Caribbee Part 10

She found the hint of sarcasm in his tone deliberately provoking. She watched as he took another drink directly from the bottle.

"I don't seem to recall ever seeing you speak with a lady, Captain."

"You've got a point." His eyes twinkled. "Perhaps it's because there're so few out here in the Caribbees."

"Or could it be you're not aware of the difference?" His insolent parody of politeness had goaded her into a tone not entirely to her own liking.

"So I've sometimes been told." Again his voice betrayed his pleasure.

"But then I doubt there is much, really." He grinned. "At least, by the time they get around to educating me on that topic."

As happened only rarely, she couldn't think of a sufficiently cutting riposte. She was still searching for one when he continued, all the while examining her in the same obvious way he'd done on the sh.o.r.e.

"Excuse me, but I believe you enquired about something. The men and provisions, I believe it was. The plain answer is I plan to take them and leave Barbados, as soon as I can manage."

"And where is it you expect you'll be going?" She found her footing again, and this time she planned to keep it.

"Let's say, on a little adventure. To see a new part of the world." He was staring at her through the candlelight. "I've had about enough of this island of yours. Miss Bedford. As well as the new idea that slavery's going to make everybody rich. I'm afraid it's not my style."

"But I gather you're the man responsible for our n.o.ble new order here, Captain."

He looked down at the flask, his smile vanishing. "If that's true, I'm not especially proud of the fact."

At last she had him. All his arrogance had dissolved. Just like Jeremy, that time she asked him to tell her what exactly he'd done in the battle at Marsten Moor. Yet for some reason she pulled back, still studying him.

"It's hard to understand you, Captain. You help them steal sugarcane from the Portugals, then you decide you don't like it."

"At the time it was a job. Miss Bedford. Let's say I've changed my mind since then. Things didn't turn out exactly the way I'd figured they would." He took another drink, then set down the bottle and laughed.

"That always seems to be the way."

"What do you mean?"

"It's something like the story of my life." His tone waxed

slightly philosophical as he stared at the flickering candle. "I always end up being kicked about by events. So now I've decided to try turning things around. Do a little kicking of my own."

"That's a curious ambition. I suppose these indentures are going to help you do it?" She was beginning to find him more interesting than she'd expected. "You said just now you learned to shoot by hunting. I know a lot of men who hunt, but I've never seen anything like what you did tonight. Where exactly did you learn that?"

He paused, wondering how much to say. The place, of course, was Tortuga, and these days that meant the Cow-Killers, men who terrified the settlers of the Caribbean. But this wasn't a woman he cared to frighten. He was beginning to like her bra.s.s, the way she met his eye.

Maybe, he thought, he'd explain it all to her if he got a chance someday. But not tonight. The story was too long, too painful, and ended too badly.

His memories of Tortuga went back to the sultry autumn of 1631. Just a year before, that little island had been taken over by a group of English planters--men and women who'd earlier tried growing tobacco up on St. Christopher, only to run afoul of its Carib Indians and their poisoned arrows. After looking around for another island, they'd decided on Tortuga, where n.o.body lived then except for a few hunters of wild cattle, the Cow-Killers. Since the hunters themselves spent a goodly bit of their time across the channel on the big Spanish island of Hispaniola, Tortuga was all but empty.

But now these planters were living just off the northern coast of a major Spanish domain, potentially much more dangerous than merely having a few Indians about. So they pet.i.tioned the newly formed Providence Company in London to swap a shipment of cannon for a tobacco contract. The Company, recently set up by some Puritan would-be privateers, happily agreed.

Enter Hugh Winston. He'd just been apprenticed for three months to the Company by his royalist parents, intended as a temporary disciplining for some unpleasant reflections he'd voiced on the character of King Charles that summer after coming home from his first term at Oxford.

Lord Winston and his wife Lady Brett, knowing he despised the Puritans for their hypocrisy, a.s.sumed this would be the ideal means to instill some royalist sympathies. As it happened, two weeks later the Providence Company posted this unwelcome son of two prominent monarchists out to Tortuga on the frigate delivering their shipment of guns.

