Hunt for White Gold

by Mark Keating

  Coxon did not stop, uttered no comment he might rue, but only clicked the door shut gently behind him, catching Rogers’ faint chuckle as he walked away. There was no need for the governor to know that Devlin was returning to Providence soon enough for his gold – the very gold that had now returned to the earth, still guarded by the same girl to whom Devlin had entrusted his valuable secret. Only now she had taken the secret to her grave.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The uproll of the ship spoilt Seth’s aim and the gravity of the wooden worlds drawing together created a well of waves smashing between the freeboards. Fish slammed against the strakes, flipping up and away to escape the crushing swell.

  The shot rang off a ringbolt beside Devlin’s head but he resisted flinching and continued to count the bodies on the other ship as the survivors ducked to grab for their grappling hooks.

  Hugh Harris wiped a sleeve across his dripping face and turned to Devlin. ‘That’s Seth! That’s Seth Toombs, Pat!’

  Devlin looked hard across to the man swinging in the shrouds. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘It surely is,’ and he climbed to the gunwale ignoring the muskets levelled at him to shout to his opposing captain, the man who had pressed him to be his navigator one spring, a year gone now.

  ‘Ho, Seth!’ he yelled. ‘We’ve come a long ways now ain’t we, Captain? What say we talk awhile?’

  Seth rolled up and down as the spars above clasped each other, chaining the ships for the final conflict. His leer widened then shrunk to a grimace as he bellowed to his men: ‘Grenadoes!’ and a barrage of bottles, catapulted from unseen hands, smashed to the Talefan’s deck.

  Devlin’s paltry crew danced around the shattered glass that exploded from the dozen rag-lit bottles loaded with powder, shot and nails – the only ‘fireworks’ that Seth had the means to muster but effective enough, spitting at men’s legs and turning the fallen canvas into kindling. Flames began to trickle up from the Talefan’s deck. Devlin set his eye to the grinning face a shot away from his own and leapt from the wood towards the six pairs of eyes waiting expectantly for some word.

  ‘Throw ’em.’

  Their turn.

  Devlin’s men pulled out grenadoes and matches coiled around their wrists and carefully picked the small smouldering wicks from the brass tubes in their waistcoats or pockets.

  Good grenadoes, well prepared, unlike Seth’s jury-rigged and cobbled affairs. The eggs full of brimstone, powder and slugs of lead in a mould of tar-pitched halved musket balls that could rip off men’s faces as they detonated falling through the air.

  The black missiles sailed over the gunwale as Seth slammed his boots on the deck and gave his last order, the only order of the day that mattered.

  ‘Sling your hooks, boys! Boarding parties away!’

  Grapnels flew over, Devlin’s grenadoes streaking past them simultaneously, annihilating a couple of the hooks’ bearers as they exploded at chest height with their half-second fuse. Teeth and eyes spattered the men pulling the ships together, and they found themselves spitting out the blood of their mates.

  Devlin felt his deck camber away from him as half the hooks bit into the gunwale and the remainder landed amongst the shrouds. More than twenty snarling men pulled on the Talefan like a reluctant bull and only then did Devlin notice the absence of the yellow-coated Dandon and his air of despondent whimsy. He had no time to query his men as they raised pistols and musket stocks to the scarfed heads dragging them in.

  Devlin looked down at the dead Sam Fletcher, the young face already grey. He lifted his head back to the ship and aimed his pistol at the burgundy hat bobbing along the backs of the enemy sailors. He climbed the gunwale with his aim held to it like a line so he could fire his pistol below the leather cross sealing the cocks of the tricorne.

  The waft of his gunsmoke shielded the swinging boarding parties as the hulls collided and Devlin’s six survivors fired up at the dozen men flying into the Talefan’s rigging.

  A shot ploughed into a chest and Seth watched the screaming body slam into the conjoined hulls, the cries split by the silent shatter of the man’s skull like a watermelon between the scraping wood.

  ‘Davis!’ he called to Howell. ‘With me!’ He scrambled to the gunwale, pushing back the shoulder of the young Porto sailor clambering to join him. ‘You stay here with a musket, lad. Don’t want you forgetting who your captain is now.’

  He leapt to the Talefan, cutlass in hand, eyes locked onto the prize of the Irishman kneeling and reloading by the mainmast.

