Skull and Bones

“Strike your colours, Captain,” he said, “and pray for deliverance!”

The boy saw everything. Isabelle Bligh lowered her ensign and backed her topsail in surrender. The pirates cheered and came alongside in a squealing of blocks and a rumble of canvas, taking in sail and heaving grapnels over the side to bind the ships together. Then they were swarming aboard, fifty strong and heavily armed, as the two vessels rolled under the rumble of boots on timber.

The boy didn’t understand their speech, which seemed to be French. But they yelled merrily and a man with a feathered hat and a bandolier of many pistols embraced Captain Higgs and kissed him on both cheeks for a good fellow, while his men herded the crew for’ard. Then the boy gulped as Sam Collis, biggest man aboard, took exception and started shouting…and they shot him dead! It was ruthless, merciless and hideous. Bang! Bang! Two puffs of smoke, and a decent seaman went down and was kicked aside like a piece of rubbish.

Isabelle Bligh’s people groaned in horror, but they were pushed to the fo’c’sle with the pirate captain – he of the feathered hat – yelling at them in English: “Your lives are yours, messieurs! Be good and make no fight, and you shall have your ship when we are done with her!”

“Aye!” cried Mr ‘Meeting for Sufferings’ Banbury. “It is loot they seek, not blood!” And he joined in, shoving Captain Higgs and the rest for’ard as if he were one of the pirate’s own band, and agreeing with every word the villain spoke. The boy frowned heavily.

“Bleedin’ traitor!” he muttered.

And then the pirates got down to the serious business of smashing open everything that was locked, and breaking into the cargo, and up-ending every bottle in the ship with the most tremendous noise, but all in good temper. Most of them vanished below for this vital work, leaving a dozen men, well armed with firelocks, to guard the crew.

And none of them took the trouble to look up into the maintop where the boy was hiding. And since nobody saw him, he watched as the smashing and cheering went on and on, and men staggered about the decks in the captain’s best clothes and Mr Banbury’s hat, gorging on pork and pickles and wine and brandy.

Later still, the boy shuddered in horror as a girl’s shriek came from below, and men emerged through the quarterdeck hatchway, grinning and leering, with Olivia Rose and her father dragged behind them. The father was bloodied and staggering, and was kicked into a semi-conscious heap by the mizzenmast. But there was a roar from the pirates on sight of the girl, and greedy hands reached out to paw and grab and grope. Her long hair was loose, her gown was ripped, pale flesh gleamed and she screamed and screamed.

But the pirate leader – he of the feathered hat – kicked his way through the press, seized Olivia Rose by the arm, and merrily fired a pistol in the air for attention.

“Après moi, mes enfants!” he cried, grinning at his men. “Je serai le premier!” And they cheered and laughed, and fired off a thundering fusillade in salute.

Up in the maintop the boy shook with rage.

Rage doesn’t just conquer fear. Rage annihilates it. Rage brings boiling fury such that no grain of self-preservation remains, nor any consideration of danger, nor threat of weapons. Hence the Viking berserker transported into blood-spattering frenzy…and the ship’s boy that leapt bare-chested into open air from the maintop to slide down one of the backstays and launch himself – twenty feet from the deck – as a human projectile, landing feet first on the feathered head of the pirate captain – who went down with his neck snapped on a jutting boot, and his face burst open like rotten fruit as the impetus of the boy’s fall drove him smashing into the pine of the quarterdeck planking.

Then…uproar and confusion. The pirates bellowed and roared, surprised for an instant, shocked and disbelieving, then snapping pistols at the boy, forgetting they were empty. Taking their example, he snatched the pistols from the dead pirate’s bandolier – there were seven of them, ready loaded – and let fly, left and right. Men shrieked and fell as the bullets struck, and the rest hung back while the pistols lasted, then charged, and the boy was blocking slashing blades with the heavy barrel of a hot, smoking pistol, which soon got lost. Bodies heaved and bundled and swayed, and more men piled in, and the fight rolled and staggered, with the boy in the middle, armed only with his own two fists and his unhinged, manic fury. And then he got hold of a cutlass, which he couldn’t swing in the dense press, so he used it two-handed as a spear, shoving it into an open mouth and out the back of a head, then wrenching it free and punching out another man’s teeth with the iron hand-guard, and on and on…

But with nearly twenty pirates on the quarterdeck and more coming up from below, there could be only one end to the fight…except that the pirates were remarkably clumsy and got in each other’s way, and they’d fired off their pistols and muskets…and on the fo’c’sle, seeing their guards with backs turned, gaping at the fight on the quarterdeck, Captain Higgs had his own moment of rage.

