Cross of Fire

by Mark Keating

  ‘That dog killed my old man back in London. Lived together so we did. Like brothers we were. My father his father. And kill him so he did, in his gratitude. That’s revenge to me.’

  Coxon’s lips thinned at the exaggeration and doubted the table took in any of it. It was possible that Devlin could have done the deed. Kennedy and he had lived together. Every dog is capable of biting. But a man knows his own dog.

  ‘I freed Walter from the noose,’ he said. ‘I have that power. I’m after a murderer not a pirate.’

  The older one sat back.

  ‘Ain’t no pirates here anyways that I know of, Cap’n.’

  ‘Nor I,’ said another.

  A finger pointed out from the edge of their conclave to the tailored Manvell.

  ‘And who’s this ponce keeping an eye?’

  The finger belonged to a fellow in waistcoat over bare flesh, a skeleton of a man, impossible to judge the age of him but not his humour.

  It was a long pause before Manvell noticed he had been brought into play. Coxon raised his hand.

  ‘He’s with me,’ he said. ‘My man.’

  ‘He has a disapproving stance about.’ The pirate whistled at Manvell. ‘Too good to sit with us, lad?’

  ‘Me, sir?’ Manvell squeaked. ‘Not at all. No, sir. There is no room to take a seat. That’s the only ounce of it.’

  The young one threw his bait.

  ‘He looks like he’d enjoy sitting on your lap, Samuel!’

  Samuel’s teeth showed.

  ‘Would that be right, lad? Would you be wanting to take a rest on my lap, is it?’

  Coxon rapped the table.

  ‘My business, gentlemen?’ The hen and wine slapped down in front of him. ‘Eat. And see if you can remember something I can use.’

  ‘Your business can wait, Cap’n,’ the pirate winked and began to rise.

  Coxon watched the amusement grow around his company. This was tavern sport. It went ever only two ways. It would be up to Manvell to decide which and then it would be Coxon’s turn to be tested. He expected something like this. He moved his wrist to rest on the pistol in his belt, assured that the rest of them saw.

  Manvell stepped back as the pirate drew a dagger slow, and a cutlass slower.

  ‘You think my arse for quim, lad? Sodomy your curse?’

  None of what he heard made sense to Manvell – he was unsure even if he was hearing English – but there was steel. That he understood, and his captain still sitting.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said, convinced that the music of lute and fife had addled his senses.

  The pirate came on.

  ‘You having any of it?’

  Manvell was not familiar with the appropriate response. He imagined this was how children experienced torment when outnumbered and cornered in London’s streets by bullies for a handful of marbles. There was no rationale to any of it.

  ‘Captain?’ he said.

  Coxon half-turned.

  ‘Well, Manvell?’ he said. ‘Are you having any of it?’

  Manvell set his mouth, ignored the grinning Kennedy and his complicit captain. He turned on his heel, the door directly in front of him, the bright day beyond cutting through its frame. He marched towards it.

  The pirate exploded with laughter and the room followed, as even those who had not seen the altercation saw a smart back walking away from a brother’s pitted cutlass and guessed what had transpired.

  Coxon made a white fist beneath the table. He took some rum to cover his disgust as the table and Kennedy roared and even the musicians lost their detachment.

  Coxon, above all the jeers, could hear the door open and close – a coffin lid slammed.

  The pirate put back his cutlass, stabbed a breast of the hen with his dagger.

  ‘Fine men you have there, Cap’n!’ He slipped the greasy white flesh into his mouth as he sat. ‘What Roberts will make of them will be a horror!’

  The door opened again. The bows slid off the fiddles with a whine and the room stilled in mid-pour, and suddenly the only sound was the urgency of the rats inside the walls.

  Manvell stood in the doorway, sans hat and coat, his hand on the door.

  ‘Perhaps I am misunderstood?’ His voice thrown across the room to hit one face.

  ‘In my association a gentleman settles his reputation outside, sir.’ He put out his hand and beckoned.

  ‘I will of course accept an apology if you wish to reconsider.’

  Coxon did not turn but raised his mug to his lips again. His smile remained hidden as the pirate cursed and pushed himself up from the table.

