Cross of Fire (17 page)

Their gold was low, their silver already broken into pieces of eight. The years of fat were dwindling down to a scraggy stew.

He had thought the coin would last but avarice surprises even the richest of men, but the thief and the viscount were both only a bad month or two away from the compter.

He had met dozens of vagrant pirate captains who had once been gods. He had never seen himself as toothless and tobacco-stained like them, begging rum for their tales of past glories.

He weighed one hand with the other, not seeing it as palms closing for prayer, and he did not hear Peter Sam come to his side.

‘What ails, Captain?’ The rough quartermaster stood with his hands tucked into his broad belt, a pipe drooping from his mouth.

‘Nothing,’ Devlin said. ‘The priest has surprised that’s all. How go the rest of them?’

Peter Sam breathed in the night air.

‘They ate. They don’t speak English but it’ll be good to have some holy luck on the ship for a while. The men are pleased about it anyways. The parsons seem mighty calm for captured men.’

Devlin offered his bottle without a word and Peter Sam swigged short for its liquid was in the last quarter. You can’t drain a man’s last.

‘We’re almost broke, Peter,’ Devlin said, taking back the wine. ‘Every ship we come across is thinner than water.’

‘But we’re after The Buzzard’s gold. That’ll do. The ship talks of nothing else.’

‘Aye. But I feel like a gambler on his last coin. Going broke for the toss.’ He drank until he choked and went on.

‘It’s desperate. A myth. Chasing a fortune. We could be starving by the end of it. Never find a thing.’

Peter Sam had never heard his captain talk so. He was older than Devlin but they had both seen the end of the Spanish war. The boy was no pup.

Peter Sam had killed more, had seen more, and learnt to judge his day by what he had drunk and ate, by full belly and bleary eye. Morning was another country.

He knew his captain to be a quiet one. A man who read, who killed easy and well but slept badly for it and drank fast to drown his humour. And Devlin did not sing. And he would dance awkwardly, and then pretend to be breathless and leave the others to the jig. His was not an easy take to the life, so Peter Sam, the true, the actual, had to show him the way.

If Peter Sam was not this, not the brigand in goat leather with apostles of powder about his chest, not the giant of the deck, he would still be the cod fisherman in Newfoundland earning less than he owed his masters for their black bread and cod-bone mash. Those men who had set themselves above him would fear him now if they ever saw him again. He had often thought that he would return to greet them, one moonless night.

He knew that Devlin needed his word. His word as pirate. He needed to be reminded. Reminded that
they
would enslave him for a coin and hang him for a stolen spoon if he let them forget the fear. ‘You have your pistol about?’ Peter Sam held out his hand.

Devlin lifted from his belt his favoured left-lock Bohemian pistol. It had taken the life of more than a dozen men and grew heavier for it as all arms do when you weigh them. New, they are like babes. As they wear, as the lock and breech show each firing, they tell more about their owner than his eyes. They show the terror of every man that stared into the muzzle. Sweat from the hand turns the wood to an amber shine on the wrists of a well-used pistol. There is aught so melancholy as an old gun.

Devlin passed it over and Peter Sam twisted it and showed Devlin its wood and the deep cut.

‘This is where I hacked at you, Patrick Devlin. Tried to kill you. I thought you’d done for Seth that night. For my Thomas Deakins. You remember we fought?’

‘Aye, Peter.’ Devlin could see the storm again. The lightning flashes and the cutlasses running wet with the rain as he beat back the big man but saw his death. That had been on the island of the Verdes. St Nicolau. Four years gone. Still almost yesterday. Where he had become the pirate and been born again.

‘You had me then, Peter Sam.’

Peter gave back the gun.

‘Aye. Had it not been for the gold that you screamed in my ear.’ He patted his captain’s shoulder.

‘You don’t have to yell no more, Captain. If you say there is gold we will come.’

Peter Sam wanted one more thing. He wanted to pull the younger man towards him but that would not do. A squeeze of his shoulder was as much as he would bestow.

Once, the pirate Devlin had traversed the oceans to rescue another Peter Sam, a broken Peter Sam, a dead Peter Sam. That had been in Charles Town. That Peter Sam was now long put aside but still not forgotten. They never spoke of it but it roped them together. He pushed his captain away like a boy to be bullied and Devlin rolled against the gunwale.

‘Fuck it, Patrick,’ he snapped. ‘Let us to the gold. Shoot ’em all. What else are we here for?’

Devlin tucked back his pistol.

‘This priest. He says he knows the island where Levasseur is. He was on the ship. He wants me to believe that there’s a gold cross. That’s all he wants. We can take the rest of it.’

Peter Sam puffed on his pipe. ‘Sure. And why not?’

‘That’s mighty thin, Peter.’

‘Were you not in chains in Newgate? And chained in Providence before that? Ain’t it always thin? You could do with chancing it a bit more, you fat fuckster!’

He wheeled away to go below and close down the lamps and punch any drunk smoking near the wet baize curtain of the magazine.

Devlin fumbled for his own pipe.

One smoke before he returned to the cabin.

‘Aye,’ he announced to the sea. ‘Why not? Who’s to stop me?’

He scraped his striker, sucked his Meerschaum pipe, the wine and tobacco soothing his head.

‘Ain’t they all dead?’

O’Neill was pouring, measuring not the wine but more the greasy yellow-coated fellow left in his company.

