The Pearl
Vol. 2
To a Far-Off Country
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Scott W. Clark
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Scott W. Clark on Smashwords
Copyright © 2010 Scott W. Clark. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products that may be referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Chapter
1
Suddenly, a shadow leaped at the figure from across the room. There was a blue flash overhead and down. But where there had been a single figure in the shape and form of a man, there was now a larger mass spinning and lurching back and forth across the room.
Above and around the mass the knife the man held still flashed blue.
David got up from where he had crouched. He had heard the noise made by the hinge and had gotten out of bed to see what it was. He had seen the man standing there and had crouched by the bed. He was going to wait until the man got closer to spring.
It looked like he was too late.
David saw in front of him the mass of black shapes. He had seen the shadow come at the visitor from the right. That had to be Baryk. David wanted to help, but couldn’t see where he should come into the fray. He might just peg Baryk by mistake. That would not be helpful. He needed to see.
The candle was by Nathan’s bed.
“Nathan,” he cried, “the candle!”
There was a stirring to his left as Nathan fumbled for the matches and the candle.
The mass of shapes continued to move about the room. All of a sudden, David saw the blue flash up high and then low. He heard Baryk cry out and. There was the thud of fist landing on flesh and part of the shadowy mass broke off and slumped to the floor.
The rest of it leaped out the window and David could hear the sound of running feet across gravel. A few moments later, dogs began to bark somewhere in the near distance.
A pale light came up in the room some. By this light, David could see Baryk huddled over on the floor near the window. He cradled his left hand in his right.
David went over to him.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“He got away,” was the reply. “He got away.”
He shook his head.
“Are you hurt?”
“Just a scratch,” said Baryk and he held up his left hand for David to see.
Contrary to what Baryk had said, there was a deep gash that ran along the side of his thumb down to the fleshy part of the palm. It was bleeding and the blood dripped down onto the floor.
“What was that?” asked Nathan.
“We had a visitor,” said David. “I heard him open the window and slipped out of bed onto the floor. I waited for him and he came toward my bed. But it looks like Baryk got to him first.” He said this with a chuckle, though the chuckle was somewhat forced; David was concerned for his friend.
“You mean I didn’t save your life? You were ready for him?” said Baryk. He sounded disappointed.
“Ready for him? Oh, I don’t know. He had a knife; I had nothing. So I don’t know that I was any more ready than you were.
“Who knows what the outcome would have been?
“But it does look like you saved my thumb,” he said looking at Baryk’s.
“One life and one thumb; it just keeps piling up, brother.”
Baryk laughed. “It does look like it.”
“We need some water and something to bind up that wound,” David said to Nathan.
There was a pitcher of water on the table. And Nathan found some cloth. He brought them over to David.
David washed the cut and bound it carefully. Some pressure on it would keep it from bleeding more. It would need stitches but it was too late for that now; they would have to see to that in the morning.
While David was working on Baryk, Nathan paced back and forth across the floor. He had a look of pain on his face.
When David was finished he stood up. Baryk got up too and sat down on his bed. His was still shaking he head.
“I let him get away,” he said.
“He did have a knife,” said David trying to be helpful.
“That doesn’t matter. Knife, gun, sword, or anything else, I still shouldn’t have let him get away.” And he shook his head again.
Nathan came over to David.
“I am deeply ashamed,” he said. “I must make my apologies to you and then to your father when I return. Then I will resign my position.
“I am sorry, David. I am embarrassed to say that I slept through this and only was awakened when I heard you cry out.
“There is no excuse for this. None at all.”
David turned and faced Nathan squarely. He reached over, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “This is a reversal of roles for me, Nathan, and so I may not be all that good at it.
“I have been on the receiving end of your wisdom for lo these many years. But now you will pardon me if I say something on my own.
“You have served my father and his family well. I might even say heroically because you have done it at a great cost to yourself at times. You have anticipated our needs and worked to fill them as best you could. And you have done the same on behalf of the people.
“You have preserved us in your service as envoy to my father. There have been threats from abroad that became nothing more because of your good offices on behalf of my father and on behalf of our people.
“In the end, what you have done has always been the best that could be done.
“This has been appreciated by my father, by my mother, by my brothers and sister and, in case I haven’t said it before, by me.
“But,” and he looked Nathan in the eye as he said this, “you cannot be at your post all the time. You cannot be alert and on your guard at all the hours of the day. It just isn’t possible. No one can do it and no one expects you to do it, least of all, my father.
“It is good enough that some of us are alert some of the time. It was tonight.
“And maybe my father knew this. Maybe that is why he sent the two of you instead of only one. What happened tonight, I think, is what he had prepared for if something like this took place.
“So you can apologize if you want to. And you can resign if you want to--at least you can submit the paperwork. But I will tell you that my father will take that paperwork and click his tongue while he doesn’t read it. And he will tear it all up in front of you as he asks you for your perspective on the problems of the day.
“And that will be right.”
David smiled up at him.
