My point lowered a little. “I have no wish to kill you.”
“I am dead. Finish what you have begun.”
“Have done. You have chosen a poor profession. If you live, choose another.”
“I took money to kill you.”
“Keep the money. You tried.”
Taking up my coat with my left hand, I turned my back on him and went into the crowd, and with my naked blade still in my hand it opened before me.
When I was on the street again, I looked carefully about. This was no time to be careless, but of one thing I was sure. My sightseeing in Jamaica as well as my business were over.
Tomorrow I would find John Tilly, and tomorrow I would take Diana Macklin home.
CHAPTER XVIII
Strong blew the wind, dark the angry clouds, vivid the lightning. Upon the deck, near the mainmast shrouds I stood, one hand upon them to steady me, my eyes out upon the sea, its dark, huge waves lifting like great upthrusts of black glass, ragged along the breaking edge. My father had gone to sea in his time, but I had no love for it. He had bred a landsman, whether he preferred it or not.
There was a challenge in the storm, a magnificence in the power of the sea, and I rode the deck like a gull upon the wind and confessed inside me that while afraid, I was also drunk with it. Salt spray stung my face; my tongue licked it, tasted it, loved it. She put her bows down and took a great sea over them, and the water came thundering back, the decks awash, the scuppers sucking and gasping.
John Tilly came down upon the deck and stood beside me. ” ‘Tis a raw night, lad, a raw night! We be sailing north with the coast out yonder, and many a proud ship gone down in weather no worse than this!”
“I’ll be glad when I’m ashore,” I told him frankly. “I want my feet upon solid earth.”
“Aye!” he said grimly. “So think we all. We think ofttimes in the night that once the storm is over and the storm gone, we will go ashore and stay there. We’ll tell ourselves that in the night watches, but when the day has come, and our money is spent ashore, then we go seeking a berth again, and off to sea it is.”
“I am a man of the hills and forest.”
“It may be so. Your father made a good seafaring man, though, and belike you could do the same, given time. You are a strong one and active, and you’ve a cool head about you. I saw that ashore there.”
“Ashore?”
“In the fight with Bogardus. Ah, lad, I feared for you! I’ve seen him with a blade before, but you had him bested—”
“My father taught me, and the others.”
“It showed. I could see your father’s hand there, but you’ve the greater reach and height. He never beat a better man than Bogardus. But you did not kill him.”
“I have no wish to kill. A man’s life is a precious thing, though he waste it. A life is greater than gold and better than all else, so who am I to take it unless need be?”
“He intended to take yours.”
“He has not my thoughts, nor my wishes nor my desires, and if he lives, life may bring him wisdom. Who knows? It is a good thing to live, to walk out upon such a deck as this and feel the wind, to walk in the forest on a moonlit night or out upon some great plateau and look westward—”
“You, too?”
“What do you mean?”
“Ah, you are your father’s son! He looked to the westward, too! To his far blue mountains. But was it the mountains? Or was it that something beyond? We need such men, lad, men who can look to the beyond, to ever strive for something out there beyond the stars. It is man’s destiny, I think, to go forward, ever forward. We are of the breed, you and I, the breed who venture always toward what lies out there—westward, onward, everward.”
We were silent then, riding the deck as it tipped and slanted. She was a good ship, even as she had been in my father’s time, and she bore a good name.
“I wonder if I shall ever see her again?”
“Who, lad?”
“My mother. She went to England, you know, so that Noelle would not grow up in the forest among wild men. My father sorely missed her.”
“Aye, he did that. But she was wise, lad, wiser than all, and you’ll be proud of the lass when you see her. A fine lady she is, although but a girl yet, and Brian! What a gentleman! They tell me at the Inns of Court that he has a rare way with words.”
“It is the Welsh in him. When did they not?”
“And Jeremy, lad? And Lila? Fare they well?”
“How else? Athough it be months since I have seen them. When I go south again, I shall go calling. Jeremy is a fine woodsman now and an owner of wide lands, and Lila serves no longer but is mistress of her own estate.”
“What of the lass below there?” Tilly asked. “She has eyes for you, lad.”
I felt wary and uncomfortable. “It may be. We have talked a bit.”
“She’s a fine lass, a brave, tall girl. You’d be wise to take her, lad, if that is the way you both feel. I deem there’s been trouble behind you?”
“She comes from Cape Ann … on the coast of what they are calling New England. They thought her a witch there, and she was twice taken by slavers, the last time through sheer vengeance, dropping down of a sudden, knocking her father about and carrying her off. It was Pittingel. He wished me to see her with him, for to kill is not enough. He wanted me to suffer in my mind as well.”
“And now?”
“To her father again if he lives. What else will come we shall talk of then, but if I take her home with me, it is a far travel for a lass, far through woods and the places where savages are.”
“She’ll stand to it. There’s a likely craft, lad, and one to sail any sea. You can see it in the clear eyes of her and the way she carries her head. Give me always a woman with pride, and pride of being a woman. She’s such a one.”
We talked then of ships and the sea and of the old ways of men upon the water, of how men measured the altitude of a star by the span of a wrist or a hand outstretched before them and how they guided themselves by the flight of birds, the fish they saw, and the way water curls around an island or a cape and shows itself as a special current in the sea. “Ferns will fly far out to sea and rest upon the water when they wish, but the herring gulls never get more than seventy-five or eighty miles from land, and at eventide they fly toward shore to roost. When you see them winging all one way toward evening, there’s land there, son, land. It has saved many a seafaring man, knowing that. Men steered by the flight of birds and found their way by the stars for these thousand years or more.”
At last I went to my bunk, but once stretched upon it, I lay long awake. Was Diana indeed the girl for me? Or was I, too, to have that westward feeling?
Jubal Sackett had it. Where was he? How far westward had he gone? Did he live yet, that brother of mine? Or did his body lie in the rich black earth beneath the trees out there near the great river of which he spoke?
We Sacketts wandered far upon the face of the world. Was there something in us truly that moved us ever westward? Did we fulfill some strange destiny? Some drive decreed by God, the wind or the tides that move across the world? Why Jubal, of us all? Why not Brian, who had gone again east? Yet I knew within me that Brian’s way was westward, too. Knew? Was it the gift of which our father had spoken? The gift of second sight we sometimes had?
My father lay buried in the hills that he sought, but he died bravely there and no doubt rested well. The red men who killed him knew where his body lay, and sometimes they came there and left gifts of meat upon the grave, offerings to a brave man gone, a man who fought well and died well.
Where, in its time, would my body lie?
Westward, a voice told me, off to the westward.