image [https://i.imgur.com/15eGPa6.jpg]
rookery – A dense collection of houses, particularly in overcrowded slums. The term is taken from the breeding colonies for rooks, where their nests are piled one on top of the other.
Newgate bird – Someone escaped from Newgate Prison.
image [https://i.imgur.com/iYv5V5d.jpeg]
“KILL HIM, JOHNNY! Kill him! For the love of fucking God, kill him now!”
The constable’s thumb was in his eye. So John, hardly knowing how to fight, did the same back to him. He must’ve gotten lucky, his thumb raked right across the bigger man’s eye and he let up, only for a second. It was enough. John reached to his inside coat pocket and pulled out a knife and jabbed it into the constable’s chest.
But he felt it hit bone. Become lodged. The constable screamed and hammered John’s face with a huge, meaty fist. He saw stars and the world swam and the ground rose up to meet his face. A boot landed in his gut. John gasped. He knew he was dead now. When he looked up through bleary eyes and saw the sun peeking through dark clouds, and the silhouette of his killer towering over him, he knew he was dead. But luck saved him, the constable must’ve slipped on something, because when he tried to stomp John’s head his other knee buckled and he lurched sideways.
“Kill him! Johnny, if you don’t kill him he’s gonna bloody murder us both—” Ellis was shouting from somewhere at the other end of the alley.
John used the wall of a livery to stand up. When he got to his feet, he tried to run. He very nearly left Ellis right where he was. But the constable rose up from the earth like a devil determined to bring him down to meet the flames of Perdition, grabbed the lapel of his coat, and jerked him back. God help me! John rounded on him, swung, and broke his hand at the same time he cracked the constable’s jaw. John tried to scream but his chest was still constricted from the kick to the gut. But he saw something else. Another staggering bit of luck. The constable’s tongue had happened to be sticking out when John struck him, and the constable’s teeth had bitten his own tongue. John uppercutted him again, and the tongue was bitten so hard it sent a cascade of blood down the constable’s chin and neck.
But the constable never let go of his lapel. John tried to wriggle free but none of the fencing training his father had paid for covered a brawl like this. Good God, no fighting has ever been—
The constable pulled John in and beat him, one-handed, across his skull, across his chest and stomach, again and again. John held his hands up in useless supplication.
“Kill him, Johnny!” Ellis’s voice was reaching a new, desperate pitch. “Kill the fucking bastard!”
The constable slipped again and fell over, and this time he brought down John with him. They landed in a stinking pile of offal and sewage. John’s head cracked against a pile of old horseshoes someone had thrown out, and the constable, whose gut was as large and thick as a barrel, struggled to regain the advantage by straddling John’s chest. Two meaty fists rained down on him, one after the other. John tasted copper and zinc and tried to cry out for help but he could hardly breathe. And who would help a sewer rat getting beaten by a constable?
In between punches he was aware of a few faces peeking down the alley, but all of them ran, including Edward, the boy John had shared his bread with just last week, and Susanne, the woman John had directed to the church where they were handing out free soup. None of them came to help him now. John’s hands came up in weak defence of his head, pushing and clawing at the constable’s face—
His fingers touched something slippery. Something sticking out of the constable’s side.
Knife was the only word that leapt to his mind.
“Killllll himmmmm, Johnnyyyyyy!”
The knife was still stuck between the constable’s ribs.
“Killllll—”
John grabbed hold, twisted, and yanked it out. His enemy growled and lifted his fist to swing again when John slashed wildly at his face.
And opened his throat.
The constable threw two more punches to John’s head. John nearly blacked out. In fact he probably did. Because next thing he knew, he was face down trying to stand. Trying to breathe. Trying to anything. And when he climbed to his knees he saw the puddle of blood. Looked around. Found the constable. The fella was clutching his throat, then suddenly remembered the truncheon looped through his belt, and pulled it, and charged at John.
John just sort of fell backward meekly, and the tip of the club swiped his cheekbone, busting open his flesh. The constable reared back for another strike, then staggered back and dropped the club and now used both hands to clutch his throat. He turned and ran, disappearing at the mouth of the alley.
“Johnny! Get the knife, Johnny! Cut me loose! Johnny? Johhny! Don’t you fucking pass out, mate! Get you that knife! See it? See the knife, Johnny? It’s right beside you!”
