socialize, and that is all I know. Eventually I will unpack in a new bedroom. I will say mass at seven that night, and at seven and nine Sunday morning. Fr. Wahl will take the last mass, at eleven. I have prayed to be a good priest for as long as I remain. Suppose I do not finish this here. Am I supposed to take it to Our Lady of Bethlehem? No way! I have to write more and better, and hurry.
I had made Ben Benson our bosun. That sounds like a joke, but it was the job he wanted. We found his body outside the sail locker. He had been strangled. There was a man on board who said he had been a hangman for a while, and I got him to take a look at Ben.
'We al'ays tries to break the necks, Cap'n. Heavy enough and drop far enough is what does it, but you can't. Not al'ays. So I'd jump up and grab the feet and swing till they died. They'd look like him when I took the cap off. A cap is what we call it, so they can't see the face. But I'd take it off, after, to use again. Then I'd see 'em. So he's choked, but no rope. I'd see the marks.'
Pete and I carried Ben's body out on deck. We did that because I thought the sunlight might show us rope marks we had missed. There were none, but we did see finger marks. He had been strangled by somebody with big, strong hands.
We buried him at sea, sewn in his hammock and weighted with a nine-pound round shot. After that I talked to a lot of the men, looking at hands and trying to learn who his enemies were. Just about everybody's hands were bigger than mine and looked stronger, but I could not find anybody who did not like Ben. Most of them had not known him until he came on board. Red Jack had been his friend. Big Ned and Mahu had been his friends, too-not as close as Red Jack, but friends. All three said they wanted to kill the man who had killed him, and it sounded like they meant it.
I made it clear to everybody that on my ship, fighting was one thing but killing was something else. Tell me and I would put them ashore, each with his cutlass. Other than that, I wanted to know who did it and why. That was fine with everybody, but it did not get me anywhere. Somebody had killed Ben. It had not been Mahu or Novia, and it sure as heck had not been me. After that it was up for grabs.
When I had talked to just about everybody and gotten no leads at all, I went into my cabin, closed the door, and prayed. Novia was out on deck sketching, and I guess she knew I did not want to be bothered.
In the beginning I prayed for Ben's soul. After that I prayed for mine. I told God I knew I was a pirate and no better than Ben. Any punishment He gave me would be just. I knew that, and I told Him so. Maybe I would yell and cry and beg and squeal, but I would never say what He had done was not fair. I promised I would never be any worse than I had to be, and begged Him to forgive me for everything wrong I had done and was going to do.
That was the only time in my life that I have heard the voice of God. He answered me, not in my mind or my heart, or in my soul. He spoke out loud, and His voice was wonderful in a way that there are no words for. What he said was 'Love Me, Chris, and all else will follow.'
When I went out on deck again, everybody was talking about the noise they had heard. Even though there was not a cloud anywhere, Novia said it had been thunder. Bouton said no, it had been guns. The Magdelena stood north-northwest of us just then, two or two and a half miles away. He thought she had fired her larboard battery. I told them I knew what it was, it had been for me, and they could forget about it.
Before I write about the galleon, there is one more thing I ought to cover-in fact, I should have written about this sooner. You know that when I had turned Estrellita over to Capt. Ojeda, I found Novia waiting for me in my cabin. It was dark, of course, and she was in the bed I had made on the cabin floor (it is a deck, really), hidden under the blanket. We had made love and had not talked much while we were doing it, just things like 'Now,' and 'Do that again.'
We did not talk in the morning, either. We were both afraid that one of us would say something that would break us up again, so we were both pretty quiet. When she got dressed, it was the blue shirt and the sailor's pants, and I was afraid she was going to leave like before.
She did not. But after that she dressed like a man a lot more often than like a woman. At first I thought it was so she could go anytime if there was another blowup, but she kept doing it after we put out. Sometimes she wore her gowns. More often, she just dressed like everybody else on board.