Nathan looked at David, reached out his hand and touched his cheek. “You are your father’s son, my boy,” he said. “And I thank you.”
“You may thank me but it will be for nothing, I can tell you. What I said will surely be the case with my father-- as sure as anything.”
And David smiled at him again.
There was a knock at the outer door. The three of them threw on some clothes and went out into the drawing room.
Nathan opened the door. Mrs. Henried burst in.
“We heard someone cry out. Did it come from here?”
It did, they said. Nathan told her the whole story while Baryk and David piped up from time to time to fill in some of the details.
Mrs. Henried stood there with a look of shock on her face.
“In my tavern, in my inn? There has never been anything like this happen before.”
She crossed her arms.
“You men guaranteed me that you would do nothing that would be of a rowdy nature.” She stared at them fiercely. “It looks like you have violated your word.” They could hear a tapping of a foot and didn’t need to look to understand that it was Mrs. Henried’s.
“I can assure you, madam,” said Nathan, “that we have kept our word. We did nothing to provoke this attack. We have minded our business while we have been here.
“Have you had any complaints about us? Have you heard anything from us but requests for food and other things for which we have paid? And have we treated any of the employees with nothing but respect when they have come in?
“We have and that is what we intended to do.
“We do not know why this happened. We do not know who is behind it. We know nothing at this point other than that we have been exemplary clients in this establishment, an establishment, by the way, which has treated us well and with which we have had no complaints.”
Nathan bowed slightly to Mrs. Henried as he said this and smiled at her.
“Well, we try, sir, we try,” replied Mrs. Henried uncrossing her arms. She seemed to be more amenable after that. The explanation and the compliment—especially the compliment-- served to allay her fears quite a bit.
“So, it’s someone come in a window with a knife at night to menace my customers, is it?” She said this with a look on her face that would have struck fear in the hearts of any visitor in the nighttime come through a window to menace anybody. And she crossed her arms again.
“Looks like it,” said Baryk offhandedly.
“Come in for reasons we do not know,” said Nathan.
Two things bothered Nathan about this. One of them was how the visitor had known which window it was from the courtyard below. He could not have climbed through every one of them until he came upon the right one. He must have been aiming for their room and for them because he had passed up any number of other rooms as he made his way across the courtyard to theirs.
To come to their room straight meant it wasn’t theft.
Which brought up the second thing that bothered him. Baryk and David said that he was coming for the bed in the center of the room. Why the center bed? The center bed was the one David occupied. That was a telling point. If the visitor was out for money, why come for the middle bed? And why use a knife as he did it?
That was a second reason to believe it was not a theft. He was not out for money; he was out to kill, to kill David. It looked like that was it. He knew where he was and knew where he would strike and that bothered Nathan. Any attempt to kill his charge was unacceptable to him. But there was another matter: How could he have known?
“Mrs. Henried,” he said. “That visitor came directly to this room passing others to do so. I do not know why he did that; maybe he thought we had something of value with us that others did not have, I don’t know.
“But I think if you will examine some of the help, you will find that they may have been a bit too free with some information about us here.” Nathan was thinking of the girl who came in to examine the linen in their bedroom just before they went to bed. She would have known who was where by the bags on each bed.
David’s valise had his name on it.
“You can bet I will be doing just that,” said Mrs. Henried trying to fold arms that were already folded.
“And I won’t be waiting for the morning to do it either.
“Henry,” she said turning to the man who had come up and stood beside her. “Wake up the help. Someone has some explaining to do.”
She turned to leave. But Nathan stopped her.
Baryk needed someone to stitch his hand up. “Do you know of a doctor, Mrs. Henried? Our companion here has sustained a wound--”
“--Just a scratch, really,” interrupted Baryk apologetically. “It’ll heal over in no time--”
“--a wound,” repeated Nathan with an emphasis on the word “wound.” “He needs some stitches. I would do it but it's been awhile for me so he might not like the method—he might not sit still for it. I think we need a professional for this. We can wait for tomorrow but we will need the name of someone.”
“We’ll get Doc Stringer,” said Mrs. Henried. “He’s only a few blocks away. He’ll come at the call especially to hear tell this story that I am too mortified to tell him myself. But he’ll come—I’ll send for him.”
And with that she walked out.
“Look,” said Baryk to the others, “it isn’t much; it isn’t. No need to get anyone out of bed to come look at it or fix it. It’ll heal over by itself. There’s no need—really, there isn’t.”
David ignored him. Nathan did too and went over to the window, sat down in the same chair he had sat in the night before and thought.
This was troubling to him, deeply troubling to him.
Who was it and why had they come for David? And how did they know they were there in the city? Those were questions he mulled over sitting there looking out on the courtyard again.
Nathan was still sitting there a half an hour later when the doctor showed up.
“Well, there has been some excitement here, I take it?” said the doctor rubbing his hands together as he came in. “And who has been the lucky recipient of some special ministrations from a perfect stranger this fine eve?”
