Chapter 8 The Black Swan by Rafael Sabatini
In Command
Monsieur de Bernis paced the high poop of the Centaur in the starlit, moonless, tropical night. His tall figure could be seen by those in the waist below, sharply silhouetted in black against the golden glow of the great poop-lamp as in his pacings he crossed and recrossed the ambit of its light.
The wind had dropped at sunset to the merest breeze, but without changing its quarter, and with her sails spread to receive it, the Centaur, her steering-tackles restored and spars repaired, led the way on that south-westerly course which Monsieur de Bernis had laid. An eighth of a mile or so astern three tall poop-lamps showed where Tom Leach followed in the Centaur's phosphorescent wake.
As a result of the softened wind, the night was hot, and most of the buccaneers who now made up her crew were above-decks. They swarmed in the waist and under the booms amidships on which the boats were stowed. There slush-lamps glowed like gigantic fireflies. About these they were gathered in groups, at seven-and-eleven, and intermittently the rattle of dice in the pannikins that did duty as dice-boxes would merge into the noise of their chatter and laughter with an occasional explosive oath or the loud calling of a main. On the forecastle someone scraped a fiddle, providing a discordant accompaniment to a bawdy song which, although by no means new to the audience, had not yet lost its power of provoking coarse hilarity.
Monsieur de Bernis heard little and heeded less of all this. His mind was preoccupied, turning inwards, away from his senses, to resolve a problem with which he was confronted.
Towards midnight he came down the companion, and took his way towards the gangway leading to the cabin. Near the entrance to this, Wogan and Halliwell leaned against a bulkhead at the break of the poop in muttered talk. They fell silent at his approach, and gave him good night as he passed them.
The entrance to the gangway was a black cavern. The slush-lamp swinging there to light it had been extinguished, and as de Bernis stepped into the gloom he was aware--for his perceptions were now restored to their normal keenness--that something moved there very softly. He checked, to be instantly reassured by a voice, breathing a word with ghostly softness.
'Monsieur!'
He went on, following the invisible and inaudible Pierre who had stood sentinel, and who, he surmised, would have been responsible for the fact that the lamp there was extinguished.
In the light of the cabin, after the door had been closed, the young half-caste's keen-eyed face with its prominent cheek-bones looked grave. He spoke swiftly, in French, his voice soft and liquid. He had been on his way to the deck to take the air, when, as he reached the entrance of the gangway, he had heard the voices of Halliwell and Wogan; and Wogan had mentioned the name of de Bernis in a tone that in itself had been informing to Pierre. He had gone quietly back, and had extinguished the light, so that he should not be seen. Then he had crept up to the entrance, and had stood there listening to the conversation of those two. It had disclosed to him the treachery in the minds of those whom Monsieur de Bernis had now joined, and Captain Leach was in it. The intention was to let him guide them to the plate fleet, and then pay him his share of the plunder in cold steel. Wogan had disclosed this to allay Halliwell's grumbling at the fifth share which under the articles de Bernis claimed for himself. Halliwell had accounted the claim preposterous and was blaming Leach for having agreed such terms. Wogan had laughed at him for being such a fool as to believe that the terms would be kept. De Bernis should take what they chose to give him. If that didn't satisfy him--and there was no cause to be overgenerous--they'ld slit his throat for him, and so make an end of an impudent swaggering dawcock.
Halliwell, however, was not so easily to be reassured. De Bernis had always been known for a tricky, slippery devil, who had a way of defeating brute force by artifice. He called to mind more than one trick that de Bernis had played on the Spaniards at Panama, and but for which Morgan might never have had the town. He called to mind that it was de Bernis' wit had found a way to deal with the herd of wild bulls which the Spaniards had goaded into charging the buccaneers on the savannah. Halliwell had been there. He talked of what he had seen; and he knew the opinion in which de Bernis was held. It was not merely for his pimpish foppishness that they called him the Topgallant. In a tight place de Bernis knew how to supply just the little more that made all the difference to their sailing powers. Did Wogan and Leach suppose that de Bernis would not be fully aware of the possibility of just what they proposed?
