Hunt for White Gold

Chapter Thirty-Two





‘I’ve known worse,’ Dandon remarked, wiping the mould from his coat after he had foolishly leant against the cool walls of his cell. He removed the garment and folded it carefully on the bench that would also be his bed. He tended to his wrists where the chains had chafed and listened to the collection of footsteps echoing from the stairs without.

There were six cells in the base of the tower, below the level of the town yet still high above the harbour, but with no grill to enjoy the view. The cells circled the walls.

In an alcove at what should have been one corner spiralled the stone steps to the upper storeys, and through Dandon’s wrought-iron door he observed them for any descending sound or flickering lantern.

The soldier who had shoved him into his new home informed him that he should be honoured to be gaoled so. Most other drunken locals were interred in the wooden barracks. The cells were for the condemned of old, and that odour was the last reminder of the fort’s Spanish past. Dandon was alone in his; Hugh Harris and John Lawson shared a cell; and the other two, Ben Rice and Adam Cowrie, younger hands no more than forty years between them, shared another.

They had scraped their way through the battle on the Talefan and now sobriety exhibited to them the clarity of their fate. The scratchings on the walls from men long dead prophesied too late to mend their ways and left them sitting silent and still, not caring for the yells of the others, as their captain entered the dark confinement with his armed company.

‘Ho! Patrick!’ Dandon yelled through the iron weave of his door. ‘Could they not find a rope big enough for your head there, Captain?’

Hugh Harris chimed in. ‘I’ve saved you a room next to mine, Cap’n. Hoping you didn’t tell them you could walk through walls!’

In the centre of the stone quarters a square table and chair formed the station of the guard, who could see all the cells from his chair, and likewise the prisoners could watch him like an actor upon a stage. He was a skinny man, like every lobster Devlin had ever seen, not like the puffed up swollen marines who could blow you over. These were slivers of men, chipped off London’s walls.

‘Take out your pockets,’ the wretch rasped as Devlin’s escort brought him to the edge of the table. Awkwardly, with the chains, the waistcoat was emptied: a meerschaum pipe, hinged brass tobacco box, tinder box with lens. No coin, patches or cartridges. No knife, either. Devlin had not been without a knife since he was nine. Now he had not even a gully blade to eat with. He was less than a boy now. They ran hands over his belt and sash for the bulge of something, anything.

‘Take off your boots,’ the voice rasped again and Devlin did so, shaking them upside down to reveal no hidden weapons. With a nod to the right, leaving him nothing but his boots in his hands, he was walked to his cell.

Dandon and Hugh could not see each other, their cells sharing a wall, only the fists of the other as they hung onto their cell doors and waited. Their captain would do something. Any moment now.

The cell was unlocked. The soldiers tightened their grip on their muskets as the guard took Devlin’s chains and slowly removed the makeshift manacles.

‘Thanks,’ Devlin said, his arms lighter with freedom, and he stepped in under the stone lintel.

Confidence and cruelty flooded back to the one who had struck Devlin before. He raised his musket again and rammed Devlin’s shoulder, tripping him into his cell as the door slammed with a throw and the three padlocks were clicked shut in seconds by a well-practised hand.

The lobster stood in front of the door, judging the distance for a hand grab from the man within. ‘I thought you were going to kill me if I touched you again, dog?’ he sneered and spat at Devlin’s feet.

Devlin rubbed his wrists and rolled his shoulder through the pain. He looked past the soldier, as if he could see to the ocean beyond the walls.

‘I have killed you,’ he said flatly. ‘Spend all your coin tonight. Find a woman.’

There came the click of the musket’s dog-head pulled back and Dandon and Hugh shook at their iron doors with cries for quarter.

‘Enough!’ The bellow from John Coxon at the steps made the soldiers jump away from the cell. Dandon and Hugh held their breath as they watched him approach. ‘Get away from him!’ Coxon scowled. ‘Back to your posts!’ He strode forward and was on them in three steps. ‘Away with you. Wherever you should be. This man will be under my command.’ The two lobsters beat away, back up the stairs; the guard saluted and returned to his table. Coxon looked briefly into the cell and called back the guard, his voice too low for Dandon and the others to hear. ‘Get some supper.’ He pressed a reale into the man’s clammy hand. ‘I’ll watch them.’