“It’s him,” said David pointing to Baryk. “And he will say it’s nothing serious and will tell you that it will heal over itself, ‘really it will.’ But you just ignore him—we have—and fix him up. Would you, please?”
The doctor said he would and went over to Baryk. He heard the protests and nodded his head in agreement and sympathy but worked on Baryk’s hand anyway.
Nathan and David heard a sharp intake of breath from time to time as the doctor worked on him. That was evidence that he was being fixed up good.
After about twenty minutes, the doctor pronounced himself finished.
“Keep it clean and it won’t fester,” he said to Baryk.
“Now,” said the doctor directing himself to anyone who would volunteer, “if someone will fill me in on the particulars, this will be on the house. Sounds like as good a story as has come along this whole year.” And he sat down rubbing his hands together again.
“Well, we will pay,” said Nathan, “But I think you could get your patient there to tell it to you. And to make sure you got it all down, I think he would probably tell it to you a second time.”
He smiled.
“Well,” said Baryk smiling himself, “someone’s got to tell it right, with all the proper emphasis. And that means me.
“Would you be surprised,” he began, “if I told you that I had a feeling that something would be happening this evening that would be, shall we say, untoward?”
The doctor shook his head no; the other two shook their heads yes.
“Well, I did, at least I felt something earlier that might be taken for the same thing, though I might have confused it somewhat with the pork ribs we had for dinner,” Baryk said laughing. “No matter…” And he began to tell the doctor what happened.
His story was much better than what had actually happened though the truth was in there somewhere. But forty-five minutes later, more than four times the time the event itself took, Baryk finished.
“Well,” said the doctor, sitting back and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, “that is something. Nothing like that has happened, since…well…Come to think of it, nothing like that has ever happened around here. You hear about things like this in the Stens and Dunleavy—the worst parts of town. From those parts you hear stories; they say that those who live there would as soon slit your throat as say hello. I don’t know since I have never set foot in them.
“But you know how the stories go. Some truth to it, I think, though there is a large measure of exaggeration. Nothing though like this around here. This is a civilized place.”
He paused.
“Any idea why this happened?” he asked looking at each of them.
“Well,” responded Baryk, “I think…”
“No,” interrupted Nathan,” we have no idea why this happened.”
He looked at Baryk. There was no reason to say anything more than that. It wouldn’t have been useful to have everyone know what they were doing there. It might even cause more problems for them if word got out.
“Well,” said the doctor, “it is passing strange that they would cross the courtyard and climb up to the second floor to steal something, if that was what it was. That means they were going to steal something from you in particular and from no one else. They must have some information about you that makes them think there’s some money around--or something else of value.”
The doctor looked around to see what that something might be.
Nathan didn’t answer that. To answer meant admitting the possibility that there was no reason for them to come and steal something. That meant more explanations and that was not what he wanted.
“Your guess is as good as ours is, doctor,” he said. “We may find out something more in the morning. But for now, we would like to get what sleep there is left for us to get.”
“Yes, yes,” said the doctor getting up. “Sleep. But you will let me know if you find out anything more?
“This is a strange thing to have come among us, very strange.”
Baryk held the door open for the doctor.
“Tomorrow,” he said as he walked out. “And you, my good man, keep that clean.”
“I will,” said Baryk and he closed the door behind him.
“I was not going to say anything to the doctor that would let on about what we are doing here,” said Baryk bothered by Nathan’s interruption. He looked offended.
“I know, I know,” replied Nathan apologetically. “I am overly cautious. Forgive me, Baryk. It’s the court functionary in me—a reflex. To shape events by managing information is something that has become a second nature to me and it is hard to put that down at times. I am sorry for that.
This satisfied Baryk.
“But we do have to watch what we say, and I mean myself as much as anyone. We don’t want to create problems for ourselves by saying too much.”
“Do you have any idea why this happened?” asked Baryk, “Why that man came to David’s bed with a knife? He didn’t need to do that to steal something from us. He went straight to David’s bed and he had his knife raised as he went.”
That was the troubling thing for Nathan, troubling not only for the fact that it was directed at David, but troubling in that he didn’t know why. The only person to be affected by David’s coming was the present possessor of the pearl. But how could he or they know he was coming for it? Someone at court? There were only a few who knew about it there; David’s father, his mother, his sister and brothers, Nathan himself and Baryk. And Baryk had found out about it only at the last minute.
“You, of course, said nothing to anyone back at the palace about David and why he was going?” Nathan asked Baryk. It was more a statement of fact rather than a question.
“No one. I wouldn’t have; I had no right to. And I couldn’t have even if I had a mind to; there wasn’t much time between my getting there and my leaving with you both.
“Why, you think someone back there may have let it out?”
“I don’t think so if none of us did.”
David shook his head.
“Maybe your brother Stephen,” said Nathan, “though that would be a low thing for him and he hasn’t shown himself willing to do such a thing before.”
David nodded in agreement.
“That then leaves…”
“The post at the frontier,” said David.
“Imdrath,” said Baryk.
