“How did you come to be in the garden?” he asked.

“We was waiting for you to go home, but you came out first.”

If they had been intending—

“Stand back!” yelled Johnson.

He leaped backwards with astonishing agility for his bulk, bracing himself, knees bent, body tense, on guard with the sword. Hornblower looked round in astonishment, in time to see Spendlove relax; he had been poising himself for a spring. With that sword in his hand and its point against Johnson’s throat, the position would have been reversed. Some of the others came running up at the cry; one of them had a staff in his hand—a headless pike stave apparently—and thrust it cruelly into Spendlove’s face. Spendlove staggered back, and the staff was whirled up to strike him down. Hornblower leaped in front of him.

“No!” he yelled, and they all stood looking at each other, the drama of the situation ebbing away. Then one of the men came sidling towards Hornblower, cutlass in hand.

“Cut off his ear?” he asked over his shoulder to Johnson.

“No. Not yet. Sit down, you two.” When they hesitated Johnson’s voice rose to a roar. “Sit down!”

Under the menace of the cutlass there was nothing to do but sit down, and they were helpless.

“You write that letter?” asked Johnson.

“Wait a little,” said Hornblower wearily; he could think of nothing else to say in that situation. He was playing for time, hopelessly, like a child at bedtime confronted by stern guardians.

“Let’s have some breakfast,” said Spendlove.

At the far end of the shelf a small fire had been lighted, its smoke clinging in the still dawn in a thin thread to the sloping overhang of the cliff. An iron pot hung from a chain attached to a tripod over the fire, and two women were crouching over it attending to it. Packed against the back wall of the shelf were chests and kegs and barrels. Muskets were ranged in a rack. It occurred to Hornblower that he was in the situation common in popular romances; he was in the pirates’ lair. Perhaps those chests contained untold treasures of pearls and gold. Pirates, like any other seafarers, needed a land base, and these pirates had established one here instead of on some lonely cay. His brig Clement had cleaned out one of those last year.

“You write that letter, Lord,” said Johnson. He poked at Hornblower’s breast with the sword, and the point pierced the thin shirtfront to prick him over the breastbone.

“What is it you want?” asked Hornblower.

“A pardon. With a seal.”

Hornblower studied the swarthy features in front of him. The jig was up for piracy in the Caribbean, he knew. American ships-of-war in the north, French ships-of-war working from the Lesser Antilles, and his own busy squadron based on Jamaica had made the business both unprofitable and dangerous. And this particular band of pirates, the remains of the Harkness gang, were in a more precarious position than any, with the loss of their ship, and with their escape to sea cut off by his precautions. It had been a bold plan, and well executed, to save their necks by kidnapping him. Presumably the plan had been made and executed by this rather stupid-seeming fellow, almost bewildered in appearance, before him. Appearances might be deceitful, or else the desperate need of the situation had stimulated that dull mind into unusual activity.

“You hear me?” said Johnson, offering another prick with the sword, and breaking in upon Hornblower’s train of thought.

“Say you will, My Lord,” muttered Spendlove close to Hornblower’s ear. “Gain time.”

Johnson turned on him, sword pointed at his face.

“Shut that mouth,” he said. Another idea occurred to him, and he glanced round at Hornblower. “You write. Or I prick his eye.”

“I’ll write,” said Hornblower.

Now he sat with the volume of Waverley open at the flyleaf, and the stub of pencil in his hand, while Johnson withdrew for a couple of paces, presumably to allow free play for inspiration. What was he to write? ‘Dear Sir Augustus’? ‘Your Excellency’? That was better. ‘I am held to ransom here along with Spendlove by the survivors of the Harkness gang. Perhaps the bearer of this will explain the conditions. They demand a free pardon in exchange for—’ Hornblower held the pencil poised over the paper debating the next words ‘Our lives’? He shook his head to himself and wrote ‘our freedom.’ He wanted no melodrama. ‘Your Excellency will, of course, be a better judge of the situation than I am. Your ob’d’t servant.’ Hornblower hesitated again, and then he dashed off the ‘Hornblower’ of his signature.

“There you are,” he said, holding out the volume to Johnson, who took it and looked at it curiously, and turned back to the group of a dozen or so of his followers who had been squatting on the ground behind him silently watching the proceedings.

They peered at the writing over Johnson’s shoulder; others came to look as well, and they fell into a chattering debate.

“Not one of them can read, My Lord,” commented Spendlove.

“So it appears.”

The pirates were looking from the writing over to their prisoners and back again; the argument grew more intense. Johnson seemed to be expostulating, or exhorting, and some of the men he addressed drew back shaking their heads.

“It’s a question of who shall carry that note to Kingston,” said Hornblower. “Who shall beard the lion.”

“That fellow has no command over his men,” commented Spendlove. “Harkness would have shot a couple of them by now.”

Johnson returned to them, pointing a dark, stubby finger at the writing.

“What you say here?” he asked.

Hornblower read the note aloud; it did not matter whether he spoke the truth or not, seeing they had no way of knowing. Johnson stared at him, studying his face; Johnson’s own face betrayed more of the bewilderment Hornblower had noticed before. The pirate was facing a situation too complex for him; he was trying to carry out a plan which he had not thought out in all its details beforehand. No one of the pirates was willing to venture into the grip of justice bearing a message of unknown content. Nor, for that matter, would the pirates trust one of their number to go off on such a mission; he might well desert, throwing away the precious message, to try and make his escape on his own. The poor, ragged, shiftless devils and their slatternly women were in a quandary, with no master mind to find a way out for them. Hornblower could have laughed at their predicament, and almost did, until he thought of what this unstable mob could do in a fit of passion to the prisoners in their power. The debate went on furiously, with a solution apparently no nearer.

“Do you think we could get to the ladder, My Lord?” asked Spendlove, and then answered his own question. “No. They’d catch us before we could get away. A pity.”

“We can bear the possibility in mind,” said Hornblower.

One of the women cooking over the fire called out at this moment in a loud, raucous voice, interrupting the debate. Food was being ladled out into wooden bowls. A young mulatto woman, hardly more than a child, in a ragged gown that had once been magnificent, brought a bowl over to them—one bowl, no spoon or fork. They stared at each other, unable to keep from smiling. Then Spendlove produced a penknife from his breeches pocket, and tendered it to his superior after opening it.

“Perhaps it may serve, My Lord,” he said, apologetically, adding, after a glance at the contents of the bowl, “not such a good meal as the supper we missed at the Houghs’s, My Lord.”

Boiled yams and a trifle of boiled salt pork, the former presumably stolen from some slave garden and the latter from one of the hogsheads stored here on the cliff. They ate with difficulty, Hornblower insisting on their using the penknife turn about, juggling with the hot food for which both of them discovered a raging appetite. The pirates and the women were mostly squatting on their heels as they ate. After their first mouthfuls they were beginning to argue again over the use to be made of their prisoners.