Cross of Fire

by Mark Keating

  To the man opposite, the beef was part of his old habit. He had a compass in his other pocket and even without introduction young Walter Kennedy could smell a man of the sea, albeit one from the other side of the waves.

  ‘Thanking you there, Captain,’ Kennedy beamed, his Irish voice not lost even after years of other realms, of a thousand shores and colours of the world that other men did not have the imaginations to dream of. The saddest prisoner was the seaman. His whole world may only be contained in a small brown box, his shoulders touching another as he slept and ate, but his sky and garden were infinite. Take that away and you would have no need to kill him. He’d gladly make his own rope to be free again. John Coxon understood this, the answer to why so many of them went so well to the gallows, made merry speeches to the crowd and thanked their hangman for the show.

  He let Kennedy enjoy his bovine chewing of his meat and opened the folder.

  ‘You are Walter Kennedy, are you not?’

  Kennedy nodded, his eyes stuck to the meat.

  ‘Late of the pirate Bartholomew Roberts?’

  ‘Well late, Captain. And Bart’s his pirate name to protect his priest brother. John Roberts he be. See, Captain, I know all to validate my claims!’

  ‘And you wish to turn evidence against those who once served alongside you? To buy yourself from the noose?’

  ‘I can name at least ten I know to be in England now as freemen. But I can’t write them down, Captain. Head’s no good for schooling.’ A small choke on his meat as he grinned and drooled.

  ‘And you sailed with Woodes Rogers for New Providence three years gone?’ Another affirmation. ‘And when Howell Davis turned pirate on the Buck out of those islands you were of his crew?’

  ‘Aye,’ Kennedy chewed slower. ‘But do you not want to know the names of the men I have to give you, Captain?’

  Coxon reared up, the candle lighting up the plate buttons of his white waistcoat and his face blazed under his tricorne.

  ‘You sailed with Howell Davis did you not?’

  Kennedy swallowed the chum in his throat.

  ‘Aye, Captain. Forgiveness, Captain. That I did.’

  Coxon settled.

  ‘Very well. And when Davis met his end and Roberts elected captain how did you end up in Bridewell gaol?’

  Kennedy sat back and appeared to find a window in his eye to sigh out of.

  ‘Sounds mighty simple when you says it like that, Captain.’

  In one sense Walter Kennedy’s past did not befit his end. Generals and admirals had seen less. It had glory and violence richer than the most vulgar Spanish novels. Defoe himself would have struggled to pen a more fitting tale of folly and just desserts. Drama and dudgeon sat together like cheese and bread to pirates and were marked on Kennedy’s face with lines and wistful eye as tamer men carry lost loves.

  Coxon had been on New Providence, although Walter Kennedy’s existence was unknown to him then, for the young man was still of the ordinary world. Coxon arrived with Rogers’s fleet in July 1718 when the king resolved to end the pirates’ reign over the Bahamas. He had been privy to the order that sent out Howell Davis to trade with the Spanish. And Davis had turned pirate, as all Welshmen seemed willing to do, and his death had spawned the greatest pirate flotilla ever to threaten trade from the Indian and African seas. It was the ‘Great Pirate Roberts’, as Governor Hamilton of the Leeward Islands had christened him, that now drew costly blanks in the ledgers of Leadenhall street and Whitehall.

  Walter Kennedy, still in his twenties, had pirated with Davis and Roberts. He had helped avenge Davis’s death at the hands of the Portos and sailed with Roberts as one of his captains for over a year before slipping his cable from Roberts’s fleet and roving alone with a crew of other traitors. Trying to shape home to Ireland, navigation not his best dancing, he fell into Scotland instead where, even among a drinking people, this special band of men startled the countryside with their rumbustion.

  His men caught and hanged, Kennedy took to his heels to London, where he had been raised, and used the coin he had left to open a brothel in Deptford, close enough to the water and wharves to still have the spirit of the oak near him. Using his book of clients to work out the best-heeled he returned to the occupation of his formative years and housebreaking became his new piracy.

