Cross of Fire

by Mark Keating

  Devlin yelled into his face but Peter Sam caught none of it.

  ‘What?’ he bellowed.

  ‘Coxon!’ Devlin shouted again. ‘Coxon, Peter!’

  This time Peter Sam heard, dropped his ropes, wiped the rain from his face.

  ‘I seen him.’ Devlin leant in. ‘And another.’

  The ship pushed them together as Hartley fired his next three. The twelves of their enemy were done now, ports closed, just as Devlin had planned. The pirate’s nine pounders were the only cards in play.

  ‘Who else now? Who haven’t we killed?’

  Devlin could not say. Not here. Not on the Bedlam deck.

  They went hand over wood to the cabin doors banging wildly. They could spare a minute. The English warship had followed them into the storm. Their nines were firing, the long-guns of their enemy silenced. They could spare a minute, a sailor’s minute. Hartley and Lawson were holding. Holding against an English man-of-war. A twin-decker. Hundreds of tonnes of wood, iron and hearts of oak. A weatherdeck a man’s height taller than their own, a giant upon them, captained by the last man who had ruled over him. Bearing on him again.

  Devlin needed a drink.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  ‘Walter Kennedy.’ Devlin spat the cork from his jaw and passed the bottle to his quartermaster as they rolled in the cabin.

  ‘Who?’ Peter Sam gulped the rum, both hands around the neck against the yaw.

  ‘You remember me telling you about London? Before. A decade more. An anchorsmith named Kennedy. An Irish family that took me in?’

  ‘Aye,’ Peter Sam gave back the bottle. ‘You said murder. The son done for him. We don’t have time for this, Pat.’

  The doors slammed, the bottles and books shook against their rope beckets, the one lantern throwing their shapes around and around, but Devlin would have his word. He pointed through the wall to the ship beyond. He would have some word to settle what the rum could not.

  ‘That’s the son. The wretch that killed his father. I ran to France because. Why him here? With Coxon?’

  ‘We’ll be asking him soon enough when they catch us talking instead of fighting.’

  Devlin pulled back the rum. Drank and wiped his mouth, sucked the spill of it from the web of his hand.

  ‘And Coxon? How him? The world’s not that small.’

  Peter Sam had heard enough.

  ‘Not to chance. So he is sent. So what do we care? And he be pleasured to hear you wondering so.’

  He went to the doors, cracked them open and brought back the rain and the wind.

  ‘So let him come. You’ve taken his long-guns. Good for you. I ain’t got the brains for it and I ain’t Dandon to praise it. You want to know why he’s here?’

  He strode out to the deck, called back over his shoulder.

  ‘Come ask him like a pirate!’

  The nines fired again and Peter Sam became lost in the smoke and the sheets of rain. He found his ropes, stood with Lawson under the main. Forced himself to not look back.

  And then he heard.

  Heard the pirate Devlin once more.

  ‘Shave me two points to her bow, Lawson!’ Devlin called for the whole deck.

  ‘To that slut! Warm her well! We’ve taken her long-guns. Shove them back up their king’s arse, boys!’

  He climbed the steps to the quarterdeck, their cheers behind him.

  His quarterdeck. His wood.

  Peter Sam kept to his ropes, his head running with the rain but high to his courses and the black sky above making the grey sails gleam. John Lawson caught him for one look. Too much wind for any word from Peter Sam. The big man cocked his head back to where Devlin courted.

  He gave a wink to Lawson.

  Word enough.

  ‘Ah, Manvell,’ Coxon rolled his fingers over the rail as Manvell trudged up the companion. ‘You join us in battle!’

  Manvell looked up at them both. Kennedy beside his captain, on the quarterdeck no less. He slid to the gangway and a manrope, the weatherdeck sparse of men, the gundecks hoarding them all. Only Jenkins and his gang remained and Manvell looked up to four clinging desperately to the yards, ready to make sail if the order came.

  It had seemed worse below, the ship’s movement more pronounced as Manvell lashed the stinking sacks. But above, on the deck, it was the noise that was in command, the wind and downpour drunkenly playing the wood and sail. But still his captain’s voice speared through it all.

