Golden Lion (32 page)

‘Why am I not surprised, George Dowling? I would have wagered my last brass farthing – though the devil knows I ain’t even got that – on you taking his side in this,’ McCawley spat at the quartermaster. ‘You’re meant to be representing us,
Mister
bloody Dowling. Not him!’

Dowling, who always led the attack when boarding a ship, swept the cap off his head and used it to fan his bald pate as though his only concern was trying to stay cool. ‘If there’s a vote, I’ll stand by it, whichever way it goes,’ he shrugged.

McCawley nodded, relieved to hear that, for as quartermaster Dowling acted as trustee for the whole crew, serving as a sort of civil magistrate aboard ship, so that having him onside, or at least not against the idea of a vote, was a bolster to McCawley’s cause.

The whole of Rivers’s crew had turned out by the looks of it: one hundred and five men, plus another sixty that comprised the crews of the three captured dhows that, along with the
Achilles
, made up the small predatory fleet. Those vessels lay at anchor in the lee of a headland on Ilha Metundo, hidden from the sight of passing shipping out in the open sea. The island swept south-west where it thinned to a tail of land which was only visible at low tide: this sweep of coralline, ship-disembowelling shallows emerging again after several cable lengths to become Ilha Quifuqui. Together these two islands were slung across the turquoise sea like a hammock, and Captain Rivers doubted there could be a finer base for a man in his line of business.

‘Spit it out then, McCawley. Brain’s boiling in me skull like stew in a pot,’ a white-haired old sea dog by the name of Arthur Crumwell called out. There were murmurs of ‘aye’ and ‘go on, tell us’ from the crowd of onlookers.

McCawley grimaced and nodded to assure them all that he was coming to the crux of the matter. Many of the women and children who lived on the island with their menfolk had also gathered to be a part of it all and learn whether McCawley’s challenge would see him sleeping in the captain’s cabin on the
Achilles
’s tomorrow morning.

‘We accept that he who is captain has absolute power when fighting, chasing or being chased,’ McCawley said. ‘Not a man of us has issue with that. But in all other matters the captain is ruled by the majority wishes of the crew.’

‘Aye, we’ve played our part,’ Crumwell nodded. ‘None can say as we ain’t. We got the holes to prove it, and all!’ He lifted his arms to exhibit scars under each, one from a pistol ball, the other probably from a cutlass.

Captain Rivers thumbed tobacco into his pipe and looked out to sea while his underlings prattled on. He pretended to be absorbed by the petrels and gulls which speckled the sky, and the parrots and lovebirds which squawked noisily amongst the mangrove trees like some strange echo of the men on the beach.

‘It is us as decides if a prize is worth risking our necks for,’ McCawley went on. ‘It is us as will be strung up and made to dance the hempen jig if one of the king’s admirals brings his frigates here to prise us from our nest.’ McCawley turned a glare on his captain now, his scarred face twisted with defiance. ‘It is us as decides who our captain will be.’ He drew a long deep breath, and then spat it out as viciously as a poisonous cobra. ‘I call a vote, and put myself forward as the next captain of this crew.’

‘Good!’ Rivers nodded as he knocked the tobacco ash from his pipe against the stem of the palm tree. ‘You took long enough to come to the point.’ Then he pointed the stem of his pipe at McCawley. ‘So you want my ship?’ These were the first words he had uttered since he had come from his hut beyond the tree line to hear the men’s grievances.

‘The
Achilles
be
our
ship,’ McCawley protested, although without conviction. His eyes grew shifty now, losing their grip on Rivers’s own.

‘The
Achilles
is mine,’ Rivers contradicted him with enough steel in his rebuttal to force even the most ardent of McCawley’s supporters to lower their eyes. For they all knew Black Jeb Rivers had earned that nickname by his proficiency with gun and sword during the Civil War. Some said that he’d killed more men than the pox and some even claimed that he’d come back from the dead, on the night when a thousand newly made corpses littered the field at Edgehill.

However, McCawley had gone too far to drop his anchor and halt what he had started. He knew it, too, judging by the incessant twitching of his right eye, and his right hand that was flexing, opening and closing as though preparing to grip the cutlass hilt in his belt. Rivers almost admired the man. No one else had ever dared challenge him to become leader of the crew. And yet with McCawley as their captain they would all be drowned, shot or hung before the year was out.

