Cross of Fire (18 page)

Chapter Twelve

Cape Coast Castle, West Africa.

Three days later.

John Coxon had been here before. On the
Noble
, the ship he had commanded through the Spanish war, he had watched the bleached white walls and embrasures of Cape Coast Castle roll before his bow. All the castle’s guns faced the sea, from where the only threat would come. Africa would not attack the companies that took their unwanted criminals and prisoners of tribal war for iron and cloth.

He had watched from the castle’s cloistered rooms the escutcheon of his ship sail away. It was the only time he had watched a stern he commanded leave him behind. He had been sick, possibly dying, snared by one of the tropical diseases that befell the foreigner, and as armies had discovered often killed more men than warfare.

Once revived he had left the coast of Africa on the
Starling
and embarked on his first adventure against the pirate Devlin, the steward who had become his enemy. That ship had limped back to England months later showing what a boot-wipe could do. Now it was the
Standard
rising and falling towards the slave factory.

Castle was a strong word for the peeling building. It had been built as a garrison and prison decades before, then the slave fortunes had turned it into England’s workhorse of flesh. Its master for almost the same number of decades had been Governor General James Phipps, and Coxon divulged into Thomas Howard’s ear two mysteries.

One was that the title ‘Governor General’ should no more be respected than that of Wagon-Master General in the land army. There was no grand deed in Phipps’s past, just high friends and money. Second, that he was most surprised that the thirty-stone man was even still alive. His renown should be his constitution that kept him fat when others had become ghosts along the coast that whittled down white men into toothpicks.

‘You will see a feast such as you have never known, Thomas,’ and Thomas beamed at his captain’s familiarity. ‘But you’ll have to move fast. Phipps will suck in plates like a hog. It is a marvel to behold.’

Howard looked over the bow at the coast painted brown with the effluence of a hundred thousand ships.

‘You have been here before, Captain?’

Coxon grabbed a man-rope as the ship started its backing of the sails a mile offshore; they would take the longboat in.

‘Aye. Almost died here. Mind, you may see me take a formal tone to this dog. Pay no attention. Company men expect it.’

General Phipps was in charge of the castle, acting on behalf of Whitehall and the Royal African company. He knew that the navy kept afloat only due to the company’s magnanimity. The only defence of a naval captain would be to treat Phipps’s office as if he were in front of the lords themselves. You did not have to like him.

‘Be official,’ Coxon gave his word to Howard. ‘And we’ll be on our way soon enough.’

Thomas Howard would carry only one thing from his visit to Cape Coast Castle. Coxon informed him with an outstretched arm that just a few miles south down the coast the Dutch at Elmina Castle ferried the blacks to South America also. This was the joint reward prised from the Spanish at the end of the war. The Dutch and English had insisted on the transport of slaves most of all.

‘See that door, Thomas?’ he yelled from the bow of the longboat, and Thomas looked on the double-door and shingle path and steps from the castle’s bowels down to the beach. ‘That is where they take them to the ships. Many hundreds of them in a space for one-hundred fifty. You can smell it from here. The floor is raised almost a foot with their excrement. They stand for weeks waiting for their ships. And see here now,’ Coxon pointed to the black shapes spinning beneath the water and Howard drew himself in as men do when they first see something the length of a man cutting through the water and the black dorsal fin more fluid than the wave that breaks over the shark’s back shining in the sun. A devil waiting.

‘They follow the boats taking the slaves,’ Coxon yelled back almost gleefully. ‘They are expectant that some of them will roll themselves over into the sea before they meet the ships. They only chain them together once on the ships do you see? Else they will pull the others and the boat over with them.’ Coxon looked side to side at the fat black shapes. ‘They follow the ships for miles afterwards before returning here. They are quite smart.’

Howard watched the sleek dark fish buck at the splash of the oars, their anticipation tangible, excited by the presence of men, the potential in their roll that revealed their white bellies like a puppy and the soulless black of their eyes as they weighed him.

‘Quite smart,’ Coxon said again and pushed one away from the bow like a cow. ‘Quite smart.’

Coxon had left Manvell as his First in command; he considered that the officer might have attitudes that could sway in front of General Phipps, for the general would remember that he had dealt with Coxon before and had found him wanting of respect. Manvell was a gentleman by proxy and Coxon, although sure of his loyalty thus far, did not know how deep he had fallen under the spell of men like Phipps.

Howard however had bled with Coxon, and with the aged captain that counted more. He turned back with a reproachful glare at the giggle of Walter Kennedy as an oar slapped against one of the sharks. But he forced himself to smile at the lad and looked back to the shore ahead. He had brought him for other reasons.

You had to carry some shit in on your shoes.

‘General Phipps!’ Coxon said it as if greeting an old friend. He pulled off his hat and dipped his head. That was enough pleasantry. He squared his hat back just as swiftly and Howard mirrored him. Walter Kennedy had no hat but tapped his forehead; that would always do. He had done it all his naval life, not sure what it meant, only that it was required when men wore wigs.

This was the dining room of the house, where Phipps met all his dignitaries, and where a meal seemed always present. Its entrance was through the chapel and this had been designed just so, for if there was ever to be a slave rising or native attack they would not come through the church. The respect for the gods, even a white one, was too powerful to challenge.

