by Mark Keating
'Honestly glad to have met you, Captain Vane.' Devlin smiled and bowed slightly.
'Aye, lad. Take care. Don't bow to no pardon now. They just wants to own everybody.'
'I’ll be my own keeper, Captain Vane.'
They left the tavern leaving no remark or following stare. As if no one cared that they had ever entered.
The word 'crone' could have been created for her. She stooped as if perpetuity had condemned her to forever look for her food from the droppings of others.
She groped her way around the dark wooden shack, her black, shapeless gown hanging from hollow shoulders dappled with stains and flour, her head half hidden by a black bonnet tied under her chin so tight that the skin of her wizened neck draped over the once elegant bow like a bulldog's jowls.
Devlin sat on a spindly chair older than himself that complained every time he breathed in the stale tobacco air. He tried to smile each time the old lady flashed a grey, watery glance towards him. At his smile she giggled breathlessly, scurrying away, her lungs gurgling with glee and pleurisy.
Peter Sam stood leaning against the sloping door frame, picking his fingernails with a small piece of silver cutlery that he could find no other purpose for. He spoke impatiently.
'Come on, old woman!' he growled. 'We have no time for this!'
'Oh, is that so, Peter Sam?' She stopped in her crablike scuttling. 'And much do you know about time, I shouldn't wonder.' She resumed her search amongst the candles and the bottles muttering about Peter Sam's red beard and aluding to her own, unseen particulars.
'Ah, this be a good one!' she exclaimed, producing a yard or so of calico from a shelf low enough for her reach and slapping it down in front of Devlin with surprising alacrity.
'Won't go grey for many a year. Though you be dead by then, of course!' Again her gasping laugh filled the room. 'Now what do you want from this white pattern, "Captain" Devlin? Don't worry about the black, I got plenty of black, just tell me what you wants on it.'
Devlin had thought a little on the subject. Peter Sam had suggested the importance of a new standard, as it was naturally bad luck to sail under the flag of a dead man.
'I should like a skull, madam. A grinning skull. Planted in the middle of a compass rose. Crude as you like, but quite apparent as to what it is.' He paused and looked behind him to Peter Sam, who continued to pick at his nails, his gaze lowered. 'And two crossed pistols beneath. Bone pistols. Crossed, mind, not on top of each other. That'll do, madam.'
'Oh, that'll do, will it, Captain Devlin? That'll do?' She tried to smile, the soot-lined face cracked like tree bark. 'Compass rose, he says. How many points do you want? says I. How many hands do you think I have? says I.'
'Just the semblance of a compass will do, madam. And crossed pistols, please. If you'd be so kind.' Devlin smiled warmly and touched her cold, bony hand. He stood as he spoke. 'Two flags by the morrow. Two bottles of brandy.'
She scuttled away again. 'One flag. Two bottles. Find a Jew on board to make your other. Now leave me, Peter Sam and Patrick Devlin. You'll have your flag. Much good it'll do you!' She cackled away, a needle already appearing in her twig-like grasp, her back turned, their audience over.
'Tomorrow, then, widow.' Devlin bowed and retreated, rapping Peter Sam's chest as he stepped out through the door and into the afternoon sun. He was glad to be free of the rank air of the dilapidated hut.
"Tis strange that,' mused Peter Sam. He joined Devlin's side as they strolled back down into the town from the high wooded hill where the old woman lived.
'What be that, then, Peter?' Devlin asked. For the first time in months, he felt like a young man rather than a weather- beaten sailor, the Caribbean sun warming his damp Irish bones.
'She called you "Patrick Devlin".'
'Well, so now, what be the harm in that?'
'I never called you Patrick. And I'm sure you never did, Cap'n.'
Devlin looked back to the shack, half expecting it to have vanished magically.
'I think you be right, Peter. She knew me.'
'Aye. Don't be too enamoured by that, Patrick. Fame is the beginning of the end.'
Devlin stopped and faced the big man. 'You still have issues with me, Peter?' His words gentle.
