Chapter 208: A Merry Life, Not Yet His Motto

James walked back towards the bar.

He’d begun the night here with a stranger’s rum and, If his luck held, he’d finish it here too.

There was no need to look far. A voice came clean through the general racket, one James knew better than most voices he had left in his life.

It was pitched loud enough to carry over three tables and had no particular concern for whether anybody wanted to hear it.

"...and I’m tellin’ ye, the water went black as a Spaniard’s conscience the second that eel showed its face..."

Jim was in the middle of his story, hands cutting forms through the air.

Around him, a small loose knot of listeners wore dubious, glazed expressions and started to invent one excuse after another to leave the group.

One man hadn’t wandered anywhere.

By the time James came close enough to make sense of the story instead of merely hearing it, Jim had reached an eel the length of a bowsprit and a Spanish captain’s signet ring lost in the black water off Tortuga.

Then came the dive after the thing, which had left teeth marks clean up his forearm.

Jim was perfectly prepared to display those marks to any man foolish enough to doubt him.

The stranger doubted him, but not the eel.

"That current runs east around the point this time of year, not west."

He said it without malice and without raising his voice.

"You’d have had it fighting you all the way down, not carrying you."

Jim blinked.

He considered this for precisely the amount of time required to surrender a point he clearly had not expected to lose, then grinned.

"Aye, fair enough. The current, ye’ve got me there."

He didn’t let it slow him.

"But the eel and the ring stand regardless."

"I never said otherwise about the eel."

James looked the man over, and the man repaid the inspection by being worth every second of it.

He was tall, taller than half the room even while sitting down, dark-haired and clean-jawed in an establishment made almost entirely of stubble and salt crust. His coat had once been a good Bristol cut, though ten years too many had left it soft and shiny at both elbows.

He had turned the cuffs back with genuine care, exposing a fringe of lace gone the tone of old teeth. Worn anyway, kept anyway, as if the color mattered less than the fact that some of it remained.

A brass ring sat on his smallest finger, rubbed and spat upon until the lantern light couldn’t quite decide whether it was brass or gold.

And in his free hand, held as gently as another man might hold a woman’s waist, sat a chipped cup of tea. It was black and stewed twice beyond any respectable strength, in a room that ran entirely on rum and kill-devil.

James considered, before learning a single fact about him beyond what his eyes had already supplied, that this fellow was worth the walk over.

"Rory Flynn."

He offered a hand and made no effort to dress his voice as Irish this time.

"Whoever’s tellin’ the better lie between you two, I couldn’t rightly say."

"John Roberts."

The hand that met his was steady and calloused in all the places a sailor’s hand ought to be.

"And I’d wager it’s a close-run thing."

Over the next few exchanges, the man had an identity.

He had been quartermaster aboard the Severn Trader until a month ago. A Bristol lass, she’d limped into this harbor with her hull gone soft as a rotten apple, worm-eaten and sprung after a voyage that ought to have drowned every soul aboard her twice over.

Her owner had taken one look at her in daylight and condemned her on the spot. Now she was being broken up for salvage in these very yards, while her crew had been paid off and scattered toward whatever work each man could find.

Roberts had found a mate’s berth aboard the Industry, a slow little sloop hauling sugar and salt between here and Barbados.

He plainly thought the position beneath him, though he hadn’t refused the offer only because nothing better had yet come along.

"Quartermaster to mate."

James said it flatly, with no question in it.

"That’s a step down any competent man’d feel."

"It is."

Roberts made no attempt to soften it.

"I’ll not pretend otherwise merely to make myself sound easier company."

James liked him considerably better for that than he would have for any amount of false modesty.

"Tell me something, Captain Flynn."

Roberts set down his tea cup after a gentle sip. "Jim, your man there, has been painting me a picture of freedom and treasure and never a bad day in it. Is any of that true, or is it only the rum talking for him?"

"It kills men as any other trade in the sea does."