The guard passed an eye over Coxon’s pistol in his belt and the hilt of his sword. The captain breathed over him. ‘Two minutes,’ he whispered.

‘Aye, sir,’ and the man ducked away to the mess upstairs, where a mug of small beer and a plate of cheese awaited him.

Coxon looked at the pirates hanging off the doors opposite, pacing in front of them as he spoke. ‘Without your steel and pistols you seem much smaller, gentlemen. Almost like good citizens.’

‘Come closer and I’ll show you how good I am, Cap’n,’ Hugh Harris growled.

Dandon raised a finger through a square of his door, ‘And I tend to carry neither, Captain Coxon, as is my wont. I prefer much subtler methods if you recall.’

‘Of course you do, surgeon.’ He whipped back to Devlin’s cell, close to the door where Devlin joined him, both leaning in to whisper as if merely partners at cards.

‘I promise you Sarah died of the fever, Patrick. And before she did, she entrusted me with your secret. I reckon two thousand pounds’ worth, what say you?’

‘About that I’d say, John.’ Devlin gripped the iron door, bringing his mouth closer. ‘And what are you to do with it?’

‘The rest of it is aboard the Talefan?’

‘Perhaps,’ Devlin cocked his head, judging Coxon’s voice, which held a different tone from that he recalled of his old master. It was the tone of gold rattling in a pocket.

‘Or perhaps a large portion with that Howell Davis? I have sent him and his men to bring your load in. But I might order the Mumvil to be searched also. Just in case. And whatever he might carry to the Buck.’

‘What are you after suggesting, John?’ Devlin leant back, his voice louder.

‘I suggest,’ Coxon moved closer in, almost biting the bars with his bitter words, ‘that Howell Davis is not the valiant hero that he is sketched to be. I suggest that you were coming back for your gold and that Davis did not capture you. He is with you. I know it. And a day will tell it I’m sure. But there is something I am missing. I have taken your gold, but I can feel my own skin crawling and telling me that there is something afoot here, Patrick.’

Devlin let go the bars, falling back, cocksure as if the future were only his to know. ‘And what of you, John, this past year? I sent you back in shame to your masters yet you turn up here under Woodes Rogers, no less. And all the pirates pardoned, and Providence a colony as bright and English as Bermuda, although covered in shit and salt. And me but one of the flies upon it. Shall we not tell Rogers about the gold now? Together like the good friends that we are?’

Devlin’s rising smile stopped as the walnut butt and brass cap of Coxon’s pistol rattled through the crossed bars of the cell. A small pistol, but its presence felt like a battering ram through the bars.

‘Take it,’ Coxon said coolly. ‘Take it now. I offer it. I’ll say you wrestled it from me. You’ve done that before, remember? The guard will be back soon and you can free yourself. And your men.’

The others had seen the pistol lift and twist between the bars, but the words were dim and they strained against the iron to hear. Devlin looked down at the beckoning weapon – as sure a key to his cell as if he had forged it himself.

‘What goes on, John? Do you think I am hard enough to kill my own men and a dozen more just to get here under some ruse? Pretend to be brought to justice? Can you not imagine that I am simply caught by a crew that bested me? Or does it rile you that a fool like Davis bested me when you could not?’

‘Take the pistol. It’s a simple test. I give you the chance to escape. On my own head.’

‘But why, John? I am caught and barred. What harm am I to you, now?’

‘You won’t take it?’ Coxon edged the weapon further in, its steel scraping over the ironwork. Devlin backed away more, his face now in shadow, his palms up in retreat.

‘As I thought,’ Coxon dragged the weapon clear. ‘There is more to come.’ He brought the weapon up, twisted it in one casual movement, and aimed through the mesh of iron to the trapped man in the cell. ‘If I can’t hang you for the sake of others in their ignorance …’ He thumbed back the hammer suddenly, held his breath and fired before Devlin could move.

The head flashed into the pan with the spark of an empty charge. A candle snuff of smoke between them and nothing more. No bullet. No death. Just answer enough for Coxon to finish his sentence grimly.

‘Now I know it. I can prepare.’

He looked no longer into the cell and buried the pistol back in his belt, ignoring the jeers to his left and barging past the guard returning with his pewter mug and muslin-covered plate.

The Milford and the Delicia. Enough. More than a match. The night was coming in. And it would soon be dark enough for shadows to be upon the waters.