Pyrate's Boy, page 10
A day later we come upon a wooden dinghy floating upside down in the sea.
‘Oh, dear,’ says Black Johnnie.
I try not to think about the drowned Spaniards or the threat of growlers as we sail on. Days turn into weeks and still there is no sight of Scotland. Even Billy the Fiddle starts to worry.
‘If only we could see,’ he says, ‘then I would feel a whole lot better.’
And then one day the fog clears and there is land on either side, close, much closer, than any of us expected. I recognise the place immediately.
‘By my calculations,’ Billy the Fiddle tells us, ‘we should be heading up the Firth of Clyde,’
Up ahead, two ancient castles – one on an island and one on the mainland – look like sentinels guarding the mouth of the river. We cannot pass by without being seen. The Irish flag is still flying. Billy the Fiddle glances at Black Johnnie. If he wants to change his mind, if he feels now that our mission is too dangerous – that it might be better to steal the Jewels of Caracas from Isabella, forfeit our reward and squander any possibility that she be reunited with her long-lost lover, then this would be the place to decide.
Black Johnnie rubs his shoulder and then he nods.
‘Keep going, Bill,’ he says. ‘We’ve a fair wind behind us. We’ll be in Glasgow by nightfall.’
24. THE FAIR SHORES
Greenock, at the mouth of the Clyde, is far from being the huge, dirty, smelly town of my memory. From the ship I can see the harbour, the sugar warehouses, the tannery and, on the hill behind, the brewery and the parish school where I used to go. With its bright green fields and a fresh wind to blow away the smoke from its chimneys, the town is not the sad place I remembered. Maybe it isn’t Greenock that has changed, but me?
I can barely picture my sister’s face any more. It has been more than two years since we last saw each other. Is she still working as a housemaid? What did she think of me when I left without a word of farewell? Was she somehow involved in the attempt to bring me home? And if so, was she told I had drowned?
I am filled with a longing to see her again, to let her know that I tried my best, to tell her that soon, as soon as I can, I will send her enough money to let her start a new, better life. But that will have to wait. There is a price on the head of Jon Harkin. I know he risks much by coming here. Before we do anything else, we must fulfil my promise to James: deliver the jewels to William Dunlop and collect our reward.
The river grows narrower. Up ahead, built on a plug of volcanic rock, sits Dumbarton Castle. Although the wind has dropped, Black Johnnie shivers as we pass it.
‘Are you cold?’ I ask. ‘Shall I fetch your coat?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I am fine. I have spent too long in the tropics. I am not used to the chill of the Scottish climate.’
I know how he feels. I pull my fur coat a little tighter around my shoulders but still the damp air seems to seep into my bones.
Just beyond Dumbarton we must anchor and transfer to a barge. The Clyde river is not deep enough for ships beyond this point.
‘We’ll be back tomorrow,’ the captain tells the crew who volunteer to stay with the Curby Dodger. ‘Try not to draw attention to yourselves.’ It seems that the captain is not the only one who takes a risk by stepping on to Scottish soil.
Looking back, among the cutters and the three-mast sloops, the brigs and the snows, our ship doesn’t stand out. After the long voyage her sails are tattered and her paintwork is peeling and crusty with salt spray. But, in spite of being a tub, she has got us across the Atlantic, through treacherous seas and thick, suffocating fog. And for that, despite her looks, I am ridiculously proud of her.
Although Glasgow is only twenty miles from Greenock, I have never been to the city before. I grew up hearing about it – about the thieves and cut-throats who hung around the Gallowgate Port and Skinner’s Green, the university students of Rottenrow and the wealthy tobacco lords who, after making their fortune in the Colonies, parade along Goosedubs and the Saltmarket with their red capes and gold-tipped canes, looking over the city as if they own it. Which now, as I understand, they do.
It is evening by the time we approach Glasgow Bridge, with the Merchants’ Steeple and the University Clock tower beyond. The rain is torrential. Even the polar bear coat is no match for Scottish weather and it is soaked in minutes.
