The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [55]
One night she woke from sleep in a panic. A presence in the room. She felt it before she heard breathing. A dream in which she understood she was dreaming but could not manage to force herself awake. Her head on the pillow as heavy as an anvil. Her mangled appendages useless by her side. Daniels had come for her. He’d already dispensed with Whaley, all stealth and silent steel, a knife across the throat as Whaley slumbered in the front room, beneath that portrait Daniels had come to retrieve. She tried to form some words, not of supplication but an offering, Take me now, take the portrait too, though whatever propensities you have allowed it are patently false, it has no power and it never spoke to me, it was all a misguided act to fool you into thinking I was worth saving, it is only paint and a battered frame, technically amateurish and not even a very good likeness.
Then Whaley said, “I need you to wake up.”
The bones in her neck creaked as she raised her head from the tick. In a bluish light from the moon she saw him leaning against the wall, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
“I have something to tell you now,” he said.
She swallowed and nodded, her relief that he was alive mixed now with trepidation, for whatever he had to tell her was middle-of-the-night weighty.
“I’ve not been honest,” he said.
She waited. Her own breathing, shallow and ragged, drowned out his, though, anxious as she was, she knew there wasn’t anything he could tell her about himself that would make her not care for him. Had he been hired by Jefferson to assassinate her father she would have come in time to his side of it. Yet the fact that there was something to make him cower, render him so dejected, bothered her, for it meant he wasn’t perhaps as inviolable as she’d thought him.
“Ten, eleven years ago, I was in the West Indies with a crew out of Hull. We were ambushing supply ships running to the islands, Spanish galleons mostly. Daniels was down there too. He claimed to be the grandson of Teach. Blackbeard, they also call him. The math is off by a good half century, but when you get to know the man, you believe that part of his story more, for if Teach was as black of heart as he was of beard, Lord God the blackness at the core of Daniels.
“We’d put in at a place named Cortez’s Cay. Laying out for a fleet of French ships headed for Martinique. I was second mate by title, but the captain, my mother’s brother Clarence, was a day and night fall-down drunkard, so it was me mostly captaining that ship. We’d dropped anchor in a cove and set up camp awaiting the fleet to arrive. Second night on the island one of the crew caught something trying to steal our food. They brought him into the tent I shared with my uncle and the equally besotted first mate. He won’t nothing but sunburnt leather and bone. Wild-haired, blackbearded like his so-called granddaddy. Uncle Clarence tried to get him talking, but he just spat and swore until Clarence ordered his skinny arse hung and his dirty black throat cut.”
“What was he doing on that island?”
“Daniels isn’t one to explain a lot about his past.”
“You two have that in common then.”
What annoyed her most was not what he had left out—she hadn’t exactly told him everything about herself either—but what he had led her to believe: that he too was touched, if not by God then by Daniels, God of these banks.
“We have more in common than I care to admit.”
She could feel the heat of his shame, how bright it still burned.
“I figure he got chased there and somehow survived, or else