Cross of Fire Read online

  Cross of Fire

  Mark Keating

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Mark Keating 2013

  The right of Mark Keating to be identified as the Author of the Work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious, or are historical figures

  whose words and actions are fictitious. Any resemblance to real

  persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  eBook ISBN 978 1 444 72791 3

  Book ISBN 978 1 444 72788 3

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Jim and Nick

  —little Villains must submit to Fate

  That great Ones may enjoy the World in State.

  Samuel Garth

  The Dispensary. 1699.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Prologue

  London. February 1721

  He had been called back. Not to Walsingham House as he expected or even to Whitehall. The victualler’s house at Tower Hill was where the coach from Portsmouth had carried John Coxon.

  The first frozen grey days of February and the former post-captain was coming home, or at least to London. Home was a parsonage in Norfolk, a dead father and mother, a brother perhaps still preaching from a stone pulpit somewhere.

  He had never known London as now, in the midst of winter, and he wrapped his boat-cloak about his face and snapped the ice from the window frame of his carriage. It was as cold as the Massachusetts Boston colony he had left just weeks ago. He had thought of the Caribbean then, when the two men in black cloth had come to him to request he return, and he thought of its warmth again now, a memory hard to recall when the frost numbed him so.

  He could not remember being cold in the wars, or in thirty years at sea. His duty had kept him in warm climes all the year and all the world round and he imagined he might die if he stayed here much longer.

  His skin was dry. He could feel his joints move. His hands were chapped; he owned no gloves. He had never needed them, and he was not gentleman enough to wear deerskin just for colour.

  I am no longer English, he thought. I have come to a foreign land.

  He had retired to Boston after it all. Retired and withdrew to open a store as he had always thought to when the sea finally let him go. At first it was just a chandlery and then, over the months, he had come to sell all manner of general goods as the homes around him matured and one by one brickwork replaced wood.

  Last, before, he had been with Woodes Rogers as part of his colonisation of the Bahamas, of New Providence, where colonisation had truthfully meant the eradication of the pirate crows nested there. Coxon had gone with Woodes Rogers because it was the challenge of the Caribbean, as ever. Because he saw a white star-shaped scar on his right forearm every morning when he woke. Because Devlin might be there. Because Coxon could have his revenge.

  And then Devlin beat them again.

  But he had been promised that was all at an end now.

  For years the name Patrick Devlin had pursued John Coxon with ridicule and rumour. He was Post-Captain Coxon now, his rank granted following actions he had taken when an Irishman in the Marine Royale stepped forward to save the lives of his French officers by translating for them. That was Devlin. Coxon had been fascinated to discover what adventure could possibly have brought an Irishman into the service of the French fleet.

  It was a tale beginning with injustice, as in all good stories. But a father’s injustice: the little boy sold to a butcher and working at eight years old for a burlap bed beneath a counter and beer for breakfast. Bloodied hands all his life. Butcher-boy grown up to poacher until a hypocrite magistrate’s judgement had forced Devlin to flee to London. Then the murder of a fellow countryman who had taken him in set him running again, as only the poor are able, now to St-Malo for dread of accusation and the rope. A few years of fishing along the Breton coast and then war had saved him from starvation until the day Coxon captured his sloop.

  Devlin became his steward. For years the younger man stood at his shoulder and, charitably, when he found that his ward could read and write, Coxon gifted knowledge and books to him. The Irishman absorbed the intricacies of navigation and became a valued acquaintance if not quite friend. Yet Coxon had much in common with the ex butcher-boy despite his officer’s strut. For Coxon, son of a clergyman, had succeeded through sheer hard work and grasping opportunities. The servant, with the same application, might one day make a fine bosun’s mate – and more than that, Coxon was sure, had it not been the fellow’s misfortune to have been cursed with Irish birth.

  But no matter now. Instead, the loss of his ship, the loss of Patrick Devlin to the pirates, to the Devil. And now Coxon’s promise to give the Devil his due.

  The unevenly worn heels of his shoes added to his poor gait and marked him as a man before the mast as he clacked his way along the black-and-white corridor. But he walked towards the closed double-doors confidently, assured they would open by the breeze of his approach.

  And they did.

  He entered the dark room, naked candles at the four tall, shuttered windows on the right, a blank wall on the left, and enough light from the open door and the flames to discern the smoky outlines of picture frames recently removed. There would have been portraits hung up, portraits that he supposed he might have recognised.

