The best thing about Port Cullis was always its location.  It was precisely where it needed to be. Not too far from the Windward Passage. And not too close to Port Royal. The best thing about robbing pirates, was always their unwillingness to record their inventory. No one ever knew what they’d got. So no one missed it when it disappeared. The other brilliant thing about pirates, was their stubborn instinct not to tell anyone where they were going. That meant no one complained, when they failed to arrive...

I wanted to write a story where the town’s folk were the real baddies and for once, the pirates came off worst. I wanted to build a death trap for pirates, a town where rules were made with no regard for their romantic, robin-hood image. It had to be a place where pirates died quietly and in large numbers. But most of all, it had to be a place who’s single, simple goal, was to leave no witnesses.

Jack Landan was christened twice, once in Port Royal, and once in Port Cullis. Officially, his initials were J. L. for Jack Landan, but unofficially they were M. G. for Maddox Greene.  Maddox was the name his parents gave him at the altar of their own church, in a town they themselves had founded, near the mouth of the Black River on the east coast of Jamaica. 

The ceremony wasn’t recognised by the Anglican ministers living and working in Jamaica’s busy capital. It was recognised in Port Cullis though, by the merchants and traders sweating on its frantic quayside. At last, their town’s governor had a son and heir to whom he could leave his vast fortune. They called him Jack when the Jamaican authorities were in town, and Maddox when they were not. 

Maddox’ parents were quite relaxed about the whole two-identities thing inside the grounds of their vast (and highly-productive) cotton plantation, which they’d sited quite deliberately a mile inland. It was the strangest thing, but no one ever pulled them up about it. The fact that their hardworking, conscientious son had two names was simply glossed over. Such inconsistencies were commonplace on the Rose Park estate, seemingly woven into the fabric of its day-to-day life. 

If you knew what was good for you, you kept your mouth shut and got on with your work. Hopefully Hector Price, the estate’s senior foreman, left you alone to complete your task. The trouble was, every now and then, he received orders to make an example out of someone.

It was easy to see a flogging coming. First, any non-resident workers were sent home. Next, the bunkhouses were locked up. Finally, the floor of the punishment yard was swept and strewn with fresh straw.

Maddox put up with this sort of thing until he was thirteen, when at last he began to ask questions. But by then, it was too late. Hoping he’d acquire a taste for it, his father had let him stand in on one too many near-fatal thrashings. He’d groomed him to take over his ruthless business when he retired. And there was no way he was going to start interviewing candidates from outside the family now.

If Maddox was sure he didn’t want to inherit it, he’d better think seriously about running away now, before it swallowed him whole. The trouble was, his father had spies planted in every community from here to Martha Brae. His best, if not his only chance to make a clean getaway, was to stow away onboard a ship bound for Europe. 

Within a few days, Maddox had stuffed some valuables and a change of clothes into a shoulder bag, and turned his back on Rose Park… forever. He padded down the dirt track from the estate gates to the reef-strewn coast in the dead of night and picked his way around the first wooded piece of headland he came to.

The lights of Port Cullis spread out in front of him. He couldn’t believe his eyes. How had his parents managed to keep this place a secret from him his whole life? He had no idea it existed, no idea his family had interests in property and land outside the sheltered valley he’d grown up in.  

Like a thousand pirates before him, Maddox was captivated by the sheer scale and majesty of Port Cullis’ bright quayside. The town’s cruel smile was the thing that finally made him sit down and take stock though. A row of sharp, mechanical teeth in the mouth of the bay had just broken through the surface of the water, to fix themselves at a peculiar angle, like stone pillars bowing before the stars.

These were the brainchild of his brilliant, if ever-so-slightly-greedy mother.  They were what made Port Cullis unique amongst all other Caribbean ports of the day. Port Cullis had the enviable distinction of being the only port, anywhere in the world, that could close off all a ship’s exits at once. By raising a giant, wooden sea-gate across the narrow entrance to its harbour, it could trap buccaneer vessels for months at a time. Long enough to watch their crews die of hunger, or thirst, or worse…

Maddox would soon realise his parents as-good-as invented the savage practice of pirate bashing on these shores, generating a handsome annual income for themselves. Their cotton plantation was just a front, a smokescreen to explain away their fancy parties and expensive tastes.

He could either join in, helping the locals slaughter their way through a crew of fat, fetid pirates a month, or side with the scourge of the seven seas, the pirates themselves. Whichever way he jumped, he had to bear in mind Hector Price (the plantation foreman) was still out looking for him, and would show him the lash for sure if he found him at large on the island.
The punishment yard at Rose Park had a rapacious appetite for fresh blood, which it was happy to source from anybody, twice-christened or not...
 
 

The spectacular plantation mansion Maddox Greene calls home is run like a concentration camp. His father is a bully, his mother is a beautiful (if slightly-batty) control-freak. So, one forbidding night in the middle of the hurricane season, he sets out to find a new life for himself away from the remote Jamaican cotton fields he’s determined he’d rather forget, than inherit. 

Putting the place behind him, he runs to the edge of his world; the steep cliffs that drop to the ocean on the south side of the island. Lights glint in the darkness below him. A cobbled street extends towards a quayside he never knew existed; where a pirate galleon is moored, awaiting the next high tide. 

The seas around it have turned themselves inside out, trying to resist the ferocious storm breaking on the jagged reefs offshore. Beyond the galleon but inside the white reef line, Maddox can see something else though, something very unusual in the water. A row of sharp teeth standing proud of the waves, closing off the narrow mouth of the bay. It looks like someone has shut the door on the port’s only entrance. Nothing can get in and nothing can get out while the massive frame of this sea-gate remains in place. 

