Captain Crossbones. Donald Barr Chidsey

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СКАЧАТЬ did not have the courage to engage her in talk. Only once had George Rounsivel ventured to speak to her.

      This was the previous day, just after the conviction had been announced, the sentence passed.

      “You must know, ma’am, that my case is different from the others. If I could speak to your uncle in private . . .”

      She had looked up in that swift birdlike way of hers, and her eyes, the color of Parma violets, for an instant swam with moisture, but she had looked down again.

      “My uncle makes it a point of policy never to interfere with the findings of the court.”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      That was all that had passed between them.

      Yet it was this same girl who had given the scream outside of the cell door—the scream that turned nine heads as though they were worked by a single wire.

      It was not all her blame. Corporal Pugh, admittedly, had sprung out of the shadows with an abruptness that might have jogged anybody. For Pugh himself was scared.

      He was characteristic of the company Woodes Rogers had brought. Rickety, cough-racked, and like so many of his companions he was a pensioner taken from hospital. Here were men that the army no longer wanted and even the navy wouldn’t have. There was not much about their appearance to point at a military past. They weren’t alert, they lounged, and they snoozed on sentry-go. If ever these miserable totterers were called upon to defend the enfeebled walls of Fort Nassau the result would be sure. The buccaneers were a rabble, granted; they were unorganized, stupid, and in many ways unskilled men, besides being prodigiously lazy and very often drunk; but when stirred to action they could be furies, and they knew every dirty trick in the game.

      Corporal Pugh was aware of this. When he had been assigned to stand sentinel at the cell door, on this night of all nights, he knew that if the rumshops suddenly were emptied and the pirates came storming into the fort, here was the spot they’d head for. He had no dream of making an heroic stand. He had, therefore, marked out in his mind a route of retreat, and instead of standing smack before the door he had hunkered down in the shadows thrown by a charcoal bin twenty feet away. There, alas, he had all but fallen asleep. At the sound of Delicia Rogers’ step he had sprung to his feet with an abruptness that brought from her that involuntary scream.

      They grinned sheepishly.

      “Ma’am, you shouldn’t ought to be out on a night like this. You should be at Government House, where you got a guard.”

      “And what a guard! All of them hiding their heads like ostrichs—like you here, for that matter!”

      “Now, ma’am—”

      “No matter. I’ve been talking to my uncle, and I think I have at last persuaded him to reconsider the case against Rounsivel.”

      “Good. That lad’s innocent. He just got into the wrong company, that’s all. You have a let-pass?”

      “Here—”

      The light was poor. Pugh could not read anyway, but he did know the governor’s signature, and he made a show of spelling out the words.

      “Yes, that’s right. But I’m not going in there alone, ma’am.”

      “The men are all chained!”

      “Aye, but they’re desperate. I’ll call out the guard.”

      He did this, and he summoned the armorer as well, and for a few minutes he made a deal of bustle. He even went into the cell—with the armorer and two others.

      “To what am I indebted for this service?” asked George Rounsivel as they knocked the chain off his ankle-ring.

      “Show you when we get outside,” muttered Corporal Pugh.

      There was no need to extend this information. Rounsivel saw the girl the instant he stepped through the doorway.

      “Oh,” he said softly. He went to her, and made a small stiff bow. “You pleaded for me after all? Thanks. You’ve been kind.”

      “Sir, not kind, only human. I saw you in court, and heard you.”

      “I shall remember it, whether or not your uncle relents. I’ll know at least that somebody spoke up.”

      She hung her head—not at all in shame but shaking it a bit, as though irked to find herself at a loss for words.

      “Master Rounsivel, my . . . my uncle is an extraordinary man.”

      Here was an understatement. Woodes Rogers stood alone. A mariner in Rounsivel’s position might have said: “I am about to meet the finest seaman alive.” A merchant: “Here’s the fellow who on an investment of less than £14,000 came home with loot of more than £800,000, the most profitable privateering trip in history.” A patriot: “The Spaniards fear him more than anybody since Drake.” He of literary tastes could be awed by the prospect of meeting the author of that classic: A Cruising Voyage Round the World.

      George Rounsivel’s reaction was different. He wasn’t thinking of past glories. He was about to meet, not an author, a navigator, a maker of money, but the captain-general of the royal plantations of the Bahamas. He was not asking himself. What kind of man is this? He was asking. Will this man let me off?

      “I don’t know what he’ll say to you, Master Rounsivel. I think he might ask you something.”

      “Ask . . . me?”

      She nodded, mute for the moment.

      Surely there was nothing sleek about this young woman, Tonight, with the worriment that was upon her, and her earnestness, she showed rather tousled. But her small smooth head was adorably shaped for caresses, so that, seeing it, you were tempted to try to pick it up, like a separate thing, a warm, pulsating thing, and fondle it, the way the aged Chinese fondle their jade fingering-pieces.

      Standing there a few feet from her in the fitful light, George Rounsivel had all he could do to keep from reaching out, with tender fingers, for the sides of that head. Pugh and the other soldiers, of course, had their hangers out, and they would have cut him down if he took a step toward her.

      She, on her part, could hardly be harboring a wish to fondle him, he reflected grimly. Smudged, ashen, hollow-eyed, his wigless pate covered by no more than a fuzz, while the stench of the cell was upon him, he was no figure of romance.

      “You must realize that the governor is in . . . well, in a position of great peril, Master Rounsivel.”

      “For that matter, so am I.”

      “Yes, but in your case it is but your own life—”

      “The only one I happen to have.”

      “—while in the case of my uncle it’s his career. It might mean his life as well . . . and the lives of all who are dear to him.”

      “Meaning yourself? You shouldn’t be abroad on a night like this.”

      They had been whispering, as though in church, but he said this СКАЧАТЬ