  Dandon pulled on his boots, then leant back for several breaths to let the blood drain from his head. He sat on a fragile cot in the white rooms of the cathedral of Bourbon. He scratched his face where his short beard had once been. He had removed it months ago but still mused by working on a beard that was not there.

  It had taken two days to sleep well, the ship still swimming in his head, but now it was if he had never left bed and land. He woke late every morning, and at night found the chirrup of the insects comforting despite the lack of drink from the priests, which made him question their vocation.

  Dandon’s days had been dry. He had little rattling coin to slake a thirst which was also his hunger. He had lived with Patrick Devlin for four years and summed up that living as corks thrown to the sea and hens picked clean. Maybe he had lived beneficially on his friend and it seemed just so now that his own purse came short.

  He stood and looked in the mirror over his basin. It had been one year to the next since he had looked in a mirror and he combed his hair with his fingernails and questioned why his beard had not grown back.

  ‘’Tis the drink,’ he declared aloud, and examined his gold teeth in the smoky glass and picked the unleavened bread out of their corners.

  ‘And it is not the drink,’ he said and put his wide hat on and brushed down his eyebrows. He looked at his purse by his pillow. No need to weigh it any more than he had done for the last week. Not enough for a bottle, but why not just a coin or two for some relief? Four or five Dutch tin won’t buy a house or a week’s food so why not let it serve some purpose every day?

  He heard footsteps coming down the long stone corridor and sighed.

  The priests. The damned priests.

  Five days Devlin had left him here with O’Neill’s Porto brethren and the Santa Rosa. Five days of cornmeal and honey-wine.

  Devlin had abandoned him it seemed, and when he thought deeper on it there were many ‘occasions’ when Dandon had not been present at the culmination of Devlin’s plans. No matter. If Devlin felt him too inclined to drink, too useless for conflict, disliked his notion to go unarmed, so be it. Maybe the one had outgrown the other. Dandon would only add that to the list of things to drink to and for.

  The footsteps towards his door were running now and Dandon steadied himself for the blast that was about to burst into his room. The door flew. A priest skidded in, his breath rasping.

  ‘What is it?’ Dandon said. ‘The captain has returned?’

  ‘Señor . . .’ he waved Dandon to follow. ‘A fight . . . there is a fight at the inn about to begin!’

  Dandon crossed the room unimpressed.

  ‘Is there not a fight every hour?’

  ‘There are English there. And soldiers too.’

  ‘. . . Soldiers?’

  ‘Redcoats. And smart men with smart clothes.’ He sped ahead. ‘Come. Hurry, señor.’

  Dandon followed. Redcoats? And smart, orderly clothes on Bourbon? That meant naval men and none of it could be to the good.

  Dandon straightened his coat and plucked his shirt-cuffs to his knuckles, confident now that this was why Devlin had left an unarmed, drunken loblolly boy behind. Dandon went always unarmed save for his head and his tongue. Dandon was trusted to do the wisest thing. Trusted. Aye, that was it. Trusted. Not left behind at all. And that would do until the end of days.

  Dandon looked throug
h the shoulders of the crowd at the scene. A young man stood in shirt and waistcoat. A rapier-point to the ground, right foot behind, left arm across the small of his back and his left side angled to the figure opposite. The other hunched, cutlass flinching, dagger loose in his second fist. They were given a wide circle. Empty mugs held wagers, full mugs pointed and laughed at the prim statue of the gentleman.

  ‘That is not one of my companions,’ Dandon informed the priest. ‘Do we all look alike to you?’

  The priest pulled Dandon’s sleeve and stabbed a finger to the two marines and the pirate’s opponent.

  ‘See!’ he whispered. ‘Englishmen! They come for Devlin!’

  Dandon studied the young man with the rapier and the marines leaning on their muskets holding the young man’s coat and hat.

  ‘Not necessarily, Father. Even priests can’t be that unlucky.’

  Just two marines. No fear in two marines. A ship come for victualling, nothing more.

  The pirates jeered both duellists, their fight slow to start and mugs already empty and the sun too hot. Manvell cleared his throat.

