by Mark Keating
‘I hadn’t favoured you as the visiting type, Cap’n.’
Coxon ignored Seth’s jibe. ‘Do you want my attention, sailor?’ he snapped as he walked to the door. Seth pursued him, shadowed by the Porto sailor.
‘Aye, Cap’n,’ Seth chirped as the door swung open to a different, colourful world outside. ‘I was of a mind to enquire about the sloop-trading? I gather we be going to market somewhere south of here. Via and vis the Buck and the Mumvil Trader?’
‘I am on my way to Governor Rogers, Toombs. Speak your mind.’ Coxon’s pace increased as his mind raced ahead. A cacophony of questions spun his sensibility into a gyre.
‘I was only wishing to make an annotation of the matter, Cap’n, that I have sailed with the Mumvil afore. And I would be much inclined to offer my capable knowledge on her manners, Cap’n. If it might be of use.’
Coxon wheeled round to face him. ‘When did you sail on her?’ He squinted in the sun at the lank and dirty sailor. Seth’s scarred cheek was not the only aspect of the man that unsettled Coxon. There was something of a mask about him wholly, as if he was a reflection of someone else. There seemed to be pretence even in his salutes and leers.
Seth scratched his eyebrow evasively. ‘Oh, time ago, time ago. Labrador. Cod to Bristol. Captain Snow – good man. Hard days.’
Coxon nodded. ‘No doubt.’ He looked at his Porto entourage, contemplating how much English the man might know. What inkling he had of the scene that had transpired in Sarah’s room? Perhaps minimising the ranks of avarice would be a sound action. And Toombs with his gallows countenance, the itch of the sea-rover all over him. A mistake waiting to happen.
‘A man familiar would be of use. Sign yourself up with the master. She sails to Hispaniola. And take this good man with you. He has taken the Act of Grace, being formerly acquainted with the pirate Devlin.’
Seth rolled his head to the diminutive Porto. ‘Oh is that so? Devlin is it now?’ He touched the boy’s shoulder. ‘What tales you must have, young man!’
The boy’s chin bounced eagerly.
Coxon sniffed. ‘He knows little English I feel, Toombs.’ He moved on.
Toombs hailed after him, ‘Thank you kindly, Cap’n. I’ll lade myself with his well-being.’
Coxon turned. ‘One provision, Toombs: there are to be no personal arms aboard the ships so stow any you have with the master. Each man will be only permitted a gully to eat with.’
Seth dipped his head. ‘No concern, Cap’n. A gully will do me just fine. Good day to you now, Sir!’
Coxon watched him bow, but he turned and left before Seth rose again, attempting to erase the scarred sneer from his mind’s eye.
He came to the staggered path that led to the old Spanish fort, Woodes Rogers’ residence. It overlooked the east of the harbour and most of the old town, and was a reminder of better days. The guns that had kept even Morgan’s tiller hard to larboard; thirty-two pounders of Spanish bronze sat on the cliff-top parapet staring out of their embrasures as if waiting for glory to come again.
Coxon was standing stock still. Without noticing he had been looking up at the yawning windows of Rogers’ rooms long enough for some children to begin a game around his statue.
He could not hear their rhymes as they skipped at his feet. The only sound in his head was his own voice stumbling through a report before the board. He was again listening to the grey wigs cough uncomfortably as he listed the miseries of his failure a year ago.
By rights, by duty, he should break the circle of hands that whirled around him. He should immediately inform Rogers about Sarah Woods and her silent bed partner.
But Rogers had commissioned two sloops to trade with the Spanish. Had hung pirates like clothes pegs. Had been a privateer in the war. Had drowned natives reluctant to kneel. Stripped Spanish Ladies for their secreted jewels. Coxon politely lifted apart the chain of arms around him and turned away.
No, Rogers could remain oblivious for a moment. It was better Coxon summoned his surgeon for Sarah Woods, and a guard for her door. The fever would suffice as validation. He would enjoy dwelling on consequences yet to come.
He had found the chest. And Devlin would find him holding it.
Chapter Nineteen
Bath Town, North Carolina
Governor Eden’s mansion.
Governor Eden had not welcomed Teach when the pirate had first come to his attention. Eden was loath to associate with such a notorious brigand and enemy of mankind.
