Wilbur Smith - Golden Lion

Upon boarding the Earl of Cumberland Pett had taken his time before making his move against the captain. He needed to find his sea legs and to learn as much as he could about the ship’s company and the various friendships, alliances, enmities and tensions that existed within it, all of which he intended to exploit in the execution of his plan. More than that, however, he was waiting for the signal without which he could not kill, the voice in his head, a messenger from heaven whom Pett knew only as the Saint, who came to assure him that his victim deserved to die and that he, William Pett, would be rewarded in heaven for his efforts to purify the earth of sin.

Pett slept each night in a wooden cot that was suspended from hooks in the timbers that spanned the cabin, so as to keep it stable when the ship rolled. Now he knelt by the cot as the presence of the Saint filled his mind and soul – indeed, his entire being – with the knowledge that he was blessed and that the whole company of angels and archangels was watching over him and protecting him. For as long as the vision lasted, Pett experienced a blissful ecstasy greater than any he had ever known with a woman, and when he rose it was with joy in his heart, for he would be doing God’s work tonight.

His chosen weapon was a perfectly ordinary table knife that he had taken from the captain’s table, where he ate every night with Goddings and his senior officers. Pett had honed its blade with a whetstone he had discreetly purloined from the ship’s stores until it was as sharp as any dagger. Once he had used it to kill Goddings, he planned to take advantage of the confusion that the discovery of the captain’s body was bound to cause and leave it amongst the personal effects of a sulky, unpopular young midshipman, whose incompetence and bad character had made him the target of the captain’s wrath on a number of occasions. No one would doubt that the lad had reason to want revenge and he would have no friends to speak in his defence, though Pett was minded to volunteer to act on his behalf as summary justice was meted out. That was for later. Now, however, he placed the knife in the right-hand pocket of his breeches, left his cabin and knocked on the door of the captain’s quarters.

‘Come in!’ Goddings called out, suspecting nothing for it had become the two men’s custom to share a glass of brandy every evening, while discussing the day’s events aboard ship, ruminating on the ever-growing might and wealth of the East India Company (with particular reference to how a man might get his hands on a larger share of it), and generally setting the world to rights.

The two men talked and drank in their usual companionable fashion, but all the while Pett was waiting for the moment to strike. And then the Saint, as he always did, provided the perfect opportunity. Goddings, by now somewhat befuddled by drink, having consumed much more than Pett who had discreetly kept his consumption to a minimum, got up from his chair to fetch more brandy from a wooden chest whose interior had been divided into six compartments, each of which contained a crystal glass decanter that was filled with a variety of spirits and cordials.

Goddings turned his back as he rummaged through the decanters to find one containing more brandy, quite oblivious to Pett, who had risen silently from his seat, taken the knife from his pocket and was crossing the cabin towards him. At the very last moment, just as Pett was about to stab the blade into Goddings’s right kidney, the captain turned around.

For Pett, moments such as these seemed to stretch out forever. He was aware of every movement his victim made, no matter how tiny; every breath he took; every flicker of expression on his face. Goddings’s eyes widened in a look of utter bewilderment, the total surprise of a man who simply could not understand what was happening to him or why. Pett delivered three quick stabs, as sharp and fast as a prizefighter’s jabs, into Goddings’s fleshy gut. The captain was too shocked to shout out in alarm, or even to scream in pain. Instead he mewled like an infant as he looked down helplessly at the crimson outpour of blood that was drenching his white waistcoat and, for he had wet himself with fear and shock, the stain of urine spreading across his breeches.

With his last iota of strength, Goddings attempted to defend himself. He hurled the decanter, missing Pett who easily swayed out of its way, instead striking the lantern which hung from a low beam above his desk, knocking it off its peg onto the escritoire on which lay his open logbook and a nautical chart. The oil from the lantern and the brandy from the decanter were both highly inflammable, as were the paper documents. The lantern’s flame was the final ingredient and soon fire was flickering across the varnished wood of the escritoire and running in streams of burning liquid across the cabin floor.

Pett did not move. He was still glorying in what he had done. He remained in the cabin, even as the flames crackled and the air filled with smoke, with his pulse racing and his breath coming in ever shorter gasps, as Goddings suffered through the final seconds of his life. Finally there came the moment of death for Goddings and ecstatic release for his killer and now, as if awoken from a trance, the latter began to move.

Pett knew full well that fire was the deadliest of all perils at sea, and a ship whose cargo was saltpetre and whose cannons were fired by gunpowder was little more than a floating bomb. Now the fuse had been lit, he had to escape the Earl of Cumberland as fast as he could. Like him, Goddings slept in a cot. It was made of wood and would serve as an impromptu life raft. Moving swiftly, but without the slightest panic, Pett unhooked the captain’s cot from the hooks to which it was attached. Then he carried it across to the windows that ran across the stern end of the cabin, pounded at the glass until it shattered and then hurled the cot out of the opening he had made. A moment later, Pett climbed up onto the window ledge and, heedless of the glass shards scraping against his skin, threw himself out into the warm night air.

As he fell through space, towards the glittering blackness of the sea, Pett had little idea of where he was, other than somewhere between India and the Cape of Good Hope. He was not sure that he could find the cot, or even if it was still floating on the surface of the waves. He had no idea what manner of sea-creatures might be lurking in the depths beneath him, ready to attack him, kill him and eat him. And quite apart from all of that, he did not know how to swim.

None of that mattered, not in the slightest. William Pett had answered the voice of the Saint. He was doing God’s will. And thus no harm could befall him. He was absolutely sure of it.

As the first rays of the dawn sun cast a soft orange glow across the harbour at Mitsiwa, the pride of the Ethiopian fleet sat at anchor, joyfully flying the Union Flag of her native British Isles. The Golden Bough had been built on the orders of George, Viscount Winterton, at the stupendous price of almost two thousand pounds. Winterton already possessed a substantial private fleet of merchantmen and privateers. His intentions for the Bough were to provide his beloved son Vincent with an agreeable vessel on which to follow the family’s seafaring traditions, while providing himself with further additions to what was already one of the largest fortunes in England.

The Honourable ‘Vinny’ Winterton now lay buried on the shore of Elephant Lagoon, beside the waters of the Indian Ocean a short way north of the Cape of Good Hope, killed in a duel that was, in truth, little more than an act of murder. Yet his father’s money had been well spent, even if the Golden Bough’s recent incarnation, as the flagship and sole fighting vessel of an African navy, was no more part of the viscount’s plans than his boy’s demise. She was as slim and pleasing on the eye as a thoroughbred racehorse and could cut through the water with rare speed and grace. On a broad reach, with her sails full and a good breeze blowing, she could escape any warships that outmatched her and catch any that did not. And like a horse with a winning jockey, the Bough rewarded a captain who was strong in skill and nerve, for she could be sailed tight into the wind when other vessels would be left floundering or forced to change their bearing.