Cross of Fire Read Free

his meat and opened the folder.
    ‘You are Walter Kennedy, are you not?’
    Kennedy nodded, his eyes stuck to the meat.
    ‘Late of the pirate Bartholomew Roberts?’
    ‘Well late, Captain. And Bart’s his pirate name to protect his priest brother. John Roberts he be. See, Captain, I know all to validate my claims!’
    ‘And you wish to turn evidence against those who once served alongside you? To buy yourself from the noose?’
    ‘I can name at least ten I know to be in England now as freemen. But I can’t write them down, Captain. Head’s no good for schooling.’ A small choke on his meat as he grinned and drooled.
    ‘And you sailed with Woodes Rogers for New Providence three years gone?’ Another affirmation. ‘And when Howell Davis turned pirate on the Buck out of those islands you were of his crew?’
    ‘Aye,’ Kennedy chewed slower. ‘But do you not want to know the names of the men I have to give you, Captain?’
    Coxon reared up, the candle lighting up the plate buttons of his white waistcoat and his face blazed under his tricorne.
    ‘You sailed with Howell Davis did you not ?’
    Kennedy swallowed the chum in his throat.
    ‘Aye, Captain. Forgiveness, Captain. That I did.’
    Coxon settled.
    ‘Very well. And when Davis met his end and Roberts elected captain how did you end up in Bridewell gaol?’
    Kennedy sat back and appeared to find a window in his eye to sigh out of.
    ‘Sounds mighty simple when you says it like that, Captain.’
    In one sense Walter Kennedy’s past did not befit his end. Generals and admirals had seen less. It had glory and violence richer than the most vulgar Spanish novels. Defoe himself would have struggled to pen a more fitting tale of folly and just desserts. Drama and dudgeon sat together like cheese and bread to pirates and were marked on Kennedy’s face with lines and wistful eye as tamer men carry lost loves.
    Coxon had been on New Providence, although Walter Kennedy’s existence was unknown to him then, for the young man was still of the ordinary world. Coxon arrived with Rogers’s fleet in July 1718 when the king resolved to end the pirates’ reign over the Bahamas. He had been privy to the order that sent out Howell Davis to trade with the Spanish. And Davis had turned pirate, as all Welshmen seemed willing to do, and his death had spawned the greatest pirate flotilla ever to threaten trade from the Indian and African seas. It was the ‘Great Pirate Roberts’, as Governor Hamilton of the Leeward Islands had christened him, that now drew costly blanks in the ledgers of Leadenhall street and Whitehall.
    Walter Kennedy, still in his twenties, had pirated with Davis and Roberts. He had helped avenge Davis’s death at the hands of the Portos and sailed with Roberts as one of his captains for over a year before slipping his cable from Roberts’s fleet and roving alone with a crew of other traitors. Trying to shape home to Ireland, navigation not his best dancing, he fell into Scotland instead where, even among a drinking people, this special band of men startled the countryside with their rumbustion.
    His men caught and hanged, Kennedy took to his heels to London, where he had been raised, and used the coin he had left to open a brothel in Deptford, close enough to the water and wharves to still have the spirit of the oak near him. Using his book of clients to work out the best-heeled he returned to the occupation of his formative years and housebreaking became his new piracy.
    Some bad dealing with the ladies of his house had his name squawked to a beak and Walter Kennedy found himself dragged to Bridewell, the house of correction near the Fleet gaol, a fairly comfortable prison, until one of the other inmates recognised him as the pirate who had taken a ship from under him – and then the Hole in Marshalsea became Walter Kennedy’s new home.
    Now it was a silver oar, the pirate’s last memory of the sea, that would ride with him to Execution dock, being the