Hunt for White Gold

by Mark Keating

  Ignatius stiffened. ‘No, Teach will be dead soon. He knows too much. And he failed to bring me the letters. You have succeeded. I may have a need for you to live.’ He looked fondly at Devlin then remembered where they were. ‘Go get your letters. You may take your man when I have them. I must check their validation first.’

  ‘You do not trust me, Ignatius?’ Devlin began to turn away.

  ‘Do you trust me, Captain?’

  They retired to their corners.

  Valentim’s eyes were now wide with fury. ‘What is happening, pirate? What is said?’

  Devlin picked up the tube, his back to the others. ‘I’ll go for the big man. You go for Ignatius.’

  ‘What of Blackbeard? Who goes for him?’

  ‘Teach will hold until he sees a coin land. I have the advantage that he may want me for himself.’

  ‘So I am to go for the man who has two pistols against me? You pirates and your rules of war!’

  Devlin grinned. ‘You can trade if you want.’

  Valentim silently declined the offer as he watched Hib glowering at them. ‘What of your man? I disbelieve he will assist. He is broken, you understand?’

  Devlin turned and considered Peter Sam. ‘No. He won’t help us. But with luck he may yet help himself. Wait until I move, Valentim.’ Together they crossed the path.

  Hib leant towards Peter Sam’s ear. ‘Here he comes,’ he whispered, his voice as soft as a lamb’s tongue. ‘Here comes the man who has led you here to me, my boy. Here we are against him, my Peter Sam.’

  Peter Sam lifted his head to the familiar face walking towards him.

  How many months now? A different coat. Different hat. Might not be him at all. No matter. Little to matter now.

  ‘Your letters, Ignatius,’ Devlin held out the sleeve of bamboo. ‘From Father d’Entrecolles, to a Father Orry, to Captain William Guinneys, to you, to Black Sam Bellamy, and now me.’

  Devlin placed the bamboo tube in Ignatius’s arms and looked Hib’s frame up and down, regretting he had not packed his ebony dagger. Ignatius unbound the cork and string to pull out the volume within.

  Valentim Mendes saw only that Ignatius’s hands were occupied. He saw that perhaps together, with this porco dead, himself and the pirate could fell the Scotsman. Perhaps just two strikes from the pair of them. The odds would be in the favour of the Portuguese and those of righteous birth.

  He thrust his rapier exactly as he had been taught to.

  Devlin shouted something but Valentim would never understand it. He saw Devlin’s cutlass strike down at the Scotsman’s arm as it stabbed towards him but the giant swatted away the pirate; and then Valentim was looking down at the hilt of the Estilete as it stuck out from under his chin and his doublet was soaked with blood.

  He touched the warm flow as he stumbled back, mystified by its streaming. He staggered, dropped his sword and pulled out the spike rammed in his throat, a white piece of his spine stuck to its tip like a rough diamond. Valentim croaked a bloody grin at its ghastly beauty that seemed as strange as his exquisite porcelain hand.

  He saw nothing else and Hib left him twitching on the grass. Then the Scotsman stomped over to where the pirate lay.

  Devlin scrambled to his feet and tried to get away from Hib’s approach. He looked around the garden. Valentim lay dead. Blackbeard was standing fast but his fists were pulling out pistols. Ignatius was white-faced and checking for wounds about him. Peter Sam did nothing. The Scotsman brought a cudgel from behind his back and grimaced happily as he approached Devlin’s outstretched cutlass.

  He looks like a farmer, Devlin thought absently. A poor worsted waistcoat and calico breeches and buskins like a Dutchman’s, but a big bastard nonetheless. Go for the head. Slice something off. He’d stop at that.

  He looked at the boulder-like hands closing in on him. If he gets inside the blade I’m dead. Think on that. Accept that. Know that in a fight you will get pain so wait for it. Move with that in mind.

  Hib kept grinning. He made a playful lunge for Devlin’s coat with his empty hand and the pirate swiped at his head with his curve of metal.

  Hib leant away easily and wrapped his fist around Devlin’s falling sword hand, crushing the blade loose. Holding him high and away like a struggling rat and revelling in the pain across the pirate’s face as he hung from his arm, Hib felt Devlin’s bones grind inside his monstrous fist.

