Chapter Ten

SAINT-DOMINGUE, 1724: PROSERPINA

They called her Proserpina. Tall and straight, she was, with mahogany skin, and lustrous eyes as deep and rich as Spanish chocolate. My crew and I shared a taste for vengeance as well as profit, and I ran them hard aboard the Jolie Rouge. But we’d run afoul of a frigate off Saint-Dómingue; laden with plunder, we’d barely limped away with our lives. One of my men was native to the place and knew of a hidden bay where we could shelter and careen the ship. I’d taken a wound in the thigh that would not heal, dripping pus and bringing on bouts of fever, so they took me to Proserpina.

It was whispered that she knew voudon, that she consorted with spirits of the dead, jumbies and demons, a queen of the underworld indeed. But it made little difference to me. For days I scarce knew where I was, beyond a straw pallet covered in some indigo stuff where I lay writhing. In more lucid moments, I perceived a shadowy chamber of earth and straw, low mud walls open to the breezes under a high roof of thatch. My pallet lay in one corner, near a table littered with baskets and hollowed-out gourds filled with powders, buds and seeds, small clay pots sealed with moss, bunches of dried grasses and herbs strung upside down across the open space, all of it reeking of spice and ferment, the sweet-sour perfume of dying things.

In the opposite corner, Proserpina kept her private altar of piled stones, a shallow basin on the bottom, little niches above for candles, festooned with flowers and beads, a gourd rattle, feathers, small bleached bones. Once or twice, woken in the night by a tang of smoke in the little hut, I heard the witch chuckling at her altar, conversing softly in her motley island patois with unseen visitors whose formless voices rasped like the dust of centuries. One night, the sweet scent of jasmine crept into my dreams. “Bienvenu, Mama Zwonde,” I heard the witch murmur. “Your daughter greets you from the living time.”

My fever had broken at last, but my thigh was yet too tender to bear me up. I awoke one sun-glazed afternoon to see some yellowish thing moving across the shadows above my pallet. Peering closer, I saw it was a spider, fair the size and color of a gold doubloon, creeping along an invisible line. I lashed out with a cry and a wave of my hand, but the thing scuttled up out of my reach.

“No, no, no, Capitaine,” Proserpina scolded me softly from where she stood at her table, fiddling with her pots and balms. Turning my head to look at her, I noticed a large spider’s web glowing faintly gold in the sunlight in the opening above her table, between the edge of the roof thatch and the top of the wall. With a small coaxing sound, Proserpina raised a hand above her head.

“Come, Sister,” she murmured, tugging gently with one finger on a thread I could not see. The spider hastened along it over my head, all the way back to where the witch was waiting, and crawled onto her hand with long, probing, tiger-striped legs. My own flesh prickled with dread, but Proserpina turned to gently place the creature on a broken upper spoke of its web, where it set at once to spinning and weaving.

“Your pet,” I said gruffly, to cover my unease.

The witch smiled faintly, returning to her pots. “We have an understanding. She gives me what I need.”

I glanced again at the shimmering halo of web behind her.

“It spins gold,” I whispered.

With a low chuckle, Proserpina turned again to the web. At an outer edge of its intricate pattern, some distance below where the spinner squatted now at its own task, Proserpina’s deft fingers pulled loose several strands and eased them out, scarcely disturbing the rest of the orb. She brought the oozy stuff and one of her pots, and a little clamshell dish over to me, and sat on the floor beside my pallet. With a practiced hand, she shifted aside the hem of my shirt and spread something warm and fragrant from her little pot over my wound. After working the sticky bit of webbing with her fingertips, this too she began to stretch across the gash in my leg, where it clung of its own accord without bandage or splint, as light as down against my skin. A small contented groan escaped me. I had no need for pretense with the witch; she had seen me raving with fever, weeping in shame. I could be myself with her as I never dared among my men.

“Gold,” Proserpina clucked. “This far more useful. It will knit you up like a second skin, Capitaine. So many come to me with stings, scrapes, cutting wounds. My sister, she is very busy.”

Again, I peered up under the palm-thatch roof, where the yellow creature the witch called her sister plied her web. “Surely there are other spiders.”

