“So that’s it? You’re just a gun for hire, eh? A damned assassin?”
“Not primarily. I was a sailor, mostly, well, to be honest, a smuggler, but everyone was back then. The crown just about strangled any honest shipping business with tariffs and whatnot. But you asked me what I was most proud of in life, what I’d like to be known for. Well, a onetime killer, and I was glad I did it.”
“What was your price? How much is a life worth to you?”
“I did it for a friend. He had saved my hide with a quick loan, not even a loan. He didn’t think I would pay it back, but I found him again once I was flush. Paid him back and more, but he wasn’t the man I knew. Worn, sad, lifeless, no heart left in him. Pried him with drink, and he poured his soul out to me. His sweety had been stolen while he was out to sea. I knew the groom better than he. An odious fellow, blackmailer. I heard enough of the story to recognize the patterns. I knew he had something on her or her father, forced her to marry him.”
“So, you became a murderer to pay off a debt?”
“If my friend hadn’t given me that cash, mate, the people I owed would have had me keelhauled. He saved my life. My conscience didn’t sit well with me just giving him back his money. I owed him more. He gave me my life back; I gave him his.”
“By taking another.”
“Yep.”
“Strange conscience you have. Spilling blood. Truly, you call good evil and evil good.”
“I’ve told you one half. But let me tell you the kind of person this blackmailer was.”
“No better than you. A criminal. Smuggling, blackmailing. It’s all the same.”
“He wasn’t just a blackmailer, you know. The things he did on that farm. I’m no abolitionist, but I felt sorry for his slaves. He whipped them if they did good or ill, whipped them and more. He was a cannibal. No, I’ve seen cannibals. They at least have the excuse of being savages. There needs to be another word for what he was. I didn’t want the girl to know what she’d been eating, what I found in their larder, but I think she guessed. Maybe she knew. Leastways, she helped me cover it up.”
“And this is what you’re proud of?”
“It was the one time in my life I got to play knight errant. Saved a beautiful girl from the clutches of an ogre. It was the only thing I ever did that was right, that wasn’t tainted with selfishness or done from some angle. I went in and killed him. I felt clean.”
“You’re damned if ever a soul was.”
“Don’t I know you? Haven’t we sailed together? Yes, you’ve been there on every voyage, haven’t you? I recognize the face. You were there when I first signed on to this life, when I ran away from home. You were there every step but that one, weren’t you? You’ve been there, easing my sorry excuse for a conscience into every little sin you could imagine, but this one time, it wasn’t you whispering to me, was it? And you can’t stand that, this one good deed in my life. You want me to be ashamed of it. Maybe I am damned, I don’t know, but if I was ever close to heaven, it was in the shedding of blood.”
Tale Told 