On the horizon, another ship appears. Driving inland, it’s heading straight for the mouth of the bay. Its captain must be desperate, convinced the harbourmaster won’t let him drown. But he’s wrong. Dead wrong about that… There’s a stomach-churning groan as the vessel’s bow buries itself deep in the heavy beams of the seagate’s top two tiers. Then silence. 

Maddox runs immediately from the waterfront but can’t forget the ship’s distant, drowning crew. He finds an empty warehouse, a line of smart, merchant homes, then finally, a sumptuously decorated, bohemian-style pub.  Inside, a fight is brewing.

Maddox can feel the tension oozing through the walls but despite everything, decides to report the stricken ship in the bay to the landlord at the bar. To his surprise, the man takes him readily under his wing, offers him a room for the night, and assures him the crew of the ship will be saved. 

Sure enough, when Maddox wakes up the next morning, the wreck has been cleared and the seagate has been lowered. The pirate ship docked on the quayside is just setting sail. There’s the faint smell of death in the air but that aside, nothing appears to be even a fraction out of place in Port Cullis. The town lies ready and waiting, anxious to be explored and understood… 

At once, Maddox is captivated by its rich architecture and people. He’s invited to a society barbeque and introduced to the most influential characters in town, but suspicious of their overwhelming generosity, decides not to stick around. Tucking his few possessions under his arm, he slinks out the lush garden’s back gate and vanishes into the undergrowth. 

The thought of Hector Price catching up with him has never left his mind. That shifty-eyed monster, with a taste for pain and suffering, won’t think twice about leaving his post at Rose Park to track him down. As the site’s senior foreman, he’s used to pulling rank on people, but this latest assignment will have given his tired bark teeth. No doubt, he’ll be hungry to try them out. 

Determined to deny him the satisfaction of capturing him alive, Maddox heads back into the island’s forested hills. Another ship is not expected at Port Cullis’ glitzy wharf for several days, so making for Falmouth or Port Royal seems like his best (if not his only) option. 

A mile out of town, he stops to take stock. The light’s fading, the weather’s closing in on him and he’s hemmed in on all sides by a six-foot fence, pointlessly locking in a community twice-nominated Jamaica’s most remote. At last, he turns a corner into the mouth of a deep, narrow valley. 

All around him are broken tombstones, cheap wooden crosses and freshly worked plots revealing the location of more than a thousand shallow graves. A ramshackle church presides over the entire, bizarre scene, its south face languishing in dark shadow. Puzzled but determined not to jump to conclusions, Maddox decides to have a good root around. 

The shadowy churchyard turns out to contain more than just a load of poorly marked graves. There are at least twenty ship’s bells dotted about it too. Is it stating the obvious to say that at this point, there appears to be a link between Port Cullis’ gruesome sea-gate and the swollen ranks of its cemetery? 

Maddox knows that despite the hunger-pains in his belly and the aching cold creeping up his tired legs, he should push on, scaling the mist-shrouded mountains in the distance to reach Port Royal. But there’s a name chiselled into one of the granite stones at his feet he can’t ignore. That name is written in a flowery font with swirls and loops all over it, but the letters are legible... 

‘Here Lies,’ it reads, ‘An English Gentleman, Captain Of The Deliverance, Sir Walter Maddox Greene.’
Maddox can’t turn his back on Port Cullis now. He has to know whether finding his name in the cemetery is just some giant coincidence or not. The four-poster bed in the pub on the seafront calls to him. Choosing to believe the landlord would rather tell him what’s going on than turn him over to Hector Price, he heads back towards it. 

Soon, he’s asleep, buried gratefully in a pile of feather pillows and eiderdown duvets. But at two a.m. there’s a loud, unnatural noise right outside his window. He wakes at once. Listening intently, he finds he can hear the wind in the sails of a square-rigged ship, the clatter of a heavy rope against its solid side and the odd voice, raised in anger. Finally, he hears the sharp crack of a musket ball being fired and a long, fading scream. He tries to look out of his window, but its shutters have been bolted. He tries to leave by the door but finds it’s been firmly locked from the other side. 

In the morning, the docks are busy. Crates of goods are being split open on the cobb. Their contents are carefully unpacked by an army of labourers, then loaded onto carts and ferried away into the streets. There’s no sign there’s been any fighting in the area, no acknowledgement from the landlord is forthcoming about the nightly locking of Maddox’s bedroom. 

A girl brings him breakfast on a tray. He asks her about the seagate and the strange noises he’s heard outside his window, but she refuses to tell him anything. Instead, she urges him to leave town at once. ‘You’ve been rumbled,’ she says. ‘They know who you are. That man Price from the plantation is on his way to pick you up; arrest you some people are saying!’  

Maddox rams his belly (and his pockets) full of food, then disappears into the backstreets behind The Stretched Neck. He spends the rest of the day dodging slobbery canine teeth and ricochet bullets. By nightfall, he’s exhausted and is forced to give himself up. He’s taken to a villa atop a humpback hill, overlooking the entire town. Hector Price asks him what he thinks he knows about Port Cullis and what he thinks he’s seen over the last few days, while at Rose Park his parents climb into their carriage. They drive straight to the villa to see him.  

Maddox is stunned into silence by what they have to say. Somehow, it seems they’re tied up in the complex machinery of this strange little town. Over drinks, they tell him exactly how the whole Seagate idea came to life and how they make money out of it. The place, Port Cullis, is a giant honey-trap for pirates! 

Fleets of them are lured to the quay, their crews are then drugged and killed. Their ships are sunk, any under-eighteens still standing are given the choice of a quick death, or a life of slavery. The establishment of Maddox childhood home, Rose Park, was financed entirely by the nefarious activities of Port Cullis. The poor suburbs around town, house the latest generation of ex-pirates working for his parents for free. 

Maddox begins to grasp the full horror of the situation. The two communities of Port Cullis and Rose Park are inextricably linked. By pooling their resources, they’ve managed to insulate themselves from the outside world. By attacking only pirate vessels, they’ve stayed below the radar of the authorities in Port Royal.

