Blood Diamond: A Pirate Devlin Novel

by Mark Keating

  Peter Sam looked down to Albany cradling Dandon and missed the shot.

  Devlin never heard the crack that slammed a hot lead ball into his back and kicked him over. He was on his knees, his spine on fire, his eyes locked on Trouin soundlessly screaming at his men.

  ‘Not this way!’ Trouin bellowed at his officers. ‘Not this way!’ He swept his hand across all their protests and fell to his knee before Devlin and bowed as the pirate collapsed to the deck, a growing black stain across his shirt.

  Peter Sam pushed Albany away from Dandon, the soldiers forming a circle of pointed muskets around them. He held Dandon and looked into his draining face.

  Dandon coughed. ‘No blood! That is to the good. The captain, Peter. He is shot.’

  ‘I’ll take care of that. You are hurt bad, popinjay.’ Peter could feel the warmth spreading over the arm holding Dandon’s body.

  ‘True, Peter, but as Bartin has it: I am hurt but I am not slain. I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile and then I’ll rise and fight again. Have no fear.’

  Peter Sam held him tighter as Dandon began to shake. ‘Do you still not know when to shut up, ponce?’

  Peter Sam laid Dandon down gently and looked at his fallen captain. And then Peter Sam looked across the deck at Trouin.

  And then Peter Sam stood up.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Trouin could feel the heat of the big man’s fury burning its way towards him. Officers drew pistols and the marines cocked their muskets and stayed Peter Sam’s path with their bayonets, his scorn and anger rattling them as still he came on.

  Control of the fo’c’sle shrunk as the pirates cursed and spat, pulled against their chains, the musketeers heaving them back with braced guns.

  This was not how Trouin had seen the course of the day. He had hoped to gain the pirate’s respect – at least, as much as the caged could respect their captors. Now their captain had been cheated. He had given up the ship and Trouin knew how that must have felt inside him.

  And all this by his men, against his omnipotent word, when the pirate had only shown him dignity and approbation.

  Peter Sam brushed the bayonets aside and Trouin waved them back further and looked up into the face of a man wronged and all the more dangerous for it.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘You would be right to strike me down but for now and for the best I would ask you allow me to help tend to these men. I swear to you that the guilty will be punished.’ He dared to touch the huge bare arm and Peter looked down at the hand upon him. ‘Help me to help them. I have a surgeon on my ship. I shall send for him.’ His officers began to protest, their pistols still on the bulk of the man in leather. Before he could reprimand them a weak voice called from the deck behind.

  ‘No need!’ Dandon, leaning against Hugh, limped forward. ‘There is no time. He has a doctor. He has . . . me.’ He gulped, his throat dry and this simple action ached. ‘An egregious barber-surgeon but . . .’ he slumped and Hugh hoisted him up. ‘But at least that title has the convenience that I can bandage the slips of my blade as I shave, Milord.’

  They were before Peter and Trouin now. ‘Let him help,’ Dandon pleaded to Peter. ‘Into the cabin with our boy.’

  Trouin watched the young man sweat and fade before him, watched his eyes smart and blink. ‘You will need a surgeon for yourself, sir.’

  ‘I believe I heard you were to send for your own. That will do for me but first my friend is dying, and I would not wish to live if that matter goes further, sir.’

  Trouin and Peter Sam carried the limp body of the pirate to the table in the cabin and fetched the shargreen etui of ivory-hilted probes and scissors that Dandon called for and even made way for the filthy Hugh Harris to slip into the cabin.

  Trouin studied them. These pirates. Dandon, Peter Sam and Hugh. The gentleman, Albany, he observed, did not join them as water was fetched from the scuttlebutt and Devlin’s shirt was cut away and his back sponged clean. Hugh helped Dandon’s hand while Peter Sam held his captain fast.

  Trouin backed away as if he had violated some ancient ritual and thought of his own past. The corsair at sea at sixteen, the brotherhood and adventure, the time when he had been loved; surely it was this memory that had led to taking his cutlass off the wall.