John was only vaguely aware that that was his name. Knife? What knife? He saw it somewhere amid the dark red puddle. Absently, he reached for it. The knife fell from numb fingers. He tried again, and again, and again, and on the fourth attempt his fingers finally remembered their purpose. He gripped the knife, turned back to the end of the alley, and saw Ellis there. He looked funny. John laughed. “What—are you—doing—all tied up?” he wheezed.
Then he remembered. The woman in the blue bonnet, Ellis had been watching her in the market for three days, always with a large purse. Ellis had John do the following, while he did the asking around. Together, they surmised she made drop-offs at the bank for her husband. The purse was likely full of money. Ellis had John dress up as a woman, since he had the dresses and the voice down pat. John lured her…somewhere. Behind a milliner’s shop, yes. But something went wrong. She was a fighter. Ellis struck her over the head with a club—
—where did he get the fucking club?—he never said he was going to—
And then they were running. But the woman wasn’t knocked out. She screamed. And then two watchmen rounded the corner and saw them running away. Blew their whistles. John and Ellis made it halfway across St. Giles. Thought they got away. But word in the streets was a constable had recognized the descriptions the watchmen gave. And he was here, in St. Giles, looking for them. They said the constable’s name was…something long…something French-sounding…but he liked to tie the young ones up. And beat them.
“Johnny!”
And then what? He must’ve ambushed us. That must be why John remembered almost nothing until he was gouging the man’s eye. Must’ve got a knock on the head. The constable thought John was out, and left him alone while he tied Ellis to the—
Pipes. Ellis’s hands were tied behind his back, around a sewage pipe coming from the tenements. His hands were fastened by knotty hempen rope, his face battered and bloody.
John took two tentative steps towards Ellis, knife out. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to cut him free of the pipes. So he lunged forward and threw it.
“No, that’s no good, Johnny! My hands are all tied up! You’re going to have to do it—”
John collapsed onto the gravel.
“Johnny!”
A set of footsteps rushed past. John did not know the toothless woman that lifted up the knife and cut Ellis free, but he imagined she might have seen her share of abuse at the hands of the constables, because once she had them free she pushed the knife into Ellis’s hands and ran away. The good deed was done, and Ellis bent to haul John to his feet. John leaned against a wall until Ellis could throw him over his back. John hung from Ellis’s right shoulder, staring down vacantly as his friend’s feet splashed through water, sewage, and the constable’s blood, all of which ran down a drain at the center of sloped ground.
I’m a killer now. Oh, God, I’m a killer.
____
“He’s dead, everybody’s saying,” said Agatha. She pressed a wet washcloth to John’s brow. He was vaguely aware that he’d been in and out, and he’d been catching snippets of this same conversation, which seemed to last a week or a month or a year. “They’ll hang you two fer it, and no doubt. You two’d best be gone before they set their sights on this place.”
John looked around, and when he did, he became a little dizzy and almost vomited. He was on a straw mattress on somebody’s floor. Bright sunlight came through the slits of wooden boards all around. It was cold and musty, like they were in someone’s attic. Agatha’s room upstairs from The Jolly Swing, where she worked.
John looked at his hands. I’m a killer now. I killed someone. With these. It did not feel real. It felt like it had happened to someone else.
He looked around. Ellis was a blurry figure at one side of the room, peeking through curtains at a window too tiny for escape if they had to. He and Agatha spoke quickly. “—not gonna move Johnny just now—”
“—better to move him and see how he does, than to wait for—”
“—they don’t know we’re here, no one does—”
“—and how long d’ye think it’ll be before someone tells them you and I like to occasionally fuck?”
“—and if I leave, I may have to leave Johnny here—”
“—can’t take care of him here! You both have to go. Now. Tonight—”
“—can’t go anywhere else besides—”
John tried to stand. Agatha and Ellis both helped him up while they kept arguing.
“—can’t understand why you don’t see what’s plain in front o’ yeh? You need to leave the bloody city—”
“—don’t know anyone outside the bloody—”
“—you could ask Sam, he’s got—”
“—just can’t, I said! His father already hates me for—”
“—then what about Sam’s girl? What’s her name? Beth!”
“—can’t imagine she’ll have room for us, not with her brother just moved in. That fella from the press-gang.”
“—then you need to think of something else—”
John tried to speak, but his lips were swollen and caked in scabrous sores. Some of them from the beating, some of them from the infection he and others had gotten from the bread at the church. It hurt to breathe, to blink, to exist. His hand was wrapped in bandages. Felt broken, all right, although he’d never had a broken hand before. This must be what it feels like.
