Cross of Fire

by Mark Keating

  ‘But we’re after The Buzzard’s gold. That’ll do. The ship talks of nothing else.’

  ‘Aye. But I feel like a gambler on his last coin. Going broke for the toss.’ He drank until he choked and went on.

  ‘It’s desperate. A myth. Chasing a fortune. We could be starving by the end of it. Never find a thing.’

  Peter Sam had never heard his captain talk so. He was older than Devlin but they had both seen the end of the Spanish war. The boy was no pup.

  Peter Sam had killed more, had seen more, and learnt to judge his day by what he had drunk and ate, by full belly and bleary eye. Morning was another country.

  He knew his captain to be a quiet one. A man who read, who killed easy and well but slept badly for it and drank fast to drown his humour. And Devlin did not sing. And he would dance awkwardly, and then pretend to be breathless and leave the others to the jig. His was not an easy take to the life, so Peter Sam, the true, the actual, had to show him the way.

  If Peter Sam was not this, not the brigand in goat leather with apostles of powder about his chest, not the giant of the deck, he would still be the cod fisherman in Newfoundland earning less than he owed his masters for their black bread and cod-bone mash. Those men who had set themselves above him would fear him now if they ever saw him again. He had often thought that he would return to greet them, one moonless night.

  He knew that Devlin needed his word. His word as pirate. He needed to be reminded. Reminded that they would enslave him for a coin and hang him for a stolen spoon if he let them forget the fear. ‘You have your pistol about?’ Peter Sam held out his hand.

  Devlin lifted from his belt his favoured left-lock Bohemian pistol. It had taken the life of more than a dozen men and grew heavier for it as all arms do when you weigh them. New, they are like babes. As they wear, as the lock and breech show each firing, they tell more about their owner than his eyes. They show the terror of every man that stared into the muzzle. Sweat from the hand turns the wood to an amber shine on the wrists of a well-used pistol. There is aught so melancholy as an old gun.

  Devlin passed it over and Peter Sam twisted it and showed Devlin its wood and the deep cut.

  ‘This is where I hacked at you, Patrick Devlin. Tried to kill you. I thought you’d done for Seth that night. For my Thomas Deakins. You remember we fought?’

  ‘Aye, Peter.’ Devlin could see the storm again. The lightning flashes and the cutlasses running wet with the rain as he beat back the big man but saw his death. That had been on the island of the Verdes. St Nicolau. Four years gone. Still almost yesterday. Where he had become the pirate and been born again.

  ‘You had me then, Peter Sam.’

  Peter gave back the gun.

  ‘Aye. Had it not been for the gold that you screamed in my ear.’ He patted his captain’s shoulder.

  ‘You don’t have to yell no more, Captain. If you say there is gold we will come.’

  Peter Sam wanted one more thing. He wanted to pull the younger man towards him but that would not do. A squeeze of his shoulder was as much as he would bestow.

  Once, the pirate Devlin had traversed the oceans to rescue another Peter Sam, a broken Peter Sam, a dead Peter Sam. That had been in Charles Town. That Peter Sam was now long put aside but still not forgotten. They never spoke of it but it roped them together. He pushed his captain away like a boy to be bullied and Devlin rolled against the gunwale.

  ‘Fuck it, Patrick,’ he snapped. ‘Let us to the gold. Shoot ’em all. What else are we here for?’

  Devlin tucked back his pistol.

  ‘This priest. He says he knows the island where Levasseur is. He was on the ship. He wants me to believe that there’s a gold cross. That’s all he wants. We can take the rest of it.’

  Peter Sam puffed on his pipe. ‘Sure. And why not?’

  ‘That’s mighty thin, Peter.’

  ‘Were you not in chains in Newgate? And chained in Providence before that? Ain’t it always thin? You could do with chancing it a bit more, you fat fuckster!’

  He wheeled away to go below and close down the lamps and punch any drunk smoking near the wet baize curtain of the magazine.

  Devlin fumbled for his own pipe.

  One smoke before he returned to the cabin.

  ‘Aye,’ he announced to the sea. ‘Why not? Who’s to stop me?’