  He landed squarely, elbowing a face beside him and Howell followed the blow with a cutlass thrust and kicked the body from his blade and stuck to Seth’s back as he barged through the mass of men.

  Hugh Harris had taken two boarders with his pistols, the flintlocks hanging around his neck. Now he had a sweeping cutlass in one hand, a parrying poniard in the other and three more dead lay around him as his bloodied face and clothes, his wild screams, weakened the spirits of his foes and he laughed as they backed away from his terrifying form.

  Lawson had unloaded his partridge shot from his musketoon into three more and swung the club of it through the jaw of one of them, then put them down with his pistols that cracked one by one as he stepped away from the men still coming over the side. His third pistol snapped its shot and his back stopped at the larboard quarter and he could retreat no further. He checked once over the gunwale to the alluring waves then unsheathed his falchion sword and dagger, declaring loudly that the four men rushing towards him were most definitely in trouble now that he was cornered.

  Devlin kicked groins and swung his hanger, and blood and flesh arced before his eyes. In his left hand he beat with his pistol at cutlasses and pikes stabbing gingerly towards him. His pistol was still loaded for the taking of Seth Toombs when the moment came.

  There were too many of them, despite the better arms borne by his men. Three of Toombs’s crew had remained on the ship. Three were dead from the grenadoes. Twenty-two had swung or leapt across. Nine lay dead or dying but still it could not be done with six – no, another stilted scream, five now – against the horde. Devlin felt the gunwale against his own back now as the tide came forwards and he too glanced to the sea behind. Then the tide slowly parted before him.

  ‘Back!’ Seth yelled above the riot and a moment later the only sound on the Talefan was the faint crackling of the flames chewing its way through the tarred, hanging rigging and the creaking of broken spars above the two captains’ heads.

  Seth moved cautiously, the cutlass in his right hand bouncing playfully, the gully blade in his left dripping blood.

  ‘Well, well, Cap’n Devlin. As you said: We’ve come a long ways to be sure.’

  ‘You’ve come as far as you’re going to, my man!’ Dandon’s shout from the quarterdeck spun the heads of everyone aft to the mouth of the swivel gun aimed to the crowd of Mumvils. Dandon behind it. His eye ready to fire. ‘Toombs is it?’ he continued. ‘I vaguely recall you now that I see you.’ Dandon held up the cord that would snap the flintlock to its charge for everyone to acknowledge. ‘You’ll drop your arms if you please, else you have stepped your last.’

  Devlin looked proudly to the man at the falconet and raised himself taller as his remaining men pushed back their assailants with contempt and curses.

  Seth, one look to Devlin, stepped towards the swivel gun for its eye to cover him more than his men. His cutlass twitched.

  ‘Dandelion, ain’t it? Reckons I knows you from Haggins’s knocking shop on Providence. A pox doctor. Not one for a fight as I recollects.’

  Dandon bowed his head. ‘Which is why I favour the spread of grape from my friend here,’ he tapped the gun affectionately. ‘He affords me the position not to fight at such close quarter.’

  Seth paced closer and the gun followed, the range enough for him to absorb every lead seed and shatter him like glass. Dandon tensed the cord and Seth stopped pacing. ‘That’ll do fellow. Lay down and you’ll yet live.’

>   Seth dragged his curled lip upwards. ‘Then fire, Dandelion. Fire if you can. I’m right here. Fire at Seth Toombs. He needs it.’

  Howell Davis barked from the huddle of men, ‘No, Seth!’ He came out of the crowd. ‘No need for this. The ship is sunk soon enough. We can sail on.’

  Seth kept his eye on Dandon as he cocked his head back. ‘I sail on with a heavier ship, Howell. Always do.’ He ran his thumbnail up his cutlass blade. ‘See, Howell, I ain’t no fool. I don’t walk towards loaded guns, mark my word. Now to my mind I reckon that gun be empty. I reckon that, because if I had such a loaded gun I’d have fired it as we boarded.’ He turned his neck to Devlin. ‘I wouldn’t have waited until all was lost would I, Cap’n?’

  Devlin, still by the larboard gunwale, heart steady, breath back to a more restful pace, held Seth’s hateful gaze. He looked up to Dandon’s hand at the cord of the falconet and tensed his own hand on his pistol, thumb gently resting on the doghead as soft as a spider’s leg.

