Blood Diamond: A Pirate Devlin Novel (28 page)

‘I’m sorry, Milord. Have I missed something?’ Law even managed a smile. There was some surprising small relief in failure after all.

Philippe began to reply but his bellow could not compete with the cries now rising outside the door.

In the centuries when flame and wick ruled the night, and kings and emperors studied siege warfare as keenly as dancing, two phrases filled their palaces with dread.

‘
The enemy is at the gates
!’ was the first, understandable enough.

The second could change your world even more.

‘
Fire
!’

The shout went down the corridors and up the marble stairways.

‘
Fire
!’

Law tensed. A look at the clock again. But surely not? Not even a pirate could be so bold?

Guards and footmen ran from door to door with the cry, smoke at their backs, horror greeting them at every open door as lords, viscounts and clerks ran from their offices with linen at their mouths and valuables clutched about them. They made for the garden, for the courtyard. There were certainly enough glass-doors for easy escape, to be flung wide, allowing in oxygen enough to stoke the flames.

In the garden, they coughed and dried their eyes and watched the smoke billowing out of the open doors and climbing up over the blue roofs where servants hung from their windows and screamed futilely for help to the lords and ladies below.

Skinny, aproned men and women, dusted with flour, filled the courtyard from the kitchens below and pointed and yelled at the smoke engulfing the east wing. Their senses returned, some of the more regal witnesses sent their servants scurrying back into the smoke to fetch more of their goods, lowly protests impatiently slapped away with bejewelled fists.

Philippe stayed at his desk, his eyes on the door. Ronde cradled his brass and wood crown to his chest. Law watched the regent measure the threat by the rush of footsteps in the hall and the screams of women far off; but then they would shriek at a cold wind, so that was hardly a gauge. Philippe’s eyes flashed to the foot of the door as the first trickle of smoke began to puff and spread.

‘
Lass
!’ he shouted. ‘See what goes on!’

Law sprang up, his hand at the door just as it was thrust open, catching his wrist painfully. A white wig appeared and a spluttering footman with streaming eyes and powder running off his face begged them to leave, as a black cloud formed behind him. Ronde ducked beneath his arms and was gone before he had finished his plea.

Philippe held to his desk, clutched the sides like a pitching deck. ‘Firemen to their sand! Where is the fire?
Report
!’

The footman wiped his brow. Somehow a fire had broken out in the east wing. A curtain set ablaze by a fallen candle had then spread. A quick thinking piss-boy had dashed to the area with his pails but some accident with another fellow, a collision with an arm to his throat, had sent him and his waste spilling along the floor. Now there were pastries and piss everywhere and fire all about.

‘
Pastries
?’ Philippe’s exclamation provoked some coughing fit from Law, or perhaps it was only the smoke.

‘No matter, Milord. Please, hurry! Come now!’

Law gathered himself.

‘Pay attention
,’ Devlin had said.

‘We should retreat to the garden, Milord. Let the firemen to their work.’ His request was suitably punctuated by a sudden black belch from the corridor.

Philippe’s instincts were not without their reward in Law’s eyes. At first, disappointment, as the regent grabbed a miniature oval watercolour of his late daughter and pushed it into the highest pocket, closest to his heart; then, as his footman could no longer wait and fled, the duke’s hands were beneath his chair. An instant later Law glimpsed a small green silk bag slip into another pocket. Philippe’s head rose in a snap, cautious in case Law’s eyes were upon him; but he only saw the Scotsman peering anxiously down the corridor, and heard his voice calling back.

‘We should leave, Milord.’

Philippe was already at his shoulder, hearing more than seeing the panic of a fire. ‘To the garden, Lass,’ he said, and closed the door behind them.

Priming powder alone makes for good smoke. Primer poured. A candle dropped. A curtain suddenly engulfed. Two men running, shouting down the corridors, alerting the denizens of the palace to their impending doom. Others take up the call without seeing the sight; the word is enough.

Minutes later, the corridors cleared, the firemen with their sand victoriously extinguish the small blaze and puzzle over the vast clouds of smoke that one curtain had managed to create.

In the garden the fortunate saved begin to return to their offices, the smoke still hanging above their heads, and the higher-appointed order a change of clothes to be brought to their apartments. Philippe, crowded by ministers and clerks, nods at every apology and explanation and walks calmly back to his rooms. He dismisses with a wave those that irritated him, his only concern being that he had secured the diamond in one pocket and his late daughter’s only miniature in another.

John Law surveyed the rooftops, the chaos diminishing into nothing but a smart anecdote for the evening’s supper before the commencement of Philippe’s other feast of flesh that crowned every evening.

‘Monsieur Lass,’ came not a question but a whisper at his shoulder. He turned to see Devlin admiring his work rather than meeting his eye, as if the two were not talking at all, Devlin’s tray empty save for the one large pie.

‘You did this?’ They were the only horrified words Law could shape. Once he had stood on Primrose Hill and shot dead a man who had dared to kiss his darling’s hand. That is what gentlemen do. They do not set fire to royal palaces. ‘People could have
died
!’

Devlin, growing into his French demeanour, shrunk his neck into his shoulders. ‘People die every day. You paid attention like I said?’

Law, aware of those lingering around them, picked up the pie on Devlin’s tray as if it were his only interest. ‘Indeed. I know where the regent keeps the Regent.’