'Sure now he may be aware of it. But it's the risk he has to take. How could he be helping himself?'
'I don't know,' said Halliwell. 'If I did, I should be as spry as de Bernis himself. Ye'll not persuade me he don't know what he's doing, and just what we might do.'
'Why shouldn't he be trusting us to keep faith?' Wogan had countered confidently. 'He's a buccaneer of the old sort. They respected articles. And we'll do nothing to alarm him. Until we have the plate fleet gutted, we'll just be humouring him and suffering all his impudence. But if there's too much of it, sure we'll be keeping the score, so we will. And it's the fine reckoning we'll be presenting at the end.'
And then Monsieur de Bernis had come down the companion, and the talk had ceased.
The Frenchman heard his servant out. He stood by the table, chin in hand, his face thoughtful, but neither surprised nor alarmed.
'Bien, mon fils,' he said, when Pierre had ended. And he added, after a moment: 'It is just what I supposed would happen.'
His calm seemed to fill his servant with alarm. 'But the danger, monsieur?'
'Ah, yes. The danger.' Monsieur de Bernis smiled upon the other's gravity. 'It is there. At the end of the voyage, Until then, we have something in hand. Until the plate fleet is gutted, as they say, they will humour me and suffer all the impudence I may show them. I may show them a good deal of it.' He laid a hand on the slim lad's shoulder. 'Thanks, Pierre, for your diligence. But no more of it. You take risks, and it is not necessary. Preserve yourself against my real need of you. And now, to bed with you. It has been a heavy day for us all.'
In the interests of his fellow voyagers, or, perhaps, purely from a chivalrous interest in Miss Priscilla, Monsieur de Bernis displayed next morning some of the impudence which Wogan and Halliwell condemned in him. Coming early on deck, and finding the two together there, he addressed to them as a command what might better have been preferred as a request.
'Madame de Bernis is in delicate health. Sometimes she sleeps late. I desire that the cabin be left to her in the morning, so that she may not be disturbed. You understand?'
Wogan's face darkened as he looked at the Frenchman standing before him so straight and aloof and with such airs of master. 'Sure now, I don't understand at all,' said he. 'What of breakfast? We must eat, I suppose, by your gracious leave.'
'You'll break your fast in the wardroom, or where else you choose. But not in the cabin.'
He did not wait for an answer, but passed on to make a round of inspection of the ship.
When he was out of earshot, Wogan breathed gustily in his indignation. 'Airs and graces, by God! It's not fine enough we are, you and me, Ned, for madam. The delicate piece! Well, well! Maybe there'll be another opinion before all's done. The delicate piece may have to learn to be less delicate, so she may. Meanwhile, what shall we be doing?'
'Same as you said last night,' grumbled the corpulent ship-master. 'Humour him. Pay out rope. So long as we break our fast, what odds where we breaks it? To tell you my mind, I found it none so joyful at table with them yesterday. Madam with as many simpers as a court-slut from Whitehall, and her brother mute but for grunts, and this Bernis with his fine, pimpish manners. Bah! I wonder the food didn't turn sour on my stomach.' He spat ostentatiously. 'Give me the wardroom by all means, says I. I likes to be at my ease at table.'
Wogan slapped him on the shoulder: 'And it's entirely right ye are, Ned. And, faith, we'll let him know it.'
So, presently, when de Bernis was returning, he found an Irishman awaiting him arrayed in sarcasm.
''Twas a fine notion yours, Charley, of the wardroom for Ned and me. We're much obliged. So well do we like it that we'll not be troubling your lively madam and her hilarious brother with any more of our company at all. Ye understand?'
'Perfectly You have my leave to keep to the wardroom.' And he passed on, up the companion, to the quarter-deck.
The shipmaster and the lieutenant remained staring at each other a little dumbfounded.
'He gives us leave!' said Wogan at last. Did ye hear that now? He gives us leave. Glory be! I wonder if he has his match afloat for impudence.'
