Hunt for White Gold

by Mark Keating

  ‘Valentim?’ Peter croaked through his beard. ‘You’re dead. Toombs is dead. Thomas. Dead.’

  ‘I do not know anyone called Thomas,’ Mendes sighed. ‘I know of Toombs. Seth Toombs I know very well.’ He began to tug and peel the glove from his ungainly left hand, slowly revealing a white wrist. ‘You will come with me, Peter. I will protect you. I will protect you from Devlin and those who cause you harm. It is, after all, because of him that this terrible situation has arisen.’ He paused to watch the face of the quartermaster sink again. ‘He has done much to harm both of us.’

  With his final words and a flourish carrying off the glove, Mendes revealed the cold, startling white and blue of his exquisite porcelain appendage.

  He waved it in front of Peter, its unmoving fingers crafted to appear pleading, like Adam begging for the apple.

  He appreciated the horror his lifeless hand brought to Peter’s eyes then looked down to the stump of his wrist, still scarred white, with the leather stitching sewn to his skin stuffed crudely into the base of the hand. Iron clasps nailed into his wrist bone also bolted him to the porcelain hand.

  Mendes pulled his shirt cuff back over the wrist and moved away. ‘We have much to thank Capitao Devlin for, you and I.’

  He joined Hib by the door. ‘He is good, yes? He can sail?’

  Hib looked at Peter’s huddled form. ‘He is healthy enough, aye.’

  Valentim looked back. ‘He is a different man. I almost failed to recognise him. Why the need to change him so?’

  Hib bent to Valentim’s ear. ‘You do not know the joy of it. I can make a man knot his own rope and thank me for hanging him. Besides, he was a big one, aye. And me on my own.’

  ‘He infests the air,’ Mendes grimaced. ‘Wash him some. Then bring him to the ship.’

  Hib glowered. ‘I am to be accounted for at some time?’

  Mendes snorted. ‘You will be paid, executioner. I employ your employer. It is written. It is marked. Do not worry. Or would you rather go back to hanging the stinking English? Ah, but perhaps that is not a threat? Perhaps you would enjoy that very much, no?’

  The slap of feet landing from the stairs spun them both in the direction of the stairwell, and Mendes’ good hand flew to his sword.

  ‘Enough!’ Andrew Morris yelled, pistol steady, its mouth gaping at both of them. ‘You should both worry now!’

  His soft sandals had afforded him a silent entrance and now he stood before them, a vagabond swashbuckler in straw hat and matted beard. ‘Get back! I would see my mate, Peter. Alive, you’d better be hoping. I have one clean pistol. Swan load on top. Enough to warm both of you, I swear.’

  Slowly, Hib and Mendes preceded the gun back into the cell.

  Andrew Morris stepped forward, his left hand fumbling behind him for the dagger in his belt. He felt suddenly unsettled by the ghostly white, oversized hand of the Porto.

  Neither of his opponents were carrying firearms, just Mendes’ deadly espada and Hib’s long-bladed dagger in his waistband. Good, but not that good, for Andrew Morris was but one man and could add no more teeth to himself. No matter, he would have Peter Sam in a moment sure enough.

  Keep your head. Take what they have.

  ‘Drop your weapons, ladies.’ He eyed the giant up close then and saw breast bones like a barrel. Morris had doubts that lead could stop him. A thought came to drop him anyway. Just for looking so dangerous. He was an awkward one to be sure.

  He crossed the threshold as the weapons rang on the flagstones and were both kicked to the left wall under the wave of his pistol.

  He edged towards Peter Sam, sparing a look at him for one heartbeat. His heart gulped at the sight.

  Once Peter Sam’s shoulder had been as large as Andrew Morris’s head and his ruddy arms like other men’s legs. Now there was this pale thing that shrank from Morris’s stare in the weak square of light let in by the narrow window high above, like the grating of a ship’s hold.

  The cringing, ragged form and the heavy tainted air reminded Morris of the first sight of a slaver’s lower decks and the fearful shadows rattling in the dark. He had done nothing then. Could do nothing then.

  ‘Peter?’ His eyes darted back to the two men by the wall as he spoke, his pistol steady. ’Tis me, Peter. Andrew Morris. I’m here with Will Magnes. He’s top-side with the others. Come to get you out of here. Back to Devlin. Back to Lucy, remember? Remember Lucy? And Will?’

