slab that had once been Hib Gow.
Inside, Ignatius’s boy had helped him wrap his blackened hand and pulled back the rug to reveal the ringbolt door that led to the storm drain and the harbour. Tossing aside the other of Devlin’s pistols, Ignatius took his own from his desk, awkwardly cocking it with one hand, accustomed as he was to palming back the dog-head. It clicked just in time to meet the crash of the doors from the garden and tremblingly played over all three men stepping into the room.
‘Keep your distance!’ Ignatius’s voice rattled, the shot nearly let fly too soon.
‘Do you not want the Jesuit’s letters, Ignatius?’ Devlin called. ‘You left them in the garden there.’ Devlin and Teach separated instinctively, the only defence against a single shot. Peter Sam attached himself to Devlin, the room crawling with memories around him.
Ignatius bade his boy open the hole and as the trap door slammed back it belched a breath of sea and moss.
‘I am leaving for my ship, gentlemen. I will fire on you should you follow.’ He moved around his desk to the hole, sparing an eye to check the ladder, convinced that he could climb down and still keep an armed hand upon the pirates. ‘For now you may have the letters. That is the price I pay for my escape. Perhaps time may come to haunt you for what you have spoilt this day. I very much hope so. You could have been witnesses to the birth of a nation.’ He took his first step down into the tunnel and neither Devlin nor Teach moved a muscle. ‘For the moment you are free, but mark me, gentlemen, I am not one to be tried.’
The black youth suddenly realised he was to be abandoned to the mercy of cut-throats and skipped to the hole. ‘Master?’
Ignatius swung the pistol at him. ‘Stay, boy!’ Then he vanished.
He ducked along the passage for only a few feet before he noticed that something blocked the shaft of light that should have been shining in from the sea.
One lightning-fast hand slapped his pistol loose while another whipped its own across Ignatius’s jaw.
‘Hullo, chum!’ Hugh Harris chirped. ‘Where you planning on going then?’ he asked as he slipped his kidney dagger from his belt.
Ignatius scuttled back towards the light from above, his hand to his mouth, horrified by the taste of his own blood. He looked up at the bright square light above him just as it was blotted out by the silhouette of Peter Sam looming over the hole. Peter descended in silence and Devlin slammed the hatch behind him.
‘What’s your name, lad?’ Devlin put his face close to the youth’s, who had begun to shake tears from his wide eyes as the screams came wrenched and muffled from the cellar beneath them.
The boy looked deep into the pirate’s eyes and wondered how the man could not hear the terrible sounds from below, the face so kindly looking upon him. ‘Matthew, sir,’ he caught a sob and pleaded. ‘I is fifteen years old.’
‘Well, Matthew,’ the pirate squeezed his shoulder. ‘I could do with some help getting back to sea. How do you fancy being a pirate, my boy?’
The cellar door rattled once, desperately, like a storm door, and then all became still. Only the dark eyes of the pirate remained, looking softly and questioningly into William’s face as if nothing had happened to any of them.
‘I think …’ he stammered, ‘I think I should not like it, thanking you kindly, Captain.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
The immutable law of the sea was the only faith that John Coxon knelt to in spite of his parson father’s vigorous attempts to make a church-going Christian of him; and, in spite of Devlin’s ingenious attempt to shake the Milford from his Shadow’s stern, to Charles Town Coxon inevitably came.
In London he could stumble out of The Grapes into Narrow Street after dark and not know east from west; but streets did not have tides, did not leave wakes, apart from the ebb and flow of vice and the morning roll of the brewer’s dray. Ships he could follow. Seas he knew. And he had followed Devlin.
South-east of Charles Town harbour, far away from the acres of wood bustling along Cooper river trading indigo and rice, black backs and beaver laps, the Milford sat and waited. She had been cleared for action since dawn.
‘A sail!’ The cry echoed around her decks. It was a grey sail, above a black and