Bring It Close by Helen Hollick Page B

and removed, the stern windows folded up overhead, the glass panels of the skylight removed, to be stored in the hold along with the furniture, china plate and silverware.
    Sea Witch , transformed from the elegant and immaculate mistress of the seas to a professional fighting ship. Deadly and accurate. The lark become the hawk.
    On deck, awaiting orders, the hands at their stations beside masts and guns looked towards the quarterdeck, to Jesamiah. This was always the worst part, the catching up. And the waiting.

Nine
    Port Royal – 1683
    Watching his son and waiting for the Witch Woman to come again; to come and help him put right that which he had done wrong, Charles St Croix remembered…

    He closed his telescope with a sharp ‘clack’ and leant on the starboard rail staring at the several ships resting at anchor in Port Royal Harbour. He had expected a warm welcome, had received a notable rebuttal. ‘Come ashore and you will be arrested and hanged.’ A fine welcome indeed!
    The place was so different now to what it had been ten years past. The fortress rebuilt, the town doubled in size. The narrow streets appeared to be as filthy and stinking as ever, but they were busy with trade. Much of it legal, for all that most were inclined towards the vices of gambling, drink and women. The harbour was full – but not one of the ships that Charles St Croix had studied through his telescope, the bring it close, was a pirate vessel.
    The various wars and sparring matches with Spain and France and Holland had ended. There was no more privateering, and no more piracy, at least not here in Jamaica under Captain Henry Morgan’s administration.
    St Croix spat disdainfully over the rail into the ebb tide gurgling past the hull of the ship. “Henry Morgan – beg pardon, Sir Henry Morgan, I forgot the King had knighted the rum-sodden old sot – was ever one to feather his own nest. He sits over there lording it as Lieutenant Governor, his fat rump planted on a gilded chair, while his drunken brain forgets the days when he sailed these waters as a pirate with his comrades.”
    “Do not permit him to hear you say that, my friend. Morgan insists he was a legal privateer. He sailed with the King’s permission and did naught without it.” The speaker, Carlos Mereno, also spat over the side. He was shorter in stature than his good friend St Croix, broader around the waist and across the shoulders, but where Mereno was dark-eyed and dark-haired, St Croix had inherited his mother’s colouring. A tall, gaunt woman, long-nosed and olive-skinned, but her hair, the rich tone of spun honey and her eyes amber, like a cat’s, had for all her plainness drawn men to her.
    “Despite my breeding,” Carlos Mereno smiled, “I have no love for Spain, yet the atrocities that man committed against my countrymen and women are beyond contempt.”
    St Croix shook his head. “Privateer? Pah! He is a pirate to the core, always has been.” He had served with Morgan; had committed some of those atrocities. But then, the Spanish, or the French, or the Dutch, had been the cause of just as many.
    Shrugging his shoulders Mereno sighed, a sound of resignation and regret. “Yet any man who steps ashore and makes mention of how he came about the gold in his pocket, or boasts of triumphs at sea, is named pirate and hanged.”
    “Aye, even when he learned all he knew from Morgan’s own orders. It is a sad day when a great man, even if he be a fat-bellied, fart-arsed drunkard, forgets those of us who served with him for England’s sake.”
    Mereno disagreed. “No , mi amigo, Morgan cared naught for England; he fought to gain for himself a fortune and to assure his name is remembered when he is nothing but worm fodder. He had not the same honour as do you and I.”
    Footsteps on the planking of the deck. Slow and measured, for the man making them, though still a youth, was heavy in build. The kudos of becoming Second Lieutenant had added weight to his