Blood Diamond: A Pirate Devlin Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

but he has five hundred pounds on his head! Five hundred, John!’
    Wild had not looked at the price.
    ‘Bah! That’s what makes you, you, George, and me, me. I say again. What’s a pirate doing in my city? Lot of risk for him here. Take an awful deep purse to bring him in for something. And this here bag is nothing compared to what he might have. In mind or in box.’
    ‘But five hundred, Jon!’
    Wild leaned back and watched his street, passing an eye up to the prison. ‘We’ll go see him after dark, when it’s quiet. See what he has to say. And if nothing else we still got five hundred on him.’ He stretched out, saw a rosier future ahead. ‘If he dies tonight or next week I’ll still be a hero. Fetch us up a pie, George. And some beer. I got business to think on.’
     
    To be belayed and hammered unconscious is not a perfect slumber by any measure. A few minutes at most of blackness and the rest, particularly if one is dragged along and has the noise and smells of Wapping as a background, is a grey watery world of dreaming and pain as reality forces itself back.
    Voices jumble, sounds clang like bells, and all the victim feels is a sleep that promises to come but will not, and the gnawing of his toecaps and ankles dragging on cobblestones as the crowd filtering past takes sport in his sorrow.
    It is even some comfort, then, to be dropped onto a bed of straw over oak planks, for some sleep must surely arrive now. But the pain galloping around the head like a dancing Pan pricks the tormented awake to enjoy his painful tune.
    Devlin eased up on an elbow and surveyed the last corners of the damned.
    A stone room laid with planks for a floor, studded with ringbolts to tether ankles. One barred window, high in the wall and narrow as a post-hole, lets in August and the fading twilight. The walls are made up of blocks of stone like the last room gladiators see before the arena; and perhaps in truth the chains that fastened men to the floor had been wrought by the same hands, for the gaol made up the last Roman remnant of the city’s east wall. It was the bailey of old that once ringed Londinium and gave the street alongside the gaol its name. God had burnt it down once already but the Devil still had his need and Newgate rose again.
    Charles II had the gaol rebuilt as a priority after plague and fire heralded the end of the world, when prisoners had lain like fat flies upon the carts.
    Sir Richard Whittington and his cat saluted the inmates, with the pious figures of Liberty, Peace, Security and Plenty bowing to justice at his feet. The session house stood next door. Newgate, Old Bailey and Giltspur spread like the points of the cross, with Tyburn anchoring it three miles away to the west. Eight hundred turns of the cartwheel to the rural setting of the hangman’s tree.
    Devlin looked about. Grey, green and black, an etching of doom. A dark smell of the butcher’s apron and effluence strange to a man now used to the brilliant vermillions and blues of the Caribbean and the wash of light, fresh-born every morning, that removed the stain of tobacco and rum from one’s lungs. That air full of salt, boucan allspice smoke, fruit and promise.
    This was grey. A grey sketched by the suicidal artist. This was stone and damp and death. This was London. He had left it once, the pores of its burnt walls reeking of gin and rotten oranges, fish and filth. He tugged at the manacles around his ankles. Fettered to the floor. This was not a London that Devlin wished to see. It was the London of his past, the one he had run from when he was skinny and poor with murder hanging over his head. No, not good for an Irishman to be found with a dead body. That had been old man Kennedy. Ten years ago. A long ten years but still remembered somewhere, for sure, somewhere an Irishman could still be hung just for his voice and of that he was certain. There was the son, Walter Kennedy, whom Devlin had shared lodgings with, alongside the father.