On the other hand a privateer enjoyed a certain degree of formality and Eden might lower himself to the occasional social engagement.
So it was that Edward Teach came calling again at the governor’s acres in Bath Town, in a carriage no less, and gave notice that he had come to take up the Act of Grace so recently appointed by the King and offered Eden his loyalties as privateer in lieu of which he presented Eden a sack full of coin in good faith. After that, Eden courteously listened to the crimson-coated sea-dog and let his secretary count the coin.
They enjoyed a fair companionship. Eden had granted Teach his Grace, and Teach gave tribute with his own hand from whatever happened to chance across his bows.
Teach had sniffed the Proclamation a year past and knew its meaning to his trade. Granted the French Guineaman, Concorde, by Ben Hornigold, his former captain, he took the three-hundred ton square-rig and re-christened her the Queen Anne’s Revenge; he then proceeded to haunt the colonial coast. His resolution was to remain several steps ahead of his British would-be enslavers and gain legitimacy and position with the frustrated governors of the Carolinas.
He raided those who refused to let him trade in the towns and he courted those that let him in to savour their daughters and unload his tenders.
To the governors it was an opportunity for free trade, a tax-exempt boon to their coffers and, as the nod to the pirate began, other sloops crept up the inlets and the pirates found a new and willing home.
This day was different. A new covenant had come for Eden and Teach. The trust between the two had been split by Eden’s sudden change of humour when the smashed medicine chest lay strewn across the oak floor of his drawing room.
‘Where are they, Teach? Where are the letters?’ Eden stood with an axe heavy in his hands, breathless and sweating in the dry August heat. Although his bob wig had been cast aside after the third heavy swing, he was still the gentlemen in silk waistcoat and stockings.
Teach sat behind Eden’s desk in full garb, crimson coat, black hat and boots, seemingly immune to the heat. Pistols representing every nation stuck out of his every nook like voodoo pins from a ‘poppet’. Their unlikely cabal lay before them as broken as the shattered chest.
‘What letters, Charles?’ Teach spoke softly as he sucked on a long-pipe, his scowl as black as his matted mane. ‘You sent me for a chest from that man. And I brought you a chest. I know nothing of any letters. Save the ones you promised to me, Charles.’
Eden let the axe fall, chipping the floor, and stepped towards the desk.
‘I sent you to Ignatius. I sent you for a chest. That chest came off the Whydah, Sam Bellamy’s Whydah, with Palgrave Williams over a year ago.’
Teach plucked the pipe from his teeth, ‘Who?’
Eden wiped his brow. ‘Palgrave was Bellamy’s partner. He left the ship to visit his mother on Block Island. The only thing he took off the boat with him was that chest!’ He stabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the pitiful splinters.
‘Perhaps she was sick,’ Teach speculated, replacing his pipe. Then he lifted his feet to the desk and leant back.
‘Edward,’ Eden cooed. ‘Two men survived the Whydah. I paid fifteen hundred pounds to one of them for that information and spared him the noose.’
‘Well, Governor, you were fair robbed, so you were. That there chest ain’t ever worth more than three. Course, worth even less now, mind.’ He pulled his bracken beard out of his linen shirt, allowing it to cascade down his chest. ‘Now, I have fulfilled my part. And I
want my letters. The Admiralty pardon, promised to me, that says every ship is mine by law. A fair price I would say for what I have done.’
‘Done?’ Eden swept Teach’s boots from his desk. ‘Done? You have done nothing except cost me money and wasted a year of my life hunting for that chest! I swear, Teach, if you do not give me what you have betrayed you have slept your last peaceful night!’
The black eyes fired at Eden’s words like pistol balls shooting across the desk. Teach’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the desk’s edge. Then just as suddenly the coals went dull and lifeless, wide and placid as a doll’s. Eden stepped back as Blackbeard rose up, covering him in shadow.
‘Done?’ he whispered. ‘What I have done? I will tell you what I have done, Governor.’ He stepped around the desk. The three brace of pistols slung around his neck seemed to jiggle in anticipation as he moved.
