Blood Diamond: A Pirate Devlin Novel

by Mark Keating

  But Albany was the only one of them armed and his blade cut short Peter’s path.

  ‘Come on then, fool!’ He stepped back for Peter to consider his steel, his eyes wide and laughing. ‘You’ll not find me with my back to you!’

  The rocking boat drew looks from the others all around and from the Sunday strollers on the street above. Devlin hissed for them to calm, aware that lapses in discretion tied nooses; but the gun had been cocked. Peter Sam came on, the sword only maddening him more.

  Albany drew a circle at Peter’s chest, daring him forward and Peter obliged, his hand protected by a leather sewing palm as he grabbed the point and closed it in his fist.

  Albany tried to tug back the blade only to find he had struck carelessly into an oak tree. Peter Sam twisted the blade and Albany’s wrist, committed in his grip, was wrenched painfully.

  In a fight if you own a man’s wrist you own his entire body; you can angle him to his knees as easily as tumbling a kitten. Albany yelled out in pain as his arm, shoulder and torso bent him to the bottom of the boat as if his spine had left him.

  He looked up at his master holding him at a leash, his twisted, entangled hand unable to let go of his sword’s grip. An enormous fist rose above his head.

  ‘Peter!’

  Devlin’s shout broke Peter’s rage like a spell and he dropped the sword. Albany whined at the bones in his wrist, hated his arm and let his sword fall as the giant stepped over him out of the boat and to the stone walkway. Dandon danced behind him and laughter came from the other boats all around.

  Devlin stood on Albany’s sword and leant down to him. ‘Are you mad? That man will kill you as easily as throwing a rat against a wall and with less thought.’

  Albany looked up hatefully, his good hand holding his wrist. ‘I am not mad! But I begin to suspect the affection you “matelots” have for each other. I think Walpole would be very interested to know what den I have found myself in! In England we still find such acts punishable by death, whatever your colonial instincts, Captain!’

  Devlin ruefully shook his head. ‘I’m for a drink. We are hours away from our aims and you pull this shite.’ He stepped out of the boat to join his men. ‘You can come if you want. You need to drink with Peter at least. That’s how it goes on a ship. No room for grudges. He’s hit me enough times.’

  ‘I will come! If only because I am dressed like a pig and could probably find no other company!’

  ‘Do what you will.’ He went up the steps and trawled through his pockets for his pipe and tobacco. He tapped a stranger for a light. As he sought the flame’s relief with cupped hand he considered his small band wearing the tension of their days like tight boots. How did his Shadow fare? How were a hundred men coping without him to rule them? He had but five to carry and yet dogs would work closer.

  He had to get back. Back to the wood. London, now Paris. A mass of stone and crowds all moving faster than him. No control. No ropes to pull to change things. The endless sea felt small in comparison.

  There was no order in this order. The straight streets, the houses on top of each other, the rush of carriage wheels always rolling somewhere. He understood then that his men had not ended up on the sea. He had not ended up on the sea.

  They had escaped to it.

  Get back to the Shadow, hold it together for one more day. John Law to do his duty and then back to Walpole and the prince. Take his amnesty for the past and then back to the real world.

  He swallowed deeply his Brazilian smoke. His head lightened and his eyes turned misty, and he soon caught up with the others heading to the cabaret, the Image Notre Dame. Tomorrow he would be free again. One more day. And if Law failed, what had he lost? They would be on the sea again and no more hated than the day before.

  The night came too soon for John Law. He dreaded it like the jilted lover looking mournfully out over the city and knowing that somewhere the woman that had been his heart was pulling the chemise from her shoulders for someone else now that the day was done, with every light in every window a reminder of your loneliness.

  Only a warm bottle for company. He resided in a palace that had now become a cell. His cuffs brushed over the glass, a blackness at their ends, his laundry overdue. A whiff arose from his blue velvet waistcoat. Candle smoke and damp. He had neglected being a gentleman, perhaps deliberately, as a small punishment to himself. He drank deep until his throat burned.