Part of it was size, I know. When we first met, she had told me she wanted to be round again, to be womanly. With us she did not have to work nearly as hard and got better food, when we were in port particularly. Some of the gowns she and Azuka had made would not fit at all, and the rest were tight.
The other part was something else. I think I know, but I am not sure I can make it clear. When she wore gowns all the time, and stayed in that tiny little cabin mostly, she had not really been one of us. When I had made her get out, and she-proud as she was, because Novia was always very, very proud-had turned around and come back, she had changed. I was a pirate, so she would be a pirate, too. Right about the time we were running from the Santa Lucia, something clicked with me that I had not seen before.
Bouton was first mate, but Novia was really number two on the ship. If one of those shots from the Santa Lucia had killed me, Novia would have been captain with Bouton as her first mate. Pages and pages ago I wrote about reading about those women who had been pirate captains. That would surprise a lot of people, but it had not surprised me. It could have happened on the Castillo Blanco.
We were headed up the Jamaica Channel with the wind south-southwest, about as good a wind as you can get for that course. When we rounded Lady Marie Cape, there she was. She could not have held the wind close enough to head straight for us, but she did not want to do that anyhow. She went for the place where we were going to be, holding as close as she could with all plain sail set.
When I say now that we tacked east, it sounds like I wanted to commit suicide, I know. I did not, and I will explain what I was doing in a minute. While we were tacking, I made signal to Rombeau on the Magdelena: SPLIT. MEET TORTUGA.
He acknowledged and held his course north, which was what I wanted.
Here is how I was thinking. First off, by going east I was going straight for the galleon like it sounds. I was heading between the galleon and the north coast of the Tiburon Peninsula. It meant I was going to have to pass in front of her broadside, sure. But she was heeling quite a bit, and I could see that she was not going to bring those guns to bear. Second, that end of the island was still French from what I had heard in Port Royal. I figured a Spanish galleon was not going to want to get too close to shore. Third, with us hugging the shore, the range was going to be long. And we were fast.
From all that, it ought to be clear I was figuring the galleon would go for the Magdelena. She was on course for her already, for one thing, and for another the Magdelena was bigger. When she did, I was going to come up behind her and cross her stern. It would mean coming under the fire of her stern chasers, sure. They would be twelve-pounders or about that, and there would probably be two (though there could be four). But while they were shooting at us-probably one shot from each gun-we would be raking her stern with our broadside. If we could not disable her rudder like that, it would be mighty poor shooting and we would try again.
I have gone into all this detail because I still think what I did was logical and good tactics. The problem was that the captain of the galleon was not on the same page. She turned into the wind a lot faster and handier than I would have expected from a ship that size and came after us. What she wanted, of course, was to come alongside us. With thirty guns a side in her main battery, she would have blown us out of the water. All we wanted was to get away.
We were fast, and that was good. But after a bit of racing along and gaining a bit on the galleon if anything, it hit me that all we were really doing was racing for the armpit of Hispaniola, where the land makes a hairpin turn to run northwest. That was where Port-au-Prince was, and there were sure to be shore batteries. If we were lucky, they might protect us. If we were not, they would probably sink us.
What looked practically certain was that once we got under the protection of those shore batteries we would not get out again until they said so, if they ever did. A good big bribe might do it-one that would leave us flat.
We would not have to make port there, though. Not unless we wanted to. We could turn north and try to slide past the galleon instead. I figured we would have about one chance in ten.
Up ahead I could see Big Cayemite Island, the little shallow channel between it and the coast, and a finger of land beyond it that would force us to turn north. That looked like a very, very big break to me just then, and I decided to go for it. If the galley followed us in there, she would have to drop back, and there was a good chance she would run aground. That is what I was hoping would happen. If she passed Big Cayemite on the north-which is what she did-I had another plan.
There are no brakes on a ship like my dear quick and slick old slider, but there are ways to stop pretty fast,