  The glare from the corridor threw his shadow to the back of the room, and then the unseen hands closed the doors and only the narrow candleligh
t remained.

  Coxon was not a man for ghosts and melodrama. He had lived too long.

  He turned and faced the men by the door, their lower faces hidden by cloth. He nodded at them to no response. He removed his hat.

  ‘Post-Captain John Coxon,’ he announced to his echo. ‘I have returned under orders of the king. From the colony of Boston. I came with Messrs Duke and King, summoned here before I am to Walsingham House. Whom do I address?’ He let his words hang.

  ‘Walsingham.’ A covered voice rose slowly from the darkness. ‘How apt. The spymaster of Elizabeth. Our gratitude to you for attending, Post-Captain.’

  He saw them now. Two figures that had seeped from the far corners, their cloaks and blank Bauta masks shimmering in the candlelight.

  Coxon sneered at the foolishness of the secrecy.

  Masks was it? Is that what it had come to?

  ‘I asked whom I address. Mark that I will take orders from the Board only.’

  ‘Not from your country? Is that what you say?’ They drifted towards him, their luminous faces floating in the gloom.

  ‘Aye,’ Coxon said. ‘From the Board. From my king.’

  ‘You judge that the same as your country?’

  Coxon said nothing. His weariness with the scene was visible in his shifting stance. He turned his hat in his hands.

  ‘What have you been told, Post-Captain?’ One of the masks leaned into a cocked pose, neck bent to a shoulder.

  Coxon’s instinct was to turn from the room or pull open the doors and throw light on these badgers and watch them scamper away. Or better still pull their masks and have them face him like men. If they could.

  This was not Coxon’s world, or anything that rang of the sea. This was old courts and secret signs. He had heard of such things but did not know them; but he understood how the world turned and why his kind would never make admiralty or high office. It did not hinder his bread so let the world to it. He did not fear them.

  ‘I am told that I have been recalled to capture the pirate Devlin. That he has embarrassed you all long enough. That I am the man to bring him.’

  ‘Just so,’ one said, but Coxon could not tell which of the blank masks had spoken and on they came, drawing closer all the while.

  ‘There is the rumour, Post-Captain, that you may have . . . acquired some of the pirate’s gold. To furnish yourself in the colonies. Something of a French island? Gold to fund Louis’ colonies. They do love to build on swamps do they not?’

  Coxon rested on his sword hilt. His old sword, older than their voices.

  ‘I resigned my commission. I earned all that I had.’ He offered nothing more and there was no apology in his voice.

  ‘Devlin was your man. Your steward. He has caused you much dishonour. It is attested. Twice he has bested you. And his king. You would like to end this pirate’s . . . ways – would you not?’ They stood together in front of him. ‘Would that not be beneficial to you? To your king?’

  ‘Would it be more beneficial to the companies he has hurt?’

  The masks stood back. Their heads angled unnaturally, pivoted as if they had no necks, as if their marionette strings had been cut. Coxon stood fast. His words had struck a chord. He knew nothing of Devlin’s adventure of the diamond. That history was as secret as the conclave of handshakes and the symbols that scored the walls of gentlemen’s clubs which ran off of London’s alleyways and met above her coffee-shops and taverns. But Coxon was aware of the South Sea Company that had collapsed like a house of cards, and with his ear to the sea had noted Devlin’s absence from the pirate round.

  Even from his hideaway in Boston the pirate atrocities ran and rang along the post roads like the horrors of an Indian massacre – except accompanied by grins and whispers, not howls and the wringing of petticoats. Coxon had noted the colonists’ curious admiration for pirates; he marked it as nothing more than a new country devoid of heroes but with infinite space in which to celebrate any deviation from the order forced upon them. But Devlin had vanished from the Americas and during his absence a financial cataclysm had shaken every coffee and chocolate pot from London to Amsterdam.

  And soon after it all two men had come for John Coxon to demand he eradicate a pirate, with no questions asked. Coxon did not need a map to spy the lie of the land.

  ‘You are a shrewd man, Captain,’ the masks agreed between them. ‘We have chosen well.’

  ‘Your games do not impress me, gentlemen. I will do my duty as ordered and if that is of benefit to you, I have no mind in that regard. If my king wants the pirate . . . that will suit.’

  A white packet appeared in a gloved hand and floated in the air in front of him.

  Papers to his hand. Good. Real weight at last.

