and “The paychests!” and “Sound the alarm!” and “Goose me wi’ a handspike, we’m beset!” and by the time they tumbled downstairs all hell was breaking loose. The pirates were bearing out the treasure-chests under Rackham’s directions, while Bilbo, firing his pistols with an elegant air and tossing them to his dwarf for reloading, was commanding the covering party who were at grips with the belated redcoats. It was desperate work, what with shots banging in the enclosed space, and powder-smoke everywhere, and pirates cursing as they were wounded, and redcoats falling down obligingly when they were shot, and Bilbo fleering and shooting, and Black Sheba leaping like a leopard, skewering with deadly daintiness, and Firebeard bashing and bawling. The commandant rallied his men with cries of “Blister me!” and blundered bravely ahead, crossing swords with Sheba over a couple of fallen bodies. He thrust clumsily at her chest … and paused, shaken, as he realised that his target, instead of being a conventional masculine torso, was more like something painted by an enthusiastic Rubens, and bouncing most distractingly to boot.
“Sink me, it’s a woman!” he concluded loudly. “Strike me speechless!” he added, which was prophetic, for:
“With pleasure!” hissed Sheba, and glided in like a dancer, perfect teeth bared in an unholy smile, and the commandant tripped and fell flat on his back. A high heel pinned him as she flicked aside his hat with her rapier point, whispering “Doff, dog – doff to a lady!” and the last thing the commandant knew was that black face mocking down at him and a tearing pain in his throat.
The soldiers fell back, appalled, and as the last of the chests was borne down the passage Rackham roared his followers back and away. They retreated, firing, down the great stone tunnel, while Sheba, the blood-lust on her, slashed and stabbed and laughed, with Firebeard beside her swinging his cutlass roaring “Take that, ye lousy lobster! Kill ’em! Tear ’em! Kill the honest men!” and Bilbo carefully shot an officer in the shoulder, and turned to supervise the stowage of the chests in the waiting longboats. Shepherding his men, Rackham looked back along the shambles of the tunnel, to see Sheba alone, fronting the disheartened soldiery, flourishing her rapier and screaming:
“Come on, you King’s men! Fight! Is one woman too many for you, you mangy cowards? Fight – that’s what they pay you your shilling a day for!”
And it’s not enough, either, was the universal thought among the military as they faced that black and crimson fighting fury; but the wounded officer tugged at a lever in the wall, and above Sheba’s head, through a slit in the stone, a great portcullis gate came swishing down. Too late Rackham cried a warning, too late she saw and sprang back; the great steel frame fell to divide the corridor from wall to wall, and although Sheba snaked beneath it to the seaward side, it pinned her ankle cruelly to the floor, and she lay trapped and helpless, her face contorted in agony, her rapier clanging on the flags. The pirates, with appropriate oaths, ran back to help; Firebeard strained his mighty thews in a vain effort to raise the portcullis, roaring “Heave, ye maggots!” and getting back the usual excuses, like “’Tain’t no manner o’ use we heavin’, cap’n, look’ee, she’m caught, like, an’ us can’t shift the bugger no-how!”
Meanwhile the soldiers, encouraged by the fact that there was now a stout steel gate between them and the pirates, surged foward, shooting; one even rushed up and tried to bayonet the fallen Sheba through the bars. But Bilbo snapped an order, the dwarf Goliath sprang to the bars like a monkey, through them went his wooden leg, and out of it shot a steel blade to drink the soldier’s heart’s blood. (Full of tricks, those pirates were.) But Sheba, writhing on the flags, was fast as ever, and as the others banged away overhead, Rackham knelt beside her.
“It’s no use, camarado! We can’t shift it! D’ye want to go quick, girl?” For garrison reinforcements were crowding down the tunnel, and Rackham looked to the priming of his pistol.
“Leave me!” gasped Sheba. “Each takes his chance … law of the Brotherhood!”
Firebeard, of course, was having none of that; he was a proper pirate, after all.
“We’ll fight it out, by the powers!” he bellowed. “I don’t leave no mess-mate in the lurch, by cock, burn damn and blast me if I do!” And he beat his fists on his chest.
“Balls!” cried Bilbo, forgetting his affectations in the heat of the moment. “She’s right! If we linger, we are undone! Anyway, we’ve got the loot! Shove off!” No nonsense about Bilbo; he strode to the sea-steps, and the long-boats surged into the night, heavy with the booty. Several pirates dragged Firebeard into the last boat, heedless of his bawling: “We can’t leave her! Let’s cut off her leg!,” and for a brief moment, with the last pirates on the steps keeping the soldiers at a distance with their pistol fire, Rackham was left alone by the pinned and helpless woman.
“Go, Calico! Quickly!” she gasped, and the big man stared down at her with tears in his eyes, and stooped to kiss her brow.
“I’ll be back for you, camarado! Wherever they take you – we’ll get you out!”
And then he was gone, springing down the steps to the last boat, and it shoved off into the darkness, with the pirates singing “Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest,” which is not actually a very good song to row to; consequently they caught crabs all over the place, and wallowed in a welter of gold coins and bilge-water and rum, with the boats bucketing about. The redcoats on the battlements should have picked them off easily, but as everyone knows, in such circumstances redcoats never hit anything, but pop off their blanks in a most desultory fashion.
But while the pirates eventually regained their ship, the soldiers in the tunnel were bearing down triumphantly on the slim crimson figure pinned beneath the portcullis; Sheba cast one agonised glance after her departing comrades, choked on tears of pain, gnashed out a truly disgusting oath at her enemies, and then lapsed gracefully into a swoon. The wounded officer, clutching his shoulder, ordered the portcullis raised, and kicked the insensible figure cruelly in its shapely ribs, snarling: “We’ve got this heathen slut, at any rate! Gad, but we’ll make her pay for this …”
Which is a suitably dramatic moment to bring this first chapter to a close, with the powder-smoke a-reek in our nostrils, our principals introduced, and Delectable Dusky Villainy in the clutches of the law. What will the brutal beastly soldiery do to Black Sheba? Will they …? What of Rackham’s promise to save her? Does Bilbo even care? And what has all this got to do with the handsome Captain Avery and the rascally Colonel Blood? We shall e’en see in Chapter the Second.
In fact, while Sheba was languishing decoratively in her chains in the grim dungeon of Fort St Bartlemy, having beaten off the advances of her leering jailers till her arms ached, and her pirate shipmates were falling about in drunken celebration singing “Mouths were made for tankards and for sucking at the bung,” while their ship headed erratically towards Tortuga with the loot, Captain Avery was bowing gracefully – not too little, not too much, but just right – on the threshold of Mr Pepys’s office at the Admiralty. And Mr Pepys, hurriedly adjusting the wig he had laid by, and guiltily shoving his Diary under some papers, could have done without him. For one thing, Pepys had been looking forward to neglecting the victualling estimates in favour of sneaking in a few fresh entries – he was itching to record the details about his fine new broadcloth coat, and the red-head who he was sure had winked in his direction at Drury Lane, and the curds and small beer he had had for breakfast, and his wife’s all-night card parties. But there it was in his appointment book: “Capn Everie, at 10 of the clock,” so he sighed and composed himself to receive his visitor.
Another reason for the Secretary’s discontent was that he was meeting Captain Avery for the first time, and suffering the common reaction to such masculine perfection. Nobody, decided Mr Pepys resentfully, had any business to go around looking like that; it made you feel positively sub-human. But