  The cudgel dove inside at the pirate with enough force to punch straight through his back, and then Hib batted Devlin away with another strike as he laughed at the splash of blood leaving his stick.

  Devlin landed whimpering like a boy. Pain wept out of him. Then a boot like a paving stone lifted him clear across the garden.

  He rolled painfully; tried to raise himself. Coughing, he searched desperately for his cutlass: Always find your steel. The sight of it gave him strength over his pain.

  Devlin clutched his sides and staggered across the grass to where he had seen a glint of metal. The shadow of the Scotsman fell over him, his faint giggle the only sound in the garden.

  Ignatius found his voice again, feeling secure rolling the bamboo tube in his hands. Now he could save the pirate or let him live. The Irishman might even be grateful, for Hib could break him as easily as the other.

  But Hib had cut once already and would need more. The Regulador of Sao Nicolau was stretched dead and open-eyed but that was not enough. One was never enough. The bowels of Newgate had vomited Hib into Ignatius’s hands after the hangman had lost his position in the fallout of the Jacobite uprisings, but Hib had not lost his taste for murder with the loss of his employ and London had dribbled blood for months afterwards from alleyway to alleyway.

  The giggle came again and Ignatius knew what it signified. The pirate was no real loss, after all.

  ‘Finish him, Hib!’ Ignatius cried. Devlin looked up as Hib’s eyes upon him grew round and white, and Devlin called to the lowered head of his quartermaster.

  ‘Peter Sam! Stand to!’ Devlin choked out the words, gaining a moment’s respite as Hib looked round at the chained man. Devlin dragged himself away and continued to call. ‘To me, Peter Sam!’ Still coughing he pulled himself to try and stand, finding his vision had cleared enough to see his cutlass a few feet from him. But he couldn’t rise. Nothing worked. Everything wanted to sleep.

  Hib twisted his cudgel in his hands, slitted eyes observing the big quartermaster. The head still hung down. The Scotsman switched back to Devlin. He was just flesh and bone like all the rest. He giggled once more as Devlin began to crawl towards his cutlass and still tried to speak to ghosts.

  ‘Back for you, Peter Sam … Ship waiting for you.’

  Hib’s boot tipped him onto his back. He wanted to see Devlin’s face before he died and still the stupid choking voice prattled on.

  ‘Come back for you, Peter Sam … Come back for my brother.’

  The voice came like a dog growling in the night. Hib’s head whisked back to look at Peter Sam. Ignatius watched the chains pull tight as shoulders flexed and a back rose straight. He inched away as the growl whispered across the garden.

  ‘Get your filthy Scottish arse away from him, you dog!’ And Peter Sam began to move. Hib turned and smiled, slapping his bloody cudgel between his hands.

  ‘Forget him, Gow!’ Ignatius called. ‘Kill Devlin!’

  Obediently Hib spun back to the pirate Devlin who was pulling himself closer to his blade.

  Ignatius backed to Teach’s side. ‘Teach! Kill this animal!’

  But Blackbeard holstered his pistols. ‘Do something yourself. I think you’ve spoken enough to pirates.’ And he stepped into the shade as Peter Sam lumbered away from them.

  Not enough, Peter Sam thought. Nothing in my arms except cabbage water and broth. Not enough strength in my limbs to stop him. His eyes sought for steel, any metal, even wood – and then he saw it.

  But enough in my arms still to pick up an iron sundial.

  His fists wrapped around its
leg and with its heft of iron came the memory and the memory ran hotly through his arms. His strength had been gone but the feel of iron was as strong as meat.

  Hib’s prey inched away from him like a worm. He stamped a buskin on the hem of Devlin’s coat. ‘Where do you think you’re going, little man?’

  Devlin looked up at the beast and spat his own blood at the boots. He turned a bloodied smile on the Scotsman as the sun hit the garden for the first time. ‘I’m getting out of the way, you fat fuck!’

  ‘Hib!’ Ignatius warned, cocking his pistol too late and fatefully causing Hib to turn just as Peter Sam ploughed the sundial’s flat edge across the broken, bent and twisted nose that defined his face.

  A staggering flash of agony jolted through Hib and a ferrous odour seemed to explode in his head. For the first time, even after all the laughing boys of Greenock, the taverns and gutters of London and his own father’s terrible fists – never forgotten – Hib Gow fell to his knees, and the great and masterful proboscis that set him apart from all others plopped onto the stone path before his eyes – eyes that were already beginning to swell and close as his body panicked to protect his sight.

