Captain in Calico

by George MacDonald Fraser

  ‘Now!’ snapped Rackham, and the two men flung their combined weight on the wheel. The Kingston shuddered and came round, and as she did so there was the triple crash of gunfire and three sickening thuds against her hull, one after another like knocks on a door. Smoke welled up from the waist as Carty’s guns gave answer – ‘Too soon! Too soon!’ a voice was shouting, and Rackham recognised it for that of Bull, stamping beside him.

  He saw the red ship looming up on their larboard bow, and groaned aloud as the Kingston answered sluggishly to the wheel. There was nothing he could do as their opponent veered slowly round, presenting her huge flank with its double tier of black shining muzzles; he watched them with a kind of dull fascination, heedless of the yells and howls from the waist, Bull’s storming beside him, or the acrid bite of the powder smoke in his eyes. This was the end.

  The side of the King’s ship seemd to burst into flame, and the Kingston staggered and lurched as the broadside smashed into her. Rackham was hurled from his feet and thrown against the rail, where he lay, half-stunned. Someone fell on him, and a second later he felt the hot stickiness of blood on his face. He struggled up, throwing the body aside, and saw it was the man who had held the wheel with him, but now he was dead, with his head battered to pulp. Rackham clung to the rail as another salvo boomed out with deafening violence and the Kingston heeled over again. She half-righted herself, drifting with her deck canting beneath his feet as he staggered blindly towards the ladder and looked down into the shambles of the waist.

  It was as though a gigantic scythe had been swept over the Kingston’s deck. The foremast, struck by a round-shot, had come crashing down and hung outwards over the starboard side, caught in the mesh of its own gear. There were two great gaps in the port-side rail and the deck planking was ploughed and scarred with shot. One of the port guns had broken loose from its tackles and careered across the deck, smashing half-way through the opposite bulwark where it hung precariously over the water. There were men on the deck, too, some of them stirring or crawling, and others who lay grotesquely still. Several lay huddled round one of the guns, and he saw a stream of blood begin to trickle down across the tilting deck.

  Bull was roaring behind him on the poop, and as though awakened by that stentorian voice the Kingston began to come to life again. Carty was on his feet in the waist, and perhaps half a dozen others. As Bull bellowed his commands they started forward obediently, and then the Kingston lurched again. She was beginning to go down by the head, and the chorus of shrieks grew louder.

  ‘Aft!’ roared Bull. He was bleeding freely from a gash in his cheek, and there was more blood on the leg of his breeches, but he moved with the assurance of a whole man. He stood at the opposite ladder to Rackham, his broadsword naked in his hand, his face purple with the effort of making himself heard above the din.

  The King’s ship was going about only a cable’s length away on their port quarter. Rackham, ironically enough, had accomplished his object: the Kingston now had an unhindered passage to the entrance of the bay, but she lay yawing and helpless, her hull a riddled hulk that must founder in half an hour or less.

  Men were scrambling up the ladder, tearing at each other to reach the temporary security of the poop, heedless of the screams of the wounded abandoned in the waist. Rackham saw a red head on the deck below where Anne Bonney was picking her way carefully through the tangle of gear and timber, stepping gracefully as ever even in the carnage that surrounded her. Beyond her a man was hobbling across the deck on one foot, catching at any handhold he could reach, and Rackham recognised Ben, the leg of his breeches sodden with blood and his foot trailing behind him. He stumbled and fell, and Rackham started down the ladder to his assistance. As he reached the deck he came face to face with Anne Bonney.

  Her face was deathly white and there was a look of terror in her eyes. He put out a hand to steady her, but she brushed him aside.

  ‘Alan,’ she asked, her voice trembling. ‘Have you seen Alan?’

  It took him a moment to realise that she meant Kinsman. He shook his head and she put up her hand to her mouth to check a sudden uncontrollable sob.

  ‘Oh God,’ she muttered. ‘Where is he? He was with me by the gun, and then … then they fired on us and there was blood everywhere … and … and he was gone! He was gone!’ Her voice rose in a shriek, and she covered her face with her hands and half-collapsed on Rackham’s shoulder. He steadied her and guided her feet to the ladder.