James offered him nothing than the truth.

"Only difference is we fancy the killin’ up in prettier words than most."

Roberts leaned toward him then, judging whether James meant what he’d said. "And is it cruel, the whole of it? Has to be, I should have thought, dealing with men who’d sooner cut a throat than shake a hand."

James clicked his tongue. "Only if the articles say so. My code never condoned useless butchery or welcomed piss-dogs horny for murder and blood."

Roberts’s hand went to his coat pocket and stayed there, weighing an answer rather than merely listening to one.

James watched him while the silence lasted, looking for a hunch.

Welsh, unmistakably so now that he listened for it in the cadence rather than waiting for some accent thick enough to announce itself. A quartermaster who wouldn’t touch rum and couldn’t leave that scrap of cloth in his pocket alone for more than a minute at a time.

James couldn’t be certain of it, not the way he could be certain of a chart or a tide.

Not anymore, the whole world had already shown him it could bend into stranger ways than anything he remembered reading about.

But Roberts was too close to a name remembered from another life to dismiss the thought, even if he wasn’t ready to speak it aloud.

Bartholomew.

Crimson coat and gold chain and a diamond cross, worn into his last fight, if the old histories were correct. The richest haul of prizes this whole ocean would ever see taken by one man’s hand.

He said none of it.

Jim, who had never once in his life allowed a thoughtful silence to go unfilled, spared him the trouble of deciding whether he would.

"Here, Roberts, what’s that ye keep touchin’ at your coat for?"

Roberts’s hand drew out a scrap of cloth no bigger than a man’s palm, crimson and heavy despite being folded small.

It had been worn soft along every crease by years of being handled in exactly this fashion.

"Damask."

He said the word like another man might say a woman’s name. "I mean to have a coat cut from cloth just like it. Crimson, close-fitted, with a gold chain across it heavy enough that a man would feel it before he saw it, and a cross set with enough metal to really reflect the light."

He turned the brass ring on his finger once.

"Spit and a rag can only carry a lie so far under decent torchlight."

Jim let out a whistle that turned two heads at the nearest table.

James couldn’t have looked away from Roberts’s face just then if he’d wanted to. The man was entirely unashamed of every word, without so much as a scrap of self-mockery to make the ambition easier to swallow.

Roberts folded the cloth away with care, then moved on to a subject he plainly considered every bit as serious as the coat.

"All pretty words, but your code is only worth it if sailors and captain alike respect them."

Jim spat out a laugh.

"Christ, Roberts."

He didn’t wait for either of them to ask why. "The captain’s short a quartermaster, and any fool with eyes in his head can see he’s found one sitting right here, drinking his tea like a vicar at a wake."

Roberts didn’t reply to Jim.

He looked to James instead, with a question in his eyes that hadn’t quite become a question yet.

"True enough, that, my old lady wants a quartermaster."

James said it with no flourish left in his voice. "Her own captaincy’s still open, although there’s some chance it’ll be filled in the next days. I stand commodore over the whole fleet she sails with now."

He told him the rest just as easily. "The articles are fair, and not one soul aboard my fleet has the guts to disrespect the code out shame alone, that much is also plain as day."

Roberts took it all in without interrupting once.

"I have learned not to trust a deck before I have seen the wood underneath it for myself."

He turned the ring once more around his finger.

"I mean to watch this crew a few days yet before I put my name down on any articles."

"Fair enough, aye."

James meant it and didn’t press him for more.

Hands were shook on nothing firmer than a promise that Roberts would have a proper look, and Jim, entirely pleased with himself despite how little had actually been done, declared the whole matter closed as far as he was concerned.

James finished what remained in his cup and rose from the stool.

He gave Roberts a carefree goodnight and informed him where to find the old lass, then turned toward the door at last.

Enough of these streets for one night.

Cudjoe was still holding the wharf, and there was a whole outlandish parade of fools left to gather before either of them saw their own bed again.