Blood Diamond: A Pirate Devlin Novel (42 page)

The diamond had only ever known blood. But if he died and the stone became theirs? Nothing gained. The dead wasted. If he took it with his dying body to the water they might lose it still.

Hold on. Keep standing. You’ve fought in gutters with less space
.

Blood trickled down his back. Why does a man’s body betray him when he needs it most? As if it is always seeking death? The blood ran warm, then cold in an instant.

When men fight to kill they fight like children. That with Trouin had been a fight of honour. It had rules that made sense even to those who watched it. This struggle was children brawling, and children fight for hate. But children do not fight with blades and they live to fight again. Devlin and Albany’s breath clouded on each other’s necks like lovers, the only sound they could hear.

Hold on, Devlin thought. Hold on to make Bill smile. For Trouin to hear the sound of the diamond falling.

‘
Cap’n
!’ Edwin ducked as he heard the slow firing of muskets muffled by the fog, but too high from the clumsy lobsters on the pitching water. But Albany stiffened at the whistling of lead over his head and Devlin needed nothing more than that.

He dropped the diamond at his feet and grabbed Albany’s wrist and held him close where their swords would not matter.

Albany felt his wrist and dagger turned towards his waistcoat. Another hand controlled his will.

The last sound Albany heard was the musket volley chipping into the oak of the monster that had ploughed out of the fog behind him and then the small hiss of his liver bursting as his dagger was twisted against him, Devlin’s fist driving deep and grinding as Albany had done to Dandon.

Albany clasped him like a brother, held his last breath wide-mouthed and stared pleadingly into Devlin’s eyes. Devlin shoved him to the Thames. Gone. Gone as easily as the rest of them. Bags of bones and flesh like the sacks he dumped in the river for the butcher when he was a boy. Not one day had passed when those bags weighed less than him and he hated them still. The sweat was the same and he wiped his face and the moment had gone. But still work to do yet.

He stooped to pick up his glistening burden with a fist running with another’s blood, covering it like a glove.

Then he looked up to his girl come to meet him.

The green smoke pouring off the cauldron on deck, the jigging scrape of Hugh Harris’s fiddle, the beat of an army of cutlasses pounding the gunwale – a thousand throats it seemed to those who heard, the jeers daring even the Tower to try them.

Devlin turned to see where Walpole was, then nodded that all was well to Edwin now there was an empty space where Albany had sat.

The soldiers gaped at the ship that had broken out of the luminescent fog. The noise, the fury, the potential of swivel guns swinging to bear at them from the black ship, all proved too much to stand. A handful of men faced cannon and cannibals. The darkness would cover the treachery and shame of whichever one of them broke first, and Walpole heard their urgent retreat.

The prince rose. ‘Good
God
!’ but he could not help a grin as he looked up at the bow, veiled like a phantom but with just enough of her prow and bowsprit rising and falling over Devlin’s shoulder to show them who she was; the eerie green cloud curling up the masts and clinging to the skeletal crosstrees.

The prince called to Walpole, who could not hear him above the crowing from the pirate ship. Ships began to awake at the clamour and the shots, different languages darting questions back and forth about the drum beats of fists of steel, the bells, the strange emerald smoke rising and mingling with the fog. But some whispered to their mates that they had seen and heard those ‘vapours’ before, and scuttled back to their hammocks.

Devlin stepped to Edwin who was shivering beneath his mask, his hands white on his oar. In front of them in the other boat stood three men, the one with the lamp shouting and cursing, begging the next. A shriek escaped from Timms as Albany’s body bumped gruesomely against their boat.

‘The diamond!’ Walpole screamed, forgetting all propriety. ‘I will double your money! I have your pardon! The boat rocked with his fury but steadied when Devlin raised his fist again and the ship suddenly ceased its drumming on the gunwales.

Silence. Only Edwin noticed the steady gentle tap by his feet and looked down at the spreading slick of black around the pirate’s boots. He looked up at the face which showed no pain save for a single train of sweat running from Devlin’s hair down his face.

Walpole remembered the prince and his pistols. ‘Your Highness! Shoot him down!’

George flopped down next to Timms, put away his pistols and stared Walpole down. The minister had overplayed his cards. Walpole twisted back to the grinning pirate and did the only thing he could to snuff the man from his sight: he hurled his lantern at him with a grunt.

A splash and hiss in the water, a roar of laughter from the darkness of the ship, and Walpole sank back and waited. There would be a speech. If pirates delivered speeches at the gallows there would surely be one now.

Devlin’s wound had torn. He was weakening but would not let them see him fall. He swept his arm back, looking once to see all their eyes upon him.

‘I brought you your stone.’

He threw it arcing over their heads, as if trying to send it back to the stars, and the first great diamond of the world dissolved into the fog forever. Walpole’s gaze followed it hopelessly, and he did not see Edwin pull Devlin up from where he had collapsed. No-one would ever be able to swear that they heard the Regent hit the water.

At almost three in the morning, Saturday September seventh 1720, London – the financial and governmental centre of the entire kingdom – suddenly was nothing more than a house of straw. Its faith had been placed not in its people but in paper, in ephemeral ‘things’. Things that even the ignorant fish of the Thames nibbled at once, twice, then discarded as just a stone.

The soldiers rowed to the minister’s boat once the pirate ship slowly began to turn. Two of them dragged up Albany’s corpse into their boat, if only because he prevented them getting in closer as he bobbed and buffeted between. An eighty-five guinea Dutch sword was still clasped in his fist, but only for a moment, as his rescuers winked at each other.

