He had been called back. Not to Walsingham House as he expected or even to Whitehall. The victualler’s house at Tower Hill was where the coach from Portsmouth had carried John Coxon.

The first frozen grey days of February and the former post-captain was coming home, or at least to London. Home was a parsonage in Norfolk, a dead father and mother, a brother perhaps still preaching from a stone pulpit somewhere.

He had never known London as now, in the midst of winter, and he wrapped his boat-cloak about his face and snapped the ice from the window frame of his carriage. It was as cold as the Massachusetts Boston colony he had left just weeks ago. He had thought of the Caribbean then, when the two men in black cloth had come to him to request he return, and he thought of its warmth again now, a memory hard to recall when the frost numbed him so.

He could not remember being cold in the wars, or in thirty years at sea. His duty had kept him in warm climes all the year and all the world round and he imagined he might die if he stayed here much longer.

His skin was dry. He could feel his joints move. His hands were chapped; he owned no gloves. He had never needed them, and he was not gentleman enough to wear deerskin just for colour.

I am no longer English
, he thought.
I have come to a foreign land
.

He had retired to Boston after it all. Retired and withdrew to open a store as he had always thought to when the sea finally let him go. At first it was just a chandlery and then, over the months, he had come to sell all manner of general goods as the homes around him matured and one by one brickwork replaced wood.

Last, before, he had been with Woodes Rogers as part of his colonisation of the Bahamas, of New Providence, where colonisation had truthfully meant the eradication of the pirate crows nested there. Coxon had gone with Woodes Rogers because it was the challenge of the Caribbean, as ever. Because he saw a white star-shaped scar on his right forearm every morning when he woke. Because Devlin might be there. Because Coxon could have his revenge.

And then Devlin beat them again.

But he had been promised that was all at an end now.

For years the name Patrick Devlin had pursued John Coxon with ridicule and rumour. He was Post-Captain Coxon now, his rank granted following actions he had taken when an Irishman in the Marine Royale stepped forward to save the lives of his French officers by translating for them. That was Devlin. Coxon had been fascinated to discover what adventure could possibly have brought an Irishman into the service of the French fleet.

It was a tale beginning with injustice, as in all good stories. But a father’s injustice: the little boy sold to a butcher and working at eight years old for a burlap bed beneath a counter and beer for breakfast. Bloodied hands all his life. Butcher-boy grown up to poacher until a hypocrite magistrate’s judgement had forced Devlin to flee to London. Then the murder of a fellow countryman who had taken him in set him running again, as only the poor are able, now to St-Malo for dread of accusation and the rope. A few years of fishing along the Breton coast and then war had saved him from starvation until the day Coxon captured his sloop.

Devlin became his steward. For years the younger man stood at his shoulder and, charitably, when he found that his ward could read and write, Coxon gifted knowledge and books to him. The Irishman absorbed the intricacies of navigation and became a valued acquaintance if not quite friend. Yet Coxon had much in common with the ex butcher-boy despite his officer’s strut. For Coxon, son of a clergyman, had succeeded through sheer hard work and grasping opportunities. The servant, with the same application, might one day make a fine bosun’s mate – and more than that, Coxon was sure, had it not been the fellow’s misfortune to have been cursed with Irish birth.

But no matter now. Instead, the loss of his ship, the loss of Patrick Devlin to the pirates, to the Devil. And now Coxon’s promise to give the Devil his due.

The unevenly worn heels of his shoes added to his poor gait and marked him as a man before the mast as he clacked his way along the black-and-white corridor. But he walked towards the closed double-doors confidently, assured they would open by the breeze of his approach.

And they did.

He entered the dark room, naked candles at the four tall, shuttered windows on the right, a blank wall on the left, and enough light from the open door and the flames to discern the smoky outlines of picture frames recently removed. There would have been portraits hung up, portraits that he supposed he might have recognised.

The glare from the corridor threw his shadow to the back of the room, and then the unseen hands closed the doors and only the narrow candlelight remained.

Coxon was not a man for ghosts and melodrama. He had lived too long.

He turned and faced the men by the door, their lower faces hidden by cloth. He nodded at them to no response. He removed his hat.

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