The Fiddler's Gun Page 18

  “But drown we didn’t. Though I reckon God got his vengeance on Creache after all. See, every one of them negroes died in that storm, and I like to think God did them a mercy. But the captain was furious mad at losing his entire cargo. He drug Knut up from the brig where he had him stowed and beat him a second time, worse even than before. Somewhere between the blows and the blood, Knut stopped being Knut. ‘The price of mutiny,’ said the captain. After that, Knut hadn’t never been the same.” Tan stopped and looked at Knut in a tender way Fin hadn’t seen before; it was the same look Sister Carmaline gave Bartimaeus when they laid him in the ground, the look you give a friend that’s dead and gone and isn’t coming back.

  “Why didn’t anyone help him?” asked Fin. She hadn’t helped him either.

  “Knut was certainly guilty of mutiny. Captain would have been right with the law to shoot him then and there.”

  Tan shifted on his feet and looked at the floor. “But I reckon the real answer is one I don’t care to speak.” Fin knew the answer. And she felt the shame of it the same as Tan.

  “Since then it’s Knut the captain beats when a man gets out of line. I tried to stop him once, but it didn’t do any good, only got Knut a bloodier beat than he’d got without my help. He ain’t Tommy Knuttle no more, just Knut. Makes it easier. That’s why the men keep away from him. They figure he’s bad luck. Some even figure it was his bad luck brought up that storm and brought down the sickness.” Tan’s face tightened; he didn’t agree. “Lot of the men aboard never come back after that sail though. Deserted for better berth. And then a lot of them figured maybe the captain wasn’t so much bad luck after all, seeing how he sailed us through that black storm. Some of us just got no place else to go.” Tan stopped and looked at Fin.

  “So you see, some of the men aboard, they was there when the captain knocked the thinking out of Knut’s head, and them that wasn’t, they’ve heard the tale. So now they’re wondering what the captain’s got in store for Jack. Most of the men like Jack. Don’t think a one of them want to see him get what Knut got. No one deserves that—or else we all do.”

  “I’ll kill him if he touches Knut again,” said Fin without looking up.

  “I said that once,” replied Tan with a cheerless chuckle, “long time ago. Never seems that easy once you’re standing in the captain’s storm. Sometimes, I think maybe I ought to kill Knut and save him the misery, but that ain’t easy either.” Again, Tan laid a tender look down on Knut as he slept.

  “Were you friends?” she asked.

  Tan didn’t answer at first; he just stood there, looking down at Knut. Fin was sure he’d heard her. She didn’t ask again.

  After a quiet long enough to draw the creaks and moans of the ship out into the open, he looked away from Knut and answered, “Aye, good friends.”

  Fin leaned over and pulled her fiddle case out from its hiding spot among the boxes and crates. She opened it gently and removed the fiddle and bow. She hadn’t played it since she left the orphanage, and it felt alien to her. She crooked it up against her chin and let it remember where to sit as she closed her eyes and stroked notes from the wood. She played softly and filled the berth with a gentle cloud of song. The waves beat the hull of the ship like a metronome, and she guided her song to its rhythm. As she let herself fall into the music, she remembered how she loved it and wondered why she’d abandoned such beauty for so long.

  After a time, she lowered the violin and looked up to find Tan staring at her with something of sadness and amazement on his face. She blushed and shrugged.

  “Fiddler’s Green,” said Tan with a smile.

  “What?”

  “Where sailors live the grand hereafter on a wide green field, with nothing to do but fill your cup and bounce a lass to a fiddler’s tune. The Green ain’t exactly heaven like the preachers preach. They say it’s a place for sailors alone: the good, the bad, and all the in-between that ever give his life to the big, blue sea. And here you are—Fin Button, the fiddler himself.” Tan smiled and laughed.

  “You believe in God, Tan?”

  “Ain’t no sailor doesn’t,” answered Tan with a sure nod. “A man don’t sail his soul away and give himself to the wind and wave without he believes God above can see him to the other side.” He looked at Fin, “Don’t you?”