  ‘Up with you while there’s still time,’ he said. ‘If he’s alive he’s up yonder with the others.’ He released her and started out over the tilted deck to where Ben was trying to free his wounded leg from a tangle of cordage. Slipping and stumbling Rackham reached his side and knelt down, pulling out his knife to slash through the lines that were tangling his comrade’s foot.

  Ben looked up at him, his pain-drawn face breaking into a grin.

  ‘Good for you, cap’n,’ he said huskily. ‘I reckoned I was gone wi’ this game pin o’ mine.’

  Rackham cut away the cords and was slipping his arm round Ben’s shoulders to help him rise when the uproar from the poop was redoubled. The King’s ship was drawing alongside again.

  Rackham looked aft to see the pirates who only a moment since had been fighting their way up the ladders coming down them again in headlong flight. Others had thrown themselves down behind the shelter of the bulwarks or any other cover they could find.

  ‘Jesus, they ain’t goin’ to hammer us again, surely?’ muttered Ben, his eyes wide as he watched the approach of the King’s ship.

  There was a crash of musketry from the poop, and Rackham saw Bull with a smoking piece in his hand. Before the sound of the shot had died away it was answered by the deep blast of a gun. A storm of langrel swept across the poop, knocking splinters from the rail and cutting almost in two a pirate at the ladder head, but by some miracle Bull was untouched. He hurled away his musket and snatched up his sword, yelling defiance at the oncoming ship.

  There were armed men at her rail, and perched above them in the shrouds were musketmen who fired down into the Kingston as the distance narrowed between the two ships. A grappling iron soared over the water, lodging behind the Kingston’s rail; then came a second and a third. Bull leaped down the ladder and slashed one of them free, but two more followed, and the half-sinking Kingston was hauled towards the side of her great red opponent.

  The Kingston was in no case to repel the boarders who dropped to her deck. Apart from Bull there was hardly a man aboard with any thought of resistance; they were a disordered rabble with no thought but to escape the murderous fire poured on them from the musketeers aloft, and the steel in the hands of the boarding party.

  As the first navy men came over the rail Bull leaped to the attack, burying his broadsword in the body of a seaman even as the man’s feet touched the deck. Before he could deliver another out he was borne back by the weight of numbers and stretched weaponless on the deck.

  A voice aboard the King’s ship shouted an order, and another volley of fire was poured over the heads of the boarding party at those survivors of the Kingston who were scurrying for safety. Another man went down, and before the volley could be repeated a voice screamed out above the noise.

  ‘Quarter!’

  The command to hold fire was shouted from the rail of the King’s ship, and a young officer with the boarding party stepped forward ahead of his men, his drawn rapier in one hand and a pistol in the other. He looked round him about the ravaged deck and shouted, ‘Do you surrender?’

  Rackham nodded wearily and somewhere behind him a hysterical voice answered the officer. ‘Aye, aye. Christ, aye! No more, no more!’ It trailed off into a sob. It might have been the voice of the Kingston, beaten and broken. The young officer sheathed his sword and ordered his men forward into the doomed ship.

  Rackham and Ben were dragged to their feet and held each between two burly sailors, and Rackham looked about him to see who else had survived. There was Bull, s
enseless on the deck, but still alive, and Carty with a broken arm that hung limply in its blood-sodden sleeve. Dobbins, the ship’s boy, was weeping as he was kicked to his feet, and herded together at the stump of the foremast were Earl and Bourne, two of the jail-birds, with Malloy, crumpled up between them, his grey hair streaked with blood.

  Somehow he was surprised to see Anne Bonney still alive, and near her Kinsman. So she had found him after all. Her face was so grimed that he would have been hard put to it to recognise her as a woman at all, in spite of her hair, which hung wildly disordered about her shoulders. The sailors evidently took her for a man, or else they were indiscriminate with evil-doers, for one of them pushed her roughly forward, sending her sprawling in the scuppers. Kinsman made as though to help her, but another sailor jostled him aside.

  Bull, Dobbins, Earl, Bourne, Malloy, Carty, Anne Bonney, Kinsman, Ben, and himself. No, there was Fenwick, another dock-rat, being hauled out from under a mass of rigging where the foremast had gone overside. That made eleven – eleven out of thirty. Eleven of two hundred who had sailed from Providence.

