Pyrate's Boy Read online

  To the first three pyrates,

  Theo, Frances and Oscar

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to Eleanor Collins, my wonderful editor. Also thanks to all at Floris, Strident, Alison Stroak, Simon Trewin, Sara Pinto, my children and my parents. Thanks, too, to Elsa and Andrew Thompson, who introduced me to the basics of sailing on the beautiful Firth of Clyde. And finally thanks to Paul, who made the tea.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication and Acknowledgements

  1. A BOX

  2. THE CAPTAIN’S REQUEST

  3. A PASSAGE TO THE COLONIES

  4. KINGSTON TOWN

  5. THE SHIP OF MISERY

  6. THE VOYAGE

  7. THE RESCUE

  8. LIFE ON BOARD

  9. THE NARROWS

  10. MARTINIQUE

  11. AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

  12. OVERBOARD

  13. ST PIERRE

  14. DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH

  15. A GAME OF CARDS

  16. TO THE SEA!

  17. THERE SHE BLOWS

  18. JAMES’S STORY

  19. A FRESH START

  20. A SUDDEN SQUALL

  21. THE MANGROVE SWAMP

  22. THE HEALER

  23. THE GREAT CIRCULAR

  24. THE FAIR SHORES

  25. BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE

  26. A WINK

  27. TWICE INTERRUPTED

  28. TIME AND TIDE

  29. AGNES

  30. AT A GALLOP

  31. AN UNEXPECTED RE-ACQUAINTANCE

  32. THE WINDING PATH

  33. THE ENCAMPMENT

  34. THE CAPTIVE

  35. THE RUINED TOWN

  36. THE HANGING

  37. TWO SHIPS

  38. WALKING THE PLANK

  39. THE RAINBOW

  40. SWEET PARTINGS

  Copyright

  1. A BOX

  It is as we are sailing away that I hear him. Not a voice, but the faintest of splashing. I look down and see the small bump of a nose and a swirl of hair just above the ocean’s surface.

  ‘There’s someone in the water,’ I shout. ‘A boy!’

  Our captain, Black Johnnie, looks down and sees him too.

  ‘Heave to!’ he yells. ‘Man overboard!’

  ‘He ain’t one of ours,’ says Bart, the navigator. ‘Are you sure? Fast in, fast out, you always say.’

  ‘We have enough time,’ he replies and nods back at the White Stag, the Merchant Navy ship we have just plundered. ‘Look how she blazes.’

  The boat is on fire: the decks, the masts, even the sails, are in flames. It fills the night with the roar of burning timber and the leap of orange and yellow.

  Heading for Scotland, the White Stag had been loaded up with sugar and tobacco, with molasses and rum from the Colonies. We had spied her from afar and then crept up in her wake in the pale glimmer of dawn. Rather than resist, the crew had welcomed us on board and declared mutiny. McGregor was the name of their former captain. After the crew had restrained him, we had tied him up with rope along with two soldiers sent to guard the ship. And then we had thrown them into a small rowboat with enough bread and water to last a couple of days and cast them adrift.

  We took the White Stag’s cargo, plus six trunks full of silver and gold coins we found in the captain’s cabin, loaded it in our hold, then gave the crew their promised cut, a chest of French doubloons to split. Once the crew were all aboard the ship’s dinghy, they threw a lighted torch into the White Stag’s hold.

  ‘Good riddance,’ one of them had shouted. ‘May your timbers sink to the bottom of the sea and rot!’

  ‘And as for you, Captain McGregor,’ another yelled, ‘may the sharks be more merciful than you ever were.’

  It clearly hadn’t been a happy voyage so far.

  As we keel round to pick up the boy, however, a musket fires. In the spill of light from the blazing cargo ship, the rowboat appears. McGregor and his soldiers have managed to escape the ropes and now, to our surprise, they seem to be pursuing us.

  ‘Who tied the knots?’ demands Black Johnnie.

  ‘You did,’ I tell him.

  He frowns, then looks as if he is going to deny it. But this is no time for an argument.

  ‘Just get the lad on board,’ he shouts. ‘As quick as you can.’

