Soon a whole cloud of birds circled and joined the dance, joined the song that for an hour of the glass was the only sound in the whole empty world.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Captain’ Seth Toombs
Howell Davis, a Milford man, was a good chief mate when he was a merchant sailor. Half a year ago he sailed with one Captain Skinner and had almost made it to Sierra Leone aboard the sweetest little snow that was ever Bristol-made, when a black flag brought a blight to their harvest.
Captain Skinner, rest his soul, shared the unfortunate fate of every man who forgets that the Lord had informed him when he was a boy that he shall reap what he sows.
He found himself taken aboard the great pirate Captain England’s ship, and Skinner hoped to strike a bargain to save some portion of his lading, and a good deal of his blood.
Once there he met a smattering of acquaintances who recognised old Captain Skinner as the very same who had denied them any wage on a cruise a year before, then sold them into service on a King’s ship where conditions were hard and hungry even compared to the near slavery of the merchant trade.
Justice, to Skinner, was not kind. His wife would be spared the detail of it, for anyone who has ever had the chance to deliver a blow to a man who has wronged him can affirm just how sweet a lick of his blood can taste.
Tied by his neck to the windlass, Skinner was bloodied by the crushing of broken bottles into his naked form or having bottles broken upon him, empty or otherwise.
Then he endured several circuits stumbling around the deck, being whipped on and on should he falter or slip in his own blood to the boards.
After a time, whilst he still retained the power of speech, he entreated through a foaming mouth to his former crewmates for an easy death.
His old mates obliged with several shots to his face, then went about their trade upon his snow.
That was how Howell Davis met and took the measure of a sang-froid pirate captain.
Captain England, a generous man according to all who put pen to paper about him, gave Davis the snow, Cadogan, and set him on his way. Davis sailed to Barbados, with what scant cargo still remained for the merchants that owned the lading.
The merchants and the magistrates did not believe the barefooted sailor when he told them of the tale, preferring the more obvious occurrence that Davis and his crew had turned pirate themselves for the best part of their goods and done away with the brave, resolute Captain Skinner.
Assured that evidence would be forthcoming, Davis passed three months in the vision of hell that only an eighteenth-century prison can imprint on an innocent man.
Someone may have apologised to him when he finally emerged like a ghost from his dungeon, but history affords us no such record, and a single extant yellow page only relates that after Davis was freed he thought long on his future and on those that had imprisoned him – and on the truth that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
This was the story he relayed to Seth Toombs the second night out on their errand to Hispaniola aboard the Mumvil, for Davis had made his way to Providence to become a pirate only to find that he had arrived too late. But not too late for Toombs.
Woodes Rogers had decided to send two sloops to trade with the Spanish, an illegal act for the navy but craftily avoided if the ships were privately manned. Unfortunately Rogers’ only available crew had their own ideas of what was and what was not illegal.
And so it was that when Captain Finch found himself gently woken in his cot at midnight by the tapping of the cold blade of Toombs’s gully upon his forehead, it was Davis that stood by in the dark, aiming the captain’s own pistol into Finch’s bleary eyes.
Toombs shushed Finch like an infant before he had a chance to blather some objection.
‘Whist now, Cap’n,’ he said and put a finger to his lips. ‘It’s time.’
Finch looked about him in panic as more figures weaved in the dark behind the two men, monstrous in size as the single candle on his writing desk danced and warped their shadows.
He heard the stifled pleadings of surgeon Murray in the darkness and the nervous giggling of the treacherous rats restraining him.
Toombs,