Gene Wolfe - Pirate Freedom

Novia was staring at me. "You know!"

"After you said it was yours? Heck yes. Anybody would. Sit down."

I was sitting on one of the bunks already, and Bouton made her get back into her chair. With the gold in the bags again, I said, "Okay, we'll start with you, since you left home first. What's your real name?"

"You know it." Her chin was up, and I knew she would have loved for those little pistols to be loaded again. "I am who you said."

"Senora Guzman. Sure. But what's your first name?"

She would not say a word, but Estrellita whispered, "Sabina."

Novia looked daggers at her.

"Fine. Do I call you Novia or Sabina? It's got to be one or the other."

"It is a matter of no difference to me what you call me, Capitan."

That hurt. It still hurts just to think about it. I tried not to let it show. "Okay, Sabina, if that's how you want it. You were the lady who looked at all the parrots, then got your maid to carry the one you bought. Estrellita here was the maid. Go on from there."

She only shook her head.

Estrellita said, "You came back to play for me. We held hands, and once I came out to dance to your music. For that I was beaten. Oh, most terribly!"

"I, too," Novia muttered.

I nodded. "That's what the cook said. Your husband beat you both. Why did he beat you?"

She would not speak, and Bouton offered to make her. I told him no.

"What was your husband's name?"

Still nothing.

I turned to Estrellita. "What was it? What was the name of the man Sabina here was married to?"

"It was Jaime, Senor Capitan." Her voice shook.

"He was the man who brought you on this ship?"

"Yes, Senor. This horrible ship. My husband."

We had to pull Novia off of her. It took a few seconds, and she did some damage. When I got her knife away from her, I threw it out a window.

After that I had to patch up Estrellita enough to stop the bleeding. The devil of it was that I could not have Novia do it, and if I had Bouton do it I knew what would happen. So I had to do it myself, and that was bound to be bad. I took her into the other cabin, and went back for two candles.

"It does not trouble me that you see so much of me, for I have always loved you. How many nights I have made your picture in my poor, fretted thoughts and clasped it to my heart, mi marinero!"

I made her shut up and hold still.

"Will you not kiss my wound? For me?"

When I got her back in the bigger cabin with Novia and Bouton, I sat down again. I was getting pretty tired by then and trying not to show it. "Okay, Bouton," I said, "here's what happened. If anything I say is wrong, they can sing out. Only they'd better tell the truth, or we're going to get into it.

"Jaime Guzman beat them both. I won't ask them what was going on, or what he thought was going on. Or what may have gone on before. He did what he did. Sabina wouldn't take it. She ran away."

"He beat me because I was in love with you." Sabina's voice was so low I could hardly hear her. "I can draw. Have you not seen my pictures, Crisoforo? I learned in my father's house. In my tocador in Coruna, I had drawn your picture over and over. Many pictures. He found them."

"I see," I said, and wondered whether I could believe her. I turned to Bouton. "She ran away. I don't know why she didn't go to her father, but my guess is that he'd have taken her back to her husband. She was afraid her husband would find her-"

"I searched for you!"

I nodded. "Yeah. That's what you said when you said you were Estrellita. If you lied about one thing, you could be lying about a hundred."

Bouton said, "They all lie, Capitan. I have never known a woman who did not lie, not even my mother."

"I could not make myself known!" Novia jumped up screaming. "I was a married woman! You were a sailor!"

I tried to say okay or something like that, but she kept yelling. "I watched, every night! You had eyes for my maid! Only her! I watch and envy her! Holy Mother, how I envy!"

I pushed Novia back into her chair, and she finally shut up.

"She bought sailor's slops," I told Bouton. "She's slender, and small in the chest. She tied a rag around those to keep them in and passed for a boy. There was one thing she said to me when we first got together that ought to have bothered me a lot more than it did. She said she would be my lady, wear a gown, and stay in my cabin. And pretty soon her hands would be soft for me again."

I reached over to Estrellita, felt her hand, and put it down. "Only Estrellita's hands hadn't been soft. We'd held hands, and hers had been almost as hard as mine. They're soft now because she hasn't been doing the work she used to do when she was just the Guzmans' maid, sweeping floors, washing dishes and so forth."

Estrellita's chin went up. "I had maids. Two! One for the house, and one for me alone."

"I've got it. Ugly girls, I'll bet. I wish I could see them. You were sleeping with Jaime."

"He forced me!"

Novia laughed. "For one real. 'How could I refuse, Mother? He gave me a real.' "

"He did! Defend me, Crees!"

I told them both to shut up. "So you lived together as man and wife, only you couldn't be the real thing. You couldn't get married, because everybody knew Guzman had a wife already. She'd run away, but he was still married just the same."

"Adulteress!" Estrellita hissed it. It does not hiss as good in Spanish, but she hissed it anyway.

"Right," I said. "She was, only he's dead now. You two couldn't marry in Coruna. Nowhere in Spain, really. Or anyhow, there wasn't any place where he'd feel safe. Some people must have known you'd been the maid, too, and that can't have been nice. Maybe he could have gotten a different girl, but he still wouldn't have been able to marry her. So you two decided to go to New Spain, where you could play lady and he could tell everybody you were his wife."

When I had translated it, Bouton laughed. "I'd have told them to go to the devil."

"So would I, but they were his business connections, or some of them were. Besides, this was better. He'd buy a big place, build a house for her, and raise cattle and corn. Have a bodyguard of vaqueros. Any man who lived within a hundred miles would pull his hat off when Jaime Guzman rode by. De Santiago told us a fairy tale about Guzman's losing his money. He hadn't. He had a lot. What he'd lost was his wife. If he'd really lost his money, I doubt that de Santiago would have agreed to take him across the Atlantic."

"You said he was dead, Captain. Did we kill him?"

I shook my head. "He killed himself, or that's what they say. When they were a week out of Coruna, he wasn't around anymore."

"It is accursed," Estrellita burst out, "this horrible ship! Will you not take me from it?"

"Yeah, sure." I went back to Bouton. "I've got two ideas. I'll give you both of them. First idea-he really did kill himself, like everybody says. He'd beaten his wife and lost her, he was giving up his house, his friends, his country, everything. And he was giving up all that for a girl who was already cheating on him."

"That is a lie!"

I told Estrellita to sit down. "The heck it is. You were cheating on him with de Santiago."

In French, Bouton said, "It was this de Santiago?"

"Right. When I first saw that trick hiding hole, I thought both of them must have known about it. When I'd had time to think it through, I saw that couldn't be right. In the first place, de Santiago wouldn't have trusted Guzman that much. If Guzman knew, he could open the cabinet on his side and take de Santiago's money. So he didn't."

Bouton scratched his chin. "But he let de Santiago put his money in there?"

"No, of course not. He had his money in his cabin, locked up. Or maybe hidden someplace, although there aren't a lot of places to hide things in there, because it's so small. I asked Estrellita how she'd been able to put food and wine and all that stuff in there when you and Rombeau showed up, and she said she hadn't. It had been in there already. She didn't tell me, but what she really did was grab the gold-the money she thought was hers now that her man was gone-and take it with her when she hid."