‘Shall we go to Dunlop now?’ I ask.
The captain shakes his head.
‘Respectable men do not receive visitors after nightfall,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow shall suffice. Tonight we shall explore a little.’
While Billy the Fiddle spruces himself up to go looking for wine and women and song in any, he tells me, combination, the captain takes off his furs and his fine clothes, and buys a set of breeches and a jacket from one of the crew of the barge. Filthy, tatty and just a little too small, the clothes transform him. But if you look closely, you can tell by the way he holds his head and the spark in his eye that he is more than he first appears. And so he experiments with hats and eyepatches and even contemplates a limp.
‘No one must know me,’ he explains. ‘You must not call me Black Johnnie but by another name.’
‘What do you suggest?’ I ask.
‘How about something Irish?’
And so my captain, at least for our time in Scotland, becomes ‘Paddy Kelly’, an Irish importer of furs from Newfoundland.
‘Do we know where Dunlop lives?’ I ask.
‘It can’t be hard to find out,’ he replies. ‘Wealth has a habit of announcing itself to the world. I’m sure if we ask anyone, they’ll know.’
25. BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE
The rain has stopped by the time we go ashore. Even at night, the Clyde is busy. As well as unloading tobacco and sugar by lamplight, the longshoremen are loading up several barges with cast-iron chains, guns, cotton, wool and linen. The chains and guns will be exchanged for captured Africans, the captain tells me, the linen woven into cloth and made into clothes for the slaves to wear on the plantations. Slaves’ clothes made out of material usually used for sacks are one of Scotland’s biggest exports.
‘Everyone else makes a profit,’ he points out. ‘While the men and women who live and die on the plantations are paid nothing.’
Likewise, as we walk along Virginia Street and pass the fine new houses of the tobacco merchants, the captain finds it hard to mask his disgust.
‘Their palaces are not made of brick,’ he says. ‘But with the bones of dead men.’
We walk along the river and end up at a large stretch of land called Glasgow Green. It could not be a more peaceful place. And yet, the captain still looks troubled.
‘It seems smaller than I remember it,’ he says.
‘You know it?’ I ask.
‘I was here before, in ’45,’ he says.
‘You were here with the Jacobite army?’
‘I was,’ he says. ‘It was just after Christmas.’
He pauses. But he’s itching to tell me. It’s obvious.
‘Go on,’ I say.
‘I was here for ten days,’ he says. ‘The Green was all covered in snow. We tried to hoist up our temporary shelters but the ground was so hard with frost that it was almost impossible to hammer the stakes into the earth. We cut down a few trees and lit a fire but the men were still cold. No wonder. We’d marched all the way from Carlisle, and Derby before that. Our clothes had been soaked by the snow, dried by the heat of our own bodies and then, only an hour or two later, been soaked through all over again by more snow. Our skin was red raw from the wind and our boots worn right through at the soles. We didn’t look like an army fighting for the restoration of the Stuarts to the throne, but a ragtaggle bunch of scallywags.’
At the brewery I remember my adoptive parents talking about Prince Charlie’s army, calling them looters and plunders, thieves and cowards.
‘I heard you held the city of Glasgow to ransom?’ I say.
‘We didn’t ask for money,’ he replies. ‘Just food and supplies; for clothes, shirts, jackets and warm pairs of socks.’
‘And you got them?’
He smiles and nods his head.
‘Mostly,’ he says. ‘Plus flowers and sweet cakes and baskets of apples. Although many of the men of this city were loath to support him, the Young Pretender, Prince Charlie, was bonnie indeed. We had plenty of supporters here, women and girls who dressed up to the nines and came down when they heard that he was going to spend a few days here.’
‘He was right here?’ I ask. ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie was here?’
He pauses and stares out at the green.
‘Yes, he was,’ he says. ‘He stayed in Shawfield Mansion for most of the time. But he came down to the Green to raise morale and meet the men. You see it wasn’t just women he had an effect on. I remember watching him walk from that tree, right there, down to the Clyde with all the men cheering and clapping and singing. And even though they’d marched for so long, and even though they’d fought at Derby and Carlisle and lost, and even though they were retreating rather than advancing, they still had faith in him.’
