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  I agreed vigorously with this, and Natty continued.

  “He speaks about how he has changed, which is true in certain respects. He is not a pirate anymore. He is a law-abiding gentleman—for as long as he remains in the world. But he cannot change entirely, because he cannot forget the island. He must have that map of yours. He must have the map, and then he must have the silver.”

  “Well,” I said, somewhat dully, because my mind was still fixed on practical things. “At least that should mean he has found us a reliable crew.”

  Natty nodded, and despite the gathering darkness I saw that her face was flushed—which I thought had more to do with the heat of our talk than the effort of our work. “We shall not have the same experience as our fathers,” she said in a low voice. “I can assure you of that. I have met this crew and their captain. They are all good men—Captain Beamish especially.”

  “You know them all?”

  “I said I have met them. The hands have all been hired by the captain. He is the only one I know. But I assure you we shall be safe. My father wants his treasure too much to allow it otherwise.”

  “But how will he have it, if you do not return to England?” As I asked this question, I already knew how Natty would reply. She would tell me that once she had found the silver she would send it home with this Captain Beamish, then take her life in her own hands and strike off in some other direction.

  I could not decide what this meant for me. It was an uncertainty that lay too far beyond other uncertainties. Because I did not want to imagine them yet, I was relieved when Natty did not answer me, but left a pause in which I heard nothing except the sound of our oars biting into the water. My question drifted for a moment on the surface like a leaf, then slipped out of sight.

  “Of course,” said Natty, after a while, with a sharp note in her voice that showed she was changing the subject, “I shall not be sailing as myself.”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “I shall be there,” Natty said. “I shall be with you. But I shall be traveling as a boy. It is my father’s idea—for my safety. Captain Beamish knows me for what I am, but the crew are already convinced that I am Nat.”

  “Nat?” I echoed, with a smile.

  Natty raised her eyebrows, pretending she was not in the least amused. “I could not possibly go as myself,” she said. “That is what I believe. And what my father believes. Our shipmates would not allow it. And supposing we run into any trouble … It is better this way.”

  I assured her that I understood the good sense of what she had decided, but in truth my response was a little more complicated than I allowed. I felt a sort of annoyance at not being consulted, and thereby included, in her decision. I also realized that Natty’s disguise meant no demonstrable affection could possibly develop between us during our journey—although I was so far unwilling to address this idea in any detail.

  “Very well,” I said briskly, copying her example. “This evening you are Natty. Tomorrow you are Nat. That is all we need say on the subject. But I have a question that is connected.”

  Natty raised one eyebrow in a pretty arch.

  “Will the crew know who I am?”

  “You mean, will they know you are your father’s true son?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Only the captain.” Natty paused, then added with the confidence I had come to admire in her, no matter how much it took my consent for granted: “We thought it for the best. The men would only bother you for stories, and you have already said you do not enjoy such things.”

  “Very good,” I said, knowing she spoke nothing less than the truth. My reward for this degree of understanding was to see Natty give me her sweetest smile; as it left her, we fell silent to complete the work in hand.

  I have said that we reached our destination fairly easily, by which I mean our talk continued fluently enough. In fact we took considerably more time returning than we had done setting out. Perhaps we were tired. More certainly, I was loath to complete the crime I had already begun—partly out of respect for my father, and partly because I feared discovery. In any event: by the time we were past Greenwich (which was about nine o’clock, if the churches of that village could be relied upon), and beginning the last slow sweeps of the river that I recognized as the beginning of home, the moon had climbed into the sky, and the first stars were gleaming above the marshes.

  Because I knew my father would be serving his customers until midnight, and was therefore likely to notice my arrival, or have it reported to him, Natty and I had no choice except to lie up in secret for a while. I therefore suggested we pull into a creek some distance away from the Hispaniola, and wait until the inn was quiet. The place we found was a water-alley that several seagulls had already chosen for their roost; they complained very loudly as the nose of the Spyglass turned out of the main river and drove them away.

