Rough Passage to London(93)

Just then, he saw a quick glimpse of the man’s cap. Perhaps he was mistaken, but another look back and he knew he was right. The man was walking across the street, his face turned in his direction. It was too dark to see any of his features. The shape of his thin body, hunched shoulders, southwester cap, and blue pea jacket convinced him this was the same man he’d first seen off South William Street. Morgan became concerned. His well-tailored clothes made him a possible target. He was dressed like a ship’s merchant with a long-skirted blue coat, top hat, and Wellington boots. Still, whoever was following him must have more than money on his mind. Why else would he stalk him so intently through so many different crowded streets? No, he said to himself, this was personal. Someone was targeting him and he began to think of Blackwood.

When he saw wagons moving toward Peck’s Slip, he followed them as far as South Street. He hadn’t brought his pistols and felt vulnerable. He did have his sheath knife, which he always carried when he came ashore, and he fingered the handle with his right hand for reassurance. He was thinking of stopping and turning to confront his pursuer head-on when he heard a nervous, slightly hesitant voice behind him call out his name.

“Captain Morgan? Would that be you, Captain Morgan, brother of Abraham?”

Morgan quickly turned, knife in hand, and looked to the other side of the narrow street, but all he could see was a silhouetted figure.

“Who’s there?” Morgan asked, a slight tremor in his voice.

“It’s John Taylor, Captain.”

“John Taylor?” Morgan asked in astonishment, stammering. He paused for a second as he tried to think how to react. “The John Taylor who sailed with my brother Abraham?”

“That would be me, Captain Morgan, the man you saved from a watery graveyard all those years ago, the one who wrote your mother about William and Abraham.”

Morgan could hardly believe his ears. He walked over to this voice in the semidarkness, still somewhat suspicious.

“I thought it were you because of the way you walked,” said the shadowy figure with the southwester cap. “I knew you were here.”

Morgan stopped. “Why didn’t you just approach me?”

“You were walking so fast, I almost lost you several times.”

Morgan could now recognize the man under the dim light of a street lantern. He remembered his unmistakable thin, hollow cheeks and his weak jaw that fell inward toward his neck. He walked closer until he could see the weather-beaten face in front of him. Somehow the man with his droopy shoulders seemed even more thin and frail than he had been years earlier. His eyelids were red. He was dressed in a torn, battered pea jacket caked with mud, which told Morgan the man had either passed out or was sleeping in the street. The lines in his thin face and sadness in his eyes told the story of his troubled life.

“I’ll be dammed if I ever thought I’d see you again, Taylor,” Morgan said finally. “I thought you would be dead by now.”

Taylor gave a slight start, but he said nothing, his features frozen, his taciturn face showing little emotion. He kept glancing backward nervously, and then looking back at Morgan and staring at some point beyond him. Morgan turned around quickly. A row of houses on the other side of the street was empty and dark, but in the distance the faint light of a grog shop revealed human shapes.

“What’s wrong, Taylor? Is someone following you?”

“I thought I saw Big Red,” he replied in a hoarse whisper.

“Big Red?”

“The mate who sailed with Abraham and me. Tom Edgars. He is the one who has been chasing me all these years, he and Blackwood. They was recruitin’ sailors in some of the grog shops down on Cherry Street, but they been looking for me, making inquiries down at the docks. I been hiding and sleeping in the stinking wet gutters because they been trailing me.”

“But why were you following me?”

Taylor made no reply, the tips of his fingers on his lips as he looked down at the cobblestones on the street. Morgan suddenly clenched his teeth as he felt his patience wane. He stepped forward to grab the man, coming close enough to his face to smell his rummy breath and a foul, vinegar-like smell that seemed to be seeping from every pore of his saturated body. The man’s hollow cheeks were ashy white, his eyes bloodshot. The crushing memory of going back to see Taylor in the boarding house where he had brought him so many years ago, and finding his room empty, descended on him. As he stared into John Taylor’s twitching eyes, which seemed to be lost in some other world, he remembered the man’s cryptic remarks about Blackwood, the blood boat, and the foul dealings.