"Lot - the fellow with the wife who was made out of salt."
"Oh, that Lot." Shandy nodded. "Sure."
" 'Member when Yahweh came over to his house?"
Shandy scowled in concentration. "No."
"Well, Yahweh told him he was going to stomp the town, because everybody was such bastards. So Lot says hold on, if I can find ten decent lads will you let the town alone? Yahweh huffs and puffs a bit, but finally allows as how yeah, if there's ten good men he won't kick the place to bits. Then Lot, being crafty, see, says, well, how about if there was three? Yahweh gets up and walks around, thinking about it, and then says, all right, I'll go three. So Lot says, how about one. Yahweh's all confused by this point, having had his heart set on wrecking the town, but at last he says all right, one decent man, even. And then of course Lot couldn't find even one, and Yahweh got to torch the town anyway." Davies waved at the other men in the boat, a gesture that managed to take in the Carmichael, too, and New Providence Island, and perhaps the whole Caribbean. "Don't, Jack, ever make the mistake of thinking he'd find one among these."
BOOK TWO
Cut off from the land that bore us,
Betrayed by the land we find,
Where the brightest have gone before us,
And the dullest are most behind -
Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!
'T is all we have left to prize:
One cup to the dead already -
Hurrah for the next that dies!
- Bartholomew Dowling
Chapter Nine
The evening breeze was strong and from the sea; the three ships moored offshore were nudged parallel, and the fires on the beach threw sparks away from the setting sun toward the black Florida cypress swamps. In the raised hut the pirates had built on a sandy rise just inland of the fires, Beth Hurwood peered out at the sky and the sea, and filled her lungs with the cool sea air, and prayed that the breeze would hold until dawn. She didn't want to spend a third night locked into the stifling "mosquito shelter" her father had forced the pirates to build - a canvas-walled box just big enough to lie down in.
She had never thought she would look back fondly on her two and a half years in the convent in Scotland, but now she mourned the day her father took her out of the place. The pale sisters in their robes and hoods had virtually never spoken, the rooms were stark old stone, the only food ever served was an oily gray porridge with lumps of dispirited vegetable stuff in it, and there was not a book in the place, not even a Bible - in fact, she'd never learned what Order the sisters belonged to, nor even what sort of faith; there had been no pictures, statues or crucifixes, and they might have been Moslems for all she knew - but at least they had left her alone, and she was free to stroll through the garden and feed the birds, or stand on the catwalk at the top of the wall and watch the road across the fields of heather, hoping to see strangers. Once in a while she would see someone, a farmer driving a cart, or a hunter with dogs, but though she waved to them they always hurried away - almost as if they were afraid of the place. Nevertheless she'd felt closer to those distant, hurrying figures than to the more profoundly remote sisters. Everyone in her life, after all, was a stranger to her.
Her mother had died when Beth was thirteen, and that was when her father became a stranger. He quit his position at Oxford, put his daughter in the care of relatives, and then left - engaged in "independent study," he had once said. And she was fifteen when he met Leo Friend.
The swish of boots approaching through the sand made her look down, and she was relieved to see that it was at least not Friend. Blinking against the afterimage of the sun, she didn't recognize the figure until he climbed the steps and ducked in under the low thatched roof; then she almost smiled, for it wasjust old Stede Bonnett. He had arrived only yesterday in his ship the Revenge, but though he was a pirate captain, and was said to be a partner of Blackbeard's, he seemed to have been well brought up, and had none of the mocking, sardonic cheer of a man like Philip Davies, nor the cold, driven savagery of her father. Beth wondered what could have led him into piracy.
"I'm sorry," he muttered, actually doffing his hat to her. "I didn't - realize - "
"It's all right, Mr. Bonnett." She waved at the log that served as a bench. "Do sit down."
"Thank you," he said, lowering himself onto it. A long-necked bird flapped up out of the marshes and gave a squawk that made Bonnett jump. He peered after the bird suspiciously.
"You ... don't seem happy, Mr. Bonnett," Beth ventured.
He looked at her then, and seemed for the first time really to see her. He licked his lips and smiled hesitantly, but a moment later his worried scowl had returned and his gaze had moved away from her. "Happy? Hah - I defy anyone, after that spectacle at Charles Town - before Thatch demanded the ransom, they thought we meant to take the town - I turned a glass on the place - women and children running weeping through the streets - Jesus - and for what? A chest of black medicinal tobacco, and so that he could go look at the Ocracoke Inlet. And I find myself saying things, doing things ... even my dreams aren't my own anymore ... " The breeze shifted slightly, blowing Beth's long hair across her face, and belatedly she smelled the brandy on Bonnett's breath. An idea struck her, but out of fear of disappointment she forced down her sudden surge of hope.
She bit her lower lip. She'd have to be careful ...
"Where do you come from?" she asked.
For a long time he was silent, and she wondered if he hadn't heard her, or didn't intend to answer. I've got to get away from here, she thought; I have to believe that in some normal place, far from Friend and my father, my sanity won't seem such a fragile, flawed, imperiled thing.
"Barbados," he said quietly. "I ... owned ... a sugarcane plantation."
"Ah. You didn't prosper at it?"