It is time Maddox grew up and accepted the truth about his mum and dad. They’re waist deep in the filthy business of pirate bashing and if he wants to stick around much longer, he’ll roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty too. 

All the roads out of Port Cullis are being watched, only the dirt track leading to Rose Park is free of barriers and check points. No ships ever leave the bay besides those ready to be sunk off its jagged reef. The chances of Maddox escaping that way are slim. For now, he’s locked in the villa cellars as punishment for his rebellious behaviour. There, he has plenty of time to think things over. 

But even the dank cellar rooms hold clues to the town’s main economic activity. Trestle tables stretch deep into the hillside, each one displaying items of value stripped from individual pirate ships. The place is like a museum, exhibiting the prized possessions of a hundred professional, seafaring villains. 

The slight figure of a young girl emerges from the shadows. It turns out to be the very same girl Maddox spoke to earlier in his room. She’s been in chains for hours now after defying her masters, speaking out in church, rejecting the town’s bogus religion and generally trying to encourage people not to steal from pirates any more. 

Waiting alone in the dark, the girl’s compiled a shortlist of the most valuable items she can touch. Her best guess is that she and Maddox are stood in the middle of a hundred thousand pounds worth of gold and jewels!
‘The name’s Serena,’ she says, awkwardly offering Maddox her hand in the blackness. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

Maddox listens to her story. It turns out she’s lived in Port Cullis for nearly ten years, doing the bidding of the people she calls the smarts (first generation families who helped set up the town). ‘The rest of us, the shadows,’ she explains, ‘are kept dirt poor, but there’s something of a tradition in these parts, I don’t know if you’ve noticed…?’ She looks archly at Maddox. ‘They call it slavery, that’s taught men exactly how to keep others down.’ She nods at the noisy smarts above. ‘Tomorrow, they’ll bury the bodies of the seamen we all helped murder last night. And that will be that. More money. More trophies. More graves.’

Maddox promises to juggle things so Serena can come back to the plantation with him, assuming that’s where his parents plan to take him next. Before long, a burly Creole chef lumbers down the cellar steps to find him and drag him back to their dining table. Carefully crossing his fingers, he swears to become a faithful, lifelong member of the Port Cullis elite. 

His parents are delighted by his apparent lack of moral fibre. He dismisses the human rights of all pirates as ‘childish fantasy’, pledging their continued persecution at the hands of an ever-stronger Port Cullis. To honour his promotion into the ranks of the town’s upper circle, they agree to let him bring Serena home with him. First though, the three of them (four if you count Serena) must spend a night in the Stretched Neck, catching up on all matters local and legal.

Maddox’ room in the dockside pub is as quiet as the grave when he eventually returns to it. His mind churns with thoughts of escaping Port Cullis, perhaps with Serena, but how? The answer floats into town on the very next high tide. A pirate crew, attracted by the warm lights on the front, disembark and trudge into the pub’s long bar. 

They manage to order a round of drinks, assembling themselves at a table in a dark corner. Their arrival draws hordes of busty women and servants from the woodwork. Maddox manages to give Mr. Price the slip and settles himself behind a curtain, within earshot. He hisses and calls to the pirates, hoping to warn them of the terrible danger they’re in. But these are crusty, died-in-the-wool, South Atlantic pirates; used to taking advice from their quartermaster or their captain, no one else. They shrug him off and get back to their food.

Maddox is forced to take drastic action to reveal the true nature of Port Cullis to them. He deliberately starts a fight, which turns into a brawl, which turns, before long, into a full-scale riot! The Port Cullis authorities show their hand, raising the Seagate across the mouth of the bay and firing into the crowds from the rooftops outside the pub.  

Falling back to the docks, the infuriated pirates climb aboard their ship and weigh anchor. Most of the heavy guns and ammunition housed on their lower decks have already been offloaded, but they turn what little they’ve got left onto the vulnerable Stretched Neck - and let rip. Maddox escapes just in time, scrambling from the rubble to safety. He jumps for a rope dangling in the wake of the ship and is swept out to sea. 

But the pirate’s way is blocked, the Seagate standing firmly across the bay’s only exit. Maddox pulls himself up onto the main deck and offers his services. He will lower the gate for the pirates, if they agree to transport him and Serena safely to England. The captain swears his crew will honour the deal come hell or high water (which is handy because both are approaching…) 

Under the cover of darkness, a small team (including the captain and Maddox) row themselves ashore, stashing their dinghies on the edge of a mosquito-infested lagoon. They have already spent several hours placing small charges of gunpowder on the seagate in case things don’t go as planned. They interrupt proceedings in the town’s churchyard, where a cartload of pirate corpses are being buried, and snatch Serena from the astonished congregation. 

Shadowy figures rise from every ditch on their way back to their ship to help them (and hinder the smarts). The pirates detonate the charges they’ve placed on the Seagate, which is weakened but not destroyed as a result. Now it’s up to Maddox and Serena to sabotage the gate’s controls on the cobb. 

Under fire from the fort, they shatter them, sinking the Seagate before hurrying to the lagoon where the last dinghy awaits them. They row their way out of the bay, climb aboard the waiting pirate ship and sail into the sunset. Behind them, an angry mob of shadows turn the fort’s guns on the town itself and level it.   
   
The spectacular plantation mansion Maddox may one day have inherited, now sits alone above the sheer island cliffs. Piracy looks like the most tempting career option for him from here. Maybe he’ll give it a try...

 .

The eyes of Amiri, the young slave boy, hardened. Tiny creases appeared either side of his nose. Maddox could see how desperate he was not to cry. He was astonished how brave he was being, under the circumstances.
There were only a few people present, in the Punishment Yard tonight; Maddox, his father and of course, Hector Price, holding a long, leather whip as if it were a natural extension of his arm. Its frayed end dangled in a muddy puddle at his feet. Its platted handle turned slightly in his fist as he shifted his weight from one gout-infected leg to the other.

