The Black Ring

by William Westbrook

  A cable’s length away a small brig lay hove-to and rode easily on the swells. Its hull was a dull black, with nine gun ports to each side, behind which were 12-pound cannons. The brig’s gun crews were at the ready, but they were usually not needed against more or less defenseless prizes like the slaver.

  After a particularly devastating broadside of grapeshot across her decks, the slaver went silent. Boats were lowered from both sloops, and crews armed with cutlasses and pistols began pulling for Soledad. But there was to be no hand-to-hand fighting; Lebron’s crew was mangled and dying, with Lebron himself draped over the hot swivel gun, hands and mouth dripping blood onto the deck. The last broadside had finished him.

  Down below decks, the slaves knew only that the terrible thunder had stopped, but on the lowest deck appeared a new terror: water gurgling up through the floor! The wailing grew louder and held a new note of panic as screams drifted up through the decks and out through the shot holes in the hull. One of the sloop’s captains went below to Lebron’s cabin to gather up the ship’s slave manifest and also to check for any remaining crew who might be hiding. Then, finding no one, he went to check the holds. At the lowest level in the ship he found the seawater rushing in.

  Quickly, slaves were put on the pumps and they pumped as if their lives depended on it, which was the case, of course. But Soledad already had almost five feet of water in the well, and the pumps were old, partially clogged with debris, and one soon stopped working. The slaves panicked and would not pump, and instead scrambled up the ladder to reach the next deck. Two were shot, but no threat would bring the others back. The sloop captains soon realized there was nothing for it. The ship couldn’t be saved and the thing to do was to get all the slaves they could into the boats quickly.

  The sloops’ crews broke open the hatches, and the slaves came pouring up, terror in their eyes. They tumbled into the boats and huddled in fear, a sloop captain shouting at them in words they could not understand. The warrior stayed below, calling out for his sister, but in the pandemonium her voice could not be heard. Finally, he was forced up the ladder and onto the deck. In the sloops’ boats the slaves wailed in confusion. But the warrior guessed at the truth: They would be trading one hell for another.

  Soledad was getting lower in the water; the screaming from the slaves still trapped below was growing more pronounced. The sloop captains looked helplessly across the water at the brig, aware that this was not supposed to happen and wondering what would now happen to them.

  On board the black brig, meanwhile, the pirate they called the Holy One was not happy. He watched the boats pulling for his ship with far fewer slaves than he had expected. He stood on his quarterdeck in dark vestments, fingering a rosary and staring at the sinking slaver. Perhaps he was just too angry to contemplate the fickle world at that moment. One never knew with the Holy One, and one did not ask too many questions.

  He was tall, with lank gray hair and an aquiline face. A thin scar ran from his left eye down his cheek to a thin mustache that quivered slightly over a cruel mouth. He stood completely erect and immobile on the quarterdeck; now his arms reached upward, his eyes closed in prayer, the sun flaring off the large silver cross that hung from his neck.

  Finally, the slaver began its descent into the ocean, sliding silently beneath the waves, with dead slaves on the lower decks floating off their pallets. Globs of air bubbles rose and clung to the underside of the decks before rolling forward toward the dark bows as the ship purged the air from the slaves’ lungs and the boxes, drawers, chests, barrels, and canisters below decks. The slave ship’s eventual velocity reached 25 knots through darker and colder water until it finally crashed with surprising force onto the lightless bottom of the sea and broke in half. Incredibly, the trip down took almost ten minutes.

  Meanwhile, the Holy One came out of his trance. He had reached a calmer place. It was unfortunate about the drowned slaves, of course, but his God would never put a good soul into a black body, so the world lost very little.

  With the captured slaves safely in the holds, the Holy One gave the order to raise the boats and resume hunting for other opportunities to fill his holds before turning for Cuba, where the slave markets offered the best prices in the Caribbean.

  Not long after Soledad settled on the seabed, the pirate ships set sail.