“—we can’t bloody fucking leave London! We can’t even get beyond St. Giles, the bloody fucking constables’ve got them roadblocks going up—”
“Hang on…the press-gang, you said?” said Agatha.
“What?”
“You said Sam’s girlfriend’s brother just moved in with her, and he’s with the press-gangs?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Oh, sweet Mary, you’ve never been burdened with too many wits, have yeh, Ellis Cockrell? There’s your bloody answer! The press-gangs. They’re desperate right now, they’re not even asking for proper papers, all yeh have to do is the same trick Arthur Banks’s brother did—you remember Arthur Banks, don’t yeh, Ellis?”
“I remember him. So?”
“—yeh can join up! Go with the press-gangs to—”
“No!”
“—yeh just have to go to a cemetery and get the name of a baby that died within a couple o’ months of its birth, within a few years of when you were born—”
“We’re not going to do that—”
“Just listen! Then yeh take those babies’ names, yeh visit the churches, maybe those hospitals close by and they’ll give yeh the mothers’ names, the fathers’, they’ll tell yeh if there were any siblings, if they were Catholic or Protestant or whatever, all o’ that. Then yeh have all yeh need to sign up. That’s if the press-gangs even ask. Yeh usually don’t even need that much. Honest, Ellis! Then yeh show up to the docks any Tuesday or Thursday by eight o’clock and have yer duffel. Long as yeh don’t have any lice or anything—”
“We can’t—leave—London,” John croaked. Every word hurt, and his hands quivered to touch his bruised stomach. And his balls hurt. He didn’t even understand how that had happened.
“Why bloody not?” said Agatha.
“Because my—my parents are here. You join the navy—you don’t come back.”
Ellis nodded eagerly. “Too bloody right. Especially since we’d have to use fake names. We’d have the lowest of the lowest ranks. I don’t even know what they do on them ships, but I heard they put the lower-class people in something call the bilge. Full o’ shit and piss!”
Agatha shook her head. “My cousin was in the navy, that’s not what the bilge is. That is, I mean, it can have shit and piss, but…look it doesn’t fucking matter, boys! You two killed a constable!”
“They don’t—know our names,” John wheezed.
“No, sweetie, but they know yer faces. So here’s what yeh do. Yeh vanish for a while. Live as somebody else. Grow a little, grow yourselves some beards, let your hair grow out, let the sun give them fair skins a good tanning. Then, when yeh come back, yeh take up yer old lives like yeh were just on holiday. That’s it. Couple o’ years and the constables will have time to find someone else to blame for what you two—”
“Couple of years?” said Ellis. “Couple of years, she says!”
“Years yeh won’t have if yeh stay here, Ellis Cockrell. I guarantee it to yeh both. Stay here, an’ I guarantee you’ll swing from a rope. Yeh know I’m right. Johnny? Yeh know I’m right, don’t yeh?”
Ellis snorted derisively. “Stupidest fucking plan I ever heard.” But when he looked over at John, he must have seen a different perspective staring back at him. Because John was fed up. To the point he would have wept if he had the tears left. His mother and father had shunned him, but it wasn’t until that moment that John realized that being here in the city had allowed him some small hope of reconciliation with them. Close proximity made it more possible, but to sail off to God knows where…
No chance to reconcile. No chance ever. And yet…
“Stupidest plan, it may be,” John said. “Perhaps only other one close is snatching purses like a couple o’ fucking prigs.” He coughed up a gob of blood. Felt a pain inside his mouth. Reached to the back of his top teeth, and felt a molar wiggle. He looked over at Ellis, who looked devastated. Then he looked at Agatha. “Tuesdays and Thursdays, you said?”
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Agatha nodded. “By eight o’clock.”
____
Moss covered most of the tombstones at Bunhill Fields. Tall grass grew up around stone angels and cracked placards. That made it very easy to spot the more recent graves, easier than all the graves at the churchyard had been. The rain was coming down in sheets. John walked silently beside Ellis, holding his coat over Ellis’s head so that he could write down names on a list. This was the sixth graveyard they had checked in as many days, if this didn’t work then they would need another plan.
I’m a killer now. The thought would not leave him. I have killed a man. What’s next? Hell? I never meant to—
“All right,” Ellis said, wiping rain from his face, and using a charcoal stick to write down another name on his arm. “There’s one or two here might work. Christ, Johnny, keep that coat over my head!”
