Chapter 126: Talk Shite, Drink Deep
Word of the battle had reached Nassau an entire day before the armada, and the town had spent every hour since whipping itself into a frenzy over the tale. By the time James and the rest shoved through the Drowned Rat’s door, the tavern was roaring loud enough to make the shutters tremble.
There were enough bodies to pack the room wall to wall, to the point heat, rum, and the stink of unwashed sailors hung so thick James could almost taste it.
Near the entrance, a bass scraped away with the grace of a cat bein’ strangled in a sail locker while half a dozen drunken bastards shouted songs that had started as different tunes and somehow ended as the same one. Nobody cared enough to stop and just joined whichever verse they happened to recognize.
A dice game had swallowed an entire corner, silver clattering across the table between curses, threats, and promises no honest Christian would’ve believed sober. Somewhere beyond it, two sailors were knocking the everlasting shite out of each other while three more fought over whose turn it was to win. By the look of the blood drying across one man’s knuckles and the split lip another wore like a prize ribbon, they’d already fought it once and thought it worth doing it again.
Behind the bar, Meg threaded through the crush with a tray balanced easily on one hand, paying the chaos no more mind than she ever did.
James claimed a place with his back against the wall and Anne slipped onto his lap sideways as though the seat naturally belonged to her, one leg draped comfortably across his, an arm curling around his shoulders while she rested against his chest with familiarity.
Her eyes drifted lazily across the room, like a cat watching a yard full of dogs it had already decided it could kill, if the effort ever seemed worthwhile.
Anne kept to herself most of the time, which some men mistook for quiet and the wiser ones took for warning. She was not shy, and never had been, but simply had no taste for filling space with noise unless there was good reason for it, and anybody foolish enough to put a spark to her temper learned very quickly that her silence had never meant softness.
Across from them sat Cudjoe with his arms folded, Mary, as Mark, beside him nursing a cup she’d scarcely touched, and Bonnet at the far end of looking somehow both freshly pressed and thoroughly shaken at once. He had worn that very expression ever since his name had been put beside the destruction of one of the King’s warships.
Mackerel Jim had one boot on the bench and the other on the table, leaning into the crowd like a preacher who had mistaken rum for revelation.
His hat sat askew on his head, his face gone shiny with drink and self-regard, and he started with stubborn delight, "I have been telling the lot o’ ye for years that I took a man o’ war before and lived to drink to the telling after."
Jim declared, sweeping one arm wide enough to nearly hit some sailor. "Ye all laughed, which was rude, but I forgive ye, because now I get to sit here while my betters choke on the truth."
Cudjoe shot him a slow look over the rim of his cup. "We laughed because every time ye told it, the ship got bigger, the sea got meaner, and the crew got more famous than any crew had a right to be. By the end of it, ye’d had a princess aboard, a priest at the helm, and a cannon mounted in the bloody foremast."
Jim frowned at him, as if he was misunderstood by fools. "That is what happen when a tale has to cross water, Cudjoe. It picks up weight, it fattens, it learns from the next port over and comes back lookin’ more mighty than when it left."
Mary snickered at last, the corner of her mouth twitching as though she had nearly gave him a compliment. "If a tale of yours ever came back mighty, Jim, Nassau would catch fire from the shock and the whores on shore would start prayin’ for bad weather."
That drew a few laughs from the nearby tables. Jim pointed at her as though she had only strengthened his case. "See there? A wise lad that knows the sea does strange things to a man’s memory, and even stranger things to his pride."
"It does stranger things to yer face," Cudjoe snorted. "Yer nose is still wearin’ the last lie."
Jim touched his nose with grave suspicion, then jabbed a finger toward the room as if the answer might be hiding in the rafters.
"Ye boys can mock if ye like, but I know what I saw. If that were not a fight worth tellin’, then may the devil keep my tongue for a bellrope."
Mary snorted softly into her cup. "By your count, Jim, the devil has been holdin’ that rope a long while."
Cudjoe finally set his drink down. "Fine. Say ye did take her, fought her off Curaçao and lived to boast. Why is it then that last month ye swore it happened off Tortuga, and the month before that ye had the Spaniards chasin’ ye past Hispaniola with a bishop in the captain’s chair?"
Jim drew himself up, affronted but not in the least troubled. "Because the sea has no respect for clean stories, and neither do I. If the current drags a man a league west while he’s tellin’ it, then the tale has every right to follow."
The table answered that with laughter, and Jim, pleased to have won at least the idea of the argument, spread his hands as though the matter were settled by nature herself.
"Besides, the only honest thing about a battle is that everybody lies afterward."