  SIX

  RASCAL BOUNDED across the great blue of the Atlantic Ocean, unleashed from the constraints of her anchorage in St. George’s Harbor, free of the incessant tug and pull of her heavy anchor, and once again a living thing. Her crew reveled in her—and their—freedom, none more so than Nicholas Fallon, her enigmatic captain who, at that moment, was high up in the larboard ratlines feeling like the king of the world. The melancholy of life ashore in St. George Town had left his face, and his green eyes were bright again. He hung in the ratlines like an old tar and looked at miles of sky above the impossibly blue ocean and smiled a secret smile to himself. It was a wonderful day, a brilliant day, in fact; indeed, it was a day when anything could happen.

  Below him he could see Beauty’s roundish, foreshortened body standing next to the helmsman, her short black hair blowing about her face, her peg leg anchored firmly in a ring bolt on the deck against the heel of the ship. Fallon had thoughtfully placed ring bolts in strategic positions about the deck for his first mate.

  Fallon could see Ajani on deck—Aja as he liked to be called. The boy was learning the art of navigation under the tutelage of Barclay, the sailing master. Barclay was a good instructor and Aja had made remarkable progress.

  Since his rescue, Aja had become quite attached to Fallon, becoming his coxswain and erstwhile protector as well as Beauty’s right hand. She had taught him to read English; he could already speak and understand it from working in an English household in Africa before his family was kidnapped and sold. Certainly, reading had opened up the world to him and contributed to his innate wisdom, for all on board agreed he was not only older but wiser than his years. He was only fourteen, but he was well on his way to becoming a man.

  Cully had the ship’s youngsters huddled around him and was reviewing the intricacies of sighting a long nine on a heaving ship, the younger boys smiling in anticipation of action, not knowing that death and horror were often consequences. Cully was a white-haired Irishman with a quick smile and leather face and one eye that could sight the great guns with uncanny accuracy. He was the best gunner Fallon had ever known, and Fallon had placed him over all the other gun captains aboard Rascal. Cully’s gun crews could load and run out and unleash their deadly broadsides in two minutes. It was doubtful many gun crews in the Royal Navy could match that time.

  Rascal was several days out of Bermuda, on the watch for pirates, privateers, and any ship otherwise the King’s enemy, French or Spanish, there being many to choose from. The war with France had cast a dark shadow over the sunny Caribbean just as it had over the rest of the world. For the war had many fronts due to France’s ambition to dominate the known surface of the earth. France’s navy, privateers, agents, and armies were active throughout Europe and the Med, India, the Baltic, and the Caribbean, with Napoleon Bonaparte himself leading his army in Egypt in an attempt to wipe out British trade routes with India. His army, while successful against the Egyptian military, had been left stranded after his navy’s disastrous showing at the Battle of Aboukir in August. But he was hardly finished.

  Bonaparte had always been an energetic warrior throughout his military career. Somehow, he’d found time to marry the beautiful and seductive Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, whom he renamed Joséphine. That in itself linked Bonaparte more closely to the Caribbean, for she was born to a wealthy plantation family on Martinique. Like most of the plantations on the island, the Tascher plantation raised sugarcane and, until France abolished slavery in her colonies in 1794, had kept hundreds of slaves; indeed, most of the population of every island in the West Indies was composed of kidnapped African slaves.

  As he hung on the
ratlines, Fallon thought of his friend Davies and the secret mission he’d given him. The rear admiral’s letter had been brief and to the point, a favor between friends and allies. Fallon wondered at the responsibilities on Davies’ shoulders, for much was required of him besides managing His Majesty’s ships in the Caribbean, not least of which was the ability to understand the shifting nature of world politics and its implications for the British Empire, and to act on his understanding in ways that pleased the Admiralty. It made Fallon very happy to be in his little corner of the world, a minor cog in the grand scheme of things. And yet he had to admit to his secret self that he took an interest in affairs in Europe and, truth be known, felt he was capable of playing a bigger role in them one day.

