Cutthroats of the Coast

Chapter 10 - Mighty Achilles Girds His Loins!

After our perfidious execution of The Resolve’s crew, our own men were in high spirits.  It seems that there is nothing a sailor likes more than a little blood-letting, most particularly if it does not emanate from his own veins.  Also we continued to make excellent progress, logging over a hundred miles a day.  It was as if their enthusiasm for murder gave The Betsy wings with which to fly from the scene of her shameful crimes.  My own low spirits were comforted with rum and unceasing labours at the clerk’s desk and with MacPhail.

The Betsy sailed South with no further incident to obstruct our passage.  Biscay offered us no mighty tempest with which to strive against. Papist Spain did not intercept us with a galleon full of Dons to drag us into The Groyne and subject us to the torments of the Inquisition.   From Portugal came boatloads of eager fishermen, keen to sell basketfuls of glistening, twitching sardines to the Purser, who looked askance at me each time he passed over silver and gold to sea-burnt, outstretched hands.  

What did Mr Mandrake know of my suspicions of his crimes?  What did he know of mine?  I was as ignorant two weeks after the battle as I had been the day after.  All I could sense was his gaze upon me when my back was turned, yet when I happened to look upon him, I would only see his back receding as he passed down a hatch, or along the deck. 

Those two weeks of sweet sailing had brought us close to our destination.  I had heard mention that we were passing Cadiz.  My mind still churned with panic each night as I put my head down to sleep.  How was Morgan going to rob the treasury of one of the most secure fortresses in Christendom?  Why did I have to be involved?  I would reach for the flask of rum that Morgan ensured was filled each night and I would suckle at it like an infant seeking comfort from a mother’s teat.  As I slid into a warm daze, I would feel a hot, hard body slide into my cot beside me.  Morgan’s muscular arm would glide across my hip like a snake and he would press himself up against me, forcing my legs apart with his own.  Compliant and confused, tears streaming from my eyes, hot sweat soaking the cot beneath me, I would gasp with guilt, shame and passion, as he thrust his way into me each night.  The Devil had surely seduced me.  Morgan did not force me; it was my own weakness that gave into his lust, and my own.  Shame consumed me in a way that it had not at Oxford, when creeping clerics tormented the younger, more innocent scholars. 

The Captain also seemed ill at ease.  He was covetous of my company, insisting that I return from assisting MacPhail without tarrying on deck.  In the cabin he would sit sprawled along the counter below the stern windows, gazing alternately at our churning wake, or at me engaged in my Herculean labours beneath the grinning head of my predecessor.  Every now and again, Morgan would suddenly yell out some expostulation or other as if he was having a private conversation with some unseen presence. 

“Nay, you’ll not have him!”  he would typically shout.  Or perhaps it would be “He has not the ferryman’s price!  Come again tomorrow, dire spirit!”  He appeared to have a diverse range of sayings that became more intemperate the closer we came to Tangier.  To whom he was speaking I could only wonder but it sounded like some phantasm that the ancients would have known well.  As the days wore on, Morgan’s mood became more worrisome.  Morose and inclined to fits of melancholy, his cries became tinged with a note of desperation.  

The morning that I was due to transfer to The Resolve, and before I made my rounds with MacPhail, Morgan appeared to collapse.  “Fuck off, foul sprite!”  he screeched before he turned to me with wild staring eyes.  “Go not to your doom, Matthew!  Come back to me.  Swear on it, or I’ll bathe in your blood before you leave!” 

Greatly unmanned, I placated Morgan, “It is nothing, Cap’n.  I must away to my rounds and then to the snow, as you have commanded.  Would you have me stay?  Are you afflicted with poor bowels, again?  They do so make you low.”