  ‘Manvell! Where the sacks? Where your duty?’

  In answer a troupe of sailors came up the companion after, sacks off their shoulders.

  ‘Your order, Captain,’ Manvell said. ‘How goes the fight?’

  ‘That is not your concern.’ Coxon saw the sword, the gentleman’s scabbard, the duke’s bursary. He pointed to it and remarked as the guns fired again, his words lost in the wind and cannons’ roar.

  The rain ran around their feet, misting in the broiling air like the brume of a dawn field, and Manvell dared the stair of the quarterdeck.

  ‘I am still an officer of this ship! I can be of service. I believe we have lost the twelves.’

  ‘Lost? No, not yet. And you are very much of service, Christopher. I need those sacks over both gunwales.’

  ‘And what mad— what foolishness is this now?’ Manvell stepped on the quarterdeck. ‘We are already fighting six-pounders against nines!’

  Coxon grabbed Manvell’s coat but only for him to hear better. Orders in his ear. Kennedy slunk to below the taffrail, hugged his knees, hoped now to be forgotten.

  ‘Manvell!’ Coxon yelled above new waters powering over them. ‘Let me teach you something about these waters! Teach as I ever wanted, Christopher!’ He pushed him from his deck.

  ‘Set those sacks over the gunwale! Even apiece! For once, for your ship, do as instructed!’

  The guns of the Shadow came at them again, punctuating Coxon’s fury. Manvell and Coxon were the only ones not to duck, not to stare over the waves. Their eyes were only trained on each other, with one look to the swords at their hips.

  ‘It would expedite my action, Captain, if I knew what good will be served.’ Manvell swayed at the foot of the stair, his arms across it, supporting himself against the rise.

  Coxon wiped himself of the rain.

  ‘See it done!’

  He returned to the rail, to boast against the pirate and the whistle scything through the rain, a visible fall of the chain cutting the water in the air between like skipping stones on a pond. He could see their links, frozen in space. The experienced men put their hands to their heads and their chins to their knees.

  They bit their jaws and waited. Waited while the chain chewed the wood around them.

  ‘We have range!’ Devlin ran along his deck. ‘She comes for feeding, boys!’

  He made his fo’c’sle, to see that prow still coming. His words bolstered his men admirably but he was alone among them. There was a space around him where Dandon should have been. A wide space amid the drama. He had set Dandon down to protect him. But now he feared, prophesier to himself, that it had been more. He missed the yellow coat. Coxon against him. Good enough. All fair. But Dandon had been with him always when the cards had fallen.

  On The Island with the French gold: Dandon. On the deck of the Talefan with Seth Toombs: Dandon. In Charles Town: Dandon. In London and Paris: Dandon. He was the penknife used to prise the stone from the heel.

  Devlin had set him down. Walked without him in his pocket. And now his deck felt emptier without him. A wide lonely space. Wide and yet as narrow and lonely as the grave without him.

  But perhaps Dandon not set down. Perhaps Dandon spared. Perhaps Devlin knew and chased that which he deserved. Devlin closing his own book, turning the final pages swiftly ever since the death of Valentim Mendes, the Porto governor whose hand he had taken, whose ship he had taken, and ever since the deaths of all those dogs that followed his heels. Names crossed off in his log.

  The guns cracked onc
e more from his enemy, nails hammering into his Shadow’s coffin. The time come to pull down the lid on his face.

  He thought of the cross. O’Neill’s legend of the Flight of the Earls. Had Devlin but persevered, had he faith, he could have had a cross that could still the waves.

  If he had believed in fairy tales.

  No matter. He had taken Coxon’s long-guns, taken his sails with the storm and levelled the odds. There was no Lord, no miracle that he required.

  Thomas Howard’s head was at the square of a gunport as he checked the pirate. He had first seen her in the Caribbean and the ship seemed larger then. But he was a boy then. The pirates must be old now. Devlin lined and grey, surely, and their luck run aground. Still, he would not misjudge the monsters aboard her, those faces that he had seen with axes raised still vital, still engorged with blood.

  A thousand yards of turbulent water heaved between them. Good range. If the waves had not taken his long-guns he would be grinding her to waveson.

