Cross of Fire (21 page)

Coxon called Kennedy back like a dog, and Kennedy wiped his mouth of the spittle that had frothed and licked it back, his eyes white on the gasping Cracker.

Coxon came forward and helped him up and to a seat. ‘Don’t fret, John.’ He joined him on a stool and pushed Cracker’s own rum towards him. ‘Walter is excited to be back on the sea. I won’t let him step out of line again.’ He moved his hat further away and dismissed Kennedy to the door. ‘But he has a point.’

Deliberately, Coxon had brought only Kennedy to Cracker’s shack. When his telescope surveyed the cliff as the
Standard
sought her sounding he had seen the shack and the ragged landscape, the few outbuildings like the last tombstones at the end of a cemetery.

He had judged at that time the type of man who had abandoned Company order for such degradation. A man who traded with interlopers and pirates. He had looked down his ship at young Manvell with the astonished eyebrows and Howard who was the stalwart picture of fresh heroism. He would spare them this. Just he and Walter Kennedy. They both knew what was needed to gain respect and intelligence. And he did not want his officers to measure him so soon if the meeting went badly.

Cracker took just a rinsing of rum. ‘What point does he have, Cap’n?’ he asked, carefully he hoped.

‘He does have the king behind him now, in a sense – a strict sense – but further than that it is the Davis and Roberts aspect that is most relevant.’

‘Cap’n?’ Cracker’s face twisted in pain, convinced something had burst inside him. He kept an open eye on Walter Kennedy by the door.

‘I want to know about Devlin, Cracker.’

‘What about him, Cap’n?’

Coxon had thought this would be harder. ‘So you know him?’

Cracker scratched his whiskered cheek. ‘Well . . . know of him, know of him. Can’t be sure beyond that. Exactly who I sees and who I remembers are different pages, Cap’n.’

Coxon flicked a mosquito from his leg and watched it settle on Cracker’s face, where the man ignored it.

‘Walter came here with Davis and Roberts. He tells that all the pirates come here. Roberts has certainly been seen and we are hunting him. I would like to know if Devlin is here also.’ He gave Cracker a charitable look as one might bestow to a simpleton at Christmas. ‘Is that too much to ask?’

Cracker sweated. His eyes shifting from Coxon to Kennedy lounging at the door. ‘No, Cap’n. Not much at all.’

‘If it is for fear of betraying those that you consider brethren do not concern yourself. We would have nothing to gain by mentioning it. And besides this is nothing to do with pirates.’

‘It’s not?’

‘No, Leadstone. We require your assistance in a murder investigation on His Majesty’s request. With due respect to you being a former Royal African Company man.’

‘Whose murder?’

‘A poor man in London. Killed in his prime and leaving his young son to fend for himself. And the murderer fled. Would you begrudge us to seek such a villain?’

‘No, Cap’n. I would not. I have a son myself somewhere.’

‘And would you give your pity to that boy if you could meet him now, John Leadstone?’

‘I would. As a Christian man.’

Coxon watched the mosquito sucking on Cracker’s face and then his eye dropped to the buzzing of other wings at Cracker’s shin and a grey bandage wrapped and seeping.

‘Walter?’ Coxon called. ‘Introduce yourself to John Leadstone.’

Kennedy sprang from the door before Cracker could move and slapped Cracker’s slack face.

‘That was my father that bastard killed!’ He saw the smudge of blood along Cracker’s cheek and looked at the crushed insect in his palm and wiped it off on Cracker’s hair. ‘Talk, worm!’ He yanked him to his feet. ‘Where be Devlin?’

‘More instructively,’ Coxon suggested. ‘When did you see him last and what did you hear?’

He drew his hat across the table. ‘Your only consideration, Leadstone, is that if I put my hat on I become His Majesty’s Captain again. It would be my duty to take my licence as a protector of the royal companies and push your little enterprise here into the sea.’

Kennedy, his eyes bulbous, his teeth drawn, pulled the terrified Cracker closer, as Coxon went on.

‘Or you take the lesser of that evil and tell the vexed young Kennedy where the man who killed his father might be heading.’

Kennedy shook Cracker like a doll until Coxon raised his hand.

‘And you can start by telling me what happened to your leg.’

Chapter Fifteen

They had passed in the night. Coxon and Devlin; Coxon asleep on the
Standard
, Devlin drinking long into the early hours aboard the
Shadow.
Behind Devlin sailed the
Santa Rosa
, the priest’s ship now consort. Sixty-odd nautical miles lay between the freeboards of the pirate and the returned captain. Two of sand on a beach in the sea’s measure, city to city for the two captains. Their only connection had been that their respective ships’ watches had witnessed the passing of the same school of Southern-Right whales making their way to the cape for calving. On each ship one man had been moved enough to try and capture how the moon had shone on their barnacled hides and reflected the solemn eyes of the great creatures who were studying the humans passively. Charcoal and book in calloused hands. The same date scribbled, the same emotion scratched on the page. But if they met on a deck, each man would carve different, violent emotions and never know the majesty they had shared.

