Hunt for White Gold

Chapter Forty-Nine





The immutable law of the sea was the only faith that John Coxon knelt to in spite of his parson father’s vigorous attempts to make a church-going Christian of him; and, in spite of Devlin’s ingenious attempt to shake the Milford from his Shadow’s stern, to Charles Town Coxon inevitably came.

In London he could stumble out of The Grapes into Narrow Street after dark and not know east from west; but streets did not have tides, did not leave wakes, apart from the ebb and flow of vice and the morning roll of the brewer’s dray. Ships he could follow. Seas he knew. And he had followed Devlin.

South-east of Charles Town harbour, far away from the acres of wood bustling along Cooper river trading indigo and rice, black backs and beaver laps, the Milford sat and waited. She had been cleared for action since dawn.

‘A sail!’ The cry echoed around her decks. It was a grey sail, above a black and red freeboard, sporting a ragged kingdom pennant trailing from her backstay but fooling noone. She was making for the Mer Du Nord, hiding herself amid the merchants and Indiamen. But not hiding well enough.

‘That’s her,’ Coxon grinned as he stood at the larboard chains with Rosher, who had not seen the Shadow this close before. There, threading through the forest of masts, against the tide, less than a mile away, he could count the red gunports facing them. Nine along the weatherboard and two quarterdeck guns, another at the fo’c’sle. Nine pounders. One broadside, 216lbs, if double-shot. The Milford could hurl 312lbs in reply and Rosher tapped the gunwale proudly.

‘Weigh anchor!’ Halesworth yelled in response to Coxon’s nod. ‘Make fighting sail!’

‘We’ll meet her in less than an hour, Rosher,’ said Coxon, checking his watch. ‘Away from the lanes. Meet her in the Atlantic. Take her once and for all.’ He noticed a tremor of concern pass across the young man’s face and shooed it away. ‘Come now, Rosher, you are to be congratulated! It is not every day we get the chance for a prize!’

‘No, Captain,’ he agreed. ‘But I am glad for your presence also on such a day.’

Coxon sniffed away the compliment. ‘Lay dead-lights to the cabin windows and prepare for closed-quarters, Mister Rosher, then to your gun-crew.’ He looked over to the Shadow where some activity drew his eye and also Mister Halesworth to his elbow.

‘Captain, it appears—’

‘I see it, Mister Halesworth: they are raising arming cloths.’

Along the ship the pirates were stringing ‘fights’, red sheets trimmed in white that would both shield them from accurate targeting and hide their own actions and numbers. The reason for the choice of red was obvious enough and the sheets were pulled up even to the tops until the Shadow looked more like a costumed circus tent than a man-of-war.

‘He knows we are on him. Stand to, Mister Halesworth. Putting up his fights shows he is troubled.’

Halesworth traced a finger out to the Shadow’s stern to the gig being lowered from the counter. Two figures were aboard. Coxon followed Halesworth’s finger to the sight and watched the white flag shimmy up the Shadow’s mainmast from the cover of the arming cloths.

‘Troubled indeed, Captain,’ Halesworth raised his eyebrows at the unexpected behaviour of a man he had begun to fear, sure now that one of the dark figures rowing towards them was the pirate Devlin. ‘He wishes a truce of some kind perhaps?’ He looked carefully at his captain who seemed to be studying the boat stoically but whose hand was tight and pale against the gunwale.

‘Stay your sails, Mister Halesworth. Let him come to me,’ decided Coxon, then turned his back to Halesworth and walked aft to the Great Cabin. ‘I’ll kill any man who fires against him.’

Coxon spared one look over the water to the black and red ship. Whatever Devlin had planned to do, whatever fate Charles Town held for him, whatever trickery New Providence had provided, had come to an end. And he wanted to hear what picture the man who had once been his thrall had painted on the world this final time, before his inevitable end.