Free On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers Page B

drifting over to where Davies’ crews clustered around the moored sloop
Jenny,
for the
Jenny
and the
Carmichael
were supposed to leave New Providence Island, taking the cook along, on Saturday the twenty-third.
    On Friday afternoon the cook was rowing a boat up the harbor from the deep inlet where the
Carmichael
sat; the ship was restored to her normal upright position now, and had been pulled almost all the way back down into the water, and as Jack Shandy watched her recede, his muscled brown arms hauling on the oars and propelling the boat forward, he saw section after section ofscaffolding, axed and pried loose from the hull, spin down and splash into the sea.
    Before the end of the month, he told himself, I should be able to get to Kingston and get my credit situation established, and then get a boat to Port-au-Prince and pay a visit to the…family estate.
    Now that he’d seen the colors of these western skies and seas and islands, he didn’t feel nearly as disoriented by the drawing he’d seen in the letter his lawyer had found; the wide porches and windows of the Chandagnac house in Port-au-Prince, with the waving palms and giant tree ferns in the background and the parrots sketched flying overhead, now seemed much more attainable, much less like a drawing of imagined dwellings on the moon.
    After the death of old François Chandagnac, his father, John’s lawyer had located a hitherto unknown Chandagnac cousin in Bayonne, and this cousin had let them have a file of letters from an aunt in Haiti, where John had always vaguely understood he had a grandfather and an uncle. These letters, and then a lot of expensive research in obscure labyrinths of deeds, quitclaims, probate and birth and death records, had finally turned up the information which caused John Chandagnac to terminate his engagement to the daughter of a successful coal merchant, resign from his position with the textile firm and book passage aboard the
Vociferous Carmichael
to the far side of the globe: John learned that his grandfather in Haiti had, in his will, left his house, sugarcane plantation and considerable fortune to his eldest son François, John’s father, and had then died in 1703; and that François’ younger half-brother Sebastian, also a resident of Haiti, had produced forged documents to indicate that François was dead.
    On the basis of this fraud, Sebastian had inherited the estate… and John Chandagnac’s father, not even aware of the inheritance,had gone on giving his marionette performances, in ever-increasing poverty and ill health, until that last lonely night in Brussels in the winter of 1714. His uncle had, in effect, killed his father as well as robbed him.
    Jack Shandy squinted now, and pulled harder on the oars as if that might get him into his uncle’s presence sooner, as he remembered talking to the landlady of the shabby rooming house in which his father had died. John Chandagnac had gone there as soon as he’d heard of his father’s death, and he plied the woman with quantities of syrupy Dutch gin to get her to focus her dim attention on the old puppeteer whose body had been carried down her stairs four days earlier. Finally she had remembered the incident. “
Ah, oui,
” she’d said, smiling and nodding, “
oui. C’était impossible de savoir ci c’était le froid ou la faim.
” His father had either frozen to death or starved, and there’d been no one there to notice which death had got him first.
    Jack Shandy had no real plan, no particular idea of what he’d do when he got to Port-au-Prince—though he had brought his father’s death certificate to show to the French authorities in Haiti—but his lawyer had told him that the charges would be virtually impossible to press from another country in another hemisphere, so he was bringing it to where his uncle Sebastian lived. He could only guess at what problems he