  The boy looks about seven or eight years old and should weigh next to nothing. And yet it takes four men to drag him out of the water. We soon realise why. Padlocked around his ankle is a thick metal chain, which plummets right down to the seabed. If we want to save him, we have to pull up the chain. And whatever is at the end of it.

  Another bullet whistles past us. The rowboat is coming closer. We don’t fire back. Although none of us would admit it, the guns we use for raids are only for show. Right now we have about two bullets between us. We have cutlasses and dirk knives in our belts, but they are not much use at this distance.

  And so we haul length after length of the chain over the side as fast as we can. But it is a very long chain. Bullets begin to whistle over our heads and we keep ducking to avoid them. Several hit our ship’s bow and, like a tap turned on, a stream of seawater begins to pour into the hull.

  ‘Is there more chain?’ asks our captain.

  There is more chain. Lots more. Our efforts are beginning to look increasingly futile. Sensing this, the boy begins to sob.

  ‘You could cut off the foot,’ someone offers, which only makes him cry harder.

  ‘Not a good plan,’ says Black Johnnie.

  The same thought that has occurred to me must have occurred to him. Whatever is at the end of the chain is so valuable that the child has been made into a human buoy, whose body, dead or alive – as long as the fish don’t get there first – will mark the spot.

  ‘Work faster,’ he tells the crew. ‘All hands to it.’

  The rowboat is so close now that I can hear the strain of effort of the men as they row. McGregor is standing in the bow, the musket in his hands aimed straight at Black Johnnie. Only the swell of the sea makes him hesitate. But as he comes nearer, the size of his target increases. Black Johnnie, however, hasn’t noticed.

  I open my mouth to shout out. But by the time I have my captain’s attention it might already be too late. Since I’m eleven and not allowed to handle a gun, I raise my own weapon – a slingshot loaded with pebbles – and fire. I hit McGregor square in the jaw so hard that he staggers and falls back into the sea with a loud splash. The soldiers raise their oars and rush to help him. The whole boat starts to list to one side; clearly none of them has had much rowing experience. Even as I watch, however, McGregor clambers out of the water and over the side. He is younger and fitter than he looks. As soon as he is back in the boat he scans our crew and picks me out. His stare makes something inside me run cold. At first I think it is the gash on his forehead or the hiss and creak of the blazing cargo ship behind him as it starts to go down. And then I realise with a shiver what it is. I’ve seen his face before.

  ‘How much more?’ Black Johnnie shouts as the marines slice the oars back into the water and start to row. ‘We must be almost there.’

  ‘Got it!’ shouts one of the men as the end of the chain falls with a clatter on to the deck. Attached to its end is an ordinary-looking box made of lead.

  ‘Bring to.’ Red Will at the bridge reacts immediately. ‘Keep her full before the wind! Aloft!’

  Our ship, the Tenacity, is a schooner. With its narrow hull and shallow draft, she is one of the fastest ships on the ocean. We turn, the sails fill up with wind, then we billow forward and begin to slip across the sea as smoothly as a swan. McGregor and the soldiers bob helplessly in our wake.

  ‘Start rowing,’ I yell back at them. ‘If you’re lucky yo
u might reach dry land in a week.’

  They do not look amused.

  On deck, all attention turns to the boy. One seaman hurries below decks to find a gully knife to prise open his shackles, another to bring up a flagon of water or something stronger. But still he cowers beneath the bow looking terrified. It is not the fact that he almost drowned that frightens him. It is his present company: us.

  ‘Are you pyrates?’ he whispers.

  ‘We are Gentlemen of Fortune,’ I reply. ‘Brave, proud and free.’

  He closes his eyes, and seems to shrink – as if by sheer force of will he could make himself disappear.

  I leave him alone, as this seems the only possible kindness, and find Black Johnnie standing on the bridge, a picture of elegance in his green velvet frockcoat and scarlet pantaloons. His hat is cocked and his boots shine like black glass. He gives a nod back to the rowboat. I can just about make out the furious faces of McGregor and the rowers, but we are moving swiftly away from them.

  ‘Maybe we were a little harsh,’ Black Johnnie says.

  ‘In my opinion, that man deserves more than a pebble in the face,’ I reply.