‘I have damned myself for your will by holding a whole town to ransom! I have run aground the finest ship I ever owned. Grounded the Revenge to maroon my own men with the promise that I’ll be back. Sailed here on a sloop with just a few trusted brethren all because you wanted that there chest a secret.’
He growled his way to Eden’s cabinet of glass, picked the finest dark carafe and drained half of it, the great back to Eden stretching taller with each swallow.
‘All because you wanted that chest,’ he swallowed his rising bile. ‘What I have done …’ His voice trailed away.
Eden watched the carafe go back in the cabinet as Teach’s head sunk down beyond his shoulders. He looked at the axe on the floor, then back to the crimson figure as it spoke again.
‘I have a house here at Bath. Another wife. And land.’ Teach turned round, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘I have plans, Governor. A future beyond the sea,’ enunciated Teach as he took in the red face and then the tight waistcoat straining across Eden’s paunch. ‘Where you be standing, there stand I, Governor. Mark me.’ He reached back for the carafe. His first draught had slaked his temper. The second would steady the furious trembling of his limbs that normally preceded someone else’s pain.
Eden looked at the splinters of the chest and stroked the grey pelt of his hair, kept close-cut for under his bob wig. He was grey as a rabbit at forty-five and governor for the last five years. The letters were not in the chest. Think again.
He kicked petulantly at the wood and dragged himself to the cabinet for a glass, resigned to the fact that angering Teach was a bad tack to follow.
‘I apologise, Edward, for my outburst.’ He poured himself a drink and clinked his glass against Teach’s bottle. ‘We are in this together, I know. I will get my secretary Tobias to issue your letters of ownership.’ He drank fast, the instant warmth in his belly soothing and bracing him. ‘You blockaded a town at great personal risk and I am sorry to have doubted you. Ignatius has fooled us. Rather, fooled me.’ He poured another.
‘The chest I was led to believe contained some letters. Letters that have whispered around the world for years. I felt they were in my grasp.’ He eyed Teach over his glass. Threw him one card. ‘Did Ignatius mention what the chest might have contained?’
Teach’s beard rose, a smile presumably under the thicket of hair. ‘Important enough matter I gather. I had to kidnap a councillor and his son to sway him, and only then when I promised to deliver their heads ashore. Two heads better than one!’ He elbowed Eden’s drinking arm, splashing his drink and bellowing out a laugh that rolled through the house.
Eden paused for the roar to subside, unable to join in himself. ‘Quite. Now however, I must regroup.’ He walked to his desk and sat with a sigh. How much did Teach need to know? How much did he know? He had known the villain a time. Violent, certainly; drunken, always. But no fool.
‘Ignatius now knows I am after the letters. And I am probably not the only governor seeking the same.’ He chanced a quick glance at the drawer to his right where a pistol waited. ‘Did you know Black Sam Bellamy, Edward?’
Teach snorted. ‘Aye. Knew of him plain enough. One of Hornigold’s through and through.’
‘No doubt. It was a pirate named Thomas that survived Bellamy’s shipwreck. Did you know of him?’
Teach shook his head slowly, trying to recall, taking a swift swallow to aid his memory.
‘No mind,’ Eden went on. ‘Young Thomas was acquitted for being a pirate. Mainly for his fascinating evidence, as it were. He told of the letters being on board and of the promise of a pardon for Bellamy and all of them if they took them north, up to Cape Cod. I assume to safety or to a buyer. Thomas swore that Bellamy and Palgrave decided to unload their precious cargo at Block Island, perhaps to haggle for more money, perhaps to take the letters for themselves, who knows?’ He drank solemnly, listening to the slave gangs bringing in the evening with their songs lilting up from his plantation acres.
Teach’s voice almost rolled along in the same tune as he spoke the inevitable. ‘Or perhaps this man Thomas knew the letters were still aboard the Whydah when she went down. And took that acquittal, and your fifteen-hundred pounds, to fetch them his-self maybe?’
‘That indeed occurs to me now, Edward. Either way he has vanished and the letters with him.’ He drained his glass and beckoned for another. ‘Or with God knows who else.’ Teach came over with the decanter and poured slowly.
‘My counsel,’ Teach proffered, ‘would be that if a pirate got a hold of such a prize he would make his way to a safe point. Somewhere he could conceal his luck from those that might enquire. Somewhere a pirate can hide and bide his time maybe, until he can capitalise on his good fortune.’
