The English Monster

by Lloyd Shepherd

  And so he has come to the King’s Head, swaying silently in the dark, his mind beer-barrel hazy. The door to the deserted inn is a heavy one, but it has glass panels, and these glass windows are not shuttered. However, even in his current state he does not necessarily wish to be spotted smashing his way into premises which are still private and which are heavy with the aura of slaughter.

  He heads uncertainly around the side of the building, down a dark and stinking side alley. The source of the stench, the privy described by Turner, is at the end of the alley, facing out onto the ridge of ground and wasteland behind. There is another door into the tavern here, and through it Horton can see a kitchen. So here, out of the view of the common throng, he smashes his way inside.

  The kitchen is dank and cold. He tries to remember the layout of the place from his visit immediately after the murders. The sturdy brown leather armchair still sits in the middle of the room. As he walks in he feels something sticky underfoot, and a wave of boozy bile hits his throat with the thought of what it might be.

  He needs some light. There is little prospect of finding any in here, so he goes out into the alley again and walks back into New Gravel Lane and down the street to a small shop, one of the general stores which scrape a living from the local boardinghouse women. He buys four small candles and a taper, which the old shopkeeper lights from his own fire and which Horton carries back to the side alley and into the kitchen.

  His head is beginning to pound. He still feels vaguely like vomiting.

  He lights one of the candles, and its flame flickers across the kitchen, picking out strange angles and unexpected vectors. His horror at what might have been on the floor is unconfirmed by the jittery gleam. There is only a suggestion of a darker area down there, and he cannot remember having seen anything when he visited in daylight. He steps over it anyway, toward the door that leads into the public bar. He knocks his thigh on Williamson’s old chair, and pushes the door into the bar open with his free hand.

  A sensation of a larger, more open space greets him. The candle flickers up into a higher ceiling and more distant walls, where shadows dance as the candle flame is buffeted by the drafts. He feels for the edge of the bar, and then along it. Jugs and bowls and tankards sit on shelves beneath the bar, and his hand feels around behind them, seeking, seeking.

  There’s nothing of interest there. He puts the candle down on the bar and walks around the other side, his head beginning to clear as he starts to consider the task at hand. He turns around and around within the place, mentally checking off things until a thought occurs to him.

  Of course. The cellar.

  He picks up the candle again, then thinks better of it, placing it back down and lighting one of the other three from its flame. Best keep this room as light as possible. He goes back behind the bar and into the kitchen and finds the door at the top of the steps down to the inn’s cellar. The door is partly open, and he pushes at it with his toe.

  A square of black opens in the wall, and he shines his candle down there. He remembers Thomas Anderson’s story of the body down there, clenches his jaw, and steps down.

  The ceiling is lower, of course. The barrels of beer sit along one wall, raised off the floor on wooden frames. From one of them runs a pipe, via some odd-looking contraption and then up through the ceiling to the bar above. One of those new beer engines, thinks Horton, filing away a thought that Williamson was a man of some means if he’d been able to afford such an innovation. The ladder up to the street is broken in two places, presumably from when the men clambered down here on the night of the murders.

  He thinks. And thinks. And looks. And thinks.

  A box, there in the corner. He goes toward it, and notices that the box is a metal sea chest, the kind every merchant sailor in Wapping would recognize. For them, it contains their life: clothes, tools, weapons. What did it contain for Williamson?

  It’s secure, of course. Otherwise someone, perhaps even a police officer or constable, would have nicked it by now. So how to get into it? Except of course he doesn’t have to get into it. He just has to get it back to the Police Office.

  The box is attached to the wall by a chain, and Horton, a little drunker than he thinks he is, makes a decision. He places the candle on the floor and pulls the box out to make the chain taut. He stands on the box, and stamps down on the chain with all his weight. On the third stamp the chain suddenly wrenches out from the wall, and he stumbles forward with the momentum, hitting the side of his face against the brick. His feet scrabble on the stone cellar floor for a moment, and he nearly slides backward, which would drag his face down the wall’s masonry, but then his boots grip and he is still.