  ‘Cut him down, Dandon,’ he almost whispered and even the flames hushed as all eyes went back to the quarterdeck.

  Dandon leant away from the forthcoming explosion, one eye closed, the cord ready to snap, as Seth opened his arms for the impact that he was sure was not there.

  Every man that lived that day would retell the tale, again and again, from father to son, from uncle to nephew, and on from tutting widow to orphaned bastard: The day the yellow-coated Dandon fired an empty gun at Seth Toombs with a pitiful spark and the pirate Devlin clicked his left-locked gun into life and walked it into Seth’s nape with the words:

  ‘Lay them down, Seth. I ain’t empty, and you’ll die else.’

  Seth turned his head, heedful of the cold barrel kissing his collar, and hissed over his shoulder, ‘I’ve been dead once already, Judas. I’ll not be bitten twice.’ And Devlin caught the clockwork sound of a pistol near his head and the young man’s face in the corner of his eye.

  ‘My name is Davis, Cap’n Devlin. Howell Davis. Pleased to meet you. Twitch a finger, blink an eye, and I’ll send that head of yours to the sea.’

  Seth turned. A cold grin dragged across his face painfully. ‘Ain’t no Peter Sam here I see, Devlin. No Black Bill. Just a mess of you against more than twice as many.’ He brought up his gully blade to gently ease the barrel of Devlin’s pistol aside. ‘It be over, Patrick. Come to my ship with me and we’ll talk. There’ll be lots we can mull over.’

  Devlin looked over Seth’s shoulder to Lawson with cutlass poised, staring back. To his right, across the ship, the blood-black face of Hugh Harris glared above white bared teeth.

  He glanced over to the others. Young John Rice. Adam Cowrie. Pirates to a man, Devlin read fear and bloodlust in their looks and his arm faltered with the weight of the pistol still outstretched to Seth’s head. Lastly he met Dandon’s face, and Dandon removed his hat, held it to his front over the small-barrelled pistol lifted from his silk belt and winked as Devlin recalled their exchange of less than an hour ago.

  This is folly, Patrick, Dandon had said. There is the gold to consider and the letters that will save Peter. You should think on.

  And he remembered his own reply about conscience, about men’s hearts, and he winked back to Dandon.

  ‘Fuck it!’ Devlin spat and fired his pistol shot into Seth Toombs’s yellowed sneer.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Along the stone-walled harbour of Charles Town, below the bastions long-abandoned after the last of the conflicts with hostile natives, several arched storm holes ran around the sloping wall of the bay; each hole stood no more than five feet tall, no two more than twenty feet apart.

  To an approaching ship the arches would give the appearance that she were facing the many windows of a drowning medieval castle. The aged stonework gave the burgeoning city a façade of nobility that even the slaves on Sullivan’s island respected, perhaps relieved that they appeared to have landed in an empire of kings and civilisation.

  The night was coming on. Along the flowered streets husbands with their wives perambulated before supper and tipped hats to ladies and raised canes to gentlemen whilst their black maids scrubbed their children like apples.

  The working poor clung to the tables of the taverns like limpets at low tide, lubricating their tired muscles with unregulated liquor whilst the even poorer workers in the slave quarters soothed and warmed away the day with horse emollient and prepared for their seven hours rest from the rice fields that provided the body of Charles Town’s income.

  The Angelus of ship’s bells rang out the watch across the bay. Sidelights and lanterns were lit and the smell of beef and cabbage drifting on the air was only mildly weaker than the stench of pitch, kelp and damp wood.

  Within one of the alcoves of the storm drains Ignatius sat upon a cobbler’s stool, sifting through a book of Dryden, his interest fading as the light dwindled for his lantern was a poor substitute.

  He would sit until the bells rang out twice more, an hour to add to the hour he had already waited and two more to add to the dozens of others he had spent over the weeks, his only comfort being the poet, the stool, and the coin for his trouble.

  He lifted his head to the splash of a boat being lowered and listened, head cocked like a blind-man, to the path of the oars as they rowed onwards. From the narrow window of the arch he could see a square of the horizon and the bowsprit of some unknown vessel that had kept him company for several days on his nightly vigil.