Eden nodded and could already feel his pockets getting lighter. ‘Such a place as Providence, by any chance?’
‘Aye,’ Teach agreed as if the thought were not his own. ‘That would be such a place as good as any, aye.’
Eden sat back. ‘And if I afforded you, perhaps, the necessary to take a trip to Providence, on my behalf, you would not be too disinclined?’
‘Well now, Governor. Times have changed. Providence now be the King’s Island. Propriety has switched quite a bit now I gathers. Be an awful risk for a pirate to sail within five leagues of such a place, what with all the wood and lobsters patrolling her. Take an awfully big purse to persuade a gentleman of fortune to take a risk like that.’
‘And what would it take to persuade you, Edward?’
Teach straightened up, pausing for a breath as he thought on the matter. ‘I suppose I could manage such a task for the promise of some land. Land to do with what I pleased with no objections. That might persuade me.’ He turned away.
Eden was genuinely impressed. The only thing he could think to ask was where and why would Teach require land, except to conceal corpses perhaps. Teach walked through the remnants of the chest, crunching the mahogany beneath his boots as he pondered, then slowly turned round again.
‘I have a sailcloth base at Ocracock. I want a fort there. My own stone fort to protect my interests. And I want noone to stop me building it.’ He pointed his face hard at Eden.
Eden could not comprehend the consequences of Teach having a fort on the point of his colony. The entertaining of such a scheme, to turn Carolina into another Providence or Tortuga, would condemn even the men who carried the stone. It would never happen. Could never happen.
Like a father promising a begging child he tried to appease, confident that Teach’s tomorrow was a long way off.
‘I believe we can come to some arrangement, Edward. Yes. If that is what you want. How soon could you get under way?’
Teach strode to the oak desk to snatch at the decanter. ‘Tomorrow. I can leave when your Tobias brings me my Admiralty notes.’ He swigged and slammed it down. ‘You’d best find him tonight. I ain’t patient when I’m waiting.’
Eden concurred. The thought of how much Teach really knew, how much he had gleant from Ignatius or fathomed in his own mind, would grow within him as a cancer, but for now he glowed at the
concept that he had Blackbeard himself preparing to rain down upon Providence.
It was not by theory, Eden surmised, that Teach had suggested the place. He knew something. And by design Charles Eden would always profit, as did all advantageous men, from the knowledge of others. But Teach’s knowledge would not come cheap.
If Eden had to dig into the town’s taxes to bid against Ignatius, a day that would surely come, he would give as graciously as he could.
Teach idled on the gravel outside, waiting for Eden’s cob to carry him back to his ship. As he watched the dusty cloud of insects floating over the fields in the dusk, following the slow bobbing of the black heads of slaves, he wondered only about the Chinese gun Ignatius had told him of, and that Eden had never mentioned. The gun that Palgrave Williams had taken to Providence and hidden therein.
He had Eden now promising land and legitimacy. Ignatius promising even more. All for a Chinese gun hiding some priest’s letters that meant nothing to him. Teach’s losses after the dust settled would be as light as his conscience.
In England he would be vilified and hung. Here, he was a landowner and a personage of promise. The opportunities that this New World offered were limitless to a shrewd man of means. He tapped the lump of wax hidden beneath his shirt. The chance to remind Devlin of his affront would be a suitable final act to the life he was planning to leave behind, a final pirate glory to warm him in his days of fireside and grandchildren to come. That thought pleasured him all the way back to the shore.
Chapter Twenty
The Talefan caught the trade winds. A week coursing east-southeast on a broad reach; sailing fairer than a ship has a right to. Devlin stood on the larboard gunwale, hanging off the shrouds and watching the streaking grey dolphins effortlessly match the Talefan’s nine knots and even take the time to leap from the water, stitching the ocean as they plunged again and again.
Devlin glanced aft to the man at the tiller who waved as his captain stuck out his right arm across the deck, pointing west. The helmsman heaved on his iron staff and the gunwale began to rise beneath Devlin’s boots. The aproned larboard guns rolled back one turn of their trucks, squealing with delight.
