Hunt for White Gold

Chapter Nineteen





Bath Town, North Carolina



Governor Eden’s mansion.




Governor Eden had not welcomed Teach when the pirate had first come to his attention. Eden was loath to associate with such a notorious brigand and enemy of mankind.

On the other hand a privateer enjoyed a certain degree of formality and Eden might lower himself to the occasional social engagement.

So it was that Edward Teach came calling again at the governor’s acres in Bath Town, in a carriage no less, and gave notice that he had come to take up the Act of Grace so recently appointed by the King and offered Eden his loyalties as privateer in lieu of which he presented Eden a sack full of coin in good faith. After that, Eden courteously listened to the crimson-coated sea-dog and let his secretary count the coin.

They enjoyed a fair companionship. Eden had granted Teach his Grace, and Teach gave tribute with his own hand from whatever happened to chance across his bows.

Teach had sniffed the Proclamation a year past and knew its meaning to his trade. Granted the French Guineaman, Concorde, by Ben Hornigold, his former captain, he took the three-hundred ton square-rig and re-christened her the Queen Anne’s Revenge; he then proceeded to haunt the colonial coast. His resolution was to remain several steps ahead of his British would-be enslavers and gain legitimacy and position with the frustrated governors of the Carolinas.

He raided those who refused to let him trade in the towns and he courted those that let him in to savour their daughters and unload his tenders.

To the governors it was an opportunity for free trade, a tax-exempt boon to their coffers and, as the nod to the pirate began, other sloops crept up the inlets and the pirates found a new and willing home.

This day was different. A new covenant had come for Eden and Teach. The trust between the two had been split by Eden’s sudden change of humour when the smashed medicine chest lay strewn across the oak floor of his drawing room.

‘Where are they, Teach? Where are the letters?’ Eden stood with an axe heavy in his hands, breathless and sweating in the dry August heat. Although his bob wig had been cast aside after the third heavy swing, he was still the gentlemen in silk waistcoat and stockings.

Teach sat behind Eden’s desk in full garb, crimson coat, black hat and boots, seemingly immune to the heat. Pistols representing every nation stuck out of his every nook like voodoo pins from a ‘poppet’. Their unlikely cabal lay before them as broken as the shattered chest.

‘What letters, Charles?’ Teach spoke softly as he sucked on a long-pipe, his scowl as black as his matted mane. ‘You sent me for a chest from that man. And I brought you a chest. I know nothing of any letters. Save the ones you promised to me, Charles.’

Eden let the axe fall, chipping the floor, and stepped towards the desk.

‘I sent you to Ignatius. I sent you for a chest. That chest came off the Whydah, Sam Bellamy’s Whydah, with Palgrave Williams over a year ago.’

Teach plucked the pipe from his teeth, ‘Who?’

Eden wiped his brow. ‘Palgrave was Bellamy’s partner. He left the ship to visit his mother on Block Island. The only thing he took off the boat with him was that chest!’ He stabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the pitiful splinters.

‘Perhaps she was sick,’ Teach speculated, replacing his pipe. Then he lifted his feet to the desk and leant back.

‘Edward,’ Eden cooed. ‘Two men survived the Whydah. I paid fifteen hundred pounds to one of them for that information and spared him the noose.’

‘Well, Governor, you were fair robbed, so you were. That there chest ain’t ever worth more than three. Course, worth even less now, mind.’ He pulled his bracken beard out of his linen shirt, allowing it to cascade down his chest. ‘Now, I have fulfilled my part. And I want my letters. The Admiralty pardon, promised to me, that says every ship is mine by law. A fair price I would say for what I have done.’

‘Done?’ Eden swept Teach’s boots from his desk. ‘Done? You have done nothing except cost me money and wasted a year of my life hunting for that chest! I swear, Teach, if you do not give me what you have betrayed you have slept your last peaceful night!’

The black eyes fired at Eden’s words like pistol balls shooting across the desk. Teach’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the desk’s edge. Then just as suddenly the coals went dull and lifeless, wide and placid as a doll’s. Eden stepped back as Blackbeard rose up, covering him in shadow.