‘Then we’re done. He did not see that you watched him?’

Law put back the pie. ‘I thought you did not take me for a fool?’ Here, in Law’s very place of position, Devlin’s brusque tone would at least be matched.

Devlin looked about for Dandon and found him offering the last of his tarts to a giggling pair of kitchen maids. He pushed his tray back to Law. ‘Take the pie: the replica is inside.’

Law paled, looked down at the crust with new light. ‘Could you not have given it to me this morning? Was the drama so necessary?’

‘And you’d have spent the afternoon trembling in front of the duke if you’d have known. I said before that you gentlemen are not thieves. Besides, you’ll be the one taking the diamond for the other tonight. I figured that would be enough for your nerves.’

‘
Me
?’

‘Who else? You belong here. I’ll see you tomorrow in your office. My part is played. I showed you where it was. Take the pie. Don’t worry, John. It’s only beef.’

‘I cannot,’ he said as, still, his hand took hold of it. ‘I will be killed if caught!’

‘We’ll all be dead if you do not play. Tomorrow morning, Monsieur Lass.’

Law watched him walk away to summon Dandon, who had at least earned two kisses for the afternoon. Law dragged himself back to the palace, mulling the weight of the pie between his hands. His failure weighed more so. The dreams of his greatest venture, his dream to raise France above all others, reduced to a crust.

From the tall doors of the passage, through the mullioned panes, Philippe watched the lank form of his finance minister trudge away from the tall peasant. Philippe ducked, as if he could hide behind glass, and watched the dour face of Law study the pie in his hands, clearly not pleased with his gift.

Philippe followed the backs of the two others as they went to join the crowd leaving the grounds. His thumb rested in the coat pocket where the green silk bag lay.

He straightened and switched his gaze back to Law, now entering under the pillars far to his right and disappearing.

He sniffed the smoky air, the thumb now stroking the hard lump inside the bag. He ignored the trio of ministers with raised fingers and flapping papers vying for his eye and spun back to his rooms, slamming the doors against their indignant white faces.

Chapter Twenty-Two

A good pirate ship possessed an enviable selection of marksmen. Often pirates took to the sweet trade from an impoverished hunting background – those that had not sprung from a decade of service as soldier or seaman.

Such men were accustomed to sleeping with a gun; they were men with powder forever lined or pocked in their faces. The buccaneer of the old Tortuga ways was marked by his long French musket. His clothes might be little more than rags of goatskin, his features indistinguishable under the filth, but his gun was waxed, oiled, cleaned and screwed to watchmaker precision.

The pirates upheld this tradition, valuing their arms as their most prized possessions. Twenty men with muskets was worth more than a six-pound cannon.

At fifty yards the musket’s value would fall off, its usefulness almost as great as a thrown stone; but when ships collided in a brawl, bruising against each other like cattle through a gate, fifty yards is the end of the earth. At fifty yards you could see the red eyes of the faces you shot into, hear the curses and squeals as men instinctively patted their wound and looked at the blood on their palm.

The
Shadow
had at least sixty men that suited, and had the added lot of knowing how to triple their ‘sticks’ threat by double-shotting or loading with swan-shot over ball and scraping faces from bone like a carpenter’s plane.

Half an hour after the first cannon spoke, Trouin was appreciating the skill his foe possessed to this end. They fired fast, these pirates, and he even elbowed his officers to stand up and admire their ferocity rather than duck the hail of shots from the opposing rigging and the gunwale nettings. He admired them as much as the beauty of a pheasant’s futile escape before his gun or the struggle of the fish upon his hook before it gives up on the bank. Noble but pointless.

His two ships flanked the
Shadow
, providing a blazing
rencontre
that punched back and forth. The fire-fight was watched from miles away by curious ships who could make out nothing but a dark cloud of snapping cracks and flashes on the horizon. They were as far removed from the drama as if looking at a painting on a wall.

The swell of the Atlantic and the pace of the pirates’ musket fire slowed their cannon’s report. Hard to run home a gun when thirty men are plucking your gun-grew like feathers off dead game. Not all good shots mind, the yawl of the decks put paid to that, but try to get your job done with eighty or ninety whistling balls a minute chipping the wood around you and ringing off your iron.

Half an hour of sharing shot and ball. The men aloft wearing black masks for faces, their eyes raw with powder. The deck littered with splinters. The last of the
Shadow
’s
elegant furniture had been whittled away from her rails, white wood visible under split oak and a heaving of lungs under the dust and smoke.

The weaker of the ships,
La Patiente
on their larboard, began to heel away. A cheer erupted on the
Shadow
as the bow began to slowly turn. They were running. They were running from the black flag. Now Bill only had to worry about the twenty-four gunner, the stronger ship off their starboard. The time had arrived to hurl caltrops from the rigging, crows feet of iron spikes to cut the bare feet of the gun-crews. Time for grenadoes to be flung from the deck, clay pots filled with shrapnel and brimstone. And time, too, to play them a tune to welcome them to St Peter. The drum and the fiddle or fife worth ten thousand men when your enemy heard that you deemed their efforts limp enough that you could jig while they sweated and fell. He ordered it now, musicians being as favoured on a pirate as any other man.

‘Bill!’ A shout at his back turned him from the heeling ship. ‘She’s raising fights!’ Bill pushed through the crowd amidships to see for himself, wiping the sweat and smut from his eyes.