He blinks and I notice his eyes are wet.
‘Of course, we won at Linlithgow,’ he says and wipes his face with his sleeve. ‘But we kept on being ordered to retreat, to Inverness, and then finally to Culloden in the north. Although we had been six thousand strong when we marched south, by that time we were fewer. And then we lost two thousand men on the moors.’
I stare down at my feet. I know what happened up there on Culloden Moor. The Jacobites, it was said, fought bravely but were butchered by the Duke of Cumberland and his men, who had pursued them from England like hounds after a fox.
‘Afterwards everyone who was left alive turned and fled,’ he says softly, ‘throwing down their weapons, their worn-out boots, their drums and pipes as they ran. And still they kept on firing. My horse was hit and we both fell into a ditch. As I climbed out I came face to face with a redcoat with a sword in his hand. He looked at me and I looked at him. I could see the fear in his eyes. I had blood on my clothes, my horse’s blood, and a pistol in my hand, so he just lashed out. He caught me right in the belly.’
He runs his hand across his middle, the place where I have seen the white slice of a scar.
‘At first I thought he’d got me,’ he goes on. ‘I lay there and waited to die. But it didn’t happen. When night fell, I crawled through heather and mud and mire until I was far away enough away not to be seen. Slowly I made my way in the direction of the west coast.’
And then he falls silent. The clouds are racing through the sky above, throwing down rain one moment and letting rays of sun through the next.
‘So what happened?’ I insist. ‘You reached the Clyde? You boarded a ship to the Colonies? What?’
He shakes his head.
‘No,’ he says. ‘My wound wasn’t serious but I was still bleeding. I would have died but for…’ Here, he hesitates and looks at me.
‘But for what?’
‘A very kind person took me in,’ he says.
‘Let me guess,’ I reply, ‘a lady.’
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘a lady.’
And here he smiles.
‘Soon I would have been well enough to travel but unfortunately, not soon enough. Her husband returned from business here in Glasgow unexpectedly and handed me in.’
‘You were captured?’
‘I was,’ he replies. ‘I was held at Dumbarton Castle. The lady came to see me every week and brought me food. She was very kind.’
‘For how long?’
‘Twelve months,’ he says.
No wonder he had shivered as we passed Dumbarton on the Clyde.
‘And then you escaped?’ I ask. ‘You were released? What happened? Tell me!’
He shakes his head and stares into the distance. ‘Unfortunately not. I was taken to Liverpool along with 150 other Jacobites, where a judge ordered us to be exiled to the Colonies. We were to become indentured slaves.’
‘You?’ I say. ‘A slave?’
Here his eyes flash.
‘The only difference between me and the slaves who work in the Colonies is the colour of my skin.’
‘I know,’ I reply. ‘I just couldn’t imagine it. That’s all.’
And then he sighs.
‘I’m sorry. You see, I still can’t understand how it could have changed so quickly. The Jacobites were winning. We believed we were going to put Charlie back where he belonged, on the throne. And even when we rested here, we thought we were winning. We believed that we would take Stirling, then Perth and then drop back and take Edinburgh again. In only a matter of months, however, dozens of my men, my friends, my leaders were caught and captured. Most of them are dead now.’
For a moment he is silent. And I think about the men who ate sweet cakes and pulled on brand new jackets and shirts for the march ahead, not knowing that in barely four months time they would die on the lonely, desolate moors of Culloden or end up strung from the gallows.
‘So how did you escape?’ I ask. ‘Were you ever a slave?’
He turns to me and for a moment he looks as if he has forgotten who I am, as if in his head he is back in ’45.
‘We never reached the Americas,’ he says. ‘Our boat was captured by a French privateer who released us from our shackles and took us to France. It was from there as a free man that I sailed to the Colonies and took up the life of a buccaneer. I wasn’t the only one, either. But that, as they say, is another story.’
A man is approaching on foot from the direction of the city, a man in a black coat and hat with a silver-tipped cane in his hand. He pauses when he sees us.
‘It is not permitted to loiter,’ he says in a voice so loud he must presume we are both deaf. ‘Take your son, my good man, and be off with you. This is a respectable neighbourhood.’
I turn to Black Johnnie, expecting him to give the man with the cane a cutting reply. But instead he simply bows his head and takes my hand.
‘We have work to do,’ he says, in a broad Irish accent. ‘Come on, son.’
The man watches as we go and mutters something under his breath.
‘Convincing?’ the captain whispers.
‘Very,’ I reply.
26. A WINK
I doze fitfully on the barge that night. The river is too calm. The air is too quiet. I get up at dawn. It is when I am staring out at the green fields and rough ground beyond the city that I notice a new barge has arrived during the night. A-ha! On it I spy Bart and Red Will and others from the Tenacity crew. They look as if they are shackled.
The captain is not happy about being woken up. But when I tell him what I have seen he leaps out of his bunk.
‘My ship,’ he says. ‘My darling vessel. It must be anchored right now at Dumbarton, somewhere by the Curby Dodger.’
‘So what shall we do?’ I ask.
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing for now. One thing at a time. We deliver the jewels, Silas, just as you promised, but that is all. We’ll get our ship back. Far from the eyes of magistrates and the like, we’ll get her back.’
Everyone knows William Dunlop. He has built a house on a plot of land on Virginia Street that is so new that the paint is still drying on the walls. Some workmen are climbing up ropes to a wooden platform on the roof, while two more are painstakingly carving the stonework above the windows.
The captain has his hand on the bell and is just about to ring it when a butler throws open the front door. He jumps, visibly, when he sees us.
‘Downstairs,’ he says. ‘Go round the back and you’ll see the steps. Tell cook that the butler sent you, if it’s food you’re looking for.’
We stand aside and see the butler usher out William Dunlop. Dunlop has fair hair and grey eyes, the colour of rain. He is handsome, I suppose, and much younger than I had assumed. As he strides past us down the stone steps to meet a groom with a horse, my nose tickles with his cologne. He pulls himself up, tells his groom he’ll be back in at noon and sets off down the street at a gallop.
So we have a couple of hours to wait, but time passes quickly in Glasgow. I wonder whether we should keep an eye out for McGregor and stay out of sight, avoiding the authorities, but the city is large and there is so much to see. On the wide streets there are theatres, coffee houses and private clubs, where ladies and gentlemen in powdered wigs drink tea and eat tiny cakes. In the market the stalls are piled high with fruit and vegetables, jugs of ale and loaves of bread, while grocers sell oranges and figs, tea from China and wine from France.
‘Isn’t it glorious?’ I say.
The captain nods.
‘For those who can afford it,’ he says.
Just off the main streets is the clatter of a dozen factories or more: ropeworks, tobacco spinners, printers and dye manufacturers. Women sit at looms and weave flax to make linen cloth, while men twist vast spools of hemp or stir huge vats of scarlet dye made from crushed insects or bulls’ blood. Children, my age and younger, carry vast baskets of coal on the their backs from the river to the factories or deliver goods from one place to another, their bodies bent double from the weight.
Although the pavements, like the streets, are unpaved, there is a single stretch that is laid with stone. It runs all the way from Glasgow Cross to a statue of King Billy. But when we walk on it, we are immediately ordered to get off. It is, we discover, only for the tobacco lords. Why? Because they paid for it. Everyone else, ladies, children and working men, have to walk to the side.
It is as we tramp through the thick brown mud that we come face to face with a middle-aged couple, who, not being rich or in the right business, also have to stay off the stone pavement. The woman has a pretty, unhappy face. The man is fat with eyes so deeply stuck in his face that he probably doesn’t see anything but the space directly in front of his bulbous nose. As soon as she spots us, however, the lady stops dead.
‘Jon,’ she gasps. ‘You’re alive?’ Then she covers her mouth with her hand.
