresome ways.
In the end, there was little left of Blackhawke but legend. That, and his sun-bleached bones, tinkling gaily in the wind off the river.
Hawke was silent a moment, having finished his tale. He drained his port, then he stood and raised the empty glass to his friend.
“Hear me then, Death, and lay on!” Hawke said, and flung his glass far out into the nighttime sky.
“Hear! Hear!” Ambrose said, and, getting to his feet, he flung his glass over the rail as well. “Now we’ve sent Captain Blackhawke off to his reward, I’m for bed myself. Good night, Alex. Sleep well.”
“Good night, Ambrose,” Alex said. “Thanks to you, old soul, I’ll no doubt be dreaming of pirates tonight.”
But of course he dreamt of them every night.
18
At six the next morning, a crewman on the bridge initiated a program that caused the entire stern section of Blackhawke to rise upward on massive hydraulic pistons. It revealed a yawning, cavernous hangar, where Hawke garaged a few of his “toys,” as he called them.
The deck and bulkheads of the hangar were brilliantly polished stainless steel and contained only a tiny portion of Hawke’s permanent collection. Among them were the 1932 British Racing Green Bentley, supercharged. A C-type Jaguar, winner of the 1954 Le Mans race, and Alberto Ascari’s Mille Miglia-winning Ferrari Barchetta.
Then there was the seventy-foot-long Nighthawke, an offshore powerboat capable of speeds in excess of one hundred miles an hour. Hawke had made many a narrow escape thanks to Nighthawke’s powerful turbocharged engines.
One of Hawke’s favorite toys, however, was the shining silver seaplane now being positioned at the top of the ramp. Its lovely streamlined appearance looked like something Raymond Loewy himself might have designed in the early thirties. At a signal, the plane was lowered to the foot of a ramp that stretched directly into the sea. In seconds, the small plane was bobbing merrily on the mirrored surface of the blue water.
The name Kittyhawke was painted in script just below the cockpit window. And, under that, a painting of a very pretty young bathing beauty. Sutherland and Quick stood at the foot of the ramp, each holding a mooring line attached to the plane’s pontoons.
Hawke and Congreve stood watching the operation. Hawke was wearing his old Royal Navy flight suit. It was his standard wardrobe whenever he flew the seaplane. He was literally rubbing his hands together in keen anticipation of the flight to Nassau.
“Fine morning for the wild blue yonder,” Hawke exclaimed, taking in a deep breath of salt air.
“Lovely,” Congreve replied, expelling a plume of tobacco smoke the color of old milkglass.
“Now, listen, old boy. I want you to have a bit of fun while I’m gone. Do some more snorkeling. Get some sun. You look like an absolute fish.”
“About that treasure map. I do hope—”
“The box is open on the library desk. If you have to lift it out, there are tweezers in the drawer.”
“I’d like to include Sutherland in my research. He might prove extremely useful.”
“Smashing. Spent some time heading up your cartography section, didn’t he? Best of luck. Who couldn’t use an extra few hundred million in gold?”
“Should be good fun.”
Hawke zipped up his flying suit and put a hand on Congreve’s shoulder.
“I’ve left you all the notes I’ve made over the years. A lot to plow through. All those rainy afternoons at the British Museum digging up contemporaneous maps and manuscripts and what-not.”
“Really? I always imagined you whiling away those hours in a pub somewhere, huddled in a dark corner with a beautiful married woman.”
“Indeed? Well. Some excellent volumes of eighteenth-century history and cartography in the library, as you know. I’ve made a fair bit of progress, but, of course, I don’t read Spanish as well as you do.”
“I was wondering—” Congreve said, and then looked away.
“Yes?”
“I wonder—well, you said you’d been in these islands before,” he said, still not looking Hawke in the eye.
“Yes?”
“Well, I was thinking perhaps that voyage you took might itself have been some kind of treasure-hunting expedition. If the map has been in your family for generations, it might be that—”
“I really have no idea,” Hawke said, his face clouding up. He stepped onto the plane’s pontoon. “I told you. I was so young. I don’t remember anything.”
“Of course. You said that. Sorry.”
“I’m off, then.”
“Please give Victoria my best.”