Matelots Read online

  “Why?”

  Pete shrugged. “HasAThingToDo WithTheHousekeeper. SheConvertedToThaChurch. SheBeMarriedTaTheodoreNow. TheJewBlamesUs.”

  “Stop! What? Good Lord, man, when were you going to impart that bit of news?”

  He paused and turned to face me before giving another impartial shrug, but he could not completely hide the mischief in his eyes. “MenBeFoolsAllTheTime. ItNotBeNews. OtherThanUsNa’Havin’AHouse.”

  “Theodore is our friend,” I chided with amusement, and then added gently, “And not a buccaneer. He betrays no matelot in the doing of it.”

  “Aye,” Pete said with a thoughtful nod.

  He shrugged yet again. “HeWishesTaSeeYa. HeSentYarLettersTa England. An’HeSentANoteFerYa.”

  I sighed and took the lead on the path. “I should see him, but…”

  “YaThinkGaston WillThinkYaGoneMissin’.”

  “Aye.”

  “IfHeWeren’tMad, IWouldSayThatWereShite. ButHeBeMad.”

  I glanced back at Pete, and found him nodding somberly.

  “Well, WeCouldBring’Theodore’Ere.”

  “If you can tear him away from his new wife.”

  I grinned. Theodore had been lonely and obviously smitten with Rachel, but to convince the headstrong woman to abandon her Jewish faith and join the Church of England in order to marry him must have required courtship of a most devoted nature. I wished I had been able to witness it. Of course, on the other hand, converting could have been a thing she wished to do.

  They were lucky to be in Port Royal, where such a thing might not bring a man of Theodore’s social stature to ruin. Here in the West Indies, her being a white woman carried far more weight than her being a Jewess by birth.

  “Any other news?” I asked.

  “BradleyBeGettin’Married.”

  “That I deem foolishness. So Captain Bradley has his plantation and wife. At least Siegfried died before he must suffer it all.”

  “Aye,” Pete grumbled. “’EBeLuckyInThat.”

  It was assumed to be the natural order of things. A man roved with other men, partnered with them, lay with them, until he had enough money to do the proper thing and settle down as a planter, with a wife, and all that that implied: mainly that he no longer was about men. For many of them, it was as it should be; but for men such as Pete and myself, who truly favored men, it was a dire future. I wondered what would become of us, especially myself, as my father surely expected me to marry, and it would certainly be a requirement of my inheriting. So it was likely I would not inherit, as marrying and all it implied was not a thing I wished to embrace. I was determined to do as I had promised Gaston, and abandon it all for him. That was, of course, if I had him.

  We were approaching the others, but I slowed. “Your mission was to cheer me, was it not?”

  Pete smiled thinly. “IBeDoin’ARightPoorJob.”

  “Love is worth all we might suffer for it, is it not?”

  Ancient wisdom did not now fold about him like a mantle: he appeared human as his gaze drifted to his matelot and back again. He frowned with pursed lips.

  “Aye,” he said with more resignation than conviction.

  “If you ever need cheering.”

  He chuckled deeply and led me toward the fire.

  There were a score of men about it. Our cabal, and a dozen or so experienced men, including most of the Bard’s better sailors, had chosen to spend the autumnal fallow – the season of the storms the natives called hurricanes – on our ship or here at Negril. Cudro, Liam and Otter, and Julio and Davey, were all my neighbors up on the point. Striker and Pete, and, of course, the Bard, had chosen to live on the Virgin Queen: a good thing that, as we apparently no longer had a house in Port Royal.

  I was greeted warmly by all, and I roused my melancholy heart to embrace everyone with at least a modicum of the heartiness they bestowed upon me. They were true friends and they deserved as much.

  We passed several bottles of rum and supped on roast fowl. In addition to the birds we dined upon, Striker and Pete had brought me a coop of chickens. I supposed I should be grateful, but all I could see of the matter was a good deal of bother, not the least of which would be hauling the damn cage of birds up the hill. I seemed to recall Gaston mentioning he favored eggs, though, so I drank and cajoled Pete and Striker into helping me get the chickens to their new home in the morning.