  This should have all been a facile matter. Take a pirate ship. An enemy of mankind. Nothing but good could come of it for him and his men. He watched Devlin flinch awake. For a moment, Trouin’s eyes met the pirate’s before they closed again. He looked anywhere else but at the tableau before him, unable as he was to hide the chagrin and envy he felt for these brothers.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Devlin awoke in the night, the cold cobalt light running through the stern windows of the cabin inched out the familiar room gradually like an oil-colour half finished. Still flat on the table he heaved painfully onto an elbow, a stabbing across his back warning him that that was as far as he would be able to move. A creak sounded from one corner as fingers pulled open the shutters on a lantern, allowing out a flood of amber light and revealing Trouin’s seated form.

  ‘You are alive and awake, Captain. I am pleased to see it.’

  Devlin tentatively put his hand to his wound, felt the tight straps of linen wrapped around him – his shirt torn up. Defiantly he sat with clenched jaw. He would not show Trouin his agony. A snore erupted from nearby and he twisted to the familiar noise and reassuring lump of Peter Sam in repose.

  ‘He has not left your side. It is only in the last hour that he has slept and only then when I feigned sleep myself.’ Trouin stood and carried a crock jug of water to the table. ‘You will be thirsty.’

  Devlin took the jug, ‘I’m starving, I know that much.’

  ‘That is to the good. Your body wishes to live.’ Trouin stepped back. ‘However, Captain, I do not know how aware you were that it was your man Dandon who removed your bullet. He was severely wounded himself. Also by my men, I am ashamed to say.’

  Devlin drank. His mind cleared. Dandon was absent from the room. ‘Where is he?’ His voice betrayed his worst fear.

  Trouin lowered his eyes then jumped at the speed of the hand that grabbed him.

  ‘Where is he?’ Devlin snarled as Peter Sam snuffled awake at the sudden movement.

  Trouin plucked his shirt free. ‘He is below. He is bad but alive.’ He related how he had witnessed Dandon stagger and faint but never pause until the lead ball was free and Hugh had stitched and bandaged the wound. At which point, in relief, Dandon fell to the floor in his own pool of blood.

  ‘Your men stabbed him. Shot me. Is that the spirit of Bretons now?’

  Trouin turned away. ‘I know not what to say, Captain. No man has come forward to confess to either crime,’ he spun back. ‘And I cannot believe that I am speaking with a pirate about crimes committed against him.’

  ‘Aye,’ Devlin swung off the table, found he could stand and waved Peter away as he came forward to help. ‘You’ve won anyways.’

  Trouin watched him limp to the locker for a new shirt. That very morning he had seen the pirate change from one set of clothes to another. Now, somehow in a different world, it was as if watching him change from one man to another. A harder man, and not like the officers of his own: they were chiselled out of marble, yes, but their notions of honour were seemingly folded out of paper. Nobles, all of them. And Trouin despite the king’s blessing was still not one of them.

  On Louis’s death they had taken away Trouin’s sea and sequestered him in Calais’s medieval fort. Year after year he had stood before archbishops and the court and they had steepled their fingers across their chests and shaken their heads at granting their most successful captain a uniform.

  ‘It cannot be done, Your Majesty. He is not of the blood. It would be an offence to God.’

  He watched the new shirt’s back already begin to stick to Devlin’s wound through his dressings. Trouin had also bled time and again for other men. He had been a corsair, a privateer for his countr
y, a pirate to their enemies. This young man was too similar. He had pictured a fat, rolling, toothless drunkard chancing his way across the sea. Instead he had met a man who offered a duel to save the lives of his men and offer up himself win or lose.

  Peter Sam disappeared to find food. The room did not need his words on the matter. His captain lived for now and that would do. Tomorrow they may well want for today. But tomorrow mattered less and these men needed to talk.

  Trouin picked up the papers that referred to the pirate. There was a pile but he had seen nothing in them that told him of the man and his men. He wondered how his own name yellowed in the tomes of his enemies and what history would make of his final acts. An old flabby fool embarrassing his country. His men of the new regime deciding above him to end his duel of honour with a bullet to the back of a mere pirate no less, to save his dignity. He dropped the papers onto the blood-stained table.

