As Eli and I stroked in alongside the Diamond, I counted a dozen soldiers with long-muskets crowding the weather-deck, some standing at ease or lounging at the rail, smoking. Near the fore-deck sat Gaspar, Jan and the one-armed Hap, downcast, prisoners again.
As we hauled ourselves dispiritedly over the rail, a voice barked, ‘Arrest these men.’
The rig of tricorn hat, blue serge jacket-coat and fastened weskit, with a brace of pistols at the belt, was unmistakable, even without the newly-deformed jawline. Captain Gamble came down from the quarter, polished calf-boots clicking on the boards and cutlass drawn. I was instantly grabbed by two burly marines, while two more manhandled Eli away.
‘Gamble,’ said Vice-Admiral Pitchbert stepping forward, ‘you’re making things worse. Did I not explicitly order you to remain aboard the Bounteous? Consider yourself on a charge of insubordination.’
The captain bowed insolently. ‘For rescuing an admiral from the hands of a vicious and determined band of pirates? For that matter, my lieutenants shall swear no such command was given and my scribe Botterel can show there were no written orders.’ He adopted a conspiratorial smile and lowered his voice. ‘Do not forget that I have removed and placed into my own safe keeping those dubiously legal pardons of yours, vice-admiral.’
Pitchbert turned to me and grasped my wrist. ‘The appendix, Loftus. Where is it? For God’s sake, give it up. I’ll do new pardons.’
‘No marines, vice-admiral,’ I said. ‘Dammit, you’ve broken our agreement.’
‘Swearing at an officer, Loftus,’ said Gamble, pointing with his blade. ‘I shall add that to the schedule of charges on your head. And since it occurred aboard a Navy commissioned vessel,’ he smirked, ‘for the Diamond is again such, so I shall deliver verdict and punishment the moment we have got back aboard the Bounteous, without waiting for any Admiralty Court.’
‘Loftus, what about your side of the bargain?’ protested Pitchbert.
Gamble snorted. ‘If I may interject, sir, there’s no more bargaining.’ He bent towards me, so close that every livid scar, all the hills and dales of the damage Eli had inflicted with his forehead, showed up in tumescent relief. ‘And you, Loftus, are going on the winding rack before you hang.’
I looked at Pitchbert, but he remained silent, deflated.
Gamble waved his arm in a triumphant sweep along the shoreline. ‘The near terrain looks adequate for a plantation and I intend to disembark a marine force to lay claim in Her Glorious Majesty’s name. I shall declare this land for the Queen of England and fly the flag over it preparatory to bringing in good church-going settlers. It’ll read rather well in my reports, do you not agree?’ He straightened and gazed over the rail. ‘Vice-admiral, I have ordered the Bounteous to close so we can proceed without delay.’
The vice-admiral and I looked round together. There was the great warship, reaching steadily along with topsails set and drawing, progressing on her stately way. Just then the breeze faltered and the canvas flapped limply as though she were borne along more by current than wind. In these pools and shallows, if Spatchears had been right, the spring tides would be running stronger than they had for a century, or perhaps ten centuries.
‘Gamble,’ said the vice-admiral, eyeing the warship’s course, ‘the way in is narrow.’
The captain gave a confident laugh. ‘You have been sorely misled, sir. Why, I saw for myself when we brought the Charity in, a fifty gunner could pass through that channel.’
Caring nothing for the Navy’s arguments and sick to my guts, I turned away and gazed over the rail to where the sea shone with bright hues and sunlight danced mockingly on the ripples. Almost in sympathy with the foreboding in my heart, the sun faded behind a passing cloud and a breath of wind fluked across the anchorage, rocking the schooner, shifting her gently in the dying breeze. Despairing, I dropped my forehead on to the rail. By now, it was clear my plan was in ruins. Perhaps it never could have succeeded, for Spatchears must be insane after all, the tables a nonsense, his heralded prediction nothing but a fantasy.
