“Of course.”
“What are you playing at, Henry?”
The man stared at him doubtfully.
“You owe me some explanation”, Rogers went on soon after. “I did my duty. And I thought that was all. But now you’re involving me in this story.”
The sound of some steps came from the bottom of the corridor, together with Kane’s light whistle. They had clearly remained in the cell too long and the hangman was coming back to check if something had happened.
“There’s no need of discussing the matter here, captain”, Morgan hissed.
“I’m afraid there is”, Rogers disagreed.
“What do you want to know?”
“The truth.”
“Ok”, the governor replied. “You’re a trustworthy man, after all.”
“Hurry up!”
“Bellamy himself came to tell me what he wanted to do. Our past is not a mystery, isn’t it? So you won’t be surprised by our friendship.”
I’m not surprised at all, Rogers considered.
“He asked us for a loan.” Morgan was talking fast and he sometimes turned his eyes to see if Kane suddenly came. “He didn’t have enough money to afford starting such a dangerous journey. We wanted the list of the crew in return. Experience has taught us to get to know who is going to use the money we are spending. The only name of the list we already knew, was Wynne’s.”
“So you sent me to look for him”, Rogers highlighted.
“Exactly. When we learnt that Bellamy had disappeared, we couldn’t do otherwise.”
The French man started talking again. He was sitting on the bedstraw, crossing his legs. “I’ll be punished because I stirred up a mutiny. But it wasn’t my fault. I can swear it. Don’t trust the man with golden teeth.” Even if his face was hidden by his hair, he was clearly smiling. “What’s more, I was the only one who could see. I was on the observation mast. I had to watch, just like the shaman had told us.”
Rogers bent down once more. He was going to open his mouth, wanting to know what Wynne was referring to. The pirate was faster.
“Our eyes often deceive us, captain Rogers!”, he said.
“And what about the treasure?”, Morgan intruded.
There was no answer. Edward Wynne bent his head back and burst into an obscene and powerful laughter, clashing with his body’s thinness. He kept laughing also when the hangman came back. The governor had he whipped again and again, hoping to get more information. But the more Kane tortured him, the more the pirate laughed. He went on till his vocal cords broke and disgusting sounds came out of his mouth, forcing Rogers to shut his ears.
CHAPTER TWO
THE EXECUTION
Late in the afternoon, Johnny started on his way back.
Remembering what had happened in the morning, he decided to take the longest way. He could avoid going through the Spanish area in doing so. His mother was certainly at work, plunging as usual in the suffocating smell of spices which impregnated the Passàro do Mar’s kitchen. She wouldn’t notice him, if he came home late.
He moved on along the east end of the harbour, getting over docks and road-steads. He sometimes cast a glance at the moored ships. Most of the crews had landed. He had often felt the impulse to sign on and leave Port Royal. But how? He wouldn’t bear the sea, not even for a week.
He heard Anne’s voice echoing in his mind at that moment, as powerful as only she could have, accusing him of being just like his father. He thought again over the story he had invented with Avery’s connivance.
I had to hand him some pincers, he revised it mentally, trying to look convincing even to himself. He told me to hurry up, so I turned. I didn’t notice a lower beam and I hit against it.
She might believe him, even if he could foresee her worried look, her goggle eyes and he wide-open mouth.
She was going to overwhelm him by her usual wave of scolding, about how dangerous the world was and everything else. Obviously, he expected her to ask the old man for an explanation. He would prove everything was right that same evening, when he was going to have a drink at the tavern.
I hope he won’t get drunk, he thought.
Farther on, the ground made some terracing, following a flight of steps which had been built against the walls of the harbour. Johnny walked up there without even stopping to think about it. He knew the area like the back of his hand. When he got to the top, he stopped there to look at the bay.
He had seen that sight lots of times, but he felt a different emotion that day, which he had never felt before. The dying sunset light was enveloping everything in violet brushstrokes. He felt sure for a moment that the air was even full of electricity, almost bringing some change forward.
“The wind is changing.”
Johnny winced. A man had come close to him while he hadn’t even noticed him, and he was staring at the inlet just like him. He was wearing a blue jacket and a shirt opening on his chest, tied by a green sash on his waist. He had knee-high boots on his feet. His face was pockmarked, as if he had been stung by hundreds of voracious insects and it was framed by a pair of long and thick dark sideburns, making it look as long as a beech-marten’s one.
“Something is going to happen, isn’t it?”, the boy asked him, not even knowing why he was addressing that man.
The other one nodded.
“Go back home, guy”, he told him. He put his hands on his hips and pushed his clothes aside in doing so. A sword hilt came into view. “A storm is going to break out soon. You don’t want to be around here, when that happens, do you?”
Johnny didn’t answer. He realized that he didn’t like that man. Especially when he smiled: he had his upper incisors set in gold.
He is a pirate, he thought and, while walking away, he could hear him sneer. It was a gloomy, unpleasant laughter. He turned, fearing the man was going to follow him. On the contrary, the pirate wasn’t caring at all about him.
The frantic life of the colony was dying away meanwhile. The streets were getting empty. The people who didn’t have a house to go back to, were showering inside the inns. The lamp men had started on their tour, lighting lamps and filling them with new oil. Oddly, there didn’t seem to be any dead man lying in the mud. But the night was going to be still long, to be sure about that.
Johnny walked all along the street separating him from the Pàssaro do Mar in a strange state of excitement, which he couldn’t understand. It was the fault of his meeting with the mysterious man. And he was still thinking about him, when he met one of the several guard spots scattered along the street, where a boy, about twelve years old, was hanging a warning. Some soldiers were surrounding him, looking curious.
“At last!”, one of them exclaimed
“I feared the governor had got soft”, another man added.
“Shut up”, a third one warned him. “You don’t want to be hanged too, do you?”
They went on discussing without really caring about it. It was different for Johnny. As soon as the boy had finished, he decided to move closer, attracted by the words heading on the sign.
ACCORDING TO HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE OF ENGLAND’S WILL,
THE GOVERNOR OF PORT ROYAL SIR HENRY MORGAN
ORDERS THE EXECUTION OF THE PIRATE EMANUEL WYNNE
AT THE FIRST LIGHTS OF DAWN