Silver sighed heavily. “See here, Doctor, there could be pardons in this for all hands. McLonarch has offered one, but only if Prince Charlie comes home…while maybe we could get one out of King George for handing McLonarch over – if Allardyce would let us.” Silver shook his head, and took another hefty pull from his tankard. “And there’s civil war brewing if McLonarch gets home, and no way of knowing which side might win…or even if we should try to stop it, for the bloodshed it would mean for all England.”
“I see,” said Cowdray. “But why need there be a decision now? We could take both men to England, ask questions when we get there, and decide then what to do with them.” He bowed his head in thought. “The great prize would be a pardon. That would be precious beyond riches.” He looked up, the evidence weighed, a decision reached: “We should go to England! Then, at worst, if the matter proves too complex, we could set Norton and McLonarch ashore in two different places – thus keeping Allardyce happy and ourselves still holding the dollars.”
“Bugger me blind!” said Silver, tipping back his hat and gazing at Cowdray in admiration. “Where have you been all these months, Doctor? You never speak at our councils and yet here you are, the sharpest man aboard!”
“I never thought the hands would listen to a sawbones,” said Cowdray.
“Well, I’m damned,” said Silver. “You almost persuaded me.”
“Oh? Will you not go to England?”
“I don’t know. The risk is so great. We might be found out. We might be taken…” He looked around King William Square. “This place might be up for bribes, but the Port of London won’t be. And the seas’d be thick with navy.”
“Well,” said Cowdray, looking sideways at Silver, “England is where your wife has gone…”
Silver groaned and rubbed his face with his hands, for that was the heart of his troubles, not the choice between McLonarch and Norton. It was the unspoken pain that not even Cowdray had dared mention until now.
“Did you hear what she said to me?” said Silver. “Aboard the prize?”
“No. I was down below, reducing Mr Miller’s fracture of the tibio-fibula.”
“Oh. How’s he doing?”
“Nicely, Captain. I am pleased to say that he will walk again on two legs!”
“Huh!” said Silver.
“Oh!” said Cowdray, mortified. “I do apologise. How thoughtless. I am so sorry.”
Silver sighed again.
“I tried to stop her,” he said. “Told her what I thought. Then she told me what she thought, which was ‘no more gentleman o’ fortune’…and so we fell to hammer and tongs again, and then that pretty-faced cow stepped up and took her part, and said she’d carry my girl off to England and make a great actress out of her. And she believed it, and so she went.”
“What pretty-faced cow?”
“The actress. She’s supposed to be famous in England.”
“Who told you that?”
“Cap’n Fitch and the rest, aboard Venture’s Fortune.”
“What was her name?”
“Cooper. Mrs Katherine Cooper of Drury Lane. Said my Selena was so beautiful – which she is – that she must succeed upon the stage.” He smiled sadly. “I hope she does.”
Cowdray shot bolt upright in his chair.
“Captain,” he said, “was this a small, very pretty woman in her fifties?”
“Aye. That’d be her.”
“And her name was Katherine Cooper?”
“Aye.”
“Katty Cooper?”
“I did hear that was her name…among friends.”
“Friends?” said Cowdray. “Friends be damned! Katty’s her professional name. She’s no actress! She’s Cat-House Cooper, the procuress! She ran the biggest brothel in the Caribbean, and made a speciality of importing fresh young black girls from the plantations. God help us…we’ve sent Selena to London to be made a whore!”
An hour after dawn (there being no watches kept nor bells struck)
2nd April 1753
Aboard Oraclaesus
The Atlantic
Billy Bones ran from end to end of the lower deck. He’d already checked the hold.
“Ahoy!” he roared. “Shake out and show a leg!” And he beat a drum roll on the ship’s timbers with a belaying pin, brought down for the purpose. Finally he stopped to listen: there was silence except for the ship’s own creaking and sighing, almost as if she knew what was coming. “With me!” he said, and ran up to the main deck with two men in his wake, and roared out the same challenge.
He bellowed and yelled from end to end of the ship, past the silent guns, staggering under the sickening motion of the rolling, hove-to vessel that clattered its blocks and rattled its rigging and complained and moaned.
“Ahoy there! Show out, you lubbers!” cried Billy Bones. But nobody answered. The ship was empty except for him and his two men. Finally they checked the quarterdeck, the fo’c’sle and the tops…all of which they already knew to be empty. But Billy Bones checked them anyway. Only then did he give the order, and one of his men opened the lantern kept secured on the quarterdeck and took a light from the candle within, and lit the three torches: long timber treenails with greasy rags bound about their tips. Taking the torches, Billy and his accomplices doubled to the three carefully prepared fire points in the hold.
In each place a pile of inflammables had been assembled: crumpled paper, leading to scraps of small timber, leading to casks of paint, and linseed oil ready broached, and finally to stacked heaps of canvas and small spars: a vile mixture aboard a wooden ship, and one which made Billy Bones’s flesh crawl, for the time he’d done the same aboard Long John’s ship, Lion, for which action he was deeply ashamed. Old Nick would surely claim him for that deed when the time came.
But this was different. They were burning a plague ship under Captain Flint’s orders, to save poor mariners from certain death should any come upon her afloat and the miasma of the sickness still aboard – which, from the stink of her, it certainly was. Bones and his men had already set Jumper aflame for the same reason, and now it was the frigate’s turn.
Billy’s face glowed in the firelight as he waited a minute to see that the fire was really under way. Then, with the crackling flames eating hot upon his cheeks, he cried: “All hands to the boat!” And he leapt to his feet and got himself smartly up on deck. Not running, for that might unsettle the hands, but moving at a brisk pace to get away from the flames now roaring down below. And he was right not to run, for the two men were waiting on deck with round eyes and mouths open in superstitious dread of what they’d done.
Billy Bones took one last look – fore, aft, aloft – at the great and beauteous work of man that they were destroying: the soaring masts, the wide yards, the sweet-curving coppered hull and the mighty guns; the cables, anchors, boats and spars; the stores of beef, beer and biscuit, of oil, pitch and tar, of candles, tallow, rope and twine. God knows what she’d cost the king and the nation!
More than that, a ship was a community afloat, bearing the cooper’s adze, the tailor’s shears and the chaplain’s bible, together with all