Cross of Fire (9 page)

The rowdiness continued past two of the morning, after which Coxon drifted in and out of sleep, his brain too fervent to rest, his anticipation too keen for the dawn. Thoughts of the weeks ahead fell before his eyes as if already past and mingled with the true – impossible echoes but plausible in the deep of the night. Memories yet to come.

Dreams. First there was Coxon, watching himself, a Norfolk parson’s son, sent to sea at twelve with an apple, a Bible, and a wet-cheeked kiss from his mother who ran inside with a howl he never forgot when the coach came for him.

A veteran of two wars; real wars when the sea turned red and the skies blackened and doomsayers bewailed the end of the world. Then there was the pirate. A man Coxon had taken an interest in, had shown patronage to when he took him from a French sloop-of-war almost a decade ago. For half that time the young man had been his steward and willing pupil. In his frowning dream that had all been part of the pirate’s plan. Devlin had accepted Coxon’s tutelage, taken what he could like the pearl from an oyster and now laughed at him from across stormy waves tinged with gold.

And then the laughter grew.

The gruesome faces of his peers laughed in the dark as papers fell and blew over the sea with his name, and the pirate’s, joined together.

Coxon’s dream body, a younger, slimmer body, went for his sword, to cut away the paper, to wade through the sea to the laughing pirate sitting far away on an island of gold. But the sword had rusted in its scabbard, his body naked, and the sand sucked him down.

He struggled to lift his legs free from the silt but only sank deeper. He tried to pull up with his arms against waves thick as mud.

The tide at his chest now, salt water splashing in his mouth and gold dust dribbling out as he tried to yell the name. The sinking sand around his thighs and then the water over his head in one huge wave, the laughter deafening and then Coxon rolled up awake, sweating and blinking at the cobalt blue of the coming dawn and the unfamiliar shapes of the room shifting back to lucid, friendly forms and hearing the last laughs of the patrons of the inn finally bidding a raucous good-night.

He wiped a hand down his cold face and took in the room, his chest heaving. He saw the room was empty, the key in the lock, the bed away from the window and clear from clawing hands coming through the glass, he drew back down into the warm blankets, assured that doubt was his only fear. The night, it was only the night after all. Only children fear it.

Confidence comes with daylight, bright June daylight, like the first Day, and suddenly Englishmen forget that they ever had a winter and months of damp clothes and cloying sea-coal fires.

Joy and a conquering spirit comes with bacon, poached eggs and a mug of hot brandy and milk hippocras, the Ship Inn’s kitchen not stretching to tea or coffee.

He made his way to Portsmouth harbour, a fair stroll from the Point but a soul-enriching walk for a seaman, poet, or painter as dozens of ships stretched along the walls and even more sat out in the harbour mouth. The giants lay there, the ninety-fours sitting and waiting. Waiting to lumber out again when the Spanish or perennial French thought their cards stacked well enough and Englishmen would yawn and roll up their sleeves and get on with it as always.

But along the harbour jostled the smaller ships, latent promise in their furled sails, the oak straining at the bit as men tended to the seams and yards with mallet and caulk, slapping tar like whitewash, and over it all a cacophony of whistles and curses in equal measure oft from the same mouth in a single breath.

Blocks squealed like piglets from the derricks and shrouds and the smaller dories and barges milled around the mother ships like ducklings as goods passed from shoulder to rope, to ship’s hold or deck. Curses and thanks.

This the best part of the venture, always. The shine of it. The coming home and the pulling out. The happy blushing wives and the shy children of men they had not seen for a year. Some toy made of wood or painted shell pushed into their chubby fingers. The weary returner looking for a still bed, and the laughing voyager about to leave, one month from knowing and wishing better.

Coxon inhaled it all, the colour of the goods, the noise and the endless tramp of backs and urgent feet. This he had missed. If he could draw it he would, if he could write it down that would be better. But to live it was the keepsake of envy.

He touched his cockade in reply to a couple of boat-cloaks saluting him. No uniform to ascertain the navy man but he had wet and brushed the dust off his old silk cockade and attached it to his hat with a pin asked from the buxom landlady of the Ship Inn.

The cockade was more green than black, aged, but perhaps that was to the good. It had aged with him, along with the pitted sword, its gold wire beginning to fray. He should have made to get it repaired. Never mind. A man on board surely had some skill that did not belong at sea. Over the years he had seen men with tremendous gentleness at quite the most delicate arts. They carved monkeys and seal pups, cut silhouettes, collected images of birds and treasured them like children and pontificated about beaks and wing-tips to anyone who would listen and Coxon had listened to them all, could remember their faces and names. Distant or dead sons now.

‘Captain Coxon? Will you give me the honour of carrying your bag for you, Captain?’

The voice startled him out of his musings. He braced at the pale face of a striking youth – no – a
man
, but the boyish face topped with coppery hair now revealed as he whisked off his modest hat.

His dress was wonderfully new but not extravagant, perfectly perfunctory for the work ahead, less to polish, to be brushed rather than cleaned. Coxon had yet to locate his ship. The familiarity required to be recognised had thrown him.

‘Do you know me, sir?’

The man grinned. ‘It is I, Captain. You may yet recall.’ He stepped back, as if the act would move him back in time and stature to be remembered like an etching in a book.

His voice chimed like a bell. ‘Thomas Howard, sir. Lieutenant Thomas Howard I should say. At your service and proud to serve.’ His grin faded but the eyes carried it still. ‘I was on the
Starling
, Captain. Midshipman. I acted Lieutenant . . . for the day.’ The eyes dropped. ‘On The
Island, Captain.’