  Now it was Fin’s turn to be silent. She didn’t want to believe in God. At the very least, she was certain he didn’t believe in her. All her life she’d listened to the sisters talk and preach about God, Jesus, salvation and the like, but all she could ever account for was God and his sisters telling her where to go and what to do. All the devils in hell can’t come between God and a man he done chose. No one but Peter had ever chosen her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think we like each other.” She squinted up at Tan to see if he understood her. He scratched his head.

  “The sea’s no place for a man that ain’t on good terms with the Lord. I’d keep quiet if that’s your mind. Other men might take to heaping all their bad luck on you like they do Knut if they knew you and the Lord was in outs.” He raised an eyebrow to make sure she understood.

  Fin nodded and lifted the fiddle to place it back in its case. As she closed the lid, she stopped suddenly. There in the case was a great long empty darkness in the shape of a gun. Betsy was gone. She thought back—The Kingfish, the soldiers. She fired; she cast it away. She could see in her mind where it had fallen to the deck. Then she’d run away across the plank, sword drawn, leaving Betsy where she lay. Fin was instantly angry with herself. It was almost certainly at the bottom of the ocean. In all the commotion and fighting it would have been kicked overboard. The crew knew it belonged to her, and surely anyone would have returned it had they picked it up.

  “Problem?” asked Tan.

  “Betsy’s gone. My pistol. I dropped it during the fight.”

  “That reminds me, you told me you could manage with that cutlass of yours.” Tan was grinning like his usual self.

  “I think I managed quite nicely, thank you.”

  “Managed maybe, but why settle for managing when one can excel, eh?” Tan pulled his rapier from its sheath and weighed it in his hand, then considered Knut before speaking. “This was Knut’s. I keep it for him since he’s not one to use it anymore.” He twirled the blade about once before seating it back in its sheath. “Back when Knut was Tom Knuttle, my friend, he taught me to use a sword. Remember I told you he was a fine boxer? He was a master bladesman as well.” Fin looked at Knut sleeping on the hammock and tried to picture the man Tan had been telling her about, but she still had trouble getting her mind to accept it. “What say I pass a little learning on to you? You could use it now that you’re gunless,” he said with a chuckle. “You and Knut seem to be good friends. I think he’d bless the teaching if he knew enough to know. What do you say?”

  Fin was still kicking herself for losing Betsy, but she couldn’t deny the excitement she felt about Tan’s offer.

  “Sounds like fun,” she answered, “but I’d rather have my pistol back.” She rummaged around the berthing area on the chance Betsy had somehow lodged herself in a nook. Tan laughed at her.

  “Come find me sometime when you’ve got a mind to learn then,” said Tan as he turned and walked away to resume his duties on deck.

  After Tan left, Fin didn’t have to look long around the hold to decide she’d lost the old blunderbuss for good. She soon enough gave up the looking with a frown and threw herself down in a corner, thinking she ought to find some sleep before her watch.

  What felt like little more than minutes later, she was shaken awake by Art Thomasson. His watch was up and hers was on. She grunted loud enough to let him know she was moving, and he stumbled off into the darkness to find his hammock.

  Fin climbed up out of the hold to the steady creaks and groans of the Rattlesnake slipping south. She preferred the late-night watch duty to any of the other watches. Shifts were set up to rotate, and every month she’d get a
week of seeming quiet when she mostly lived in the dark. Ship life never lets a sailor truly off-duty, and a man is as likely to end up working every shift as he is his own, but the work ebbs and flows like the tide below, and getting around to the shift at night always felt like a holiday to Fin.