Gamble bore on. ‘Loftus, I have ordered the bosun reeve a good new manila rope on the rack’s winding drum,’ he said, ‘to reduce the influence of stretch, do you see, and impart the best mechanical advantage.’
Staring into the captain’s bland, complacent features, I saw a man animated more than anything by the cruelties his Naval authority allowed him to exercise. Contempt and hatred welled inside me. He stood not a yard off, his cocky head framed against the purple of the sky in the distance beyond the Diamond’s quarter, the livid injuries and blood-dried weals across his nose and mouth highlighted by the cloud-obscured sun’s slanting shades. The mauve light glowed so that each ridge and furrow of the scars, even the very pimples of his nose, cast a minute shadow and stood out in prominence. Still his voice droned on, lifeless and dull, mocking all my hopes. Struggling against the beefy marines holding me, I sought to move towards him, with only murder in mind.
But wait. Slanting light? A purple hue on the far horizon? I looked again. The rays striking Gamble’s crooked face seem angled and diffuse. The glare of day was diminishing. The bright green coco palms along the shore, the white strand, the opalescent blues of the clear pool we were anchored in — all the colours of land and sea alike were fading. The sunlight shaded darker by the minute. Surely this shadow was caused by no passing cloud? I lifted my gaze. In the deepening blue above, there was not a single billow to be seen.
The time, I thought, my heart pumping — what time is it now? Well past the predicted hour, nearly half a glass after local noon, long beyond Spatchears’ prediction.
Gamble continued to observe the Bounteous’s approach, prating on about the new lands he would name for the Sovereign Queen. But Pitchbert’s gaze was directed skyward, mouth open, lips parted in surprise. In the waist, the other marines began to speak in puzzled murmurs, whispering to each other. One of them cast his eyes heavenwards, another clasped his hands in prayer. A third dropped his musket with a clatter. At the sound of the fallen weapon, Gamble whirled on the soldier.
‘Retrieve your weapon, that man,’ he snapped.
The marine ignored him, head tilted, mouth agape.
As always in these latitudes, near the top of its daily arc, the sun stood in the noon sky directly above an observer. Craning my neck in fascination, I saw the oddest thing, a spectacle to remain fixed in my mind for ever. Until my last breath, I shall not forget the vision that presented itself that noonday by the coast of Cuba.
Although still too bright to view directly, the great fiery sun was being vanquished, overcome by degrees. A growing black hemisphere had taken a giant’s bite from it. All around, the canopy dimmed, losing its brilliance just as though the Tropick dusk had fallen suddenly upon the Earth. But this was different. The colours were not those of manjoes and blood, as at many a sunset hereabouts, nor did the clouds display their common pink and silver twilight pattern of a mackerel’s back. The shapes and hues were far from those of evening, let alone of noontime. Instead, the sky was darkly tinged like the guava juice we had drunk with the natives at Tranquil Inlet. No clouds were anywhere to be seen, for even the tradewind cotton-balls had disappeared. All the time, the sun — despite being so near its zenith height — was fading as the black half-circle advanced across its face.
It dimmed further. As one man the marines fell on their knees, some chanting prayers and working rosaries with fevered fingers, others jabbering incoherently. Gamble strode forward shouting for them pick up their muskets and stand to attention. They utterly disregarded him.
By now the sun had shrunk to a quarter circle, a mere crescent. The air chilled and I shivered. A breeze sprang up, ruffling my hair as if it had come vertically, raining a wind down from above. From the darkening sky, sudden vicious gusts swept the decks, trembling the belay pins in their rack and rattling loose blocks. The Diamond, unsettled like a nervous mare, swung on her anchor this way and that. All at once the gusts strengthened and torments of wind punched in from every direction. The schooner’s bows sheered, snatching viciously at her cable.
Shouts went up from over the water, reaching us above the buffeting wind.
‘She’s dragging!’ came a cry of alarm.
