“Hah!” Carter said. “The whale can swallow Jonah, but Jonah cannot swallow the whale.”
Offended by the tone of his quip, she popped the nugget into her mouth, chewed it twice, and swallowed. The men cheered her derring-do, and Carter clapped her on the back. “You must know, sirrah, that you have et more than a whale, but a small fortune.”
With the sharp end of a stick, Chard drew some numbers in the sand. “If memory serves, the Virginia Company offered fourteen shillings fourpence for a troy ounce, and we must have enough for two thousand English sterling. Rich, rich, I tell you, rich. The king of the Bermudas—”
“Aye, and so are we all,” said Carter. “The four kings.”
Jane thought of her mother back in England making do with three shillings sixpence each week for herself and four daughters. They would live like queens.
“All we need do,” said Waters, “is hie this stuff to England …”
His words shimmered in the sunshine, the blue waves never more endless, the horizon never more distant, the ache for home never more acute. Jane thought of The Moon and the Seven Stars, her mother fending off the men who supped there, the smell of ale and mutton, her little sisters underfoot, the youngest surely walking and talking now; did the child even know her tall sister gone to the New World? And what good is the New World and its riches if no ship would ever come?
On his feet, Chard played the tyrant. “Hove, you dirty bastards. We must find some hiding place to store our treasure, and should Somers or some other English rescue come—or worse, the ungallant Spaniard—we will smuggle the goods aboard. This is mine—our discovery—and not the Virginia Company’s. Come, dogs, and make haste, let’s carry off the fruits of this isle and keep the bounty, for by this amber grease we shall one day be covered in gold.”
They found a dark, dry cave in which to stow the whale’s perfume, and there it remained through the long summer, tho not undisturbed. Once a week or more oft, they made an expedition to assure no harm had come to it nor any man alone had dared move the ambergris. Always in the company of one or the other, and no man alone, for each suspected his fellow castaways, and none could be trusted. Edward Chard thought of little else, and when he spoke of the treasure, said “I” and “me” when he intended “we” and “us,” or “mine” when “ours” was preferred. As well, he seemed to have forgot Jane and took no interest in their dalliance, nor offered so much as a kiss, an embrace, a telling look, or even one kind word. As the fog hides the morning, the idea of riches obscured his nature and rolled o’er him until he had but vanished. He did not notice, as time wore on, how Jane drifted to Waters or how Waters had become enchanted with Long Jane. As she lay unbound, she became more bound to him.
“When we are safely home and our fortune secure, I shall make an honest woman of you, for methinks I love you.” They nestled in a bower of palm fronds, sweet talking their dreams. Jane rested her head upon Robert’s arm and stared at the moon awink in the August sky. “We will sail back here if you like and build the finest house and be lord and lady of these islands when an English colony is here set. You shall have a proper bed—long enough for you to stretch head to toe—and a kitchen, too, and perhaps some Moorish girl to help govern our children, for I wish at least four of ’em, each taller than the next, and they shall not want for anything. We’ll have old Carter marry us, should he become a vicar from carrying the Good Book so.”
She sighed at the prospect and draped her bare leg over his. “And I can bring my mother to live with us here and make a home in paradise for my sisters, too.”
“Aye, bring the whole Long clan, and we shall make a forest of ourselves. We are rich, my girl, beyond the dream of richness.”
With a kiss, she sealed the matter. “Robert Waters, you are my secret love.”