  ‘So what would you advocate, Silas?’

  ‘I myself would like him immersed in seawater for a considerable time to see how he likes it.’

  Only in the middle of my words, I yawn. I can’t help it; I have been up all night. Black Johnnie smiles down at me.

  ‘Would you indeed?’ he says softly.

  I hear it before he does: the firing of a musket at the very end of its range. The shot hits him in the left shoulder, with such force that he is thrown back against the rail.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned, he got me.’ Black Johnnie sounds surprised rather than hurt. And even though he is a grown man, he closes his eyes and passes out.

  2. THE CAPTAIN’S REQUEST

  ‘Captain’s been hit!’ I yell. ‘Black Johnnie’s been hit!’

  When the crew realise what’s happened, every one of them drops what they are doing and runs to the captain’s side. The surgeon, who doubles as the cook, lets the salt-cod stew burn, the watch is abandoned, even the Jolly Roger flag, in the middle of being taken down by the fourth mate, flaps loose on its ropes and then blows away. Only our course, the wheel secured by a length of rope, doesn’t waver.

  ‘I’ll survive,’ says Black Johnnie when he comes round. ‘But look at my beautiful coat. It’s ruined!’

  The velvet is soaked right through, now black instead of green.

  ‘I’ll fix it,’ I tell him. ‘Or maybe I won’t. In my opinion, the colour never did suit you.’

  ‘Indeed?’ says Black Johnnie. ‘Thank you for that.’

  Everyone laughs and I’m not sure quite why. I feel colour rise right to the roots of my hair.

  ‘Will you do something else for me, Silas?’ the captain asks as the surgeon works on his shoulder.

  ‘Of course,’ I reply, thinking he is going to ask me to fetch him something from below, a glass of fresh water or a clean rag.

  ‘Take care of the boy,’ he says. ‘We don’t want him dead before we can put him off in a safe place.’

  ‘But what about the box?’ I ask.

  ‘Leave the box,’ he says. ‘Let him keep it until his guard has dropped. We don’t want to frighten him any further.’

  How can I say no? The captain’s injury is, in a roundabout kind of way, my fault. If I hadn’t spotted the boy in the sea then none of this would have happened.

  I find the boy curled up and fast asleep in the same place I left him. He is pale and small and the skin around his right ankle is red and bruised. His feet are bare and turning blue with cold. It is a wonder, not just that he has survived his ordeal, but that he has survived a life at sea at all. He has something wrapped up in his arms: the lead box. In his sleep, he whimpers, and as I watch, he starts to weep.

  ‘No,’ he mutters in a dream. His voice is refined, Scottish, but not entirely so. ‘You let me be!’

  If he were awake, I would set him straight. I would tell him that he need not be scared. I would assure him that he will come to no harm. If he believes that pyrates are cowardly and cruel, lacking in basic morality and dressed in rags, then he has been fooled. Picaroons, buccaneers, Brethren of the Coast, are the most courageous, most generous, most colourful men that ever sailed.

  He may have been told that the Golden Age of Pyracy is over. It is true that the days of Kidd and Blackbeard, Every, Tew and Low, when the seas were abob with precious things and the gallows were nothing more than an idle threat, are gone. With so many ships ploughing back and forth between Europe and the Americas, and so much easy wealth to be made, the trade routes are now closely patrolled. If caught, a pyrate can expect no sympathy. The sentence is death.

  And yet, although we may be the last of our kind, I doubt that any of us would choose another life. Although our skins are black, white, brown, yellow and red, we dress like royalty in satin and silk and velvet. And no matter where we have come from, no matter what we have done or what has been done to us, we have sworn on our life to equality, to loyalty and freedom. How do I know? Because I was lost and then was saved and now I am a pyrate’s boy.

  I will do as Black Johnnie asks. I will watch over the boy with the box.

  While I am looking at him, however, his eyes suddenly spring open and he sits up straight.

  ‘It’s locked,’ he says. But his face says more: if you touch the box, I shall jump back overboard.

