he wasnât in pain anywhere.
The knife had been knocked out of his fatherâs hand with the first, contemptuous kick, and then there had simply been fists, teeth, knees and boots in the darkness, and when the gang walked away, laughing and crowing as they counted the money in the unexpectedly fat purse, they must certainly have supposed they were leaving two corpses in the alley behind them.
In the years since, Chandagnac had sometimes wished theyâd been right in that supposition, for neither his father nor he had ever really recovered.
The two of them had eventually managed to get back to their room. His father had lost his front teeth and eventually lost his left eye, and had suffered fractures in several ribs and possibly his skull. Young John Chandagnac had lost most of the use of his right hand because of a heavy manâs boot-heel, and for a month he walked with a cane, and it was a full year before his urine was quite free of blood. The bad hand, though he eventuallyregained nearly full use of it, provided a good excuse to quit that nomadic career, and through thinly disguised pleading he managed to secure travel money and lodging with a relative in England, and before his twenty-second birthday he had got a position as a bookkeeper with an English textile firm.
His father, in ever-worsening health, had single-handedly run the marionette show for another two years before dying in Brussels in the winter of 1714. He never even learned about the money that had become his, the money that could so dramatically have prolonged and brightened his lifeâ¦the money that had been cleverly stolen from him by his own younger brother, Sebastian.
Chandagnac looked over his right shoulder, squinting at the eastern horizon until he thought he saw a faintly darker line that might have been Hispaniola. I was to have arrived there in about a week, he thought angrily, after establishing my credit with the bank in Jamaica. How long will it take now? Donât die, Uncle Sebastian. Donât die before I get there.
CHAPTER TWO
EVEN IN the twilight, with cooking fires beginning to dot the darkening beach, the harborâs mottling of shoals was clearly visible, and the boats rounding the distant corner of Hog Island could be seen to change course frequently as they kept to the darker blue water on their way in from the open sea to the New Providence settlement. Most of the settlementâs boats were already moored for the night, out in the harbor or along the decrepit wharf or, in the cases of a number of the smaller craft, dragged right up onto the white sand, and the islandâs population was beginning to concern itself with dinner. At this hour the settlementâs stench contended most strongly with the clean sea breeze, for added to its usual mélange of tar-smoke, sulfur, old food and the countless informal latrines was the often startling olfactory spectrum of inexpert cooking: the smell of feathers burnt off chickens by men too impatient to pluck them, of odd stews into which the enthusiastic hand of the amateur had flung quantities of hijacked mint and cilantro and Chinese mustard to conceal the taste of dubious meats, and of weird and sometimes explosive experiments in the art of punch-making.
Benjamin Hurwood had taken his daughter and Leo Friend off the
Carmichael
four hours earlier, shortly after the ship was laboriously tugged, tacked and block-and-tackled into the harbor, and long before the pirates had begun the job of careening the vessel. Heâd hailed the first boat that had come alongside anddemanded that the men in it take them ashore, and he had not only been obeyed, but, it had seemed to Chandagnac, recognized too.
And now the
Carmichael
lay bizarrely on her side, tackles fastened to the mastheads, and relieving tackles strung under the keel and tied to solid moorings on the exposed side, fully half of her hundred-and-ten-foot length out of the water and supported by the sloping
The knife had been knocked out of his fatherâs hand with the first, contemptuous kick, and then there had simply been fists, teeth, knees and boots in the darkness, and when the gang walked away, laughing and crowing as they counted the money in the unexpectedly fat purse, they must certainly have supposed they were leaving two corpses in the alley behind them.
In the years since, Chandagnac had sometimes wished theyâd been right in that supposition, for neither his father nor he had ever really recovered.
The two of them had eventually managed to get back to their room. His father had lost his front teeth and eventually lost his left eye, and had suffered fractures in several ribs and possibly his skull. Young John Chandagnac had lost most of the use of his right hand because of a heavy manâs boot-heel, and for a month he walked with a cane, and it was a full year before his urine was quite free of blood. The bad hand, though he eventuallyregained nearly full use of it, provided a good excuse to quit that nomadic career, and through thinly disguised pleading he managed to secure travel money and lodging with a relative in England, and before his twenty-second birthday he had got a position as a bookkeeper with an English textile firm.
His father, in ever-worsening health, had single-handedly run the marionette show for another two years before dying in Brussels in the winter of 1714. He never even learned about the money that had become his, the money that could so dramatically have prolonged and brightened his lifeâ¦the money that had been cleverly stolen from him by his own younger brother, Sebastian.
Chandagnac looked over his right shoulder, squinting at the eastern horizon until he thought he saw a faintly darker line that might have been Hispaniola. I was to have arrived there in about a week, he thought angrily, after establishing my credit with the bank in Jamaica. How long will it take now? Donât die, Uncle Sebastian. Donât die before I get there.
CHAPTER TWO
EVEN IN the twilight, with cooking fires beginning to dot the darkening beach, the harborâs mottling of shoals was clearly visible, and the boats rounding the distant corner of Hog Island could be seen to change course frequently as they kept to the darker blue water on their way in from the open sea to the New Providence settlement. Most of the settlementâs boats were already moored for the night, out in the harbor or along the decrepit wharf or, in the cases of a number of the smaller craft, dragged right up onto the white sand, and the islandâs population was beginning to concern itself with dinner. At this hour the settlementâs stench contended most strongly with the clean sea breeze, for added to its usual mélange of tar-smoke, sulfur, old food and the countless informal latrines was the often startling olfactory spectrum of inexpert cooking: the smell of feathers burnt off chickens by men too impatient to pluck them, of odd stews into which the enthusiastic hand of the amateur had flung quantities of hijacked mint and cilantro and Chinese mustard to conceal the taste of dubious meats, and of weird and sometimes explosive experiments in the art of punch-making.
Benjamin Hurwood had taken his daughter and Leo Friend off the
Carmichael
four hours earlier, shortly after the ship was laboriously tugged, tacked and block-and-tackled into the harbor, and long before the pirates had begun the job of careening the vessel. Heâd hailed the first boat that had come alongside anddemanded that the men in it take them ashore, and he had not only been obeyed, but, it had seemed to Chandagnac, recognized too.
And now the
Carmichael
lay bizarrely on her side, tackles fastened to the mastheads, and relieving tackles strung under the keel and tied to solid moorings on the exposed side, fully half of her hundred-and-ten-foot length out of the water and supported by the sloping
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