Wolfish bearded faces in the shadows, earrings, head scarves, hairy drawers, dirty shirts open to the waist, bad breath, great buckled belts, cutlasses, knives and pistols gripped in gnarled and sweaty hands, and at their head, all in snowy white from breeches to head-kerchief, big as a house-side and nimble as a cat, Calico Jack Rackham, none other, cautiously edging his brutally handsome, square-chinned face round a corner of the watergate, grinning at the sight of the torch-lit empty tunnel, turning to his followers, motioning them to be ready for the assault, whispering his final orders. First among equals was Calico Jack, by reason of being literate and smart and able to navigate and do all things shipshape and Bristol fashion, look'ee, as his admiring associates often agreed. Also he was strong enough to break a penny between his fingers, which helps, and having served a turn in the Navy, he was reckoned dependable. In our day he would have been a paratroop sergeant, or a shop steward, or a moderate Labour M.P. He was a pirate because it offered a profitable field for his talents, and he was saving for his old age.
First behind him came Firebeard, six feet both ways, barrel-chested, with hands like earth-moving equipment, and so covered in the fuzz that gave him his nickname that he looked like a burst mattress with piggy eyes glinting out of it. He was enormous and roaring and ranting and wild and so thick he had forgotten his real name; he had been dropped on his head at an early age and never looked back. Nowadays he might have been an all-in wrestler or a Hollywood stuntman or an eccentric peer – or, indeed, all three. His idea of living was to hit people with anything handy, grab any valuables in sight, and blue the lot on wenches and drink. He was a pirate for these reasons, and also because he enjoyed bellowing those hearty songs which John Masefield would write in course of time. His eventual claim to fame would be as the model and inspiration of Edward Teach, who would copyright the habit in which Firebeard was at that very minute indulging, of tying lighted fire-crackers in his beard to terrify the enemy. He always did this before action, fumbling and cursing as the matches burned his huge clumsy fingers, while his comrades coughed and fanned the air.
“He's at it again!” they, muttered severally. “Gor, what a kick-up!” “Thou lubberly guts, wilt set thy hair afire – fo!” “Turn it up, for God's sake!” “They reek offends, thou smouldering ape – 'tis nauseous to rob i' thy company!”
This last contribution came from Bilbo; tall, lean, rakish Bilbo, pretending to elegance in his tawdry finery of embroidered coat, plumed castor, soiled lace ruffles, and fine Cordovan boots with red-lacquered heels. (Actually, they pinched him excruciatingly, having been taken from the corpse of a small grandee whom Bilbo had skewered at Campeche, but Bilbo knew they were the height of fashion, and hobbled grimly in them through skirmishes and boarding-parties innumerable.) He was a sad case, Bilbo, really, although he looked anything but. A Wapping guttersnipe, he yearned for gentility, having observed something of it as a bare-foot stable lad in a great household, and later as a page-boy – after his lithe young figure and raffish good looks had caught the jaded eye of his master's wife. His amorous energies had led to similar posts in the houses of susceptible ladies of fashion, and some of the airs of the beau monde had stuck to him, along with the jewellery pilfered from the dressing-tables of his exhausted paramours. Among sea-scum he passed as a gentleman, having picked up a few tricks of speech from Congreve and Vanbrugh to supplement his gaudy wardrobe. He sneered and minced in sinister fashion, and made play with a rather grubby Mechlin kerchief, and wore a cut-price gem in his steenkirk. But don't underrate Bilbo – he might be a social pretender whose feet were killing him, but he had won his captaincy in the Coast Brotherhood by cunning, courage, and fighting ability. He wasn't called Bilbo for nothing – the long black rapier on his hip was reckoned the deadliest from St Kitts to Coromandel, with stoccata and imbroccata and punta rinversa, sa-ha! and he had a nice showy trick of spinning up finger-rings and impaling them on his flourished blade, like the Duke of Monmouth. Not easy. Nowadays Bilbo would have been a lion-tamer or an advertising executive. He hoped to make enough from piracy to buy an estate and title; for the moment he sneered at Firebeard's efforts to get his crackers going, and took a pinch of snuff from the box proffered by Goliath, his faithful dwarf.
