The Pirate Devlin (33 page)

  'There are only eight sons of mine on that there ship, pup.' Devlin grinned back. 'And drunk or sober, they'd hang your guts around your neck. You may lay to that!' He met Coxon's steadfast stare. 'I'm for most times scared of them myself.'

  'Are they waiting for you, Patrick?' Coxon asked. 'Has the frigate left you?'

  The room breathed in.

  'They wait for me. I have not seen that frigate for weeks, Captain. And that be the truth of the Lord. But I have that gold.'

  'Not for long, Patrick.' Coxon stood and courted the assembly once more, his hands swept behind his back again.

  Dandon raised a tearful head in despair. 'Will someone,
please
, for all the saints, remove this horror from my presence!'

  'Quiet, dog!' Guinneys' voice cracked, almost panicked, as his gun stabbed towards Dandon's head.

  'Guinneys!'

  Coxon's voice could have carried from the crosstrees to the cockpit. 'Behold yourself, man!'

  He swung round to Scott. 'Hold this room with Corporal Fauche. Do not take your pistol off this pirate. Guinneys? Come outside with me, Lieutenant.'

  Guinneys lowered his guns and truculently followed his captain out into the scorched yard, leaving the door wide open behind them. Both stepped to the redoubt, eyeing the gun in its small carriage. Puny in comparison to the
Starlings
twelve-pounders.

  Coxon's eye swept along the iron barrel to where his small band of men were guarding the gate. He looked above to the sapphire sky as he spoke.

  'William? Losing your temper will serve no good.'

  'My apologies, Captain. My blood has been rising since we landed. It will not happen again.'

  Coxon nodded. 'Now, what to do.' He walked between the huts, stepping past the drugged and the dead. Guinneys followed as if tethered.

  'The gold is with that brigantine. Now we are here, those men will no doubt sail despite their captain.'

  'They are pirates after all, sir.'

  'And they will run from English guns. Our best approach is to let them sail and to cut them off.'

  'She can outrun us, sir.'

  Coxon turned and they walked back. 'She can't outrun our guns. We'll tear her rigging apart. A shell of a crew. They'll fold at our first cannon, mark me.'

  'Undoubtedly, sir.'

  'We shall take Devlin back to the ship. Under their gaze.'

  'They may be landing now. They saw us come ashore.'

  'And we are in a fort, are we not? Armed to the braces.' Coxon sighed, rapping his hand against the coarse wooden wall of the mess hall.

  'There are only a few things that I cannot answer for which I beg your opinion, William.'

  'What would they be, Captain?'

  Coxon stopped at the mess door, idly looking in to the slumbering soldiers. 'There was a boat on the shore. If the gold is on the ship, hauled up, who rowed back to shore to fetch Devlin?'

  'I do not follow, Captain.' Guinneys uncocked his pistols with expert ease and placed them smoothly in his belt beneath his coat.

  'Picture it, William: men rowed to the ship with the gold whilst Devlin and a couple of others stayed here.' He added gently, 'If we are to believe
that
corporal and that French doctor, supposedly the others fled when Devlin was captured. Why is there still a boat on the shore? Would they not be aboard by now? If not, then they are hiding somewhere.'

  'Perhaps two boats came in? One is left for Devlin?'

  'Perhaps. I'll give you the gig may have been used to ferry the gold, although why when there is the larger one ready on the beach? And, if so, what boat did the pirates who fled use? Do you not see, William?' Coxon was pleased with the confused look on Guinneys' face.

  'I have to admit that I do not, sir.' Guinneys removed his hat and began to fan himself.

  'They are still
here!
In numbers. Watching us even now. Waiting to free Devlin.'

  Guinneys could not help but look around the walls of the stockade, his head swivelling slowly.

  'Don't look, you
fool!'
Coxon's whisper bristled. 'We are protected by ignorance only. Besides there is one other matter that nags at me.'

  'And what is that, Captain?' Guinneys placed his hat back squarely, and snapped his vest tight. A habit now.

