Hunt for White Gold

Chapter Twenty-Seven





The uproll of the ship spoilt Seth’s aim and the gravity of the wooden worlds drawing together created a well of waves smashing between the freeboards. Fish slammed against the strakes, flipping up and away to escape the crushing swell.

The shot rang off a ringbolt beside Devlin’s head but he resisted flinching and continued to count the bodies on the other ship as the survivors ducked to grab for their grappling hooks.

Hugh Harris wiped a sleeve across his dripping face and turned to Devlin. ‘That’s Seth! That’s Seth Toombs, Pat!’

Devlin looked hard across to the man swinging in the shrouds. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘It surely is,’ and he climbed to the gunwale ignoring the muskets levelled at him to shout to his opposing captain, the man who had pressed him to be his navigator one spring, a year gone now.

‘Ho, Seth!’ he yelled. ‘We’ve come a long ways now ain’t we, Captain? What say we talk awhile?’

Seth rolled up and down as the spars above clasped each other, chaining the ships for the final conflict. His leer widened then shrunk to a grimace as he bellowed to his men: ‘Grenadoes!’ and a barrage of bottles, catapulted from unseen hands, smashed to the Talefan’s deck.

Devlin’s paltry crew danced around the shattered glass that exploded from the dozen rag-lit bottles loaded with powder, shot and nails – the only ‘fireworks’ that Seth had the means to muster but effective enough, spitting at men’s legs and turning the fallen canvas into kindling. Flames began to trickle up from the Talefan’s deck. Devlin set his eye to the grinning face a shot away from his own and leapt from the wood towards the six pairs of eyes waiting expectantly for some word.

‘Throw ’em.’

Their turn.

Devlin’s men pulled out grenadoes and matches coiled around their wrists and carefully picked the small smouldering wicks from the brass tubes in their waistcoats or pockets.

Good grenadoes, well prepared, unlike Seth’s jury-rigged and cobbled affairs. The eggs full of brimstone, powder and slugs of lead in a mould of tar-pitched halved musket balls that could rip off men’s faces as they detonated falling through the air.

The black missiles sailed over the gunwale as Seth slammed his boots on the deck and gave his last order, the only order of the day that mattered.

‘Sling your hooks, boys! Boarding parties away!’

Grapnels flew over, Devlin’s grenadoes streaking past them simultaneously, annihilating a couple of the hooks’ bearers as they exploded at chest height with their half-second fuse. Teeth and eyes spattered the men pulling the ships together, and they found themselves spitting out the blood of their mates.

Devlin felt his deck camber away from him as half the hooks bit into the gunwale and the remainder landed amongst the shrouds. More than twenty snarling men pulled on the Talefan like a reluctant bull and only then did Devlin notice the absence of the yellow-coated Dandon and his air of despondent whimsy. He had no time to query his men as they raised pistols and musket stocks to the scarfed heads dragging them in.

Devlin looked down at the dead Sam Fletcher, the young face already grey. He lifted his head back to the ship and aimed his pistol at the burgundy hat bobbing along the backs of the enemy sailors. He climbed the gunwale with his aim held to it like a line so he could fire his pistol below the leather cross sealing the cocks of the tricorne.

The waft of his gunsmoke shielded the swinging boarding parties as the hulls collided and Devlin’s six survivors fired up at the dozen men flying into the Talefan’s rigging.

A shot ploughed into a chest and Seth watched the screaming body slam into the conjoined hulls, the cries split by the silent shatter of the man’s skull like a watermelon between the scraping wood.

‘Davis!’ he called to Howell. ‘With me!’ He scrambled to the gunwale, pushing back the shoulder of the young Porto sailor clambering to join him. ‘You stay here with a musket, lad. Don’t want you forgetting who your captain is now.’

He leapt to the Talefan, cutlass in hand, eyes locked onto the prize of the Irishman kneeling and reloading by the mainmast.

He landed squarely, elbowing a face beside him and Howell followed the blow with a cutlass thrust and kicked the body from his blade and stuck to Seth’s back as he barged through the mass of men.

Hugh Harris had taken two boarders with his pistols, the flintlocks hanging around his neck. Now he had a sweeping cutlass in one hand, a parrying poniard in the other and three more dead lay around him as his bloodied face and clothes, his wild screams, weakened the spirits of his foes and he laughed as they backed away from his terrifying form.

Lawson had unloaded his partridge shot from his musketoon into three more and swung the club of it through the jaw of one of them, then put them down with his pistols that cracked one by one as he stepped away from the men still coming over the side. His third pistol snapped its shot and his back stopped at the larboard quarter and he could retreat no further. He checked once over the gunwale to the alluring waves then unsheathed his falchion sword and dagger, declaring loudly that the four men rushing towards him were most definitely in trouble now that he was cornered.

Devlin kicked groins and swung his hanger, and blood and flesh arced before his eyes. In his left hand he beat with his pistol at cutlasses and pikes stabbing gingerly towards him. His pistol was still loaded for the taking of Seth Toombs when the moment came.