  His face is pressed up against the wall, and he can see behind the beer barrels, where the flickering candlelight picks out something silver on the ground beneath the barrel nearest to him. He peels his face carefully from the wall, and then goes down on all fours, kicking the freed steel box behind him, taking care not to knock the candle over. He reaches beneath the barrel, his fingers moving in and out of the dirt and dust beneath it, and he tries not to think about the material his hand is picking up. He is just about to give up when he feels the hard edge of something metallic, and pulls it into his palm and then removes his hand and stands.

  It is a coin, a heavy silver coin, and even before he has picked the candle up from the floor and shone it over his palm, he knows what kind of coin it will be. A piece of eight, here in the cellar of the King’s Arms.

  JULY 1668

  Peter Sharp had seen a great many things in his pursuit of the good old cause. None of them were a bit like what he saw up against the walls of the Santiago Fort in Portobelo.

  His middle-aged bones had been bent and broken in the service of God and Man (he drew no distinction). His scarred face was a map of English struggles. He’d served under Cromwell in the Eastern Association, and then under Montagu in the New Model Army, but Sharp was one of the thousands of soldiers left behind—morally, emotionally, theologically—by the amoral complexities of the Restoration. How was one such as he to understand one such as Edward Montagu, who had destroyed a king but had then commanded a fleet to retrieve the son of that very king to sit on the throne?

  Montagu’s betrayal was a sign. England must itself be damned if such a return to the old ways could be permitted by God. So Sharp had fled the slippery moral landscape of Europe and reestablished himself among the Brethren of the Caribbean, where a man might make his ethical peace with the whoring and drinking and thieving in return for a spiritual freedom unavailable in Europe. Sharp prayed with passion, took no whores, drank no liquor, and when he followed Henry Morgan into battle the old bloodlust was on him and his sword parted flesh and bone in a way that felt once again sanctified.

  Sharp was astute when it came to leaders. He knew what the plan to seize Portobelo was about: L’Ollonais, and Morgan’s reputation. The scheme was preposterous, as if the Welshman was beginning to believe in his own myth, and Sharp had seen the danger of that before. He had seen it on Cromwell when they’d stood beneath the walls of Drogheda and Wexford, the sense that the cause had its own life and its own needs, the belief of a leader that he was chosen by God.

  So Sharp had allowed himself to talk of mutiny, and had led the delegation to the strange quartermaster, as Brethren tradition dictated. Sharp felt the same awed fear of Long Billy Ablass as the rest of the crew. It was that fear which had caused so many to elect Billy their representative, for even Morgan must surely smell the danger which hung around Long Billy like the electrical crackle after a thunderstorm. Dark tales girdled the tall young man: how he’d tortured women in the service of the dread L’Ollonais; how he’d thrown babies from ramparts; how he and L’Ollonais had lived together in the woods above Tortuga, joined in some Satanic blasphemy of marriage, sacrificing children and sheep and smearing themselves in blood beneath a red Caribbean moon.

  Sharp didn’t believe half these things. The Brethren were notorious storytelle
rs. He saw, though, the essential truth: Ablass was a crazy cold bastard who nonetheless had Morgan’s ear and Morgan’s trust and perhaps even Morgan’s fear.

  But watching the quartermaster’s face during their disastrous conference, Sharp had believed every single word of those tales about him. The man’s eyes had been as empty as shells. Looking into them Sharp had become a child again, wide awake in a Fenland night, the wind howling off the North Sea outside and demons and specters wriggling in the shadows of the room in which he and his brothers slept.

  He’d backed down, and because of that he was now standing on the deck of the Drake, only days away from Portobelo. Sharp told himself he was here because of Prince Maurice—if the old dead king’s nephew really was in Portobelo, Sharp and the other old Ironsides in the fleet needed no further excuse to justify their sudden disinterest in mutiny. But Sharp knew why he was really here: he was afraid of what Billy Ablass would do to him if he wasn’t.