Only a shallow gutter and a sodden hay bale separated Maddox and Amiri. In the half-light, you could hardly tell them apart. They were exactly the same size and shape, their silhouettes a mirror image of each other. It was only when you got closer, you realised Amiri’s complexion was a few shades darker, his hair a few inches longer than Maddox’.

They looked at each other for a second, but couldn’t bring themselves to speak. The wind cut through their thin clothing and in the darkness, they shivered like reeds on the banks of a wide river. It was easy to imagine them spending time together in the day. They probably had a lot in common, but tonight they found themselves on opposite sides of that wide, cold river. One had been sentenced to a flogging by the estate’s senior foreman, the other had been sentenced by his father to watch.

The pain Amiri was feeling right now must have been excruciating. Maddox wanted to reach out to him and, if he could, help him recover his senses. But he himself hardly dared move. He worked his feet awkwardly into the mud beneath him instead. A possessive arm crept around his back as he stood there, his eyes cast down in shame. The arm was there not to comfort him though, but to stop him shrinking away into the night. ‘Drink it in lad,’ his father whispered in his ear. ‘You’ll get a taste for it, sooner or later.’ Maddox felt his father hug him even closer, silently crushing his will, imposing his own dark thoughts on his. ‘There’s no place for weakness here,’ his icy lips reminded him, ‘in the Yard.’ 

Maddox caught a whiff of something alcoholic on his father’s breath, perhaps gin or island rum. He closed his eyes, trying not to think about the angry hangover that would follow in the morning. ‘He had to escape,’ was all he could think at that moment, trapped in the awful punishment yard with his best friend Amiri. ‘He knew he absolutely had to, that night. Or he would become something he hated… either a weak, simpering fool or a cruel, calculating tyrant… like his dad.’ 

‘I love these ones,’ Hector Price sniffed, pushing Amiri to the floor with his knee, ‘the ones that reckon I can’t break ‘em,’ he smiled a broad, lazy smile. ‘It’s almost a chore some days. Almost…’ he acknowledged quietly to himself. ‘Never quite,’ he looked to share this little joke with Maddox, but Maddox’ heart had turned to stone. He stared at the muscles in Hector’s neck, unable to think past his bulky frame and shrivelled, black eyes. 

The muscles were flexing and moving on their own, as if a monster inside was trying everything to get out. Suddenly, it was free! Hector’s hands sprang to life and the long, black whip he was holding arced through the air once more. Like a snake uncoiled it struck violently at its victim, where it left its poisonous bite-mark. Its signature was a cruel ‘Z’ visible for an instant before a river of bright, red blood covered it. At last, Amiri screamed. 

A parrot shrieked and flew out of the single palm tree leaning over the huddle of people and torches too. Maddox had not been expecting a noise to come from above him and shrank, instinctively into himself. He knew his father’s eyes were focused on him, studying him, wondering why on earth he was still so scared of all this. But of course, it was not just the occasion that terrified Maddox, it was the thought that one day he’d turn into his father that sent ice-cold chills down his spine.  

‘Stand straight,’ he was told impassively, and he did. He stood to attention while Amiri received two more punishing blows from the dancing whip. ‘Soon we’ll eat,’ someone said but to be honest, he’d lost track of where everyone was and who was speaking. He just wanted it to be over. He just wanted it all to be over. 

The arm around him clenched and relaxed as another flick of the whip splattered his face with dirt. ‘All fixed now,’ were the last words he remembered hearing, then he was turned forcefully towards the grand house high on the hill and marched home.
As they drew closer, Maddox saw the chandelier in the dining room was being lit. He watched the housemaids circle around and around it, touching its many candles with their long, glowing sticks.

‘I’m not hungry,’ he said in a strangely detached voice.
There was a pause. ‘So don’t eat,’ his father replied at last.
‘I can go straight to my room?’ Maddox pushed him. ‘Is Ada staying away?’
‘I meant you can sit quietly at your place, and look like you’re eating,’ his father grumbled. ‘Of course your mother is home.’ The shadow of a beautiful woman wearing a sleeveless bodice and full, satin skirt fell across the walnut dining table. ‘If you really don’t want to see her,’ his father continued, ‘you’d better make out you’re ill.’

Maddox’ mother swept fluidly up to the small panes of glass in the window. Apparently she did not see them approaching. A chambermaid was ordered to draw the curtains in front of her. ‘She’s very beautiful isn’t she?’ Maddox said hesitantly. ‘Ada I mean… My mother.’
‘All the dangerous ones are,’ whispered his dad. His lips hardly moved. No emotion leaked out. And that was the end of their brief conversation. 

In the distance, thunder echoed through the forested valleys of Trelawny. A storm was coming, a tropical storm, which might provide Maddox with just the cover he needed to escape. His mind began to whirl with possibilities again... 

Moment’s later the rear door of the great house that presided over Rose Park swallowed him whole. Maddox felt as though he’d re-entered a prison after a short spell breaking rocks in the nearby quarry. In fact, he had entered the West Wing via the Servant’s Quarters.
‘Dinner is served your Lordship,’ begged the first footman as he and his father strode into the Long Gallery.
‘Thank you,’ replied Maddox mother, appearing from a side door. ‘I’ll take it from here,’ she said and together, they sat down to eat. 

~

It was dark, much darker than Maddox had expected in front of the house. He clung to one of the Doric columns that thrust up either side of its calved wooden doors and waited, silently, for the right moment to move. Somewhere, he could hear a horse being harnessed to its carriage. A coachman’s feet crunched over wet gravel. Obviously, they (his mother and father) already knew he was gone.