General Phipps did not stand. He lounged in his chair at the long table and waved a napkin in response. It had been four years since Coxon had left the man and from this same room. Perhaps he had never moved.

Thomas Howard’s eyes widened at the sight of General Phipps. When they had walked from the longboat – and he had noted that Coxon had splashed into the surf rather than be carried on the seat by the oarsmen – the humidity had hit him like a hot cloud. Ten paces and he was wet. By the time he entered the dining hall his shirt was plastered to him and his wool coat felt heavy as lead. This explained the fat man in shirt open to the chest and silk pantaloons more fitting for some Parisian whore, and that expanded over his gut to his guinea-sized belly button.

‘Post-Captain Coxon,’ Phipps nodded. ‘A pleasure to see you again, sir. Glad to see you are still alive in the world.’ He waved loosely to the other side of the table. ‘Take a seat do, take a seat, gentlemen. Please help yourself to some bread.’

There were chargers of boar and beef sitting in gravy and potatoes, as well as pineapple and paw-paws and other fruits that even the sailors did not recognise. Black and white grapes were afforded their own bowls and in them were piled high. And there was a fresh loaf and butter for the seamen.

‘My gratitude, General,’ Coxon praised, and led the others to their chairs. Howard heard his name in the introductions as he sat and closer now he could see the bracelets of shells and charms about Phipps’s wrists and neck as the fat man nodded his greetings. Phipps had long embraced some of the cultures and traditions passed onto him by his native concubine. Coxon had seen her, and Phipps’s brood of mulatto children on his last visit. In fact she had cared for Coxon in his illness. He had never even learnt her name.

‘And who is this fellow?’ Phipps grimaced at the dishevelled scrawn of Walter Kennedy. ‘Not an officer I hope? I should have to write back to Whitehall if he is so.’

‘No, General,’ Coxon said. ‘May I introduce Walter Kennedy. A captain late of the pirate Roberts now attached to our mission.’

‘A
pirate
!’ Phipps went scarlet and rolled himself against his chair; almost managing to stand. ‘A damned pirate! Are you mad, sir? You bring a sea-dog to my castle!’

Phipps had suffered badly over the last two years by those pirates who had left the Americas. Davis, Cocklyn, La Buse and now Roberts had ridden the coast and harangued and raided the forts and ships with impunity. Coxon reminded him why they were there.

‘General, we are set to capture pirates. Your troubles are what brings us, as requested by yourself – as ordered.’ He removed his hat to the table; the humidity was simply too great. ‘I designed to bring a sailor with me who has knowledge of both the pirates and the Indian sea. Kennedy is my choice.’

Phipps scoffed. ‘Bah!
Knowledge
! What knowledge can scrap provide? Nonsense, sir!’

Coxon stroked his lip to hide his thin smile. He stood and crossed the room, his attention drawn deliberately to a curious wooden box standing on one of the commodes beneath the windows. Phipps’s neck craned to spy the object of Coxon’s interest.

‘Ah, my Fruit of the Sea! A gift from the ambassador of Maputo.’

Coxon had recognised the cabinet’s origins; he would make a criterion of it for Phipps, in Kennedy’s cause.

The box was made from a Coco de Mer, the rare seed of a fabled tree. It sat on silver lion’s paws, and in its erect position could cause embarrassment to even the bawdiest of men for its shape resembled the shape and size of an ample woman’s lower half, front and back. This one had silver repoussé mountings framing the doors which opened out of the buttocks. Princes loved them.

‘What do you know of this, General?’ Coxon asked.

‘Ah, it is a mystery of the East,’ he sang. ‘Some espouse that its tree grows beneath the sea for the seed is oft seen rising from beneath,’ he leant forward and winked at young Howard. ‘And has risen many a sailor’s ardour at the sight of it, lighting up dreams of mermaids.’

He turned back to Coxon. ‘It has many legends. Of Eden, of the Roc bird. No-one knows the truth of it or where it comes from.’ He widened his eyes to all of them. ‘I can tell you it is worth a tidy sum.’

Coxon opened one of the blue velvet-lined doors and shut it as loud as he could to raise his voice to Kennedy. ‘And you, Walter?’ he called. ‘What do you know of this thing?’

Kennedy dragged himself to his feet and loped to the object. He stroked it almost tenderly and certainly inappropriately to the witnesses’ eyes.

‘To be sure, gentlemen, it comes from only two islands. The tree that is. The seeds sink when the tide drags them and don’t make for good eating ’cept for years later. Tide and time takes them out to sea. When the husk rots she comes to the surface. That’s why the sailors think the tree lives under the waves.’

Coxon looked at Phipps, who was fuming. ‘And where does it come from? In your “knowledge”?’

‘Those islands have no name. We careen and take land turtles. You keep in the fours,’ he dipped his head respectfully to Phipps. ‘That’s the latitude, Your Majesty. East-nor’east from the Comoros, that’s the perfume islands off Africa. The air smells of vanilla and Creole whores. The sands are the colour of pearls. I don’t know the degrees without tools.’

Coxon softly pushed him away.

‘Thank you, Walter. Take some bread.’