“Sorry.”
“This one was born in back in ’87. Think you might pass for fourteen, if you keep shaved.”
“Agatha said this probably isn’t even necessary,” John said, shivering. His clothes were drenched through and through. “We probably don’t even need false names. The press-gangs will take anybody right now. They’re desperate—”
“We need to be thorough, Johnny. How many times I gotta tell you? If we’re going to do this, we can’t be half-smart about it. We need these names to create fake papers, in case they check birth certificates.” He glanced sidelong at John. “Fucking Christ. If you’d only…” He trailed off.
“If I’d only what?”
“Nothin’.”
“Go on, say it.”
Ellis rounded on him. “If you’d only held on to that fucking constable’s coat, or his leg, something, he wouldn’t have been able to run off like that and die where everybody could bloody see him! We could’ve hidden his body—”
“This isn’t my fault! It was your idea to take the lady’s purse! Your idea to ambush her like that, with me in a bloody dress—”
“Only because your only bloody talent is dressing up like a bloody nonce!”
John stepped back like he was struck. “You don’t mean that. Say you don’t mean that, Ellis—”
Ellis balled up his fist and reared back. Stopped himself. Then he grabbed John by the shoulders and shook him. “I’m sorry, John. You’re my brother, you know that. You know that, right?”
John nodded.
“Then come on. We need to visit St. Thomas’s, see if any of them know the mothers’ names.”
“Ellis?”
“What, Johnny?”
He hesitated. “Are we really…are we really going to sail?”
Ellis sighed, and nodded. “Yes, John. I suppose we are.”
“To where? What if they don’t put us on the same boat? Will we ever see each other again?”
Ellis chuckled, and clapped John’s cheeks. “They’re called ships, not boats. And you always say in a ship, not on it. And the truth is, Johnny, I don’t know. I just don’t fuckin’ know. But we’ll make it work. I swear, by God, we will make this work. Once friends, always friends. I’ll never leave you, mate. Not ever.”
____
The constables and watchmen were indeed out in force, scouring the streets of St. Giles, kicking in the front and back doors of drinking halls everywhere, invading the rookeries at night, dozens of club-wielding men in black cloaks and grim faces storming into tenements and overturning cribs with babies still in them. The constables beat one boy to death who tried to run when he saw his friends get pinched. They smashed windows and gelded two stallions belonging to a breeder. They even were said to have started the fire on Brunser Street. Their wrath seemed unquenchable.
There was no way else around the roadblocks. No way except Agatha’s brother-in-law, who agreed to do her this one favour, long as she gave him a fat pig in exchange, and long as it was only for one trip to the harbour. His name was Paul and he was a drover, and carried heaps of dung in a wagon across the city to one of his business partners, who then took the manure farther north to sell to the farmers in Celmont.
No one searched dung. Not usually. But the constables were wrathful just now, and they were stopping wagons in the street at random, so who knew what they might do?
John and Ellis laid down as comfortably as they could on the smelly wagon floor. Agatha threw a sheet over them so that they might breathe for a while. Then straw was poured over them, then the dung. John gagged many times, but it was Ellis who finally vomited. In total darkness, John heard Ellis laughing. It wasn’t a good laugh. It wasn’t a healthy one.
Which meant he wasn’t going to like hearing what John had to say next. “Ellis, I’m not sure I can go through with this.”
The wagon jumped as it hit a hole in the road. After that was silence for a while.
“John, we’ve come too far now. I wasn’t excited about it, either, but now…it’s the best thing, Johnny boy. You were right. Agatha was right. It’s this or nothing. It’s this or—”
“But my father…and my mother…they won’t know what happened to me—”
Ellis’s hand was on his throat, squeezing, in the dark, in the wretched, stinking dark. “They don’t know what’s happened to you now, Johnny! They turned you out of the house and left you with what? With what?” Ellis slapped him. “For all they know, you’re dead already. But right now, no one has tied your name to the murder of a constable. But everyone knows our faces, and those rat-fucking bastards in the alley who saw us, they’ll peg us as the ones did it! But even those sewer rats only know our first names, they don’t know our families, they don’t know who we are. But if we don’t leave now, and make the trail cold for a while, they will. And we won’t see trial, Johnny! We’ll be hanged! Right in the fucking square! We’ll be—” He paused to gag. When he spoke again, Ellis was a bit calmer, and gave John’s cheek a pinch. “Just sit tight, Johnny. Just a little longer. Almost there.”