The dogs were asking to be released. All six of them wailed at Mr. Price to let them go but for the time being at least, he appeared to be ignoring them. Their slobbery voices died away a little. Now Maddox could hear his mother ordering people about. She gave them easy-to-follow instructions. ‘Do this… Do that… Stop fussing… Find him…’ she snapped. Maddox knew he would not miss her.

He thought briefly about his pet spider, Anansi. Anansi he would miss, very much. Anansi was a typical, brown and yellow banana spider, one of the largest spiders in all of Latin America. She wasn’t poisonous and was regularly let out in his room to hunt for insects. In fact, the last thing he’d done, before leaving Rose Park for good, was release her from her glass cabinet on his bookcase. With a bit of luck, she’d find her way into his mum’s wardrobe and lay her eggs in her precious hat collection!
The dog’s howled again and Maddox saw his chance. While everyone was distracted, he broke free from his cover and sprinted headlong towards the end of the drive. The gravel turnpike loomed in the distance. If he could reach it, he knew he stood a chance of getting away. 

Despite himself, he glanced quickly over his shoulder. Rolling, white storm clouds kept blocking out the light from the full moon, he could barely see to put one foot in front of the other. But he could see the bright lights of the house’s grand portico behind him. A Cinderella carriage pulled up outside. ‘Don’t tell me they’re going to track me down in that?’ he scoffed. His mum would never have sanctioned the use of her favourite carriage, even to rescue her only son. Someone would pay for making that mistake later. 

He watched the stiff figure of his father swing into the open carriage door. A tailored suit, with a starched collar and high cut waist, hung off him like a cheap overcoat. His wispy white hair was scraped back under a powdered wig. He must have got dressed in a hell of a hurry.

The last thing to disappear into the carriage were his flapping coat tails. The carriage doors clicked shut and a moment later, a riding crop cracked overhead. The carriage’s lead horse jumped and shot forward. The lanterns suspended either side of the driver’s head swayed as they began to turn. 

Now the coach was facing Maddox. He span round on his heels, stumbled slightly, only just managing to keep his feet; and doubled his pace. Ahead, the road forked. To his left, Maddox could see the turnpike, running all the way to Falmouth. To his right, a smaller track ran South, probably fizzling out into nothing before it reached the coast. He rarely got a chance to plot his own course from the nursery to the bathroom. Let alone from the house to the nearest town. 

He gathered himself. Somewhere beyond that fork in the road, the Black River wound its way swiftly to Falmouth Bay. He daren’t try and ford it; he had to stick to the main roads and their sturdy bridges. If the recent floods had taken any of them out he’d be trapped, but there was nothing he could do about that now, he had to try. 

He glanced again at the smaller track heading in the opposite direction, ready to dismiss it out of hand. But there was something, just something about it he decided he liked. It had obviously been dug by slaves, there was no sign at all any quantity of dynamite had been used to drive it through the rolling hills. And that made it narrow and uneven.

Still, it had to be the turnpike didn’t it? Nothing else made sense. The turnpike was the right choice, the only choice. So why did he feel like he was doing the wrong thing?

‘Maybe the slave track was narrower than the carriage axle?’ he thought. ‘Maybe his father would be forced to follow him on foot?’ He’d stand a much better chance of outrunning him that way. He looked down. Dropping his right shoulder, he wheeled away from the compacted earth and stone of the turnpike at the last minute. ‘This was the whole point of tonight,’ he told himself. ‘To break away from what was familiar to him, and start again, from scratch.’

Above, a leafy canopy rustled in the strengthening breeze. A spider’s web clung to his face. He brushed it away, trying to stay focused. The slave track lay dead ahead of him. It wasn’t overgrown, but he’d no idea how often it was used. Immediately, he sensed there was something blocking his path.; something dark and dangerous strewn across it. It was impossible to see exactly what it was, the moon having retreated behind an especially dense bank of cloud again. 

‘A pile of cut logs?’ Maddox could only guess, basing his assumptions on the occasional glimpse of a sawn branch near his ear. He only had a second or two to react. He jumped over something tall with a broken silhouette, clipping his toe on it, just managing to stay upright. The magnolia trees either side breathed a sigh of relief. He had cleared it. He was safe.

Once again, he stared ahead, struggling to see what other hazards lay in wait for him. But it was no use, he was effectively flying blind. To be honest, it wouldn’t make much difference if he turned his head right round and looked backwards at the people trailing him. The scent of a pimento tree filled his nostrils for an instant. He held his breath, twisted his neck sharply over one shoulder and squinted into the inky blackness. 

The coach lanterns, like two staring bull’s eyes, were not far behind him. They’d turned right already, following him down the slave-road, into the magnolia glades. Far from being too wide for the track, Maddox saw now how perfectly the carriage wheels fitted into it. The coach was a steam train, hurtling towards him on greased rails!

The lanterns danced wildly, as though knocked by a branch protruding from the ditch. But there were no branches reaching out that far; his father’s groundsmen had pruned them all back, turning them into firewood. That was it. The coach must have hit the pile of logs in the road. Unfortunately, it hadn’t stopped it. It didn’t even seem to have slowed it down. 

At this rate, Maddox knew he’d be back in his bedroom by one o’clock. He tried to come up with a plan, never forgetting to throw one foot as far in front of the other as possible, running harder and harder all the time. 

His lungs were ready to burst. He was no match for eight well-shod hooves and a pair of narrow, iron-rimmed wheels. He was going to be caught. His mum’s carriage must have been glued to the road. It was like they’d been made for each other, the carriage and the dirt track. Suddenly, the trees to one side of Maddox fell away. A sharp wind cut deep into his shirt, hinting he was within spitting distance of the sea. 

