“Formidable,” says the Frenchman. “I see perhaps that you have heard my name. Now, messieurs, your odds have worsened to two in three. But your retreat is sign enough that you understand your situation.”
The first of the three men reached the perimeter, then the second, then the Frenchman fired and the last of them was flung back into the other two, his chest open and red. One of the men yelled something obscene in what Guillaume registered as a Midlands accent before the two remaining invaders disappeared back into the forest at a gallop, leaving their two fallen comrades to the pigeons and the mad French bastard.
The tall man looked down at his companion.
“They were leaving. You crazy little turd,” he said, a long-forgotten Oxfordshire accent lending a little humanity to his flat, dispassionate voice. The Frenchman smiled sweetly before laying down his gun on the ground and standing. He was shorter and more muscular than his English companion, his back scarred and pockmarked. He walked over to the two dead men, and picked up the Londoner’s red hat from the ground. He put it on, grinning to himself and whistling a French air. The Englishman watched him as he sauntered over to the second dead man, picking up the man’s rifle and his leather purse, which was almost empty. The Frenchman pretended to pout at this.
“I wonder where they came from?” he said, chucking the purse back on the ground.
“You mean after England?” asked the tall man.
“Bien sûr, I mean after England. They did not sail over the Atlantic just to visit us.”
“They mentioned Port Royal.”
“Oui, bien sûr. Your little English boudoir, surrounded by the Spanish scum you stole it from.”
“Wherever they came from, they’ll be back here soon enough, with more men and more guns.”
“You mean, mon cher Guillaume, that we do not have time to fuck again before fleeing into the hills.” Again, the pretend pout. “This is a shame. I am quite aroused.”
The Englishman looked at the Frenchman, and there was nothing in his expression. Despite the Frenchman’s psychopathic sangfroid, L’Ollonais did consider for a shivering moment the distinct possibility that his lover might just kill him, here and now. Out of boredom, perhaps. Out of l’amour, even. L’Ollonais even readied himself for the moment of death, as he had countless times before. The Englishman was capable of it. His still gray eyes were always startlingly cold, and the Frenchman had awoken several times to see those eyes gazing at him, as if calculating the color of the blood in his neck, while Guillaume hummed to himself absently.
Guillaume started putting on his clothes. The Frenchman was grinning still, though there was no joy behind the grin now. The shots from below had ceased. L’Ollonais started dressing as well. The dog watched them both.
They made to leave the clearing. The Frenchman headed north, toward the hill and the abandoned plantations above. The Englishman turned south, toward where the surviving interlopers had headed. They stopped and looked at each other.
“You are going to them, mon cher?” asks the Frenchman.
“Perhaps. I know I’m not going with you.”
“So this is adieu.”
“If you say so.”
“I do not say so. I say au revoir, Billy.”
“Say what you like.”
“Then au revoir.”
They went their separate ways.
I walked out from the wooded uplands of the small island of Tortuga, dressed in my simple Tortugan Brethren’s outfit of dark cowhide stiffened with thick dried blood. I felt nothing about leaving Francis. He’d introduced me to the boucaniers, the self-governing community of Godless scum who split their time between lazing in the hills of Tortuga and raiding Spanish towns and forts across the Caribbean. He’d introduced me to other things, besides, things which I participated in simply because they offered the possibility of some kind of sensation. Any kind of sensation at all. I had been with no woman since Kate. Decades before this celibacy had seemed a noble proposition; it now seemed pathetic and pointless. Nevertheless, it was the echo of a commitment I’d made. I still would not enjoy a woman, and the pleasures L’Ollonais had offered seemed to have lost their flavor of obscenity (at least to me) as the years rolled by. But the man was an empty lunatic, as dangerous as a cornered dog but with infinitely more intelligence. It was time to go.