Peter Sam looked away as he spoke. 'I have a fair wealth, Cap'n. If I comes across a man with luck and a plan to make me more so, I have no bones against accounting with him awhile.' He looked back at his captain. 'And hell help the man who gets in his way.'
The dust grew around them as they paced down the hill, Devlin's rakish grin growing ever wider.
'The Porker's End' was the most salubrious of the brothels on Providence. Several of the Lucy's crew sat at the two round tables, their insides warmed with rum and their laps warm with the closeness of dark, thin, flowing-haired ladies.
A stool flew back with a crash, shattering the happy mood and silencing the hands of the jolly fiddlers. Dan Teague had sprung from his brethren's table and slammed a yellow-coated, sniggering stranger to the wall, his dirk pressing to the man's throat as he spoke.
'And what,' Dan snarled to the goatee-bearded, finely dressed young man, 'is so amusing about my choice of whore?'
Dan had singled out one of the few white women in the place who had seemingly spent most of her formative years singling out the cream and jam from whatever house she had run from.
The choice had amused the young man in the plumed yellow hat, for Dan was a scrawny man; still, the fellow had been surprised by his alarming vigour, and to find himself against the grimy stone wall, only imagining what its slime was doing to his gold silk justaucorps.
'It's not sport, my friend, I assure you.' The young man squirmed, grinning through dirty teeth, his two front ones capped with dull gold, his breath reeking of rum. 'I am Annie's doctor, so to speak. That is to say, I am indeed her physician. And as such I was picturing the conjoining of your rapturous forms and was wondering which one of your fine friends would volunteer to fish you out' - pause - 'mate.'
His voice was Virginian, but infected by the slang and diction of a thousand travellers. Dan's eyes moved back and forth across the man's face, trying to read a threat, finding nothing but amusement behind the eyes. Dan broke into a wicked laugh, removing the blade. The tables returned to their previous jovial form.
'You may have a thought there, mate, sure enough!' He slapped the fellow's shoulder and resumed his seat. 'A doctor, you say? What type of doctor?' He gestured for the man to join them at their table. The young man straightened his clothes with a tug and a brush of his palm, and sat down, leaving enough space between the edge of the table and himself, which he judged to be a sword-thrust away from his companions.
'A physician who has lost his way, sir.' He poured himself a watery rum into a pewter mug. 'I apply my time here' - he indicated their surroundings with a wave of his hand and a roll of his eyes - 'scraping and bursting my way through the greasy capons that frequent this establishment. Present company excluded, gentlemen.' He sipped at his rum, his eyes closed. Placing the mug down with a satisfied sigh, he wiped the amber liquid from his moustache and continued, 'For the reward of a straw mattress and a noggin of rum, I attend to all the ladies of this palace.'
This remark brought admiring leers and growls from his company. 'Oh, indeed, believe me, gentlemen, there is nothing that you will see tonight that I have not, a thousand times over. And all the putrid colours of the rainbow.'
'So you be a pox doctor, then, mate?' Sam Morwell asked.
'Aye. I am at the centre of the mark of civilisation. There are colleagues of mine who would sell their souls for such a wealth of subject and project that befalls me. So I must be truly blessed.' He drank again.
'Ho!' Dan laughed. 'You be touched for a doctor, that's for sure! What be you called, mate?'
'What so, indeed?' he said, leaning his head on his fist and staring into the candle flame dancing from the neck of a green bottle in the centre of the table. As if speaking to himself, his ga
ze became cloudy and he muttered, 'You may call me Dandon, gentlemen. That will do.'
At first appraisal, Dandon was a fine figure in his golden brocade coat and yellow wide-brimmed feathered hat. Closer inspection in the candlelight showed the worn pattern and frayed hem of the coat, the dust and grime upon the brim of his hat. His buckled shoes were torn and thin, his stockings and breeches far from white, the breeches particularly unpleasantly stained.
His dark face had tight, handsome features with charming eyes that had however become sallow with the drink that had claimed his future.
'Dandon?' Dan Teague was curious. 'Where be that from, then?'