  Some bad dealing with the ladies of his house had his name squawked to a beak and Walter Kennedy found himself dragged to Bridewell, the house of correction near the Fleet gaol, a fairly comfortable prison, until one of the other inmates recognised him as the pirate who had taken a ship from under him – and then the Hole in Marshalsea became Walter Kennedy’s new home.

  Now it was a silver oar, the pirate’s last memory of the sea, that would ride with him to Execution dock, being the judge’s mark of a pirate for the crowd to torment. But Kennedy knew names, and those names had bought him this beef, this weak wine – had brought him a gentleman captain to talk with young Captain Walter Kennedy, just twenty-five. And not dead yet.

  This man of the sea had time for Walter Kennedy.

  ‘Would you submit that your pirate days are over, Walter? That by giving up these names you wish to return to the proper world?’

  Kennedy rapped the table. ‘That I do, Captain. I owes none of them anything except for the fate that awaits me due to them.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it. It is a small world for evil men. Their end ever the same.’ Coxon watched Kennedy savour his final swallow.

  ‘However, the names of these men will not save you.’ He calmly observed the drop of the young man’s greasy chin.

  ‘You will hang. These names you hold in regard are worthless to me.’ The candle flame rose as Coxon let his words test Kennedy’s nerves. ‘But your past interests me. It is your younger days that may save you yet.’

  The brisket stuck in Kennedy’s chest.

  ‘How is that, Captain?’

  Coxon looked down to the sheaf of papers and pulled from the others the one in his own hand. The one with the name.

  ‘What can you recall about Patrick Devlin? Your time with him?’

  Coxon already knew the most of it. Devlin had related it himself.

  For five years the man who would become the pirate Devlin had been his valet, his steward, his servant. Coxon had liberated him from the Marine Royale where Devlin had found himself during the war. Before that a Breton fisherman, before that, in London, apprenticed to a Wapping anchorsmith.

  The anchorsmith had been murdered – the reason Devlin had run to France. Coxon had always believed the boy’s innocence but then Devlin had become a pirate and left dead men behind him wherever he went.

  The vellum in Coxon’s hand said all of this and one thing more that he had pulled from memory. The anchorsmith’s name had been Kennedy. He had had a son named Walter, a housebreaker who shared the home with his father and Devlin. The paleness of the face in the candle-light, the hesitancy to answer as wheels turned in the pirate’s head, seeking the safest reply, revealed to Coxon that he had found the right Walter Kennedy.

  Post-Captain John Coxon had been removed from his retirement in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and summoned hence by royal decree, which did not impress him more than the subject of his orders.

  Get Devlin.

  Four pages of the summons but the gist of it simple: the pirate had embarrassed the kingdom once too often, hurt the right people this time, hurt their pockets. Devlin had twisted away from them and sunk their schemes along with the first great diamond of the world, the Pitt Diamond as was, the Regent Diamond as is. Only now the world would look unknowingly upon its replica in the boy king’s crown when he finally ascended, Devlin having ‘lifted’ the original. Coxon had arrived in London to hear that surreptitious gangs under government sanction still dragged the Thames daily in the hope of finding it. Mudlarkers’ dreams.

  With his final defiance against the good, the pirate Devlin had caused the devastating crash of the South Sea Company to become inevitable. T
he greatest diamond in the world, that might have saved the fortunes of the many – the righteous were merely seeking to protect the interests of those they had encouraged to invest in the great companies, after all – had vanished along with the pirate they had sent to fetch it. This pirate who had spurned them, had cast away what the diamond might have achieved. It could have saved the Company, saved the whole country. The pirate was too ignorant to understand. What had it cost him? Some men, some flesh? What concern was that to governments and fortunes?

  In January, just as Coxon was receiving the Navy Board fellows ‘Duke’ and ‘King’ in Boston, the Committee of Inquiry in London published its findings into the deceit and chicanery woven by the Company’s directors. The loss to the general public and even those of greater means was catastrophic to the world. Devlin’s part in it was only one of the torn seams but at least it was one could be repaired, could be restitched, and Coxon would be its tailor.

  He repeated: ‘What can you recall about Devlin, Walter?’

  Kennedy trod carefully for a hundred nooses hung in the room to catch a wrong word.