  Once this hubbub had died down, it was replaced by the sound of a million oozings and bubblings that were the ordinary conversations of the marsh. This was comforting for me, because it was the sound of the earth itself; yet it could not help but remind me of everything I was about to offend. I tried to ease these guilty feelings by keeping up a constant flow of chat with Natty—in whispers, of course, so the sense of conspiracy was never far away.

  Our talk led us from earliest memories (avoiding the subject of mothers and fathers); to schooldays; to the difficulties of the Latin language; to hopes (of happiness); to fears (of worms for her, and of more abstract things, such as failure, for me); to birthdays; to foods liked (beef) and disliked (hard biscuit); to the stars and moon, which shone so brightly above us it might have been the door to another world, made entirely of light; to schooldays again and the teachers we had most enjoyed; to books (where Natty would not follow me, calling them dull); and so on. Occasionally a bird would approach, take fright, and clatter away again. For the most part the river was deserted—although now and again quiet barges sailed past, with lamps fore and aft, their sails and hulls a beautiful soft charcoal color. The water lapping against their prows was like the noise of sleep itself. All these things helped to control my sadness. Had the air not grown steadily colder, I believe we would eventually have closed our eyes and leaned together, then resumed our gossip when the dawn broke.

  I calculated that midnight had already gone when the last of my father’s customers staggered out from the Hispaniola and home along the towpath. We knew this because we heard a tipsy farewell, and a few bars of his disappearing song.

  Good night, my sweet ladies, goodnight, my dear friends,

  The moonlight shows clearly where this journey ends—

  In sleep and in dreaming of countries not seen,

  Where loving is easy and no man has been.

  A profound silence succeeded the fading of this ditty—swelling through the emptiness like a wave of black water. Yet instead of drowning me, the effect was to splash me awake, so that suddenly all my senses revived, and my brain concentrated. Everything I had previously done—all my book learning, and in particular my time studying the creatures of the world—appeared to me like a preparation for this moment. I had no need for Natty to wish me good luck. After I had waited a few minutes more, in which I imagined my father taking himself upstairs and falling asleep, I merely touched her on the shoulder and climbed out of the boat. She, in return, said nothing I might have taken with me as comfort—except what I most wanted: “I shall stay here.”

  It is the strangest thing, to stand outside a childhood home and feel unknown to it. In my own case, the sense of division was all the more shocking after the last few hours, in which Natty and I had entertained ourselves with the history of our past lives. When I slipped in through the side door of the house, its familiar curly handle and the squeak of the latch were merely cold facts.

  This feeling of strangeness deepened as I stepped further indoors. The pale stone counter in the taproom, daubed with moonlight; the larder door with its metal grill in the central pane
l; the worn-away hollow in the red bricks of the threshold to the hallway: these were suddenly objects of curiosity, and not the fabric of my existence. I moved on—floated on, I should say, since I felt no more substantial than a wraith from the marshes. Up the narrow stairs. Along the corridor where the faces of huntsmen and hounds and horses regarded me impassively. Down the three steps of which the middle must be avoided because it would creak if stepped on. And here was the door to my father’s room—left ajar—and the sound of his snores rising like bubbles through mud. These would have directed me to my father’s bedside even without the help of a lantern, which he had left guttering on the floor beside his shoes, and which I now silently retrieved.

  As I lifted up this light, a fresh sense of trespass poured through me, because I could not recall the last time I had entered my father’s room. When I had been a child, no doubt, woken by a bad dream and stumbling for comfort. My exile at school in Enfield had brought an end to such visits, not by eradicating the need for them, but by creating a coolness between my father and myself. This grew steadily whenever we lived together during my holidays. He had his work in the taproom, and I had my life on the marshes, and my habits of botanizing and collecting. By the time my school days had ended, and I had become a daily servant in the taproom, my body remained in the Hispaniola but my mind was elsewhere.

