Pirate Latitudes

The door closed. Hunter got out of bed. The girl still slept, snoring loudly. He looked around his room, which was small and cramped - a bed, a sea chest with his belongings in one corner, a chamber pot under the bed, a basin of water nearby. He coughed, started to dress, and paused to urinate out of the window onto the street below. A shouted curse drifted up to him. Hunter smiled, and continued to dress, selecting his only good doublet from the sea chest, and his remaining pair of hose that had only a few snags. He finished by putting on his gold belt with the short dagger, and then, as a kind of afterthought, took one pistol, primed it, rammed home the ball with the wadding to hold it in the barrel, and slipped it under his belt.

This was Captain Charles Hunter’s normal toilet, performed each evening when he arose at sunset. It took only a few minutes, for Hunter was not a fastidious man. Nor, he reflected, was he much of a Puritan; he looked again at the girl in the bed, then closed the door behind her and went down the narrow creaking wood stairs to the main room of Mrs. Denby’s Inn.

The main room was a broad, low-ceilinged space with a dirt floor and several heavy wooden tables in long rows. Hunter paused. As Mrs. Denby had said, Levasseur was there, sitting in a corner, hunched over a tankard of grog.

Hunter crossed to the door.

“Hunter!” Levasseur croaked, in a thick drunken voice.

Hunter turned, showing apparent surprise. “Why, Levasseur. I didn’t see you.”

“Hunter, you son of an English mongrel bitch.”

“Levasseur,” he replied, stepping out of the light, “you son of a French farmer and his favorite sheep, what brings you here?”

Levasseur stood behind the table. He had picked a dark spot; Hunter could not see him well. But the two men were separated by a distance of perhaps thirty feet - too far for a pistol shot.

“Hunter, I want my money.”

“I owe you no money,” Hunter said. And, in truth, he did not. Among the privateers of Port Royal, debts were paid fully and promptly. There was no more damaging reputation a man could have than one who failed to pay his debts, or to divide spoils equally. On a privateering raid, any man who tried to conceal a part of the general booty was always put to death. Hunter himself had shot more than one thieving seaman through the heart and kicked the corpse overboard without a second thought.

“You cheated me at cards,” Levasseur said.

“You were too drunk to know the difference.”

“You cheated me. You took fifty pounds. I want it back.”

Hunter looked around the room. There were no witnesses, which was unfortunate. He did not want to kill Levasseur without witnesses. He had too many enemies. “How did I cheat you at cards?” he asked. As he spoke, he moved slightly closer to Levasseur.

“How? Who cares a damn for how? God’s blood, you cheated me.” Levasseur raised the tankard to his lips.

Hunter chose that moment to lunge. He pushed his palm flat against the upturned tankard, ramming it back against Levasseur’s face, which thudded against the back wall. Levasseur gurgled and collapsed, blood dripping from his mouth. Hunter grabbed the tankard and crashed it down on Levasseur’s skull. The Frenchman lay unconscious.

Hunter shook his hand free of the wine on his fingers, turned, and walked out of Mrs. Denby’s Inn. He stepped ankle-deep into the mud of the street, but paid no attention. He was thinking of Levasseur’s drunkenness. It was sloppy of him to be so drunk while waiting for someone.

It was time for another raid, Hunter thought. They were all getting soft. He himself had spent one night too many in his cups, or with the women of the port. They should go to sea again.

Hunter walked through the mud, smiling and waving to the whores who yelled to him from high windows, and made his way to the Governor’s Mansion.

…

“ ALL HAVE REMARKED upon the comet, seen over London on the eve of the plague,” said Captain Morton, sipping his wine. “There was a comet before the plague of ’56, as well.”

“So there was,” Almont said. “And what of that? There was a comet in ’59, and no plague that I recall.”

“An outbreak of the pox in Ireland,” said Mr. Hacklett, “in that very year.”

“There is always an outbreak of the pox in Ireland,” Almont said. “In every year.”

Hunter said nothing. Indeed, he had said little during the dinner, which he found as dreary as any he had ever attended at the Governor’s Mansion. For a time, he had been intrigued by the new faces - Morton, the captain of the Godspeed, and Hacklett, the new secretary, a silly pinch-faced prig of a man. And Mrs. Hacklett, who looked to have French blood in her slender darkness, and a certain lascivious animal quality.

For Hunter, the most interesting moment in the evening had been the arrival of a new serving girl, a delicious pale blond child who came and went from time to time. He kept trying to catch her eye. Hacklett noticed, and gave Hunter a disapproving stare. It was not the first disapproving stare he had given Hunter that evening.