Hunt for White Gold

Chapter Thirty-Nine





Escape




To the beach. To the boats and oars. A chink of dawn showed on their left, the night still their greatest aid against the law that would grind them into the earth. To the law they were a band of cut-throats, devils in lead and steel, spitting powder. The reek of death seeped from them, drunk and rapacious, these villains of blood – as long as night remained.

Daylight would shatter them, remove the hooded cloak, reveal barefoot sailors ingrained with grease and pitch, clothed in dirty slops and harlequin waistcoats, drunkenly slurring with dull eyes above, the scrapings of the sea. Daylight was for knights in glinting armour not for alley dogs who were wolves in the darkness but pitiful rats at noon.

But their weapons shone like jewels. Pistols were waxed and oiled, the screws tight as nuns. Muskets stayed dry, their priming pans gleaming like virgins and treated with just as much tenderness. One shot fired, one man dead. They would show nothing of the clumsiness of the mutton-handed soldiers bearing down upon them, blinking as they shot, muskets rising high with the lurch of the trigger. Pirates milked their triggers and fired with their shoulders not their hands. They marked men like sewing needles, their bullets threaded through their enemies’ eyes. As long as the night remained. As long as the legend stood.

Five of Devlin’s men sheltered among the trees, a rear guard checking the approach from the town, shuffling back to the next tree like hunchbacks, scuttling through the ferns and spreading out like a hand waiting for the herd of soldiers to come lumbering forth.

They sweated and heaved, out of breath, but their barrels remained steady as if separate from the tired, anxious forms, the pimple of a gunsight waiting for a pale English face to appear through the gloom.

Silence.

Nothing.

They move back again to the next tree downhill, then wait again for five more breaths, knowing that their brothers are creeping back with them, unseen, to the beach and the boats, beside them somewhere in the dark.

Then it came. A rumble of leather, brass, buckles and ammo boxes under thumping boots, and at once a crow’s call echoed its way to Devlin and Bill whilst the five men of the rear guard pulled back the hammers of their guns and held their breath.

Devlin was on the beach now, beholden to Bill to lead. The white of the surf was welcoming, crashing around the two boats.

‘They’re coming.’ Devlin cocked his musket, Dandon filtered in behind him, cradling the bamboo tube in his arms.

Bill spied the brazier on the sands, smouldering red and shrunken now but with white coals still waiting for food. An idea began to form in his mind, but it was shattered by the sound of the first shots from inland.

It was the smooth wafting crack of partridge shot from the rear guard. Not one bullet but a weight of lead grain, a shotgun spread, inaccurate and short of range but murderous to a cluster of bodies funnelled along a narrow path.

Ten lobsters dropped their guns and howled. Eyes were peppered, uniforms flayed and skin burnt. Checking for wounds their comrades buckled to their knees and fired blind into the dark whilst Tolliver ducked and counted his fallen men.

He had heard the crash of five shots, yet almost a dozen of his fifty men limped backwards. He went for his sword to beat them back, but his hand found only an empty scabbard. Devlin. In the end he pushed the wounded down to the beach with kicks and curses.


‘We’re to row to Hog Island, Cap’n,’ Bill said as he dragged Devlin away from the snaps of gunfire. ‘The Shadow is on the other side.’ He pulled his captain along, Devlin’s survival the honour of these last hours, but something would have to be done to stop them becoming fish in a barrel as they rowed away.

Bill yelled for those with canvas satchels of fireworks – bottles, iron grenadoes, anything loaded with scrap, powder and nails – to jump to his back. ‘Dump your load around the brazier, boys!’ Then he led them down to the shore as cracks of musket fire spat out from the dunes. Devlin watched as men threw their loads to the brazier and understood, but still he crouched and raised his musket to the path, Dandon at his shoulder. This had been the beach he had come upon that afternoon. The same beach where Rogers had landed over a month ago now. To his left he saw the pile of dead pirates due to be burned in the morning. Seth Toombs lay somewhere within the stack.