  For these reasons, I now found myself looking around his room as inquisitively as a stranger, very grateful for the glow of my candle. My first thought was: my father kept his possessions remarkably neat and tidy. The shirt and trousers he had been wearing that day were folded on a wooden bench, ready to be put on again tomorrow. The single picture on his walls—the sketch of a working vessel entering an estuary under full sail—was hung exactly above the Windsor chair, in which he evidently sat to look through his window at traffic on the river below. A pitcher and ewer stood on a marble-topped table in one corner, their whiteness strengthening the lantern light. All perfectly orderly, all perfectly settled. Like a ship’s cabin, I thought, and not just because I was thinking about the low roof above my head. In a part of my mind, I was already on the high seas.

  At the foot of his bed, standing square and black, and locked with a most ingenious-looking and ancient device, was the chest I had come to open. The chest that had long ago been trundled into the Admiral Benbow with Billy Bones, and had remained there when Billy Bones went to meet his Maker—for my father to redeem when he returned from Treasure Island. In my own childhood, I had been encouraged to venerate this object as though it contained relics that made the grave cloths of our Savior as insignificant as kitchen rags. But in truth it had not been so much the contents that attracted my attention as the thing itself. Running my small hands over its pitted planks, touching the scars in its iron bands, and the initial B burned on the top of it with a hot iron, I felt that I could trace the exact course and drama of the stories my father told me, with a far greater sense of conviction than any of his words engendered. The cannon-smoke of battle still hung around it, along with the gleam of blades, the blood of wicked men, and the glamour of their feuds. When I reached it now, I set down my lantern on the floor and laid my hands flat on the domed lid as if expecting something like human warmth to pass into my fingers.

  I felt nothing but dust and cold—which my father also seemed to think was disappointing, for he suddenly stirred in his sleep, broke off snoring to open and shut his mouth with a succession of loud smacking noises, then resumed his dream. In the course of this disturbance, as his head rolled on the pillow, I saw around his neck the dark string on which was tied the key to the chest.

  Up to this point in my raid, I had told myself that if my father were to wake, I would say that I had come to bid him goodnight, and report myself safely returned from my visit to London. But as I crept forward, and the night winds pressed more loudly around the house, sending unexpected creaks through its timbers, I felt the weight of my actions more heavily. I was about to reach the point where my excuses would run out. The point where I turned from being a prodigal returning, into a prodigal departing.

  So gravely did this thought strike me, I came to a dead halt and stood regarding my father for a full minute, as he lay softly illuminated in his unconsciousness. I examined his face and the hair thinning across his scalp. I saw his lips shake loosely as his breath came in and out. I studied the folds and ridges of his ears, and their long lobes, as if I were poring over a trophy I had brought from the marshes to add to my cabinet of curiosities.

  This was my father. My father, who as a boy had enjoyed a greater adventure than any I thought possible in my own life. My father, who had never lifted a hand against me. My father, who had offered me advantages of schooling and suchlike that he had never known himself. My father, who had kept honorable the memory of my mother. My father, who had raised me in his loneliness, and whose only fault had been to expect hard work and too much loyalty. No doubt if he had not done so, I would have said he was ignoring me! I can honestly say that I had never loved him more than I did in the moment before I betrayed him.

  This might explain why, as my fingers set about the work they were required to do, they appeared not to belong to me but to a stranger who had taken possession of my body. Mercifully, they did not have to be busy for long—because my father was now lying flat on his back, his nightshirt open at the throat, with the string loose around his neck and the key sunk into his right armpit, where it lay half-buried in damp black hairs. Gently I teased it out. Tenderly I felt along the string, which seemed gilded in the yellow lantern light and was warm with the heat of his body. Gladly I found the knot. Deftly I picked at the knot to loosen it …

  And failed. The knot was pulled tight and, having been left undisturbed for many years, had hardened into a solid mass. I knew what I must do next. I also knew that if I delayed for a moment longer I would be overwhelmed by fear, and lose my capacity. It was at this moment the thought of Natty burst into my mind—how the night would be sighing around her, how she would scorn me if I returned to the Spyglass empty-handed. So vividly did she appear to me, in fact, it might almost have been her head that I slid my hand beneath, and lifted. It might also have been her warm throat I brushed with my palm, as I reached for the string and drew it upward, gripping the key between my thumb and forefinger.

