Cousin Jack made it clear he wasn’t going to let Charlie go anywhere – especially not with us and especially not to the Caribbean. When Henry told him that he intended to go and look for Mr and Mrs Stevens I thought Jack was literally going to explode.
“I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous,” he said. “Just because your guardians give you more licence than is good for you, Hunter, doesn’t mean I’m going to do the same with Charles. In the first place you won’t find anything, because there’s nothing to find. And in the second I don’t want all this raked up again. Charles has been through enough and I have told him that he has to accept the fact that his parents are gone for good. The last thing he needs is to go gallivanting around the Caribbean in search of some imaginary ship!”
Henry was far too wise to argue. He just smiled his toothy grin and shook Mr Bligh’s hand. “I expect you’re right, sir,” he said politely.
Now I know that when Henry Hunter smiles like that, and calls an adult ‘sir’ it means he’s already planning to do exactly what he likes, regardless of their opinion; but Charlie’s Cousin Jack didn’t know him as well as me. He huffed and puffed a bit and muttered things like: “I should think so too.” Then he suddenly seemed to relent.
“Look, lads,” he said, not shouting this time. “All I want is what’s best for Charles. As long as he’s here with me I know he’s safe. It takes time to get over this kind of thing and I don’t want him to get his hopes up for nothing.”
“We understand, don’t we, Dolf?” said Henry in his most serious voice. “If it’s OK with you, sir, I’ll just go and say goodbye to Charlie, then we’ll be on our way and leave you in peace.”
Henry slipped away for a few moments, leaving me staring uncomfortably at Mr Bligh’s shoes.
When HH returned, Cousin Jack ushered us out to the car. As we were getting in he put a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “I only want what’s best for Charles,” he said again. “If you want to visit again sometime I’m sure it will help.”
As we drove away from the house I looked back and saw Charlie standing forlornly at one of the windows. He half-raised a hand to wave at us – then seemed to forget and let it fall to his side again.
“Er… what did you tell Charlie?” I asked.
“That we’re going to find out what happened to his parents,” answered Henry. He looked about as serious as I’d ever seen him; then he turned and grinned at me. “Pack for warmer shores, Dolf. We’re off to the Caribbean! And the best thing is we’re going to find out a lot about pirates on the way… ”
The flight from London Heathrow to the Bahamas was a long one, and during that time Henry made sure that it was me who found out a lot about pirates. Though, after raiding the Hunter Learjet’s seriously well-stocked kitchen (chocolate éclairs and lemon tarts, if I remember right), I struggled to keep awake in my comfortable seat as Henry shared ‘a few facts’ about pirates.
“Pirates weren’t jolly buccaneers like most people think,” said Henry, waving a book containing lots of colour pictures of salty sea-dogs with roguish gleams in their eyes and a fair scattering of peg-legs and parrots. “They were lowlife scum of the earth – they preyed on the weak and stole everything they could to get rich and drunk on rum every day—”
“They sound like a great bunch,” I put in.
“There were some good things about them. Not all of them were cruel villains – they had laws on board their ships, which were a bit like floating countries, each with their own rules, strictly dividing up the spoils, giving payments to men who got wounded in battle, and so on.” Henry leaned forward and jabbed a finger at me. “Did you know, Dolf, they would get different payments for the loss of an eye, a finger, a leg or an arm?”
I shook my head, wondering if any of them hurt themselves in order to make a quid or two.
“Believe me there were plenty of opportunities to get injured,” continued Henry, as if he’d read my mind. “Apart from having to survive the terrible conditions on board – no fresh food, no way to get clean, and as for the toilets… ” He shuddered. “It was likely they’d get hit by a flying cannonball, or spiked with splinters when one hit the side of the ship. Those could finish you off pretty nastily.”
“So most pirates were a bunch of smelly, unwashed killers, who couldn’t expect to live very long?” I said.
“Their life expectancy was anything up to six months, but sometimes a lot less. It’s safe to say most of them ended up in Davy Jones’s Locker.”
“Davy who’s what now?” I enquired, baffled.
“Davy Jones. No one is really sure who he was. Some say he was a real sailor who drowned and became a kind of sea demon. Whatever the truth, pirates used his name for the place you went if you died at sea.”
“So when were these pirates around?”
It turned out to be the worst question I could have asked. It set Henry off talking about what he called the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’, from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century, and how after that there was such a big push to stamp out pirates that their numbers dwindled until they’d finally all but died off.
By this point I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
“But you know,” Henry said, as I felt myself drifting off, “there are still pirates today. You must have seen in the news those rich people’s yachts that get captured and their owners held to ransom.”
That woke me up a bit.
“Do you think that’s what happened to Charlie’s parents?”
“It’s the most obvious answer. But I’m not sure how it could tie in with what Charlie saw.”
“You mean the ghost ship?”
“Yes,” said Henry. “There are plenty of stories about pirate ghosts… some of them could easily be true… ”
“Ghosts! You mean you believe in them now?”
“It’s not that I actually believe,” said Henry. “But until I see one, I can’t say I don’t. After all, we didn’t always know that vampires existed, did we – until we met Bella Dracul?”
Henry pulled out a large leather-bound book from the stack he’d brought along. It had a long title – something like Ghostly Pirates and Apparitions on the Barbary Coast.
“There are loads of different stories,” Henry said. “Ghostly pirates who come ashore in search of treasure they buried while they were alive, or who’re guarding their hoard from the living. There’s a bunch that are supposed to be the ghostly crew commanded by Captain Kidd, one of the most infamous pirates. It’s said he buried loads of his treasure before the law caught up with him, and people have been looking for it ever since. But every now and then the ghosts of his crew come ashore and chase would-be treasure-hunters away.”
I digested this for a minute or two. “So you’re saying that what Charlie saw was real and that it was ghosts that took his parents?”
“I’m just saying it could be,” answered Henry cheerfully. “That explanation’s a lot more fun than modern pirates.”
I wasn’t sure I’d call either option fun. I rolled my eyes and asked, “So how do we start looking for them? I mean, the Caribbean isn’t exactly small.”
Henry looked thoughtful. “To be honest, Dolf, I’m not sure. I guess we’ll start with this Captain Nathan Trueblood and the Spinnaker and see where that takes us.”