I had spent some two years with the boucaniers since meeting L’Ollonais. I had crewed on dozens of raids, and had grown somewhat rich on the proceeds. While my shipmates squandered their takings in the fleshpots of Port Royal, I carefully husbanded my growing resources. I sometimes disappeared for weeks to hoard away my treasury in among the trees of a hidden cove on the north coast of Jamaica, near a place the English already called Cockpit County. My treasure was watched over by a small group of Maroons whose reliability had been bought by the murder of a Spanish plantation owner a decade before, just before Penn and Venables arrived to begin the process of co-opting Jamaica into the empire about which England, even then, was dreaming.
So despite my appearance, I was now a moderately wealthy man. I had near a century’s experience of rapine, from barges on the Thames to the treasure ships of Venezuela. I had no ship. I was no captain. But I did have a reputation for fearlessness which went some way before me. Long Billy some of them called me, unaware of the irony of such a name to one whose life had been long indeed.
For now, Tortuga was my home. It was here the boucaniers had established themselves, as a loosely held confederacy under the inconsequential governorship of France. When L’Ollonais had first come here, the core of the boucaniers had been French and Spanish, but that had been changing since I arrived. More and more Anglo-Saxon flotsam and jetsam had washed ashore, many of them refugees from Restoration England, men who’d fought under the old Protector and had seen early visions of a Commonwealth of men under God. Poor fools. There was no God, and now there was no Protector. I fought under him, too, for a while. But revolution, like sodomy, was just another form of desire.
So these old Roundheads and Ironsides had ditched their God in favor of money, but their silly dreams of Commonwealth remained. So the boucaniers were reconstituted as the Brethren, a free society of delinquents living in the sun thousands of miles away from the new Stuart monarch and his bastard Papist brother. Their language, not mine. They imagined themselves a set of sun-kissed dissidents under a Caribbean sun, freedom in their hearts and gold in their pockets. It was an attractive dream, I supposed. But it was just a dream.
There was no leader—no emperor of the Brethren (although the man I would shortly be meeting would come closest to holding that title). But there was ample opportunity for a bunch of well-organized men, and there were very few disincentives to piracy. For myself, I took pleasure where I could find it, and I husbanded my stock of gold and (mainly) silver. For now, piracy was suiting me extremely well.
Any captain with ambition could find willing accomplices among the Brethren, as long as he timed things properly. He needed to be offering adventure and rapine just as the takings from the previous raid had begun to dry up, when lazing in the sun and drinking and fucking had begun to lose their allure, when the bloodlust began to whirl and men started to remember the feeling of a sheet in one hand and a sword in the other. Throughout Tortuga, pockets of Brethren had been considering for days the options for a new raid, and today as if by magic a small fleet had appeared down in the harbor below.
I could see the fleet in the harbor now, dominated by a fair-sized vessel, one of the biggest ones of recent times, forty guns at least. There was something compelling about her. She was perky and somehow magnificent. I sniffed the candlewood trees for the last time, as I always did before the start of a new journey, and headed down.
Almost a hundred Brethren had already gathered at the harbor, mingling with the island’s small community of traders and prostitutes, the aging remnants of an army of whores a former French governor had imported to try to break Tortuga’s reputation as an island of sodo
my. A few of the Brethren noted my arrival and, as usual, cleared an area to avoid physical contact with me. They appeared to be looking for L’Ollonais as well; several of them visibly relaxed when they’d established that I was alone.
A large tender was tied up to the harbor wall, and a group of men from the ship had gathered themselves at the quayside. They were not in any kind of uniform; but they were upright and clean-shaven, and their clothing was neat. They seemed organized. They looked like the men who’d disturbed us in the woods. The two who’d run away from us were nowhere to be seen.
One stood in front of the others. He was short, broad-shouldered, and barrel-chested, a scarlet kerchief was tied around his forehead, and his red-brown beard was carefully tended. He affected the appearance of none other than Francis Drake, and I smiled at that. His natural authority made it clear he was the captain. His leer, the rings on his fingers, and that blatant red kerchief, all made it clear that he was also a buccaneer.