  But not today. Today he was Nicholas Fallon, King of the World.

  Satisfied that all was well in the King’s world, he descended to the deck and joined Beauty and Barclay at the binnacle just as Barclay finished noting the ship’s position on the slate.

  “Did you enjoy looking over your domain, your Highness?” asked Beauty, correctly reading Fallon’s mind and mood and, once again, knowing him at least as well as he knew himself.

  “I did,” replied Fallon. “I think I may punish every other person in the realm for insolence. Starting with sharp-tongued women!”

  “Next it will be sailing masters,” Barclay said as he shuffled off. Beauty was just about to comment when the hail came from the lookout.

  “Deck there! Something in the water dead ahead! A lot of something!”

  Fallon snatched his telescope from the rack near the binnacle and moved to the larboard railing to look forward, aghast that the lookout had spotted something he’d missed only moments ago. Maybe the King’s eyesight was failing.

  “Beauty, let’s get closer and then heave-to. Then I’ll want my gig lowered, please,” he said, a sense of foreboding in his voice. “And get Colquist on deck. I don’t know what we’ll find.”

  Colquist was a young surgeon lent by a merchantman whose ship was laid up at the dockyard on Bermuda and would be for a while. Fallon had taken an immediate liking to the man, not least because he was sober and meticulous in his habits. But he had yet to be tested with casualties.

  Rascal sailed on for a half mile before Beauty brought her to a standstill with practiced ease, the schooner’s sails balanced just so in the moderate breeze so that the ship would go neither here nor there.

  As Fallon stepped down into the gig and Aja ordered the crew to push off, he had a premonition, for wreckage floating in the water usually meant one thing: a ship was down. A ship that sank, any ship—enemy or not—brought a natural sadness to sailors who knew how fragile their existence was on the ocean.

  They rowed a short distance before Aja ordered “oars” and the gig drifted into the floating debris: wooden boxes, odd timbers, bits of clothing, and air-tight tins—whatever could work its way out of a sinking ship and float to the surface. Fallon noticed several of the tins had French writing on them, but he let them be. There were no bodies; no doubt the sharks had seen to that. Even now, ominous dorsal fins cut the water nearby. The crew sat silently, their oars dripping, unable or unwilling to speak. At last, satisfied there were no survivors, and in fact having no idea how long the wreckage had even been floating, Fallon ordered the gig back to the ship. But, as he did so, Aja reached over the side and plucked a red ribbon from a tangle of cordage floating on the surface of the sea. A red ribbon that perhaps had belonged to a woman or child, a wife or mother or daughter; here was a clue to a life, a story that would never be known. The gig’s crew stared at the ribbon in silence, until Fallon finally ordered them to pull back to the ship. It was a somber little journey and a morose captain who stepped onto the deck.

  “Beauty, let’s be away from this place,” Fallon said as the gig was hoisted aboard.

  Beauty ordered the helmsman to bring the ship back on course and soon enough Rascal was making her best speed through the water. But the mood aboard ship had altered, and the hands went about their tasks with a lowness.

  “What do you think happened back there, Nico?” Beauty asked after Rascal was well away from the wreckage and Fallon seemed approachable.

  Fallon had been wondering the same thing but could come to no real conclusions based on what he had seen.

  “Maybe privateers or pirates and a capture that went wrong,” he mused aloud. “Could have been a packet or trader of some kind. Or maybe a slaver that sprang a plank and sank accidentally. Many of those ships are in bad shape, and the slaves are at the pumps constantly. Even a small storm could overwhelm one.”

  “I wonder if she was British,” Beauty said.

  “I think French,” Fallon responded. “But if she was a slaver she could have been from anywhere, bound for anywhere, of course.” Both knew that French, British, and Spanish slavers were opportunistic, selling to the highest bidders regardless of political boundaries on a map.

  “I’m going below, Beauty,” Fallon announced suddenly. “Call me with any other surprises.”