  ‘I never have come across Devlin as a pirate. Had none of his doing, Captain.’

  ‘What about in London? What about Wapping? The Pelican stairs. What about your murdered father, Walter?’

  Kennedy coughed the tough brisket down. This man he had never met had the knowledge of a judge, and all of it about young Walter Kennedy.

  ‘I never did for my father, Captain, I swear. I gave up all he had to my mother and sisters and went to sea.’

  ‘So you think Devlin may have done for him? Could that be the case? As you might remember it?’

  At Coxon’s words the nooses snapped back into the ceiling; Walter Kennedy was free to run again.

  ‘Aye. Aye, Captain, that it could. Devlin lived with me and me old man. Me father found with a knife in him and Devlin gone.’

  ‘And you distressed so that you fled to sea yourself?’

  ‘Aye,’ he poured more of the warm wine. ‘Distraught I was. The sea my saviour. I am only sorry that I was led astray.’

  ‘Of course. And what if you had the chance to redeem your life of wickedness, Walter? What if I could take your repentant soul from this place?’

  Kennedy wiped his chin. ‘You want me to find Devlin, Captain? I told the truth, as always I ever have, I never sailed with the man.’

  ‘You sailed with Howell Davis. You sailed as captain with Roberts and I need a man who knows the pirate islands of the East Indies. The Americas are not the place for pirates now.’

  ‘That’s not easy, Captain. Hundreds of islands for a man to hide on.’

  ‘You’re a pirate, Walter. One of the worst. A pirate to catch a pirate.’ He supped his own wine for the first time, his chest rising.

  ‘A chance for you to have revenge on the man who killed your kin . . . or silence those who may know otherwise – depending on your own objective of course.’

  ‘He to be dead then, Captain?’

  Coxon became a portrait. ‘Do we have an accord, Walter?’

  Kennedy could discern the first wails of the morning seeping through the damp ancient stone as those in the sick ward came to life and were dragged to their labour.

  ‘I’d be a poor son, Captain, if I didn’t seek justice wouldn’t I?’ He thought on the man who had become the pirate, the pirate Devlin, the cemetery in his wake. ‘Mind, it might be too painful in my sorrow to actually meet him again. Perhaps leave that part for better men. Such as yourself, Captain.’

  Coxon squared back his papers, bid Kennedy finish the wine, stood to leave, even nodded a sententious smile before rapping on the door.

  ‘I would have it no other way.’

  Chapter Two

  1721. A good year to be a pirate. The purge of the pirates from the Bahamas in 1718 under Woodes Rogers’ cutlass and the pardon bestowed upon the rovers by King George had broken the spell for most.

  Some returned to the life, to be sure, finding the hoe and the taxes lesser reasons to own a putrid shirt than times under the black flag. But the amnesty proved what amnesties only ever prove:

  The ones that don’t take it, the ones that defy,

  you can accord that thems will be the worst, Your Honour.

  The Americas were now unfriendly shores. With the gruesome end of Blackbeard in 1718 the bell had begun to toll the end of the Caribbean’s ‘Golden Age’ of piracy. Hundreds had been hanged, notorious names swinging or staked out for the tide. For those bold and lucky enough to still sail, new climes were needed. The ‘pirate round’ was growing ever smaller.

  Africa proved the course to shape, the Indian Ocean, Madagascar and her islands still a free world, a mysterious world of old gods and untold wealth. What was once the edge of the pirate round was soon to become its prime corner.

  The Lion Mountains. Serra de Leão, West Africa. The Rice Coast. Some twenty miles upriver lay the Royal African Company’s fort, a slave fort, on Bense Island. And like Cape Castle further up the Guinea coast her twenty-two guns faced the sea rather than inland. Any attack on her would come as a European assault not an African one.

  In front of Bense’s cannon, Tasso Island. Larger, harder to defend, her Dutch fort abandoned for more than a hundred years. It had been foolish for the Dutch to desert such a fertile area, for now Governor Robert Plunkett and his forty-strong garrison processed the most valuable slaves for the New World. By all means let Cape Coast Castle and General Phipps send hands and backs to the Caribbean – any fool can cut cane. Bense fort was built for a superior breed of slave. Bense fort was built for rice: slaves to grow rice for slaves.