“So, this is Tortuga.”
His accent was rich and musical. Welsh, like that of old Tillert a century ago, only this man’s voice was more cultured and more capable of fine words and manipulation than even that old rogue’s. He had a charisma and a power that was so apparent I knew instantly where the perky attraction of the ship at anchor stemmed from. The same thing shone out of this man like a beacon above a Cornish crag. I knew then that I’d be joining his crew, and that I’d benefit enormously from doing so.
“Tortuga. Island of the Brethren. And here you all are, in your shitty cowhides stinking of wild boar and buggery. Greetings from Port Royal, you godforsaken bastards.”
There were mutterings in the crowd, but only dim ones. They wanted to hear what the man had come to say. And they knew how recruiting started. This was a dance with which they were all familiar.
“The ship out there shall remain nameless, as shall I, for the time being. No one knows I’m here, least of all the people who are paying for the little trip I’m embarked on. There’s three other captains along with me, and they’re all waiting off some little islet between here and the Main. They want what I want. They want bounty.”
At the magic word, the mutterings ceased, and attention was rigid once more.
“I can bring you to bounty, my sodomizing friends.”
He was now standing with his legs apart and his hands on his hips in a posture which, for most men in most places at most times of the world, would have been ridiculous, but for this extraordinary bundle of energy rooted to the spot on a buccaneer island with a pirate ship behind him was somehow just right. His chin was up in the air, the beard quivering.
“There’s bounty, lads, bounty enough to keep the syphilitic inbred Spanish in pearls and women’s underthings until the Sun King decides to head south. There’s gold, lads, more gold than the entire English stinking Parliament has ever seen, and it’s waiting to be taken, lads, waiting to be taken from under the noses of carpeting bureaucrats and councillors who only want to save their own skin and take whatever cut we care to give them. It’s all there, just over there”—he pointed vaguely westward—“glistening under the jungle trees. And all you need to do is step down into this little boat”—now he pointed down to the water—“step down, and sign up for the usual terms, and we’ll be singeing the fucking King of Spain’s fucking beard before the year is out.”
For a moment the mention of beards and singeing caused my breath to seize, and the world seemed to shimmer, as if curtains between decades were shifting in the breeze from the open sea. I half-expected to turn and find Drake standing there beside me, smirking in that belittling way of his at this little Welsh popinjay with his ridiculous copycat beard, yet mesmerized by what he was saying.
For now, the popinjay had stopped, and waited. There was silence. No cheers, no rowdy hail-fellow-well-met huzzahs. He had their attention, that was all. He had still not told them why they, the Brethren, the boucaniers of old, should trust this Celtic firebrand, trust him with their lives and their hard-earned reputation. For myself, I’d already signed up and was ready to go. The rest of them still needed to be convinced.
“You know Mings, I suppose?”
Quite a few of them stirred at that name. Christopher Mings, son of a shoemaker, cabin boy-to-captain, the man who had raided Campeche harbor in broad bloody daylight, who’d seized over a million pieces of eight, who’d been taken back to London for refusing to give a single shred of it to the whoresons in the Admiralty, who’d come straight back out here and had then taken Santiago, the second largest city on Cuba. Mings was a legend among the Brethren, the first English captain and privateer with the balls and the backing to seize entire towns and not just ships. Christ, Mings was more a king out here than Charles would ever be.
“Ah, Mings I see you’ve heard of. Good. Well, Mings was my admiral, fellows. I was captain of one of his ships. I’ve got several thousand pieces waiting to be spent back in Port Royal, where the whores know me by the size of my purse and the length of my cock. I can drink any of you catamites into an early fucking grave, but I need you, or rather I need your sordid, vicious greed. Henry Morgan’s the name, fellows. And tearing great big fucking holes in the Spanish Empire is all the bounty I need.”
21 DECEMBER 1811
Abigail Horton ties up the buttons on the front of her husband’s coat, humming softly to herself as she does so. Constable Charles Horton gazes at the top of her head, and smells the fine strawberry-and-straw odor of her blond hair. He leans forward, and kisses her gently.