  An ancient rowing boat was inching its way around the coast, away from Portobelo and toward the ship. Two or three of the men on the boat were signaling wildly. Morgan and his quartermaster appeared at the rail, and the captain ordered that the boat be allowed to come alongside.

  Six men were inside, so weak and frail they needed to be carried up to the ship. Sharp lifted one of them himself; as he pulled him over the rail the man’s head rolled back and a pair of half-mad eyes stared up at him, as if they were looking at Satan himself.

  Another one of the six began talking, quietly and with urgency despite his condition, kneeling on the deck. Morgan made his way down to the waist of the ship, his silent quartermaster beside him, to listen to what the man had to say.

  He was English, he said, as were all six men. They were the remnants of an earlier Brethren fleet, under Edward Mansfield, which had taken the island of Providence two years earlier. Mansfield had left it under the guard of fifty English Brethren but the Spanish had retaken the island, locking up the surviving Englishmen. These six men were some of the survivors; there were still more in Portobelo.

  As the man spoke, Henry Morgan became visibly excited, and as the story of the Providence Brethren came to an end, the captain placed one hand on the head of the kneeling man and turned his face to his crew, for all the world like a priest offering benediction. He carefully looked into the eyes of each and every pirate, weighing them up and nodding occasionally. Then he breathed deeply, drawing in the energy of the moment.

  “You heard the man, lads. There’s English Brethren locked up in Portobelo, dying by the day, their loyal bones broken and shattered by Papists and inquisitors. They need rescuing, and who’s going to wait for the King’s navy to do the job? How many of them will still be alive by the time the Admiralty bureaucrats fill in all their bits of paper? None of them, I’ll wager. Not one. So are you with me? There’s treasure in Portobelo. All the treasure of Potosí, silver lying in the street. But that’s all a secondary consideration. There’s good hearty Brethren need us to rescue them, shipmates. There’s us and freedom on one side, and idolatrous bastard gaolers on the other. And there’s treasure scattered all around. So do we go in, fellows? I say again: who’s with me?”

  An enormous huzzah! rose from the crew, answering Morgan’s question with no further doubt. Some of the old Ironsides may have muttered their concern, but Morgan had the rest of the crew once again. The Welshman’s luck had turned. He grinned at his quartermaster, took his hand off the head of the rescued man as if he was now forgotten, and walked back to his cabin.

  As the crew dispersed, each man moving to his usual position with adventure sizzling in his head, Sharp squatted down alongside the rescued man, who remained, head down, kneeling on the deck.

  “What of the prince? What of Maurice?” Sharp asked. The man looked at him, but appeared confused, as if he didn’t recognize the name. The excitement he saw in Sharp’s face caused his expression to change; something cunning came into his eyes, and he forced a smile.

  “Yes! Yes! He was with us! He is there still!”

  Sharp felt his heart surge, despite that change in the man’s expression. He would choose to believe this desperate man and his tales of prisoners and princes. He would follow Morgan and the quartermaster into Portobelo.

  Morgan ordered the fleet to be anchored some miles to the southeast of Portobelo, wary of the two imposing forts which protected the harbor mouth. Twenty-three small boats had been towed from the South Cays, and most of the men climbed into them, leaving only skeleton crews on the larger ships. The boats started to make their way up the coast.

  For four days they traveled, only at night, cutting through the dark blue water; during the day, they pulled the boats up on shore and slept under the trees, terrified of snakes and burning in the heat.

  On the fourth night, the little flotilla of boats came across a fishing boat. In it were three men. Morgan stood up in his boat and yelled something at the men, but they replied in a hail of Spanish and some other language no one recognized. Morgan sat down again, and after a few moments Long Billy spoke to the men in Sharp’s boat (the quartermaster had spent most of the previous four days in Sharp’s boat, watching the old soldier with calm eyes and causing the other men in the boat to whisper and pull away from Sharp, as if he was diseased in some way).

