Authors: Mark Keating
It did not take long to surmise the cabin that had belonged to Seth Toombs. It was bare, scattered with papers and broken ship's lamps. The air hung with the smell of cordite, damp and a mist of smoke, as if a spirit with a pipe had stepped past them and onto the deck.
Only one object remained: the table, which in the dim light had taken on the form of an altar.
A black cloth lay upon it, almost to the floor, in much the same way as the green velvet cloth covered the dining table in the quarters of the unfortunate Captain Bessette.
Unsettled by the black sight, Guinneys and Scott cocked their pistols, and all moved to look down at the grinning white skull almost filling the table. Vaguely they realised that the skull sat in a compass rose, the cardinal points spiking viciously outwards and a pair of bone-like pistols crossed beneath.
'Their flag, I presume?' Scott asked the room.
'Undoubtedly,' Guinneys agreed, his eyes now drawn to the silver tube that lay on the side of the table, the only other object upon it.
Cautiously, as if it might bite, he picked it up. 'What the devil is this?' Not acknowledging the humour in his words, he noticed the smiling horned engraving staring back at him. He opened it, revealing nothing within. An empty, pointless cylinder. 'How odd,' he said. 'Wonder what it's for'
Guinneys looked up to Scott, who looked around the room as if following the path of a fly. 'What do you suppose this is, Richard?'
'Sorry, William?' Scott's face was perturbed; then he looked at the silver tube. 'I don't know, William. Can you hear that noise?'
The two marines also looked anxiously about them, as the crackling hiss slowly began to fill the room.
Guinneys noticed it then, directly around the table, at his very feet. His fist closed on the tube and he bent to the floor as the source of the sound most definitely emanated from beneath the table.
As one might lift the linen from the face of the deceased in a parlour to pay final respects, Guinneys raised the black cloth from the floor, then swept it up as the horror came upon him.
He stood back, his eyes widening. The others stared in cold mortification at the six white oak barrels of powder that were slowly sucking in the coiled fuse, the one that Hugh Harris had wrapped around his elbow and hand for fifty counts. Fifty lengths, to time for one quarter-hour, or five hundred yards of distance between himself and the kegs.
Thomas Howard stood by the larboard gunwale, watching the longboat on its almost painful crawl back to her home. The boy was dwarfed by Midshipmen Granger and Davison, two years his senior but two years beneath his commission; and so although at table they tweaked his ears and put salt in his tea, on deck they stood out of his shadow and followed Midshipman Howard's word, after that of Lieutenant Anderson, who stood with the glass to his eye at the fo'c'sle, watching all that occurred on the beach almost a mile distant.
Once, some years ago now, before the sea, Anderson had been at a party, in Woolhampton, at the vile home of some wildly successful cheesemonger, the daughter of whom had had a very vivacious chaperone that Anderson had chosen to attend to.
He recalled how there had been a show by some local chap, in which a large black cylinder placed upon a gaming table had been rotated by crude handle and with great enthusiasm. Somehow, when a lighted candle was placed inside the cylinder, and all were seated in fascination before the spinning drum, one could see the form of a horse running as fast as life before one's eyes, flickering in motion, through narrow vents cut in the cylinder's sides.
Anderson had applauded, along with everyone else, and participated in the exchange of smiles, but between himself and the chaperone he confessed that he had found the flickering motion detracting from the miracle. The horse had jerked before his eyes, moving in rapid stages rather than flowing like a rippling beast in nature.
The explosion of the
Lucy
before his isolated eye behind the scope reminded him of the movement of the horse. As if a hand were ripping it away, the quarterdeck flew skywards from the small ship, almost intact before his eye, sawing the mizzen in two, followed by a cloud of black smoke and spiralling wood cascading through the air like straw.
Anderson's left eye opened in awe; he lowered the scope, and was instantly removed from the scene that he had momentarily been a part of.
The sound hit then. A distant thunder roll, hastily chased by a momentous crack that tore the air of the bay and pulled all the sound from his ears, so he stood in a world of stillness and calm.
The little ship ducked almost beneath the water as another explosion ripped through the main deck, accompanied by the terrifying sight of the cannons imploding, for they had only been spiked after being double-shotted and crammed with powder, sending a golden bloom of fireworks into the air.
A third tremor ripped through the bowels of her keel, the updraught of which kept the
Lucy's
sails billowing around the whole spectacle, held tight by the stubborn mainmast that had always forbidden itself to let go even through the hardiest storms. The bowsprit catapulted free, only to be snapped back like a whip by the elderly mainstay, for that had also learned long ago from the mainmast never to give in.
But now the decks were full of the crushing sea, and barrels had already begun to bubble upon the surface of the boiling water, covered by the gay flotsam of clothes and hammocks.
With an awful drawing howl like the moaning of a whale, the brigantine that had sailed new from Bristol to all the ports of Africa's slave coast, to unnamed islands of the Antilles, the archipelagos of the Americas and the frozen haunts of Nova Scotia, laid herself in pieces on the shallow shore of an unknown island somewhere north of the Caymans, south of Cuba.
The wave hit the
Starling,
sending water up to the gun ports, the splash of which awoke the young officers from the mournful sight that they did not understand.
It was Thomas Howard who spoke first. 'Did we not see Guinneys go aboard there, Mister Anderson?' He lifted his head fore.
'Aye,' Anderson agreed. 'We did indeed, Mister Howard.'
Anderson shivered, then gathered himself to look to the longboat still bobbing, oars motionless, frozen in time as her crew watched the mainmast of the
Lucy
hovering above the white, sandy water. 'Boat there! Row, and get those passengers aboard!' His first thought was to get back to the island. Coxon was there. Officers were dead. A ship had exploded before his eyes and he was sure Coxon had seen such terrors before.