  Did he have to wait until the palace was asleep? He looked to his clock. Two porcelain cherubs pointing their arrows to the white face. After ten. The regent and his court were fed and drunk by now. There would be midgets cavorting beneath the table passing their tongues between the ladies and gentlemen; one of them, trussed like a pig, would be laid out naked on the table, an apple in his mouth.

  Law counted Philippe as a friend, as fellow gamblers count themselves, the same as drinking partners measure their allegiance. He knew him as a painter, a sculptor, a composer of operas and did not understand how the debauchery fitted in with these accomplishments. To Philippe there was no division. His power was simply a means to enjoy and develop these better things. Politics just a means to this end. He had created some of the finest art galleries in the world for his people, made public the royal library and funded the Sorbonne university for all who were too poor to attend elsewhere. His desires were only fuel to the notion that life was joy without limits.

  What Law missed, what Law misunderstood, was that these men of royal blood tied themselves to the gods. They were above morals and despised the church built by men. They could trace their line back to heaven. The world needed their breeding or it would cease to be. They were forestalling judgement with their lusts, for if not then the meek would surely inherit the earth. It was a warning to carry on indulging, not a prediction. Every seed sown increased their line, each one a noble angel. Everyone below them was allowed only to till the earth to fill the gods’ bellies.

  Law had not been born to be a king so he did not understand. Philippe admired his genius for numbers and balance that had temporarily restored France to greatness but for all his formulae the Scotsman was still only a broken dog shivering with raised paw for approval. Philippe had raped his paper bank of its coin but even he had been dismayed at the number of nobles now plundering the vaults and making for Switzerland and Belgium. The dismal end lay only a few suppers away.

  Law threw another brown glass of liquor down his neck. So I owe him nothing, he confirmed to himself. He has ruined my schemes with orgies and diamonds.

  He put down his glass. Enough courage. He looked again at the clock and threw his wig to his bed, then shoved his hand through the crust of the pie that Devlin had given him, his probing hand as urgent as the Indian slave’s who had first plucked the real stone from the walls of the Parteal mine. And with the same slave’s hope he gazed upon it as it sucked free from the rancid meat and gravy. He gave it a wipe of linen and spit. It had been years since he had first seen and brokered it to the duke for Pitt, and this replica looked just as magnificent. Clear and hard. Sitting heavy in his palm like a stone. Just a stone.

  Amused he watched his beating heart make his waistcoat tremble. Might it fail before he had a chance to complete his task? Then his door was open and with a shuttered lantern in his hand he crept into the corridor without another thought.

  He could not remember the long walk to the regent’s study. The dark passages still held lingering smoke. The piss-boys had disappeared and he heard only distant laughter and violins’ notes falling from high above, the musicians wearing blindfolds so they could not report who or what they had seen. He could be caught at any moment, but only by a man dressed as a satyr chasing a giggling maiden down the stairs. Such was the night in the Palais Royale, the guards as dumb as the musicians were blind.

  He padded on, respectfully quiet for the hour but with the confidence of one who belonged in these halls. And then the doors, and the gold handle softly turned. He stepped into a darker world, unaware of the
eyes that had followed him and still observed him surreptitiously. Then the watcher moved away, on to the rooms upstairs to report what he had seen.

  Law opened the shutters on his lantern, but still the shadows outweighed the dim light. He placed it down and sought a stronger source.

  Above, Philippe had gathered twelve of the prettiest girls from the opera, all now enjoying the attentions of his libertins de bonne compagnie. Tokay and champagne, a course of the feast in themselves, poured directly from bottles into the faces of the naked young ladies, who laughed and spluttered and pretended to struggle as the dwarves dressed in grapes and laurels tied their wrists and ankles to their chairs under his guests’ slavering gaze.

  Philippe, distracted, uninterested in the sights around his table, tapped a finger against his cheek. His conversation had been melancholy this supper, his appetite subdued, his eye glassy and resting on the empty chair beside him – the chair that no-one spoke of any more.