  ‘Whatever you hear from Walsingham House, whatever happens at sea, this is your only order. It will be seen by no-one, not even yourself. It is to be opened should you fail, for then you will have need of its power. It is to release you from blame should you have to deviate from orders to make an end the pirate. Anything you do will be warranted and conceded. And concealed . . . if necessary. From the highest. From the very highest. You have only one order. Whatever the cost. You understand this?’

  Coxon put the packet in his coat.

  ‘And I have my store in Boston? To keep without question?’

  They retreated.

  ‘We will forget you.’

  ‘Am I to be certain?’

  ‘Nothing,’ they repeated the word between them. ‘Nothing shall remain.’

  ‘It has been nigh three years since I have known him.’ Coxon put back his hat. ‘I will need to peruse the Board’s papers.’

  ‘Full warrant, Post-Captain,’ they assured him. ‘All doors will be open to you, though you will not know who has opened them, nor question how or why. For . . . security. For protection. For you and your country.’

  Coxon sighed then tapped his forehead, and the doors opened behind him. The masks backed into the shadows. He spoke to an empty room.

  ‘Full warrant? Are you sure on that? You may regret such. And I hope you gentlemen have studied him also.’ He smirked at the silence. ‘You may have found that he has left less of you every year. He has probably saved the country a fortune.’

  He turned on his heel. Gave them no further thought.

  Chapter One

  May 1721.

  Three months later.

  It was the Principal himself who hauled Walter Kennedy along the corridor to the Master’s side of the Marshalsea. The gaol was not only a debtor’s last card but also the biding place for those to be tried for crimes at sea; Southwark its home, south of the river, the wrong side of the Thames.

  Once a butcher, the Principal was as beefy as his past and scrags like Kennedy, no matter how much they struggled, were blown before him. Still adorned in his leather apron of old, large enough to serve as a blanket to most, as good for wiping off blood as it had ever been, he now coupled his breadth with a capstan bar for a bludgeon and a rusty ring of ward keys that may well have been the originals for the medieval doors within.

  Kennedy stumbled with each shove from the man of meat, his bare feet stubbing on the rough limestone, his cursing and whines lost on folded cauliflower ears. At least he was out of the Hole. His words had gained him that much; they had bought him an audience in some better air for a while.

  The Hole in Marshalsea was a fabled early grave. Below ground, scarcely more than a stone alcove next to the sewer of the gaol, it was not uncommon for a man, woman or child to lose an eye or a cheek to rats while they tried to sleep there; more common for the miasmas and the damp to produce men rotting from the outside when they finally emerged with swollen flesh, white, carrying the miasma back up to the other unfortunates.

  Three hundred men and families slept in the common debtor’s side in rooms made for thirty, an hour’s light in the yard every day their only respite, charity and church plates paying for their keep. But now Kennedy was seeing the other side, the sid
e for those who had means and family enough to eventually pay off their debts, but not too soon that the director’s profits should suffer.

  White-washed walls, doors without keys, wax candles in the lanterns along the walls – not stinking whale-blubber stumps as in the wards. The inmates here could be released to work outside for their debts and garnish, pay for women to attend them. They had their own taproom and chandler for extra food. This was a gentleman’s gaol, a place where Kennedy could reside if he played his hour well enough.

  The Pound now, quarters where prisoners were first brought until an inmate ‘vacated’ his room. The butcher pushed Kennedy through the door before him, slamming it hard and fast so that its planks caught the spit Kennedy had intended for his gaoler.

  The room was dark, windowless, but Kennedy could make out a hat and figure sat at a table. A strike of flint and steel, a candle lighted. A crock bottle and two clay cups. Enough invite for Kennedy to sit. He thought on the figure sitting in the dark awaiting him. Be a cold man to sit and wait in the dark so, but a friendly enough hand waved to the bottle for Kennedy to help himself.

  The flame grew and spat. A leather folder, red-ribbon tied, was the only other object the rising light revealed. Kennedy poured and drank before the liquid even lapped the brim, and the watery red wine washed away his swollen tongue and rinsed his teeth of the scum furring them.

  Now men could talk, the civility of wine waving away the differences between them. Only food could do better at clearing the air.

  A hand to an outer pocket and Kennedy flinched. A lump of charred brisket fell from the hand to the table and again the hand waved Kennedy to partake.

  Kennedy snatched at the meat, as gaols teach. His teeth wobbled as he chewed, but no mind. His mouth ran wet as the beef sucked at his gums and his belly tried to pull it down even before he could taste the savour, and he had to fight his own throat against the swallow.