Some kind of crop had been sewn on the open patch of ground below him. Sugar cane, tobacco, coffee or cotton, he couldn’t see but it didn’t matter, they’d all cushion his fall if he threw himself off the road, into it. He knew better than to stop and ask questions. Instead, he dived at full stretch, into what he hoped was a thickly set field of something green and springy. Unable to brace himself for the moment his young body hit the ground, he simply crossed his fingers and prayed things would turn out all right. 

He felt himself soar through the air, then tilt and begin to fall. Wide, green leaves pushed past his face, creaking, yellow stems began to snap under his weight, then all of a sudden, SMACK!, the stodgy soil Rose Park was built on came up to meet him. His lip opened up immediately and he tasted blood at the back of his throat, but at least he didn’t think he’d broken anything. He came to rest on his back, staring upwards at the road.

The ground beneath him trembled as the carriage lanterns flashed past. Both left their mark on his retina like shooting stars across the sky. His father’s face was a pale shadow in the window, contorted with anger and fear. What would it look like to their slaves and their neighbours, if it was shown his parents couldn’t even control their son? 

For a while, Maddox listened to the carriage wheels rattle away into the night. One of them must have drifted onto the grass verge. The sound changed, softer now, bobbing over the fields towards him like thistledown. Then it stopped abruptly. He blinked. As his eyes flicked open again he realised something was wrong. Very wrong. 

There was a splintering crash in the distance, as though a barn door had been torn down or a tree had fallen through a shed roof. No, he was being stupid. Of course he knew what had happened, the carriage had crashed!

Maddox imagined shards of white-painted wood exploding into the air. In his mind’s eye, he saw the horses being pulled off their feet. And the driver leaping from his leather bench-seat to safety. He almost got up, to see if he could help. But at the last second, he held himself back. 

A swarm of bats flew low over his head. The insects hidden in the undergrowth behind him began singing, chirp, chirp, chirp... And somewhere, a rat nosed through a pile of rotting leaves, in search of something good to eat.
Another stream of fresh, salt-saturated air blew across Maddox’ face. Slowly, a minute, or maybe it was two, slipped by on the edge of his exposed, weather-beaten field. Now, at last, he could hear two distinct voices, rising out of the forest, somewhere near where the carriage must have crashed. 

They came closer. Maddox lay perfectly still, listening to them struggle towards the estate house through a stinging shower of rain. ‘If they could walk, they weren’t badly hurt,’ he told himself. ‘He didn’t need to worry.’ Only when he was certain they’d passed, did he allow himself to wipe clean his face and move his left knee off an especially sharp stone. He was a mess, he was tired and hungry, and he was completely lost, but he was also free. He began to crawl away through the prickly weeds growing in the field’s ragged boundary. 

Maddox Landan had never been free before, not even for a second. He tried to enjoy the feeling, the feeling of being in complete control of his own destiny for the first time in his life, but it was harder than he expected. It seemed almost impossible to get past the hollow sense of dread and loneliness that gripped him out here, near the edge of the wild Caribbean. He must have gone nearly a quarter of a mile before it occurred to him he could safely stand up! 

The ominous clouds gathered overhead parted and a fat, round moon finally allowed him to see properly the countryside all around him. He was standing by a three hundred foot cliff at the base of which, waves broke relentlessly against solid lumps of volcanic rock. The horizon was empty, as far as he could tell. But the vast, heaving canvas of open ocean below was not. It was punctuated by two small cut-outs, boats (or more accurately square-rigged ships) heading for land. 

Even from his vantage point high above them, Maddox could tell they were in trouble. One of them was on fire. It didn’t look like it was in danger of sinking any time soon, but several blazes still appeared to be burning out of control on its gleaming deck.
By contrast, Maddox saw the other ship was heavily laden, sitting low in the water. It probably had substantially more cargo on board than was sensible. A thought occurred to him. Was it a pirate ship? Had it recently attacked the other vessel, adding her inventory to its own? The fires, the torn sails. It all made sense.

But Maddox was sure, even a greedy pirate wouldn’t risk his ship by overloading it with loot in the middle of a tropical storm. He must have thought his crew could cope with the extra weight. The weather was still getting worse though. Perhaps he’d been wrong to gamble with their safety. Maybe he’d have to offload some of their cargo, to reduce their draft? Or maybe he’d have to put in to the nearest port, wherever that was, sitting out the rest of the storm in relative safety? 

Maddox heard the plantation dogs, barking over the next hill. His dad and coachman must have arrived back at the mansion. He dug his hands into his pockets and scuffed his feet. What next? Mr. Price would be woken soon. His mum would tell him to find her son, find him before dawn, whatever it cost. And Mr. Price would leer at her, the way he always did, and fetch the two longest leashes he had from the chest of drawers by his bed. Then he’d clip them to his two favourite animals, Tooth and Nail (both droolers, both with painful looking red rims round their eyes) and drag them onto the estate road. After that, the only certainty was Maddox would be found.

A cloud of gravel rolled away from him. Pebbles tumbled down a short slope, then dropped to the swirling surf hundreds of feet below. He’d always known there were pirates in this part of the world. He couldn’t help thinking about them as their vessel was picked up by an especially tall wave and flung back down again. Hundreds of them, if he was to believe what his mum’s favourite companion-slave told him. 

They preyed on the fleets of merchant ships that used the Windward Passage as a shortcut in and out of the Caribbean Sea. They were a throwback to a forgotten time, something the kings and queens of Europe no longer worried about. But instead, something organisations like the East India Company grappled with daily. 

It was clear they had little to fear, plying their cutthroat trade in the waters around Rose Park. Besides Maddox, no one else was going to see what they were up to tonight. No one would dare cross the fences his dad maintained right round the perimeter of his estate. In all probability, no one else had ever stood where Maddox was standing right now.  

The nearest settlement he knew of was Wakefield, at least five miles up the coast. But Wakefield’s main headland curved northwards, obscuring its view of the pretty cliffs below it. There was no way its scruffy harbour patrol boats could ever police the Rose Park shoreline. 

