“Very much so. But now he leaves all the adventures to me and to Juan, here. Now Juan, he could tell you some stories, and true ones. He sailed many years with my father.”
But de Brassart, predictably, hadn’t asked anything of Juan Ramírez.
And Captain del Rio had proven that he could tell colourful stories himself, like the one he was telling them now. “So on the fourth night, we fell in with—this is how you say it, yes?—we fell in with the Bellewether. This ship I know and recognize, because I have done business many times, se?or, with your son Daniel. So we keep in company with her all night, since on the sea it’s good always to have a friend beside you. With so many English ships around, it’s better not to be alone.”
De Brassart asked, “Why would the English bother you? Your kings have signed a treaty of neutrality.”
The Spanish captain even shrugged with style. “We are not at war, but the English still capture our ships, and whatever we carry they say that we carry for you, for the French, you see? Then by declaring our cargoes French property they can condemn them and claim them and keep them for sale, so they capture our ships and they carry us into their ports and they take all our cargoes. They give back our ships, but our profits . . .” He shrugged again, raising one hand in a gesture as though he were scattering unseen coins into the empty air. “Two times I’ve been carried now into Antigua, and if it continues this way I cannot make a living,” he said, “and besides, it is very annoying.”
Joseph, who’d kept silent so far, spoke up unexpectedly, and in the tone that Lydia knew carried trouble. “Are you saying, Captain, that the British have no honour?”
Del Rio reached towards the centre of the table with his knife to take more salt and used the movement to glance sideways at her brother as though noticing him there for the first time. That single glance appeared to take her brother’s measure, and she felt a quick flood of protective feelings that she just as quickly sought to stifle, lest they do more harm than good, for Joseph lately rose to anger if he sensed that he was being treated softly.
As she pulled her gaze deliberately away it caught and clung a moment to the silent, level one of Mr. de Sabran, directly opposite. He was frowning, as he often did, and yet this time there seemed to be no anger in it, only what appeared to be the kind of concentration that a man might give a puzzling thing he sought to understand.
She broke the contact as Del Rio gave his answer to her brother: “No, of course I would not say this.” With a faint curve of his mouth he added lightly, “I am saying war can be a complicated game of many moves and many players, and a man must guard his backs.”
She saw the lowering of Joseph’s eyebrows and she intervened to keep the interchange from turning to an argument. She said, “Forgive me, Captain, but you have not finished telling us your story.” As he looked to her with interest, she reminded him, “You had just met the Bellewether at sea.”
“Ah. Yes. This was at night, as I have said, and in the dark all things are hidden, so we sail the night in company with her and all seems well. But when the dawn comes, the light shows us all is not well, that the Bellewether has suffered much from some attack. And when we come up close enough to call to them, we see there are not many men aboard that ship, and those we see are not the men that we expect to see aboard the Bellewether, you understand. They are men who sail with Big-Headed Tom.” He paused his narrative to ask, “You know this name?”
None of them did, so he elaborated. “All of us who sail in the West Indies know this name. He’s not a good man. Very violent.” To de Brassart, with more emphasis, he said, “He is a pirate.” Then he reached and slid his knife point once again into the salt. “He is a plague to all my countrymen, to all us Spanish. When he takes a ship he kills each man aboard, her crew and all her officers. He has killed many friends of mine. So when I see his men on board the Bellewether, this is not good.”
He knew the way to spin a tale and keep the listener in suspense. He salted his food in the pause, and sliced it with precision.
“So,” he said, “I talk with Juan, and he reminds me Daniel Wilde has always been a good man and an honest one, and so we think we should not let his brother’s ship be kept by pirates. But how to take it back—this is a problem.”
Lydia knew that the Bellewether’s crew numbered near fifty men, but a ship that had been captured would be running with a prize crew put aboard her by the capturer, and prize crews were significantly smaller, sometimes ten or fewer men. She pointed out, “Your ship is larger than the Bellewether.”
“It’s true. I sail on El Montero with a hundred men and eighteen guns, but these I could not use to full effect on this occasion.”
She was puzzled. “But why not?”
He smiled. “Because, se?ora Wilde, your brother’s ship it was already very damaged, and if I had fired a shot at it myself, if I had made another hole in it, that would not have been wise. You cannot tell a friend, ‘Come, look, see how I’ve saved your ship, it’s at the bottom of the ocean.’ I don’t think he’d be so grateful.”
She could see his point, and smiled herself at how he’d stated it. With such a man, she thought, it was impossible to not be slightly charmed.
She was still smiling when her eyes again met Mr. de Sabran’s, across the table. He did not look charmed, though it appeared this time his frown was aimed directly at the Spanish captain.
Unperturbed, Del Rio carried on. “Then I remember that the men aboard the Bellewether, they do not know we will not harm that ship. So I . . . well, in my language we say tirarse un farol, yes? The words mean exactly to show them a lantern, a light, but a false one, like when you are playing at the cards and you make someone think that you carry the king when you only have deuces.”
Her father translated. “You bluffed.”
“If that is the same meaning, then yes,” said the captain. “I bluffed. I tell Juan to knock open our gun ports, to show them our teeth, and we fire at the same time our deck guns and muskets, but just at their rigging because it is already bad. And they think we are truly attacking them.”
De Brassart nodded. “And so they surrendered.”
The Spanish captain looked at him as though he did not understand the word, his eyebrows faintly drawn together, but from what he said next Lydia assumed it was the concept of surrender that was foreign to him. “No, of course not. No man would surrender in such circumstances. But he might run, and this is what they tried to do. It is unfortunate for them,” he said, “that no ship is as fast as El Montero.”
Lydia owned that the Spanish ship might have had an advantage in that quarter, with the Bellewether so badly mauled and poorly handled, but she knew that if her brother’s ship had been in fine condition there was none upon the seas that could sail faster.
From good manners she said nothing, though she shared a glance along the table with her father, who had evidently had the same thought, for his eyes danced in the way they did when he was trying not to smile.
He said, “Well, we are grateful to you, Captain, for returning her. I hope it did not cost you any men?”
“It cost one man a finger, and another has a new scar on his shoulder, but I give thanks to God the rest of my crew are all well.”
De Brassart asked, “What of the pirate crew?”
“They did not do so well. There were I think eleven of them to begin with, and when it was finished there were only seven we could find.” His tone was light, as though it were lost nails that he was speaking of, not human lives. “We put them down together on a little island we were passing, very scenic, with a little bay like this, you know, for swimming. If they’re careful of the sharks.”