Across the reef-encircled pool, the Charity’s shadowy form was still visible in the weakening light. She had twisted out the flukes and sprung her anchor. In the grip of an astronomickally-strengthened current, she dragged helplessly across the pool towards the reefs. Her windlass clanked as more cable was run out but it failed to halt her progress.
The light began to wax and wane as if screens were being passed in front of the source. The sun shrank to nothing more than a jewel of light, flashing its single facet, reduced by the second. Now the sky was black all over. Absurdly, like a cowering God-fearer, I imagined the Devil himself riding above, his huge cape enveloping the source of light and plunging the earth into a perpetual, frigid darkness.
A terrible, inhuman moan rose up right behind. The two marines still pinning my arms were struck rigid. From the hatchway there emerged into the gloom an emaciated figure, bony hands waving, the skull-like face illuminated in the last ghostly glows of the wounded, dying sun. The apparition paused, its enraptured countenance lifted to the sky. Then the spectre began its chant.
‘O Deus ex machina! O declinations and conjunctions! Eight and seven and six and three!’
The warbling voice, rising in pitch to reach an inhuman wail, trembling and rattling in his mucous-ridden throat, gripped the entire complement of soldiers in spellbinding fear.
‘My integers, O my logarithms! Fours and sixes and nines and ones!’
The marines capitulated. They cast themselves down on the deck-boards, begging for absolution and deliverance from Hell, until the babble of their prayers and religious incantations became a cacophony of clashing cries and shouts for mercy. Releasing their grip, my captors too prostrated themselves.
The Observator’s rantings fell to a hoarse, painfully drawn whisper.
‘Signs and symbols, equations and vectors, Dea gratias,’ he breathed, his head waving from side to side. ‘Plus twenty four, minus twenty four — forty eight’s the difference.’
Though free, I stood immobile, unable to act. Never had I dreamt the event would be like this. I had foreseen, coldly and clearly from the dry tabulations and calculations and columns of figures, that there came simply a period of darkness followed by a re-illumination of the day. And the unexpected night had been my plan, our chance to dash off in the Diamond, leaving the Charity blind and trapped amongst the reefs while we out-pointed the lumbering warships and got away. I had foreseen nothing of the transfixing nature of the event itself. Now, gripped by its grandeur and its terror alike, my mind defied the common sense that urged me to take advantage and press on. Instead, I reeled with the others, in thrall to the forces of Deity and Nature altering the Universe, upsetting the balance of everything. The stage on which we stood was tilting. We are angling towards the abyss, I thought, and reaching the end of the world.
Gamble’s strangulated voice brought me back to my senses. He was yelling at the marines.
‘Get up, you fools! It’s only an eclipse of the sun.’
Far from rising at their captain’s command, they threw themselves flatter before the mighty unknowable forces of their God, kissing the decks and calling for a priest, or an absolution, or their mothers.
Suddenly a pitch black shade raced in from the sea, so fast that in an instant its shroud was upon us and past. The edge of the Moon’s sphere had covered the last golden shard of the sun, extinguishing it altogether. In that second, we were plunged into total night, cast completely under the shadow of the Moon.
The winds fell quiet. The marines quitted their wailing. Even Spatchears stopped babbling. In the stillness, utter silence reigned. I could not see six inches in front of my face, so total was the blackness.
Now the sun was quite gone from the sky, save for a smoky haze around where it once had beamed unchallenged. Overhead, the jet black canopy was littered with brilliant, twinkling stars. The planets shone out clear — Venus and Jupiter, masters of the night sky, suspended insouciant as ever, as though nothing was untoward.
But this was no ordinary time. A shrill, bubbling sound arose, like a busy little burn high on the moors. Ashore, though the animals and birds had gone to sleep or rest believing it to be night, in the darkness, insects awoke. The cucarachas began to sing and the moskeets to whine. The tree-frogs too, those tiny creatures that chirrup loud enough to wake the dead, added their voices. Millions of crawling, nocturnal creatures, tens upon tens of millions, trilling in unison — the sound enlarging suddenly like a wick turned up on a lamp — had embarked on their night-time chorus.