“I have the utmost confidence in Imdrath,” said Nathan. “But I think I will have some words with him about members of his staff when we go back through.
“Who was behind this and why,” he added, “I do not know, though.” And he didn’t. There were bits and pieces in his mind that might have assembled themselves together into a strong suspicion, but facts were facts and he didn’t have many.
“It looks like we should get whatever sleep we can get right now,” said Nathan. “Goodnight to you both--whatever there is left of it.” And he took off his clothes and climbed back into bed.
The other two did the same and within minutes there was the sound of regular breathing. They were asleep again.
Over across the room, the window the visitor had come through was closed and bolted shut.
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Chapter
2
The next day the three of them were up and away early. The help was stirring when they left but they didn’t see Mrs. Henried on their way out. It was just as well; she might not want to be reminded of the events of the previous evening.
They wanted to see some of the sights of the city. But before they did, they called in on the stable to see if they could take Buttons with them.
Tembley met them and said that he couldn’t part with the boy that day.
“Works been pilin’ up and there an’t no one here to do it, when he’s gone, except Little Petey. There’s only so much Little Petey can do though I am always a encouragin’ him to do more.
“The pay’s good all right, gen’elmens, but you an’t goin’ to be here forever. And not taking care of what’s needin’ to be done around here is like eatin’ the seed corn of our business. So, no, sirs. He has his work to do today and he’s goin’ to be doin’ it.
“Now, I, on t’other hand am free this whole long day. If it’s a guide you be wantin’, I offer myself for the service. And I wouldn’t charge you for lunch. That’s a discount, sirs, anyway you look at it,” he said grinning.
“I offer myself to you as your guide for the day.”
When they heard this, there were a few clearings of the throat among the three companions and a cough or two. In fact, Baryk sounded as if he had swallowed something the wrong way whole. David slapped him on the back to help him clear it, whatever it was.
“No thank you,” said Nathan. ”We know that your supervision of this establishment is the difference between its success or its failure. To take you away with that in mind would be to do a disservice to you, to your business and to those who depend on you—and I think there are a number who do.”
The stable owner owned that Nathan spoke rightly, that he was the indispensable party in the business and that he was the difference between success and failure. And he admitted readily that he did have those who were dependent on him and that that created such cares from day to day that they, “you gen’elmen’s,” could hardly appreciate, such were the burdens a man such as he was carried. He noted how perceptive Nathan was, though, and said that he was right, that he would stay there and keep things running and hoped they would have a fine day.
“Especially you, sir,” he said to Nathan.
Now the extent of that fine, indispensable man’s work day consisted in making sure his breakfast was prepared to his liking and browbeating his wife if it was not. When that was over, around about mid-morning, he would repair to the stables to find out what those “good-for-nothin’” boys were doing and cuff them on the ear for good measure when he found them and found out. That took a few minutes only and, after that, he would retire to the room in the back to read the newspaper. He took most of the rest of the morning to do this which ended up exhausting him greatly—and made him hungry again. That meant he would go back to wait for his lunch which would be accompanied with “words” if it were late or not again to his liking.
In the afternoon, this worthy man spent his time in a prone position contemplating life, he would say to anyone who asked, which contemplation was accompanied by the sound of snoring. When he woke up later, he would find the boys again and give them an edifying cuff to the head which was for their instruction and profit.
That was the sum total of that man’s day; that was the sum total of every day for that fine and worthy man, that indispensible man.
The companions were disappointed in not being able to take Buttons with them. And David hoped that what Nathan had said to the owner would not make Button’s day worse by making Tembley think he needed to supervise the business more closely--meaning Buttons more closely, maybe even more hands on. He tried to think of something he could say that might lessen any impact on the boy but could come up with nothing.
They walked over to the door and the owner opened it up to let them out. The bell sounded when he did. David and Baryk were the first two through; Nathan was the last.
As he was leaving, Nathan turned to Tembley and said, “You and I are men of the world, Tembley, men of business. And we know things, you and I, that few, if any, other men, men who are not successful men of business, understand. One of these is that we don’t go using up the business seed corn, as you put it so precisely and so knowingly, my good man. We know, don’t we, that that seed corn is a precious thing to us, that if we use it up there will be no more business. And no more business will mean no more money, money that we need to meet our obligations as men of the world, as responsible men.
“And we, of all people--you and I-- know that a part of that seed corn is the people who work under us. If we use them up, we use up an important part of what it is that allows us to be successful and to make money. So we treat those people under our charge, those people who work for us in our business, as well as we can to make sure that that does not happen. Because, when that seed corn is gone, it is all gone; isn’t that right, Tembley?”
Tembley said that no truer principle of business or of the world, for that matter, had ever been spoken and that that was just what he did. And he thanked Nathan for the honor of conversing with another man of business who knew the burdens such men carried. And he shook Nathan’s hand warmly as he thanked him.
When Nathan was outside, David said, “Well, that was masterful.”
“You hear it? Asked Nathan.