‘We’ll vote right here,’ McCawley said, ‘and Quartermaster Dowling will see that it is done fair and honest.’

Dowling nodded and Rivers saw McCawley’s major accomplices were murmuring to the men around them, warning them against voting the wrong way.

‘Your time is over, old man,’ McCawley told Rivers.

The man was half right. Rivers would give him that. At forty-six he was not a young man. His thinning hair, tied back in a long pigtail beneath his broad-brimmed hat, was silver now and his bones complained in the mornings when he climbed out of his bunk. But was his time over? No, McCawley was wrong about that.

Rivers touched his hat’s rim, which was the pre-arranged signal, and the loyalists in his crew went to work. Bendall tried to haul his cutlass from his belt but the dagger in his heart robbed him of strength and he fell to his knees in the sand. It was butchery, and when Rivers picked out Laney amongst the slaughtered he saw the man standing there staring right at him, the grim red smile cut across his throat spilling blood down his naked torso.

Then Rivers was moving and the men cleared a path for him, scuttling away from John McCawley too, the way woodlice flee when someone puts fire to the log in which they were hiding. McCawley saw him coming, and yet to his credit he drew his pistol, and cocked the hammer.

‘Damn you to hell and back!’ he yelled and he fired. Rivers felt the ball shred the air by his left ear; but so many had tried to kill him and much good it had done them. And now McCawley hurled his pistol into the sand and lifted his cutlass even as Rivers pulled his own blade from its scabbard. It was a broad-bladed, basket-hilted sword. Not an entirely practical weapon when boarding enemy ships; however, ashore it was a limb-lopping man-killer.

McCawley aimed a blow at Rivers’s head. Rivers blocked his blade with a dead hit. Then he slammed the basket hilt of his own sword into McCawley’s face. The man staggered backwards but Rivers followed up in the instant and led with the point. McCawley froze as the blade went full length into his armpit. Then slowly his fingers opened and the cutlass fell into the sand at his feet. Rivers leaned close to him and locked his free arm around McCawley’s neck like a lover. Then he worked the blade back and forth, enlarging the wound, splitting his heart so that the blood pumped out in a thick crimson stream.

When McCawley’s legs buckled under him, he plucked out the long blade and stepped back.

‘Anyone else?’ Rivers asked in a conversational tone.

His own supporters closed up around him. However, he knew which men McCawley had bought off, the ones who had been busy in the last week coercing others with threats and bribes, and those men were nothing more than meat for the crabs now.

‘Captain!’ one of his own men called, and for a heartbeat Rivers thought that perhaps the day’s killing wasn’t over after all.

‘Captain! Ships!’ the man called again, pointing out to sea. Rivers pushed his way through the crowd and shaded his eyes to get a better look at the approaching sails.

‘That leading frigate is a beauty!’ Dowling spoke in awe. ‘Fast, light and powerful. Proud as can be. And that’s a pretty little caravel following in her wake.’

The frigate was not moving as fast as she could have been, for she only had half her canvas spread to the wind. Evidently her captain had enough sense to be cautious, being this close to the island. He would be taking his soundings and watching his speed, his deep-keeled vessel being almost amongst the shoals and reefs. But
why
was he this close to the island? Rivers asked himself; most passing ships gave it a wide berth, sticking to the deeper parts of the channel or even holding not less than a half league’s distance from the mainland.

‘Be this yet another ambitious fellow come to snuff out the Pirate Rivers and his cutthroat crew?’ Dowling pondered his own question, as he shot his captain a wry look.

‘Catch her in our net and we shall be rich as kings.’ Someone else voiced his opinion, and Rivers could almost feel the hackles rise all around him as his men steeled themselves to the hunt like the predators they were.

‘She has twice our guns,’ Dowling said. ‘Even with the dhows she’ll be a tough nut to crack.’ And yet the quartermaster’s eyes glinted hungrily at the sight of her. ‘We’ll lose men. Boats too, like as not.’