Coxon had grey hair now amid the black but it darkened as he brushed memories away from his eyes like dust from a painting’s glass and he saw again the mottled, nervous-brave face of Midshipman Howard, sixteen once again and handing him his quarter-bill for the hour against the pirate. A tearful child recounting how he had found the murdered body of Edward Talton. The first act of betrayal from Lt Guinneys, who did not live to see the end of the day. But Howard had survived. One of the pirates had protected him when the demons had boarded and killed. The yellow-coated barber-surgeon had shown some compassion – to Coxon’s mind just to save his own hide if all went wrong. The pirate doctor had hugged Howard close to his chest, surely to protect himself, and had stared down the axes and cutlasses that swung across the faces of Coxon’s crew. Perhaps some sodomite plan for the boy that was never realised.

So Thomas Howard had sailed back to England with the crippled
Starling
and Coxon. Howard had been there, fought there, and the officer’s reticence left Coxon as he dropped his sack and clasped the man’s shoulders and laughed at the new height and breadth of him.

‘Bless my soul! It is Thomas Howard so it is! Lieutenant Howard now, is it?’

‘It is, Captain,’ Howard glowed and picked up the hemp sack without demur. ‘When I heard of your return I begged myself from my Bristol packet to see you proper. Especially when I heard of your purpose.’

He put out a hand for them to continue and they walked abreast; the carriages and their passing click-clack over cobbles and the discord of the dock were unable to drown their words, not when seaman can throw their voices like ropes when they wish.

‘So it is the pirate then? That is true?’ Howard asked.

‘Aye,’ Coxon tugged at his nose. ‘But chasing after the
Swallow
and the
Weymouth
first. There is a man, a Roberts, who is more vital since I was called.’

‘Ah,’ Howard sighed. ‘The pirate Roberts is doing terrible harm to the right people. Thank the Lord that the Royal African Company keeps us all in her debt so we may keep busy.’ Howard stopped, pointed out into the bay.

‘
There
she is!’

Coxon followed the arm as Howard drew his head in close to his captain’s.

‘The
Standard
,’
Howard declared and Coxon walked to the edge of the seawall so his toes peered over; nothing but a straight line of sea between the tips of his shoes and the black freeboard.

‘Mister Howard,’ he called behind, ‘what of her? She is a two-decker?’

The
Standard
. Of the 1706 Establishment, Howard informed. That would make her the youngest ship Coxon had ever sailed. A fifth-rate frigate. She would have had some use in the Mediterranean during the Spanish war, a victualler or guardship perhaps. Forty guns, almost twice as many as the pirate, if Devlin had kept to the same ship.

Twenty twelve-pounders on the lower and twenty six-pounders on the upper, according to Howard, but none on the fo’c’sle or quarterdeck.

Coxon had never commanded a separate gundeck and they were heading to Africa in June, in the rains. He had heard many bemoan that rough water kept the lower deck ports closed, a whole battery ineffective. It depended on the wind and the rain; more often a heavy downpour could be gracious, and smooth the water like glass; then the gundeck’s portholes could be used for sweeps, long-oars, to speed her along. He asked Howard if she carried a complement of such. Howard confirmed.

They continued to the gig awaiting them. ‘And oil, Thomas? Does she have plenty hogs of whale oil also?’

Howard was surprised at the seriousness of Coxon’s face at what seemed like the dullest factors of a supercargo’s mind.

‘Some, sir. For lamps, grease and such. We should carry more?’

Coxon spied their man with his red oars and slops, surely theirs, the only gig not loaded and a man not impatient to be so.

‘Oh, no concern. We will meet many tides. We are entering the coasts during the wrong season, that is all.’ His words were too cryptic for Howard to follow and you only questioned your captain once.

‘But I should like to know how much oil she carries by and by, Thomas. And what you have been up to these past years. You will dine with me tonight?’

‘Of course, sir. Thank you, sir.’

They found steps and clambered into the gig, with the tightest-lipped greeting from Coxon to the man of whiskers and Monmouth cap who rowed them off.

‘Did my man find his way aboard, Thomas?’ Twenty more minutes and the familiarity would drop. It would be Mister Howard again until supper.

‘Your man, sir?’

This had been the first test for Walter Kennedy. He had coached down to Portsmouth with Coxon but had been sent to find the ship and go aboard alone. It raised a level of trust that Coxon would need if the mission were to go well; but after seeing the Marshalsea he had confidence that Kennedy stroked his neck carefully at every deliberation.

Howard settled Coxon’s doubts just so.

‘Oh, yes! Scruffy fellow with darting eyes, kept his head low. Used to a ship. Good man, Captain?’

‘I’m very much afraid not, Thomas,’ and he leaned back to relish the bright morning, the sounds of life drifting off behind, the lap of waves at the gunwale and the mesmerising stroke of the oars drawing the frigate closer. Thomas Howard felt sure that his captain’s utterances were hieroglyphics that only needed experience to decipher and a nod of the head to at least acknowledge that one had heard.

One turn of the glass later, the final grains tapped loose by a black fingernail, and the
tang-tang
of the bell coincidently marked Coxon pulling himself through the entry port. He forsook any introductions or piping; the ship was busy, and noon, for their departure, only two hours off. Taking his bag he gave Howard his muster instruction that he would address the ship ten minutes before the noon bell but that he would like to see his First Lieutenant, Christopher Manvell, in his cabin as soon as he was free from his duty. Coxon ducked beneath the quarterdeck and went to his coach, to his new command. His first for very near three years.