She said nothing, but turned on her heel and walked away.
Hunter looked at Enders. Enders shrugged.
Later in the afternoon, Hunter was informed by his lookouts that there was new activity aboard the warship; all the longboats had been lowered on the ocean side, out of view of the land. They were apparently tied up to the ship, for none had appeared. Considerable smoke was issuing from the deck of the warship. Some kind of fire was burning, but its purpose was unclear. This situation continued until nightfall.
Nightfall was a blessing. In the cool evening air, Hunter paced the decks of El Trinidad, staring at the long rows of his cannon. He walked from one to the next, pausing to touch them, running his fingers over the bronze, which still held the warmth of the day. He examined the equipment neatly stowed by each: the rammer, the bags of powder, the shot clusters, the quill touch-pins, and the slow fuses in the notched water buckets.
It was all ready to use — all this firepower, all this armament. He had everything he needed except the men to fire them. And without the men, the cannon might as well not be there at all.
“You are lost in thought.”
He turned, startled. Lady Sarah was there, in a white shift. It looked like an undergarment in the darkness.
“You should not dress like that, with the men about.”
“It was too hot to sleep,” she said. “Besides, I was restless. What I witnessed today . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“It disturbed you?”
“I have not seen such savagery, even in a monarch. Charles himself is not so ruthless, so arbitrary.”
“Charles has his mind on other things. His pleasures.”
“You deliberately miss my meaning.” Even in the darkness, her eyes glowed with something like anger.
“Madam,” Hunter said. “In this society—”
“Society? You call this” — she gestured with a sweeping hand to the ship, and the men sleeping on the deck — “you call this society?”
“Of course. For wherever men gather, there are rules of conduct. These men have different rules from the Court of Charles, or of Louis, or even of Massachusetts Colony, where I was born. And yet there are rules to be upheld, and penalties to pay for breaking them.”
“You are a philosopher.” Her voice in the darkness was sarcastic.
“I speak what I know. In the Court of Charles, what would befall you if you failed to bow before the monarch?”
She snorted, seeing the direction of his argument.
“It is the same here,” Hunter said. “These men are fierce and violent. If I am to rule them, they must obey me. If they are to obey me, they must respect me. If they are to respect me, they must recognize my authority, which is absolute.”
“You speak like a king.”
“A captain is king, over his crew.”
She moved closer to him. “And do you take your pleasure, as a king does?”
He had only a moment to reflect before she threw her arms around him, and kissed him on the mouth, hard. He returned her embrace. When they broke, she said, “I am so frightened. Everything is strange here.”
“Madam,” he said, “I am obliged to return you safely to your uncle and my friend, Governor Sir James Almont.”
“There is no need to be pompous. Are you a Puritan?”
“Only by birth,” he said, and kissed her again.
“Perhaps I will see you later,” she said.
“Perhaps.”
She went below, with a final glance at him in the darkness. Hunter leaned on one of the cannon, and watched her go.
“Spicy one, isn’t she.”
He turned. It was Enders. He grinned.
“Get a well-born one across the line, and they start to itch, eh?”
“So it appears,” Hunter said.
Enders looked down the row of cannon, and slapped one with his hand. It rang dully. “Maddening, isn’t it,” he said. “All these guns, and we can’t use ’em for lack of men.”
“You’d best get sleep,” Hunter said shortly, and walked off.
But it was true, what Enders had said. As he continued pacing the decks, the woman was forgotten, and his thoughts returned to the cannon. Some restless part of his brain churned over the problem, again and again, looking for a solution. Somehow he was convinced there was a way to use these guns. Something he had forgotten, something he knew long ago.
The woman obviously thought he was a barbarian — or, worse, a Puritan. He smiled in the darkness at the thought. In fact, Hunter was an educated man. He had been taught all the main categories of knowledge, as they had been defined since medieval days. He knew classical history, Latin and Greek, natural philosophy, religion, and music. At the time, none of it had interested him.
Even as a young man, he was far more concerned with practical, empirical knowledge than he was in the opinions of some long-dead thinker. Every schoolboy knew that the world was much larger than Aristotle had ever dreamt. Hunter himself had been born on land that the Greeks did not know existed.
Yet now, certain elements of his formal training tugged at his mind. He kept thinking of Greece — something about Greece, or the Greeks — but he did not know what, or why.
Then he thought of the oil painting in Cazalla’s cabin, aboard the Spanish warship. Hunter had hardly noticed it at the time. Nor did he remember it clearly now. But there was something about a painting aboard a warship that intrigued him. In some way, it was important.
What did it matter? He knew nothing of painting; he regarded it as a very minor talent, suitable only for decoration, and of interest only to those vain and wealthy noblemen who would pay to have their portraits done, with flattering improvements. The painters themselves were, he knew, trivial souls who wandered like gypsies from one country to another in search of some patron who would support their efforts. They were homeless, rootless, frivolous men who lacked the solid attachment of strong feeling for the nation of their birth. Hunter, despite the fact that his parents had fled England for Massachusetts, considered himself wholly English and passionately Protestant. He was at war with a Spanish and Catholic enemy and did not comprehend anyone who was not equally patriotic. To care only for painting: that was a pale allegiance indeed.
And yet the painters wandered. There were Frenchmen in London, Greeks in Spain, and Italians everywhere. Even in times of war, the painters came and went freely, especially the Italians. There were so many Italians.
Why did he care?
He walked along the dark ship, passing from cannon to cannon. He touched one. Stamped on its postern was a motto:
SEMPER VINCIT
The words mocked him. Not always, he thought. Not without men to load and aim and fire. He touched the lettering, running his fingers over the grooves, feeling the fine, smooth curve of the S, the clean lines of the E.
SEMPER VINCIT
There was strength in the crispness of Latin, two tight words, military and hard. The Italians had lost all that; Italians were soft and flowery, and their tongue had changed to reflect the softness. It had been a long time since Caesar had bluntly said: Veni, vidi, vici.
VINCIT
That one word seemed to suggest something. He looked at the clean lines of the letters, and then in his mind he saw more lines, lines and angles, and he was back to the Greeks, to his Euclidean geometry, which had been so agonizing to him as a boy. He had never been able to understand why it mattered that two angles were equal to another, or that two lines intersected at one point or another. What difference did it make?
VINCIT
He remembered Cazalla’s painting, a work of art on a warship, out of place, serving no purpose. That was the trouble with art, it was not practical. Art conquered nothing.