'It is not my original name, to be sure, sir.' He stretched his neck towards a half-eaten chicken on a pewter charger. 'If you were to avail me some use of that small hen, I would be willing to share the peculiarities of its origins, sir. By that I mean my name, not the hen.'
Dan pushed the charger accompanied by a bone-handled gully towards the young man. Dandon happily began to relate the story that had brought him to the pirate haven.
Three years previously, he had been subsisting, barely, as an apothecary's assistant in Bath Towne, North Carolina. He spent his quiet days mixing remedies and poring over secondhand medical journals fooling himself that such a practice would substitute for real medical training and would catapult him into the comparatively wealthy world of medicine.
Amongst the jars of leeches and mercury compounds he noticed the growing popularity of sea-salt pills and powders, particularly those salts originating from the Bahamas. Like most young men at some time or another, a scheme to profit quickly for minimum effort infects their otherwise noble and straightforward plans. As with most of these schemes, small harm occurs. The young man realises the error of his ways and returns to honest effort instead, thanking his saints that the venture cost him and those around him little.
The young apothecary's assistant was not so fortunate, however. After a scrimption of research, he saw how easily one could set up a small salt-refining concern, right on the very beach of Providence Island. This saltern would actually cost only a pocketful of coin to build; all he had to do was undersell all the other unscrupulous pill-peddlers and his fortune would be secure.
The plan was promising but the realisation that he barely earned enough money to eat and sleep warm in the back room of the apothecary, let alone to afford such an enterprise, meant that his dreams would only ever be that.
Bitterness began to crawl within him. He felt exploited by his bloated master, who only appeared in the shop to remove the coin from the premises, deduct the rent for his assistant's lodgings from his wage, and on a Monday bestow upon him the cold and fatty remains of his Sunday beef by way of charity.
Almost without thought and certainly without guilt, he slowly found himself depositing less and less of the cash in the wooden box beneath the counter.
He knew it would only be a few months before his master noticed a fall in stock with a diminishing return, but some ironic providence favoured the assistant and his master became ill and bedridden. All trust of the business fell to his loyal assistant whilst his master recuperated.
Three weeks of tireless embezzlement later and the man who would become Dandon sailed to the island of Providence with one hundred and twenty guineas and a new golden silk justaucorps coat and matching feathered hat, with dreams of building a saltern business in the Bahamas, perhaps an empire of them, and why not?
In his mind he considered the stolen money merely a secret loan. He would repay it, anonymously of course, as soon as he began to reap the rewards of his vision.
'But alas and alack, gentlemen' - Dandon sipped his rum - 'I found myself a fly in a spider's world. The saltern business was a - shall we say? - competitive one. My attempts even to find tools to build were met with violence and theft. I was not fortunate enough to have the backing of a band of brothers such as yourselves. You, my friends, are all protected by the companionship of each other. You may find it is a hard world for the lonely.'
Dandon managed to insert a whole chicken leg into his mouth; a moment later, he pulled it out again, naked of meat, his gold front teeth glistening with grease.
'With time I found myself frequenting the hostelries of my new home, offering my medical knowledge. My fellow islanders took amusement from my yellow attire and christened me "Dandelion". Over the years, those more familiar have come to call me Dandon. Which is how I present myself to you, my friends.'
'Then it is a pleasure to acquaint with you, Dandon.' Dan Teague raised his mug in appreciation of the tale.
The evening descended into the fumbling of petticoats, the rolling of rum bottles across the stone floor, and the endless yaw of sailors' songs, merrily married to the wail of bouncing, jigging fiddles.
Outside, the familiar sounds drew the tall man in like a siren's song. His square-tailed crimson coat was smeared with pitch. Across his chest he wore braces of pistols, six in all, two of which hung at the end of a sling of red silk round his neck.
The black matted beard began just above his waistcoat and covered half his dark, narrow face, mingling with the coarse black hair that cascaded down his back, all topped with a broad black tricorne.
In one movement he downed the dregs of a green bottle and sent it smashing to the ground. He grinned up at the sign, crudely depicting a sailor in a cutter boat harpooning a great white that had leaped half out of the water, and then ducked beneath it and through the door.