  The natives had grown the precious crop for thousands of years and now it was the Carolina colonies’ largest export. But whereas white hands had yet to learn to cultivate it well, the slaves from Bense had rice in their blood. Plunkett’s slaves were farmers, a machine for the plantation owners of His Majesty. Chosen men. Valuable men. Their final journey to the Americas would be more survivable than most.

  The slaves ate well aboard – better than the crews, whose worth was less, the slave ship being the last rung for a sailor before disease or old age ended him. There was even malt liquor for the males whilst the ‘blackbirders’’ officers drank palm wine. In fine weather the prisoners were taken on deck in the morning where they could remain until sunset separated from the crew by a wooden wall athwart. Pipes of tobacco were allotted on Mondays and, most distinctive of all, no chains once at sea.

  Aye, Robert Plunkett of Bense island kept his stock well. In 1719 he had defended his small world against Howell Davis, Thomas Cocklyn and Olivier Levasseur – La Buse or ‘The Buzzard’ as he had become, one of those rare men to gain a pirate name in his own lifetime.

  Against this pirate triumvirate, formidable for even a nation to hold against, Plunkett only surrendered when he ran out of shot and then impressed the pirates so much with the Irishman’s fearless temper and swearing while tied and kidnapped that they let him live.

  A year later and even the ‘Great Pirate Roberts’ decided to careen further downstream rather than go against the furious governor. But upstream, in Whiteman’s Bay, the mouth of the river, pirates of a darker breed found a home and the farmers of the tribes found a harsher side to the white man.

  Here a former Royal African Company man had himself turned pirate. John Leadstone saw no profit in waiting for the tribes to pawn their unwanted criminals, captured enemies or their own indentured as the companies dictated. An armed gang ‘panyarring’ – kidnapping – from the farms, proved quicker for Leadstone’s turn of coin.

  Leadstone found willing trade in the visiting Bristol and Liverpool ‘interlopers’, those ships that had also decided the Crown’s slavers had too much of the business than was good for them.

  With smaller sloops and pinks these low men, sunk below the level of honest merchants in a poor world since the South Sea Company’s collapse, needed harsher controls for their violently procured carg
oes to prevent mutiny on their short-crewed ships.

  First they would identify and dismember the strongest in front of the others. Without them knowing your tongue the captives would understand what would be their punishment should they resist. Any assault against the crew and the assailant’s heart and liver were to be fed to the others; or if a woman was found disrespectful she would be hoisted by her thumbs from a yardarm to be whipped with knives attached to ropes in front of the rest.

  ‘That’s the way you do it, Cap’n.’ Leadstone, ‘Old Cracker’ his pirate name, pointed his thumbs at the ceiling of his shack, demonstrating to the young captain with the black hair, dressed for cooler climes in his Damask waistcoat and dark twill coat and tricorne, the close heat invisible upon him.

  ‘They’ll do what you says then, so they will!’ Cracker twirled gleefully, his arms close to his head as he mockingly sobbed and mimicked the screams of the women until he could take it no more and doubled over laughing and drooling. He looked up at the captain who was coolly unimpressed with the pantomime, or indeed the heat. Leadstone sweated like a whore in comparison, a shine of grease matting his clothes to his arms and back. The man had introduced himself as Captain Devlin, and he was in a buying mood.

  Leadstone wiped his face, the sweat on his linen just shifting the dirt around. A good Bristol man at one time and somewhere under the grime a friendly face, but drink and easy living had turned it wasted and sallow, and evil never seeks mirrors.

  ‘Rogues of dignity be the black, Cap’n. Treat ’em as any mutineer, they understand little else. Mind I don’t deal with Kormantine blacks. Those fellows will kill you or themselves once your back’s turned. Be assured, Cap’n, my chattel be willing and true.’

  He came from around his counter, nailed crudely from barrels and decking; Devlin noticed the short legs under the normal length body. He had watched a gypsy baiting dogs in St-Malo with the same disproportion, an ugly waddle like an old circus ape.