The eclipse has come late, I found myself thinking. At once, the absurdity of such a notion struck home, for the event could not be late, only the prediction wrong. Twenty four minutes before noon, Spatchears had promised, yet it had come after the sun passed its noon meridian. Exactly twenty four minutes after. Then I remembered the eclipse’s duration. It would last, so the Observator had insisted, six and one half minutes. If he was right, then I had only this brief time in which to act before the light returned. I stamped my feet on the deck-boards. The wood felt solid. I reached out and touched the rail. It was smooth, still warm from the day’s heat. Six and one half minutes. In the pitch darkness, surrounded by the eerie sounds of night, I had to act.
Without a sound, I fell on the startled Pitchbert, took hold of his weskit and flung him bodily against Captain Gamble. Both men lashed out in the dark, cursing, neither realising in the gloom who the other was. Snatching up the soldiers’ fallen muskets, I herded the two big marines forward into the waist. They stumbled blindly, yet I knew every inch of these boards — every belay, every stow and step and rail. I moved surefootedly in their wake, issuing terse commands to their companions.
‘Kick your muskets towards my voice,’ I ordered. In the grip of superstition and fear, they complied at once and I cleared the weapons safely to one side.
‘Up, fellows,’ I said, encouraging them to the rail with a musket stock. ‘Over the side and into your launch.’
If their faces had been visible in that pitch of night, they must have been pale with fear. Groping for the boarding rope, they hauled themselves up on to the rail, still praying and calling for salvation, and fell down unsighted into their boat. Moments later, I saw the glowing phosphorescent splash of the blades as the launch thrashed away, circling, trying to make towards the sounds of confused hue and cry issuing from the troubled Charity.
‘Eli, make sail! Boys, get the anchor!’ I shouted.
Like me they had been overtaken by the magnitude and strangeness of the spectacle, quite forgetting my warnings that when a great darkness came, then was the time to act. Now at the sound of my voice they responded, moving quickly and noiselessly about the decks. On the quarter Captain Gamble barked nervously at his men, but they were gone. Keep talking, Percy, I breathed, padding silently back bearing a long-musket. Pointless orders and futile curses came in a stream from his deformed lips, allowing me to home in on him. The gun was a mere barrel’s length from his chest when I sprang back the lock with a loud click.
‘Cast down all your weapons, captain,’ I told him, prodding with the muzzle. When his pistol and cutlass clattered to the deck-boards, I said, ‘Now jump overboard.’
I heard his foot mount the rail. Then he hesitated. Beneath my finger, the trigger moved infinitesimally. Did he know he was within the twitch of a muscle of losing his life? I checked myself. The spring was strong and it held.
‘Go,’ I ordered. ‘Over the side with you.’
There was a grunt as he climbed over. Was it my imagination or did he truly pinch his scab-encrusted nostrils fussily between two fingers before descending feet first into the black water below? There was a splash and a greenish glow of foam, the only source of light in the whole world under the eclipse’s shadow. Then he stroked away in the direction of the commotion from the Charity.
Right forward, the Diamond’s windlass clanked busily as the anchor came up, fathom by fathom. I started for the waist, intent on making sail, and ran into something soft and pulpy. It was Pitchbert’s sweating form. He was down on his knees, in a trance, hands clasped together as if in prayer.
‘You too, vice-admiral — time to go,’ I told him, with the musket’s muzzle at his arse.
‘It’s beautiful — gorgeous,’ he murmured, rising and groping for the rail. ‘What a wonderful work.’
‘Just the Moon covering the sun,’ I said, prodding him with the long-musket.
‘How did you do it, Loftus?’ he said. ‘Get under the path so exactly?’
‘The tables. The appendix, as you call it. Now, over the side.’
‘O, glorious works!’ His voice was close and breathy. ‘Don’t you see, man? We can return in triumph to London. You’ll get a free pardon, I’ll be made earl or duke. We can bargain still.’