“A barbarous affectation,” he lisped. “Thou vulgar big birk.”
“At least I don't have a bloody goblin in tow,” growled Firebeard, and Goliath, who was all of two feet tall and had a wooden leg, hopped and gibbered in rage. Suddenly the fire-crackers took light, and Firebeard chortled while the air turned blue.
“All ready?” whispered Calico Jack, and a fierce chorus of “Aye, aye, cap'n, we'm ready for sart'n” answered him, with the odd “Belike” and “Look'ee” as an afterthought from the more eager spirits. And as they crouched for the assault, up from the rear came the fourth leader of that desperate enterprise, cat-footed and stately, and those hairy ruffians fell back, eyeing her askance with lustful respect as she stalked by, hips swaying, with a trace of Pierre Cardin lingering on the sultry air as she passed.
Six gorgeous feet she was, from the heels of her tight-fitting Italian thigh boots (from Gucci, undoubtedly) to the curling plume of her picture hat, breeched and shirted in crimson silk that clung to her like a skin, lithe and sleek and dangerous as a panther – Sheba, the black pirate queen, looking like something out of Marvel Comic with her lovely vicious face and voluptuous shape, her dark eyes flashing against her ebony skin, smouldering silently as she unsheathed her dainty rapier with its Cartier hilt, and posed with the contemptuous grace of a burlesque star, indifferent to the ecstatic sighs and groans of her besotted followers. She had that sort of effect on men – it was notorious that when, in boarding a galleon, her shirt had been ripped off by an enemy pike, her entire crew had had to go on bromide for a fortnight. She never walked, she prowled, exuding menace and sex-appeal at every step, but none was so hardy as to presume on her femininity, for Sheba was as cruel and deadly as she was beautiful, and her scorn for men was proverbial. (True, in the focsle they breathed rumours of sizzling orgies in her secret fortress on Octopus Rock, with prisoners who were afterwards done diabolically to death, but that's focsle gossip all over.) Born a Barbados slave, she had clawed her way to power in the Coast fraternity by a piratical genius and ruthless ferocity that had made her the toast of women's liberationists all along the Main. Her fellow sea-wolves respected her, had astonishing fantasies about her, and went in terror of her, and she despised them all with a curl of her shapely lip and a lift of her perfect Egyptian nose and a low-lidded glare from her smoky slanting eyes, fingering her one long silver earring the while. Only to Rackham did she show the respect due an equal, and the big man treated her as a brother. Three centuries later Sheba would have been on the cover of Vogue, or leading a soul group; she was a pirate because she hated the world for enslaving her, and took a sadistic pleasure in killing – men, for choice, but women given half a chance, and quite small animals.
All round, they were a happy little gang of eccentric cut-throats who crouched in the shadows under Fort St Bartlemy's massy walls that balmy tropic night, waiting for the word from Rackham – and then they were storming up the passage, yelling bloody murder, while sleepy sentries above fired futile warning shots and ran about with their muskets at the high port. By then the pirates were slicing up the guards at the strong room, forcing the door, bursting open the first chest in a cascade of gold coin, into which Firebeard, exploding all over the place, threw himself bawling:
“It's the dollars! A bloody fortune! Har-har! Calico! Sheba! Bilbo! We'm rich!” He always shouted this on taking a prize, whatever its value, while his fire-crackers set his hair ablaze and those nearest choked and spluttered. A tiny Welsh pirate crouched by the open chest, eagerly counting the coins: “One, two, three …” until someone yanked him aside.
Up in the commandant's room they were exclaiming and belching and grabbing up their wigs and over-turning chairs, and shouting useful things like: “Pirates!”
and “The paychests!” and “Sound the alarm!” and “Goose me wi' a handspike, we'm beset!” and by the time they tumbled downstairs all hell was breaking loose. The pirates were bearing out the treasure-chests under Rackham's directions, while Bilbo, firing his pistols with an elegant air and tossing them to his dwarf for reloading, was commanding the covering party who were at grips with the belated redcoats. It was desperate work, what with shots banging in the enclosed space, and powder-smoke everywhere, and pirates cursing as they were wounded, and redcoats falling down obligingly when they were shot, and Bilbo fleering and shooting, and Black Sheba leaping like a leopard, skewering with deadly daintiness, and Firebeard bashing and bawling. The commandant rallied his men with cries of “Blister me!” and blundered bravely ahead, crossing swords with Sheba over a couple of fallen bodies. He thrust clumsily at her chest… and paused, shaken, as he realised that his target, instead of being a conventional masculine torso, was more like something painted by an enthusiastic Rubens, and bouncing most distractingly to boot.