  “Take me alongside the admiral, lads,” said Billy. They began to row over to Morgan’s boat. As they came alongside, the quartermaster stood and called across to Morgan’s boat.

  “They may know a way into the town,” he said, his voice clear on the still water. Morgan did not answer. “It would be wise to question them, at least.”

  Sharp saw the admiral look up at that, and hold Billy’s gaze for a few seconds. Then he nodded sharply and looked away as he spoke.

  “Then question them.”

  The quartermaster grinned. “Let’s go and get them, fellows,” he said as he sat down, his flat Oxfordshire accent uninflected. They began to row again, the man at the tiller steering toward the little fishing boat. The quartermaster kept his eyes on Sharp, a smile painted on his face.

  They seized the fishing boat without resistance, and the quartermaster beckoned half a dozen men into it, starting with Sharp, and sailed it into the shore. In the boat were two Negroes, and a zambo, half-African and half-Indian. The Brethren took these men up the beach, where they were held down, a pair of sailors to each captive. Sharp held down the arms of the zambo. Torches were lit and pushed into the sand, as if for a ritual. At the back of the beach, the trees moved their leaves in the sickly night breeze.

  The Negroes squirmed and shrieked, but the zambo was silent, staring up at Billy, who was standing at the feet of the three captives. He was not looking at the Brethren or at the captives. He was gazing toward the back of the beach. Sharp felt the wind pick up, and then heard something from behind him, from within the trees. It sounded like people humming.

  The quartermaster looked away after a moment, kneeled down at the side of the first Negro, and pulled out his knife. He muttered something in Spanish. The man’s response was a splatter of yelled words in his native tongue, unintelligible to any of the Brethren. The zambo was silent. Billy tried English.

  “We need a guide to take us into Portobelo. Will you help us?”

  There was no change in the Negro’s chattering, not even a shift in register. He had no idea what Billy was saying. But it occurred to Sharp that Billy was not speaking to the African; he was speaking to the zambo. Through a break in the African’s shrieks, Sharp could hear the humming noise from behind them growing in intensity. Were there people in the trees, watching them?

  With deliberate care, the quartermaster leaned across and cut the Negro’s throat down to the bone, from ear to ear. The blood squirted up his arm and into his face, as well as across the body of the second Negro and over the hands and arms of the Brethren holding both the blacks down. Two of them shouted and started to lift their hands.

  “Hold them!” yelled the quartermaster, h
is voice booming across the beach, and the Brethren grabbed the arms and legs of the prisoners again, even the now-dead one. Sharp looked at the man opposite him holding the legs of the zambo and saw that he was staring into the trees behind them, not even glancing at the chaos of blood and bone where the first Negro’s neck used to be.

  He hears it too!

  For a moment, the screams of the surviving Negro were echoed in the woods behind by the shriek of some hunted creature, which roared in fear and hunger. The creature’s shrieks were cut off with a high-pitched yelp, as if something else there in the jungle had picked it up and ripped its throat. The hum continued, growing louder and broader and deeper.

  The quartermaster rolled the dead Negro over and along the beach. Sand stuck to the sticky blood on his front, arms, and neck, creating huge orange swirls on the black skin which flickered in the light from the Brethren’s torches.

  Still the zambo said nothing. Looking down at his upside-down face, Sharp saw the man’s eyes were closed and he was frantically whispering some kind of catechism.

  “Open his eyes,” said the quartermaster. Sharp looked at Billy. “Do it.”

  Sharp knelt on the zambo’s arms to keep them in place, and placed the thumb and forefinger of both hands over his eyes, forcing him to look out. His eyes rolled up and around, a frenzy of color and white. Sharp turned his head to look at the sticky black-and-orange skin of the dead Negro.

  Billy leaned over the second Negro, and showed him the bloody knife. Blood from the blade dripped down into the black man’s face.