“Yeah, almost there.”
After a long beat when nothing was said, Ellis laughed. “Fuck Benedict Laurier.”
John laughed. “Yeah. Fuck him.” But his humour soon died, and a dark thought returned to him on black wings. “Ellis, am I damned? I—I killed—”
“Hush, Johnny. Almost there. We’re almost out.”
John said nothing else about it. They were carried easily away from those dangerous streets, where constables were still looking for them. But they still weren’t safe, not yet.
____
It was too easy getting aboard the Equinox. Agatha was right, they didn’t even need their counterfeit papers. They didn’t even need the names of the dead babies they’d taken from the graves, nor the names of their mothers or extended family. The press-gang was waiting on a corner in front of a cheese shop, exactly where Agatha said they would be. “We can’t look too eager,” Ellis said. “Remember, it’s all about looks. If we look desperate to join up they’ll assume we’re on the run for something. Remember, not too eager, Johnny. They’ll approach us, press us to join. We must put up a bit of a fight because that’s what everybody does. We have to look like everybody else, Johnny.”
“Right.”
“Here, dip your fingers in this.” It was a bit of ink in a small bottle. “Run it over your fingertips.”
“But why?”
“Makes ’em look a bit tar-stained, like a sailor.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sailors use tar to repair stuff, I think. Makes things waterproof. That’s why they call sailors ‘tars.’”
“They do?”
“Christ, Johnny, just do as I say. And remember, put up a fight.”
And they did exactly that. The seven tall men descended on John and Ellis almost before their hands touched the door to the cheese shop. They surrounded them and asked them their ages, their names. Ellis shouted, “Run, Connor!” Using John’s new name. Ellis made a show of trying to run, but allowed himself to get caught. John did not have to pretend to be frozen by fear, he was, but when they grabbed him he did try and shove the press-men away. Ultimately, they were detained, and sent to the wharf for holding.
There, they were pressed. An officious old woman with a pen and paper scribbled their names on parchment and stamped it. They were put into a room that looked like a jail cell, iron bars and all, along with ten other boys all between fourteen and twenty. Some of them were Newgate birds, he was sure. All looked terrified. Marines with muskets paced by at all hours, making sure no one even thought of attempting escape.
John and Ellis sat quietly together in one corner, trying to sleep, watching out for one another.
The next day they were put on a tender, a ship that was barely more than a jail with sails, and sent away. Then the HMS Equinox came for them, and they and forty others were shuffled aboard their very first ship. It happened that fast. John was trembling as he ascended the gangplank.
____
“This is a double knot,” said the instructor. He stood before dozens of sullen-faced boys, some of them with bloody lips or broken arms from when they had tried to run. “And this,” he said, using his elbow to loop many folds of rope around before tying a knot around his thumb, “is a shank knot.” He undid it, and showed them again. “Double knot. Shank knot. Double knot. Shank knot. Got it? The shank knot is used to shorten or remove slack from a rope. It can also be used to bypass a frayed section of a rope, making it so you don’t have to toss out the whole rope just because one section is damaged. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” they murmured.
They were outside under a tent, sitting on their arses, on some island John had never heard of before. He was terrified by moving forward through time by habit. Ellis was near the front of the class, while John had been placed at the back. He kept looking back at the tent’s entrance, the flap gently pushed by a breeze. He kept thinking how close it was, how easy it would be to run away.
“This will be very important when you reel in the sails,” the instructor said. “To undo a shank knot, you simply pull at these two sections ’ere—” He paced in front of them, demonstrating, an old man with knotted hands, most of his hair missing in clumps around red welts on his scalp. His flesh was brown and leathery from too much sun. A lifetime at sea, no shade. John was afraid just listening to him talk about ropes. He could not make himself believe this was real. They had made a terrible mistake. This could not be real. Perhaps if he went back to St. Giles and explained to someone in the courts what had happened—
“This is a round turn and half hitch,” said the instructor, making another knot. “You’ll use this’un a lot to hook around a chain or some other loop, to hang heavy storage, per’aps netting to suspend barrels on the ceiling. Yes, sometimes you’ll need to store the cargo on the ceiling to make room for the crew to move about—”
This went on for days, and it had a greying effect on John’s wits, where one hungry day bled into the next, his belly aching for berries or real bread or beef or anything substantive. The hardtack they were fed was disgusting, and he was told to get used to it, for that was a large portion of their meals once out to sea.