‘I shan’t bargain with you again, not for all the riches on God’s Earth.’
‘But it was Gamble’s fault. The marines were his idea.’
‘Do you think it matters to me? Into the sea you go.’
‘I can’t swim!’
‘Dogs can. Think of them and you’ll work out the method.’ Dropping the musket, I grabbed his ankles and swung his legs up. With a shriek, he pivoted, clawing at the rail, arms waving. When I shoved, he lost balance and disappeared. Half a second later, there came a satisfying splash followed by a pitiful cry and a gurgle. But he found the way to swim.
It was still inky black. I made my way into the waist and joined Eli to help hoist up sail. The windlass clanked and groaned with the boys’ efforts until Gaspar’s voice came through the thickness of the gloom, ‘Anchor cable up and down, captain.’
The breath of a breeze brushed my face and the Diamond’s bows swung through a great arc. The sails flapped and bellied, then filled. Grabbing the tiller-bar, I sensed the waters passing over the rudder blade. The helm answered and she pointed her head downwind. The current was strong, but running which way? Then I realised the compass lamp was unlit. Dammit, in the darkness, how could I get my bearings?
I faltered. Of a sudden, a field of light appeared in the far distance. The six and a half minutes had passed. Where earlier, the near edge of the Moon’s shadow had raced across the sea and plunged us into that final, extinguishing blackness, now the cast of its far limb came flying across the leagues as if they were mere fathoms. It flashed overhead at an unimaginable rate and at once the darkness lifted. The sun showed a thin circle of fire with — at the top limb — a sparkling blaze of flame for all the world like the diamond ring on a queen’s finger.
The half-light gave enough to get a bearing on the land. With renewed force, the wind returned, gusting this way and that, boxing about and sending the compass card swinging wildly. Uncertainly, the Diamond gathered way. But where was the escape channel? A touch came at my arm and there was Spatchears, his face shining like a schoolboy’s.
‘Four six eight and ten! O, my predictions were right,’ he trilled.
‘Your predictions were only half right, Observator Spatchears,’ I said, brushing him aside to get a clear view. The event had surely tipped him over the edge and back into lunacy.
He held out a paper, his eyes bright and alert. ‘No more numbers, not even eleven fifteen twenty two or forty nine — just lines. Your vade mecum.’
It was my pilot’s sketch. Lord, I thought, gratefully snatching it up, some vestige of sanity must remain in the old man’s mind.
A chorus of shouts and alarms rose up on our larboard side. In the growing light, we saw the Charity, borne along in the grip of current and wind, falling back with her anchor bouncing uselessly along the bottom. She stopped dead and canted over a few degrees. Men ran to the side rails, pointing down in alarm.
‘She’s hard aground!’ came the cry.
The Charity heeled further, settling on the reef’s edge, her fate fixed. There came a hollow booming sound as she loosed off a piece. It was a wild shot from a figure bent over the forward swivels, fury getting the better of his aim. With his men beyond orders, Captain Gamble had acted alone, and futilely.
Across to our steerboard side, with the sun strengthening by the minute, a morning twilight illuminated the greenish waters of the coral reefs. Beyond I saw a band of blue. Glancing from the plan to the compass and back, I reckoned it must be the deep water channel.
‘Harden sheets,’ I called, pushing the tiller-bar to larboard. Our bows swung over.
I ordered Jan up the ratlines to spy out the way from the vantage of height and give the course to steer. Full daylight was almost restored and the blue-black smear of the channel became clearer by the minute.
‘Look, look — the Bounteous!’ called Jan, pointing.
There was the warship, revealed once more in the daylight, nearly a league away at the edge of the reef field. I needed no magnifying tube to tell me the story. She was stopped in the water, her topsails aback.
‘By all the sinners,’ cried Eli Savary, ‘she’s stuck faster than a whore on a jack-tar!’