  He scraped his striker, sucked his Meerschaum pipe, the wine and tobacco soothing his head.

  ‘Ain’t they all dead?’

  O’Neill was pouring, measuring not the wine but more the greasy yellow-coated fellow left in his company.

  ‘And you, sir? How are you come here?’ He passed a glass that was not his, from a bottle that was not his. ‘You are a surgeon?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Dandon chimed his glass against the priest’s exactly as seamen are not meant to do.

  ‘I was an apothecary’s man. First in Louis’ American lands and then in Bath. My master was French and I learnt his tongue and I tore through his books better than he. I can make a fine draught and powders to keep you in or out of bed. Whichever is best required.’

  ‘But how with the pirate, my son?’ O’Neill’s face grew warm and welcoming. Extracting confessions was his métier.

  Dandon recounted. The tale almost a myth to him now so long had he been on the sea.

  It was as if he were his own father, and the son still back there somewhere dreaming of owning a saltern on New Providence and selling salt pills to gout-ridden gentlemen in the Carolinas.

  The priest shook his head and apologised on his God’s behalf as Dandon explained how the rum had claimed him and he made his living in a brothel for a pile of straw on a floor and popped, pierced and scraped what was beyond poultice.

  ‘The pirate – as you call him – saved my life. I imagine that even in your world the name of Blackbeard filtered through. My tongue had slipped badly again and the rogue Blackbeard was about to vent my spleen. It was Patrick who took him down, and with an empty gun at that.’ Dandon held a finger at the priest.

  ‘Mark that, Father. An empty gun against Blackbeard. And he has pulled down loaded on the Prince of Wales and the first minister of England. Killed king’s agents and Porto governors.’

  He drank to his captain.

  ‘If you want your cross you have found the right man.’

  O’Neill saluted his glass.

  ‘The Lord has found me the right man, my son. And it is the Lord’s humour and his love for the Irish that he brings me a fellow countryman.’

  Dandon scratched his eyebrow with closed eyes and sniffed away a laugh.

  ‘Don’t play the countryman with Devlin, Father. I suspect there is no love in him for his home.’

  O’Neill poured again, the bottle in a losing wager against his mood.

  ‘Nonsense! I have been across the world and still measure every blade of grass against that on my mother’s own porch.’

  He was cut by Devlin crashing back into the room. Pipe in one hand, bottle in the other, a boot kicking the door closed. He strode forward and bit on his words as they came through narrow lips.

  ‘My mother left me before I knew her face. My father drank. Left me that as a trait. Sold me to a butcher before I was nine.’ He handed Dandon the dregs of his bottle and Dandon tipped it to O’Neill.

  Devlin still came on and O’Neill backed up.

  ‘An English magistrate bid me hang for poaching fowl that he ate. All I know about being Irish is that we’re the last to eat and the first to hang.’ He pushed the priest’s chest.

  ‘I don’t know about a “flight of earls” and their sons and any Irish kingdom and your God gave me nothing.’ He turned his back and went for the ropes that held the bottles.

  O’Neill watched him select a wine and pitied the boy inside the man.

  ‘My son,’ he spoke as in his pulpit. ‘Can you not see that it is the Lord who has given you this path for this very purpose? He has given you your strength and your fortitude and your nature so t
o be his sword. This is His work for you. To bring back the True Cross for the worship of the world!’

  Devlin pulled the wax and the cork with his teeth and spat it to the priest.

  ‘I’ll let you live. Give me the name of the island. If your cross still exists I’ll bring it to you and take as much treasure as my men can carry.’ He drank with the bottle high and gasped it from his mouth and wiped his chin.

  ‘And that’s all I’ll give your God.’

  O’Neill bowed his head, a balding pate revealed to Devlin, the first weakness. He went to the table and the Neptune Français.

  ‘I will need you to read it, Captain.’

  Dandon coughed as Devlin crossed the cabin.

  ‘Is there no ill, Patrick, in going after the wealth of another pirate?’

  Devlin glared but Dandon knew how far he could go against his friend.

