Cross of Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the three wigs. Five red leather-backed seats stood available, two empty. Coxon bowed and clicked his heels together; Walter Kennedy hovered at his shoulder and swivelled his eyes about cautiously. The oil paintings hung all around the room looked down at him disapprovingly and the white wigs in front of him scraped the hour with swan’s quills. Rarely did such occasions go well for one of his birth. He kept his eyes down and his mouth shut.
    One of them put out a friendly hand.
    ‘Come forward, John. Sit down.’
    Viscount Chetwynd. Not a man with fighting history Coxon recalled, a junior of the office, younger than him at least. A landsman. Coxon looked at them all as he sat.
    Sir Charles Wager and Sir John Jennings, the older hands at the table. Both in their late-fifties, they had oak in their bones and the red, dry faces of seamen. They would not drag this out. Good. Get along with it.
    ‘Who is this you have with you, Captain?’ Chetwynd asked.
    Coxon looked at Kennedy behind his shoulder as if he had forgotten he was there.
    ‘Ah. Sirs, this young man is Walter Kennedy. I intend to take him with me. A special envoy of mine.’ He looked along the three faces. ‘That is if I am still here for the purpose of why I was recalled from my retirement? That is to say . . . to make an end? Make an end to the pirate Devlin?’
    Sir John Jennings leaned into the others. ‘What did he say? Who is it now?’ Sir John had been part deaf since the Spanish guns.
    ‘Never mind,’ Sir Charles patted Jennings’s hand. Coxon noted the two golden-liveried scriveners, one to his left at a desk against the wall, another behind the lords. It was only when they picked up their pens as Sir Charles first spoke that their movement made them apparent to him. His words were now marked by their audible scratching.
    ‘Captain. You resigned your commission in the Bahamas three years since. You should consider that if the Board has requested you in particular that it would be for no small matter.’
    ‘No, My Lord,’ Coxon blushed. ‘I meant no disrespect. But I am aware how circumstances can change. I have been on a packet three weeks since from the Americas. Then been in London months more before being called here. As I said, I know how things can change.’
    The deaf Sir John leaned in again. ‘Change what now?’ He cupped a hand to his ear as if his ailment needed emphasis.
    Sir Charles carried on, thumbing through the pages of vellum.
    ‘Aspects have indeed changed somewhat. No doubt your assumptions are part of the instincts that have kept you alive for so long, Captain.’ Coxon nodded his thanks to the compliment.
    ‘And we are all well aware that your recommission will be a short-lived affair – if you will pardon the expression, sir – and you can return to your ambitions in His Majesty’s colonies with no mark against you.’
    Mark ? Coxon’s mind leapt on that one word. What mark ? He brushed his hair forward again, flattening it down like a man trying to hide thinning hair. He had no marks against him unless there was still the embarrassment of his servant turning pirate, his failure to stop him the first time, his bowing to let him go the second, although that decision had brought the secret of porcelain to the king.
    It is the gold they refer to, John. The gold you buried on Providence, remember? Devlin’s gold from The Island. The gold that you took up to start your new life. That is the mark they have against you.
    His feet had risen up on his toes as he tensed. Chetwynd looked down at the sound of the shoe leather creaking and Coxon put his heels back to the floor.
    ‘Yes, My Lord,’ he said. ‘Aspects have changed, you say? In what way?’
    Sir Charles shifted, ruefully shook his head, some of the words to come distasteful judging by his sour expression.
    ‘You may be unaware that the pirate nuisance has become exasperating in the African and Indian waters. These fiends have become overtly wealthy, ever