“Sink me, it's a woman!” he concluded loudly. “Strike me speechless!” he added, which was prophetic, for:
“With pleasure!” hissed Sheba, and glided in like a dancer, perfect teeth bared in an unholy smile, and the commandant tripped and fell flat on his back. A high heel pinned him as she flicked aside his hat with her rapier point, whispering “Doff, dog – doff to a lady!” and the last thing the commandant knew was that black face mocking down at him and a tearing pain in his throat.
The soldiers fell back, appalled, and as the last of the chests was borne down the passage Rackham roared his followers back and away. They retreated, firing, down the great stone tunnel, while Sheba, the blood-lust on her, slashed and stabbed and laughed, with Firebeard beside her swinging his cutlass roaring “Take that, ye lousy lobster! Kill 'em! Tear 'em! Kill the honest men!” and Bilbo carefully shot an officer in the shoulder, and turned to supervise the stowage of the chests in the waiting longboats. Shepherding his men, Rackham looked back along the shambles of the tunnel, to see Sheba alone, fronting the disheartened soldiery, flourishing her rapier and screaming:
“Come on, you King's men! Fight! Is one woman too many for you, you mangy cowards? Fight – that's what they pay you your shilling a day for!”
And it's not enough, either, was the universal thought among the military as they faced that black and crimson fighting fury; but the wounded officer tugged at a lever in the wall, and above Sheba's head, through a slit in the stone, a great portcullis gate came swishing down. Too late Rackham cried a warning, too late she saw and sprang back; the great steel frame fell to divide the corridor from wall to wall, and although Sheba snaked beneath it to the seaward side, it pinned her ankle cruelly to the floor, and she lay trapped and helpless, her face contorted in agony, her rapier clanging on the flags. The pirates, with appropriate oaths, ran back to help; Firebeard strained his mighty thews in a vain effort to raise the portcullis, roaring “Heave, ye maggots!” and getting back the usual excuses, like “'Tain't no manner o' use we heavin', cap'n, look'ee, she'm caught, like, an' us can't shift the bugger no-how!”
Meanwhile the soldiers, encouraged by the fact that there was now a stout steel gate between them and the pirates, surged foward, shooting; one even rushed up and tried to bayonet the fallen Sheba through the bars. But Bilbo snapped an order, the dwarf Goliath sprang to the bars like a monkey, through them went his wooden leg, and out of it shot a steel blade to drink the soldier's heart's blood. (Full of tricks, those pirates were.) But Sheba, writhing on the flags, was fast as ever, and as the others banged away overhead, Rackham knelt beside her.
“It's no use, camarado! We can't shift it! D'ye want to go quick, girl?” For garrison reinforcements were crowding down the tunnel, and Rackham looked to the priming of his pistol.
“Leave me!” gasped Sheba. “Each takes his chance … law of the Brotherhood!”
Firebeard, of course, was having none of that; he was a proper pirate, after all.
“We'll fight it out, by the powers!” he bellowed. “I don't leave no mess-mate in the lurch, by cock, burn damn and blast me if I do!” And he beat his fists on his chest.
“Balls!” cried Bilbo, forgetting his affectations in the heat of the moment. “She's right! If we linger, we are undone! Anyway, we've got the loot! Shove off!” No nonsense about Bilbo; he strode to the sea-steps, and the long-boats surged into the night, heavy with the booty. Several pirates dragged Firebeard into the last boat, heedless of his bawling: “We can't leave her! Let's cut off her leg!,” and for a brief moment, with the last pirates on the steps keeping the soldiers at a distance with their pistol fire, Rackham was left alone by the pinned and helpless woman.