Distantly astern of her was the Forbearance, keeping well off the shoals, unlike her sister warship, but in the wind and current she had sagged far to leeward and would need half a day’s sail just to draw level. The Diamond would be over the horizon in an hour.
From the Charity, I heard Gamble bawl at his men to engage in their gunnery work, but the Navy schooner had settled on the edge of a steep coral bank, her guns one side pointing high in the air and, on the other, into the water. As we swiftly approached to pass her by and run through the channel, there were voices raised in argument.
‘You disobeyed my orders.’ It was the vice-admiral. ‘You endangered Her Majesty’s ships for no good purpose.’
‘On the contrary,’ came Gamble’s petulant reply, ‘it is you who acted without good reason — for no prize, no land claim, no war purpose, merely this diverting appendix.’
‘The appendix is worth more than any dam’ prize, you oaf!’
‘You’ll have little chance of convincing the Court-martial of that. Not when they see my evidence of your bargaining with a common pirate and wanted criminal.’
‘You’re on a charge, Gamble,’ spluttered Pitchbert. ‘Good God, you’ve put two Navy vessels hard aground in as many minutes.’
‘As is my right, I shall be bringing counter charges, vice-admiral,’ was the rejoinder, ‘based on my detailed reports covering all the mishaps.’
Their argument raged on. We swept past all but unnoticed as the Navy — disabled, reef-bound, incapable of fighting — disputed and contested amongst themselves. Meanwhile, skimming the corals, consulting my sketch of the reef field, I short-tacked the Diamond back and forth along the narrow channel until at last it broadened. Beyond lay the open sea.
‘We’re bearing off,’ I called, pushing the tiller over. ‘Ease sheets.’
The compass needle swung. With every passing second, the tradewind breeze reasserted itself, strengthening and carrying the schooner clear. The sun shone so strong and clear it was nigh impossible to believe that a quarter of an hour before we had been benighted by the totality of an eclipse. The day was as bright as an ordinary Tropick noon.
Or even, I smiled, twenty four minutes either side of it.
‘All is lost — lost,’ muttered Noah Spatchears, huffing and gasping after a prolonged coughing bout. ‘I cannot go to England.’
I glanced around at my fellows’ glum faces. The Diamond was anchored in a river mouth along the deserted Florida shore, a swampy disease-ridden land of no imaginable colonial or commercial value whatsoever, giving it the advantage of being free of Spanish and English patrols. With Pitchbert’s pardons lost to us, my plan had been to meet the Charlestown packet off the Carolina shore, put the Observator aboard and send him safe to London with the volume and the code. We had completed more than half the long voyage when the astronomer unexpectedly confessed he had discovered a ‘terrible flaw’. So we had all — Eli, Gaspar, Jan, the one-armed Hap and myself — packed into the cramped day-cabin to hear him out.
‘But you must have remembered the code right,’ I insisted, waving the sheaf of parchments under his nose. ‘Or almost right. Your prediction was out only by forty eight minutes — twenty four the wrong side of the zenith.’
‘Yes indeed,’ he said quietly, ‘all but good enough for the transit.’
‘And not for the Navigation?’ I said, remembering our discussion.
Old Noah’s sunken countenance crumpled into a parody of dementia. ‘O the code’s inversed, the Universe reversed! O dear, O dear, festina lente. Too much haste and discombobulation.’
‘Perhaps just a figure or two missing from the code was enough to reverse the timing?’ I suggested hopefully. Earlier, I had wondered if the two pages torn from the volume itself during our Martinique encounter could be to blame, but he had assured me they were not.
‘O nooo-ooooo, mea culpa,’ he puffed, ‘it’s wrong, wrong, wrong!’
I laid a hand on his wrist. ‘What? What is wrong with the code?’
‘Confused, O so confused, my poor head. The code’s not wrong.’ Again, he wore the fearful, haunted look of insanity. ‘The drawers — stealing the book,’ he breathed, shaking his head. ‘In my haste, when I broke into Sir Thomas’s cabin, I must have laid hands on the wrong set of tables.’