  ‘I only ask because I was believing that our ilk are dwindling in number without our assistance. Is there no loyalty other than to the ecstasy of gold?’

  O’Neill’s shoulder stood at Devlin’s, both looked down at Dandon.

  ‘How can you be so?’ O’Neill’s tone completely assured. ‘This is about the cross of your saviour!’

  Devlin pushed him aside, away from the table and the charts.

  ‘No it isn’t. He’s right. You look on us all the same. One set of evil men after another. Always useful ain’t it, father? When the Church needs something done.’

  O’Neill’s sanctimony came back, something about righteous men and forgiveness, but Devlin put his hand up. Dandon was his only interest.

  ‘And you,’ he pointed down to Dandon. ‘You should know better,’ he held up the wine. ‘These bottles represent the last for your thirst unless you want to start making your own. The ships are drying up if you hadn’t noticed. Honest merchants lie rotting in the harbours. Just a small bite of kings and moguls with any tin to sell. And did they work for it?’ He gave Dandon the bottle.

  ‘The world’s burst its purse. Tew became rich. Avery and Captain England like kings. They did it by Indian waters and princes’ ships. Why not me? If The Buzzard has it and I’m starving and can work at finding him who’s to say I don’t deserve it?’

  Dandon drank and wiped his lip.

  ‘He may have argument against your deservedness. I would think that pirate against pirate would not be a bloodless encounter.’

  Devlin snatched back the bottle.

  ‘You!’ he pointed O’Neill back to the atlas. ‘Tell me this island. Make sure I believe.’

  ‘Believe?’ O’Neill smiled warmly. ‘Faith, Captain, so it is. Faith is all we need.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Cape Coast Castle, West Africa.

  Three days later.

  John Coxon had been here before. On the Noble, the ship he had commanded through the Spanish war, he had watched the bleached white walls and embrasures of Cape Coast Castle roll before his bow. All the castle’s guns faced the sea, from where the only threat would come. Africa would not attack the companies that took their unwanted criminals and prisoners of tribal war for iron and cloth.

  He had watched from the castle’s cloistered rooms the escutcheon of his ship sail away. It was the only time he had watched a stern he commanded leave him behind. He had been sick, possibly dying, snared by one of the tropical diseases that befell the foreigner, and as armies had discovered often killed more men than warfare.

  Once revived he had left the coast of Africa on the Starling and embarked on his first adventure against the pirate Devlin, the steward who had become his enemy. That ship had limped back to England months later showing what a boot-wipe could do. Now it was the Standard rising and falling towards the slave factory.

  Castle was a strong word for the peeling building. It had been built as a garrison and prison decades before, then the slave fortunes had turned it into England’s workhorse of flesh. Its master for almost the same number of decades had been Governor General James Phipps, and Coxon divulged into Thomas Howard’s ear two mysteries.

  One was that the title ‘Governor General’ should no more be respected than that of Wagon-Master General in the land army. There was no grand deed in Phipps’s past, just high friends and money. Second, that he was most surprised that the thirty-stone man was even still alive. His renown should be his constitution that kept him fat when others had become ghosts along the coast that whittled down white men into toothpicks.

  ‘You will see a feast such as you have never known, Thomas,’ and Thomas beamed at his captain’s familiarity. ‘But you’ll have to move fast. Phipps will suck in plates like a hog. It is a marvel to behold.’

  Howard looked over the bow at the coast painted brown with the effluence of a hundred thousand ships.

  ‘You have been here before, Captain?’

  Coxon grabbed a man-rope as the ship started its backing of the sails a mile offshore; they would take the longboat in.

  ‘Aye. Almost died here. Mind, you may see me take a formal tone to this dog. Pay no attention. Company men expect it.’

  General Phipps was in charge of the castle, acting on behalf of Whitehall and the Royal African company. He knew that the navy kept afloat only due to the company’s magnanimity. The only defence of a naval captain would be to treat Phipps’s office as if he were in front of the lords themselves. You did not have to like him.

  ‘Be official,’ Coxon gave his word to Howard. ‘And we’ll be on our way soon enough.’