  3. A PASSAGE TO THE COLONIES

  The sun is high in the sky and I am lying in the cool shade of my bunk. We are anchored in the bay of a small island, one in an archipelago of about twenty that is strung in a long, loose line, in the Caribbean Sea. This island, like the rest, is uninhabited and there are plenty of coves and bays and tiny inlets to hide a ship or two. Lush green forests rise up from the beach and the air smells of warm earth and fresh spice and ripe fruit.

  The bullet in Black Johnnie’s shoulder has been removed, the injury bandaged up. Even though it could have been much worse, he won’t be able to use his left arm until the wound heals. Luckily he’s right-handed. On days like these, he writes long letters with a quill pen and Indian ink that leaves dark stains on his lips and fingers. The crew say he sends them to a woman in Cape Cod, a woman whom he loves but whose wealthy family would never accept an outlaw like him. They laugh openly at the idea that he might take a good haul one day, settle down, turn respectable, then ask for her hand in marriage.

  ‘Black Johnnie respectable!’ they say. ‘Now that’s something I’d like to see.’

  Right now I can hear whoops of their laughter as they dive off the deck into sea so blue and clear you’d want to take a drop of it to wear around your neck. Later, they’ll sleep and eat, count up coins and calculate how much money we’ve made.

  The boy we pulled out of the sea lies just across from me in the spare bunk. He has the lead box beneath him, even though it must feel like a brick. He is too young to sail on our ship for long – the pyrate code does not allow young children or women on board – but I am longing to know what happened to him and how he ended up in the sea chained to his precious box.

  When I ask if he’d like to go up for a breath of air, he shakes his head: no. And when the men start to sing and joke and laugh and use rough language the way they always do when they’ve had a shot of grog mixed with the juice of a mango, he pulls the blanket right over his face.

  I remember my first day aboard the pyrates’ schooner. I was so scared by the sound of knives being sharpened and the smell of fish and coconuts that I wouldn’t come out of my bunk. Gradually, however, I began to listen to the way the men talked to each other and hear them joke and tease and, although their table manners are appalling and many of them smell a bit, it wasn’t long before I saw that they were nothing like I expected. I thought they would chop me up and eat me. Instead, they took me in and fed me when I was half-starved and dressed in rags. Then they gave me leather shoes a
nd silk stockings and buckled breeches, and kept me. Being kept, to me at least, was a completely new experience.

  My name is Silas Orr. I have been called many things in my life so far, not all of them complimentary. Just like my sister, Agnes, who is older by four years, I have pale blue eyes, brown hair and the kind of skin that freckles as soon as the sun comes out.

  We were born in the town of Greenock on the west coast of Scotland. I remember the wind on the silver-grey surface of the river Clyde, the shipping lanes filled with the white sails of ships and fishing boats, and the mountains that rose up beyond, purple in summer and capped in snow all winter. It was where my mother had come from, those mountains, although I never really met her. She left this earth just two hours after I was born. My father was a church minister and when I was six, he sent me to the parish school with Agnes to learn to read and write. A year later, there was an outbreak of fever in the town and he too died. The church congregation, with every good intention, stepped in to organise for our needs. I was adopted by a brewer and his wife, and Agnes was sent to Glasgow to work as a housemaid.

  The brewer and his wife had no children but claimed they treated me like their own anyway. This meant working six days a week, regular beatings and lectures on sin. Every now and then on a Sunday my sister would travel back to see me. She always brought me a gift: an apple or a lemon. After a few years, the bloom was gone from her cheeks, her face was white and her dress worn thin at the knees from scrubbing floors. I was sitting on the quay with her in the cold, grey rain one Sunday, watching the ships sail by and trying to guess which were heading to the Americas.

  ‘That one,’ she said with certainty, pointing to a schooner with a wide prow and many sails unfurled on its three masts. ‘You can almost smell the sunshine.’

  And then she sighed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘How I wish I had another life,’ she said.

  As the rain came down and the ship sailed away, I made a decision. I would set out to seek my fortune, to make a new life for both of us. The very next day I ran away from the brewer and headed to Port Glasgow where a ship was just about to sail for Jamaica. Along with one other boy and a girl a year older than me, I signed a bond and agreed to work for seven years in exchange for the price of my fare.