Pieces of Eight

“Now, my little Catalina!” said Bentham.

“Oh, senhor!” she said, and the blood pumped into his loins at the sight of her, sat small and helpless against the pillows, with a linen sheet pulled protectively under her chin. Miss Cooper’s girls had expertly combed out her hair and spread it around her shoulders, while Catalina herself had been a virgin recently enough to remember a maiden’s modesty, and to deliver a representation of it sufficiently convincing for Danny Bentham.

“Senhor,” she pleaded, “seja delicado…”

“Be gentle?” said Bentham. “I’ll show you gentle, my girl!” and he swept off clothes, boots, belt and sword, to stand magnificently naked before his bride, legs spread wide and hands on hips.

“Oh!” said Catalina, sitting up straighter and staring in wonderment, for Danny Bentham’s body was something to see: slim-waisted, smooth and muscular, with long legs, strong arms, and gleaming skin. Catalina thought it a sight to please any bride–apart from the undoubted presence of a fine pair of breasts and the undoubted absence of anything between the legs that stood to attention, or even dangled at ease. In fact there was simply nothing. (Indeed there was doubly nothing, since to explain his smooth chin, Cap’n Bentham called daily for razor, soap and water, and having nothing else to shave, shaved what he had.)

“Hmm…” said Catalina, who understood a lot more than these stupid English thought, and who’d never for a moment believed she’d got a permanent husband: one that would last longer than the dollars she’d been paid. But she had thought she’d got a handsome husband and had been looking forward to the wedding night.

Que piedade, she thought; what a pity. But Captain Bentham thought otherwise. There was not the slightest equivocation in “his” mind as he leapt on to the bed, throwing sheets aside and seizing his wriggling, naked bride with absolute conviction, abandoned passion, and remarkable technique, for Danny Bentham liked women, and only women, and had learned how to please them.

Outside, Mr O’Byrne was at his station, lounging in a chair backed against the door with a bottle of rum for company, still keeping dirty-minded eavesdroppers from their sport.

“Uh! Uh! Uh!” came Bentham’s voice, muffled through the door.

“Go to it, me hearty!” said O’Byrne, and drank a toast.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” came the other voice.

“Give her one for me, by Christ, Cap’n!”

“Oh! Oh! Oh!”

“Go on, my galloping boy!”

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Chapter 4 (#u290d5c57-2e90-510e-9dca-388a83445eee)

Two bells of the forenoon watch (c. 9 a.m. shore time) 7th October 1752 Aboard Walrus The southern Caribbean.

“No!” said Selena, “I won’t go below. I want to see.”

“Damn it, girl, do as you’re bid,” said Flint, while beside them at the tiller, Tom Allardyce the bosun worked hard not to notice the argument, focusing instead on the ship they were chasing.

“She’s Dutch, Cap’n!” he said. “Round stern and bilanderrigged, and she’s hard up in a clinch with no knife to cut the seizing!”

Flint snapped out his glass and looked. Allardyce was right–he must have marvellous eyes: it was a Dutchman, heavily storm-damaged, and plodding along helpless. So much the better! He turned to Selena. “Go below, girl!” he muttered. “Don’t play the little madam with me!” Then he raised his voice cheerfully to the men standing to the guns and ready at the sails: “There’s our dockyard, lads!” he cried. “Our planking and rum, and our pickles and pork!”

The men cheered. Walrus had taken a battering in the fight against Lion; heavy shot into her hull had spoiled stores, sprung leaks, wrecked her windlass, and blown away her binnacle and compasses. Desperately short of provisions and fit only for a short voyage, Walrus remained sound aloft. Now, charging onward under foresails and gaffs, mainsail and topsails, she was going like a mail-coach on a turnpike.

“Go below!” said Flint. “There’s danger…and things unfit for you to see.”

“No!” she said. “Not this time. I won’t be shut up below!”

Flint’s eyes showed white all round. Nobody said no when Flint said yes. In agitation he reached up to his shoulder to pet the parrot that was his friend and darling…and which was no longer there because he’d lost it to Silver. Just as he’d got Selena, Silver had got the parrot.

“Huh!” he said, snatching down his hand before anyone should see. “You shall do as you are bid!” And he grabbed Selena, pulling her close and breathing the scent of her. He breathed it deep and felt her warmth and looked into her eyes. This was a new game. He knew it. She knew it. He’d been playing it ever since the island: finding excuses to brush past her, to touch her, and even–on one occasion–attempting to slide a hand inside her shirt to touch her naked skin.

Yes. A shining dawn was breaking for Joe Flint. Thanks to Selena, his lifelong, shameful incapacity seemed to be on the mend, and the dormant contents of his breeches were stirring. Conversely, Selena felt that for her the sun was going down. Flint was master aboard Walrus and would take whatever he wanted the instant he became capable of taking it.

“Flint!” she said sharply. “Look!” Flint turned and saw every eye was on himself and the lovely black girl in her boots, shirt and breeches, with two pistols stuffed in her belt. It’d been Flint’s joke to rig her out like this, but by God Almighty didn’t it just suit her! And now the swine were ogling and nudging one another for the fun of seeing a shapely seventeen-year-old defying him on his own quarterdeck.