No surprise, Governor Hilton of the island's Puritan settlement soon had little use for him either. After he turned out to show no more reverence for Puritans than for the monarchy, he was sent over to hunt on Hispaniola with the Cow-Killers. That's where he had to learn to shoot if he was to survive. As things turned out, being banished there probably saved his life.

When the Spaniards got word of this new colony, with Englishmen pouring in from London and Bristol, the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, the large Spanish city on Hispaniola's southern side, decided to make an example.

So in January of 1635 they put together an a.s.sault force of some two hundred fifty infantry, sailed into Tortuga's harbor, and staged a surprise attack. As they boasted afterward, they straightaway put to the sword all those they first captured, then hanged any others who straggled in later. By the time they'd finished, they'd burned the settlement to the ground and killed over six hundred men, women and children. They also hanged a few of the Cow-Killers--a mistake that soon changed history.

When Jacques le Basque, the bearded leader of Hispaniola's hunters, found out what had happened to his men, he vowed he was going to bankrupt and destroy Spain's New World empire in revenge. From what was heard these days, he seemed well on his way to succeeding.

Hugh Winston had been there, a founding member of that band of men now known as the most vicious marauders the world had ever seen. That was the piece of his life he'd never gotten around to telling anyone. . . .

"I did some hunting when I was apprenticed to an English settlement here in the Caribbean. Years ago."

"Well, I must say you shoot remarkably well for a tobacco planter, Captain." She knew he was avoiding her question. Why?

"I thought I'd just explained. I also hunted some in those days." He took another drink, then sought to shift the topic. "Perhaps now I can be permitted to ask you a question, Miss Bedford. I'd be interested to know what you think of the turn things are taking here? That is, in your official capacity as First Lady of this grand settlement."

"What exactly do you mean?" G.o.d d.a.m.n his supercilious tone.

"The changes ahead. Here on Barbados." He waved his hand. "Will everybody grow rich, the way they're claiming?"

"Some of the landowners are apt to make a great deal of money, if sugar prices hold." Why, she wondered, did he want to know? Was he planning to try and settle down? Or get into the slave trade himself? In truth, that seemed more in keeping with what he did for a living now.

"Some? And why only some?" He examined her, puzzling. "Every planter must already own a piece of this suddenly valuable land."

"The Council members and the other big landowners are doubtless thinking to try and force out the smaller freeholders, who'll not have a sugarworks and therefore be at their mercy." She began to toy deliberately with her gla.s.s, uncomfortable at the prospect she was describing. "It's really quite simple, Captain. I'm sure you can grasp the basic principles of commerce . . . given your line of work."

"No little fortunes? just a few big ones?" Oddly, he refused to be baited.

"You've got it precisely. But what does that matter to you? You don't seem to care all that much what happens to our small freeholders."

"If that's true, it's a sentiment I probably share with most of the people who were at this table tonight." He raised the empty flask of kill-devil and studied it thoughtfully against the candle. "So if Briggs and the rest are looking to try and take it all, then I'd say you're in for a spell of stormy weather here, Miss Bedford."

"Well, their plans are far from being realized, that I promise you. Our a.s.sembly will stand up to them all the way."

"Then I suppose I should wish you, and your father, and your a.s.sembly luck. You're going to need it." He flung the empty flask crashing into the fireplace, rose, and moved down the table. The light seemed to catch in his scar as he pa.s.sed the candle. "And now perhaps you'll favor me with the next dance."

She looked up, startled, as he reached for her hand.

"Captain, I think you ought to know that I'm planning to be married."

"To one of these rich planters, I presume."

"To a gentleman, if you know what that is. And a man who would not take it kindly if he knew I was seen with you here tonight."

"Oh?"

"Yes. Anthony Walrond."

Winston erupted with laughter. "Well, good for him. He also has superb taste in flintlock muskets. Please tell him that when next you see him."

"You mean the ones you stole from his ship that went aground? I don't expect he would find that comment very amusing."

"Wouldn't he now." Winston's eyes flashed. "Well, d.a.m.ned to him. And if you want to hear something even less amusing than that, ask him sometime to tell you why I took those muskets." He reached for her hand. "At any rate, I'd like to dance with his lovely fiancee."