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“Because you speak the King’s English, lad. Speak it, read
it, write it as well as any Yorkshireman. Because you are familiar
with Scripture. Because you seem to have an extremely able head
on you.”
“Those things—the learning and the Scripture—they were the
doings of the Scotsman who raised me. He and his wife. Before he
came to Africa to start his chandlery, Mr. Bascombe was a vicar.
He taught me the Scripture, and history and philosophy.”
The pirate smiled. He had white, even teeth. “Then, when you
say your prayers, you must thank God for Vicar Bascombe.”
He tied off another lock of the wig.
“But, Captain, does a slave not fetch a higher price if he speaks
English?”
The captain looked up from his work. “I sold those men and
women to save them, boy. They’d made it all the way across to
the Indies; they were strangers in a strange land. If I’d put them
ashore on some island, thirst and starvation and the Arawaks would
have killed most of them off by now. And those who lived would
be hanged for escape when the colonists found them. By making
them chattel, I gave them food and a roof and the hope of still
being alive by this time next year. Slavery may be the devil’s own
commerce, but death is irreversible. So I sold them to save them,
lad. That and put a few farthings in our pockets. But you?” The
captain picked up another ribbon. “What you’ve got between your
ears is all you need to survive, boy. I kept you apart because you
showed that promise. Why? You had no kin among the others,
did you?”
The teenager shook his head. “They were people of the bush.
I was raised in town.”
The pirate shrugged. “Then what I did was best for all
concerned.”
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“Begging your pardon, Captain, but we’ve closed half the dis-
tance on the merchantman.”
“Near enough to make out her ensign?”
The mate nodded. “It’s the old flag, sir. White cross on a blue
field.”
“Servants of King Louis. Splendid. We’ll have to air her out if we
take her, but I’ll wager she has brandy. How many guns, Ben?”
“Ports for ten each side. Plus a swivel gun or two: that’d make
twenty-two. Looks like deckhands in her rigging, not marines, but
she could be carrying some.”
The pirate looked at the young man. “Twenty-two guns to our
twelve four-pounders and the chance of two dozen muskets, to
boot. What do you think, boy? Try to take her, or let her run?”
The teenager straightened. “Take her.”
The pirate returned to his plaiting. “You’d risk my men’s lives
for a prize when we don’t even know what she’s carrying?” He
looked up again.
“No, sir. But I’d risk her men’s lives.”
The pirate tied off the tip of a lock with a silver bead. “How
so?”
The younger man motioned toward the silver brush and a
tortoiseshell comb on the tabletop. “May I?”
The captain nodded once, slowly, his eyes on the boy.
“Say your brush here is the merchantman. Even if she has guns
we can’t see atop her aft castle, she’ll still be blind in the quarters.
She can shoot broadside and possibly straight aft, but she cannot
shoot at an angle astern—not without repositioning a gun, and that
takes time. So we sail straight into that unprotected quarter.” He
moved the brush. “Then we turn broadside and fire chain shot:
take down her rigging and maybe even her masts. That puts her
adrift; she can no longer maneuver to return fire. We can stand
off and fire solid shot at her until she surrenders.”
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“Well.” The captain looked at his mate. “It seems that young . . .
What’s your name, lad?”
“Theodore, sir. Theodore—”
The captain shushed him. “Your Christian name alone will
suffice on this ship, unless you’re married, which I doubt very
much that you are.”
He divided his beard in two and began plaiting the left side
with the scarlet ribbons. “So, Ben, it seems that young Ted has a
knack for the scheming of things. What think you of his plan?”
The mate hoisted his breeches a bit. “It leaves us with a crip-
pled prize, Captain. We can’t put the half of what she’s carrying
in our hold; the rest would go to waste.”
The pirate glanced up at Ted. “He’s right, you know.”
The young man scowled. “Then we take her gold and silver
and burn her.”
Both pirates laughed, and the teenager’s face reddened.
“I like the cut of your jib, Bold Ted,” the pirate said. “But that’s
an inbound merchantman. She carries very little gold or silver;
only what her frightened passengers might have stuffed away in
the corners of their trunks. Her cargo is probably cloth and tools
and furniture, gunpowder and shot and some cannon, I wager,
in her bilge as ballast. And perhaps—if Providence smiles upon
us—some brandywine, seeing as she’s French.”
“Cloth and tools? What good are those?”
The pirate finished plaiting the other side of his beard.
“Those goods are needed by merchants here in the Indies,
Bold Ted. They order them from the Old World, and pay when
they arrive on the dock. Now, those merchants—or one of their
cousins—will still get those goods, but they will buy them from us
for a few shillings on the guinea. We can do that and still profit,
because we paid naught for their manufacture, nor for the cost
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The three of them climbed to the open hatch and the deck—
the teenager first, then the mate, and finally the captain, who had
topped his finery off with a brocaded velvet waistcoat. The crew,
on the other hand, had opted for practicality, pulling on tarred
breeches and jackets and leather jerkins—clothing designed to
turn a light sword’s blade. All around them the Caribbean Sea
shone a deep and rolling blue under a sky dotted with only a few
small clouds.
Their quarry, a three-masted ship, was under what seemed
its own small constellation of cumulus—a full set of snow-white
sails straining concave before the wind. But it was plain to see that
she was losing her race to the pirates’ faster Jamaica-built sloop.
Already they were close enough to make out the men in her rigging,
shielding their eyes as they watched the closing pursuer.
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lad. We’ll still keep our guns on her, and we will sink her in a minute
if anyone decides to be brave or foolish. But I doubt anyone will,
and we’ve a fine prize with no unsightly gaps for our carpenter to
patch.”
He turned to the mate. “Ben, would you be so good as to
assemble a prize crew?”
The mate saluted—the first time anyone had executed a proper
shipboard salute all morning—and chose men from the volunteers
clustered around him.
The captain clapped the teenager on the shoulder. “You are a
good lad and a bright one, Bold Ted. But I daresay that this Vicar
Bascombe of yours took his knowledge of tactics from the histories
of Caesar, and perhaps from naval accounts; we will have to do
our best to clear your head of all that battle nonsense. Ships of
the line fight to the death, and if hard-pressed, so shall we. But for
men in an enterprise such as this, our stock in trade is the option
of surrender, and surrender is always what’s best for all parties. If
one of our men is maimed in a fight, we must pay him a pension
and buy him a plot of land, and that expense reduces considerably
the prize share for all concerned. Not to mention that the prize is
worth more if taken whole.
“And those lads over there”—he nodded at the merchantman—
“are highly relieved now that things are proceeding in a civilized
manner. Most of them will volunteer to crew our prize and receive
shares for their cooperation. As for the ones that don’t, they will be
locked in the hold and set ashore at the nearest landfall.”
Ted shook his head, his close-cropped black hair glistening in
the bright Caribbean sun, as the sloop closed in on the drifting
merchantman. “It’s not how I thought it worked at all.”
The pirate laughed and lifted a hailing trumpet.
“I am Captain Henry Thatch, a servant of King George.” Behind
him, the first mate coughed. “And you are my prize.” The captain
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