Port Royal sinks — the drowned clue

The morning is cloudless. The harbour is full. The town has, in its sixty-two years of operation as the Brethren’s principal Caribbean base, become the wickedest city in the New World — the phrase that the chroniclers will, two generations from now, settle on as if it had been their invention.

The Brethren captain is in the safe-house on Lime Street. He has just finished his coffee. The recovery team is at the dock. They have a small boat. The boat is rigged for a half-day’s row to the cay.

The plan is straightforward. The captain has held the fragment for seven years; he has, for the last eleven months, been receiving word that his line of safe-keeping is no longer secure. He has decided that the fragment goes down — under the cay, in a sealed box, under enough sand and rubble that no diver of any plausible 17th-century capacity can recover it. He has named four men he trusts. The four men are at the dock. The morning is cloudless.

At eleven forty-three the earth shakes.

The shake is not localised. The shake is the entire eastern Caribbean. It runs along a fault the Caribbean plate’s modern instruments will identify, three centuries from this morning, as the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault zone. The shake’s first thirty seconds are vertical; the next ten are sideways; the last twelve are something the seismic record has no name for.

The cay sinks completely. Not slowly — instantly. The harbour bottom drops two metres. Where the cay had been there is now eleven metres of water. The fragment goes down with it.

The four men at the dock are killed by the tsunami’s first wave. They have not yet stepped off the dock. The boat is gone.

The captain is in the safe-house when the upper storey collapses on him. He survives the day. He dies two weeks later of a wound he cannot reach. He does not name a successor.

The ledger that records the cay’s location survives. It is in a sealed wrap, in a fitted lining of the captain’s writing-case, which is in the cellar of the safe-house, which has not collapsed. A Bridgetown merchant — a man who has had a working financial relationship with the captain for nine years — collects the writing-case on a trip to Port Royal in late August. He takes the case to Bridgetown. He passes the case, in 1714, to a cousin who is sailing to Philadelphia.

The Founder of Book Eight will, in the late 1700s, carry the same ledger ashore inside the cover-binding of a Bible the customs officers will not open.

The fragment is, in 1692, lost.

The fragment is, in 2026, recovered.

Iris Lettsome and Kwame Cudjoe will not be at Port Royal during Book 2; the recovery is done by an underwater team Vilar’s old channel quietly pays for. But the Brethren-hidden fragment that surfaces from the Port Royal mud in Book 2 is the same fragment the Brethren captain put down on the morning of 7 June 1692.

The pale man stands at the seawall that morning, watching the cay vanish.

He has been at every closing morning of every era of the chain so far.

He has, by his own count, four hundred and thirty-four years more to wait before the line reads what was put down in the harbour mud this Sunday.

He waits.

The harbour fills with the dead.

The line continues underwater.