Skull and Bones. John Drake

all in good temper. Most of them vanished below for this vital work, leaving a dozen men, well armed with firelocks, to guard the crew.

      And none of them took the trouble to look up into the maintop where the boy was hiding. And since nobody saw him, he watched as the smashing and cheering went on and on, and men staggered about the decks in the captain’s best clothes and Mr Banbury’s hat, gorging on pork and pickles and wine and brandy.

      Later still, the boy shuddered in horror as a girl’s shriek came from below, and men emerged through the quarterdeck hatchway, grinning and leering, with Olivia Rose and her father dragged behind them. The father was bloodied and staggering, and was kicked into a semi-conscious heap by the mizzenmast. But there was a roar from the pirates on sight of the girl, and greedy hands reached out to paw and grab and grope. Her long hair was loose, her gown was ripped, pale flesh gleamed and she screamed and screamed.

      But the pirate leader – he of the feathered hat – kicked his way through the press, seized Olivia Rose by the arm, and merrily fired a pistol in the air for attention.

      “Après moi, mes enfants!” he cried, grinning at his men. “Je serai le premier!” And they cheered and laughed, and fired off a thundering fusillade in salute.

      Up in the maintop the boy shook with rage.

      Rage doesn’t just conquer fear. Rage annihilates it. Rage brings boiling fury such that no grain of self-preservation remains, nor any consideration of danger, nor threat of weapons. Hence the Viking berserker transported into blood-spattering frenzy…and the ship’s boy that leapt bare-chested into open air from the maintop to slide down one of the backstays and launch himself – twenty feet from the deck – as a human projectile, landing feet first on the feathered head of the pirate captain – who went down with his neck snapped on a jutting boot, and his face burst open like rotten fruit as the impetus of the boy’s fall drove him smashing into the pine of the quarterdeck planking.

      Then…uproar and confusion. The pirates bellowed and roared, surprised for an instant, shocked and disbelieving, then snapping pistols at the boy, forgetting they were empty. Taking their example, he snatched the pistols from the dead pirate’s bandolier – there were seven of them, ready loaded – and let fly, left and right. Men shrieked and fell as the bullets struck, and the rest hung back while the pistols lasted, then charged, and the boy was blocking slashing blades with the heavy barrel of a hot, smoking pistol, which soon got lost. Bodies heaved and bundled and swayed, and more men piled in, and the fight rolled and staggered, with the boy in the middle, armed only with his own two fists and his unhinged, manic fury. And then he got hold of a cutlass, which he couldn’t swing in the dense press, so he used it two-handed as a spear, shoving it into an open mouth and out the back of a head, then wrenching it free and punching out another man’s teeth with the iron hand-guard, and on and on…

      But with nearly twenty pirates on the quarterdeck and more coming up from below, there could be only one end to the fight…except that the pirates were remarkably clumsy and got in each other’s way, and they’d fired off their pistols and muskets…and on the fo’c’sle, seeing their guards with backs turned, gaping at the fight on the quarterdeck, Captain Higgs had his own moment of rage.

      “Sod you, you bugger!” he said to the hand-wringing Banbury. “Come on, lads!” he cried, pulling a belaying pin from the pinrail, swinging it down with a crunch on to the blue-kerchiefed head of a mulatto pirate and snatching up the carbine that he dropped. The guards hadn’t fired off their arms, so Higgs blasted lead and flame at three-feet range into the chest of another pirate even as he turned back to face the sudden danger.

      After that, it was hellfire and damnation aboard the good ship Isabelle Bligh and Quakerism went over the side with the dead. For Isabelle Bligh’s crew were seething that they’d not manned their guns in the first place, and were out for vengeance for their murdered shipmate. So even though they were outnumbered more than two-to-one, they recaptured their ship, fighting at first with belaying pins and sailor’s knives, and then taking up the weapons of their foes…and with the considerable advantage that many of the pirates were blind staggering drunk.

      When Captain Higgs finally called an end to the slaughter, less than a quarter of those who’d come aboard as bold dogs and roaring boys were left alive to be clapped like slaves under hatches, and the pirate ship was sailing under a prize crew, behind the triumphant Isabelle Bligh, such that even Samuel Banbury’s conscience was eased by the money he’d make in selling her.

      As for the boy who’d saved the day: he was ship’s hero! Without his plunge from the maintop there would have been no fight, and no triumph. So there were glorious weeks of a merry voyage when even Olivia Rose’s father did not try to keep her and the boy apart, and the two fell as deeply in love as ever it is possible for a pair of sixteen-year-olds to do: he loving her for her beauty and sweet kindness, and she loving him for those things that she saw that others did not, especially his limitless capacity to love. She saw that he would never be happy without a cause to follow and a loved one to serve. In her eyes this transformed Caliban the ugly into Ariel the shining one.

      It was a wonderful, golden, glorious romance that approached…reached…and transcended Heaven on Earth, for the two young lovers.

      “You are my beau chevalier sans peur et sans reproche,” she said to him once.

      “What’s that?” he said.

      “It means…my fair knight, fearless and pure.”

      He blushed.

      And so they sat together, and talked together, she telling him stories and playing that ancient game with seashells – at which she was adept – whereby swift movement of the shells deceives the onlooker who cannot tell which hides the pea. He loved the game, and the curious West Indian shells she played it with, and of which she had a collection. And he loved the country love songs that she sang to him of an evening, with the crew sitting quietly and joining in the chorus.

      But voyages end. This one ended in London, and there the two were parted by duty: hers to her father, and his to his trade. There were bitter tears and mighty promises of faithfulness when finally, in the Thames below London Bridge, she was about to go into the boat that would take her and her father ashore to their new life. In that tragic moment, he gave her the traditional seaman’s love-token of a staybusk that he’d carved from whalebone with his own hand. In return, she gave him a lock of her hair, and half a dozen of the West Indian shells that he loved.

      “I’ll be back for you, Livvy Rose,” he said, “when I’ve made me pile!”

      “Be a good boy,” she said. “And remember me.”

      And indeed he did. He remembered her to the dying second of his dying day, and he really did try to come back to claim her. But he never quite made his pile, and day by day other duties intervened, until finally it was too late, because – in the meanwhile – he had become something very other than a good boy.

      For he was led astray. He was led bad astray was Billy Bones.

       Chapter 2

       Dinner time, 12th March 1753

      Aboard HMS Oraclaesus

       Anchored in the southern anchorage

       Flint’s Island

      Chk-chk-chk! Groggy the monkey chattered and reached his little hands for the horn mug. At first, when they saw his love for strong drink, the crew had called him “Old Grog”. But they turned this into a pet name when the monkey became ship’s favourite and ran from mess to mess at dinner time, and they fed him drink till he staggered and lost his nimble footing and couldn’t even lie on the deck without hanging on, and they laughed and laughed at his merry antics.

      But they didn’t laugh today. Not with most of them too sick for