‘And you, sir? How are you come here?’ He passed a glass that was not his, from a bottle that was not his. ‘You are a surgeon?’

‘Not at all,’ Dandon chimed his glass against the priest’s exactly as seamen are not meant to do.

‘I was an apothecary’s man. First in Louis’ American lands and then in Bath. My master was French and I learnt his tongue and I tore through his books better than he. I can make a fine draught and powders to keep you in or out of bed. Whichever is best required.’

‘But how with the pirate, my son?’ O’Neill’s face grew warm and welcoming. Extracting confessions was his métier.

Dandon recounted. The tale almost a myth to him now so long had he been on the sea.

It was as if he were his own father, and the son still back there somewhere dreaming of owning a saltern on New Providence and selling salt pills to gout-ridden gentlemen in the Carolinas.

The priest shook his head and apologised on his God’s behalf as Dandon explained how the rum had claimed him and he made his living in a brothel for a pile of straw on a floor and popped, pierced and scraped what was beyond poultice.

‘The pirate – as you call him – saved my life. I imagine that even in your world the name of Blackbeard filtered through. My tongue had slipped badly again and the rogue Blackbeard was about to vent my spleen. It was Patrick who took him down, and with an empty gun at that.’ Dandon held a finger at the priest.

‘Mark that, Father. An empty gun against Blackbeard. And he has pulled down loaded on the Prince of Wales and the first minister of England. Killed king’s agents and Porto governors.’

He drank to his captain.

‘If you want your cross you have found the right man.’

O’Neill saluted his glass.

‘The Lord has found me the right man, my son. And it is the Lord’s humour and his love for the Irish that he brings me a fellow countryman.’

Dandon scratched his eyebrow with closed eyes and sniffed away a laugh.

‘Don’t play the countryman with Devlin, Father. I suspect there is no love in him for his home.’

O’Neill poured again, the bottle in a losing wager against his mood.

‘Nonsense! I have been across the world and still measure every blade of grass against that on my mother’s own porch.’

He was cut by Devlin crashing back into the room. Pipe in one hand, bottle in the other, a boot kicking the door closed. He strode forward and bit on his words as they came through narrow lips.

‘My mother left me before I knew her face. My father drank. Left me that as a trait. Sold me to a butcher before I was nine.’ He handed Dandon the dregs of his bottle and Dandon tipped it to O’Neill.

Devlin still came on and O’Neill backed up.

‘An English magistrate bid me hang for poaching fowl that he ate. All I know about being Irish is that we’re the last to eat and the first to hang.’ He pushed the priest’s chest.

‘I don’t know about a “flight of earls” and their sons and any Irish kingdom and your God gave me nothing.’ He turned his back and went for the ropes that held the bottles.

O’Neill watched him select a wine and pitied the boy inside the man.

‘My son,’ he spoke as in his pulpit. ‘Can you not see that it is the Lord who has given you this path for this very purpose? He has given you your strength and your fortitude and your nature so to be his sword. This is His work for you. To bring back the True Cross for the worship of the world!’

Devlin pulled the wax and the cork with his teeth and spat it to the priest.

‘I’ll let you live. Give me the name of the island. If your cross still exists I’ll bring it to you and take as much treasure as my men can carry.’ He drank with the bottle high and gasped it from his mouth and wiped his chin.

‘And that’s all I’ll give your God.’

O’Neill bowed his head, a balding pate revealed to Devlin, the first weakness. He went to the table and the
Neptune Français
.

‘I will need you to read it, Captain.’

Dandon coughed as Devlin crossed the cabin.

‘Is there no ill, Patrick, in going after the wealth of another pirate?’

Devlin glared but Dandon knew how far he could go against his friend.

‘I only ask because I was believing that our ilk are dwindling in number without our assistance. Is there no loyalty other than to the ecstasy of gold?’

O’Neill’s shoulder stood at Devlin’s, both looked down at Dandon.

‘How can you be so?’ O’Neill’s tone completely assured. ‘This is about the cross of your saviour!’

Devlin pushed him aside, away from the table and the charts.

‘No it isn’t. He’s right. You look on us all the same. One set of evil men after another. Always useful ain’t it, father? When the Church needs something done.’

O’Neill’s sanctimony came back, something about righteous men and forgiveness, but Devlin put his hand up. Dandon was his only interest.

‘And you,’ he pointed down to Dandon. ‘You should know better,’ he held up the wine. ‘These bottles represent the last for your thirst unless you want to start making your own. The ships are drying up if you hadn’t noticed. Honest merchants lie rotting in the harbours. Just a small bite of kings and moguls with any tin to sell. And did they work for it?’ He gave Dandon the bottle.

‘The world’s burst its purse. Tew became rich. Avery and Captain England like kings. They did it by Indian waters and princes’ ships. Why not me? If The Buzzard has it and I’m starving and can work at finding him who’s to say I don’t deserve it?’

Dandon drank and wiped his lip.

‘
He
may have argument against your deservedness. I would think that pirate against pirate would not be a bloodless encounter.’

Devlin snatched back the bottle.

‘You!’ he pointed O’Neill back to the atlas. ‘Tell me this island. Make sure I believe.’

‘
Believe
?’ O’Neill smiled warmly. ‘Faith, Captain, so it is. Faith is all we need.’