  Hib tried to mouth some plea to the suddenly monstrous man in leather but only the gurgle of his own black blood dribbled out. His jaw hung loose. He swayed, attempting to grab the man moving behind him, who now stood on his legs, who wrapped chains around his neck, who was pulling the life out of him, whose knees were pushing Hib’s back away from the tightening iron garotte, whose wrists were straining rivulets of blood down the chains as the links coiled and choked him.

  ‘It’s Hib!’ the hideous crones would cry. ‘Hib’s doing it!’ And the cheers would ring out all around the Tyburn tree because the black mask could not hide the proud ugly nose stretching the cloth sack to its furthest. ‘Hib’s doing it!’ the biddies cheered, and he always gave them a choking to remember. He had been good at that one thing all his life. Knew it now.

  Peter Sam felt the last rattle shudder through his arms, and the last of his strength fell away with the huge body as he slumped alongside it in the grass and the gore. Only Peter Sam’s chest rose and fell with his gasped breaths. His arm lay against Hib’s.

  Ignatius had witnessed a man who seemed potent for another forty years slaughtered before him. Flies were already playing in Hib’s blood; his protector was gone.

  Ignatius’s peaceful garden was now a butcher’s drain hole. He raised the pistol like a man lost in the forest who hears the baying of wolves all around him and aimed at the pirate reaching for his cutlass as he struggled to his feet.

  You hold too much faith in steel, pirate.

  He laid his sight.

  To kill you with your own gun and then your own man with your other gallant pistol. All that you deserve.

  He fired.

  He had underestimated the pirate. Plucked the wrong crow.

  Ignatius let go the pistol, unable to hold it now his thumb and forefinger were no longer part of his hand.

  Devlin had given up a pair of rich, fine London pistols, hard for a gentleman to resist, but Devlin had overloaded them with two fists’ worth of powder and iron scrap and plugged them with hemp. On firing, the breech, plates and walnut stock had exploded in Ignatius’s fist.

  A laugh burst from Teach as he watched Ignatius buckle and wonder at his hand.

  Ignatius dropped the bamboo tube as he grabbed at the blood and stumbled for his rooms. His shoes crunched on his own shattered fingers like the crushing of snails. He needed cloth for staunching, he needed water, he needed help. For the first time in all his years of dining with kings and princes he needed help.

  Here be pirates.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Do you want to be a pirate?

  He closed the door to them, biting back the shock seeping through him as he summoned his boy with a scream. Outside, Devlin stood over Peter Sam and gave him his hand, hauling him up like a fallen child.

  Peter stumbled but stood. He touched Devlin’s hand. ‘I think I been lost, Captain …’ his voice faded.

  Devlin held him up and gave him his shoulder. ‘You came back, Peter. Besides, I didn’t have anything else to worry about.’ They hobbled together to the house and Teach stepped out from the trees.

  Peter Sam straightened as best he could, pulled his bloodied chains taut again and stepped in front of Devlin.

  Devlin levelled his blade. ‘Come on then,’ his voice grating as ribs pinched inside him. ‘Let’s have you an’ all.’

  Edward Teach slowly reached into his waistcoat, past the pistols holstered about his chest, and brought out the stump of candle he had carried with him the past year.

  ‘I am due to light this,’ he said as placidly as his growling tones would allow. ‘I need to light it to end your days, Captain Devlin.’ He pulled down his broad hat to cover his eyes and tossed the candle to Devlin’s feet. ‘Too much wind here to light such a promise. We should go inside and finish that dog. I’ve a ship to gets to and so has you.’ Then Teach gave up his only secret, and he gave little to any man: ‘He has a tunnel to the harbour.’ Devlin said nothing and Teach lent an arm to Peter Sam and they walked to the house, only Devlin giving a backwards look to the blood-soaked body of Valentim Mendes staining the fallen Magnolia blossom. No-one cast an eye to the abandoned bamboo tube or the fleshy slab that had once been Hib Gow.

  Inside, Ignatius’s boy had helped him wrap his blackened hand and pulled back the rug to reveal the ringbolt door that led to the storm drain and the harbour. Tossing aside the other of Devlin’s pistols, Ignatius took his own from his desk, awkwardly cocking it with one hand, accustomed as he was to palming back the dog-head. It clicked just in time to meet the crash of the doors from the garden and tremblingly played over all three men stepping into the room.