She stops humming and steps back, looking into his eyes. It is one of her measuring looks.
“Are you happy, faithful husband?” she asks at last. Her mouth is shaped in a familiar half-smile, half-pout. The question is lightly asked (that faithful an old joke between them) but seriously meant. Horton knows she is referring to his distracted air of recent days. He has rarely been able to stop his mind calculating and reasoning upon the current case, and several times has looked up to see her looking at him with one of those measuring looks, not untouched by sorrow.
“As happy as I have ever been, faithful wife,” he replies, instinctively.
“Ah, but you have indeed never been a happy person, Charles Horton,” she says. “So that is saying very little indeed.”
“Well, then. As happy as I have been at my least unhappy moments. Such as our wedding day.”
“Ah, our wedding day.” She brushes invisible bits of something off the front of his coat. “Yes, you were happy then, I think. For the first time in a long time.”
“Indeed I was.”
“You are worried about what the magistrate said to you. Markland.”
A man who is suspected of mutiny . . .
“I am not worried about what he said.”
“But you are worried about what he knows.”
“To be accurate, I am worried about what he might do with what he knows.”
She smiles again, and now he smiles as well. It amuses her when he is so deliberately precise.
“You are worried he will inform on you.”
“Like I did on my shipmates, you mean.”
His voice is harsh, and she catches her breath at that for a moment, and looks away. Then she looks back at him.
“We have not spoken of this for some time,” she says, and her voice is soft, though her eyes are hard and determined.
“And I would not have spoken of it now, Abigail. Had you not mentioned it.”
She does not speak for a second or two, and continues busying herself with imaginary dirt on his coat.
“Listen, Charles,” she says at last. “Listen to me. You had no choice other than to act . . .”
“Please, Abigail.” He is pleading, now. “Please, not again. I cannot bear it.”
“But you cannot allow this poison to remain in your heart!” She is gripping the tops of his arms now, and once again he smells her hair. It is impossibly evocative.
“Abigail, enough.” He does not shout, but t
he words are spat out with such force that her eyes widen and her hands drop from his shoulders. “You cannot simply demand that this leaves me. It is with me. It is part of me. My actions stay within my heart. There is no feat of memory by which I can erase them. I must carry them with me. It is part of what makes me Charles Horton.”
“I understand . . .”
“No, Abigail. You do not. You sympathize. There is a difference.”
And with that he claps a thick woollen hat on his head and walks out into the winter air, leaving his wife to look after him for a moment, her eyes softening and her brow furrowed. After a moment she turns to sit down before the fire. She picks up the book she has been reading these past few days, a new edition of Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy in Letters to his Pupil. Abigail Horton buries her concern for her husband beneath dreams of the stars.
The first of his visits that day takes Horton in a coach toward the east, out along the Ratcliffe Highway, past Shadwell, Limehouse, Ratcliffe and across the top of the Isle of Dogs. The crowded edges of London begin to give way to countryside around Ratcliffe, before commerce and development return with the new docks at the top of the Isle of Dogs and then disappear for good out to the east. The coach is driven by the brother of a fellow River Thames waterman-constable, his time paid for out of River Office funds, despite the jurisdictional niceties.
As the houses give way to green and brown (mainly brown, out here on the flat, open river borders) the air opens out and the crowded nooks and crannies of Wapping are shown to be what they truly are: an astonishing aberration in a still overwhelmingly rural England. Out here, it is almost impossible to imagine a place like Wapping existing on this rolling foggy earth.
Horton is taking his own advice; he is following the evidence. Today that means talking to the two living people who were physically closest to the Ratcliffe Highway and Gravel Lane murders. His first stop is a house on the edge of the village of Tilbury, right on the banks of the Thames, out near the sea where the river is three times wider than it is at Wapping, at the edge of the estuary itself.
The English Monster Page 17