“Still, I knew well enough I was unpopular with them—little did I know quite how unpopular, though, until the day the cellar was finished and the foundation ready to be laid.”
Bonnet paused to draw on his cigar, lest it go out. He let out puffs of smoke from the corners of his mouth, white wisps that curled past his head into the greater white of the fog.
“The trenches were dug,” he went on, the cigar clenched between his teeth, “and the walls started; the great block of the cornerstone standin’ ready. I had gone to my supper, and was just walkin’ back to the place where I slept, when to my surprise I was caught up by a pair of the lads with whom I worked.
“They’d a bottle; they sat down on a wall and urged me to drink with them. I should’ve known better, for they were friendly, which they’d never been before. But I did drink, and drink again, and in no time at all I was reelin’ drunk, for I’d no head for liquor, havin’ never the money to buy strong drink. I was well fuddled by the time ’twas full dark, and scarcely thought to pull away when they took me by the arms and hastened me down the lane. Then they seized me, tossed me over a half-built wall, and to my surprise, I found myself lyin’ in the damp dirt of the cellar I’d helped dig.
“All of them were there, the workmen. Another man was with them, too; one o’ them had a lantern, and when he held it up, I could see the man was Daft Joey. Daft Joey was a beggarman that lived beneath the bridge—he had nay teeth, and he ate rotten fish and floating dung from the river, and he stank worse than a blackbirder’s hold.
“I was so dazed with the whisky and the fall that I lay where I was, only half hearin’ them as they talked—or argued, rather, for the chief o’ the gang was angry that the two had brought me. The daftie would do, he said; a mercy to him, at that. But them that brought me said no, better me. Someone might miss the beggarman, they said. Then someone laughed and said aye, and they would not have to pay me my last week’s wages, and ’twas then I began to know they meant to kill me.
“They’d talked before, while we worked. A sacrifice, they said, for the foundation, lest the earth tremble and the walls collapse. But I had not listened—and if I had, would not have guessed that they meant any more than to chop the head off a cockerel and bury it, as was usual.”
He had not looked at Roger through this recital, his eyes instead fixed on the mist, as though the events he described were happening again, somewhere just beyond the white curtain of fog.
Roger’s clothing hung on him, clinging, wringing wet with mist and cold sweat. His stomach clenched, and the cesspool smell of the steerage might have been the stink of Daft Joey in the cellar.
“So they palavered for a bit,” Bonnet went on, “and the beggarman began to make noise, for he wanted more drink. And at last the chief said it was not worth so much talk, he would throw for the choice. Then he took a coin from his pocket and he said to me, laughin’, ‘Will ye take heads or tails, then, man?’
“I was too sick to say a word; the sky was black and whirling round and bits of light kept flickering at the edges of my eyes, like fallin’ stars. So he said it for me; by Geordie’s head should I live, and by his arse I should die, and he threw the shilling up in the air. It came down in the dirt by my head, but I had nay strength to turn and look.
“He bent to see and gave a grunt, then he stood up and took nay more notice of me.”
They had reached the stern in their quiet pacing. Bonnet stopped there, hands on the rail, smoking silently. Then he took the cigar from his mouth.
“They pulled the daftie to the wall that was built, and made him sit down on the ground at its foot. I do remember his foolish face,” he said softly. “He took a drink and he laughed wi’ them, and his mouth was open—slack and wet as a old whore’s cunt. The next moment, the stone came down from the top of the wall, and crushed his head.”
Drops of moisture had gathered on the spikes of hair at the back of Roger’s neck; he could feel them run down, one at a time, trickling cold down the crease of his back.
“They rolled me on my face and hit me,” Bonnet continued matter-of-factly. “When I came to myself again, I was in the bottom of a fishing boat. The fisherman left me on the shore near Peterhead and said he would advise me to find a new ship—he could see, he said, I was not meant for the land.”
He held up the cigar and tapped it gently with a finger to loosen the ash.
“At that,” he said, “they did give me my wages; when I came to look, the shilling was in my pocket. Ah, they were honest men, sure.”
Roger leaned against the rail, gripping its wood as the single solid thing in a world gone soft and nebulous.
“And did you go back to the land?” he asked, and heard his own voice, preternaturally calm, as though it belonged to someone else.
“Did I find them, ye mean.” Bonnet turned and leaned back against the rail, half facing Roger. “Oh, yes. Years later. One at a time. But I found them all.” He opened the hand that held the coin, and held it cupped thoughtfully before him, tilting it back and forth so the silver gleamed in the lantern light.
“Heads you live, and tails you die. A fair chance, would yez say, MacKenzie?”
“For them?”
“For you.”
The soft Irish voice was as unemphatic as it might be were it making observations of the weather.
As in a dream, Roger felt the weight of the shilling drop once more into his hands. He heard the suck and hiss of the water on the hull, the blowing of the whales—and the suck and hiss of Bonnet’s breath as he drew on his cigar. Seven whales the fill of a Cirein Croin.
“A fair chance,” Bonnet said. “Luck was with you before, MacKenzie. See will Danu come for you again—or will it be the Soul-Eater this time?”
The fog had closed over the deck. There was nothing visible save the glowing coal of Bonnet’s cigar, a burning cyclops in the mist. The man might be a devil indeed, one eye closed to human misery, one eye open to the dark. And here Roger stood quite literally between the devil and the deep blue sea, with his fate shining silver in the palm of his hand.
“It is my life; I’ll make the call,” he said, and was surprised to hear his voice calm and steady. “Tails—tails is mine.” He threw, and caught, clapped his one hand hard against the back of the other, trapped the coin and its unknown sentence.
He closed his eyes and thought just once of Brianna. I’m sorry, he said silently to her, and lifted his hand.
A warm breath passed over his skin, and then he felt a spot of coolness on the back of his hand as the coin was picked up, but he didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes.
It was some time before he realized that he stood alone.
PART NINE
Passionnément
40
VIRGIN SACRIFICE
Wilmington, the Colony of North Carolina, September 1, 1769
This was the third attack, of whatever Lizzie’s sickness was. She had seemed to recover after the first bad fever, and after a day spent regaining her strength, had insisted she was able to travel. They had got no more than a day’s ride north of Charleston, though, before the fever struck again.