  ‘Mr Williams!’ A voice rang out from the quarter-deck of the King’s ship. ‘Come away, Mr Williams, why d’you wait?’

  The young officer looked up. ‘If you please, Sir John, there are wounded men caught in the wreckage.’ He spoke in an apologetic tone, as though he had put them there. ‘It may take some time to free them.’

  ‘How many of the villains have you?’

  The side of the red ship towering above them was lined with men, and aft, at the gilded rail of the quarter-deck, stood a group of officers, foremost among them a slight gentleman in a magnificent suit of apricot taffeta. His face, pale among the bronzed skins about him, was refined and almost like a woman’s. He held a snuff-box in one hand and tapped the lid impatiently.

  ‘Eleven, Sir John,’ said Williams.

  ‘You don’t say so? Then I think you have done well enough. You’ll be swimming back to the ship if you wait much longer. Bring them aboard.’

  Williams hesitated, and the Kingston lurched again with a clatter of broken timber sliding across her deck. The men aboard her had to cling for support.

  ‘Come, come, now.’ Sir John’s voice was almost conversational. ‘She’ll sink, you know.’

  Williams struggled to keep his balance. ‘But the wounded men—’ he began.

  ‘Come aboard, Mr Williams,’ came the order, and Williams hesitated no longer. The pirates were driven to the rail and forced to scramble up the red hull to the deck of the King’s ship. The sailors followed them, Williams last of all, and even as he swung himself off the rail the Kingston shuddered and sank lower in the water.

  On the broad open deck of the King’s ship the pirates were pushed into an uneven line under guard of the seamen’s muskets. Williams, who went in evident apprehension of his soft-spoken commander, supervised their marshalling with a great show of energy and one eye on the quarter-deck. When he saw a trickle of blood dripping from Carty’s wounded arm to the spotless planking he rapped out an oath.

  ‘Have that man’s arm bound up,’ he cried, adding in a lower tone, ‘And clean that mess away. If Sir John sees it he’ll go mad.’ He strode along the rank, pushing the prisoners into line so that no irregularity of dressing should annoy the great man, exclaiming impatiently when Malloy, too weak from his wound to stand, tottered and sank to the deck.

  ‘Blast him, pick him up,’ he commanded. ‘Here you,’ he pointed to Bull, who had recovered his senses but was still dazed and was staring about him vacantly, ‘help him up and hold him, d’you hear?’

  A sailor prodded Bull with his musket butt, but at that moment Williams’ attention was distracted by a scuffle at the end of the line. He wheeled round furiously, to see Anne Bonney attempting to wrench free from a sailor who was gripping her wrist. As she did so, swinging a fist against the side of his head, another seaman sprang forward to his mate’s assistance.

  ‘Fight would ye, ye bloody pirate,’ he snarled and grabbed at her shoulder. He missed his hold and caught her shirt, and as she wriggled free there was a tearing sound and the garment came away in his hand. The sailor who had her wrist gave a yell of surprise and released her, his jaw dropping.

  ‘Hell!’ he shouted. ‘A mort!’

  Williams started towards them. ‘What the devil—’ he began, and stopped as he saw Anne Bonney stripped to the waist. ‘My God!’ he exclaimd, colouring with embarrassment.

  One of the sailors, grinning broadly, reached out towards her, and Williams leaped as though he had been stung.

  ‘Drop that!’ he snapped. ‘And you, woman, whoever the devil you are, cover yourself. You, you there, give her a coat or a shirt. A cloth or anything. Rot me!’ A thought struck him. ‘Who – what – are you one of these villains, woman? Or were you their prisoner, or what?’

  Anne Bonney snatched the torn remnant of her shirt from the sailor and calmly arranged it over her shoulders and breasts. She nodded to the pop-eyed officer.

  ‘You can look away now,’ she said.

  ‘Eh?’ Williams was bewildered. ‘But who—’

  Ben, who was standing only with the support of Rackham’s arm round his waist, raised his head.

  ‘She’s one of us, an’ twice the man you’ll ever be,’ he growled, and had his face slapped by the petty officer.