There were too many of them, despite the better arms borne by his men. Three of Toombs’s crew had remained on the ship. Three were dead from the grenadoes. Twenty-two had swung or leapt across. Nine lay dead or dying but still it could not be done with six – no, another stilted scream, five now – against the horde. Devlin felt the gunwale against his own back now as the tide came forwards and he too glanced to the sea behind. Then the tide slowly parted before him.

‘Back!’ Seth yelled above the riot and a moment later the only sound on the Talefan was the faint crackling of the flames chewing its way through the tarred, hanging rigging and the creaking of broken spars above the two captains’ heads.

Seth moved cautiously, the cutlass in his right hand bouncing playfully, the gully blade in his left dripping blood.

‘Well, well, Cap’n Devlin. As you said: We’ve come a long ways to be sure.’

‘You’ve come as far as you’re going to, my man!’ Dandon’s shout from the quarterdeck spun the heads of everyone aft to the mouth of the swivel gun aimed to the crowd of Mumvils. Dandon behind it. His eye ready to fire. ‘Toombs is it?’ he continued. ‘I vaguely recall you now that I see you.’ Dandon held up the cord that would snap the flintlock to its charge for everyone to acknowledge. ‘You’ll drop your arms if you please, else you have stepped your last.’

Devlin looked proudly to the man at the falconet and raised himself taller as his remaining men pushed back their assailants with contempt and curses.

Seth, one look to Devlin, stepped towards the swivel gun for its eye to cover him more than his men. His cutlass twitched.

‘Dandelion, ain’t it? Reckons I knows you from Haggins’s knocking shop on Providence. A pox doctor. Not one for a fight as I recollects.’

Dandon bowed his head. ‘Which is why I favour the spread of grape from my friend here,’ he tapped the gun affectionately. ‘He affords me the position not to fight at such close quarter.’

Seth paced closer and the gun followed, the range enough for him to absorb every lead seed and shatter him like glass. Dandon tensed the cord and Seth stopped pacing. ‘That’ll do fellow. Lay down and you’ll yet live.’

Seth dragged his curled lip upwards. ‘Then fire, Dandelion. Fire if you can. I’m right here. Fire at Seth Toombs. He needs it.’

Howell Davis barked from the huddle of men, ‘No, Seth!’ He came out of the crowd. ‘No need for this. The ship is sunk soon enough. We can sail on.’

Seth kept his eye on Dandon as he cocked his head back. ‘I sail on with a heavier ship, Howell. Always do.’ He ran his thumbnail up his cutlass blade. ‘See, Howell, I ain’t no fool. I don’t walk towards loaded guns, mark my word. Now to my mind I reckon that gun be empty. I reckon that, because if I had such a loaded gun I’d have fired it as we boarded.’ He turned his neck to Devlin. ‘I wouldn’t have waited until all was lost would I, Cap’n?’

Devlin, still by the larboard gunwale, heart steady, breath back to a more restful pace, held Seth’s hateful gaze. He looked up to Dandon’s hand at the cord of the falconet and tensed his own hand on his pistol, thumb gently resting on the doghead as soft as a spider’s leg.

‘Cut him down, Dandon,’ he almost whispered and even the flames hushed as all eyes went back to the quarterdeck.

Dandon leant away from the forthcoming explosion, one eye closed, the cord ready to snap, as Seth opened his arms for the impact that he was sure was not there.

Every man that lived that day would retell the tale, again and again, from father to son, from uncle to nephew, and on from tutting widow to orphaned bastard: The day the yellow-coated Dandon fired an empty gun at Seth Toombs with a pitiful spark and the pirate Devlin clicked his left-locked gun into life and walked it into Seth’s nape with the words:

‘Lay them down, Seth. I ain’t empty, and you’ll die else.’

Seth turned his head, heedful of the cold barrel kissing his collar, and hissed over his shoulder, ‘I’ve been dead once already, Judas. I’ll not be bitten twice.’ And Devlin caught the clockwork sound of a pistol near his head and the young man’s face in the corner of his eye.

‘My name is Davis, Cap’n Devlin. Howell Davis. Pleased to meet you. Twitch a finger, blink an eye, and I’ll send that head of yours to the sea.’

Seth turned. A cold grin dragged across his face painfully. ‘Ain’t no Peter Sam here I see, Devlin. No Black Bill. Just a mess of you against more than twice as many.’ He brought up his gully blade to gently ease the barrel of Devlin’s pistol aside. ‘It be over, Patrick. Come to my ship with me and we’ll talk. There’ll be lots we can mull over.’

Devlin looked over Seth’s shoulder to Lawson with cutlass poised, staring back. To his right, across the ship, the blood-black face of Hugh Harris glared above white bared teeth.

He glanced over to the others. Young John Rice. Adam Cowrie. Pirates to a man, Devlin read fear and bloodlust in their looks and his arm faltered with the weight of the pistol still outstretched to Seth’s head. Lastly he met Dandon’s face, and Dandon removed his hat, held it to his front over the small-barrelled pistol lifted from his silk belt and winked as Devlin recalled their exchange of less than an hour ago.

This is folly, Patrick, Dandon had said. There is the gold to consider and the letters that will save Peter. You should think on.

And he remembered his own reply about conscience, about men’s hearts, and he winked back to Dandon.

‘F*ck it!’ Devlin spat and fired his pistol shot into Seth Toombs’s yellowed sneer.