  'I cannot discuss it even with you, William, until I know one thing more.'

  Guinneys paid no attention to Coxon drawing one of his pistols as innocently as pulling out a handkerchief.

  'To what is that, sir?'

  'Edward Talton was murdered, William. To what extent and why was your hand involved?' Cards down. Play or fold. No bluff to play. Point or play.

  'Sir?' Guinneys smirked, his eyes drawn to the neat hole of the muzzle pointed at his chest from Coxon's hip.

  'Answer how you may. I will not judge you, lad.' Coxon smiled as a warmth of control swept through him, again generous in his patronage.

  'I did not
kill
Talton, Captain. Why would I? Have you gone mad, sir?' Guinneys giggled slightly. Nervous and surprised.

  'We will go forward from this point on your honour, William. I ask
only
that. Why did Talton die?'

  Guinneys' face lost the good humour that had been its customary setting for the weeks that Coxon had known him. From somewhere else came the look Coxon suspected appeared at the end of the hunt, flecked with mud and blood.

  'If you must know, Captain, it was not in my interests to allow an employee of John Company to have any knowledge of my intentions for that gold. I also believed that he would not be a willing party to your undoing.
Sir.'

  Coxon did not move, nor did his face alter from its stoicism, as if he heard such notions every day. 'My undoing?' he calmly asked.

  'I am sorry, Captain. In truth I genuinely am. More goes on here than you may be permitted to know.'

'Permitted?
You
dog!
I have orders from Whitehall! You dare allude to a mutiny while I stand behind them? The very gall of you, sir!'

  'Oh, hush now, John, 'tis not a mutiny. I have my own orders, don't you know.' Guinneys' smiling face returned and he stepped back and crowed to the sailors, 'Cole! Williams! To me, now!'

  Clay pipes disappeared as if they were never in the mouths at the gate. Straw hats were held tight to their heads with one hand, their musketoons in the other as the two sailors rushed to Guinneys.

  Coxon felt the unsettling nausea run through him once more. His face cold in the heat. The pistol heavy in his hand.

  'Yes, sir?' Cole spoke to Guinneys, yet nodded to Coxon.

  'Cole,' Guinneys said, pulling out a tight wrap of papers from his vest. 'I have orders here that I wish you to witness that relieve Captain Coxon of his position under certain articles of deposition. Will you confirm them for me, Cole?'

  Cole looked to both men in confusion. 'Sir?'

  'Cole!' Coxon ordered. 'Relieve Lieutenant Guinneys of his weapons, if you please, and place him under arrest without parole at once. By my command, Cole.'

  Cole and Williams passed a slow, curious glance to each other. The honourable pair took in the pistol of their new captain and the yellow parchment tied with black ribbon in the hand of their former master, the man who had travelled with them back and forth from Guangzhou and the Indian factories for the last two years. Both men rested their weapons' stocks upon the ground, the barrels between their legs.

  Cole held a polite hand for the square wad of paper with soft words to Coxon. 'Begging your pardon, Cap'n.' He pulled off the ribbon at the corners rather than untying the neat bow and moved his head as he painfully began to read.

  Guinneys' left hand, now empty of the papers, lowered for Coxon's pistol to be proffered voluntarily. 'Your weapon, Captain. If you please.'

  'Cole!' Coxon's voice commanded. 'Those papers to me, now!'

  Again, Cole spoke gently with his rumbling voice, 'Begging your pardon, Cap'n,' and returned to his page.

  'You may read them, John,' Guinneys deigned magnanimously. 'After you offer me freely your arms.'

  Coxon switched his focus from Guinneys to the labours of Cole deciphering the language of commissioners, then back again to the smiling Guinneys. He begged inwardly for a deck beneath his feet, not this French dust with its uncertainty dragging him down like quicksand.

  'Whatever you have forged, young man, I have my orders to secure this island and this gold. This madness ends now. You will be detained under my instruction.' Even so, Coxon put away his pistol.

