"At the time it was a job. Miss Bedford. Let's say I've changed my mind since then. Things didn't turn out exactly the way I'd figured they would." He took another drink, then set down the bottle and laughed. "That always seems to be the way."
"What do you mean?"
"It's something like the story of my life." His tone waxed
slightly philosophical as he stared at the flickering candle. "I always end up being kicked about by events. So now I've decided to try turning things around. Do a little kicking of my own."
"That's a curious ambition. I suppose these indentures are going to help you do it?" She was beginning to find him more interesting than she'd expected. "You said just now you learned to shoot by hunting. I know a lot of men who hunt, but I've never seen anything like what you did tonight. Where exactly did you learn that?"
He paused, wondering how much to say. The place, of course, was Tortuga, and these days that meant the Cow-Killers, men who terrified the settlers of the Caribbean. But this wasn't a woman he cared to frighten. He was beginning to like her brass, the way she met his eye. Maybe, he thought, he'd explain it all to her if he got a chance someday. But not tonight. The story was too long, too painful, and ended too badly.
His memories of Tortuga went back to the sultry autumn of 1631. Just a year before, that little island had been taken over by a group of English planters—men and women who'd earlier tried growing tobacco up on St. Christopher, only to run afoul of its Carib Indians and their poisoned arrows. After looking around for another island, they'd decided on Tortuga, where nobody lived then except for a few hunters of wild cattle, the Cow-Killers. Since the hunters themselves spent a goodly bit of their time across the channel on the big Spanish island of Hispaniola, Tortuga was all but empty.
But now these planters were living just off the northern coast of a major Spanish domain, potentially much more dangerous than merely having a few Indians about. So they petitioned the newly formed Providence Company in London to swap a shipment of cannon for a tobacco contract. The Company, recently set up by some Puritan would-be privateers, happily agreed.
Enter Hugh Winston. He'd just been apprenticed for three months to the Company by his royalist parents, intended as a temporary disciplining for some unpleasant reflections he'd voiced on the character of King Charles that summer after coming home from his first term at Oxford. Lord Winston and his wife Lady Brett, knowing he despised the Puritans for their hypocrisy, assumed this would be the ideal means to instill some royalist sympathies. As it happened, two weeks later the Providence Company posted this unwelcome son of two prominent monarchists out to Tortuga on the frigate delivering their shipment of guns.
No surprise, Governor Hilton of the island's Puritan settlement soon had little use for him either. After he turned out to show no more reverence for Puritans than for the monarchy, he was sent over to hunt on Hispaniola with the Cow- Killers. That's where he had to learn to shoot if he was to survive. As things turned out, being banished there probably saved his life.