‘Done?’ he whispered. ‘What I have done? I will tell you what I have done, Governor.’ He stepped around the desk. The three brace of pistols slung around his neck seemed to jiggle in anticipation as he moved.

‘I have damned myself for your will by holding a whole town to ransom! I have run aground the finest ship I ever owned. Grounded the Revenge to maroon my own men with the promise that I’ll be back. Sailed here on a sloop with just a few trusted brethren all because you wanted that there chest a secret.’

He growled his way to Eden’s cabinet of glass, picked the finest dark carafe and drained half of it, the great back to Eden stretching taller with each swallow.

‘All because you wanted that chest,’ he swallowed his rising bile. ‘What I have done …’ His voice trailed away.

Eden watched the carafe go back in the cabinet as Teach’s head sunk down beyond his shoulders. He looked at the axe on the floor, then back to the crimson figure as it spoke again.

‘I have a house here at Bath. Another wife. And land.’ Teach turned round, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘I have plans, Governor. A future beyond the sea,’ enunciated Teach as he took in the red face and then the tight waistcoat straining across Eden’s paunch. ‘Where you be standing, there stand I, Governor. Mark me.’ He reached back for the carafe. His first draught had slaked his temper. The second would steady the furious trembling of his limbs that normally preceded someone else’s pain.

Eden looked at the splinters of the chest and stroked the grey pelt of his hair, kept close-cut for under his bob wig. He was grey as a rabbit at forty-five and governor for the last five years. The letters were not in the chest. Think again.

He kicked petulantly at the wood and dragged himself to the cabinet for a glass, resigned to the fact that angering Teach was a bad tack to follow.

‘I apologise, Edward, for my outburst.’ He poured himself a drink and clinked his glass against Teach’s bottle. ‘We are in this together, I know. I will get my secretary Tobias to issue your letters of ownership.’ He drank fast, the instant warmth in his belly soothing and bracing him. ‘You blockaded a town at great personal risk and I am sorry to have doubted you. Ignatius has fooled us. Rather, fooled me.’ He poured another.

‘The chest I was led to believe contained some letters. Letters that have whispered around the world for years. I felt they were in my grasp.’ He eyed Teach over his glass. Threw him one card. ‘Did Ignatius mention what the chest might have contained?’

Teach’s beard rose, a smile presumably under the thicket of hair. ‘Important enough matter I gather. I had to kidnap a councillor and his son to sway him, and only then when I promised to deliver their heads ashore. Two heads better than one!’ He elbowed Eden’s drinking arm, splashing his drink and bellowing out a laugh that rolled through the house.

Eden paused for the roar to subside, unable to join in himself. ‘Quite. Now however, I must regroup.’ He walked to his desk and sat with a sigh. How much did Teach need to know? How much did he know? He had known the villain a time. Violent, certainly; drunken, always. But no fool.

‘Ignatius now knows I am after the letters. And I am probably not the only governor seeking the same.’ He chanced a quick glance at the drawer to his right where a pistol waited. ‘Did you know Black Sam Bellamy, Edward?’

Teach snorted. ‘Aye. Knew of him plain enough. One of Hornigold’s through and through.’

‘No doubt. It was a pirate named Thomas that survived Bellamy’s shipwreck. Did you know of him?’

Teach shook his head slowly, trying to recall, taking a swift swallow to aid his memory.

‘No mind,’ Eden went on. ‘Young Thomas was acquitted for being a pirate. Mainly for his fascinating evidence, as it were. He told of the letters being on board and of the promise of a pardon for Bellamy and all of them if they took them north, up to Cape Cod. I assume to safety or to a buyer. Thomas swore that Bellamy and Palgrave decided to unload their precious cargo at Block Island, perhaps to haggle for more money, perhaps to take the letters for themselves, who knows?’ He drank solemnly, listening to the slave gangs bringing in the evening with their songs lilting up from his plantation acres.