  ‘You know we have not shaped a course? We are still anchored near my shores, near your shores. You are still only a day away from your goal as it was.’

  Something of the pirate returned to Devlin. He stood straighter. The world began to turn again.

  Trouin saw the change. ‘This diamond, this “Regent”, it cost my country greatly at a time when she could ill-afford it. You stole it under arms?’

  ‘I replaced it with its likeness. The same copy used to barter its sale in the first place. It is hoped that no-one will notice.’

  ‘So if I return that which is not missed to a man who is not my king and knows me only as the guardian of an old citadel. What rewards can I expect?’

  ‘If you take me in, take my story as true, reveal the diamond as replaced, you’ll be a hero. You’d have captured me when no-else has laid a hand.’

  ‘That may well be a great thing.’ Trouin spoke with the conviction of a man justifying his taxes. ‘You wish to see your friend. I can see it.’ He held out his hand. ‘I will help you to him.’

  Devlin took the hand, and two men who had fought and clashed hours before linked arms and inched from the cabin to the deck below. Peter Sam returned, his bowl of stew covered with a muslin cloth. He watched Trouin half carry Devlin down the companion stair, cradling him with every painful step. He put the bowl on the table and followed faithfully.

  It was an hour or so before dawn. Half the ship lay asleep. A blue crack between the sea and the sky heralded the sun, heralded the end of the pirates’ last day of freedom. After seeing Dandon alive and sleeping Trouin walked Devlin to the expanse between the shrouds along the gangway, away from any curious ears of those stationed over the companions fore and aft.

  The September night’s dew on the tarred ropes and wood gave their world a sheen that it rarely possessed. A silver edge, crisp and new, unnatural as a dream. The pirate thought that at any minute he would be woken by Dog-Leg with a cup of pea-berry coffee and be back in the warmth of the Caribbean. Wished it so.

  ‘You will die if I bring you into Brest.’ Trouin snapped Devlin from his slumber. Devlin was unfocused; his wound needed rest and willed him to lie down. He leant on the gunwale barely listening to Trouin and looked only at the dawn.

  ‘If you make it to Paris you will be broken on the wheel.’ The pirate showed no concern. Trouin shivered at the morning. He came closer. ‘Pirate? If you had the diamond in your grasp, why did you not sail off and damn them all? Why risk any of this? You do not seem to be afraid of any of us in this world.’

  Trouin thought he had seen a prodigal grin slant across the lowered face, but the light was dim and it might have only been the pain.

  Devlin thought of Valentim Mendes, the governor of the Verdes whose ship he had stolen, whose hand he had exploded from his body, who had died beside him when they stood together – the guilt still unassuaged, a guilt that did not belong in a pirate’s slender conscience.

  ‘Maybe I wanted to do something right. Maybe I wanted to fail.’ He looked at the commodore. ‘I believed you would kill me. And from you that would have been a grand death. I never thought in my life I would have traded words with a man such as you. And now I feel no gratitude in being alive.’

  Around them the dark receded, little by little the mile around the Shadow again showed the pool of ships around them, Trouin’s two at their stern. Devlin lay anchored between failure and success. A day away from England. He had almost made it.

  Trouin took a deep breath, held it, tasting the sea as other men might savour the perfume of their infant’s hair.

  ‘I have made a decision, pirate. It is not the right decision, but it will do. If you want we could make an agreement like the peasants that they regard us as. For we are not gentlemen as they measure them.’

  Devlin straightened. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Our countries do not need diamonds to save them. They need their people. My final glory should not be the tale of how my men shot my foe in the back to save my skin from a duel I had granted. Nor that I killed unarmed men who had given their acquiescence and parole. And have ungrateful lieutenants pleasure themselves on the consequences.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘I cannot find peace with such an end. Nor can I give a false king satisfaction who has made it his ambition to bring down my own countrymen with contrived conspiracies. He has executed many Bretons to keep his nobles and his own back safe from questioning. In wronging you I have wronged myself and yet there is not one man in my command who would understand this.’

  ‘I understand.’ Devlin’s heart beat hard. ‘Suppose I offer that none will profit from this diamond? My word on the bodies of my dead.’