“Go, Calico! Quickly!” she gasped, and the big man stared down at her with tears in his eyes, and stooped to kiss her brow.
“I'll be back for you, camarado! Wherever they take you – we'll get you out!”
And then he was gone, springing down the steps to the last boat, and it shoved off into the darkness, with the pirates singing “Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest,” which is not actually a very good song to row to; consequently they caught crabs all over the place, and wallowed in a welter of gold coins and bilge-water and rum, with the boats bucketing about. The redcoats on the battlements should have picked them off easily, but as everyone knows, in such circumstances redcoats never hit anything, but pop off their blanks in a most desultory fashion.
But while the pirates eventually regained their ship, the soldiers in the tunnel were bearing down triumphantly on the slim crimson figure pinned beneath the portcullis; Sheba cast one agonised glance after her departing comrades, choked on tears of pain, gnashed out a truly disgusting oath at her enemies, and then lapsed gracefully into a swoon. The wounded officer, clutching his shoulder, ordered the portcullis raised, and kicked the insensible figure cruelly in its shapely ribs, snarling: “We've got this heathen slut, at any rate! Gad, but we'll make her pay for this …”
Which is a suitably dramatic moment to bring this first chapter to a close, with the powder-smoke a-reek in our nostrils, our principals introduced, and Delectable Dusky Villainy in the clutches of the law. What will the brutal beastly soldiery do to Black Sheba? Will they …? What of Rackham's promise to save her? Does Bilbo even care? And what has all this got to do with the handsome Captain Avery and the rascally Colonel Blood? We shall e'en see in Chapter the Second.
CHAPTER
THE SECOND
n fact, while Sheba was languishing decoratively in her chains in the grim dungeon of Fort St Bartlemy, having beaten off the advances of her leering jailers till her arms ached, and her pirate shipmates were falling about in drunken celebration singing “Mouths were made for tankards and for sucking at the bung,” while their ship headed erratically towards Tortuga with the loot, Captain Avery was bowing gracefully – not too little, not too much, but just right – on the threshold of Mr Pepys's office at the Admiralty. And Mr Pepys, hurriedly adjusting the wig he had laid by, and guiltily shoving his Diary under some papers, could have done without him. For one thing, Pepys had been looking forward to neglecting the victualling estimates in favour of sneaking in a few fresh entries – he was itching to record the details about his fine new broadcloth coat, and the red-head who he was sure had winked in his direction at Drury Lane, and the curds and small beer he had had for breakfast, and his wife's all-night card parties. But there it was in his appointment book: “Capn Everie, at 10 of the clock,” so he sighed and composed himself to receive his visitor.
Another reason for the Secretary's discontent was that he was meeting Captain Avery for the first time, and suffering the common reaction to such masculine perfection. Nobody, decided Mr Pepys resentfully, had any business to go around looking like that; it made you feel positively sub-human. But there he was, like some naval tailor's fashion model, announcing himself the Secretary's humble obedient in a smooth, well-modulated tone that proclaimed him anything but; to Mr
Pepys's paranoid imagination he conveyed the impression that he had many more important things on hand – probably conferring with Dr Newton or Lord Clarendon – but that he was graciously prepared to give the Admiralty ten minutes provided they got on with it. Right, thought the normally amiable Pepys grimly, we'll cut this one down to size. To which end he looked at his visitor severely over his spectacles and inquired:
“Captain Avery, are you an honest man?”
It didn't work, of course. Far from being taken aback, Avery raised one brow a millimetre and replied, in a tone of gently amused tolerance:
“I am a gentleman, sir.”
Mr Pepys almost said “So's the King, and look at him,” but fortunately refrained. Covering his chagrin by fiddling with the rigging of a ship's model – his cosy little office was full of them, and globes and charts and waggoners and maps – he went on as amiably as he could:
“I ask, sir, because when I requested their lordships to find me a young officer for a desperate and confidential business, they told me that of all men, Captain Avery was the most capable, expert, brave, discreet, and intelligent gentleman in his majesty's service.”
He paused, and gave up fiddling with the model's mainsail, which was in a hopeless tangle. Avery said nothing, but took a deferential pace forward, twitched a thread, and the mainsail rose smoothly into place.