Edward Teach had returned to Providence.
* * *
Chapter Ten
Above the revelry, in one of the gaudy sweating rooms of the Porker's End, Patrick Devlin, dressed in shirt and breeches, lay languidly on his side across a tousled bed, toying with a doubloon, spinning it repeatedly upon the dusty surface of a short cabinet beside the bed.
The room was dark. A small oil lamp at the window lit barely half the room, and threw fluttering shadows upon the naked shoulders of the young woman putting up her tawny hair in front of a speckled mirror.
She hummed an unrecognisable melody to herself, seemingly unaware of the man on the bed behind her, or the dancing of the coin as it fell again and again.
Without turning she spoke, quietly, in a soft Carolina accent. 'Where you be going after Providence, Patrick Devlin?' she asked.
'I have an island I have to pay homage to, Sarah.' He spoke absently, never removing his concentration from the spinning coin.
'For more doubloons, no wonder. Don't suppose I'll be getting one of those at all?' She turned to look lovingly at him, revealing her small bruised breasts.
'Three pieces of eight, my girl, and be thankful. It used to take me six months to earn that in shillings.'
'Lucky me.' She turned back to her mirror. 'Why do you rovers need so much money, anyways? None of you ever lives to spend it all, from what I see.'
Devlin paused the coin for a moment. 'Oh, I intend to stop, Sarah. I'll take my fill and I'll part my ways. And as to why? The coin is the most of it, that's true, but there's more. We don't take money from the likes of you.' He stretched out, his hand high in the air, admiring the coin between his fingers. 'We take only that which people think belongs to them. The monies they take from the hearts and backs of men. Piracy is not theft. I understand that much. I could spend my life breaking into the homes of the poor and stealing all I need to live on and nobody would raise a sniff. But take a hogshead of sugar from the interests of a gentleman, that's a different matter. That's interfering with the grease of the world. That's a degradation in the ledger of the mighty. That's half the bloody navy on your arse protecting the greed of a handful of men.' He went back to spinning his coin.
'Aye, you're all bloody heroes. Shame, then, that nobody's ever pleased to see you. Now me? Wherever I go, everybody's pleased to see me and the girls. Light up the world, we do.'
She was startled by the violent slapping of the coin on the wood, and crossed her arms across her breasts in alarm, whipping he
r neck to him, cursing.
'You bloody fool! You nearly gave me a failure banging the table like that!'
'Say that again, Sarah!' He sat up urgently.
'Say what again?'
'You're true as they come, Sarah my girl! Every man is always glad to see a whore! Every sailor and every soldier! You've earned this doubloon, my girl, and another if you come sailing with me!'
'Do what now?'
'Tell me, girl, do you have any French ladies here?'
Through the sudden tension in the small room, amid the sounds of laughter and music below, the muffled shot of a pistol cracked. The music stopped.
Devlin grabbed his sword belt and pistol before stumbling, bootless, through the door. Sarah opened her mouth to protest at the suddenness of his departure, but closed it when she saw the shining gold coin still lighting up the room.
For the second time that evening, Dandon found himself pinned unceremoniously to the filthy wall, this time by a powerful right forearm; the left hand was pointing a pistol mouth at his sweating temple.
'I beseech you, Captain Teach,' Dandon spoke calmly, despite choking on the arm at his neck. 'I was not of suggesting that the odour was related to your personage entering the tavern, merely if anyone could inform me of its source, that is all!'
Teach's pupils were needle-holes, the whites of his eyes growing every sweating second.
'Dandelion! Every time I see you I wants to kill you more!'
'We are agreed, then, that absence is our preferred situation. We should follow on such a notion, surely, so as not to displease the nature of the world.' Dandon grinned his most effacing gold-capped smile. Teach could see his own savage, skeletal rack reflected in their sheen.
'You're not worthy of pistol shot, you wretch!' Teach pushed the dragoon pistol into his belt and released his arm from Dandon's throat, only to replace it a breath later with the tapered tip of his cutlass. 'I’ll run you through likes I been promising since I first saw you!'