  ‘You could hurt them?’

  ‘I could take the diamond from them. They only hurt in their purses.’

  ‘And how do I know that you will keep your word? I could take this diamond myself, throw it to the sea, that would end them all just as surely.’

  ‘Aye, but where would be the glory in that? Better to see their faces through me. I’ll send it back to the earth in front of them. When it falls even Philippe will hear the crash of it. I promise you that.’ He watched the sun flash its first light over the horizon. ‘And I promise you I will see it in their eyes. And you will hear it fall.’

  Trouin watched the rising sun along with him. ‘I should like to hear that sound.’ He laid a finger to the pirate’s chest. ‘But we will agree many things first if I am to give you back your ship.’

  Devlin took Trouin’s arm, too pained to stand on his own. ‘You were to show me Albany’s sword.’

  Two of his officers watched their commodore hobble the pirate along the gangway and exchanged a look. They would need orders soon but needed first to decide who should stay and breakfast on the pirate’s offal and who should row back to their own hams and coops. Their commodore obviously had chosen the biscuits and rancid gravy of his youth.

  Chapter Thirty

  Albany was tied to the others below. He had slept awkwardly and now shifted awake to find that his situation had not improved. Their guards rested against their muskets or sat on barrels and grumbled back and forth about how they would be the last to eat.

  The morning light came through the main hatch and already the heat began to ferment. Albany’s haunches were asleep and he shuffled against the pirate body beside him. Dan Teague elbowed him off.

  Albany elbowed back. Dan’s patience was at an end. He had seen Hugh Harris and Peter Sam ascend and itched to be with them. He could smell the powder from the magazine’s hemp curtain, knew that only feet away were pistols and steel. He could taste it, and these men that dared to lord it over him were already dead. Dead for what they had done to Bill. His cold thoughts were turned aside by Albany still wriggling.

  ‘Will you stop, ponce!’

  ‘I cannot! My arse is numb from a night of this. I shall be grateful when we move off for a properly appointed gaol!’

  Dan noticed then that the ship had not yet begun to stir. They were still anchored and that was for the good. For days he had been tied with his brother
s. They had been led to the head in groups of six, fed in groups of six, and had quickly surmised that their guards had little grasp of English let alone the almost gypsy language that the pirates shared.

  A plan of sorts had been made and been made easier once the guards believed that the men had accepted their fate. The soldiers had checked their bonds less often as one day tumbled dully into another and their charges only yelled for food and drink and cursed their mothers more mildly than before.

  Dan Teague and the others had only to wait, to bide time until their clever captain and Peter Sam returned. And now that had happened, and Hugh Harris when he had come back aboard had sidled close to his mate Dan Teague and slipped a gully into his shirt.

  Dan showed his yellow teeth to one of the moustached guards who returned the grin before remembering his duty and put on his sullen look again. But both of them started as the crack of a gun echoed over the ship and the guards jumped and snapped at their muskets.

  ‘Oh, and what is this now?’ howled Albany.

  ‘About fucking time!’ Dan threw his loosened bonds free along with six of the others and went for his knife. ‘I’m dying for a piss!’

  ‘Back!’ Devlin loosed a pistol shot over the heads of the white-coats who had leapt forward as he blazed from the cabin. He held Albany’s sword tight across Trouin’s throat. He dropped the smoking pistol and before it hit the deck his own left-locked brute replaced it. ‘Back, or I’ll slit his throat and shoot you for looking!’

  Peter Sam and Hugh Harris were at the foremast. They needed no word. They cracked the noses of the nearest marines and covered the rest with their snatched muskets before anyone could move and even before the bodies had fallen. This was their trade, the thing they did well, and the marines had heard enough bloodstained stories to look aft for more responsible men.

  Trouin’s officers cocked pistols and dragged out rapiers, and Trouin saw in their wide eyes that they had decided that the pirate’s desperation would be short-lived. There were only three of them left aboard now. He had advised Devlin as they conspired in the cabin that the others would leave to breakfast with their own men, so that now would be the time to take the ship.