‘At least,’ Maddox thought, ‘no one had to worry about pirates making landfall in this area.’ He was pretty certain there wasn’t a safe harbour for anything bigger than a sloop, anywhere along this stretch of reef-strewn coast. Pirates might be a law unto themselves, but they were a law of the sea. They were bound for the other side of the world, or the bottom of the ocean. Not the humble parish of Trelawny.

He shivered, realising he’d been standing stock still for quite a while. The ships below him had moved on and it took him a moment to locate them again. He had to look more or less straight through his own legs to see them; they had crept so close to the shore. 

What were they doing? In this weather, the shore was the last place you wanted to be. Their beams could be smashed on a reef, torn to pieces on a submerged outcrop of rock or caught in a rip tide. If their crews were having trouble bailing them out in deep water, they were going to sink for sure in the shallows. 

Then, Maddox noticed something out of the corner of his eye, something he’d not spotted before. A few tiny pinpricks of light on the curve of a natural bay he’d have sworn shouldn’t have been there. The tiny lights were waving at him through the rain.

Everything at this time of night was grey. Even the lights were grey. That didn’t matter. You could tell a lot from shades of grey. Thousands of gallons of water must have been suspended in the air all around him. Yet still, Maddox’s brain managed to piece together an image of the area below. He saw a small cove, with a narrow mouth, open to the ocean from the north.
The water inside was black. That meant it was deep, able to accommodate a heavy ship. His eyes screwed up. He wanted to extract every ounce of information available to him. The bay was not a perfect oval. Part of its longest side was dead straight. Had someone constructed a wharf of some kind along it? 

Maddox could see roughly where the waves were breaking on the peninsula that formed the lower lip of the bay’s mouth. It wasn’t quite where it should have been. That could imply the presence of a harbour wall; some form of coastal defence perhaps?

Maddox leant into the wind, extending his neck and head right out, over the edge of the cliff. He wanted to see as far round as he could. There was definitely the faintest outline of a pitched roof and a church steeple behind the bay’s short beach. ‘A town,’ he whispered in amazement. ‘A secret town right under my feet. Right under my nose.’

The wind dropped suddenly and he stumbled forward. His foot slipped on some loose chippings and his heart leapt to his mouth. He was falling. He could feel his centre of gravity shifting. Slowly, his body was being sucked off the cliff top!

He found his eyes had been focused on something too far away for too long. They couldn’t give him the snapshot he needed of the grasses and roots trying to trip him up. He spun round and lunged forward with both arms in a kind of ten-to-two pose. His fingers clenched and opened and clenched and opened. But nothing was stopping his slide backwards, over the edge.

Finally, he felt his palm clasp something tough and leathery. He supposed it was a kind of vine or creeper he wasn’t familiar with. Whatever it was, it was a good four inches thick. It slipped through his fingers but he was so close to a quick and painful death he could almost taste it. He had no choice. He clawed his fingernails into the vine and let it take his full weight.

At first, he thought he’d done the wrong thing. The vine gave way and his legs found they could no longer feel anything besides fresh air. But at the last possible moment, his steady descent came to a shuddering halt. The thing he was holding stretched and swayed but held fast. Slowly, he began to crawl up it. 

Before long, his foot found a purchase on the slippery bank. He was able to hoist himself to safety. The feeling of exhilaration and relief he felt, lying on his chest, not caring how dirty, wet and cold he was, took him by surprise. He had to make something of himself, just to prove his mum wrong. He had to show he was better off without her. He’d have failed utterly if he’d slipped into the sea fifteen minutes after he’d cut his apron strings!

HSSSS… A feather tickled his cheek. ‘A feather?’ he thought. ‘Where had that come from?’ He swiped at it. HSSSS… It rattled around his ear now. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling but he’d rather it went away. He pulled his knees up, underneath his chin and finally let go of the vine that had saved his life. His hands went instinctively to his head, massaging his scalp and rubbing his eyes. When he took them away, he couldn’t believe what he saw.

Dancing an inch from his nose was the angry head of a yellow boa! Its long body trailed away, into the blackness. It must have been the biggest one he’d ever seen, perhaps five feet long. Maddox knew yellow boas weren’t poisonous. It was clear if they had been, this one would have let him have a double dose of venom several seconds ago. 

He edged away from it, watching it uncurl itself from around the trunk of a young palm tree. Squirming inside, he realised it had been the snake that had saved his life. He had pulled himself up on its scaly body, cutting into its muscle with his fingernails.

He rubbed his index finger and thumb together, feeling paper-thin snake scales fold and crumble between them. Yuck. He hated snakes. He darted quickly to the other side of the palm tree. It turned out to be the first of a long line of them, stretching downhill. The snake slithered away, angry at having lost so many fresh scales from its tail. It had only shed its old skin yesterday. It would be months before the damage Maddox had wrought was repaired.

A whole avenue of palms had apparently been planted on the cliff top, perhaps ten years ago. They were all a good size now, huge parasol leaves like peacock feathers sprouting from the tops of their trunks, enclosing Maddox. The avenue lead inland hugging the contours of the next valley and the next, dropping all the time, towards the secret bay he had spotted.

Cautiously, Maddox began to follow them. Several small species of monkey were trying to sleep in their swaying branches. Nervous lizards crawled over their cracked balk. Maddox felt a hundred eyes on him, as he marched away from Rose Park, towards the unknown. But at least Mr. Price’s eyes were not among them. For the time being at least, he had stayed one step ahead of him. He had been given a chance, a chance to get away, and he was determined to make the most of it.

Without thinking, Maddox soon broke into a jog. There was just too much adrenaline pumping through his veins not to. He became very aware of the sound of the wind, the smell of the sea and the pounding of his legs on the ground. Nothing else mattered. He was totally focused on staying upright, moving as quickly as possible across the overgrown and uneven landscape.