  When the sun set at last, I wandered away from the others to walk in the surf and attempt to enjoy the flaming majesty of its descent – and to cease being taunted by all the happy couples about the fire. They had said nothing untoward, but all had asked of Gaston; and I had spun a lame excuse about his being out hunting, knowing all the while that Liam had told the lot of them my matelot had been missing for weeks. I had grown tired of their sympathetic glances and even more wearied by their sitting about one another in casual embrace. Not all of them were paired, but most were, and every time an arm went companionably about a shoulder, my back grew colder and my arms emptier.

  A presence loomed in the dimming twilight to my left, and I turned swiftly to find Cudro. He stood gazing out at the last tendrils of sunlight beyond the waves. I had grown accustomed to the big Dutchman, despite my intermittently-harbored ill will over his past treatment of my matelot.

  “He’s been away, what, a fortnight?” Cudro rumbled in French.

  “About that.” I frowned. I did not wish to discuss the matter with him.

  “Do you see him at all? I keep thinking he might be sneaking in at night and avoiding us.”

  “It is not your concern,” I said somewhat harshly. I regretted my momentary rancor and sighed. Cudro’s curiosity seemed born of genuine concern. “I am sorry to snap so.”

  He waved me off and heaved a sigh. “I know why you do. Perhaps you should.” He studied me with speculation and nodded to himself before sitting and turning his eyes back to the sea. “I am a man prone to… obsession,” he told the night beyond. “It has been my undoing more than once. I set my heart upon a thing and…” One large fist clawed and grasped the air in front of him. “I am like a bulldog. I cannot let go. It is in my blood to hold on, whether my body is slammed about and broken on a post by the object of my desire.”

  I nodded and sank to the sand beside him.

  He faced me and spoke earnestly. “I fell in love with him when first I saw him. He was… Well, you know well how he is. He would sit away from us and talk only if we spoke to him. I knew it wasn’t arrogance that kept him away. I saw him as shy. I made overtures. He rebuffed them. Then a circumstance occurred in which he was forced to reveal the scars. I could not imagine a man that ill-used, and I thought it must account for the madness everyone spoke of. I wanted to… touch him. I wanted to see him smile. I wanted to rescue him. It was a thing I had done before with others. I…” He waved his words away and met my eyes. “I latched onto him and refused to give up. Yet the more I tried, the more he refused. And then one night he said some bitter things and I was drunk and others had heard him and… by then I had decided I wanted to…” He sighed. “If I could not gentle him down, I thought I might break him. So... I provoked him and he came at me.” Cudro pointed to a scar along his left forearm and opened his vest to show another along his ribs. “It took three men to bring him down. And then he would not stop cursing me. I hit him. Once he had his wind he hurled curses at me again. So… I regret how far it went. I will always rue that day.”

  On this new description I could picture it all quite clearly; and having been in the face of Gaston’s rage, I could well understand how things had gone awry.

  “I am sorry I have been unable to forgive you,” I said. “I think I can, now. I have stood in the face of his madness and heard things that curdled my blood. He seems to possess unerring aim for those places most… soft… upon another when he is thus.”

  “I saw what occurred on the galleon, though I did not hear it.”

  I shrugged. “If I had not knocked him senseless with my first blo
w there, I daresay I would have hit him again while Pete held him. Yet…”

  “You already had him. He already cared for you,” Cudro said wistfully.

  Things tumbled through my mind as I let myself recall what Gaston had said that day. “He lashed out at me from… fear over that, I feel. He does not favor men, as I feel you and I do.”

  Cudro grinned. “Oui. I have known I preferred men since I first found my manhood. You?”

  “The same, though I did not truly understand it then.”

  “Who does?”

  We regarded one another with new understanding.

  He grinned. “However did you net him?”

  I thought of how it might look from his perspective, or that of anyone else my matelot had rebuffed. I was thankful I had not pursued Gaston per se, at least not in the traditional manner. Then I remembered Striker’s amusement at the duration of our relationship. “How long do you think I knew Gaston prior to the North Wind sailing?”

  He grinned. “Months I would imagine, though I know not how. You did not sail on the Josephine, which Gaston arrived on, and she had only been in port a few weeks. It has been a curiosity to me.”

  “I see.” I grinned back. “I met him two days before I met you.”

  “Damn,” he said with awe.

  So I told him of how we met and how we became matelots, and Cudro rumbled with amusement at the unwitting part he had played in the scenario.

  When the humor passed, Cudro regarded me with wonder. “So he pursued you.”

  “Oui. So it seems. And I am well glad of it. I would have been just as smitten had he not evinced interest in me, and probably just as thoroughly rebuffed as all who came before me.”

  “So all it took was a book on philosophy?”

  “Apparently.” I still wondered what Gaston had seen in me that afternoon. “I blame the Gods, Fates, what have you. It was as if we were destined to meet.”

  He chuckled. “You were the one he was waiting for.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “He said that once, that he was waiting for someone. I had asked him if he liked being alone and he had replied that he did not, but he was waiting for a certain person and he would know them when he met them.”

  “Truly?” I murmured.

  I wondered if Gaston had meant it, or if it had been yet another diplomatic tactic to retard Cudro’s advances. Either way, he had met me. The whole of it filled me with renewed wonder. We had been fated to meet, had we not? He would return. He would not leave me waiting any longer than he had to. All would be well. And in the meantime, I had made a new friend.

  I clapped Cudro’s shoulder. “I am pleased we have finally spoken of this.”

  “As am I,” he sighed. “I have known what he must have told you, and I can imagine what you must have thought. If he were mine, I would hate any who harmed him.” He shrugged and changed the tack. “So truly, he has not recovered from events on Île de la Tortue? It has been a matter of discussion and concern.”

  “Has it now?”

  “Among those who care for the both of you.” He nodded vaguely toward the fire.

  “Well,” I said, “I would rather that than my enemies finding delight with it.”

  He chuckled. “You have dangerous friends. You need not fear enemies.”

  I felt this was true. It burned away even more of the melancholy.

  When at last the others began to sleep – all clustered in the smoke of the fire to keep the damned insects at bay – I took a torch and the remainder of a bottle and staggered home. Though my heart was far lighter, I did not wish to sleep with so many about when I was so alone.

  My hut was empty, but between the rum and something Cudro had said, I had begun to muse on the concept of Gaston stealing in to check on me from time to time. I had oft woken from dreams these last weeks feeling he had been standing beside me.

  Having no paper, I searched about with the torch until I located a small plate of rock. I wrote, “I miss you,” upon it in French with charcoal. And then I climbed into my hammock and set the rock upon my chest, such that he could see it if he did come by. It was whimsy, but I found it comforting.

  In the morning, the rock was gone. I found it sitting beside the fire pit. I would have thought my recollection of writing upon it and taking it to bed to be the result of rum-addled delusion if it did not now have “J’taime” written on the other side.

  I cradled it in my hands for a long time before finally placing it on a little shelf in the hut. Then I went down to the beach to fetch the chicken coop and more fronds to repair the thatch.

  October, 1667

  A shot rang out in the heavy afternoon air. At first I was unsure as to whether I had actually heard it, and then I knew I had. I left off work on the wall and took up a weapon and ran to the top of the hillock that composed one side of my dwelling. I quickly spied Cudro waving and pointing from his house to the west. He signaled that a ship was coming around the point and gave no further sound of alarm. Otter and Liam joined me, as their home was a little farther east, and we walked to the edge in time to see the Virgin Queen dropping sail.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Liam roared. “I were sleepin’. The daft bastard coulda’ just came ’round an’ tol’ us the Queen be here.”

  “Well, he does not often have a chance to discharge his weapon,” I said.

  I returned to the work of laying stones before my mortar dried. There would be a party tonight on the beach, and I had ample time to attend it. I need not rush off now.

  Thus it was with surprise that I looked up a time later and spied a jacketless and panting Theodore cresting the promontory and staggering toward my house. Pete and Striker were with him, carrying a sea trunk I recognized, and my dear solicitor’s coat and satchel.

  Pete reached me first. He shed his baldric in one smooth movement, and dropped it in a hurried heap with Theodore’s satchel and coat on the bench before my home. Then he was upon me. His embrace hurt both my ribs in its rigor and my heart with its unfamiliarity. I had not seen the two of them in three weeks, and no one else living upon the Point found need to touch me. I truly needed to be embraced more often. Striker followed Pete, and I did not wish to release either of them.

  “Gaston?” Striker asked quietly by way of greeting.

  I shook my head. “He is still… hunting. He lets me know he is well, or rather, still living, from time to time, but I have not seen him still.”

  “It has been a month now?” he asked.

  “More than that,” I sighed. “But in speaking to Cudro, I have learned that he once heard Gaston would disappear into the Haiti for months at a time, which agrees with things my matelot said in passing. I try my best not to worry. As I said, at least he comes around and leaves some small message for me on occasion.”

  “He’ll always return to you,” Striker assured me.

  “I know,” I sighed. I had settled that matter in my heart a month ago. I did not now doubt his eventual return; I only wished to know when.

  “And look what we have brought,” he said, and gestured to panting Theodore, who was finally joining us.

  Striker was carrying a bottle of rum in the hand he pointed with, and I snatched it. “Good, rum, I have been dry. Oh, you meant my solicitor,” I added, after taking a good pull from the bottle.

  Theodore ignored me. He stood gasping, turning in a slow circle to take in the entire vista.

  “My Lord, Marsdale…” he began.

  “Will,” I corrected him as he drew his labored breath.

  He gave a disparaging snort. “Will, then. My Lord, Will, I see why you have not returned to Port Royal.”

  “Is it truly such a distance?” I teased as I embraced him.

  “Nay, nay, this, all of this.” He waved his arms to encompass the view when we parted. “If I had this to look upon daily, I should not care what else might occur in the world, either. Ah, and we shall see the sunset from this vantage soon. I can only imagine its glory
from here.”

  I had not thought him to hold interest in such things. This added another mark of favor in his already full account.

  “You are welcome to stay and visit as long or as often as you wish, though my accommodations are meager.” I indicated my hut.

  Theodore gazed upon the dwelling for the first time and raised an eyebrow. “I suppose it keeps you dry.”

  “Aye.”

  I chuckled. The hut was as crude as it had been when first Gaston built it, but I had decided to enlarge it, and now it almost had two rooms. I had collected a great number of limestone blocks and begun to lengthen the walls, so that there was a much larger chamber in front of the original sleeping space. The eastern wall and the section of the northern wall running from it to the new door were complete; I had even made a window. The western wall would be identical except for orientation. It was the height of my chest, and the latest layer of stone had been the object of the afternoon’s labor. Within a few days, I would have to go with some of the others to cut and haul more wood for roof beams.

  I proudly told Theodore, “I will eventually manage an entire manor house.”

  “And here I never envisioned that you came here to build something… literally,” he said with a smile.

  “Neither did I, but I have found great satisfaction in it.”

  “You should apply for a grant of this land,” he said and looked about again. “All of it.”

  “As it is not arable, and therefore useless, I assume the Governor would grant it without a second thought.”

  “Aye,” Theodore sighed. “But… Will… be thankful it is useless in its beauty.”

  “I am, as I know if it had less esoteric value it would soon be overrun by greedy wolves. I am well-versed in those ways of the world.”

  “You should all apply for grants here,” Theodore added, indicating Pete and Striker.

  Striker nodded seriously. “I would not mind owning that bay to the north, the one with the good anchorage.”

  “I’llTakeThis’EreBeach.” Pete pointed at the long strand running north.