Cross of Fire (33 page)

‘It’s a dam, Cowrie,’ Devlin’s sketch grew more elaborate. ‘To hold back the tide while men work behind it. These islands are full of caves, some of them only sea-caves, littoral caves. They be full of water but when the tide goes back you can get to them.’ He drew a cave which, judged by the whispered giggles, reminded Dan Teague of a woman of his acquaintance.

‘But they’re still full of the sea. A dam will give them time to drain elsewhere. Time enough to move a million pounds of gold and jewels inside. You couldn’t bury that, but the sea could.’ He cut a waterline over the cave. ‘Levasseur. Smart man.’

Hugh Harris studied the sand. ‘So it’s beneath us? The priest has gone to it?’

‘No,’ Devlin put back his blade. ‘The tide will only reveal the cave for a short time. Even then if I were La Buse I would choose a cave that no man could take a boat into. I would say there is another way in. If a cave is big enough there is always a crawling hole to get to it. That’s nature. The hole draws in the sea.’

Peter Sam saw reason drawn in the sand and his spirit rose to the hunt again.

‘The priest has come ashore,’ he said, ‘and gone to this hole? Hidden the boat. So we find this hole?’

‘No,’ Devlin’s tone was sorry. ‘That could take months.’

Peter Sam was at his shoulder. Again.

‘So what then?’

‘We rebuild the dam,’ Devlin said. ‘When the tide goes out.’ The pirate’s motive crawled on Devlin’s face, the rakish Irish grin they had come to know as the promise of jingling coin.

‘And we go in,’ he said.

‘Blood?’ Hugh Harris threw another stone. Devlin caught it in the air; sent it to the sea in the same movement as they gaped at his speed of hand.

‘There’d better be,’ he said. He wiped his ancient boots across the drawing.

Hugh O’Neill had been a priest for thirty years. At fifteen he was sent from Ireland to serve his diaconate in Lisboa. It was there that the story of his ancestor’s relic first divined to him that his profession was more than just his mother’s ambition.

The first Hugh O’Neill, the Earl O’Neill, the man who might have been king of Ireland, failed to raise a holy army to take on the English. But after his death he bequeathed to the church a gold nine-inch cross with a small glass tomb set at its heart. Visible within was a dull, dry splinter of wood that had passed through his family for hundreds of years. The Earl O’Neill believed that towing the cross behind their fleeing ship had calmed the storm that came across them and had guided him into France. It had been a miracle but his only one. It was God’s will that an army would not come to save Ireland.

The priest O’Neill, with such a personal connection, was entrusted to take the cross to Goa and there have it set into the Cross of Fire, a gift of Indian gold from the archbishop and viceroy to King João.

And then a pirate intervened. And miracles ended there.

O’Neill checked above to the diminishing light. He was scrambling down a hole, kicking wet slate and stone before him. His dread was that pirate faces might appear in the mouth of daylight even though he had tossed away the black quartz stone that marked the gap. They would look for such signs. That thought carried him down and into the dark.

It was a confining descent and he had to scrape down on his back and push himself along with his hands at his face. His breath was hard now, the stone hot all around, and then the cool blast of air and the eruption into the enormous cavern as if the tunnel had never pressed so close.

He dropped onto the narrow outcrop, sending a rain of shingle to glisten through shafts of light as they fell to the well of water below. They splashed and rippled like excited fish.

He crouched and looked about the place he had left over a month ago.

A cathedral of a cave. Fifty feet above him the stone broke in places with tiny holes that shone like the piercing of stars and shimmered on the water. He pictured the hunting feet of pirates walking high over his head. Below, the lake glowed like jade and lured you to dive as all still pools captivate if you stare deeply into them for too long.

His entrance would have been heard but before announcing himself he crept along, away from the hole lest his voice carry too far. The ledge ran around and down the walls, broken into a ruin like so many castles from his homeland since the English came.

He knew he would now be watched then remembered he was in different clothes and called out before a shot sounded.

‘It is I! Father O’Neill!’

Nothing returned. He jumped the last few feet to land at the edge of the water. There was no trepidation in his footsteps but there was a coolness about his skin that had nothing to do with the languid pool.

He moved away and into the dark again, into the other chamber where he had left some of his brothers and the handful of pirates that had remained loyal to their captain.

‘I have come back! As I swore!’ His voice rang back at him. ‘I am alone!’

Still he was not met.

He began to think of the woodcut plates of Bibles and the fate of the damned and then just as his thoughts had begun to pull away the veil of his faith he had turned the corner, and Levasseur was there.

O’Neill put a fist to his mouth at the sight and smell of the floor of the cave. He crossed himself and brushed the blowflies away then looked up at the motionless figure seated above it all.

Levasseur.

Still he looked the captain in his blue wool coat and scarlet brocade hat. He had seemingly spent the weeks of waiting to make a throne of rocks situated beneath a perfect beam of sun. He had piled the gold about his feet like steps, had carpeted a path with it. Rubies and diamonds on his lap like breadcrumbs. He cradled the magnificent Cross of Fire, from his feet to his chest and it blazed in O’Neill’s eyes.

