Cross of Fire (2 page)

‘Post-Captain John Coxon,’ he announced to his echo. ‘I have returned under orders of the king. From the colony of Boston. I came with Messrs Duke and King, summoned here before I am to Walsingham House. Whom do I address?’ He let his words hang.

‘Walsingham.’ A covered voice rose slowly from the darkness. ‘How apt. The spymaster of Elizabeth. Our gratitude to you for attending, Post-Captain.’

He saw them now. Two figures that had seeped from the far corners, their cloaks and blank Bauta masks shimmering in the candlelight.

Coxon sneered at the foolishness of the secrecy.

Masks was it? Is that what it had come to?

‘I asked whom I address. Mark that I will take orders from the Board only.’

‘Not from your country? Is that what you say?’ They drifted towards him, their luminous faces floating in the gloom.

‘Aye,’ Coxon said. ‘From the Board. From my king.’

‘You judge that the same as your country?’

Coxon said nothing. His weariness with the scene was visible in his shifting stance. He turned his hat in his hands.

‘What have you been told, Post-Captain?’ One of the masks leaned into a cocked pose, neck bent to a shoulder.

Coxon’s instinct was to turn from the room or pull open the doors and throw light on these badgers and watch them scamper away. Or better still pull their masks and have them face him like men. If they could.

This was not Coxon’s world, or anything that rang of the sea. This was old courts and secret signs. He had heard of such things but did not know them; but he understood how the world turned and why his kind would never make admiralty or high office. It did not hinder his bread so let the world to it. He did not fear them.

‘I am told that I have been recalled to capture the pirate Devlin. That he has embarrassed you all long enough. That I am the man to bring him.’

‘Just so,’ one said, but Coxon could not tell which of the blank masks had spoken and on they came, drawing closer all the while.

‘There is the rumour, Post-Captain, that you may have . . .
acquired
some of the pirate’s gold. To furnish yourself in the colonies. Something of a French island? Gold to fund Louis’ colonies. They do love to build on swamps do they not?’

Coxon rested on his sword hilt. His old sword, older than their voices.

‘I resigned my commission. I earned all that I had.’ He offered nothing more and there was no apology in his voice.

‘Devlin was your man. Your steward. He has caused you much dishonour. It is attested. Twice he has bested you. And his king. You would like to end this pirate’s . . .
ways
– would you not?’ They stood together in front of him. ‘Would that not be beneficial to you? To your king?’

‘Would it be more beneficial to the companies he has hurt?’

The masks stood back. Their heads angled unnaturally, pivoted as if they had no necks, as if their marionette strings had been cut. Coxon stood fast. His words had struck a chord. He knew nothing of Devlin’s adventure of the diamond. That history was as secret as the conclave of handshakes and the symbols that scored the walls of gentlemen’s clubs which ran off of London’s alleyways and met above her coffee-shops and taverns. But Coxon was aware of the South Sea Company that had collapsed like a house of cards, and with his ear to the sea had noted Devlin’s absence from the pirate round.

Even from his hideaway in Boston the pirate atrocities ran and rang along the post roads like the horrors of an Indian massacre – except accompanied by grins and whispers, not howls and the wringing of petticoats. Coxon had noted the colonists’ curious admiration for pirates; he marked it as nothing more than a new country devoid of heroes but with infinite space in which to celebrate any deviation from the order forced upon them. But Devlin had vanished from the Americas and during his absence a financial cataclysm had shaken every coffee and chocolate pot from London to Amsterdam.

And soon after it all two men had come for John Coxon to demand he eradicate a pirate, with no questions asked. Coxon did not need a map to spy the lie of the land.

‘You are a shrewd man, Captain,’ the masks agreed between them. ‘We have chosen well.’

‘Your games do not impress me, gentlemen. I will do my duty as ordered and if that is of benefit to you, I have no mind in that regard. If my king wants the pirate . . . that will suit.’

A white packet appeared in a gloved hand and floated in the air in front of him.

Papers to his hand. Good. Real weight at last.

‘Whatever you hear from Walsingham House, whatever happens at sea, this is your only order. It will be seen by no-one, not even yourself. It is to be opened should you fail, for then you will have need of its power. It is to release you from blame should you have to deviate from orders to make an end the pirate. Anything you do will be warranted and conceded. And concealed . . . if necessary. From the highest. From the
very
highest. You have only one order. Whatever the cost. You understand this?’

Coxon put the packet in his coat.

‘And I have my store in Boston? To keep without question?’

They retreated.

‘We will forget you.’

‘Am I to be certain?’

‘Nothing,’ they repeated the word between them. ‘Nothing shall remain.’

‘It has been nigh three years since I have known him.’ Coxon put back his hat. ‘I will need to peruse the Board’s papers.’

‘Full warrant, Post-Captain,’ they assured him. ‘All doors will be open to you, though you will not know who has opened them, nor question how or why. For . . . security. For protection. For you and your country.’