  ‘Keep your distance!’ Ignatius’s voice rattled, the shot nearly let fly too soon.

  ‘Do you not want the Jesuit’s letters, Ignatius?’ Devlin called. ‘You left them in the garden there.’ Devlin and Teach separated instinctively, the only defence against a single shot. Peter Sam attached himself to Devlin, the room crawling with memories around him.

  Ignatius bade his boy open the hole and as the trap door slammed back it belched a breath of sea and moss.

  ‘I am leaving for my ship, gentlemen. I will fire on you should you follow.’ He moved around his desk to the hole, sparing an eye to check the ladder, convinced that he could climb down and still keep an armed hand upon the pirates. ‘For now you may have the letters. That is the price I pay for my escape. Perhaps time may come to haunt you for what you have spoilt this day. I very much hope so. You could have been witnesses to the birth of a nation.’ He took his first step down into the tunnel and neither Devlin nor Teach moved a muscle. ‘For the moment you are free, but mark me, gentlemen, I am not one to be tried.’

  The black youth suddenly realised he was to be abandoned to the mercy of cut-throats and skipped to the hole. ‘Master?’

  Ignatius swung the pistol at him. ‘Stay, boy!’ Then he vanished.

  He ducked along the passage for only a few feet before he noticed that something blocked the shaft of light that should have been shining in from the sea.

  One lightning-fast hand slapped his pistol loose while another whipped its own across Ignatius’s jaw.

  ‘Hullo, chum!’ Hugh Harris chirped. ‘Where you planning on going then?’ he asked as he slipped his kidney dagger from his belt.

  Ignatius scuttled back towards the light from above, his hand to his mouth, horrified by the taste of his own blood. He looked up at the bright square light above him just as it was blotted out by the silhouette of Peter Sam looming over the hole. Peter descended in silence and Devlin slammed the hatch behind him.

  ‘What’s your name, lad?’ Devlin put his face close to the youth’s, who had begun to shake tears from his wide eyes as the screams came wrenched and muffled from the cellar beneath them.

  The boy looked deep in
to the pirate’s eyes and wondered how the man could not hear the terrible sounds from below, the face so kindly looking upon him. ‘Matthew, sir,’ he caught a sob and pleaded. ‘I is fifteen years old.’

  ‘Well, Matthew,’ the pirate squeezed his shoulder. ‘I could do with some help getting back to sea. How do you fancy being a pirate, my boy?’

  The cellar door rattled once, desperately, like a storm door, and then all became still. Only the dark eyes of the pirate remained, looking softly and questioningly into William’s face as if nothing had happened to any of them.

  ‘I think …’ he stammered, ‘I think I should not like it, thanking you kindly, Captain.’

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The immutable law of the sea was the only faith that John Coxon knelt to in spite of his parson father’s vigorous attempts to make a church-going Christian of him; and, in spite of Devlin’s ingenious attempt to shake the Milford from his Shadow’s stern, to Charles Town Coxon inevitably came.

  In London he could stumble out of The Grapes into Narrow Street after dark and not know east from west; but streets did not have tides, did not leave wakes, apart from the ebb and flow of vice and the morning roll of the brewer’s dray. Ships he could follow. Seas he knew. And he had followed Devlin.

  South-east of Charles Town harbour, far away from the acres of wood bustling along Cooper river trading indigo and rice, black backs and beaver laps, the Milford sat and waited. She had been cleared for action since dawn.

  ‘A sail!’ The cry echoed around her decks. It was a grey sail, above a black and red freeboard, sporting a ragged kingdom pennant trailing from her backstay but fooling noone. She was making for the Mer Du Nord, hiding herself amid the merchants and Indiamen. But not hiding well enough.

  ‘That’s her,’ Coxon grinned as he stood at the larboard chains with Rosher, who had not seen the Shadow this close before. There, threading through the forest of masts, against the tide, less than a mile away, he could count the red gunports facing them. Nine along the weatherboard and two quarterdeck guns, another at the fo’c’sle. Nine pounders. One broadside, 216lbs, if double-shot. The Milford could hurl 312lbs in reply and Rosher tapped the gunwale proudly.