  The quoins were away from his six-pounders and he looked down the long row of the ten guns. Bare-chested men sweated before him, working to the beat of the drum; worm and sponge, ramrod and ladle in all their hands. They had spent days firing at barrels floated on the calms, not to hit them, that would be fiction, just to range. Three minutes to reload the hogs at their knees. But the black and red ship fired back, was not a barrel. She answered every call as if she caught and heaved the shot back at them.

  The gundeck was level with the pirate’s weatherdeck, and if Howard had the long twelves available he could answer to her hull and that would be the short of it, the mark of it. As it was now, and for these last minutes he was cascading six-pounder roundshot at the pirate’s returning nine. And they were closing, the storm in charge, hauling them together. It would be grappling hooks soon enough. Weapon lockers loosed, grenadoe and musket, pistols in belts. Then cutlasses and flesh. Skulls and bones.

  Howard took a moment to look down a gun at the ship beyond, the barrel hot near his cheek, the water rising towards him, its pattern marbled like fat Irish beef, like horse flesh. It slammed against their wooden walls like it – like horses tumbling. He wondered if that was how the waves got their equine name. He saw that the pirate’s tops had swivel guns mounted, men aloft already. That would not paint pretty on the Standard’s deck.

  We are too slow, he thought. The Mediterranean draft of the clinker-built pirate was like a lamb to a hog in their wallowing. She could cut in front and have at their bows while they lumbered through the molasses of the waves. They would need a miracle now.

  A rough hand pulled him away to let them roll out the gun and then a midshipman yelled from the stair. A boy was calling for them to hold and Howard bellowed through the gloom, repeating the same. He looked to the window of the port again as a sack dropped before them and hit the water below. His gun-crews stood back, their tools to the overhead, and waited for his word. He had none. He looked to the boy who had a hand outstretched to him. The drumming stopped as the sergeant wiped the rain from its hide.

  ‘Hold, sir,’ the boy said.

  ‘Hold!’

  Manvell’s gang had belayed to pins the last of the sacks. The oil-soaked bags ran along the ship, bobbing at first, then they dragged like the nets used to steep their meat, the sea creaming over them.

  Manvell looked up to Coxon paying the bags no mind. His concentration was solely on the pirate. Manvell’s gang of apprentices and servants loped away, their swiftly learned course of knots ably applied. Shelter now became their objective after the pointlessness of their task.

  ‘Your farmer’s bags are laid, John!’ Manvell called and hovered to the quarterdeck stair.

  Coxon raised and lowered his hand to the midshipman waiting and the punch of the guns echoed out from below seconds later. He watched for the guns’ report against the pirate. Only five met the fall. Not a shiver of wood could be observed. He called Manvell to him.

  ‘You may see better from up here, Christopher.’ And Manvell came to the rail.

  ‘To see what?’ He looked to the cowering Kennedy. ‘And what of him? Would he not be better served below?’

  Coxon faced him.

  ‘It was you that done for my first plans for Kennedy. My intention was to let Devlin’s men know that I had him, along with their pirate. His crew may have questioned their captain’s past. Do not suppose that they worship dishonour. We could have created discord amongst. At the very least we might not be fighting if we still had his friend. Had you not let him go.’

  ‘I did not—’ and then Manvell remembered his lie for Howard, ‘I did not wish for this!’

  ‘Nor I. But this is command, Christopher. Know it. And no, it is not this pirate I wish you to see.’ He pulled Manvell to the rail. ‘I have magic, don’t you know?’

  Manvell felt the ship steady beneath his feet and Coxon drew his sight to the wake around them.

  ‘I was aware we were entering the season for the Indian storms. This whale oil we use for lamps, for grease, for butter. But it serves for war also.’

  Manvell looked down the freeboard to the seething sea. The white catspaws began to walk away from the hull, began to cease lapping at the gunports, and he could see the bags now. The water calmed around them, as if a spell encircled the ship, the rain now flattening the waves like a housemaid folding linen.

  ‘Oil, Christopher,’ Coxon said proudly. ‘Since the time of Pliny it has aided the fisherman and the warrior. The old world!’

