Nassau

Nassau was Port Royal with the earthquake shaken out of it.

Port Royal had been the pirate city of the Caribbean, and then in June of 1692, which was the same year Gallows Hill took my mother and I began learning to live without the things I loved, the ocean had simply swallowed it. The earthquake came first; the water came after; two thousand people gone in an afternoon. The survivors took what they could and moved, and what they moved to was Nassau, and by the time I arrived in 1698 it was a city in the process of becoming itself: rough, provisional, full of people who had survived something and were not sure yet whether that made them lucky.

I understood the feeling.

I spent several months in Nassau doing what I had done in Portsmouth, which required less of me now than it had before, in the way that the second time you do a difficult thing is always easier than the first. I watched. I listened. I applied the distance I had been perfecting since I was eight. I fed when I needed to feed and I kept my own counsel and waited for the city to show me what it intended.

Then I met Mango.

He had a beard the color of a ripe mango, so vivid it operated as a kind of announcement. He found me one evening on the waterfront, in the way that people looking for something specific always eventually find what they are looking for, and he told me he had a ship and a crew and that the crew included individuals of particular constitution who tended to find strength in one another’s company.

He said it more directly than that. He said: vampire need to stick together.

I had not heard the word applied to me before. I considered it.

It was accurate enough. I had been called worse.

The Sanguine Judge was a good ship, well-maintained, with a crew that understood exactly what their situation was and had made their peace with it in the way that men make their peace with things they cannot change. The blood-bound among them were steady. The rest were practical. We had letters of marque from both the English and the French, which gave us a certain latitude with the Spanish treasure ships, and the Spanish treasure ships had a great deal in them worth liberating.

It was, I discovered, work I had been suited for all along.

Sings-in-Woods had taught me to move without being seen and to take only what I needed and to leave the forest as I found it. The Sanguine Judge operated on a modified version of that principle. The forest was larger. What I took was more.

Some lessons transfer better than you expect.