Coxon sighed then tapped his forehead, and the doors opened behind him. The masks backed into the shadows. He spoke to an empty room.

‘Full warrant? Are you sure on that? You may regret such. And I hope you gentlemen have studied him also.’ He smirked at the silence. ‘You may have found that he has left less of you every year. He has probably saved the country a fortune.’

He turned on his heel. Gave them no further thought.

Chapter One

May 1721
.

Three months later.

It was the Principal himself who hauled Walter Kennedy along the corridor to the Master’s side of the Marshalsea. The gaol was not only a debtor’s last card but also the biding place for those to be tried for crimes at sea; Southwark its home, south of the river, the wrong side of the Thames.

Once a butcher, the Principal was as beefy as his past and scrags like Kennedy, no matter how much they struggled, were blown before him. Still adorned in his leather apron of old, large enough to serve as a blanket to most, as good for wiping off blood as it had ever been, he now coupled his breadth with a capstan bar for a bludgeon and a rusty ring of ward keys that may well have been the originals for the medieval doors within.

Kennedy stumbled with each shove from the man of meat, his bare feet stubbing on the rough limestone, his cursing and whines lost on folded cauliflower ears. At least he was out of the Hole. His words had gained him that much; they had bought him an audience in some better air for a while.

The Hole in Marshalsea was a fabled early grave. Below ground, scarcely more than a stone alcove next to the sewer of the gaol, it was not uncommon for a man, woman or child to lose an eye or a cheek to rats while they tried to sleep there; more common for the miasmas and the damp to produce men rotting from the outside when they finally emerged with swollen flesh, white, carrying the miasma back up to the other unfortunates.

Three hundred men and families slept in the common debtor’s side in rooms made for thirty, an hour’s light in the yard every day their only respite, charity and church plates paying for their keep. But now Kennedy was seeing the other side, the side for those who had means and family enough to eventually pay off their debts, but not too soon that the director’s profits should suffer.

White-washed walls, doors without keys, wax candles in the lanterns along the walls – not stinking whale-blubber stumps as in the wards. The inmates here could be released to work outside for their debts and garnish, pay for women to attend them. They had their own taproom and chandler for extra food. This was a gentleman’s gaol, a place where Kennedy could reside if he played his hour well enough.

The Pound now, quarters where prisoners were first brought until an inmate ‘vacated’ his room. The butcher pushed Kennedy through the door before him, slamming it hard and fast so that its planks caught the spit Kennedy had intended for his gaoler.

The room was dark, windowless, but Kennedy could make out a hat and figure sat at a table. A strike of flint and steel, a candle lighted. A crock bottle and two clay cups. Enough invite for Kennedy to sit. He thought on the figure sitting in the dark awaiting him. Be a cold man to sit and wait in the dark so, but a friendly enough hand waved to the bottle for Kennedy to help himself.

The flame grew and spat. A leather folder, red-ribbon tied, was the only other object the rising light revealed. Kennedy poured and drank before the liquid even lapped the brim, and the watery red wine washed away his swollen tongue and rinsed his teeth of the scum furring them.

Now men could talk, the civility of wine waving away the differences between them. Only food could do better at clearing the air.

A hand to an outer pocket and Kennedy flinched. A lump of charred brisket fell from the hand to the table and again the hand waved Kennedy to partake.

Kennedy snatched at the meat, as gaols teach. His teeth wobbled as he chewed, but no mind. His mouth ran wet as the beef sucked at his gums and his belly tried to pull it down even before he could taste the savour, and he had to fight his own throat against the swallow.

To the man opposite, the beef was part of his old habit. He had a compass in his other pocket and even without introduction young Walter Kennedy could smell a man of the sea, albeit one from the other side of the waves.

‘Thanking you there, Captain,’ Kennedy beamed, his Irish voice not lost even after years of other realms, of a thousand shores and colours of the world that other men did not have the imaginations to dream of. The saddest prisoner was the seaman. His whole world may only be contained in a small brown box, his shoulders touching another as he slept and ate, but his sky and garden were infinite. Take that away and you would have no need to kill him. He’d gladly make his own rope to be free again. John Coxon understood this, the answer to why so many of them went so well to the gallows, made merry speeches to the crowd and thanked their hangman for the show.

He let Kennedy enjoy his bovine chewing of his meat and opened the folder.

‘You are Walter Kennedy, are you not?’

Kennedy nodded, his eyes stuck to the meat.

‘Late of the pirate Bartholomew Roberts?’

‘Well late, Captain. And Bart’s his pirate name to protect his priest brother. John Roberts he be. See, Captain, I know all to validate my claims!’

‘And you wish to turn evidence against those who once served alongside you? To buy yourself from the noose?’

‘I can name at least ten I know to be in England now as freemen. But I can’t write them down, Captain. Head’s no good for schooling.’ A small choke on his meat as he grinned and drooled.

‘And you sailed with Woodes Rogers for New Providence three years gone?’ Another affirmation. ‘And when Howell Davis turned pirate on the
Buck
out of those islands you were of his crew?’