And then, without having thought at all about what to do when he got there, he was on the outskirts of a small town. There were some shanty style dwellings taking shelter from the gale behind what looked like the walls of an old quarry. There was a river of oozing mud, which probably had been called a road at some point in its life. And a poorly fenced graveyard, its occupant’s remembered with crude, wooden crosses, rather than smart, granite headstones. 

‘Whatever the stone from the quarry was for,’ Maddox thought, ‘it wasn’t for the dead.’
He slowed his pace to a walk, his eyes flicking suspiciously from side to side. There was a partially collapsed barn, an open-topped chicken run and a pigsty to his right. More graves hemmed them in. He crept past, thinking idly that the port, whatever it was called, must be a lot bigger than he’d first guessed. Even Falmouth didn’t have a cemetery like this. 

‘Perhaps the place had suffered some terribly tragedy in the last few years?’ he considered the possibility as he rounded a slow bend. A modest but well built watchtower confronted him. It had four walls, clad with wood, a steeply pitched roof, tiled with cut coconut shells, and an A-frame bell tower from which a rope dangled over the front door. 

The wooden cladding had originally been painted white. But Mother Nature had decided it needed a second coat of seaweed-green moss. There was a cat, asleep on the first step. Maddox didn’t want to disturb it. Even with its head tucked into its neck and its paws folded beneath it, it looked shifty. 

Had it been stationed on the step to alert the town when a stranger arrived? If it saw him, would it leap up and swing off the bell rope dangling over its head? Maddox heard sounds coming from the waterfront and crept away, glad he’d managed not to disturb it. Maybe one of those ships had docked?    

~

He approached a pole fence stretching right round the back of a low line of hills. A gate set into it was closed but not locked. He passed through and continued into a much richer area. Now the buildings were clad in polished stone, glazed with sheer, transparent glass, roofed with glossy black-slate tiles. He’d never seen wealth like it. There were dozens and dozens of executive, merchant properties queuing up either side of him, each one trying to outdo the last. A few were set back, surrounded by beautifully maintained gardens. Many were four or even five stories high, with cranes reaching out over their eaves to allow expensive pieces of furniture to be dropped effortlessly into the upper floors. 

By the time he reached the quayside, Maddox had been walking through cobbled streets lined with citrus trees for nearly ten minutes. Just the smell was intoxicating. The cobblestones changed colour. Instead of perfect grey blocks of ice, now they perfect white blocks. It was obvious Maddox had left one neighbourhood behind, to enter another, even more affluent one, the waterfront.

Torches and braziers burned all over the waterfront. Some were set into the walls of the giant, rectangular cargo houses bounding it. Others were slotted into barrels on long piers or hung from cradles on floating pontoons. There was the sense that the town’s folk worshipped the simple horseshoe of water at the centre of their community. They certainly valued the arrival of ships into their protected harbour. There was a sign, not far from where Maddox was standing, underlining this simple fact.

‘Welcome Sailors to Port Cullis,’ it read.
Port Cullis. Maddox liked the name. The letters seemed to sparkle in the light of a nearby lantern burning whale-oil. It was the name of a town in touch with its own history. Like Port Royal, it was proud to declare itself English. Obviously, a settlement with close ties to the crown. 

A wave crashed on the quay, its spray finding Maddox’s tongue. He tasted the salt in it, fresh and clean, straight from the wild Atlantic. Beyond the nets and lobster pots drawn back from the sea wall, he saw a smart fishing fleet, anchored in perhaps thirty feet of water. The boats were being tossed and thrown by the high winds, even in the sheltered bay. But they looked like they’d still be there in the morning, exactly where their proud owners had left them. 

They were tied in a line, now Maddox looked. Maybe the people of Port Cullis had laid a chain across the seabed to secure their vessels on nights just like this. That had been done before, especially in places where regular sea anchors were known to slip. It made sense. One… Two… Three… He began to count the swaying boats. Four… Five… Then something brought him up short.

There was a hole in the night. A great patch of the bay that was just black. Nothing in it moved. The waves inside it didn’t reflect the flames on the quay like they did everywhere else. The fishing boats disappeared into it. Then re-appeared, twenty yards further along. Maddox shook his head. What was he looking at? What was wrong with this picture? He couldn’t work it out.

Once again, it was the moon that came to his rescue. It appeared briefly in a window of cloud high above, illuminating the entire cove with its arctic, white light. There was a giant ship, a Spanish galleon, parked at the nearest wharf. It was so big, and Maddox was so close to it, his brain had refused to recognise its shape. 

It was also pitch black, as black as tar, for its entire length. There wasn’t a single artistic detail on its massive starboard side to help Maddox’s mind interpret its slippery curves. It seemed almost to absorb the light from the two nearest braziers, as though it were cold and needed their warmth. It was a ghost ship, moored at a quayside Maddox was still having trouble believing was there at all.

Shouts from the deck reminded him he could be discovered at any moment. He withdrew into the shadows behind him, making sure he couldn’t be surprised, double-checking there were no windows or doors in the recess he’d found. The moon was masked by cloud but now Maddox had got his eye in. He spotted gun ports, all closed, and a rail surrounding the ship’s forecastle. There was a towering middle mast and at least two others, fore and aft. 

This ship was a magnificent animal of the sea. From the path clinging to the cliff top, he’d seen it as a victim, at the mercy of the fierce storm and high waves raging around it. But it was nothing of the sort. This ship was not, nor could it ever be, a victim. It was unquestionably a predator. He had been right about one thing. It was certainly a pirate ship…

So where were the pirates? Maddox knew a bit about life at sea. He had, after all, spent every one of his thirteen years on the planet, trapped on a relatively small island. You would need at least thirty men to crew a galleon of this size. