Chapter 204: The Gentleman and His Gorillas

James left the bar and let the noise of the room carry him along.

One voice reached him through the ruckus, clean and easy, rising above the racket like a ship’s bell in a gale. His boots picked their way between the tables, and his head only caught up afterward to wonder why.

The voice led him past the dice table, past a fresh pair of birds hauled toward the pit by their scruffs, and into a part of the room he hadn’t noticed until then. An old length of sailcloth hung crooked from the rafters, hiding whatever was behind mostly by suggestion than any serious attempt at privacy.

Behind it sat quite a curious sight.

Big men, hunched over small tables, with knuckles flattened and misshapen, and noses bent in directions God had plainly never intended.

By the look of them, they were the house’s muscle, kept close for nights when the pit’s gains were thin and the sailors wanted more than just some wee blood.

James considered, at one glance, that whatever had drawn him across the floor was certainly not waiting for him back here.

He was wrong.

Stede Bonnet sat in the middle of the roughest table, coat pressed and buttoned as if some Bridgetown tailor had dressed him up less than an hour ago. That ruined cutlass he had bought earlier rested against his knee like a walking stick.

Around him sat three men who looked as though they had been cut from rock rather than born like ordinary people. Every one of them leaned toward Bonnet’s words with open attention, like children waiting to hear how a story ended.

Whatever Bonnet had done to get them there, it had worked beautifully.

James eased up near enough to eavesdrop, caught somewhere between delight and the certainty that he had arrived too late for the best part.

"...gentlemen, there is nothing on this earth that compares to it."

Bonnet explained, one hand brushing slowly through the air as if he were laying his words down like bricks. "The horizon forever calling a man forward, then the deck beneath one’s boots, and nothing between yourself and the whole of the known world but wind enough to bring you there."

The biggest of the three was built much like a wardrobe and seemed about as easy to move. He brought one fist down on the table hard enough to make every cup on it jump.

"AYE!"

He leaned farther across the table with every word, as though he meant to climb right inside the story.

"That’s it exactly, that is! Felt that meself once, standin’ on the dock, just lookin’ out at it!"

"Have you indeed, Mister Ox?"

Bonnet tipped his head with the courtesy of a duke greeting an earl.

"Then you already understand more of it than most men learn in a lifetime at sea."

Ox looked ready to burst from the pride of it.

Bonnet leaned closer, and his voice dropped into a rather fond tone.

"Let me tell you of the first storm I ever weathered as a captain."

He put it as the finest hour of his career. "The wind came out of nowhere and drove us hard toward a lee shore, ropes parted aloft, and the hull began to founder beneath me. For the better part of an hour I stood at that wheel with every soul aboard looking to me, while I had not the faintest earthly notion whether we’d live to see the dawn."

The story sat in James’s memory perfectly. Then one green captain, the sloop too small to cruise through a storm, and a night that had come within a hair of ending his life.

James put the back of his hand to his mouth and kept it there.

Bonnet told it like he had won a war.

The next giant of the three was squat and wide enough to look like two ordinary men. If you were willing to divide the trouble evenly, that was.

He interrupted without the slightest concern for the story content.

"Where’s a man piss on a boat that size?"

Bonnet replied to the question with polite courtesy.

"Over the rail, Mister Barrel. Downwind, if he’s got any sense."

Barrel thought this over, nodded once as though a matter of great importance had finally been answered, and waved Bonnet onward.

Bonnet straightened his shoulders, and the storyteller in him let way to more. "If you find in yourself the desire to become a sailor, I find that I must explain an extremely crucial fact. The crew is a family one can choose, gentlemen, once earned the place among them."

The last giant had said nothing so far. He was a wall of a man, and the other two called him Anvil. James felt the name had been earned the hard way, because whenever Anvil moved so much as a finger, the other two remembered that silence was sometimes the wiser choice.

Now he spoke, and the voice that came out of that enormous body was several sizes too gentle for it.

"Never seen a whale. Always wanted to."

Bonnet nodded with a bright smile. "The sea is full of them, Mister Anvil. You will see one within the month if you sign on, and I give you my plain word on it."

The tension loosened in the big man’s face at that promise. For one unguarded moment, he looked younger than all those scars had any right to allow.

James stayed where he was, caught by the surprising fact that he wanted this enormous man to get his whale.

That was when Bonnet noticed him. His whole face brightened at once, pleasantly.

"Captain! Come, come, you must meet my new acquaintances."

He swept a hand around the table and presented the three of them with all the warmth. "This magnificent fellow is Ox. Beside him is Barrel, a man of considerable directness. And here is Anvil, who I am confident will prove the gentlest soul aboard the whole ship once you know him. Together, I am told, the three are known as the Bonebreakers."

He offered the name cheerfully, apparently unaware that ’Bonebreakers’ was not an especially comforting name for prospective sailors.

Bonnet folded his hands together, ready to make his case. "You did ask me to find respectable recruits, Captain, and I confess I have taken the instruction to heart."

He nodded toward the three men in turn.

"I will say plainly that none of them has much cleverness to spare."

He said it without the least trace of malice. "But I believe every one of them would make a fine and competent sailor. I offer this very conversation as my proof of the word respectable, and I doubt you will find more agreeable men on this stretch of dock tonight."

"Sure, and who am I to argue with a case put so well."

James pushed Flynn’s voice forward, though only just.

"Vouch away to yer heart’s content, so."

He clapped Bonnet once on the shoulder, hard enough to make clear that he meant it, and left him with his new friends.

Then he chuckled to himself. "Four more fools to find, and God only knows what the rest of them have gotten themselves into."

He hadn’t the faintest notion where to look next.

That, he decided as he walked back into the racket, was half the fun of it.