  Jenkins joined them at the sight of the marvel, gasping over the gunwale as the white water retreated, as the gunports ran dry.

  ‘It is a miracle!’ he declared upwards to the quarterdeck.

  Coxon took no pride, glared down to the midshipman at the companion.

  ‘Tell Mister Howard do better. Range the twelves again.’ He puffed his chest to Jenkins.

  ‘What we have is movement, Mister Jenkins. We can run round them now. Do that. It won’t last. Hard to larboard if you please, sir! Wait for one round of the twelves.’ He turned to Manvell.

  ‘You see now, Christopher?’ He leant on the rail as his deck sailed smooth. ‘I have taken back what you have wrecked.’

  Manvell swept a low bow in time with the sixes firing. The twelves would follow.

  He gave Coxon his due, convinced he had met and seen the moment of which he would tell his grandchildren, if they would but believe. And if his court martial would allow.

  ‘May I stay, Captain?’

  ‘Not on my quarterdeck,’ Coxon looked hard at the soaked lieutenant. Looked through him to the duke and the pregnant wife standing behind.

  ‘You must dry, Christopher. Go below. Howard is to the twelves. See if you can man the sixes. I have only boys. If you can, try to do better than them. I will need the starboard battery soon enough.’

  Manvell tapped his forefingers to his head. ‘Aye, sir.’ He took the stair in a jump.

  ‘Christopher!’ Coxon called.

  Manvell looked up.

  ‘On your parole, Lieutenant.’

  Manvell genially gave his accord and went down.

  Peter Sam pushed through the gun-crew, slammed his fist on the gunwale. ‘And what is this now?’

  Devlin appeared beside him, small against him.

  ‘How is this?’

  They watched the great ship running, coursing as if on a different sea, a toy wheeling across a paper ocean.

  ‘She’s moving fast,’ Peter Sam moved back as the lower-deck gunports swept open with a run of water. He dragged Devlin away. ‘And she has her twelves!’

  They all watched the first smoke, heard the sharp crack a blink later and then the black ball visible as it turned the rain to steam. They ducked before the nine other charges echoed through the storm. A long, sweating wait of only seconds and Peter Sam and Devlin, tight at the larboard bulwark shared them all, open-eyed, as the low hum came on.

  The Shadow rolled, cried out against the iron. That which they repaired
a year ago after fighting Trouin in the Channel busted open like old wounds. There was no good wood in the world any more.

  Only half the shot had hit, but still the deck shook, leant, the guns falling back on their tackles.

  Devlin stood, saw Hartley already up and to his linstock and powder-trails. He would cover his foe’s sight of their success with his own prowess.

  Devlin and Peter Sam ran to starboard, held the rail and felt it tremble, the water shaking from its wood as their guns fired back, the furore no longer a shock to the senses. Devlin leant over the side, Peter Sam instinctively grabbing the tail of his coat.

  ‘We’re holed,’ he called back. ‘Not below our water.’ He thanked the storm. The rise and fall of it his design, his genius against whatever card Coxon had pulled from his sleeve. ‘They will re-sight for that.’

  Peter Sam pulled him back. ‘I think he has another mind.’

  Devlin did not see how his returning fire fared. He only saw the other bowsprit winding round, the ship yawing hard and the petticoats of her keel showing as she rose. Coming about. In a storm. She crashed and ploughed on. Towards him. In a storm. Not sluggish and mute.

  How? It was the only thought in his head.

  He could make forward passage. Ride the storm. Crush them within while he skated through and would win. But the larger ship was shaming his, and she would have the wind.

  ‘What now?’ A loud Peter Sam.

  Devlin felt the cold rain, his old coat pasted to him. The short minute again. The sand-glass of decision. Sixty seconds to what? He stared at the ship, aware of his crew’s eyes upon him.

  ‘Devlin! What now?’ Peter Sam said again.

  He could helm-a-lee, make a run of it with their cleaner heels but that would be the first choice and thus the one Coxon would already expect, would count on. The storm was across them, leaning them to windward, forward movement dragged to a crawl, but they could run into the eye of the typhoon; Coxon would have to be mad to follow. But they might not ever leave from there. His ballad would not end well when the taverns rolled with it.