“Sod you, you bugger!” he said to the hand-wringing Banbury. “Come on, lads!” he cried, pulling a belaying pin from the pinrail, swinging it down with a crunch on to the blue-kerchiefed head of a mulatto pirate and snatching up the carbine that he dropped. The guards hadn’t fired off their arms, so Higgs blasted lead and flame at three-feet range into the chest of another pirate even as he turned back to face the sudden danger.

After that, it was hellfire and damnation aboard the good ship Isabelle Bligh and Quakerism went over the side with the dead. For Isabelle Bligh’s crew were seething that they’d not manned their guns in the first place, and were out for vengeance for their murdered shipmate. So even though they were outnumbered more than two-to-one, they recaptured their ship, fighting at first with belaying pins and sailor’s knives, and then taking up the weapons of their foes…and with the considerable advantage that many of the pirates were blind staggering drunk.

When Captain Higgs finally called an end to the slaughter, less than a quarter of those who’d come aboard as bold dogs and roaring boys were left alive to be clapped like slaves under hatches, and the pirate ship was sailing under a prize crew, behind the triumphant Isabelle Bligh, such that even Samuel Banbury’s conscience was eased by the money he’d make in selling her.

As for the boy who’d saved the day: he was ship’s hero! Without his plunge from the maintop there would have been no fight, and no triumph. So there were glorious weeks of a merry voyage when even Olivia Rose’s father did not try to keep her and the boy apart, and the two fell as deeply in love as ever it is possible for a pair of sixteen-year-olds to do: he loving her for her beauty and sweet kindness, and she loving him for those things that she saw that others did not, especially his limitless capacity to love. She saw that he would never be happy without a cause to follow and a loved one to serve. In her eyes this transformed Caliban the ugly into Ariel the shining one.

It was a wonderful, golden, glorious romance that approached…reached…and transcended Heaven on Earth, for the two young lovers.

“You are my beau chevalier sans peur et sans reproche,” she said to him once.

“What’s that?” he said.

“It means…my fair knight, fearless and pure.”

He blushed.

And so they sat together, and talked together, she telling him stories and playing that ancient game with seashells – at which she was adept – whereby swift movement of the shells deceives the onlooker who cannot tell which hides the pea. He loved the game, and the curious West Indian shells she played it with, and of which she had a collection. And he loved the country love songs that she sang to him of an evening, with the crew sitting quietly and joining in the chorus.

But voyages end. This one ended in London, and there the two were parted by duty: hers to her father, and his to his trade. There were bitter tears and mighty promises of faithfulness when finally, in the Thames below London Bridge, she was about to go into the boat that would take her and her father ashore to their new life. In that tragic moment, he gave her the traditional seaman’s love-token of a staybusk that he’d carved from whalebone with his own hand. In return, she gave him a lock of her hair, and half a dozen of the West Indian shells that he loved.

“I’ll be back for you, Livvy Rose,” he said, “when I’ve made me pile!”

“Be a good boy,” she said. “And remember me.”

And indeed he did. He remembered her to the dying second of his dying day, and he really did try to come back to claim her. But he never quite made his pile, and day by day other duties intervened, until finally it was too late, because – in the meanwhile – he had become something very other than a good boy.

For he was led astray. He was led bad astray was Billy Bones.

Chapter 2 (#ulink_aa63ccce-8840-5011-99e9-d90f3281c847)

Dinner time, 12th March 1753

Aboard HMS Oraclaesus

Anchored in the southern anchorage

Flint’s Island

Chk-chk-chk! Groggy the monkey chattered and reached his little hands for the horn mug. At first, when they saw his love for strong drink, the crew had called him “Old Grog”. But they turned this into a pet name when the monkey became ship’s favourite and ran from mess to mess at dinner time, and they fed him drink till he staggered and lost his nimble footing and couldn’t even lie on the deck without hanging on, and they laughed and laughed at his merry antics.

But they didn’t laugh today. Not with most of them too sick for their dinners and busting with headache besides. That made for a quiet dinner time in the close wooden cave of the lower deck, even with twenty mess-tables and near two hundred men trying – and mostly failing – to shovel down their dinners. They managed the drink though, except what they gave to Groggy.

