Cutthroats of the Coast

Chapter 21 - Cleaning out Tangier

The following morning, after a restless night back in the cellar sweating, waiting to hear the tramp of soldiers' boots, I found that there were almost too many reasons for me to list to explain the onset of nausea that now trembled in my guts.

Theoretically, we were on our way to freedom, with all luck, planning to slip past our pursuers via a small, lightly guarded gate near the Irish Battery on the East wall of the town. More likely, we would be discovered and skewered to the ground with cruel bayonets before being dragged by our heels through the town to the harbour. Fear enveloped me like an old, familiar cloak, its heavy folds dragging at my limbs.

Perhaps my nausea was a natural reaction to the events of the past two days which had caused me so much alarm and fright. Mayhap the lack of a drink and the resulting, forced sobriety was something that my fibres were reluctant to accept. I knew that the thirst raged within me but there was no bottle to be had down amongst Da Silva's turnips. It could have been because I was still sick at heart over the murder of that officer, or the death of shipmates like Two Tusks, or even worried over the disappearance of poor French Bob. Had he been taken by the Governor's men? If he had there would be no mercy for a pirate. He would be hanged in chains at the port's mouth, a lesson for all sailor-men to see.

My nausea could also be explained by the dreadful, choking heat in the rank enclosure that I now found myself, bumped and jolted every which way. Like a coffin, I was tightly encompassed by wooden boards, a hard one on which I lay, and an equally hard one an inch away from my nose that I crashed into every now and again. Unlike a coffin, I had company. Nathaniel's piss-soaked stockinged feet lay adjacent to my head and on the other side of those, Jack's eyes glared at me.

“Damn these potholes!” Nathaniel cursed. “Why didn't I spend more time sorting these out rather than that damned mole!”

“A right lot of fucking twats we'd look if the lobster backs twig us!” Jack grimaced, referring to the Tangier Regiment's red coats that clad the soldiery that I glimpsed through a narrow gap in the boards next to my head. “Keep your fucking trap shut!”

Most of all though, the likely reason for my nausea was due to the infernal fluid that seeped through the gaps above us. Even in the dim light I could see the dark, fat drops collect in lines that ran the length of the seams above us, swell, then burst with every shake of our torrid gaol.

Maria had quite clearly explained that the only way out of Tangier open to fugitives was through her own arrangements. That had been revealed in Da Silva's yard. A ancient ass, broken-backed and dull-eyed, was harnessed to the traces of a two wheeled, low slung cart upon which was piled the source of my current indisposition. Nightsoil; a great cartload of weeping dung, human and animal, that filled the yard with a stink so great that I could taste it.

The vile girl had revealed the secret space beneath the load bed in which Nathaniel, Jack and I were now packed like herring in a barrel, and instructed us that on no account were we to make noise.

“You make sound, they will kill you! I will kill you! Morgan will kill you!” she had said with venom, drawing a finger across her throat, clearly indicating our future should we transgress.

Well, now we transgressed mightily. The stench was horrendous. We choked back vomit and to stifle the coughs that wracked us, bit into our lips so much as to draw blood. It was likely that the noise we made within our hiding place was drowned by the wheels that squeaked and rattled on their dry axles. However, we weren't to know that for sure and the familiar dead weight of fear had sunk into my bowels each time some spluttering cough of disgust resounded from any one of us.

“Clap a stopper over it down there. You're like a p-parcel of fucking hogs!” Ramsbottom's voice called through the gap in the boards. “They'll fucking have us if you keep g-griping in there!”