“Yes. I thought he might get the idea to supervise Buttons a little more closely with that first piece of diplomacy of yours.”
“I was afraid of the same thing,” replied Nathan. “I think this might have gotten him thinking about it some, hopefully. It is a good thing the little lies didn’t stick in my throat, fortunately, for the boy’s sake.”
The other two agreed.
They walked down the sidewalk to get a cab.
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All the rest of that day and for a few days after that, Tembley kept his hands off Buttons. And he could be seen from time to time during those days peering around corners to steal a look at the boy. The fact was that that little talk from Nathan had had an affect on the man—it had spooked him. He made a calculation about the loss of Buttons to his business. That must have been revealing to him because not only did he check up on Buttons from time to time during the day but the fact was that Button’s food got better too, at least a little.
If only it had lasted for more than just a few days.
But after those few days had passed, all was forgotten and the stable owner, that bully of a man, went back to his old ways. And Buttons was left to his own devices as he had been for most of his life.
So much will a man’s character not down even in the face of the best of reasons, even in the face of heavy prodding, even in the face of stark self-interest. Eventually, inevitably, as inexorably as any law of nature, after a brief interlude caused by a realization of the facts, a man will revert back to his character once more.
So it was with Tembley.
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Chapter
3
The day passed quickly for the companions. Nathan spent a part of it asking around the wharf and around as much of the town as he could get to about the Witch Maiden, her captain and her crew.
He found nothing that would cause any alarm. As a matter of fact, he found nothing at all. It was the first time that both the ship and that ship’s captain had been to this particular port, as far as he could find out. So there was nothing about them that he could pick up.
There were some old salts who had something to say about the ship and about the state of the crew and, by implication, the ship’s captain, from what they had seen of her. But that was no more than the same conclusion Nathan had already drawn himself. It was, from that perspective, nothing new though it was some more support for his own position. It was something, though, that they, all of the men he spoke to, had reached the same conclusion he had.
He found some of the crew at various places around town after some more looking. But when he asked them about the ship, they all clammed up and wouldn’t say anything.
He offered to pay some of them money for anything they might want to say. Some of these refused. Others accepted some and then told Nathan what he already knew, that they were bound for the West with freight they had picked up there at the port city. That was all they would volunteer even with Nathan’s money in the palms of their hands.
They thought it funny, of course, taking the money of the man that way. And they laughed at the joke they had played on the man looking for information.
In the end, though, none of them would answer Nathan anything he wanted to know about the ship or the ship’s captain.
That raised Nathan’s suspicions. In his experience, there was not a crew he had ever met that was not interested in talking about their ship or about their captain. It was their job, the job that they were skilled at and they would naturally want to talk about what they were good at. But what was more, it was their life; the ship and its captain, the officers and the rest of the crew were the boundaries that circumscribed the lives of these sailors for long stretches of time. So to talk about this was to talk about their life; to talk about life was to talk about this. And he had found other crews willing to talk about it.
Others, that is, except for the crew of the Witch Maiden.
That made him even more suspicious. That they wouldn’t talk made him all the more leery about sending David on that ship.
The problem, however, was that this only raised suspicions; it was not any kind of evidence he could take to David. It consisted of some vague misgivings that were not concrete enough--they would be dismissed out of hand. Nathan himself would dismiss them out of hand if someone came to him with the same information.
And that was what David did. Nathan decided that he would take these undefined suspicions to David anyway and make the best case he could for him to delay. But David dismissed them as nothing more than the doubts of a man concerned with his wellbeing.
“And I thank you for that,” he said with a pat on Nathan’s shoulder. But that was it. David would be going and he would take passage on that ship regardless of anything Nathan thought. That was the fact of it and there was nothing Nathan could do about it absent anything more substantial.
But, even so, Nathan didn’t let it alone. He hoped that something would come forward about that ship which would either allay his fears or give him something he could take to David, something concrete. But he had exhausted all possible avenues for information that he knew of so there was nothing else for him to do. It was possible someone might come up with more and he left word where he could be found if someone did. Absent that, however, it looked like David would be going and that he would be going on that ship, the Witch Maiden.
David and Baryk spent most of that day seeing the city. They were by themselves in the morning but were joined by Nathan soon after lunch. They saw more of the sights around with Nathan and in the late afternoon, they hired a porter and to carry David’s trunk to the ship.
When they got to there, a young boy showed them where David would stay. It was a cabin amidships; they had to go down some stairs in the bowels of the ship to get to it. It was small and it had two bunks and David wondered if he was going to have a shipmate for the voyage. No one he could find would say. If he did, he would make the best of it. As it was, he would have to be making the best of it with the quarters he was given anyway.
He was told that his lunch would be in the midshipman’s mess. That was down further towards the bow of the ship from where his cabin was. If measured from top to bottom, that mess would be near the midpoint of the ship but closer to the bow. It was a small room but it had a table that seated ten and it was clean, something that could not be said, strictly speaking, for other parts of that ship.