Teach’s voice almost rolled along in the same tune as he spoke the inevitable. ‘Or perhaps this man Thomas knew the letters were still aboard the Whydah when she went down. And took that acquittal, and your fifteen-hundred pounds, to fetch them his-self maybe?’

‘That indeed occurs to me now, Edward. Either way he has vanished and the letters with him.’ He drained his glass and beckoned for another. ‘Or with God knows who else.’ Teach came over with the decanter and poured slowly.

‘My counsel,’ Teach proffered, ‘would be that if a pirate got a hold of such a prize he would make his way to a safe point. Somewhere he could conceal his luck from those that might enquire. Somewhere a pirate can hide and bide his time maybe, until he can capitalise on his good fortune.’

Eden nodded and could already feel his pockets getting lighter. ‘Such a place as Providence, by any chance?’

‘Aye,’ Teach agreed as if the thought were not his own. ‘That would be such a place as good as any, aye.’

Eden sat back. ‘And if I afforded you, perhaps, the necessary to take a trip to Providence, on my behalf, you would not be too disinclined?’

‘Well now, Governor. Times have changed. Providence now be the King’s Island. Propriety has switched quite a bit now I gathers. Be an awful risk for a pirate to sail within five leagues of such a place, what with all the wood and lobsters patrolling her. Take an awfully big purse to persuade a gentleman of fortune to take a risk like that.’

‘And what would it take to persuade you, Edward?’

Teach straightened up, pausing for a breath as he thought on the matter. ‘I suppose I could manage such a task for the promise of some land. Land to do with what I pleased with no objections. That might persuade me.’ He turned away.

Eden was genuinely impressed. The only thing he could think to ask was where and why would Teach require land, except to conceal corpses perhaps. Teach walked through the remnants of the chest, crunching the mahogany beneath his boots as he pondered, then slowly turned round again.

‘I have a sailcloth base at Ocracock. I want a fort there. My own stone fort to protect my interests. And I want noone to stop me building it.’ He pointed his face hard at Eden.

Eden could not comprehend the consequences of Teach having a fort on the point of his colony. The entertaining of such a scheme, to turn Carolina into another Providence or Tortuga, would condemn even the men who carried the stone. It would never happen. Could never happen.

Like a father promising a begging child he tried to appease, confident that Teach’s tomorrow was a long way off.

‘I believe we can come to some arrangement, Edward. Yes. If that is what you want. How soon could you get under way?’

Teach strode to the oak desk to snatch at the decanter. ‘Tomorrow. I can leave when your Tobias brings me my Admiralty notes.’ He swigged and slammed it down. ‘You’d best find him tonight. I ain’t patient when I’m waiting.’

Eden concurred. The thought of how much Teach really knew, how much he had gleant from Ignatius or fathomed in his own mind, would grow within him as a cancer, but for now he glowed at the concept that he had Blackbeard himself preparing to rain down upon Providence.

It was not by theory, Eden surmised, that Teach had suggested the place. He knew something. And by design Charles Eden would always profit, as did all advantageous men, from the knowledge of others. But Teach’s knowledge would not come cheap.

If Eden had to dig into the town’s taxes to bid against Ignatius, a day that would surely come, he would give as graciously as he could.


Teach idled on the gravel outside, waiting for Eden’s cob to carry him back to his ship. As he watched the dusty cloud of insects floating over the fields in the dusk, following the slow bobbing of the black heads of slaves, he wondered only about the Chinese gun Ignatius had told him of, and that Eden had never mentioned. The gun that Palgrave Williams had taken to Providence and hidden therein.

He had Eden now promising land and legitimacy. Ignatius promising even more. All for a Chinese gun hiding some priest’s letters that meant nothing to him. Teach’s losses after the dust settled would be as light as his conscience.

In England he would be vilified and hung. Here, he was a landowner and a personage of promise. The opportunities that this New World offered were limitless to a shrewd man of means. He tapped the lump of wax hidden beneath his shirt. The chance to remind Devlin of his affront would be a suitable final act to the life he was planning to leave behind, a final pirate glory to warm him in his days of fireside and grandchildren to come. That thought pleasured him all the way back to the shore.