Coxon and the
Standard
were making for Sierra Leone and Old Cracker’s illegal slave-hole. Devlin and his ships were sailing south to Ascension, to keep from the coast and to careen and gather food and water.

Ascension island was God’s gift to the mariner south of the equator just as the Verdes was north. From the Verdes you sail west and you will meet the Caribbean; from Ascension sail west and meet Brasil, and sail up the coast for your trade.

Run east from Ascension for the meat of Africa; or, as Devlin would, like tens of thousands before, set for one hundred and thirty-four degrees and seven hundred miles to Saint Helena and thank the Portuguese and their carracks that had discovered the islands and laid goats, pigs and trees there. Gather more water and fresh meat and set to cleaning.

Careening and caulking, ‘brooming and breaming’, to take a day. This was the pirate’s advantage over their naval hunters. The warships would careen in port, the pirates on the fly.

Wood and water. The worms and barnacles were sworn enemies of oak, and the pirates needed to show a pair of clean heels more than most. It would be a generation before copper-bottomed boats cut through the water. Burning and brushing remained the only way to clean. If a safe island were found – and if the ship were small enough – then beach her and fire and scrape away the sluggishness. For larger ships like the
Shadow,
anchor and weigh all her guns and lading to one side. Her crew put ashore to feast and drink while the gangs allotted to the task keep to the boats, some on one side pulling her gunwales down while the others cleaned what strakes they could as the ship leant clear of the waterline. A clean keel was as fine a weapon as any cannon to a pirate.

The task done, the final scuttlebutt of water filled at Saint Helena, and one more ink line was turned dramatically up to sixty degrees for the almost fifteen hundred miles to reach the Comoros islands. Thirty-five days for Devlin with his swift girl; just over five thousand miles. Africa to be kept just off the edge of the page to be safe from the coast where the hunters lurked.

But it had been a hard month. Devlin had awoken on the first Sunday to an Angelus bell and prayer under the sanguineous dawn of an African sun. He slammed out of his cabin, fit to wound those who had woken him, pulling on his shirt only to stall with one arm still naked at the sight of more than half his crew on their knees.

Their heads looked up to him and he spat as if that had been his only intention and returned to his cabin. O’Neill went back to his incantations as his Porto brethren passed out hard-tack as jury-rigged communion wafers. At least there was plenty of wine and the pirates willing to accept its holy transformation.

Devlin closed his door, dressed with coarse mutterings and looked out at the endless horizon from his slanted windows. And the month went so.

They had used the weeks to refit the
Santa Rosa
more to their purpose. Gunports cut away, six-pounders added fore and aft, stanchions for swivel-guns mounted on every rail. She had entered the world with six four-pounders and two half-pound falconets; she would dare you to make her leave it after trebling her armament and taking cut-throats for her crew.

The
Shadow
too had dressed herself for a bride. Devlin had taken a leaf from Roberts’s book and mounted guns to the fighting-tops. Half-pounders, but from the tops and firing down onto a deck it would be like hot hail to the unfortunates opposing. A rain of lead, cruel even for pirates whose rule book began with all the ways to whittle down a crew before the freeboards scraped.

And two pirate ships crossed the cape of Africa and entered the Indian Ocean and even the priests had seen it before and kept to their sewing palms and mending of sail and swabbing of wood that never ended.

So it came to Lieutenant Manvell on the
Standard
with John Coxon, seven days behind Devlin, to marvel at the new earth.

Coxon could keep to the coast, no need to shy from fort guns or passing ships. Just over three-thousand miles against Devlin’s five. Three thousand miles. Down to green water and beer and all the fresh meat gone. But now, heading for the Comoros, there was the promise of water, turtles, goats, fish, birds. A garden of Eden. After two days of rain around the Cape, an early July dawn opened for Lieutenant Manvell.

He climbed to the weather-deck and became blinded by the searing white light. He reached for some wood to steady himself and with his hand over his brow looked about the deck.

The ship shone, her wood freshly swabbed and holy-stoned, the brightness off her chains and oak dazzling. Before him the men had adapted to the light and heat like moulting a winter coat. White loose shirts, rolled sleeves and pale calico slops. To Manvell they were as angels beneath the greater whiteness of their cloud-like sails. Those who had some position wore straw hats, the common sailor a headscarf if he had it. They looked over to him as they worked and tapped their foreheads to him. Some had daubed black ash under their eyes.

With Manvell acknowledged they went back to their sewing, cleaning and painting. His eyes at last adjusted, Manvell took off his hat and then the blue of the sky hit him. He took a breath and even that was sweet. The sky was a colour he had never seen. The barest blue, going on forever, irenic and dissolving into nothingness. He leant over the gunwale off a rope and looked fore, his eye falling to the water as the ship rolled.

The sea did not boil and cream as they ploughed her, the wash parted like fresh snow and the waters shone as clear as looking up a street, only it was shoals of fish hurrying along and not passers-by. He settled down and whispered to his pregnant wife thousands of miles away.

‘Oh, Alice! To
see
it!’

‘It is hard to believe it is of the same earth.’