Meanwhile, now on the poop, leaning on the taffrail, and observing the Black Swan where she followed in their wake, her yards squared to the breeze, Monsieur de Bernis was thoughtfully frowning. It would be a half-hour or so later when he roused himself from his deep abstraction. As he took his elbows from the rail and suddenly drew himself erect, the deep lines of thought were smoothed out of his face. Into their place crept the creases of a speculative smile.
He turned, and came briskly down to the quarter-deck, where Halliwell was at the moment conning the ship and instructing the quartermaster at the whip staff below.
He surprised him by commanding him to heave to and to signal to the Black Swan to heave to also. Further, he desired a boat to be manned and launched to take him aboard Tom Leach's ship. He had a word to say to her Captain.
He was obeyed, of course, and a half-hour later he was climbing up the side of the Black Swan, on which the paint was blistering and cracked, to be received by Leach with a volley of blasphemous questions touching the purpose of this morning call and the time it wasted.
'As for time, we have time to spare. And even if we had not, it would still be my way to go surely rather than swiftly.'
He stood at the head of the entrance-ladder, tall, commanding, and oddly elegant for a buccaneer. Others of his kind had attempted modishness in their exteriors, but none had ever achieved it so completely as de Bernis. He had an instinctive sense of the value of dress and appointments, and of the authority and the aloofness necessary to authority which these can lend a man. It was just such a sense as this which had led Sir Henry Morgan to aim at splendour of apparel, but, lacking the inbred refinements of de Bernis' mind and the restraints which it imposes, he had never achieved more than a gaudy ostentation.
By contrast with the Frenchman, Leach in his gaping shirt and red breeches, wearing his own black hair in short clustering greasy curls, looked a coarse ruffian capable of commanding only by aggressiveness and noisy, blustering self-assertion.
'It would be your way, would it? Thee's come to give orders, then?'
'I've come to discuss with you our precise destination,' was the answer in that cold, level voice, a voice which seemed constantly to announce that, whatever emotions might be excited in its owner, fear would never be one of them.
The hands crowding the waist looked on with interest, and even with a certain admiration for de Bernis, an admiration by no means due only to his fine exterior and impressive manner, but nourished by all those legends which had come to be woven about his name as a result of his activities when he had sailed and marched with Morgan.
His answer meanwhile had curbed the aggressiveness of Leach. If there was one piece of information the pirate craved at that moment, it was just this which de Bernis announced that he came to give him. Once in possession of that, he would soon know how to change the Frenchman's tone.
'Come below,' he said shortly, and led the way.
As they went, he beckoned first to one and then to another of the buccaneers to follow, and when they came to the spacious but unclean and untidy cabin, de Bernis made the acquaintance of the mate and the sailing-master of the Black Swan. Both were short, sturdy scoundrels. Ellis, the mate, elected to take the place previously held there by Wogan, was a red flame of a man, with fiery hair and beard and red rims to a pair of pale cruel eyes that seemed to have no eyelashes. Bundry, the sailing-master, was dark with a pock-marked face that was of the colour of clay He wore clothes of a decent, sober cut, and affected a certain fastidiousness of person and quiet dignity of manner.
They sat down, and an elderly Negro, clad only in a pair of cotton drawers and with the mark of the branding-iron on his shoulder, brought a punch of rum and limes and sugar, and then withdrew at a growl from Leach.
'Now, Charley,' the Captain invited his visitor, 'we's waiting.'
Monsieur de Bernis sat forward, leaned his elbows on the stained table, which was of solid, heavy oak, and faced Leach squarely. His opening was unexpected.
'I've been observing your sailing,' he said. 'Not that it was necessary, or that it told me much more than I had discerned yesterday. I've already said, as you may remember, that you've been overlong at sea.'
'And that's a fact,' Bundry cut in. 'Ye don't need to be a seaman to perceive it.'
'Ye'll talk when I bid you,' Leach growled at him, as if annoyed by this early agreement with anything that de Bernis might say. 'What next?'
Monsieur de Bernis paused a moment before continuing. Bundry's confirmation of his opening statement was as encouraging to him as it was unexpected, and as it had been irritating to the Captain. He was strengthened by the quick perception that he had here an ally in what he came to do, and that, therefore, his task was suddenly rendered lighter than he could have hoped.