  He had taken his usual cup of chocolate for luncheon, its energy rewarding and luxurious but light enough that he could indulge in his suppers that his mother chided him for again and again: three animals every evening and two hundred bottles of wine a week for his guests, enough to bury Bacchus and she cried and begged him to be bled more to purge his vices.

  But tonight his attention flitted between the chair and the door behind which the blindfolded musicians played in their anteroom. His heart fell when the man he had sent to spy on John Law covered his eyes as he bowed into the room and leant to Philippe’s ear.

  Philippe excused himself at the news and swept from the room with three guards at his heels. He waited until he had reached the stair to fold his banyan tight and hold out his hand for a pistol. It was slipped into his hand and he looked down at its crudity of wood and steel. He had never felt anything colder.

  He regretted his slippers that made his walk seem clumsy against the proficient stride of the guards at his side. He had never visited his study in the night, had never noticed how wide the passage was now that it was empty, how silent his court when the glory departed with the sun.

  His white door was one he had seen a thousand times, but now it appeared with some disease upon its handle. He watched his hand reach out, then draw back to palm his pistol’s cock. He nodded to one of his men to open the door instead, as if in his mind there was something treacherous in opening it himself. It pushed in, brightness bathing them all, and Philippe went through, his pistol raised.

  His hand shielded his eyes to blank out the blinding white light from the laterna magica shining off the far wall. An image of three compromised couples shone from the white plaster wall. The guards at his back gaped at the scene and Philippe, his pistol forgotten, laughed riotously at the fumbling figure of Law adjusting himself hurriedly in a chair beside the machine.

  Law stood and his breeches fell as he began to protest at the intrusion. Sparing him his shame, Philippe shooed the guards from the room with his laughter and handed one of them his pistol.

  He turned back to face Law as he pulled up his breeches with Scottish curses that needed no translation. Philippe wiped tears from his eyes and steadied himself against a table.

  ‘Oh, Lass!’ he cried. ‘And here I thought you almost dead!’ He pushed a fist against his mouth as a choking belch caught his throat. ‘What would your wife say, Lass?’ he began to fold over, his guffaws bringing him back up. ‘I thought you disapproved of my magic light!’

  Law straightened himself and stood in front of the lantern’s beam, where the men and women now rippled across his blouse. He coughed a hand to his mouth. ‘My wife is away. A man grows lonely, Milord.’

  Philippe could barely speak and his voice squeaked awkwardly. ‘Oh, I know, Lass! I know! But have I not invited you upstairs enough?’

  ‘I do not crave infidelity, Milord.’

  Philippe staggered over to his friend, clapped his hands on his shoulders and shook him thankfully. ‘No, Lass. No you do not. You are the better of us all. Especially those who thought ill of you.’ Slowly he lowered the lever that doused the candle inside the machine and the room darkened again, hiding the relief on the regent’s face.

  Law checked his buttons once more. ‘Well, with Milord’s permission, I should like to retire back to my apartments. I have humiliated myself enough for one evening, I feel.’

  Philippe lovingly patted Law’s shoulder and wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. Then his eyes widened in horror at the sight of his chair, that had been pulled back from his desk. His back straightened instantly.

  ‘One moment, Lass,’ his tone reverted to the man who commanded France. ‘One moment.’ He went around his desk, his hands grasping the shoulders of the gold and green fauteuil chair.

  Law turned. ‘Milord?’

  Philippe hesitated, stood like a statue beside the chair and his desk, his head lowered. ‘You have forgotten one thing, Lass.’

  Law resisted the pull of his feet toward the door. Another two feet and he would have been in the corridor and away to his rooms. But fortune had already blessed him twice: once when he had heard their approach in the hall without, and twice because it was only out of necessity on entering that he had decided to use the brightest light source in the room – the magic lantern. He held his breath as Philippe raised his head and silently prayed for a third stroke of luck.

