Hunt for White Gold

Chapter Forty-Eight





Do you want to be a pirate?




He closed the door to them, biting back the shock seeping through him as he summoned his boy with a scream. Outside, Devlin stood over Peter Sam and gave him his hand, hauling him up like a fallen child.

Peter stumbled but stood. He touched Devlin’s hand. ‘I think I been lost, Captain …’ his voice faded.

Devlin held him up and gave him his shoulder. ‘You came back, Peter. Besides, I didn’t have anything else to worry about.’ They hobbled together to the house and Teach stepped out from the trees.

Peter Sam straightened as best he could, pulled his bloodied chains taut again and stepped in front of Devlin.

Devlin levelled his blade. ‘Come on then,’ his voice grating as ribs pinched inside him. ‘Let’s have you an’ all.’

Edward Teach slowly reached into his waistcoat, past the pistols holstered about his chest, and brought out the stump of candle he had carried with him the past year.

‘I am due to light this,’ he said as placidly as his growling tones would allow. ‘I need to light it to end your days, Captain Devlin.’ He pulled down his broad hat to cover his eyes and tossed the candle to Devlin’s feet. ‘Too much wind here to light such a promise. We should go inside and finish that dog. I’ve a ship to gets to and so has you.’ Then Teach gave up his only secret, and he gave little to any man: ‘He has a tunnel to the harbour.’ Devlin said nothing and Teach lent an arm to Peter Sam and they walked to the house, only Devlin giving a backwards look to the blood-soaked body of Valentim Mendes staining the fallen Magnolia blossom. No-one cast an eye to the abandoned bamboo tube or the fleshy slab that had once been Hib Gow.

Inside, Ignatius’s boy had helped him wrap his blackened hand and pulled back the rug to reveal the ringbolt door that led to the storm drain and the harbour. Tossing aside the other of Devlin’s pistols, Ignatius took his own from his desk, awkwardly cocking it with one hand, accustomed as he was to palming back the dog-head. It clicked just in time to meet the crash of the doors from the garden and tremblingly played over all three men stepping into the room.

‘Keep your distance!’ Ignatius’s voice rattled, the shot nearly let fly too soon.

‘Do you not want the Jesuit’s letters, Ignatius?’ Devlin called. ‘You left them in the garden there.’ Devlin and Teach separated instinctively, the only defence against a single shot. Peter Sam attached himself to Devlin, the room crawling with memories around him.

Ignatius bade his boy open the hole and as the trap door slammed back it belched a breath of sea and moss.

‘I am leaving for my ship, gentlemen. I will fire on you should you follow.’ He moved around his desk to the hole, sparing an eye to check the ladder, convinced that he could climb down and still keep an armed hand upon the pirates. ‘For now you may have the letters. That is the price I pay for my escape. Perhaps time may come to haunt you for what you have spoilt this day. I very much hope so. You could have been witnesses to the birth of a nation.’ He took his first step down into the tunnel and neither Devlin nor Teach moved a muscle. ‘For the moment you are free, but mark me, gentlemen, I am not one to be tried.’

The black youth suddenly realised he was to be abandoned to the mercy of cut-throats and skipped to the hole. ‘Master?’

Ignatius swung the pistol at him. ‘Stay, boy!’ Then he vanished.

He ducked along the passage for only a few feet before he noticed that something blocked the shaft of light that should have been shining in from the sea.

One lightning-fast hand slapped his pistol loose while another whipped its own across Ignatius’s jaw.

‘Hullo, chum!’ Hugh Harris chirped. ‘Where you planning on going then?’ he asked as he slipped his kidney dagger from his belt.

Ignatius scuttled back towards the light from above, his hand to his mouth, horrified by the taste of his own blood. He looked up at the bright square light above him just as it was blotted out by the silhouette of Peter Sam looming over the hole. Peter descended in silence and Devlin slammed the hatch behind him.

‘What’s your name, lad?’ Devlin put his face close to the youth’s, who had begun to shake tears from his wide eyes as the screams came wrenched and muffled from the cellar beneath them.

The boy looked deep into the pirate’s eyes and wondered how the man could not hear the terrible sounds from below, the face so kindly looking upon him. ‘Matthew, sir,’ he caught a sob and pleaded. ‘I is fifteen years old.’

‘Well, Matthew,’ the pirate squeezed his shoulder. ‘I could do with some help getting back to sea. How do you fancy being a pirate, my boy?’

The cellar door rattled once, desperately, like a storm door, and then all became still. Only the dark eyes of the pirate remained, looking softly and questioningly into William’s face as if nothing had happened to any of them.

‘I think …’ he stammered, ‘I think I should not like it, thanking you kindly, Captain.’