  He made his way to his cabin and poured himself a glass of wine. The cabin was not spacious, but stern windows swept dramatically across the rear and there was room for his swinging cot, a writing table, and a small secretary to hold his papers. And his writing. The lines were scribbles, really, a poor attempt at poetry, for nothing rhymed. He moved to his writing table now and took out a sheet of paper, quill pen, and ink and let the words flow to Elinore.

  The gray built up on the day

  Until there was no light I believed

  Was real. And the only heat in the air

  Was from my own breath and the only

  Sound the still cry in my throat asking

  For you.

  Finished, he folded the paper and put it in his secretary. God knew when it would get to Elinore. But he felt better for having written it, and having thought of her instead of lingering on the sad ribbon floating on the sea.

  SEVEN

  THERE is a look to a sea making up for a storm. The ocean begins to move beneath the ship in a different way as it gathers itself, its mood graying and hardening. Old tars can feel it deep within their memories, and throw looks to one another in acknowledgment.

  Rascal was now less than four hundred miles from Saint-Domingue, and Barclay, the sailing master, studied the sea the way he studied food before him at mess—intently and reverentially. His eyes narrowed as he stood at the starboard railing and looked into the distance, seeing nothing absolute but feeling that events were coming. It was hard to tell Barclay’s age; he was somehow born the way he was, had been that way since anyone had known him on Bermuda. He was gray, stooped, and unremarkable to look at. But he knew his navigation.

  Farther up the starboard railing, Beauty and Aja conferred about the weather as well. Rain had begun, and as the glass had been dropping for the past two hours the question wasn’t, is there going to be a storm but, rather, how much of a storm? November gales were not unusual in the Atlantic, and certainly the wind was getting up. Always cautious, Beauty ordered the topsails furled, and Aja went below to inform Fallon.

  “Deck there, two sail astern!” the lookout shouted.

  This was open ocean, and the strange sail could be coming from anywhere, could be anything from any country. As Fallon ascended the companionway and received his telescope from Aja, he turned his attention quickly to the distant ships, which were just visible from the deck: one sail off the starboard quarter and one off the larboard, effectively on Rascal’s flanks.

  “Deck there,” came the call from the lookout again. “Now three sail.”

  Fallon could not make out the third sail from the deck, but it certainly made him curious about what he might be facing. He scanned the horizon carefully but saw nothing else. The ships were miles away, but still.

  The best part of an hour passed. Beauty had ordered the courses reefed in the growing easterly, and yet the distance from the strange sails to the north remained the same.


  “What do you think, Nico?” she asked, appearing at Fallon’s side with a small note of concern in her voice. Rascal was a fast ship but, as every seaman knew, anything could happen at sea. The storm was beginning in earnest and a spar could be carried away or a stay could part or any of a hundred calamitous things could put the ship in harm’s way. It was always good to have a plan if the worst thing you could imagine happened.

  “Curious, Beauty. They seem to be keeping pace, just watching. And maybe waiting,” said Fallon pensively. Rascal had no flag up so the strange sails could not be sure of her loyalty. “Let’s hold course for the time being and do some watching of our own. We’ll wait a bit longer to see if things change.”

  The afternoon grew darker under a low horizon and, though the rain had stopped, the increased wind made the rigging moan in its ominous way. Beauty had a second reef taken in the main and foresail, for though Barclay forecast that the storm would blow itself out, who knew?

  The crew went about their tasks obediently, looking over their shoulders often, not overly concerned, but … still. The strange sails could not be seen in the gloom, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Beauty sent the hands to their dinner, and Fallon went below to have his own after leaving orders to be called if the situation changed.

  When less than an hour later Fallon returned to the deck the situation had moderately improved; the horizon had lifted a bit so that visibility was better. The wind and sea were still pitching Rascal this way and that, with the waves hissing as they passed beneath the ship. Aja was at the taffrail with the telescope waiting for him.

  “They are still following us, Captain, sir,” the boy said ominously, motioning with his head to the ships just visible under the low sky astern. “Like little wolves.”