  In the middle of this operation my father appeared to stop breathing for a moment, opening his eyes wide and staring directly at me. I stood still, returning his gaze. But whereas my eyes were able to understand what they saw, his were blind—or fixed on some object that lay inside me. For a moment I also held my breath, with the uncomfortable sensation that I was being searched and found wanting. It was the crisis of my visit. I understood that if I dropped the key now, I could return to my old ways. Alternatively, I could proceed—into adventure and danger.

  I do not need to say how I decided, or how quickly I finished my work. As my father closed his eyes again, I slipped the string over his head (which I then laid back gently on the pillow) and stepped away until I was able to crouch down beside the sea chest. Thanks to the lantern, my work was much easier than it would otherwise have been.

  To my surprise, the key entered the lock very smoothly and also turned very easily, with a pleasant heavy click that told me my father had often used it himself, for reasons I did not want to consider—they would have made its contents seem more important to him. The lid opened with an almost silent sigh, and released a faint whiff of tobacco and tar as it rested against the end of the bed. I bent forward as though I were peering into a well, and might at any moment lose my footing and fall headlong.

  Mementos that we collect in the course of our existence are bound to have a value for ourselves that is unaccountable to others. So it was in my father’s treasure chest. Among the objects that I found, and held to the lantern so that I could see them clearly, were a quadrant; a tin canikin; several sticks of tobacco; an old Spanish watch; a pair of compasses mounted on brass; five or six curious West Ind
ian shells; a leather pouch holding coins (which I assumed to be the residue of his share from the island); a loop of brown hair, braided and coiled; a green eyeshade; assorted notebooks, which were filled with columns of numbers, and must have been the business accounts of the Hispaniola; several articles of clothing, including a gray shawl and a pair of matching gloves; another small pouch containing three or four milk teeth; a very handy pistol with a label attached to it, on which a childish hand had written “the weapon used to dispatch Israel Hands”; a sealed envelope on which was written, in the same hand, “the Black Spot, as given to Billy Bones by Blind Pew: do not open”; several newspapers as frail as cobwebs; an empty scabbard; the large fang of a creature, on which had been scratched the image of a ship; and, where I expected it to be, at the very bottom of the chest, a small satchel made of green silk. This had a strap of braided string attached, so that it could be worn around the neck as handily as my father’s key, and was held shut by a ribbon tied in a neat bow.

  I immediately guessed this satchel would contain what I had come for—and I was not disappointed. Indeed, when I lifted the satchel closer to my face, and touched the ribbon that held it shut, the material crumbled into dust, and the sheet of yellow paper inside seemed actually to give itself into my hands, rather than requiring me to remove it. I hurriedly knelt down and held this sheet toward the lantern. As I remember it now, it seems extraordinary that I did not fear my father would awake at any moment, and call me a traitor. But I did not. My good sense, like my conscience, had been entirely consumed by curiosity.

  The map had evidently been very often folded and unfolded in years gone by, and was grimy with the print of many hands. Yet it was still strong, and the drawing sharp. The island was about nine miles long by five across, and had two fine harbors, and a hill in the center marked “the Spyglass.” There were several additions that appeared to be of a later date; but, above all, three crosses of red ink—two in the north part of the island, one in the southwest, and, besides this last, in the same red ink, and in a small neat hand, very different from the tottery characters elsewhere, these words: “Bulk of treasure here.” Over on the back, the same hand had written the further information: