I wish to speak to Captain Powell.”
Here it comes, I thought. The next thing is an order for my arrest. We went
outside, but I did not move from the door. Inside, I could hear Powell say, “Do
you believe them, Sir Francis?”
“Believe them? I have no idea whether they are telling the truth or not,
Captain. I have a colony on the verge of starvation, and am not inclined to ask
any questions at all. They have grain. We need grain. They will sell it at a
reasonable price. I will pay their price. Furthermore, I will let them go back
to their homes with thanks, and hope they come to us again. Such men we can
use.”
“I could use them,” Powell said grimly. “Did you look at them, Sir Francis?
That’s the strongest, toughest, most able lot of men I’ve seen in many a year.
At least two of the older ones have been soldiers or I miss my guess.”
He shook his head. “I have an idea who they are, Sir Francis. I think it’s that
lot we’ve been hearing about, from up at the edge of the mountains.”
“It well may be.” Sir Francis got to his feet, for I heard his chair shove back.
“Make no report on this, Powell. In London they will only want to know that we
fed our people. How it was done will not interest them.
“We will buy their grain. We will house them at the expense of the colony, and
we will speed them on their way. Who knows when again we may need help?”
Powell chuckled, then said, “Sir Francis, if we’ve to fight the Indians again,
just let me recruit that lot. I’d ask no more.”
Powell came out. The cabin he then took us to was well-built and strong, and
there was a small tavern, or what passed for one, close by.
“Captain Sackett,” Powell said, “there are presently three ships in port, two of
them loading for the West Indies. The third has just recently come in, but I
don’t much like her looks. I’d hesitate, if I were you.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
Powell studied his nails thoughtfully, then he said, “She’s too heavily armed
for a merchant ship, and if I ever saw a craft with a pack of rascals for crew,
that’s it. And that Captain Delve-”
“Delve, did you say? Jonathan Delve? A kind of a taunting look to his eyes?”
“You know the man?”
“I know him,” I said grimly, “and I don’t like him. I’d heard he was a pirate,
and I agree with your judgment of him.”
Powell looked thoughtful. “We’re not heavily armed here, and a ship like that
could be a trouble to us, so I want nothing more than to see him gone.”
When Powell was gone I explained to the boys who Delve was. That he had survived
so long was evidence of his cunning.
“Kin,” I suggested, “the man does not know you or Brian. Go down along the river
and see what you can learn, but stay away from him and don’t get into trouble.”
“He’s an evil man,” Abby said.
“He is that, and I would like it better if you and he were not on the same sea.
He has been a pirate, and probably is yet, and more than likely has come in for
supplies while he looks over what ships may be worth the taking.”
“Did you see his vessel?” Jeremy asked, wryly. “She’s got thirty-six guns, and
she’s fast.”
“Fast she may be,” Yance said quietly, “but she’s at anchor now. They don’t move
very fast with an anchor in the mud.”
“What are you suggesting?” Pim asked.
Yance grinned slowly, looking up from under his thick brows. “Well? If she
worries us, let’s take her, and remove the worry.”
I shook my head. “That would be piracy on our part. So far as we know he has
done nothing.”
“If you’d have sent me,” Yance said, “I’d have seen to it.”
“That’s why I didn’t send you, Yance.” I smiled at him.
Yet but part of my thoughts at this moment were upon Jonathan Delve. The
presence of the man and his ship were but a minor irritation compared with the
fact … and it was a fact … that Abby and I would soon be apart.
My mind almost refused to accept it. She had been so much a part of my life that
I could scarcely imagine being without her, though I fully understood how she
felt.
Noelle was but ten. Her feminine associations had been good. Yance’s wife,
although a gay, fun-loving girl as exuberant as he himself, had come from a
sedate, religious upbringing. Kane O’Hara’s wife, of Spanish background, was
even more so.
Peter Fitch’s Catawba wife moved with a grace and conducted herself with a
decorum that would have done credit to any great lady. She had taken on European
ways easily and naturally while losing none of her own, and it was a rare thing,
I thought, who had little experience after all, that so many women could live
together … or near to each other, without friction.
John Quill had been almost a second father to Noelle. A man married to his farm,
he thought of little else, yet he was forever bringing her the largest
strawberries, birds’ nests, or flowers from the woods or the edges of his
fields.
It had been a good life we lived, and what school we had was conducted by the
various wives and by Sakim, whose depths of knowledge none had ever plumbed.
Like the boys, Noelle had grown up on stories known to the Catawba and the
Cherokee, to the Irish (from Kane O’Hara) and Sakim’s stories of Scheherazade.
Sakim read also from the Katha Sarit Sagara, the so-called “Ocean of Story” as
gathered together by Somadeva, a court poet to King Ananta of Kashmir, and his
queen, Suryavati.
Often I wondered what their vision of life must be, learning, as they had, from
such oddly dissimilar storytellers. They had learned the Catawba story of the
beginning of things. Kane O’Hara told them stories of Cuchulainn or of Conn of
the Hundred Battles, and of the Irish longs who lived on Tara. From Jeremy they
had stories of Achilles and Ulysses and of Xenophon’s retreat of the Ten
Thousand. From Sakim, stories of Ali Baba and Sinbad, of Rustum and his fabled
horse, Raqsh, who killed a lion to protect his sleeping master.
From Abigail they had the story of God and of Jesus and Mary, and from Sakim, of
Allah and Mohammed, and from Sweet Woman the story of Wakonda the Sky Spirit.
From Barry Magill they learned something of weaving, from Peter Fitch a love of
good wood and the uses of it, and from John Quill a love of the earth and the
magic of making things grow.
What was left for me? A little of each, and the pointing out of things along the
trail, and something of England’s history, of the Normans, the Danes, and the
Celts, of the Norsemen and their raids and wanderings.
Yet there were strange gaps in their knowledge, realized suddenly when after
hearing the story of Rustum and Raqsh, Noelle asked me, “Papa, what is a horse?”
32
The cabin with which they provided us was no place for a man, what with all the
sewing and stitching, and the talk of the women as they stitched skirts and
petticoats, and tried on and fitted, and exclaimed over this and that. For
neither Abby nor Noelle had the proper clothes for shipboard nor for landing in
England, either.
Kin returned and we sat against the log wall outside the cabin. “Jonathan Delve
has something on his mind,” he said, “But nobody has a notion of what. This much
I did learn. He was taken by a British warship and was in Newgate for a time,
and somehow bribed his way out.”
“He is not idling here for nothing,” I said.
“Aye, that he is not. Brian is just now sitting over ale with a sailor who’s
been aboard her, and if I know Brian he will soon have all the man knows.”
Kin ran his fingers through his long hair. “Pa, we may be late tonight. There’s
some looking about we’ll do.”
“Be easy with it, son. The British are no fools, and are sharp upon the form and
manner of things.”
A thought came to me. “Where’s Yance?”
“Him?” Kin said, almost absent-mindedly. “He’s helping the blacksmith who is
behind in his work. You know Yance. He must be busy all the time.”
Aye, I knew him. Busy indeed he was, but with what? Yance was never one to be
idle but often enough his business was trouble.
However, the day was a quiet one, and I enjoyed sitting in the sun and watching
what went on about us, for it had been long since I’d seen any settlement but