“Lift the skin up, and put into the bunt the slack of the clews, but never too taut,” the instructor said, even in John’s dreams. “The leech and the foot-rope the same, being careful ne’er to let it get for’ard under or hang down abaft—”
____
The third day at sea, he could finally take no more. The seasickness kicked in during a light squall and the cramped, festering, stinking confines of the forecastle caused him panic. A handful of crewmen laughed while he vomited over the side. John thought about leaping into the water, as had heard two other lads had done, hoping to swim home, not realizing just how far it was. But John knew it was too far, and yet still thought about jumping. Not because of seasickness, but because the night before, two men had gotten him drunk off rum and tried to get his breeches off, but luckily Ellis had awoken in his hammock, screamed for help, and the quartermaster had heard and come just in time, and the men were now in the brig waiting to receive lashings tomorrow at sunrise.
Once he was done retching, John staggered back down below, only to have someone clout his ear. “Up top! Now! Look fast on that yardarm!” said the same quartermaster that had rescued him the night before.
John’s stomach flopped several times at just the thought of it. They pressed all the new boys to go up top even when they weren’t needed, if only to get used to their environment and watch others do the work. To train. To hold things for the carpenters while they made repairs. To tie extra knots around the cargo to secure it for a storm. To climb the ratlines and help reel in the sheets. His hands, never once used to hard work before, not even when he met Ellis and became a thief in the rookeries of St. Giles, were already coated in blisters. And he wasn’t alone in that; a ship’s surgeon had him and the other boys put their hands into bowls of vinegar and olive oil. It did little good.
And all he thought was, I want to go home. I’ll never show such affection for a man ever again. I’ll keep the desires of my heart in check and do as Father says. I’ll find a woman to marry and have children. Just please, God, let this be over. Let us find a way home.
____
The lashings had a muting effect on the crew, and witnessing the crack of each whip across the backs of his assailants made John wilt. The blood flowed onto the deck and it made him sick, it reminded him of the constable’s blood spilling onto the ground—I’m a killer now. The blood flowed and crewmen removed their hats, which he later learned was a crew’s silent show of respect to the men who they saw being unfairly maligned and mutilated.
And soon, by and large, the crew stopped speaking to John, and he knew it was somehow because of what had happened.
He spent lots of his free time playing Hazard, a game where a player cast dice and bet on the outcome. The caster had to call out a number between five and nine before chucking the dice. This was called the main. If they rolled the main, the caster nicks—wins. If they rolled a two or three, it was called outing—losing. If they neither nicked nor outed, it’s called a chance and they roll again, and if they roll the chance once more, they won. Betting money was forbidden aboard a ship, because it could create bitterness between the men and ruin the gestalt, but men could bet trinkets like buttons or string just for fun.
John played with the two or three fellows that didn’t seem to mind him. Keeping his mind focused on Hazard kept him away from thinking about the feeling of isolation. He tended to win a lot, perhaps because he understood the maths, the probabilities. He knew that the most common number to achieve when rolling two six-sided dice was seven. He most often bet on seven, but mixed it up by betting on five or nine so as not to be too obvious about it.
Funny how easy it is to manipulate other men, he often thought when casting, when they don’t have all the information you do. Few of them could read. Fewer could count above twenty.
This went on for uncounted days. Whenever John asked where they were going, the answer was usually something like, “To trade with the islanders.” John caught on that many sailors thought the nippers were annoying, and that they sort of hated being asked too many questions, and expected the nippers to only train and learn the ropes and work the sails and swab the decks.
Another squall came and went. Then a storm, and one man was washed overboard. John had been below, fighting off sickness and working the bilge with Ellis, when he heard the news they were minus one soul. That night he had a hard time sleeping, swinging in his hammock, listening to the men snoring, thinking he heard the drowned man’s ghost calling out for help.
And then Ellis was suddenly in the brig. John only knew that he had been accused of siphoning an extra ration of rum during the night. Ellis claimed innocence, but it did not matter, because he was held overnight until Captain Garner could pass judgment. Which meant he wasn’t there when the same three men came for John again. And this time, they succeeded in getting his breeches off.
