On board the flagship coming home I had been chained down in the cable-tier—a place where I could feel every straining of the great ship. Once these had risen to a pandemonium, a frightful tumult. There was a great gale outside. A sailor came down with a lanthorn, and tossed my biscuit to me.
“You d———d pirate,” he said, “maybe it’s you saving us from drowning.”
“Is the gale very bad?” I had called.
He muttered—and the fact that he spoke to me at all showed how great the strain of the weather must have been to wring any words out of him:
“Bad—there’s a large Indiaman gone. We saw her one minute and then...” He went away, muttering.
And suddenly the thought had come to me. What if the Indiaman were the Lion—the Lion with Seraphina on board? The man would not speak to me when he came again. No one would speak to me; I was a pirate who had fired on his own countrymen. And the thought had pursued me right into Newgate—if she were dead; if I had taken her from that security, from that peace, to end there.... And to end myself.
“Swing!” the turnkey said; “you’ll swing right enough.” He slapped the great key on his flabby hand. “You can tell that by the signs. You, being an Admiralty case, ought to have been in the Marshalsea. And you’re ordered solitary cell, and I’m tipped the straight wink against your speaking a blessed word to a blessed soul. Why don’t they let you see an attorney? Why? Because they mean you to swing.”
I said, “Never mind that. Have you heard of a ship called the Lion? Can you find out about her?”
He shook his head cunningly, and did not answer. If the Lion had been here, I must have heard. They couldn’t have left me here.
I said, “For God’s sake find out. Get me a shipping gazette.”