Cross of Fire Read Free Page A

judge’s mark of a pirate for the crowd to torment. But Kennedy knew names, and those names had bought him this beef, this weak wine – had brought him a gentleman captain to talk with young Captain Walter Kennedy, just twenty-five. And not dead yet.
    This man of the sea had time for Walter Kennedy.
    ‘Would you submit that your pirate days are over, Walter? That by giving up these names you wish to return to the proper world?’
    Kennedy rapped the table. ‘That I do, Captain. I owes none of them anything except for the fate that awaits me due to them.’
    ‘I am glad to hear it. It is a small world for evil men. Their end ever the same.’ Coxon watched Kennedy savour his final swallow.
    ‘However, the names of these men will not save you.’ He calmly observed the drop of the young man’s greasy chin.
    ‘You will hang. These names you hold in regard are worthless to me.’ The candle flame rose as Coxon let his words test Kennedy’s nerves. ‘But your past interests me. It is your younger days that may save you yet.’
    The brisket stuck in Kennedy’s chest.
    ‘How is that, Captain?’
    Coxon looked down to the sheaf of papers and pulled from the others the one in his own hand. The one with the name.
    ‘What can you recall about Patrick Devlin? Your time with him?’
    Coxon already knew the most of it. Devlin had related it himself.
    For five years the man who would become the pirate Devlin had been his valet, his steward, his servant. Coxon had liberated him from the Marine Royale where Devlin had found himself during the war. Before that a Breton fisherman, before that, in London, apprenticed to a Wapping anchorsmith.
    The anchorsmith had been murdered – the reason Devlin had run to France. Coxon had always believed the boy’s innocence but then Devlin had become a pirate and left dead men behind him wherever he went.
    The vellum in Coxon’s hand said all of this and one thing more that he had pulled from memory. The anchorsmith’s name had been Kennedy. He had had a son named Walter, a housebreaker who shared the home with his father and Devlin. The paleness of the face in the candle-light, the hesitancy to answer as wheels turned in the pirate’s head, seeking the safest reply, revealed to Coxon that he had found the right Walter Kennedy.
    Post-Captain John Coxon had been removed from his retirement in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and summoned hence by royal decree, which did not impress him more than the subject of his orders.
    Get Devlin.
    Four pages of the summons but the gist of it simple: the pirate had embarrassed the kingdom once too often, hurt the right people this time, hurt their pockets. Devlin had twisted away from them and sunk their schemes along with the first great diamond of the world, the Pitt Diamond as was, the Regent Diamond as is. Only now the world would look unknowingly upon its replica in the boy king’s crown when he finally ascended, Devlin having ‘lifted’ the original. Coxon had arrived in London to hear that surreptitious gangs under government sanction still dragged the Thames daily in the hope of finding it. Mudlarkers’ dreams.
    With his final defiance against the good, the pirate Devlin had caused the devastating crash of the South Sea Company to become inevitable. The greatest diamond in the world, that might have saved the fortunes of the many – the righteous were merely seeking to protect the interests of those they had encouraged to invest in the great companies, after all – had vanished along with the pirate they had sent to fetch it. This pirate who had spurned them, had cast away what the diamond might have achieved. It could have saved the Company, saved the whole country. The pirate was too ignorant to understand. What had it cost him? Some men, some flesh? What concern was that to governments and fortunes?
    In January, just as Coxon was receiving the Navy Board fellows ‘Duke’ and ‘King’ in Boston, the Committee of Inquiry in London