  She padded softly around the deck whispering hellos to the others coming on watch with her. Topper was at the helm, and she snuck up behind him and jabbed him lightly in the side. He jumped sideways in surprise. Even in the dark Fin could see Topper was his typical untidy self. No matter what the occasion, he always seemed to be in the process of becoming dirty. He never looked completely filthy; he merely looked like a recently clean man who had been doused in dirt just before you’d rounded the corner and seen him. He also had a permanent hangover, not the kind that comes from drinking, but the kind that hides a beltline beneath a portly belly. No matter what size clothes he wore, that belly would always find its way out to peek at you from between his shirt and shins. When he jumped aside from Fin’s jab his belly danced a little bobble and winked at her in the moonlight.

  “Morning, Topper,” said Fin. Topper harrumphed and swatted her hand away as she attempted to jab him again.

  “Mind your foolin’, the captain’s about,” whispered Topper with a nervous look around. Creache had been out prowling more of late, but to be out at this time of night was unheard of.

  “What for?” whispered Fin.

  “Damned if he tells me,” muttered Topper. “Get aloft before he’s got reason to make a fuss.” Topper laid a stern eye on her and pointed his nose at the crow’s nest.

  Fin didn’t need to be told again. She was as anxious to keep out of the captain’s sight as any man aboard. She climbed down the quarterdeck stair and turned toward the mainmast ladder. The other men were gathered at the forecastle working at something Fin couldn’t make out in the dark. She stepped onto the ladder to climb her way up, but before she cleared the boom, a voice broke the night’s ease.

  “Mr. Button,” said the captain’s voice. The hairs on Fin’s neck shivered and stood. She felt violated just to hear her name from his mouth. She turned her head down toward the deck and answered.

  “Yes sir?”

  “Join me in my cabin.” It wasn’t a request. It was an order, and he didn’t wait to see it followed. He turned as soon as the words departed his lips and stalked through the door into his quarters. It was a good thing, too, because Fin, in her terror, didn’t obey immediately. It took her a few long seconds to gather herself and remind her body to make its way down the ladder, a few seconds the captain might have seen as reluctance to obey at all. An excuse to accuse her of mutinous conduct was the last thing she wanted to present him with. As she dropped to the deck and started toward the cabin door, her blood ran to her feet and her face turned cold. She couldn’t imagine any solid reason that he would call her to his quarters. The only person she’d ever seen admitted there before was Jack, as first mate. Fearing she’d delayed too long already, she crossed the final feet as quickly as she could and rapped on the door.

  “Enter,” came the captain’s calm voice from within. She turned the latch and stepped inside.

  Lanterns lighted the interior of the cabin and swung gently from side to side with the movement of the ship. The light pitched shadows, long then small, in a hypnotic rhythm across the walls and furniture. An oblong table covered with maps and instruments of navigation dominated the center of the room. The captain sat on the far side of the table, facing her, smoking a long slim pipe as he stroked his mustache.

  “Sit,” he commanded and motioned his hand toward the chair opposite him. Fin dropped herself into the chair.

  For an uncomfortably long time they sat in silence, Creache considering her quietly with narrowed eyes. Fin shrank into her chair. When at last he spoke, his voice was cold and full of breathy pause as if each word had to find its way among the creaks and groans of the ship to fall at last into her ear.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Button?” His eyes narrowed again but never let up their gaze. Fin felt naked and alone.

  “You called me in, sir,” answered Fin with the meekness of a scolded child. The corners of his lips turned up. Once again he breathed words out at her and they stalked their way across the room.

  “Why are you aboard my ship, Mr. Button?”

  “I was looking for work, and Jack brought me aboard,” she said. Fin felt like she was offering an alibi for an unknown crime.

  The captain said nothing. Again, they sat in silence for a long time. Fin feared she might cry. Suddenly the captain’s hand moved from his mustache into his lap and out of Fin’s sight below the table’s edge. His eyes grew more intense, never wavering from her face. He was gripping his gun, Fin was sure of it. For no reason she could see or name, she was certain he was about to raise his pistol and shoot her. She froze into the chair. Creache’s arm began to rise. Out of the shadow of the table’s edge, little by little, his forearm emerged into the swinging light. She couldn’t move. She was fixated completely on the hand drawing out of the shadow. The handle of a pistol appeared. Fear and panic hit her like cold water. Still, she couldn’t move. Then in one smooth motion he drew the rest of the pistol into the light, pointed it across the table, and laid it in front of her. Delicate engravings ran across the metal. Upon the handle, a large embellished “B” stared at her. It was Betsy.