  'The ship is mine, John.' And he repeated mockingly the words Coxon had said gallantly to him moments before: 'Understand that much, on
your
honour, and we will move forward from
this
point.' His hand came out more forcibly. 'Your arms, please, John.'

  The sound of Cole closing the paper in its fold filled the air between them. He began to pass it back to Guinneys, who fanned his open hand graciously to Coxon. Cole moved the paper to Coxon.

  'Seems in order, Captain,' he said, his head bowing swiftly, then rising with a grimace as Coxon took the paper.

  Coxon swept his eyes to the bottom of the page. The names, scratched with pride, were unfamiliar. Aylmer and the

  Third Earl of Berkeley were named elaborately as commissioners for exercising the office of Lord High Admiral of the Kingdom of Great Britain.

  Coxon recalled the second earl. The father. But he had been away so long. These men would only know him as a name on a list, and a short name at that, with a dead clergyman as parent.

  He reverted to the order itself. A jigsaw of compliments and phrases that made no sense.

  On reaching and securing the island, command was to revert to Guinneys. The arrest of Count Gyllenborg, the Swedish ambassador who had attended a function at which Coxon and Devlin had been present, had cast doubt on Coxon's loyalty to the new king. The Jacobite threat was too powerful. The gold, for its own security, needed to be safeguarded by the British Crown, in the interests of the French, naturally. Coxon's undoubted knowledge of the Indies and his knowledge of the pirate Devlin were invaluable to the endeavour.

Once achieved, however,
his value is unclear and must be assumed threatening and disadvantageous, the value and unknown extent of which to be determined by Captain William Guinneys to whom the Board grants full warrant.'

  'I am suspected of some Jacobite tendency? From what insanity does this notion spring?' Coxon asked.

  'Oh, John.' Guinneys took back the paper. 'From nothing, most probably. Gold is gold. George loves horses, don't you know? Don't take it personally.' Guinneys secreted the paper back in his vest. 'More important is the stink this will make in that confounded Parliament. Jacobite pirates have a vast gold investment to fund a restoration through Spain. Do you want to remain on half-pay forever, for I don't!'

  Coxon half turned, removing Cole and Williams from his vision, his thoughts racking up like bridge pegs. Guinneys' orders were different from his own, their significance beyond his reasoning. The gold was to be taken. Taken for English coffers and blamed on the pirates. And Guinneys to help himself to a slice of it, no doubt.

  The Jacobite dross was convenient. Convenient enough to remove the embarrassment that Coxon had obviously become.

  Gold. Gilded blood-red. And Guinneys? What was his part? What promise had he been given? Why was Talton dead? Coxon pressed the point, for Cole and Williams to hear.

  'And Talton? What does his death achieve?' Coxon turned back, noting the quizzical looks of the two sailors at the mention of the death that had no doubt been the after-watch talk below deck that very morning.

  Guinneys smiled once more. 'Your pistols, please, John. You may keep the cutlass, on your honour.'

  Coxon peaceably released his pistols to Cole and Williams in turn. 'When I am back aboard, Guinneys, the other officers may dispute your actions. Take care with me, William.'

  'Quite. You are referring to the men who have sailed with me as captain for the last few years, are you not? I am sure your men on the
Noble
were just as loyal. You should ask your pirate man about them, perhaps.'

  He faced Cole again. 'Back to the gate. Captain Coxon will accompany me as master. I will notify Lieutenant Scott. Keep a weather eye out for the rest of the scum. We will return to the ship with our new entourage and prepare to board that brigantine.'

  'Aye, Cap'n.' Cole tapped his forehead, Williams likewise, and they beat their feet.

  'Do not feel too bad, John.' Guinneys began to walk back to Bessette's rooms; Coxon stepped beside him looking straight ahead. 'It is thanks to you that we arrived here in time. I most probably could not have done it with such vigour. But then I had no honour to restore. And, as for the gold, well, I will be posted captain for my part and you will not have to face the ignominy of a council inquiry.'