'I told you yesterday that so foul is your bottom that if I had been in command of the Centaur you'ld never have boarded her. In fact, Tom, you'ld still be chasing me if by now I hadn't sunk you, although you've forty fine guns and the Centaur only half that number of poor pieces.'
After a moment's surprise, Tom Leach received the statement with a loud, jeering laugh. Ellis grinned broadly. But Bundry's countenance, which the scarring of the smallpox had rendered naturally expressionless, remained grave, as de Bernis observed.
'Ye was ever a ruffling, fleering coxcomb, Charley, puffed up wi' your own conceit. But this beats anything I've ever heard even from you. There's a great fighting seaman, to be sure. The devil of a topgallant, high above all other canvas. Maybe thee'll tell us how thee'ld ha' done this miracle.'
'Your sailing-master isn't laughing,' said de Bernis.
'Eh?' Leach scowled inquiry at the solemn Bundry.
'That's because he guesses what's in my mind,' de Bernis continued. 'He's not without intelligence. He knows that if the Centaur with her well-greased keel had beaten up against the wind, she would probably have outsailed you.'
'Outsailing me is one thing, sinking me another. You spoke o' sinking me.'
'A ship that can be outsailed may be sunk if the other is skilfully and resolutely handled. In a sea-fight mobility is all. To swing into position swiftly, to loose a broadside, and to be off again, with masts in line, showing the narrowest mark to your opponent, that is the whole art of sea-fighting. And this the Centaur could have done, and would have done, had I been in her master's place. I'ld have turned and twisted about you like a panther about an elephant, taking my chance to strike before ever your barnacled keel would answer the helm to ward the blow.'
Leach shrugged contemptuously. 'Maybe ye would, and maybe ye wouldn't. But whether ye would or whether ye wouldn't, what's this to do with our destination?'
'Aye,' said the fiery-faced Ellis. 'Let's hear something besides boasting from you.'
'You'll hear something very uncivil from me, unless you practice civility yourself,' he was coldly answered.
Leach smote the table with his fist. 'Hell!' he roared. 'Is it just to be talk and talk until we fall to quarrelling, or are we to come to business? I ask thee again, Charley, what's all this to do wi' our destination?'
'Everything. What I've been saying is meant to show you that you are in no case to go into serious action; and ye're not to make the mistake of underrating the ships or the men of the plate fleet. They will be stout, well-found, well-manned frigates. The two ships we possess will readily account for them if properly handled. But you must first put yourself in case to handle them properly. The stake we play for is too heavy to admit of risks.'
'Ye said they would have no more nor two hundred and fifty men atween 'em.'
'But they've seventy guns to our sixty, and better guns than ours, and they are three keels to two; clean, nimble keels. Will you go shackled into the fight?'
Some of the aggressiveness departed out of Leach. But not all of it. He still sought to swagger. 'Od rot you! Why make difficulties?'
'I don't make them. They exist. I desire them removed.'
'Removed?'
'Removed. Ye must careen the Black Swan before we come to this engagement.'
'Careen!' Leach was aghast. 'Careen?' he repeated, his brow black with disagreement.
'Ye've no choice unless you want to court disaster.'
Bundry nodded, and his lips parted, obviously, it seemed, to express agreement. But Leach did not give him time.
'Sink me, man! Does thee think I needs to be taught my trade?'
'If ye refuse to careen, you'll prove that you do.'
'That's what thee says. But what thee says isn't gospel. With the Black Swan as she is, I'ld be quite ready to face your three Spaniards; aye, and account for them. Don't let me hear any more about careening. If ye weren't a fool, ye'ld realize that there's no time for it.'
'Time and to spare. We've a full month before the plate fleet sails. And that's more than you need to scour and grease your keel.'
To prove him wrong again, as de Bernis had done, was merely to drive Leach to entrench himself in obstinacy, which is ever the last refuge of a stupid man. 'Whether we've time or not, I'm not minded to do it. I'm not afeared enough of any Spaniard afloat. So leave that out. Let's come to business now. There's been enough idle talk. What's our destination?'
