Skull and Bones. John Drake

      “Below, in my cabin. I’ll show you…”

      “Back your topsail,” said Long John. “Time for that later.” And he looked around.

      For the moment, all was well. The weather was fine, the prize taken, the prisoners under guard. And that included five passengers – now trembling in each other’s arms on the maindeck, wealth written all over them – who had cabins for the passage to England. These were Fitch’s “supercargo”. Two were women: one middle-aged but handsome, and clearly a lady of fashion, wearing a Leghorn straw hat to save her complexion from the sun and a fine linen gown, cut practical for the ocean journey but underpinned with a full rig of hooped panniers. The other was her elderly maid. No blushing virgin, either of ‘em, but they’d need watching for fear the hands – bless their hearts – forgot what they’d signed under articles, concerning the punishment for rape.

      But greater matters presented themselves…

      “Long John! Long John!” cried Allardyce, coming up from the maindeck hatchway and leading a tall man with chains dangling from his wrists and ankles. “Look!” said Allardyce, with reverence. “It’s Himself! It’s the McLonarch! Him that led the charge of Clan McLonarch, between Clan Chester and Clan Atholl, and me behind him – my mother being a McLonarch – right to the British bayonets where he killed five with his own hand!”

      “What’s this, Tom Allardyce?” said Silver, stepping forward. He looked at the creature Allardyce was referring to and detected the authentic look of a holy lunatic. The man was as tall as Silver, round-eyed, gaunt and woolly-haired, with a straggling beard, a great beak of a nose and high, slender cheekbones. His clothes were unkempt but clean, for though he was in chains, he’d not been ill-treated and there was no stink of the dungeon about him. He had decent shoes and stockings besides, and silver buckles, so he’d not been pillaged neither.

      “Who are you, my lad?” said Silver.

      “My lord!” corrected Allardyce. “He is the McLonarch of McLonarch!”

      “Very likely,” said Silver. “But I’ll hear it from him, not you!”

      The tall man stirred, fastened his eyes on Silver, drew himself upright and spoke with the soft, Irish-sounding accent of the Scottish Highlands.

      “I am Andrew Charles Louis Laurent McLonarch-Flaubert – ninth Earl of McLonarch, and First Minister of His Most Catholic Majesty King Charles III, who is known to men as Bonnie Prince Charlie.” He was bedraggled and in chains, and spouting utter nonsense. But nobody laughed. Nobody laughed at the McLonarch.

      “Are you now?” said Silver. “And what does King George say to that?”

      “George of Hanover is a pretender and a heretic,” said McLonarch calmly. “He faces the block in this world and damnation in the next.”

      “I see,” said Silver. “So what’re you doing in chains? What with you being prime minister, an’ all?”

      McLonarch looked around until he spotted the group huddled against the lee rail, menaced by pistols. He pointed at Norton.

      “Ask him,” said McLonarch, and nodded grimly. “He is one whom I have marked for future attention, for he is deep in the service of the Hanoverians.”

      Everyone looked at Norton, who shrugged his shoulders.

      “I serve my king!” he said, afraid to say more.

      “And what might that mean?” said Long John.

      Norton thought before he spoke. He was a brave man but he was nervous, and with good reason. He couldn’t guess whose side these pirates might take, and he knew McLonarch’s power with words.

      “McLonarch is a leader of Jacobites,” he said. “He would raise rebellion – civil war – to soak England in blood. He is under arrest by the Lord Chancellor’s warrant, and I am charged with escorting him home for trial.” Norton looked round to see how this was received.

      “Bah!” sneered McLonarch. “The man is a catchpole, a thief-taker, an agent sent to return me to England for judicial murder. He used bribery and deceit to capture me, and to steal the treasure lawfully gathered by my master the king.”

      “Treasure?” said Silver, just when the politics was getting dull.

      “Treasure?” said a dozen voices.

      “A war chest of three thousand pounds in Spanish gold, which –”

      “THREE THOUSAND POUNDS?” they cried.

      “Which I was delivering to my master’s loyal followers in London.”

      “Where is it?” said Silver.

      “WHERE IS IT?” roared his crew.

      “In the hold, in strong boxes,” said McLonarch, and pointed again at Norton: “He has the keys. He stole them from me.”

      There followed half an hour of the most delightful and congenial work. Having been told exactly what would happen to him if he didn’t co-operate, Norton swiftly produced a heavy ring of keys from his cabin. Meanwhile the main hatchway was broken open, a heavy block rigged to the mainstay, with lifting tackles, and the crew of Venture’s Fortune set to the heavy labour of burrowing through the cargo – rum, sugar and molasses – to get to the heavy strongboxes which were on the ground tier down below.

      Then the captured crew were made to haul up the boxes, one at a time, for opening on the quarterdeck at Silver’s feet, to thundering cheers, the fiddler playing, hornpipes being danced, and joy unbounded as rivers of Spanish coin poured out all over the decks, such that it was a tribute to Long John’s leadership that all hands did not get roaring drunk and lose the ship.

      The only thing that puzzled Silver in that merry moment was why McLonarch had given up his treasure so easily. Silver pondered on that. Of course, the gelt was lost to McLonarch as soon as his ship was taken…but why speak up quite so helpful: saying how much there was, and who’d got the keys, an’ all? It wasn’t right. No man behaved like that. So what was going on?

      He got his answer later, when Tom Allardyce brought McLonarch down to the stern cabin, where Silver was sitting at Captain Fitch’s desk, going through the ship’s papers for anything that might be useful.

      “Cap’n!” said Allardyce. Silver looked up. Allardyce stood with his hat in his hands, bent double in respect for the man beside him, and whom he kept glancing at, in awestruck respect. McLonarch, free of chains and even more imposing than he’d been before, stood beside Allardyce with his nose in the air, and gazing down upon Silver as if he were a lackey with a chamber pot. Silver frowned.

      “Who took his irons off, Mr Bosun?”

      “Er…me, Cap’n.”

      “On whose orders?”

      “Seemed the right thing, Cap’n,” said Allardyce, torn between two loyalties.

      “The right thing, you say? Now see here, my lad, I’ll not –”

      “Captain Silver!” said McLonarch. “That is your name, is it not?”

      Silver stared at McLonarch, whom he did not like – not one little bit – having taken against him on sight, for McLonarch was a man who expected doors to open in front of him and close behind him, and who sat down without looking…such was his confidence that a minion would be ready with a chair! Silver forgave him that, for it was the way of all aristocrats. What made him uneasy was McLonarch’s belief that he was the right hand of Almighty God, and his uncanny gift of convincing others of it: which gift now bore down upon John Silver.

      “Aye, milord! Silver’s my name,” said Long John. “Cap’n Silver, at your service.”

      Silver couldn’t believe he’d just said that. He disowned the words on the instant.