Kage Baker: Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key

“I’d no idea you were so well educated, sir. How pleasant. ‘To the victors go the spoils!’ Words to live by, indeed.” Mr. Tudeley reached into the instrument chest for flint and steel, and set about making a few coals to smolder in his coconut shell.

They kept the sloop in sight through the night hours, John watching her stern lanterns all the while in agony of mind. Mrs. Waverly had not seemed like the sort of woman to kill herself over a bit of violation, but his imagination kept conjuring up scenes with her backing away into a corner of the captain’s cabin, holding up a dagger and threatening to plunge it into her heart. A lady had done that on the stage once, in a play he’d seen, and it had all been very dramatically lit and dreadfully moving, even though the lady was a man under the dress and you could tell his left bubbie was a pig’s bladder full of stage blood.

And perhaps John nodded off where he sat once or twice, because the twin beaming stern lanterns seemed to be shining out from Mrs. Waverly’s shift, and she hoisted up her shift and revealed her bubbies shining like lamps, bright and hard and hot, and she was begging of him to cool them down, so badly had she sunburned on that island…

They were getting bigger, and bigger. He hadn’t thought a woman’s bubbies ever got that big. They were like two suns now. “Oh, Mr. James,” she was whimpering, “Do something! Please! I’m ever so hot!”

They were so hot they were setting fire to her shift. He could smell the burning. It smelled like saltpeter…

He realized with a start that the sloop’s stern lanterns were very near now, and Mr. Tudeley had just lit a length of slow match and was saying, in a complacent tone: “There! Quite serviceable, I think. Shall you carry the pistol, or shall I?”

John rubbed his eyes and looked around. Dawn was coming up pink in the east. The sloop was no more than a half-mile off now. Mr. Tudeley had unwrapped the cutlasses and was sorting through them, weighing each in his hand for balance.

“ Very nice,” he said, taking an experimental swipe at the air with one. “And I suppose one just lays about one as though one were wielding a meat cleaver.”

“That’s the way,” said Sejanus.

“I must endeavor not to lose my other ear this time. What ho, Mr. James! A good morning to you. She’s a fair ship, is she not?”

John peered across at the sloop, where it cruised there backlit by the dawn. Low and rakish, with elegant lines, it was still just idling along. The silhouetted helmsman wasn’t even bothering to look behind him.

John clenched his fists, feeling the return of his anger. How many might be aboard? Five men? Six? Had they all had their way with Mrs. Waverly? Had she, perhaps in fear of her life, told them about the four thousand pounds? Were they even now on their way to Leauchaud?

He reached around and grabbed up the swivel gun, and loaded it with a pair of one-pound balls. “Where’s the damned powder?”

“Ready,” said Mr. Tudeley, handing him the powder horn. “Match?”

“Aye.” John took the length of slow-match and clamped it between his teeth while he filled the touch-hole and stuck a couple of extra balls in his coat pocket.

“I don’t think we want to give them a one-pound broadside,” Sejanus cautioned. John shook his head, glaring. They came alongside the sloop, making out her name at last: Le Rossignol . The helmsman saw them now, and filled his lungs to cry the alarm. John stood up on a thwart and aimed at him with the swivel gun, touching fire to powder with the match in his teeth.

“You idiot—” began Sejanus.

Boom! The helmsman was blown clear overboard, and John himself nearly pitched backward out of the pinnace. Sejanus and Mr. Tudeley swarmed up over the sloop’s rail as the sun rose, brandishing weapons. When John had caught his balance and reloaded he followed them.

Sleepy men came boiling up on deck, to face a terrible sight: a giant hoisting a cannon in his arms to aim it at them, and to one side a grinning black devil with a pair of cutlasses and a horde of shadows at his shoulder, and to the other side a ragged creature in the nadir of his fall from grace—bloodlust in his eye, snarling gap-toothed as he swung his blade, his broken spectacles glinting in the golden light of the sun.

There followed a brief but quite bloody fray. One of the crew threw down his weapon and fell to his knees. Three unwisely decided to fight, and died there on the deck, one half-beheaded and shot by Mr. Tudeley and another run through by Sejanus, with the third smashed down by John’s fist. Last of all a handsome man came rushing up shirtless from the great cabin, a slender elegant-looking fellow with a little downy mustache of the sort ladies fancy on a man. John ground his teeth. He took aim with the swivel gun and blew the captain clear to Hell.

Still clutching the smoking swivel gun, John shouldered his way down into the great cabin. “Ma’am!” he roared. “Ma’am! Are y’in here?”

“I told you, you filthy brigand, I shall never yield my honor!” cried a voice from the stern gallery head.

“It’s me, ma’am! John James! We’ve rescued you!”

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Waverly, flinging the cabinet door wide. “Oh, Mr. James, how heroic!”

She wore her nightdress, a lace one with ribbons; he’d seen it in her trunk when he’d opened it, that one time. There wasn’t a bruise or any other mark on her, that he could see. She flung her arms around his neck. He smelled perfume as she kissed him.

“Oh, Mr. James! I have been beside myself with fear! However did you find me? I reclined to rest in the heat of the day—I think I must have fallen asleep—and when next I opened my eyes, there were the most dreadful grinning blackguards standing over me! Why I wasn’t ravished on the spot I cannot imagine, unless that they intended their chief should dishonor me himself.

“They carried me off, along with my effects. Yet I was able to break free, dear Mr. James, and barricade myself in that closet. What might have happened had you not effected your timely rescue, I shudder to think!”

“Well, it don’t signify now,” said John, noting that her hair had been neatly brushed, and wondering whether he hadn’t just murdered three innocent men. “We’re off the island and back on our way to Leauchaud. No harm done, eh?”

“None, I faithfully promise you,” said Mrs. Waverly, melting against him. He helped himself to another kiss. He would have helped himself to more but her eyelids fluttered, and she passed the back of her hand across her brow. “Oh, dear—I feel faint—oh, to consider what I so narrowly escaped!”

“Maybe you ought to have a lie down then,” said John, resignedly helping her to the captain’s bed, which was in a certain state of disarray. He went out to see that her lover’s blood was sluiced off the deck before she should come out and have to notice it.

Mr. Tudeley and Sejanus were already pitching bodies over as he came up the companionway, aided by the one man who had surrendered.

“John, this is Portuguese Fausto,” said Sejanus. “He’s given us to understand he was only hired on as a cook two weeks ago, and the crew treated him badly so he doesn’t hold it against us that we had to kill them. He says he doesn’t see how you could have done any different, what with them running off with your wife and all.” Portuguese Fausto nodded in vehement agreement.

“And the hold contains several crates of china porcelain and twenty-five kegs of Spanish brandy,” said Mr. Tudeley in satisfaction. “Which will, I suspect, fetch us a goodly price in Tortuga. Such of it as is not consumed on the journey, of course.”