Mary leaned back with a slow, satisfied expression, "Then by the time ye’re finished with this one, Jim, that man o’ war’ll have sprouted wings, the commodore will be cryin’ for his mother, and some damned mermaid will be claimin’ she steered ye home through the shoals."
Jim blinked once, then gave the room a grave nod.
"Now ye’re speakin’ sense."
Laughter burst across the nearby tables. One sailor slapped his knee so hard he dumped an entire mug down his shirt, while some voice shouted a wager of two shillings that Jim’s tale would wander somewhere else before the bottle had gone around twice. Three men took the bet before he’d even finished speaking.
Across the room a chair crashed backward, loud enough to cut through even that racket.
Charles Vane rose from it laughing, already halfway through a bottle by the look of him. His shirt hung open as always, and his beard looked wild enough to hide a nesting bird.
"Fifty guns!"
Vane bellowed, drawing the room’s attention. "Fifty bloody guns on two decks, and ye’re tellin’ me she got beaten by a brigantine, a corvette, and a fat Bajan who couldn’t tell a jib from his own arsehole a year ago?!"
A rough cheer rolled up from Vane’s crowded table. Mugs rose into the air, and the lads shouted, "AYE, THAT’S THE TRUTH OF IT!" loud enough to shake the rafters.
Grinning even wider as his crew answered him, Vane swaggered over with the bottle dangling from two fingers. He stopped in front of Bonnet and stopped on him with one bleary eye.
"Well, look at ye."
He pointed the bottle like a cutlass. "How’s it feel knowin’ yer balls finally dropped after all these years?"
Bonnet inclined his head with care.
"The credit belongs to Mark, Captain Vane, and to my crew. I merely assisted."
"Listen to the bastard."
Vane’s grin split wider, bright with drink and wicked delight.
He swept the bottle out toward Bonnet, then toward the rest of the room as though presenting some rare prize. "Saints above, lads, look at him. The little curate’s gone and steered himself into history. Bonnet, tell me true, did ye sink one o’ His Majesty’s finest frigates to still speak like ye’re askin’ permission to come aboard?"
His crew howled and even strangers nearby lifted their drinks toward Bonnet. Whether they toasted him or mocked him, James honestly couldn’t tell, and he doubted Bonnet knew either.
Thatch pushed through the crowd with a grin already spreading beneath his beard, clapped James hard enough between the shoulders to jolt him forward.
Anne felt the blow through her lap at once. Without so much as looking up, she drove her elbow back into his ribs hard enough to make the bigger man fold with a grunt, though he laughed through it a heartbeat later as if the breath had only been knocked out of him for sport.
He lifted a hand before James could so much as open his mouth. "Ah, shut yer gob, Calloway. I’ll give ye this one. Ye’ve earned every bloody cheer they’re throwin’ at ye tonight."
He jabbed a thumb toward the docks beyond the tavern walls. "But don’t grow too comfortable wearin’ the biggest tale in Nassau. Soon as I find myself a ship worth the devil’s own reputation, I’ll have this whole sea cursin’ my name louder than yours, and ye’ll be buyin’ me the rum while I tell ye how it happened."
James barked a laugh and shook his head. "I’ve been waitin’ to hear ye say that. Go find her, then, I’d hate to spend the rest o’ my days wonderin’ what excuses you’d make if ye never got the chance."
Then his eye found Bonnet, and his grin softened.
"Christ, and you."
He clapped Bonnet hard enough on the shoulder to nearly knock him off the bench. "Come a long way from the man who couldn’t keep his own sloop off a reef. I’m near proud o’ ye, and I don’t say that often."
Bonnet’s ears turned pink. He answered only with a small nod, plainly far more comfortable being teased than praised.
By then the tavern had reached the happy stage where every man within it knew exactly how the battle had been fought, and no two bastards told it right. Across the room, the discussion was how many guns the man o’ war had, where some drunken sailor insisted she’d carried seventy guns from the day she first left England. Nobody complained because they believed him, but because his number was too small.
James figured the old duchess would likely reach a hundred by sunrise when he spotted Black Sam weaving through the crush with a grin broad enough to shame the candles.
Sam answered a shouted toast with his cup, cuffed one sailor across the shoulder for trying to trip him, stole a bite off another man’s plate without breaking stride, and laughed all the way to James’s table.
"There ye are," he declared, dragging a chair over backwards and dropping into it with all the grace of a collapsing warehouse. "I’ve had to listen to six different versions o’ yer battle already, and in one o’ them ye’d somehow grown a second brigantine."
James snorted.
"Only one? Give it another hour."
"I intend to. By midnight I expect ye’ll have sunk the whole bloody Royal Navy."
Sam laughed, reached across the table for the nearest bottle as though it already belonged to him, and leaned in pour himself a drink.