But they did nothing else to him. They tried, but John heard Ellis’s voice in his head, over and over again. Kill them, Johnny! Fucking kill them! And so he fought, and clawed, and kicked, and by the end it caused such a ruckus that the other crew in their hammocks—who hitherto seemed all right letting it all transpire as planned—suddenly became angry that they couldn’t sleep for all the noise, and were also getting worried the quartermaster would hear. So they pulled the three men off of John and he regathered his breeches and pulled them on and stormed out of the forecastle and slept on the top deck for the remainder of the voyage.
____
Royce Garner had been the captain of the HMS Equinox for eleven years, and believed in having little rapport with his crew. Rather than learning any of their names or telling them when they did a fair or miserable job, he only shouted at them during daylight hours, then became a recluse at night and trusted the workings to his first mate, Mr. Felt.
Mr. Felt was a tall man who always worked shirtless, revealing the crisscrossing scars on his chest and back, which he claimed he’d gotten from some Caribee tribe when he was taken prisoner ages ago. Felt took both John and Ellis under his wing when he saw they had a knack for staying up way past sunset. He put them on second-watch duty, alternating between helping the lookouts in the crow’s nest and working with the linemen to make sure they never ran aground when they skirted close to an island.
At the time, Equinox had no orders to sink any ships. The Spaniards still controlled most of the Caribbean, but that was fast changing. There were reports of battles all over the West Indies Sea. Ships that met them at sea spread the rumours. The Royal Navy had doubled their efforts at shipbuilding and naval combat drills, and had invented a new rank—Commodore—to be given to the most advanced and knowledgeable naval captains. The Commodores were already bending the Spaniards over a barrel and chasing them across the Caribbean.
The Equinox stayed at sea for weeks at a time, and always anchored within the protection of a heavily wooded inlet. At all times, John was aware that they were maneuvering through some dangerous waters. The Spaniards and the French had spread across these waters like plague, and the kings of each country only wanted more.
They heard tell of ships sinking all over. The Caribbean seabed was reportedly filling up with them. “Almost to the point you can walk across the ocean, from one foundered ship to the next,” one sea captain had joked when they met him and his vessel careening on an unnamed island.
They visited numerous islands and Captain Garner parlayed with the natives, traded with the small British and Dutch colonies that were spreading about. John learned the Equinox was a packet ship, essentially paid to transport letters and packages from one island to another, and that it was vital to keeping communications going between all the islands.
They traveled all over, John’s skin always red from too much sun. They heard rumours of battles, of the Commodores conducting great ambushes throughout the Caribbean. But the sun rose and fell almost six hundred times before John Laurier ever saw his first battle.
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Like the fight with the constable, it all soon became a blur. John remembered someone calling out, “Sail ho!” and the captain rushing to the bow of the ship, shouting, “Where away?” and the spotter in the maintop saying something about “A point off the starboard bow” or close to that. John watched along with Ellis at the railing, saw the Dutch flag. A merchantman. They had learned what those were and how to spot them.
There was smoke coming from the ship, like they’d sustained a fire. Someone stood on their prow waving a flag of distress. They slowed their speed and dropped anchor. The Equinox also slowed down and came alongside them. That’s when a trebuchet, hitherto concealed by sagging sails, was revealed and launched a flaming barrel across at them. It exploded upon impact behind John, at the same time the air was rent by the multiple firings of the pirate vessel’s cannons.
This was the first time John had ever heard of this trick. Pirates posing as merchants in distress. He screamed and looked for Ellis but Ellis wasn’t there.
It was chaos. The fire spread, forcing men to have to decide on whether to douse the flames or man the cannons. The Royal Marines were just as confused, for their major’s head had been taken off by a cannon shot, John saw the decapitated body pumping blood onto the deck. It was unclear who was in charge, where the orders ought to be coming from. The crew had run drills for combat scenarios but neither John nor Ellis had never been a part of that.
A lucky shot must’ve gone through Equinox’s keel in that first volley, because soon they were taking on water even as they tried to run. Ellis, appearing out of the crowd, grabbed John and they both ran for the swords and pistols being handed out by the quartermaster, but by that time the ropes were being thrown over, the grappling hooks dug into the railing. Men with axes tried to hack the lines away, but too late, because a second ship, which had been hiding just over the horizon, came sweeping in, completing the trap. Here came the Queen Anne’s Revenge, a towering galleon of unparalleled size and awesome guns.
John felt his legs turn to water, and he knew that surely, finally, at last, his sad and pathetic story had come to a close. But his story had only just begun, for this was to be his introduction to Captain Blackbeard.