The Pirate Devlin Read Online Free PDF Page B

painfully who fought you away from the captain's cabin, has agreed to be our new artist!' A satisfied murmur. 'I have a plan, lads, to sail to old St Nick tomorrow.' He closed his right hand into a fist.
      'I aims to capture the Portuguese governor there and hold him to ransom! The plan will be revealed to you on the morn, boys, and Patrick will take us there!'
      He raised his empty mug. The men roared and took that as the signal to return to their drink. They cared little for their destiny tomorrow - or next year. They would fight and sail when the sun rose and set. The reason immaterial.
      Toombs turned back to Devlin and Peter Sam. 'There. Now, Patrick, make any preparations that you need to sail me to St Nicholas. What happened 'twixt you and Lewis, by and by, mate?'
      As if in answer, a crack rang out below deck, and Toombs's eyes shot down to the empty belt where Devlin's left-locked pistol used to be.
      'I told him it was best not to be fed to the sharks alive.' Devlin tapped his forehead and stepped down to retrieve his pistol.
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Chapter Two
     
    Cape Coast Castle, African Gold Coast, April 1717
      John Coxon dragged himself to the top of the West Tower, the wind-vane tower that captured the delicious morning African sun before it began to sear. He hung on to the battlements, breathing deep, trying to stave off the threat of nausea. As he had been every morning for the past three months, he was in his full working clothes, despite the aching heat. There was no uniform officer dress but, like most, Coxon had a rotating wardrobe of white breeches and stockings, white linen shirts and dull waistcoats, all wrapped in a square- cut, dark twill greatcoat with muted black piping and brass buttons, which now, after his illness, sloped from his shoulders; he had been forced as well to splice a new notch on his breeches belt.
      He looked up and drew in the sea. By the beat of the sun on his back he knew it to be past ten, but there were still some straggling fishermen skimming up to the shore beneath him. The guns to the left and right of him stared out also, like silent sentinels. Nobody ever manned them, and the salt from the sea and air was eating them away. On the first day that he was able to walk any distance he had found a swallow's nest in one of them, the touch-hole carelessly painted over.
      The bleached white castle sat on Africa's Gold Coast. It was the final door that millions of slaves would walk through before they began the long journey to the Americas. Even now, beneath Coxon's feet in the gaol below, nine hundred men stood naked together, waiting for the slavers to arrive, unable to sit down for lack of space and the hardened excrement that made up the floor, in a dark hell that had originally been made for just one hundred and fifty prisoners.
      Coxon had sailed to Cape Coast as captain of the Noble, the twenty-four-gun frigate he had captained for almost a decade. He had watched her sail away without him, watched her escutcheon until he could no longer make out her name.
      There had been delays in waiting for their slaver to be ready to sail and, whilst enjoying the hospitality of the eccentric General Phipps, Coxon had been struck down with the tropics plague of dysentery, or as it was known rather more colloquially, the 'vacuums'.
      He was being paid a handsome twelve-and-a-half per cent commission from the South Sea Company to escort the galley to the colonies, and even with a fifteen per cent death rate on the cargo, he figured he might come away with enough to start an emporium of some kind in Boston or one of the cities of the five major colonies. The ones that at least had paved roads.
      In the wars, life was simpler, but ten years of conflict, of politics against the French and Spanish, had taken his prime years. This year, at forty, he found himself in a world of trade and companies, powdered wigs and ebony canes.
      There was no rich estate or lordly hearth for him to