“Not like this one. She is the best. She came to us so long ago, in the sail of a broke-up ship our wrackers find out in the shoals. The only one of her kind ever seen on this island.” Proserpina paused in her work to gaze up at the industrious thing. “I was not even born then,” she murmured. “This was my grandmere’s house.”

I swallowed a grin that this native woman, for all her skills, could be so credulous. “It cannot be the same spider,” I pointed out.

She shifted her gaze back to me, her expression amused and indulgent. “Of course she is. I see to it. Like my mother before me.”

Eerie cold gripped my spine over a fugitive memory, fearful villagers mumbling among themselves. The living dead. “Zombie?” I whispered.

“La, Capitaine, she is alive as you and me,” Proserpina chuckled. “The loas agree not bear her away to the time beyond until her work here in the living time is done.” The witch gestured upward with one expressive hand. “They lift her out of the current of time for as long as she is useful to me.”

The loas, shadowy beings who interceded in the world between the living and the dead on the witch’s behalf, so the villagers said. I had thought them myth, superstition. But by then I had cause to appreciate Proserpina’s powers, had heard dry, ghostly voices rasping gibberish in that very hut in the dead of night. I glanced again at the superannuated spider busily tending her web. “But—is it not monstrous?” I could not help but ask.

Proserpina gave a careless shrug. “She breathes, she feeds, she spins in the normal way. One day, she will return to the current of time. By this service, her spirit will find honor and peace in the time beyond.”

The witch returned to coaxing her websilk appliance along the length of my wound, her fingertips soft and tender against my skin. Only a bit of the gash was still visible when she lowered her head and pressed warm, full lips to my thigh. All but scuppered in an answering wave of desire, I could only stare as she lifted her head and spit into the clamshell dish, stippling its pale surface with my blood.

“The loas must have something in return,” she said, when she saw my face. “Is a delicate thing, the balance between their world and ours.”

I was not overfond of the notion of my blood in possession of her spirit familiars, if indeed such things were not a fantasy of my own delirium. But Proserpina healed my injury so completely that I didn’t complain. It had been years since anyone had touched me with tenderness for any reason, and the respite I found in that fragrant, ramshackle hut was worth an army of immortal spiders and muttering ghosts.

As I grew stronger, and her ministrations turned more frankly erotic, I was less and less inclined to discourage any of her whims and fancies. She was on intimate terms with my body by then, and she undertook to rouse and pleasure me with the same skill. It was sweet and easy at first. She wanted nothing, and I had nothing to prove to her. Her body and her mercy, even more than her potions and balms, began to heal the misery that had driven my life for so long. Often on those languid island nights, after we had sated each other, I boasted I would compose a rhapsody in her honor, or at least play her something to make her weep with joy.

But my men had had their fill at last of gluttony and drink and idleness, and voted to resume our voyage of terror. Proserpina offered me the protection of her hidden village and the sanctuary of her bed would I but stay with her.

“Give up your roving, Capitaine,” she crooned. “Let me be your world.”

I laughed her off, perhaps too harshly. By now, the men suspected me of weakness for the time I’d spent with her. I had to act boldly to restore myself as leader in their eyes. I knew all too well what mob rule was like, and I dared not let the men see how tempted I was by Proserpina’s invitation, lest they turn on me, on us both. “You deserve better, Pina,” I amended, more gently.

In truth, recovered health and more time spent among the men as they made the Rouge seaworthy once more had rekindled my old bloodlust for revenge against the world. Believing I’d had my fill of tenderness, I reminded myself there were still those at liberty who had not yet tasted my blade nor yielded to my power. I would not be satisfied until the name of Hook was regarded with the same terror as Blackbeard and Morgan along the length and breadth of all the world’s oceans.

I was forty-three years old, and that was all the more life meant to me.

She came to the beach with a basket of fruits for our voyage. When they rowed her aboard, she asked me to play. The men were already testy and sniggering to have her there, waiting to see how much power she yet wielded over me. She seated herself on the bunk in my cabin, the men craning to watch from the doorway, Bill Jukes squatting in the forefront, eyes narrow and appraising in his decorated face. I made a great show of seating myself at my harpsichord, stretching my fingers. I ran up the scales in a lively arpeggio, paused for effect, then commenced, with salacious gusto,

“A ship must have a buntline to haul up her bunt

And a maid must have a youngman to tickle her—”

The men hooted and cheered, but Proserpina stalked off in silence. No word was spoken between us all the way back in the boat, nor any leave taken when she stormed up the beach, back into her jungle.