They were shown the other parts of the ship that would be important to David by the same young boy that had taken them to the cabin. He would answer their questions about what David was to do and where he could go but volunteered nothing more. When he was finished, he told them how to get back to the deck and off the ship. And then he disappeared.
None of this tour had allayed any of Nathan’s concerns about the ship. In fact, it had only served to make them more acute. He saw on that little tour other parts of the ship he had not seen before. And he didn’t like what he saw. But he kept it to himself.
The evening was spent away from the Crossed Arms at a tavern near the wharf. They sat near a window that was open and could hear the workers along the quay. There was a breeze that stirred the night and came in at the window. It was filled with the smells of the sea and that stirred memories for Nathan.
He spoke of some of them.
And they had a feast, the final meal the companions would have together for some time. There was a wistfulness about the evening that bordered on the morose, however. It was so much a part of the atmosphere that David finally said that he would only hear of cheery things because “I am only going on a purchasing trip but this is beginning to sound like a wake for the dead. Me.”
So they began to tell stories again to lighten the evening. Nathan went first with some of his other tales of the sea.
It was a delightful evening, in the end. It was one of those times that seem like it should be the standard for life, something that should be prolonged in some way and extended to the rest of a man’s life. But, alas, these moments always end.
And this one did. It got late and David needed to be ready early the next morning to board the ship. He had to be on board well before the tide went out.
So the three of them caught a cab and made their way back to the Crossed Arms and to bed.
The next morning, David was up early but not early enough to have beaten Nathan. In fact, Nathan had been awake for some time before David was up. When David came out to the drawing room, Nathan was there fully dressed seated beside the open window.
He was looking out.
David greeted him. Nathan returned that greeting.
“I have some things I need to tell you before you go,” said Nathan in a tone that was serious. David sat down in a chair opposite him to hear what he had to say.
“I have been given the task of conveying to you some final words of counsel from your father-- and some words of warning.
“First, your father sends his love along to you. I know you know this—you talked with him and he said the same things to you I am sure. But he wanted you to know it once more. He wants you to know of his love for you and of his fidelity to you. There is nothing more precious to him, there is nothing more dear to him than you, his son. His loyalty and his love are as solid and as enduring as Mount Genblass.”
“I can testify to this of myself. He has had you foremost in his thoughts when he has had other matters of state to think about. You are important to him, David. I have seen it.
“He wants you to know this.
“Be faithful to him. Do not get caught up in the affairs of the Bentheni. Their ways will have their appeal, but do not be taken in by that. Be faithful to your duty and you will be faithful to your father.
“Remember, David,” Nathan continued, “do not forget. Remember your charge; remember your father.
“Remember, David and come back to us.”
“I will,” said David. And he planned to do just that. But planning to do something in one's head is often different than doing something in the concrete here and now among an array of other matters that are appealing in their own right. Good intentions are just that, intentions set in calm that are difficult to hold onto when the wind comes up and the waves crash about or the crowd is roaring its praise and cheering you on. Or when something unexpected shows up that is more to be prized at that moment, it seems, than anything that has had value in the past. These are when good intentions become something that “I intended to do,” something that “I planned to do,” something “I really wanted to do, but, actually, circumstances have, uhh, changed.”
“Now,” continued Nathan, “that the pearl is in the possession of something referred to as the “serpent” is what we know. Whoever that serpent is or whatever it is will most likely be swayed by money. You will buy it back if you can.” He bent over and picked up a valise that was close to the chair. From it he pulled out a money pouch. He handed it to David.
It was heavy.
“There is enough there for you to live on and enough there to buy the pearl back at two or three times its value. That should be enough to get it under normal circumstances.” David couldn’t see how it would not be enough. Money was money among the Bentheni and no doubt that would be enough to buy it back.
“But if by chance there is any need for more, we will establish a way for you to get what you need. When you arrive, telegraph us and we will send you instructions about where to go and what to do.
“You will have other help if you need it. We will notify you about that also when you contact us. It will be there for you when the time comes--- if it comes.
“That is all I have.”
Nathan was finished.
David thanked him.
Baryk came in at that moment. He was fully dressed and, when he walked in, he said nothing. His face looked solemn.
“We should be going,” continued Nathan. “The captain intends to leave with the tide and that means we should get there soon. He will want everyone on board long before they are set to sail. So we should go and get you situated on board.
“Of course,” Baryk broke in, “you could stay here and wait for something better to come along. We could wait here with you…”
David looked at him with his lips pursed together but said nothing. His meaning was clear.
“I thought so,” said Baryk. “But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask.”
“We’ll take a bit of breakfast here,” said Nathan, “and then we’ll leave.” And he went out to get someone to bring them food.
When Nathan went out, Baryk walked over and sat across from David. “I would like to be coming with you, my brother, but it looks like this is yours to do alone. Be careful, will you? There are not all that many princes around so that we can afford to spare one.”
He smiled at this. His good humor could not be kept down for very long.