  Thomas Howard would carry only one thing from his visit to Cape Coast Castle. Coxon informed him with an outstretched arm that just a few miles south down the coast the Dutch at Elmina Castle ferried the blacks to South America also. This was the joint reward prised from the Spanish at the end of the war. The Dutch and English had insisted on the transport of slaves most of all.

  ‘See that door, Thomas?’ he yelled from the bow of the longboat, and Thomas looked on the double-door and shingle path and steps from the castle’s bowels down to the beach. ‘That is where they take them to the ships. Many hundreds of them in a space for one-hundred fifty. You can smell it from here. The floor is raised almost a foot with their excrement. They stand for weeks waiting for their ships. And see here now,’ Coxon pointed to the black shapes spinning beneath the water and Howard drew himself in as men do when they first see something the length of a man cutting through the water and the black dorsal fin more fluid than the wave that breaks over the shark’s back shining in the sun. A devil waiting.

  ‘They follow the boats taking the slaves,’ Coxon yelled back almost gleefully. ‘They are expectant that some of them will roll themselves over into the sea before they meet the ships. They only chain them together once on the ships do you see? Else they will pull the others and the boat over with them.’ Coxon looked side to side at the fat black shapes. ‘They follow the ships for miles afterwards before returning here. They are quite smart.’

  Howard watched the sleek dark fish buck at the splash of the oars, their anticipation tangible, excited by the presence of men, the potential in their roll that revealed their white bellies like a puppy and the soulless black of their eyes as they weighed him.

  ‘Quite smart,’ Coxon said again and pushed one away from the bow like a cow. ‘Quite smart.’

  Coxon had left Manvell as his First in command; he considered that the officer might have attitudes that could sway in front of General Phipps, for the general would remember that he had dealt with Coxon before and had found him wanting of respect. Manvell was a gentleman by proxy and Coxon, although sure of his loyalty thus far, did not know how deep he had fallen under the spell of men like Phipps.

  Howard however had bled with Coxon, and with the aged captain that counted more. He turned back with a reproachful glare at the giggle of Walter Kennedy as an oar slapped against one of the sharks. But he forced himself to smile at the lad and looked back to the shore ahead. He had brought him for other reasons.

  You had to carry some shit in
on your shoes.

  ‘General Phipps!’ Coxon said it as if greeting an old friend. He pulled off his hat and dipped his head. That was enough pleasantry. He squared his hat back just as swiftly and Howard mirrored him. Walter Kennedy had no hat but tapped his forehead; that would always do. He had done it all his naval life, not sure what it meant, only that it was required when men wore wigs.

  This was the dining room of the house, where Phipps met all his dignitaries, and where a meal seemed always present. Its entrance was through the chapel and this had been designed just so, for if there was ever to be a slave rising or native attack they would not come through the church. The respect for the gods, even a white one, was too powerful to challenge.

  General Phipps did not stand. He lounged in his chair at the long table and waved a napkin in response. It had been four years since Coxon had left the man and from this same room. Perhaps he had never moved.

  Thomas Howard’s eyes widened at the sight of General Phipps. When they had walked from the longboat – and he had noted that Coxon had splashed into the surf rather than be carried on the seat by the oarsmen – the humidity had hit him like a hot cloud. Ten paces and he was wet. By the time he entered the dining hall his shirt was plastered to him and his wool coat felt heavy as lead. This explained the fat man in shirt open to the chest and silk pantaloons more fitting for some Parisian whore, and that expanded over his gut to his guinea-sized belly button.

  ‘Post-Captain Coxon,’ Phipps nodded. ‘A pleasure to see you again, sir. Glad to see you are still alive in the world.’ He waved loosely to the other side of the table. ‘Take a seat do, take a seat, gentlemen. Please help yourself to some bread.’

  There were chargers of boar and beef sitting in gravy and potatoes, as well as pineapple and paw-paws and other fruits that even the sailors did not recognise. Black and white grapes were afforded their own bowls and in them were piled high. And there was a fresh loaf and butter for the seamen.