  ‘First blood?’ he offered, loud enough for the crowd to hear. ‘That will satisfy me.’

  ‘Aye,’ agreed the pirate. ‘But you won’t mind if I slice something.’ The pirate squinted with the sun over Manvell’s shoulders, and then snarled his way into Manvell’s reach.

  Coxon came out from the door shielding his brow from the sudden whiteness of the square and beheld the cockpit before him.

  No longer did Manvell seem to be the gangly, clumsy lieutenant who dropped instruments and apologised for his slipping shoes. For a moment Coxon could see the fortitude that had suffered a dead child. The constancy in him was about to be exampled and the anger discharged through his debole.

  Manvell, motionless, recalled his Capoferro:

  If you have an encounter with a bestial man, that is, one without measure and tempo, who throws many blows at you with great impetus, there are two things that you can do: first, adopting the play of mezzo tempo, you will strike him during his throwing of a thrust or a cut, alternately allow him to go into empty space, evading backwards with your body, then immediately give him a thrust in the face or chest.

  But there would have to be subtlety here. Only a scene not a final act, so perhaps Liancour for a touch.

  Capoferro and Liancour: the treatises his father made him read after every failed prima stretta, and which Manvell then borrowed to memorise when his father was not looking. As a boy he had never questioned why a Deal publican had insisted on such a practice for his son. He thought it natural for all children. Manvell was pale and thin, not tall or impressive in any aspect. As a boy he had cut a feminine and sickly shape. But he feared nothing and had never lost a fight in his life. He bumped into every door and tripped on every stair. But with a blade placed in his hand he could only be merciful. The dead would pile up else. A Deal publican had wanted his beloved son to survive.

  He turned his breast to the pirate, opened his sword arm. The pirate grunted and lunged at his offered prize.

  Manvell appeared to do nothing, yet the pirate’s cutlass became trapped under Manvell’s left arm and his wrist wrapped around the pirate’s as if it had always been.

  Cutlass and man in a vice. The surprised face Manvell’s reward.

  He moved then.

  His rapier dashed and sliced across the pirate’s dagger and severed the webbed flesh between thumb and palm which opened to drop the blade. The pirate gaped at his treacherous hand.

  Then the rapier up, across and behind the cutlass’s guard before the dagger hit the ground, and he had dragged and disengaged the cutlass from the other hand.

  Manvell swept back, the cutlass now his. He held both weapons high. Became the statue again.

  The crowd’s cheers for their brother still rolled, the action too fast for drunken eyes to catch.

  Then the lull as their brother stood naked of any blade and bled, and the gentleman somehow had two pieces of steel. ‘First blood,’ Manvell said.

  The pirate looked to his hand, to the statue, to his dropped dagger and lost cutlass. He clutched his hand and shuffled to the shelter of the crowd where laughing hands pushed him away.

  Manvell stuck the cutlass into the dirt and bowed to his combatant and the crowd. Whores applauded, pirates belly-laughed and John Coxon reappraised his lieutenant.

  This was good work, he thought. Manvell had shown his honour and ability in a manner that suited the pirates’ temperaments and virtues. No real harm done. The pirate’s wound? A paper-cut in his trade and he would be mocked if he complained otherwise. Manvell had done well. The tavern would listen to them now. He nodded to Manvell across the shoulders of the gathering and Manvell returned the nod and scraped back his sword.

  The crowd began to filter back to the tavern, an equal number set around Manvell and the embarrassed pirate, congratulating one, building up the other. Coxon began to turn back with them. He sought the heads that had been around the table and wherever Kennedy had got to.

  He stalled at a flash of yellow.

  Across the square a dandy was fanning himself with his wide hat and flashing his gold capped teeth as he bent to a priest’s ear. The years melted away from John Coxon’s life.

  Dandon, he thought. Dandon from The Island. The pox-doctor that gamed to be French.

  Devlin’s man.

  His hand went to his pistol, slowly, as if the angels were watching him and might shriek a warning.

  ‘That was most impressive,’ Dandon put back his hat. ‘But has little to do with me I’m sure.’