‘Should we not retire to the boats, Patrick?’ Dandon ducked as the rear guard appeared and a spark above the beach sent a musket ball humming past his head.

‘Just hold the letters, Dandon,’ Devlin spoke over his shoulder. He fired back at the spark then stood and ran, biting into a fresh cartridge. Dandon huffed and fell in behind him again as Devlin knelt and fired like an archer into the white waistcoat of a lobster running down the path. Dandon began to slap him in approval but Devlin was already up again, falling back, and Dandon quickly followed behind.

At the boats men were already scrambling aboard. Oars rifled through thole pins.

‘Devlin!’ Bill yelled back, throwing himself into one of the boats. ‘Come now, Captain!’

Redcoats began to pile from the path onto the sand, spreading left and right, going down on one knee, bringing up muskets to shoulders, but the glow of the brazier shielded the boats just enough. Devlin fired once more, his last act on Providence, and sloped to the surf before the powder cleared, Dandon running by his side, a storm of bullets following them.

They leapt aboard the boat just as the sea pulled them back into its bosom. But slow, too slow despite the power of the oars and now Tolliver was on the beach, looking up and down his line of thirty guns ready to fire.

‘Down!’ Devlin ordered but those pirates with loaded muskets still aimed their guns at the land.

‘Fire!’ Tolliver bellowed and his men slammed their dogheads home, mouths of fire tearing along the beach.

Wood splintered around the boats, lead sang off thole pins and musket barrels, thudded into oars and flicked the water like rain. The pirates stood and ignored it all. They shot at each other daily for sport; they grazed on lead. Tolliver heard them laugh as they fired back and saw five of his men topple to the sand.

‘Shoot the fireworks, lads!’ Bill roared but Devlin held up his hand to halt them, looking only to Hugh kneeling beside him in the boat, his musket already raised and loaded.

‘Hugh,’ he said slowly. No order. No expectation.

Hugh Harris nodded, kissed his thumb and leant into the shot. The brazier was his beacon, a green bottle glowing beneath it his target, the roll of the waves mere impetus. His cheek pressed against the stock of his musket and sweat dripped coldly on his arm; the brass sight was the extent of his world as he closed his left eye and fired.

The bottle exploded and old powder shivered into flame, glass and nails whistled and the powder hungered as the rest of the crock and glass bottles ignited.

The grenadoes of halved musket balls and twine, the iron-and powder-filled balls, gave in to the heat and the brazier itself burst into flame, sending a storm of ash and sand thirty feet into the air and a hail of glass, nails and shrapnel blazing towards pirates and soldiers both.


Tolliver raised himself from the back-turned crouch he had adopted when the brazier went up. He coughed through the cloud of powder, trying to wave it away but seeing only a wall of fire and smoke, the boats rowing away no longer visible.

He thought of Woodes Rogers, of facing him and explaining his failure, his lost sword, his lost prisoners. He screamed at his men to get down to the shore through the blinding fire and the choking sulphur. Instead they stood, turned their eyes from him and wandered back to the path with their muskets trailing: it would soon be breakfast and they had lost hours of sleep. Tolliver was just one captain of many and did not Rogers deal them out like cards? Perhaps another was already waiting in the wings. The men had done their duty.

Tolliver was left alone to meet the dawn and listen to the laughter rolling off the tide and echoing along the beach. He ran his hand along his empty scabbard. Tell him I took your sword. Nothing you could do. And Tolliver had almost thanked him. He began to walk back, then prised something from the hours past and stopped in his tracks.

Coxon. John Coxon.

Eleven o’clock Coxon had sailed, hours past now, and would be somewhere north of the island, this little Isle of Wight island, long gone now. But the fact was that Coxon was out there, patrolling. His duty was not done. All the way back to the fort Tolliver began to build in his mind the importance of the man he had only seen count the pineapple plants off the ships after they had first landed. The horizon began to glow white. A hot day in August was just beginning.

Fear no more the heat of the sun. Tolliver’s recollection of Shakespeare vague and weak but relevant nonetheless. He tramped up the path behind his men. ‘And fear no more the frown of the great.’