Rivers nodded because this was all true. But his crew wanted a prize and so he would give them one. ‘They will fly past and need never know that we are here.’ He gave a false opinion to stir them up. ‘Or …’

He left the alternative unstated. He knew that the frigate’s captain would soon spot Ilha Quifuqui due south of him and turn his bows west in order to skirt that island, which would give Rivers time to set his trap. ‘We’ll send the dhows through the channel to cut her off south of Quifuqui. Meantime, we’ll give her gunners something to think about. While she flirts with the
Achilles
, the dhow crews will creep up and board her, bow and stern.’

Dowling nodded. It had worked before and, God willing, it would work again today.

Rivers was about to give the order for the crews to get to their stations, when something else gave him pause. ‘She’s changing course, Mr Dowling,’ he said, frowning now not because of the sun’s brightness but because something did not feel right. For the frigate was swinging her bows round, not into the west to skirt the southern tip of Ilha Quifuqui, but rather into the east. Towards them.

‘Bugger me but she’s seen us!’ Dowling lamented.

Rivers shook his head. ‘She knew we were here,’ he said, somehow certain of it.

‘Maybe King Charlie has sent his bastards to string us up,’ a man suggested.

‘They’ll never have enough bloody rope!’ a woman shouted.

But there was no doubt now. That handsome, powerful ship was coming for them and even if she held a cable length offshore to avoid the sandbars she could bring her broadside to bear on the
Achilles
and the dhows at their moorings.

‘We’d best flee, Captain,’ Dowling said. ‘Through the gap and away we go. But we’ll have to go now, and not waste a single minute.’

There was an urgency in the quartermaster’s voice verging on panic, for although the frigate was still a long way off it would take time to get everyone on the island aboard their respective vessels.

But Rivers did not move from the spot. He gave no orders other than telling a young lad to run up to his hut and fetch his telescope, though he would not likely need the thing by the time the boy returned. There was something about that ship. For all the sandbars that lay between her position and his own base in the lee of the outcrop, the frigate still came on, as though her captain knew the deep channels.

Or maybe it was not her captain, but someone at her bow rail; someone standing near the leadsman and yelling his commands back to the helmsman by the whipstaff.

Then Rivers saw the signal. He, not one of the younger men or the boys with their fresh eyes, but he with his eyes that had been stung with a lifetime of cannon and musket smoke and seen so much horror that it was a wonder they had not given up their sight. There were two ensigns flapping at the frigate’s masthead. One of them bore the Dutch Republic’s colours of orange, white and blue, the other was the Union flag. Why would her captain fly both ensigns? The English might be at peace with the Dutch, for now at least anyway, but Rivers had never seen a ship flying the colours of both countries at the same time. Nor would he ever expect to see such a thing again.

Then came the thunder; three peals of it from three of the frigate’s great brass culverins, their smoke blooms whipped away on the breeze.

‘Well I never,’ Dowling muttered as he broke into a smile. That had not been a broadside, but a salute. A moment later he was yelling after those of the crew who were already hurrying across the beach towards the
Achilles
and the dhows, telling them it was all well, that there would be no fighting today.

‘Good day, mijnheer,’ Rivers muttered to himself as he stared across at the frigate. For that three-gun salute was the pre-arranged greeting from Captain Michiel Tromp, with whom he had done a certain amount of business in the past.

‘Wonder what that cheese-head’s doing here, then,’ Dowling asked nobody in particular. ‘But he’s been busy by the looks of him.’

Rivers shook his head. ‘That ain’t
his
ship, lad. He’s a greedy whoreson and no mean sailor, but even Tromp’s not fool enough to go after a prize like that with this damned truce between His Majesty and the cheese-heads.’ He frowned, not entirely convinced by his own argument. ‘In any event, how would he go about it?’ He dipped his head at the frigate whose bows were now pointing almost directly at those gathered on the beach. ‘A beauty like that would pound any ship Tromp will ever skipper to kindling.’

‘So … mayhaps …’ John Blighton was frowning ‘… mayhaps Tromp’s gone turncoat, bringing some English captain down on us an’ now they’ve come to burn our bloody boats and smoke us out like bloody bilge rats.’

‘Calm down, boy,’ Rivers shook his head. ‘Tromp would not do that.’ Although he felt his jaw tighten at the thought of such betrayal. ‘He knows that if he did I would hang him with his own gut rope.’ He turned to his quartermaster. ‘Mr Dowling, you know what to do.’

The man nodded and marched off down the beach.