  ‘Not your man?’ the priest asked.

  ‘No,’ Dandon said. ‘But at least I am come to where I can partake.’

  The priest still held onto a portion of Dandon’s cloth and plucked his attention.

  ‘But the redcoats? We are in trouble, no?’

  Dandon stiffened as the unmistakeable jolt of a pistol in his back reminded him of his wound from last year; a good square of flesh carved out by one Albany Holmes, its inflicter dead now but still it woke him every morning.

  The voice that came with the pistol he had thought forgotten.

  ‘Dandon is it not?’ it said, and the pistol jabbed. ‘Don’t move.’

  ‘I am unarmed Captain . . . Coxon?’ Dandon raised open palms in supplication.

  ‘You were unarmed when you took my ship, pirate.’

  He grabbed Dandon’s collar and jerked it to his face.

  ‘Your priest friend can come with. We have years to catch up on and I’m sure he would like to hear your confession!’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dandon had first met John Coxon a few weeks after his introduction to Patrick Devlin. At the time he thought Devlin a creature of his own making, fresh and new. Then came The Island, the French gold, and John Coxon, bitter and vengeful.

  Another year, and the hunt for the letters of the Jesuit priest – the porcelain adventure – and Coxon had been there also. And it became apparent that Devlin had not cleared all his past as Dandon had assumed. Then came the diamond and the South Sea débâcle less than a year gone. Coxon’s pistol in his back hardly seemed a coincidence.

  When you meet a smiling soul, a devil-may-care fellow, you hope this is how they are, that they are genuinely free from mortal pains. And then they become too drunk or too sober and you discover they carry the blight of chains and stones that all men drag behind them. Did the Lord really die at thirty-three? What use that to any man? A ministry of youth? Or is it that after that age only suffering is to be expected.

  Never mind. Dandon was far too sober to appreciate any of it. A pistol in the back. Go only with what that entails.

  He sat with his tied hands across the back of a chair, painful to his old injury. The priest had been given the respect to be allowed to stand. They were in the wine room of the tavern, their privacy bought with Coxon’s purse. Dandon eyed the barrels, even the splashes, in a sweat. He could not help i
t; this was the measure of his days when Devlin was not around.

  ‘Captain Coxon,’ he said. ‘It has so been a while. Perhaps a drink to reacquaint?’

  Coxon said nothing. He surveyed the man that he only knew as Devlin’s barber-surgeon. His presence meant something. And a priest? That meant something too.

  Coxon went straight for the throat.

  ‘Where is your captain, Dandon?’

  ‘Devlin you mean, sir?’ Dandon sat up straight. ‘Say it as so. Or can you not find the heart to say the name?’

  ‘Devlin, then,’ Coxon said. ‘Where is he?’

  Dandon looked between the men. Kennedy he did not know but he knew pirates when he saw them. The young man with the able sword was obviously attached to Coxon, but the pirate? Dandon would question as much as Coxon.

  ‘Your adjutants look a little rough these days, Captain. Have standards slipped since we last met?’

  ‘Kennedy,’ Coxon put his hand out to Dandon. ‘Introduce yourself.’

  The pirate checked once to Coxon and got the eye he was looking for. He strode to Dandon and sent the back of his hand sharp across his face.

  ‘Walter Kennedy,’ he said, and the hand came back harder this time. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  Dandon shook away the blow, his eyes smarting. He had heard the name before and most certainly from Devlin, but the context evaded him. The pirate remained standing over him. Dandon would not satisfy him with a look up into his face.

  The priest ran to Dandon, behind him, his hands on his shoulders.

  ‘Please!’ he cried. ‘Do not do this!’

  Manvell watched Coxon’s hands clasp and unclasp as he spoke.

  ‘I will get to you, Father. I want to hear this man first.’

  Manvell saw the change on Kennedy’s face. The sheen of ecstasy that he might be given a chance to vent something on a priest.

  The scene was unpleasant for Manvell, the setting itself bad enough. The squalor of the storeroom, the heat and flies, and the sordid backdrop of the island, a nest of villainy and eastern savagery. Yet Coxon’s current manner lay far beneath all of them.