“You insult me. You insult yourself,” she rebuked me when I went to see her later and collect the rest of my things. “This is not you. You are better than this.”

“I am no better than I should be,” I barked. Could she not see I was trying to protect her?

“How much gold will satisfy you?”

“Gold!” I laughed bitterly. I had seen enough in the mines of Cape Coast to last a lifetime.

“How much blood?” she countered. “How many more must die? How long can you stay angry at the world?”

“The world made me, and now it must reckon with me,” I exclaimed. Bloodrage alone could purge the cruel memories of all I had lost, revenge on the world that had taken it all from me. It was all I had left to believe in.

“You better reckon with yourself! Do you want to be a child all your life?”

Stung in earnest, I barely stopped myself striking her. “It’s my life to live as I damn well please,” I spat back.

“You destroy who you are under the angry scar of what you become,” she said.

I was fair shaking with rage. Who was she to hound me with her tedious expectations? But in fact, I could not bear to see myself as she saw me, a diminished echo of the man I ought to be.

“I see into your future,” she hissed at me, “a violent end without remorse or pity, unloved, unmourned. Dying brings you no peace, your spirit forced to wander without refuge in misery for all that might have been.”

I recoiled in horror that she would curse me so cruelly, she who professed to love me. Gone were all the pretty phrases with which I’d meant to extricate myself; now I longed only to retaliate in kind. My rage needed someone to blame. It was easier than facing the truth about myself. “I can’t expect an ignorant, barefoot female to understand,” I shouted.

“I understand you must go where you belong.” Her voice was low and terse, unmuddied by the emotion in mine, her dark eyes unnerving now in their resolve. “I will give you time. All the time you need. Play well, and think of me.”

But I lurched aside with the bundle of my things, tossed it over her doorsill to the sand below, and clambered down after it.

“Capitaine,” she called after me. “Play for your life.”

Outside, where my men were waiting, I glanced back to see Proserpina in her doorway. “Your spells don’t work on me any more, Witch!” I cried.

Or so I thought.

We sailed with the tide that very evening. At first only small things plagued us—a leaky water cask, a runaway boom, a freak wind that gusted up out of nowhere and carried off a spar. Our lookout sighted warships, devil ships, that seemed to bear down on us out of the mists, then disappeared on the next roll of the sea. We tried to put into trading ports, but found them burned out by raiders or stinking with pestilence. We captured no more prizes, and our supplies ran low. We could not eat the rich plunder stowed in our hold, nor trade it away for supplies at any port. There might have been a mutiny had anyone wanted to captain so unfortunate a ship in my stead. No, that they left to me, and I drove them the harder for it. If the Caribbees were so inhospitable, I vowed, there was plenty of plunder in Africa, and there we would change our luck.

But once we made the Atlantic, we hit a freakish squall. It raged with the fury of a hurricane, blowing us far off course and out to sea. When it finally spat us out, crippled and disoriented, we found ourselves in a dense fog. We could take no bearings. Our lead showed that we were in very deep water, our compass reeled about like a drunken man. We saw neither sun nor stars to steer by, nor the lights of any other vessel or coastal settlement. Nothing penetrated that damn fog. We drifted for days, thirsting, ravenous, hopeless. My men were dying of sickness, or their wounds, or murdering each other over nothing at all. They were the lucky ones.

Then one morning the fog lifted, and a current carried us toward an island of unparalleled beauty. A wide strip of soft, white sandy beach welcomed us, in the natural shelter of a deep bay. The beach was shaded by green foliage, palm groves and ferns and fruit trees, with blue, terraced hills rising majestically behind. At one end of the beach, sheer cliffs rose away to a densely forested plateau that promised game and tinder. Far in the distance at the other end of the island, an elegant green volcanic cone rose into a coronet of pink clouds, above lush tropical jungle. And nowhere was there any sign of habitation—no battery, no warehouse, no ships in the bay. The place was ours alone. We made for the mouth of a pretty little creek protected by windswept arching palms and dropped anchor at long last, certain our torment was finally over.

Of course, it had only just begun.