Flint measured choices: he could wrestle her bodily through a hatchway–proving to all hands that she was beyond his command; he could order someone else to do it–allowing another man to handle her…or…

He came to a swift decision. “So be it, my chick!” he cried, slapping her backside merrily, as if it were the biggest joke in the world to have a woman on deck as the ship went into action. Turning to his men, he smiled his glittering smile…and it worked! For Flint was a man to admire: handsome, charismatic and splendid.

“A-hah!” roared the crew, united in shared pride of their magnificent captain…even if he was a mad bastard that popped out men’s eyes like pickled onions when the mood was upon him.

“So, my dear,” Flint said to Selena, smiling and smiling, “do try to keep your limbs clear of flying shot, and let’s see how much you relish what you now shall see!” He dropped his voice: “Because you won’t like it, not one little bit, that I do most solemnly promise you!”

The chase was short, for the wretched bilander was as slow as Walrus was fast. As soon as he came within cannon shot, Flint broke out the skull and swords–his personal variation of the black flag–and on the upward roll discharged a thundering load of chain-shot into the Dutchman’s rigging: some ten pounds of iron apiece from each of Walrus’s seven broadside guns. It was more to terrorise than to disable, for the bilander was already in ruins aloft: jury-rigged on the stump of her foremast, most of her bowsprit gone and the big crossjack yard on her mainmast fished with a spar where it had sprung.

The Dutchman shuddered under Walrus’s fire and those aboard were blinded in the smoke. She was a little ship, no more than sixty feet in the hull and a hundred tons burden, with an old-fashioned rig and shallow draught to suit the Netherlands’ waters. Against the heavily armed, sharp-keeled Walrus she was already lost. But she raised the red, white and blue of her native land and fought like a tiger.

One after another, the four one-pounder swivels that were all she had for a broadside blasted their charges, hurling dozens of pistol-balls across Walrus’s decks, prompting roars of rage as men were struck down or staggered back under the impact of shot, even as they stood ready to hurl grappling lines.

“Bastards!” cried Walrus’s men.

“Give ’em another!” cried Flint. “Grape and round-shot!” And it was a race between his gunners and the Dutchman’s as to who would fire next. The Dutchman won, and got off just one more volley of canister, killing a few more of Flint’s men before Walrus’s main battery, thundering fire and smoke, comprehensively smashed in the Dutchman’s bulwarks, blasting half her men into offal, and sending her swivel guns tumbling into the air as iron wreckage.

“Stand by, boarders!” cried Flint. “Put us alongside of her, Mr Allardyce!”

“Aye-aye, sir!”

The two vessels rose and fell, rubbing paint and splinters off one another as the grappling lines bound them together.

“Boarders away!” cried Flint, leading the scramble up on to Walrus’s bulwark. He leapt aboard the Dutchman followed by nearly sixty men, all of them armed to the teeth, fighting mad and seeking vengeance for their dead and wounded mates.

A mere handful of the Dutchman’s crew remained alive amongst the wreckage of broken timbers, shards of iron, smashed gratings and hanging sails that encumbered the narrow, smoke-clouded deck. It was hard enough to walk the deck, let alone fight on it. But fight they did, with pike, pistol and cutlass, led by a man in a grey coat boasting a big voice.

“Christiaan Hugens!” he cried, calling on the name of his ship.

“Christiaan Hugens!” cried the others, and then it was hand-to-hand.

Slick! And a man shoving a blade at Flint found the steel parried and himself spouting blood from a cut throat. Thump! And another man, pulling the trigger with his pistol aimed right at Flint’s chest, found Flint gone and a cutlass cleaving his own skull. But that was all the fighting Joe Flint had to do that day. Six men cannot fight sixty. Not for long, however brave they may be. Soon all was quiet except the sounds of the sea and the groaning, creaking of ships’ timbers.

A thick, squat man came lumbering through the wreckage. He was Alan Morton, Flint’s quartermaster, and he saluted Flint with his best man-o’-warsman salute: hand touching hat and foot stamping the deck.

“Cap’n,” he said, “there’s just three o’ the buggers left alive, and a dozen o’ dead-’uns, mostly killed by our gunfire afore ever we stepped aboard.” He pointed to the three prisoners, waiting by the mainmast. “There they are, Cap’n. Shall we slit ’em and gut ’em?”

“Good heavens, no!” said Flint, jolly as ever after a fight. “Not at all, Mr Morton–I have other plans for them.” He smiled and most cordially took a handful of Morton’s shirt front to wipe the blood off his cutlass. “Just make the gentlemen fast and we’ll see to them later. But now we have work to do.”

Flint sighed inwardly. It was on such occasions that he missed Billy Bones, who’d once been his first mate, and whose heavy fists had driven men to their duties without Flint having to do the tiresome work of punching heads and kicking behinds. Flint sighed wistfully. Bones did so wonderfully have the knack of terrifying the men, combined with just the perfect quantity of initiative: enough to fill in the outline of his orders without ever daring to question them.

“Huh!” Flint peered at Morton, now shuffling his feet and looking puzzled under his captain’s gaze. The low-browed, stupid clod was the best fist-fighter on the lower deck–which was why he held his rating–but like the rest he was infected with the equality of those blasted “articles” which were Silver’s legacy to Walrus; Silver who, believing himself a “gentleman of fortune” had drawn up a list of articles like those of Captain England, Captain Roberts and all the other pirates who wouldn’t admit what they were.