“My brothers would probably not agree with you about that,” said David laughing. “They think their elder brother was sent to them to task them and to heap up troubles on them.”
Baryk’s eyes narrowed some. “If you need any help, if you need anything, I stand ready to give it and to do what you need. I am your friend, with longstanding claims on you from that friendship. And though those claims are not on the same order as those of your father, your mother and your family, still they are not nothing.
“We have shared much and seen much and we are bound to each other by a history and by a camaraderie and fellow feeling long ago established.”
He paused, looked David in the eye closely and said, “It would be a tragedy to have that bond severed because you did not come back. So come back, my brother; make sure you come back to us.”
“I will, I will,” said David. “I will only be gone a short time just enough to buy back the pearl and then I will be back. There are adventures that await us, you and me; this will not be one of them, I have no doubt about that. I will be back in no time and then we will have other times to look forward to.”
Nathan came in with little Margaret trailing him. David expected to see Mrs. Henried come in third and stand with her arms folded as the table was set to her specifications. But there was no Mrs. Henried.
Nathan understood David’s look. “There is a full house today and only one Mrs. Henried. She is off making sure her other guests are taken care of. I told her we would be fine with the inestimable Margaret, here.”
Margaret smiled. She would have been hard pressed to word “inestimable” meant but it was easy to know when she was being made fun of and when she was not. By the genuineness of Nathan’s speaking and his plain manner with her, it was clear he was not. So she smiled and went to the table with a particular will that put everything precisely in its place and made sure it was clean and spotless.
When it was all done, she curtseyed to them and left the room as Nathan held the door.
They ate breakfast with not as much cheer as they had ended up eating dinner the previous night. They ate mostly in silence though Nathan would speak up from time to time to ask David if he had remembered a particular item or not. This happened a few times until David told Nathan that he was acting like a mother hen. At this, Nathan smiled and said that someone there had to make sure of such things. But he didn’t bring up anything more.
The plates were cleared by the same Margaret and David gathered his valise and his cloak and hat and they all went out to find a cab. It took them a few minutes but in no time they were on their way to the wharf—to the wharf and for David, the way West.
A half an hour later found them standing near the gangway of the Witch Maiden. The crew was moving about the deck of the ship under orders from the second mate. The captain could be seen at the stern near the wheel. He would say nothing very loud but communicated what he wanted to his second mate and that man, the second mate, called out the orders.
It looked like they were about ready to depart.
“The tide won’t be at full flow for another couple of hours yet,” said Nathan. “But they’ll want to get ready for that well before it happens.
“You should go.” He said this and then grabbed David by the shoulders. “Take care, my boy,” he said and his eyes glistened as he said it.
Seeing Nathan in that way was something new for David. Emotional was not on David’s list of descriptions of him. But he was close to the family and had always been close to David and so he was surprised by it but felt it was not out of place under the circumstances.
Baryk was next but he wasn’t as careful. He grabbed David and hugged him with some force. But he said nothing more though his eyes glistened as Nathan’s had.
“Sir,” said the voice of the second mate. He was standing near the side of the gangway up on deck looking down at them. “If you please. We are preparing to get underway and, if you are going with us, you had better come aboard now. We will be pulling up the gangway. So get aboard if you’re coming aboard.”
David did just that. He turned to his fellow companions, said a final “goodbye” and then walked up the gangway and onto the deck of the ship.
When he got there he turned and waved at his two companions. And they waved in return. If they had been able to see him closely, they might have seen that David’s eyes glistened as theirs had.
After a few more vigorous waves, the Nathan and Baryk turned and walked off back down the wharf. They did not want to prolong the goodbye, especially since they were having some trouble with their eyes. But David couldn’t help but feel a bit forlorn as he saw them walking away. They had been his companions for many days on this journey and for many days during his life before that. And now he was alone. It looked as if anything that was friendly or of any comfort to him was walking off with them.
But David took a deep breath and then turned and walked away to his cabin.
----
Chapter
4
The first couple of weeks of the voyage were uneventful. Nothing much happened at all. David spent much of his time up on deck standing by the rail watching the waves and the horizon. After a few days of that, it occurred to him standing there that most of sea travel was comprised of expectation, expectation that something would happen or that something would be just over the horizon. But that expectation was hardly ever realized.
Nothing much ever happened. Every so often a fish would jump out of the blue and plash back in. That happened. And a couple of times, he saw what must have been a dolphin not far off from the ship—a dolphin or a shark, he wasn’t actually sure which it was. But the fin of whatever it was stuck out of the water and David watched it go off as the ship passed.
That happened too.
And he watched as the members of the crew went about their business which was a regular thing. Or he watched the play of the sails and feel the spray on his face as strong winds came up and filled the canvas and kicked the foam off the tops of the waves.
These were something that also happened.
And he ate. The food was not what he would have preferred; it tended more toward salt pork and fish, but it was edible and there was enough of it.
That was another thing that happened and it happened at regular intervals.