  “Now, tell me why you are here,” he said, his voice sharper than before, and quicker.

  “I told you, I was—”

  “Where did you get this?” He pointed a bony finger at Betsy.

  Fin was dumbfounded. She gave him the simplest answer she could.

  “From my father,” she said, if not Bartimaeus then no one was. Creache jumped up, flung the table aside, and picked Fin up by the shirt.

  “Twenty years I’ve wandered the sea looking for that son of a motherless whore and the Crown got to him before I did. Damn his blood!” Creache was seething. He spat each word from his mouth as if it burned him. “But now I’ve got his brat, and you have your father’s debts to pay, Mr. Button—or should I say, Mr. Gann!”

  “You knew Bartimaeus?” Fin asked in bewilderment, still blenching from his stare.

  “Don’t toy with me, boy!” Creache threw Fin to the floor and drew his sword. He placed the tip against her neck. “Where is the gold?”

  “What?”

  “Your bastard father made off with more riches than King George himself, and half of it was mine, boy! You think I don’t know why you’re here? You’ve come here to seal your claim to it with my blood, eh? You’re a damned fool. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize the gun? I advise you to start talking, Mr. Gann.”

  “Captain, I swear, I don’t know anything about gold. Bartimaeus was—” Fin screamed as Creache kicked her in the ribs.

  “You expect me to believe the son of Bart Gann just happens to be hiding under a taken name, aboard my ship, for no god-damned reason? You mistake me for a fool, child. Twenty years I’ve been chasing after what I rightly stole, and what Bart wrongly run off with. If you don’t want to pay the old pirate’s debts in gold, then so be it. But mind your skin, you’ll pay in blood before you burn in hell.” He pressed the sword into her neck hard enough to draw blood.

  “Bart wasn’t my father.”

  Creache pulled his sword away. He picked her up and shoved her against the wall, then laid his sword across her neck.

  “Lie to me again, boy,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “The only reason you aren’t dead already is that I haven’t decided which I want more, your blood or my gold. Don’t play games with me. I have nothing to lose.”

  “Let me be and I’ll talk”

  Creache didn’t reply. He considered her, considered the blade at her throat with a grin. The promise of gold won out, and Fin kept her blood. He lowered the sword and dragged her across the room to her chair. He threw her into the seat and ordered her to speak.

  “I was raised in an orphanage
and Bartimaeus was the cook. He wasn’t my father, but he was the nearest thing I ever had. I never knew him for a pirate until the year they hanged him for it, and I swear on Jesus’ name he never told me anything of gold. He never talked about his past.” Fin spilled all she knew as fast as she could, then sat in the shifting light waiting to see what Creache’s cruel mind would make of it.

  Creache didn’t interrupt her. He stood over her, listening, judging her story, twisting his mustache between his fingers. When she finished, he said nothing. Once again, a long dangerous silence filled the cabin. When at last he broke it, he seemed a different man. His rage was gone, replaced with an uneasy and unnatural calm.

  “Well then, Mr. Button, I have decided to believe your story—for the moment at least. If what you say is true, then Bart’s hoard—my gold—must be hid within your orphanage. You will lead me there. I will acquire what is mine, and you may keep what is yours—your life.” Creache smiled at her, had she not known him she’d have thought it kind and genuine. Fin didn’t answer. What had she done? Creache would tear the orphan house to pieces for a treasure that might not even exist. She had to stop him. She couldn’t lead him there, couldn’t loose him upon her home and the people she loved. But for now there was no defying him.