  ‘Lucy?’ Peter’s cracked voice sparked like a fuse at the name. ‘Lucy’s gone. Thomas has gone … Andrew Morris?’

  ‘Aye, Peter. It’s me,’ his voice began to rise softly like he remembered how Thomas used to lilt. Tenderly coaxing Peter from the corner. ‘Lucy ain’t gone! We went and got her back. That’s where we been all this time. Getting her back for you. Won’t Seth be pleased? And Thomas is waiting for you,’ Andrew hoping that the memory of the moon-faced lad that Peter Sam had favoured could drag him from his stupor. ‘I’ll call Will down and we’ll get going.’

  The pale face with the grey and copper beard stepped out and looked to the terrible Scotsman against the wall, his blade gone and his merry whistle silenced under the stare of a pistol.

  ‘Here, Peter,’ Andrew passed his blade across the square of light and thin fingers lingered over the blade before grasping the bony handle.

  Good. Andrew breathed better now. All the teeth were his. His eye never left the huge Scotsman, now raising himself to his full height, almost scraping his head upon the ceiling.

  ‘Now, Peter Sam. I’ll have my orders. What’ll it be for Andrew Morris, Quartermaster? I’ll take the big man, aye?’

  Hib had only to whisper.

  ‘Drop it, my boy.’ And Andrew heard the chime of the knife against the stone as Peter let it go.

  ‘Shoot me, Andrew,’ Peter’s crumbling throat begged. ‘Shoot me, I orders.’

  Andrew’s gun-arm sank. His quartermaster now pleading with him to shoot and finish him off, his body trembling. The once great and terrible Peter Sam.

  It was all Hib needed.

  With one stride he crossed the stones to sweep up his blade. A hand clamped onto Andrew’s pistol lock.

  Andrew pulled back, kicking at the big man.

  The pistol came greasily free, miraculously back under Andrew’s power, the beeswax applied the night before paying its due. They shared a look of surprise for one moment as Andrew held the upper hand. Then the moment had gone as Hib smothered him with his arms and they danced in the square of sun. Somehow Andrew’s thumb cocked the pistol’s lock.

  Mendes dived for his sword and sampled the fray before him, looking for a gap to make his mark.

  Andrew Morris’s time was short, he could feel it. He was never the best at the game. With Peter by him he had a chance. As it was he knew the saints never paid him much mind so he chose the action that would affect the world most.

  As Hib’s blade sunk under his ribs and twisted up into his heart, as the huge left hand pushed down on his shoulder sinking it deeper, and he clasped the giant closer like a lover, Andrew fired his pistol at Valentim Mendes.

  The crack of the shot thunder-clapped around the cell. Pellets of swan-grain. Andrew Morris had not lied about that.

  Mendes was close enough to die. Instinctively he held out his porcelain hand to the barrel as it swept up at him.

  The last thing Andrew Morris saw was Valentim Mendes wiping the powder burns off his hand with the kerchief he tore from the dying pirate’s neck.

  ‘We will go now.’ Mendes looked down at the corpse, checked himself for wounds.

  ‘He said there were others?’ Hib wiped his blade.

  Mendes scoffed. ‘A pirate lie. They always lie. You will learn this, executioner. Bring the oaf.’

  William Magnes sat on the shaded porch of the tumbledown tavern. One eye was on the Jeu Force board that he played with one of the local sots, who never smiled or even spoke, the other nervously cast up and down the dust road seeking his mate. But both men
looked up at the carnival rolling down the road to the harbour.

  Magnes looked hard at the big man at the head of the horse. A glint of danger about him in his shifting eyes pricked at Magnes’s neck. On the horse, a black-gloved gentleman fanned the flies from his pale noble face and preceded a curtained sedan chair borne by four regretful locals struggling down the hill.

  He snorted at the folly of the wealthy and said as much to his silent opponent who ignored or did not understand and simply took two more of Magnes’s pieces from under his nose. William Magnes cursed the toothless old man and fell back to the game, paying no more mind to the colourful display.

  Magnes had never seen Valentim Mendes before that day. There was no fault but only pity, as his long restless nights ahead would remind him endlessly, that he chose that moment to concentrate on his two counters snatched from the board by the leathery drunk rather than to question the curious sight trailing down to the ships.