There was a cold, unfamiliar feeling crawling over Mister Anderson's back and, in an unwelcome recollection, his father, Vice Admiral Anderson, grinned at him over his porter before a crackling peat fire and whispered about such a feeling, hoping his son would know it someday.
'Move, man! To me!' he shouted to Cole in the boat, who instantly put his back to work.
Dandon had been sitting quietly until the
Lucy
had shattered his solemnity. He watched now as the ocean calmed itself again and small blazing rafts of deck began to drift away from the wreck and the black smoke already wafted above the peaks of the island.
He turned to gaze behind him, away from the horrified ladies, to watch the play of tiny figures on the beach. A smile crept to his lips from behind his gold teeth as he looked up again to the almost volcanic cloud hovering over the island, climbing higher and higher.
He laughed, slapping his thigh. 'Aye, that'd do it! Sure enough, that'd do, God damn you, sir!' He suddenly felt like a dog locked in the butcher's shop to stop him eating the bread from the baker's next door. He cocked a wink at Cole, who had screwed up his brow at the colonial accent coming from the French doctor's mouth.
Devlin still sat. He had watched the explosion and the backs of the three men with him fold up in instinct. With a foul slap, something landed at his feet that resembled the poor man's delicacy of a dried, baked sow's ear.
He looked closer to see the row of white teeth grinning along its side, and he took that as the moment to stand and peel free the pretence of the knot that tied his wrists.
Chapter Seventeen
Devlin sang. He moved whilst the others still ducked as the black smoke trailed over the beach carried by the so'west breeze and they stared at him as at a madman.
Oh I have a house.
And I have some land,
And I have a daughter that shall be at your command,
If you sink her in that lonely lonesome water,
If you sink her in that lonesome sea…
His hands were outstretched, demonstrating their freedom. He had walked free of Coxon's side and crossed back to stand directly in front of him.
'I told you, John. You could live if you want to,' and he grabbed Coxon's pistol hand, tickling the weapon loose as swiftly as he used to tickle the salmon in days of old.
Gregory and Davies half watched the dying ship, half watched Devlin weave behind Coxon and stab the muzzle into his spine before they remembered they had weapons of their own.
'Have you completely gone, Patrick?' Coxon exclaimed. 'You have no ship! No men! Nothing! Unhand me!'
'Come, John, is this not how it's always been? Myself standing behind you?'
Coxon felt Devlin's hand grip his collar, his knuckles brush tense against his neck as he held him fast. 'Davies! Shoot him, man!' he ordered.
Davies and Gregory held their weapons waist high, their barrels pointed to the body of the two men, the dog-heads still resting against the pan, modestly threatening.
'Let the captain go now, lad,' Gregory growled, sure now that Coxon had been reappointed. 'There's nowt else left to do.'
Devlin ignored them. They were sailors. Hands and backs. He had never been one of them. If they killed him, they would tell everyone they would ever meet; their children would tell their children. If he killed them, it would simply be two more to his tally for his day at Execution Dock.
Instead he chose to stand fast, to take a moment of pride in telling Coxon's ear that he had that very morning handed the silver tube of lighting sticks, which unfortunately had shrunk to one, to the bastard son of a bastard, to blow the ship if he arrived on the beach in chains, to blow the ship if she were approached, to blow the ship and send the gold in pieces to the sands.
'And then what, you fool?' Coxon snarled. 'I have almost a hundred men on that ship! Release me and I promise you'll hang in England. You'll have weeks to live instead of hours.'
'Typical of an Englishman to give an Irishman the honour of some English rope. How fine you are to me, John.' He looked up to Davies and Gregory. 'Now, gentlemen, you have done grand today. If you go for me, I will kill your captain, be most assured. Then you will have the honour of dropping me, and the double honour of justifying to your officers why, when it be plain to all that a boat of men will be over shortly to end my desperation and remove your position and ease your present troubles.'
Davies and Gregory's minds took in the soft words. They looked for confirmation or command between the pirate and their captain.
'Throw the arms away,' Devlin soothed. 'As close to the sea as you can, and wait for your officers, and this'll all be done soon enough.'
'Davies!' Coxon boomed. 'I'll see you hanged if you loose your weapon! Mark me, man! Gregory! Shoot Davies if he drops his gun!'
'He has a point, Captain.' Gregory's voice faltered. 'The boat's already at the
Starling.
The others will be here soon.'
True enough, the longboat had reached the ladder home. The women clambered up first, being helped through the entrance port by the hand of Thomas Howard, who reminded them all of some young man or another, or so they told him as they curtsied and he blushed.
The crew were occupied with reeving ropes to lower the captain's gig from its resting place above the hatch between the masts. Aft, the jolly-boat was already being lowered from the stern, with fifteen of the toughest young 'uns Anderson could find.
'Mister Howard!' Anderson yelled from the fo'c'sle. 'See those women are removed to the comfort of the Great Cabin, if you please, sir! No lolling now!'
Howard saluted, and guided the throng aft, just as Dandon pulled himself through the port, amused at the thought of an English deck beneath his feet.
'And who are you, sir?' Anderson called below. Dandon turned and removed his hat. Enthralled by the activity and noise all around, so different from the languid, laughing times of the pirate vessels, he returned to his French attitude.
'Forgive me, monsieur. I am
medecin
for the island. I have been rescued by the mercy of your great Capitaine Coxon.'
Anderson tipped his hat. 'Lieutenant Anderson. Monsieur, avail yourself of our hospitality by removing yourself from my deck. Mister Granger, kindly take this man to Doctor Wood's quarters, if you will.'