Levasseur moved amidst the dead.

Levasseur was not one of them.

‘You return, Father,’ his voice gave no emotion and it is hard to read the face of a man who has only one eye, a leather patch over his other. ‘I told them you would.’

O’Neill gaped at the twisted bodies draped towards the throne, their hands grasping at gold.

Levasseur moved his shoulder under the cross.

‘For their sins they did not believe me.’ He shifted again, towards, and beckoned O’Neill closer as if the weeks had been only minutes and the cavern floor had always been this tomb. ‘Now tell me,’ his soft French accent was slow and calm like the Calais privateer he once was. ‘You have a crew for me, no?’

Chapter Twenty-Six

Noon on the
Standard,
the day well begun. Readings, logs, purser’s lists, quarter-bills for action, Manvell to make their time and place, confer with the captain and at the ringing of the bell make sail, make way. One more day recorded. But not all of it to be written.

Coxon set his watch and desk chronometer to the bell. Two hours would have them at Île de France. Water, meat, turtles and birds, some sand underfoot for the men. A few hours of hunting would cheer them and, as he looked at the lists, they at least had a good six weeks of small beer and rum. He would keep a happy ship with that alone but the promise of gold had become the talk of the lower deck and the word had spread of the captured pirate who knew where the gold might be. Aye, the men were no concern. One speech more and they would already be counting their share. It was his young officers that knotted and creased his brow.

He set to shaving and thinking on them. He soaped and scraped his neck and contemplated Manvell and Howard.

Dinner last had been formal and trying. He had announced to them all who Dandon was and what he hoped to ‘derive’ from his acquisition. He had watched Howard attentively.

‘You understand the validity of this action, Mister Howard?’

Thomas Howard had sipped his water after his wine before he replied.

‘I do, Captain,’ he said. ‘Questioning the pirate as to his captain’s whereabouts will only speed our cause and course.’

Manvell dropped his fork to his plate and made the whole assembly jump.

Coxon wiped his mouth.

‘Something disagrees with you, Manvell?’

‘No, Captain.’ He picked up his cutlery and went again at his Poor John. ‘Nothing disagrees. But I am curious as to how goes the “questioning” of the prisoner.’

‘He will need a night to rest,’ Coxon said. ‘I believe the past association of the pirate Kennedy will do well to wile out his ways and means.’

Howard stopped eating. ‘He will speak willingly?’

Coxon saw the concern draw on Thomas Howard’s face.

‘I hope, Mister Howard. I know that you – in perhaps some addled memory – think this pirate worthy of your compassion. But I hope you also understand the business that we are about here. He will go hungry and thirsty. Nothing more. He’ll talk then.’

‘He’ll be
burning
to talk, will he not, Captain?’ Manvell looked to his plate.

The others, the doctor and the master, drank slow as they watched Manvell and Coxon lean on the arms of their chairs studiously. The study of men who had deciphered a cheating table of cards between them.

‘He will, Mister Manvell,’ Coxon decreed. ‘He is the pirate Devlin’s closest friend – him and a bald, red-bearded bear he keeps to protect. More than that he is his intellectual confidant. I doubt there is anything that Devlin knows that he does not. And we will know it too. Find the gold for our king. As ordered.’

Manvell nodded agreement. ‘Should we not consider why he left him on Bourbon then? If they are so close after all?’

Coxon plucked the wine carafe from Doctor Howe’s keeping and poured to his brim.

‘For the man’s safety I suspect, Mister Manvell.’ He drank without pleasure, only need.

‘Devlin must assume great danger,’ he continued. ‘So should we. But now that I have seen your sword in action, Mister Manvell, I have no fear of anything that might lie ahead.’

He saluted with his glass and ended the conversation with port and the tale of Manvell’s exhibition to everyone’s pleasure, save for Manvell who accepted his applause graciously, humbly, and drank with the same need as Coxon. And the day began to fade.

Coxon finished shaving. He stood back from the mirror’s oval frame as if it displayed an oil of his portrait, the sea in the window over his shoulder. A Boston shopkeeper no more. His future yet to be written when he had considered it done. And it had been his boot-wipe that had brought him back to the ledgers. And that for the last time.

He threw the Dutch towel to the bowl. What would those ladies who bought his cloth and pins make of him now? Pushing their plain daughters at him like samples of sugar. He had retired, done his duty. He had fought in two wars and had hundreds dead under him from the whims of queens and kings. He was the old bull of the field, watching and waiting for the farmer’s shotgun when the time comes to turn his land over to lambing instead.

The expected knock on his coach came and he reached for the waistcoat over his chair and flapped it on.

‘Enter,’ he called.

Manvell stepped in, his hat already underneath his arm.

‘Captain.’

Coxon waved him in as he dressed.

‘How goes it, Manvell?’