And he slept in his cabin. The bunk was comfortable enough and there weren’t any bedbugs which was a bonus. That at least let him sleep. But it was all rather spare; there was no luxury to it and not much comfort that was even intended with it. It was purely functional and in that it performed its duty though nothing more than that. David would probably have gotten a lot more if he had traveled by steamship or by schooner--he’d heard as much. But there on the Witch Maiden life was more Spartan than it was even in some of the worst inns he had stayed at.
But that didn’t bother David all that much. He would have taken a rowboat and scoffed at any inconvenience if that rowboat was the only thing going to the West and it left within a day or two. He had wanted to leave, he had wanted to get going, and he would have put up with anything to have done that.
It wasn’t the lack of comfort but the sameness of his routine that began to wear on him. He slept, he ate, he went up on deck and watched the waves or the ship and crew and then he ate and slept again. It was the same thing from one day to the next.
Early on he had hoped that his cabin mate might provide some company. On the first day out, David had gone back to his cabin and had found a member of the crew there. He was a lieutenant, a Mr. Collier—William was his first name though he didn’t volunteer that readily. As a matter of fact, he didn’t volunteer much of anything at all but was strictly to the purpose there in the cabin as he stowed his gear. David finally gave up trying to get him to talk or to get any information from him.
David thought that that was something he should expect. He wasn’t one of the crew and hadn’t paid his dues as one of them would have. So he wouldn’t be allowed into the circle and permitted to know anything on the inside or to associate with others of them. They would be like any other gathering of men; they would have their requirements for admittance into their association. Those requirements had to be met before one could be accepted by them even if he had been a member of the crew. But David, being a passenger, would not even be a candidate anyway. So he felt that he would have to put up with that aloofness from this Collier.
But though he expected it, he hardly liked it. He wanted to ask questions and get answers to them, questions about the ship and about that voyage in particular. He found that he didn’t much like being on the sea, traveling by sea. But he always made sure he knew something about what he was doing. You just never knew but that it might come in handy later.
Here however, no one would answer his questions. The rest of the crew was as closed as Collier was.
And the captain? The captain was unapproachable. David knew because he had tried it. Whenever he attempted to close to speak to him, the captain always asked his second mate or someone else to “see what that man wants.” That first mate or other person would then interpose himself between David and the captain to prevent him from getting to him.
That was not the way of someone trying to be helpful or even friendly, he thought.
And, in the end, the person standing between them would not answer his questions either.
David resolved to himself that if this went on, he would have a little talk with the captain in his cabin. If this continued, he would push past anyone sent to waylay him and would force his way to the captain. He was just bored enough to force his way through the whole ship’s crew to do it.
There had been one bright spot on that voyage, though--or a brighter spot, at least-- that he had found out about soon after they sailed. There were other passengers on board. There weren’t many of them but David met them all—or at least all of them who would be met.
There was Mrs. Stevenson with her son Timmy, a little boy of four. They were traveling to meet her husband in the West. He had gone there to find a life for them and had found it, she said. And he had sent for his wife and son to come join him. The Witch Maiden was all they could find that was leaving soon and they didn’t want to wait for anything else either.
And there was Dr. Richard Emerson, the surgeon. He was on a trip to a hospital in the West that, he said, had a new method of surgery. That was his specialty and he was interested in finding anything new related to it. He was going to learn all he could about it and then take what he learned back to his own country.
That made Dr. Emerson interesting. He was a middle-aged man; not young anymore. To think that he might travel somewhere far from where he lived—the travel was not easy-- to learn something new—well, that was a significant thing, David thought, a very significant thing.
There was also a man by the name of Smith, John Smith. That was a name that sounded as if it had been made up on the spot by someone with a reason to remain anonymous. And John Smith acted like he was that kind of man. He kept to himself away from most of the other passengers and would walk off when someone like David approached him. No one knew anything more about him other than that name and he could not be cornered by any of the other passengers to find out anything else. He was, though, often engaged in talking with members of the crew. They seemed to have no trouble approaching him and talking with him. But he would slip away at the first sign of someone else approaching him. Though David saw Smith and knew his name, he was the only one David had not actually met.
The other passengers on board were three. They were Mr. Jeffrey Montan, Mr. George Winston, and Mr. Frederick Hinson. Montan kept more to himself, too, though he was approachable when he was on deck. David had met him there a few times and the conversation had been about nothing much more than the day and the weather before he would excuse himself.
Not much of one for conversation.
The other two passengers were more apt to say hello when they passed by in the corridors or on deck. And David talked to them some.
They were nice enough. They were partners in business, so they said, and they had been off on a buying trip and were on their way home.
“It’s peanuts for us,” said George Winston. “We arranged for a shipment from the East—
“-- and it will bring us a tidy sum when it comes in and is sold back home,” said Frederick Stimson. “A good deal. Cheaper to buy them and send the load by boat than the price we’d get back home.”
“We had good contacts,” said George Winston smiling.
“That’s what we do. Hinson and Winston, Commodities Brokers,” said Stimson and he handed a card to David.