  ‘You forget your lamp.’ Philippe indicated Law’s lantern on the corner of the desk. ‘It is dark out there, my friend.’

  Law berated his foolishness too theatrically, with a slap to his forehead. He retrieved his lamp. ‘Would you wish to accompany me, Milord?’

  Philippe shook his head slowly. ‘I have my guards. Goodnight, Lass.’ He waited until Law had reached the door, watched his hand grip the handle then spoke slowly, painfully.

  ‘Why, Lass?’ his voice sounded regretful. He repeated the question when Law looked back. ‘Why?’

  ‘Milord?’ Law raised his lamp as if peering into a mine, half his face illuminated.

  Philippe said nothing and ran his hands beneath his chair. He experienced the strangest rush of blood to his head as he felt the bag still resting in its web. His fingers felt the familiar square shape but still he needed to see. He pulled the bag free and rose up with the diamond in his hand, no longer caring if Law saw it or not. Law gasped at the sight of the diamond as naturally as any man.

  Philippe caressed the stone, his shame reflecting from its surface. ‘Nothing, Lass. Nothing.’ He ran the stone between his fingers, seeing deep within it as Devlin had done, as all had done; the diamond fed on the soul like a succubus if one looked at it for too long.

  ‘I begin to feel that sometimes I judge every man by my own woes. Goodnight, my friend.’

  The bag swallowed up the stone again and he buried the bag in his robe’s pocket as Law left hurriedly, the guards brushing past him into the room.

  ‘Leave me!’ Philippe barked and they bowed out again to wait for his word.

  The closed door and the absence of Law’s lamp left him alone in the darkened study. He went to a long window and slipped aside the curtain to let some of the lamplight of Paris fall in.

  He should not be alone now. He had guests to attend to; the guards were waiting to escort him back. But the diamond and his misjudgement of Law had reminded him of his cursed life since its acquisition.

  He pulled from his other pocket the small oil of her, the Duchesse de Berry, his Marie-Louise, Marie-Louise with the little mouth, and let her glow in the soft light.

  Upstairs was the empty chair: a place for her always at his fêtes. It had been over a year since her death and that of the unborn child. He brushed a tear from the glass surface of the miniature with his cheek and whimpered for her forgiveness, so that it looked as if the crystal might break under his clumsy hands.

  He had found the romance of the blood that surrounded the diamond amusing when Law had first told him the tale and had laughed at Pitt’s hiding like a rat until it had been s
old.

  Those stories had bargained Pitt to a lower price but Philippe himself had found no price higher. The pitch of his sorrow now was unseemly for the Regent of France and the guards in the passage moved away from the door, dutifully refusing to hear the muffled lament. From above drifted down the sounds of squeals and laughter, the string quartet stimulating romance, and these distracted the soldiers enough from the sound of weeping.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Monday

  The second week

  Devlin made his way back to Law’s office in the Rue de Quincampoix. He walked stiffly; the nights aboard the small ship had him rubbing his bones against each other. Like his men he was weary of it and had begun to long for his cot and cabin. He missed his stern windows that rolled the clouds up and down as he ate, whose glass he could touch and almost predict the next day’s weather. If Law had succeeded, he would be back in his ship’s embrace soon enough.

  He had not continued the pretence of the baker and just wore the honest sailor slops. Nobody paid him any mind as he cut through the swathes of Parisians fighting for shares in the streets.

  Some investors had worked out a perfect plan to access the plethora of agents. They would line up their carriages like stepping stones from one side to the other and walk between them without ever having to touch the ground, often doubling their money from seat to seat, trading with their acquaintances before the ink had dried.

  Devlin kept his head low as he elbowed his way through. Law’s door was invisible against the throng and he had to check the walls and shutters above for some plaque to confirm that he had reached the spot that had been so quiet yesterday.

  Fortunate then that Law had been keeping watch for him from his open window and called down to the tanned face so distinctive amidst the white wigs. Devlin looked up, the two of them sharing a friendly recognition out of place with their conspiracy; then they became solemn again as they remembered.