For a long moment de Bernis calmly considered him across the table. Then he tossed off the punch in his pannikin, pushed back his chair, and rose.
'Since ye're determined, that's the end of the matter. To engage the plate fleet with a ship in the foul state of the Black Swan is, as I said before, to court disaster. And that is something I never court. As for your destination, you may make it what you please.'
The three of them stared up at him in stupefaction, incredulously, reluctant to believe what he seemed to convey.
'What d'ye mean?' cried Ellis at last.
'That if Captain Leach chooses to sail his ships and his men to destruction, I'll be no party to it. You can seek other enterprises: merchantmen like the Centaur, with cargoes of logwood and hides, cocoa and spices. I'll be wishing you good day.'
'Sit down!' Leach bawled at him. The Captain had come to his feet in his anger.
But Monsieur de Bernis remained standing. 'Do you wish to reconsider?'
'It's thee as had better consider. Thee'd better consider how we stand. Ye're aboard my ship, and, by God, I'll have no mutineers. Ye're here for a purpose, and that purpose ye'll fulfil.'
'In my own way. On my own terms,' said de Bernis, still imperturbable.
'In my way, dost hear? In my way. I am master here.'
'Ah? And if I refuse?'
'Ye'll maybe end on the yardarm. Maybe worse.'
'So!' said de Bernis. He raised his brows. He looked down his nose at Leach, considering him as he might have considered some curious and not too pleasant specimen. 'Do you know, Captain, that I have a suspicion that this crew of yours takes an interest in me, particularly since they've learnt I am to bring them to Spanish gold? They'll require to know why you are hanging me, Tom. What shall you tell them? That it is because I refuse to let you lead them to destruction? That it is because I insist that you shall take measures to make victory assured? Is that what you will tell them?'
He watched the dark, evil face before him; saw the expression change; saw a lessening of the colour glowing through his tan. He looked at the other two. In the face of Ellis he saw a reflection of the Captain's discomfiture. Bundry's looked almost distressed, and it was Bundry who spoke.
'When all's said, Captain, Bernis isn't altogether wrong.'
'I care nothing...' Leach was beginning, rallying his obstinacy, when Ellis interrupted him.
'We have to care, Captain. Damme! We have to. And that's the fact. Hell and the devil! Where's the sense o' quarrelling when our interests are all the same. Bernis wants to do his best for us all as well as for himself. What if his courage be less than your own, Tom?'
'Caution isn't altogether a fault,' came from Bundry. 'As a seaman I know him to be right about the state of the ship and the rest. If we was pressed for time, we might take a chance. But since we've time in hand, a' God's name let us spend it in making her properly seaworthy.'
Thus Leach found himself abandoned by his own officers, and by this defection realized that at present it was de Bernis who held the trumps. By the secret in his possession of the whereabouts of that plate fleet, he could constrain them to his ways and they could use no constraint with him.
He controlled himself. He stamped down his anger, flung over it a pretence almost of bonhomie.
'Aye, ye're right. Where's the sense o' quarrelling? I can admit a fault. It's the way ye goes about things, Charley. Thee's all quills like a hedgehog. A God's name, sit down, and fill your can, and let's agree things friendly.' He pushed the jack of rum across, with a propitiatory grin. Then he sat down again.
Monsieur de Bernis allowed himself to be propitiated. He permitted no faintest expression of triumph to escape him. He inclined his head a little, in acknowledgement, resumed his seat, and poured as he was invited.
'You agree, then, to careen? That is settled?'
'Why, since not only you but Bundry here also thinks it's necessary, I suppose we must. Though frankly I'm not o' your ways o' thinking. But there...It's agreed, yes.'
'In that case,' said de Bernis, 'the destination I came to discuss with you, our immediate destination, should be the Albuquerque Keys. There's an island there--Maldita--uninhabited, and well known to me of old, with a cove in which you can hide a dozen ships, and a long shelving beach that was made for careening. There's not a better place in all the Caribbean. You can lie snug there, and unsuspected, and it's convenient for another reason...' He paused, raising an impressive forefinger. 'It lies within an easy two days' sail of the spot at which I mean to intercept the Spanish plate fleet.'