“Here y’are, matey,” said one of the tars, holding out his mug for Groggy to take a sip and marvelling at the near-human way the monkey took it. The tar stroked the furry head and smiled, for Groggy was a handsome creature: big for a monkey, almost an ape, with thick brown fur, a creamy-white face and chest, bright, intelligent eyes and a long tail that served as an extra hand when he went aloft and leapt through the rigging as if in his jungle home.

He was the pet of all the squadron, for his reputation had spread and he’d been aboard the sloops Bounder and Jumper to be shown off, and all hands had crowded round to see him. But it was the flagship that owned him, for rank has its privileges as all the world knows.

“Take a drop o’ mine,” said another tar, offering his mug, but:

“No!” cried a voice from the quarterdeck, and Groggy flinched and looked up, as they all did.

Captain Baggot, commander of the squadron, was bellowing loud enough to be heard from keelson to main-truck. “No!” he cried. “I will not be deterred!” Then the voice sank to an incoherent rumbling, and the men at the mess-tables looked at one another in silence. As in most ships, there were no secrets aboard Oraclaesus, whatever delusions her officers might have in the matter, and the entire crew knew what was under discussion by their masters. They knew it, and it made them uneasy.

Above, Baggot stood with his hands clasped behind his back in the brilliant tropical sunshine and stamped his foot in rage, for he was confronted on his own quarterdeck by the only man in the entire squadron whom he could not dismiss, disrate or discipline: Dr Robert Stanley, the ship’s chaplain.

Fizzing with anger, Baggot turned his back on Stanley, and tried to ignore the fact that he was under the gaze of numerous spectators: lieutenants, master’s mates and midshipmen, together with all those of the ship’s lesser people who were on duty and not at their victuals down below. Baggot avoided their eyes and stared fixedly ahead, past mainmast, foremast, bowsprit and rigging, over the deep blue waters of the anchorage, to stare at Flint’s blasted island with its blasted jungles and its blasted sandy beaches and its blasted hills, not ten minutes by ship’s boat from where he was standing…and which island – God knows blasted where but somewhere – hid a most colossal fortune in gold, silver and stones: a treasure estimated at the incredible amount of eight hundred thousand blasted pounds, which he – Captain John Baggot – was determined to find, dig up, bring aboard, and take home in triumph to England where a fat slice of the treasure would be his, as prize money, and with it a promotion and, in all probability, a seat in the House of Lords!

But…staring into the back of his head, even this blasted instant, and wearing his blasted clerical wig, was Dr Robert Stanley, who in the first place was appointed by the Chaplain General and not by the Royal Navy, and who in the second place had a brain like a whetted razor, and in the third place – which place out-ranked all other places – had tremendous and powerful patrons.

“Captain,” said Dr Stanley, “a moment’s reflection will show you that I speak for the good of the squadron and all those embarked aboard.” He spoke quietly and politely, but Baggot only shook his head.

“Be damned if I’ll be told by you, sir!” he said. “Be damned if I will!” And he stamped his foot like a petulant child sent on an errand who refuses to go but knows he must obey in the end.

“Ah!” said Dr Stanley, for he saw that he was winning, then he nodded briefly at two young officers standing on the downwind side of the quarterdeck with the rest. These were Lieutenant Hastings and Mr Midshipman Povey: old enemies of the pirate Flint. They’d suffered in the blood-drenched mutiny he’d engineered on this very island, and had then been set adrift by him with the few loyal hands, saving the lives of all by their seamanship. And now they were most important young gentlemen – especially Lieutenant Hastings, since his mother was the society beauty Lady Constance Hastings, sister-in-law to Mr Pelham the Prime Minister. Lady Constance – outraged at Flint’s mutinous ill-treatment of her son – had badgered Pelham into equipping and sending out the crack squadron – comprised of Oraclaesus and her consorts – that had caught Flint…and now had him in irons down below!

Thus the Prime Minister himself stood behind the expedition and he had taken an active interest in many of the posts within it…including that of Dr Stanley, who now turned to another of the spectators, Mr Lemming the ship’s surgeon. Lemming had been summoned to the deck by Stanley in readiness for this moment, and was now wrenching his hat into rags in trepidation at the role he must play.

“Captain,” said Dr Stanley, “Mr Lemming will vouch for the truth of what I say…” He turned to Lemming.