  Chapter Eighteen

  John Coxon did not normally frequent the lascivious upstairs quarters of The Porker’s End. He had passed only once before under its swinging sign depicting the startling sight of a Great White flinging himself at a mutton-chopped sailor stoutly fending off the fish with a marlin spike.

  Backs turned from him as he cut through the benches, his path guided by the smiling young Portuguese who had led him there weeks previously, only to be disappointed by the confirmation that Devlin was most probably on the other side of the world.

  Upstairs was intolerably warm, dubious justification for the swift removal of clothes from most of the usual patrons.

  Coxon removed only his hat as he ducked into the room where Sarah Wood made her billet. The Porto sailor stayed on the landing.

  The room was cloudy and dark. Petticoats draped loosely about the tiny window kept the white light out but not the dancing flies that welcomed the stranger.

  Coxon looked down at the girl on the giant bed that reached up to his waist. She was a broken doll within it, slipping away from life now, the fever outside her as well as in. She was falling into whatever grace she was destined for.

  Her jaundiced skin glowed with a greasy layer of almost effervescent sweat. Her open eyes were as dry and surprised as yesterday’s smoked fish.

  Still, she made the strained effort to rise when she heard the captain’s voice.

  ‘Sarah,’ Coxon said impatiently. ‘You called for me?’

  Her voice lilted weakly through white flecked lips. ‘Captain John. You came!’

  ‘I cannot stay long. The boy said you had some word for me?’ He wanted to keep the appointment brief. Sweat had already begun to bead around his necktie.

  ‘So good for you to come, Captain John.’ She dragged herself up to the headboard, swallowing hard. Her breast shivering. ‘Patrick slept in this very bed you know? Seems so long ago, don’t it?’ Her voice faintly carried some of her Carolina origins.

  Coxon ran his tricorne through his hands, feeling a fool that some delirious whore had pricked his wound craftily enough with the damnable name to drag him up here just for companionship.

  On his arrival on New Providence, as the ropes were thrown over the gibbet, the young Porto had approached him with the name. Devlin’s name. ‘Captain’ Devlin. And Coxon had dragged the Porto into Nassau to take him to the woman who knew its whereabouts.

  They had sailed east she had said. East to spend their coin and seek sanctuary. Gone from the Bahamas. The certainty of her belief that Devlin had flown brought some small measure of absolution to Coxon. He could focus on the colony as Rogers dictated, on his duty of assuring that the pineapple trees took hold and flourished.

  Now she had called him back. Only by now the creep of the putrescent fever had found her.

  ‘What do you want, Sarah? You have already told me that Devlin sailed. Is there something else I need to know?’

  Sarah sank inches down, too weak to hold herself up for long. Her eyes looked through Coxon, trying to recall something from beyond him, long ago, before she knew of his name.

  ‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘There was something, Captain John. Something about them both …’

  ‘Both? Who?’

  An angry knock shuddered the thin door, then it was pushed open, ushering Mrs Haggins’ white powdered face into the chamber.

  Haggins looked down at Sarah who pulled the sheet to her neck. Then she twisted her gaze to Coxon.

  ‘What goes on here, Cap’n Coxon?’ Haggins demanded, her vexation causing Sarah to clasp a hand to her head. ‘Guv’nor Woodes don’t allow no officers in my rooms! I’d be thrown out! You must leave at once. I insist on it I do, Cap’n! Out, I insist!’

  Coxon pulled back his shoulders. ‘Mrs Haggins! I will insist that you await me downstairs or I will insist that Governor Rogers permits me to throw you off this colony!’ He paused for her outrage to recede. ‘Now Madam! Now!’

  Haggins gasped, almost properly shocked, although she no longer knew the sense of the word, and bundled out of the room with fuming recriminations smothered by her bulk. The Porto sailor tugged his hair to Coxon as he leant in and pulled the door to again.

  Sarah shifted beneath the grubby bedclothes, her breath coming in shallow drafts. Coxon looked around for some water. Finding none he pressed her regardless.

  ‘Who were you going to tell about, Sarah? Go on, my girl. I won’t let her bother you again.’

  She looked up at him softly, smiled at some kindness that hundreds of others did not see, that no other woman had ever seen.