The captain vowed to Walpole that they would hunt down the waterman who had aided the pirate and had disappeared into the fog once the pirate had left. Walpole did not listen. The pirate ship was being warped round by her boats. She moved reluctantly, as if she still had unfinished business and her seams groaned in her unwillingness to turn away.

Walpole sat back with the prince. Not a word was worth uttering. The music lilted once more from the ship, jollier now and further galling the ministerial blood. He lowered his head until the chortle of the prince lifted it back up.

George whistled. ‘My! What bones that man has about him, so!’

The
Shadow
had come about, her escutcheon proudly showing her name in green and gold; no shame, no disguise. There was none here to frighten them.

Her side and mast lights were lit, bright halos burning away the shroud of fog. The twin stern lanterns had gasped into life and the black flag from the fluttering ensign-staff was busy shooing the moths away from their glass. The prince exclaimed in delight at the sight of a white skull set in a compass rose, two crossed pistols beneath.

And a pirate ship sailed down the Thames.

Hungry children do not sleep well and an excuse to wake need only be the merest sound, for there may be food when you wake from a straw bed four floors up in the eaves of a house of six families, where a square of glass does for a window that does not open, and the draught all about is more than enough to carry the sound of a distant fiddle.

The grime, moistened by spit, was quickly rubbed away from the pane of glass. A ship passes Limehouse down below, a square rigger you are sure despite the early morning fog and the ghostly green emanation trailing behind her.

With your ear closer you can hear men singing but the words are too far away to make out. Fist against fist to your eyes and you make your own spyglass to stare down at the ship and bring it closer. And your heart stops, and your eyes widen in the dark night.

You have seen them hung, your mother covering your eyes at the gibbets of tar and flesh in the streets; you have seen their bodies staked out against the tide, and you can even draw the word from the lurid headlines of discarded broadsheets if you try hard enough.

But this must be a dream and those stories belong to the wide blue sea and not your voyages of wooden swords; not to your squelching through the mud and stones of low tide and swearing that the green and white bits of glass you find there are really emeralds and diamonds. You have a paper box full of them beside your bed, guarded by a terrier pup.

But she might really be there. That black flag is real and bold, as large and fearless as you ever imagined it to be. And surely no dream could conjure the only words your ear, pressed to the glass, could hear before the ship sailed on forever from your small view onto another world. It was the line you sang all day long until a piece of bread came to finally shut your trap – but still you murmured it through your full mouth, and beat your feet against the table leg.

‘. . . and most wickedly I did, as I sailed.’

Chapter Thirty-Six

A South Sea Ballad, 1720. Author unknown.

‘Five hundred millions, notes and bonds, our stocks are worth in value;

But neither lie in goods or lands or money let me tell ye.

Yet though our foreign trade is lost of mighty wealth we vapour,

When all the riches that we boast consist in scraps of paper.’

Dawn, and Dandon awoke in less of a sweat. He was in the Great Cabin, stretched on a locker beneath the stern windows, clothed in shirt and breeches. He lifted his head to the glass and thankfully saw open sea, although the sky seemed just as wet and met it with a graveyard drabness. Devlin watched him and used the scratch of his striker sparking flame for his pipe to draw his friend’s attention.

‘We’re coursing north,’ he said when Dandon turned his head. ‘Taking the long way round. Around the coast and Scotland. Respect to Trouin. I’m sure he’d kill me else.’ He sat bare-chested, his midriff wrapped in linen to hold tight his wound. Someone had bandaged him and laudanum mellowed his pain. Dandon saw how lean he was without hat and coat, how ordinary; unclothed, the captain was somewhere else. Devlin was just a man sunk in a chair enjoying a Sunday pipe, his black hair about his shoulders, only his scars glistening with exhaustion detailing his harder lot in life.

‘Where are we going?’ Dandon swung his feet to the floor – no small talk or greeting from either of them. The last week had exhausted everyone’s breath, had even throttled Dandon’s verbosity.

‘Winter, so the Caribbee. Away from these men. Be free again.’

Dandon tried to remember how it had ended and realised he had not been a part of it. ‘And the diamond?’

Devlin shifted in his seat, just to move his wound that burned if kept still. ‘That’s all gone.’ He drew long on his pipe. ‘It was Albany who did for you.’ The cold look on him that Dandon feared would become permanent crept in. ‘That’s all done as well.’

Dandon wiped his forehead. ‘Did many . . . die?’

Devlin blew out a wraith of smoke. ‘Only those who needed.’ He saw the concern. ‘What ails, Dandon?’

‘Nothing, my friend. It is only that of late – for lack of a confessor – I have worried about your soul. I concern myself that it would be a pitiful fate for the world if you became as black of heart as some of your peers.’ He checked the face for recrimination or for the rakish grin that at least belonged to a hero in one of Cervantes’ romances; for that was who he imagined his friend to be.

Devlin dragged on his pipe. ‘I’ll take the world as it finds me. Treat men as they treat me. That’s all I need. And what do you want, Dandon?’

Dandon tried to stand but his own wound held him down. ‘I want to sleep peacefully. I want to owe no man and I want to drink and eat what I want. Take love where I will and laugh more than I should be expected to weep.’

‘No hearth?’ Devlin asked. ‘No home and children?’