‘What the Devil do you mean, the wrong set of tables!’ I shouted, falling back in despair. Every time the old lunatick spoke, it seemed, there dropped from his lips some new and destructive revelation. Trying to calm myself, I said carefully, ‘The tables are the same. What difference does it make which set you stole? You had two copies of the tables made by the scribe at Greenwich and they were both flawed by similar means, you said.’
‘They were not exact copies.’ He hesitated. ‘They were flawed by similar means, but by different measures. O dear, yes, indeed, each copy of the tables had its own set of errors. Thus, there is not one version of the tables, but two, and likewise of the codes.’
‘Two codes for two tables?’ I said, not wanting to believe it.
‘Yes, but only one for each.’
My head spun. ‘You mean, they must match?’
Spatchears nodded vigorously.
‘Two codes, two tables, and they must match or the tables cannot work,’ I repeated dumbly. ‘And at this late stage, you discover that we possess the wrong tables for your remembered code?’
Noah Spatchears groaned and put his head in his hands. ‘Forgot my own symbols — misread the signs.’
‘You put signs or symbols in the tables to distinguish the one from the other?’
‘Indeed, but I fear they were too simple, so I forgot which was which. O, if only I had devised something more complicated and systematick.’
‘So you committed to memory an enormously arcane code,’ I said with growing incredulity, ‘and then could not keep hold of a few simple symbols?’
‘My mind whirls like the heavens. All at sea, the stars mixed up. The heavens plagued with stars! The Demons of the sky! The Protestants, the bankers —’
‘Hush, sir, calm yourself.’ His rambling interfered with my ability to think. A new notion had struck me. I was thinking of Commodore Filligrew, imagining him detailing a Navigator to work out sights using his tables and code, then encountering the same persistent, frustrating flaws I had found.
‘So this explains the great mystery,’ I said at last, ‘why Filligrew’s been chasing us. Not to stop our tables getting to London first, but because like us he’s realised his tables and code don’t pair up.’
‘Well, if you say so,’ said Eli, shaking his head and reaching for his baccy pouch. ‘It’s harder to make sense of than using a jellyfish to caulk a seam.’
The Dutch boy got the point. ‘So he’s got to get your tables, sir, to make the match?’
‘Exactly so, Gaspar. It’s nothing to do with any damm’d so-called appendix — that’s some game of his own making. What he wants is our tables. Or indeed, our code.’
Eli paused in stuffing the bowl of his clay. ‘Aye, well that’s simple enough,’ he said, ‘even for my poor old head.’
I barely heard him. ‘And by the same token, my good fellows, we want to barter his tables for ours. Or his code for ours — either way.’
I stood up and paced awkwardly round the cramped cabin. It seemed so easy to say — exchange the tables or code — and so inconceivable to do. Yet something must be done, for it was no longer my pardon alone at stake. The Navy’s ire would be sorely inflamed by the eclipse fiasco and every man aboard the Diamond held liable. Now we all faced being hunted down like animals for the rest of our lives, every one of us. There had to be a way of saving these loyal fellows from that fate.
Noah Spatchears, dabbing at his mouth with a disgusting cloth, leant forward conspiratorially.
‘O yes, captain, you must seize the chance. And when you retrieve the other tables,’ he said, pointing a knuckly old finger at me and smiling as if addressing a schoolboy, ‘you shall know them by the secret symbols marked on every page. And I have now remembered them all, every one!’
I shot him a fierce look. ‘Retrieve Filligrew’s tables? You make it sound an easy matter, Observator. What do you imagine, that our little schooner should go chasing after that mighty flota and ask for them back?’
Eli held a match poised above the striker. ‘That’s about as much sense,’ he said, ‘as a jack-tar swimming after the sharks who’ve taken his tunny fish.’
He struck the match and the flame hissed, lighting his weather-beaten face. But in its flaring glow, his canny old eye gleamed.