  ‘Have you done with them, Mr Williams, or shall I wait your convenience?’ The elegant captain was descending the ladder, followed by his officers, and Williams jerked round, his face scarlet.

  ‘I’m at your service, you know, Mr Williams,’ the captain continued. He crossed the deck, glancing from one end of the line to the other and back again.

  ‘Which of you is John Rackham, or is he with those ashore?’ he asked.

  Surprised, Rackham looked up. ‘I am.’

  Bright eyes considered him from the pale, effeminate face, and then they passed on to Anne Bonney. ‘And the woman, of course. Perhaps I should have warned you, Williams, that we might have a lady with us.’ He turned his head as Kinsman stepped out at the end of the line, and Williams started forward, outraged. But before he could intervene Kinsman had caught the captain’s attention.

  ‘By your leave, sir. My name is Kinsman. I’m an officer of the King and an agent of Governor Rogers of New Providence.’ He put out a hand to restrain Williams. ‘I can prove what I say, Sir John, if you please.’

  Williams stopped, staring in disbelief.

  ‘You’re a what?’ he exclaimed. He stared at Kinsman’s grimed face and torn clothing. ‘You? Why –.’

  ‘Mr Williams,’ Sir John spoke as though to a small child. ‘Would you be so obliging as to step aside? I thank you. You must learn to govern yourself, Mr Williams. You are too impetuous by far, a fault of which I am continually reminded every time I have the misfortune to partner you at play. What is claimed can easily be tested.’ Williams fell back abashed, and the captain advanced across the deck towards Kinsman. ‘Now, sir, this proof you spoke of.’

  Kinsman stooped and took hold of the top of his boot with both hands. He tugged with all his force and the lining parted with a sharp tearing sound. From the tear he drew out a small flat packet of oilskin which he ripped open, revealing a folded paper which he handed to Sir John. The captain unfolded it, raised his eyebrows, and began to read.

  It was a brief enough warrant: two lines to say that the bearer was the trusted servant of Government. It made no mention of the organisation which Woodes Rogers, patient and thorough, had built up for the security of privateers and merchantmen, so that no vessel sailed from Providence without a secret agent aboard. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they sailed unnecessarily, but here was the hundredth case, and the Governor’s system had paid its dividend. Kinsman had not been able to prevent crime, but he had done his next duty, which was to help bring about the ruin of the criminals.

  With a sudden animal growl Bull flung himself out of the line and flung himself at Kinsman, but a
seaman thrust out his foot and Bull tripped sprawling on the deck. Before he could rise he was pinioned and dragged away by the bosun’s mates, yelling threats until one of them cracked him hard across the head with a hand-spike, and he was silent. His fellow pirates stood silent, watching Kinsman and hating him, but making no move, while their guards hovered about them ready to quell any show of resistance.

  Rackham was remembering and beginning to understand. He should have known that there was something wrong about Kinsman. Now everything became clear – why Kinsman had been so willing to encourage Bull in his folly. Rackham had been ready to put it down to ignorance of the sea, or to a desire on Kinsman’s part to stand well with his commander. He knew better now.

  He wondered, had Anne Bonney known, and glanced along the line towards her. He was shocked by what he saw. She stood motionless, her face pale, biting her lip and staring straight ahead at nothing, bewildered and miserable. If she had behaved as Bull had done, and flown at their betrayer like a wild-cat, he could have understood. That would have been like Anne Bonney. But the drawn, hopeless look in her face was something he felt he should not have seen, and he looked away.

  Sir John had finished his reading, and Kinsman was speaking. ‘As you see, sir, the document bears my signature. You’ll observe it is part covered by the Governor’s seal, a precaution he took lest it be thought I had forged it.’

  The captain nodded. ‘Ingenious,’ he murmured.

  ‘I’ll write my name again, and you can compare them,’ offered Kinsman, but the captain waved the suggestion aside.

  ‘I think that will not be necessary.’ He looked sharply at Kinsman. ‘You took a great risk, captain. It seems Governor Rogers has hard men in Providence. You shall tell me later how far we are indebted to you for the capture of these villains.’ He turned to one of his officers. ‘Conduct Captain Kinsman to a berth, James. See that he has all he needs.’