  His ears pricked up and his book slapped shut as the sound of the oars came closer to the sanctity of his storm drain rather than diverting towards the promise of the welcoming harbour.

  He brushed off the hour of damp and salt and scraped his fingers through his greying hair as he rose from the stool and brought his light to the mouth of his cave and the cold of the night.

  With a sweep of the lantern he lowered a rope ladder and grasped the gloved hand that reached out to him. The purple brocade doublet brushed past the black figure of Ignatius without a word and crouched in the tunnel awaiting his entourage.

  The giant struggled up next and Ignatius was almost dragged to the sea by the lump of a hand that steadied itself around his forearm, and the tunnel seemed to shrink as his bulk huddled with them in the dark.

  The light from the lantern rose with the breaths of the giant and lit the final face rising past the edge of the storm drain. Ignatius looked down at the pale drawn features with the silver and red beard and dragged the sagging six-foot-plus frame into the drain like a catch of fish.

  ‘Can he walk?’ Ignatius whispered to the dark, hearing the grey body gasping and sucking at the damp air.

  ‘He can crawl,’ Valentim Mendes replied and took to his feet along the low tunnel. Ignatius plucked up the lantern and slapped past the grey face paying it no more mind. Hib folded himself like a concertina and hauled the sunken shoulders into the blackness.

  Ignatius kicked back the rug over the hatch that led to the harbour. The night was without. Good men had returned to their hearths while the bad plotted in taverns and Ignatius withdrew to his maple commode for liquid comfort before the rattle of manacles drew him back to the party within his study. A sound unwelcome. An iron chink that unsettled the comfort of his sanctum.

  ‘Are those chains absolutely necessary, Governor Mendes?’ He poured three guildive rums. ‘That sound belongs to the slave quarter.’

  Valentim took a seat, lifting his scabbard through the arm and resting his porcelain and gloved hand on the pommel.

  ‘He feels better that way. Trust me on that.’

  Ignatius turned and passed him a goblet. A wet sniff from the putrid head of Peter Sam spoilt the vapours of Ignatius’ crystal glass. ‘I have a room for him, bar-locked and secure. Perhaps it is better for him to retire than listen to our conversation.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Valentim raised a hand to Hib Gow without a word and the Scotsman took his eyes from the glass still waiting on the commode to tug at the chain between Peter Sam�
��s wrists.

  Ignatius’s young servant tried not to look at Peter Sam’s eyes as he held open the passage door, but his eyes alighted on the chains as they rattled past and he bowed and followed, closing the door as softly as he could.

  ‘So, Ignatius,’ Valentim sipped his rum with a grimace. ‘We are alone. Tell me how we progress? What of my revenge?’

  Ignatius moved to his desk. ‘You mean what of the letters? The arcanum of porcelain, Governor?’

  Valentim shrugged and angled his glass, his eyes lowered to watch the swirling of the cane spirit.

  Ignatius sat and bided his time. ‘How do you find Hib’s company, governor? He is quite a find is he not?’

  ‘He is an animal,’ Valentim said. ‘Even for an executioner. Where did you locate such a foul creature?’

  ‘One of Tyburn’s best I assure you. Unfortunately he lost favour some years ago. The English were mad for Jacobites, and a Presbyterian Scotsman was not to be trusted. It was most opportune that I could take him off their hands.’ He swallowed his drink. ‘My good fortune. Not so fortunate for some of London that met with the humour of a man used to killing men every day.’

  ‘If you say it is thus, Señor. I myself believe him to be mad. And a madman does not make a good companion. I have spent months with him. He has a definite ability to break the will of a man. It is a gift. But he takes pleasure in it beyond simple duty.’ He leant forward and placed his rum on the desk. ‘He appals me even more than this slave tafia you choose to serve me. Now,’ he sat back, ‘I have had a tiresome voyage on that barge of a sloop of yours, Ignatius, so tell me only of the pirate.’

  Ignatius leafed through his diary letting the pages of the last weeks pile a wall of tension between him and Valentim as they fell one by one.

  ‘The pace has picked up, Governor,’ he said at last. ‘The pirate Devlin has been dispatched to New Providence to attempt to liberate the letters of Father d’Entrecolles. If he fails he will most likely be hung. If he succeeds he will be back here within the month.’ He looked up to Valentim. ‘And the pair of you can renew your acquaintance.’