  ‘I recall it, Captain John. I recall it now. I have a mind to tell you that Patrick and Dandelion will be back. Back real soon.’

  Coxon sighed, lowered his head. The risk of fever had not been worth the revelation that at some point, some day months from now, Devlin might possibly decide to set his course to Providence. Hallelujah.

  ‘Is that it? Devlin is coming back? He fumbled with his hat, finding it difficult to locate the front-cock as he squared it on his head again.

  Sarah looked hurt, dismayed, as if she had imparted a mighty secret upon the officer and he had not heard.

  ‘Why, he’ll have to come back. He’ll be back for this, won’t he? He asked me to hold it for him. I’m the only girl that stayed, see.’

  Coxon looked up as Sarah tried to lean over her bed, her delicate hands reaching beneath the frame, but failing as a rasping cough sent her flat.

  ‘Is under there. I can’t gets it no more,’ she hacked.

  Coxon knelt to the bed, prostrating himself as if praying in a mosque to see what the girl could no longer grasp, and then he saw it.

  From out of nowhere, amongst the old dolls and half-finished sketches in a whore’s bedroom in a fever-ridden pox-hole at the rat-end of Christendom, there it lay: the black chest. The chest.

  It lay innocently beneath Sarah Wood’s bed and winked at him. Why, hullo there, John. Very pleased to see you again. How you doing this fine day?

  His forearm ached. Just his leaning on it stressed the weakened bone. He pushed himself back up, somewhat in awe of Sarah Wood as she lay retching on the bed.

  ‘That’s the gold. That’s the chest from The Island. He left it here? With you?’ His voice sounded incredulous, but then again why sail with your gold? There was always the risk of capture and defeat at sea. And why carry the evidence of your crimes with you to be taken by the first lucky soul that chances across you? Pirates usually buried their troves on spits of land. The whole world knew that. Every small boy in England knew that. It lit their dreams. So, contrarily, why not leave it on a pirate fortress with a bruised little girl who believed she loved you?

  ‘They were always so nice to me,’ she coughed. ‘I told you they’d be back you see? Oh, it ain’t all there. Just the might of it.’

  Coxon felt oddly cold. His legs had turned weak. ‘Why have you told me this, Sarah?’

  ‘They won’t be back before I die,’ Sarah smiled, ‘I know that. I didn’t want her to have a hand on
it, Captain John. No one knows, save you.’

  ‘Sarah, why would you entrust me with this?’ He tapped the box lightly with his foot, confirming its reality to his disbelieving senses.

  Again she looked hurt that the officer did not understand her reasons.

  ‘You were nice to me too, Captain John. Gentlemanly. I remember it. And I needed someone to have it who was there. Who’d know it. Who even bled a little for it. Don’t that make sense?’

  Coxon took his hat off again. Loosened his necktie.

  ‘Yes, Sarah.’ He noticed the goose-pimples on his wrist despite the heat. ‘Now that you say it. And I thank you. You have done your King a great service.’

  ‘Oh, I hope not, Captain John.’ She sank lower. ‘I hope not. Don’t let him hate me for giving it up. I’m sure it ain’t lost with you.’

  He met Haggins again at the top of the stair. Her own syrupy aroma mingled with the stale beer from the tavern below. Her bosom halted his descent. Followed by the Porto sailor, he offered his disrespect by not doffing his hat as he delivered his orders.

  ‘Bring her some water and brandy. I will fetch a doctor. And a guard.’

  ‘A guard? What guard? What for? What doctor? There’s been no doctor here since Dandelion left on the account.’

  ‘I will send for my surgeon. No one is to enter that room. She has the fever. I want it contained.’ He barged past. The Porto grinned at her and followed.

  ‘I can’t have a soldier cluttering up my stairs. Putting good folks off. I shall lose me business!’ Haggins screeched.

  Coxon turned back to her, ‘Perhaps you’d prefer it if I closed the whole place? Just in case. Would that suffice?’

  He did not wait for a reply. He had already spied Seth Toombs idling his arm on the final baluster and sneering up at him.

  Seth managed the extraordinary facial feat of beginning to wink then freezing it as he remembered Coxon had an intense dislike of such familiarity. He knuckled his burgundy hat instead.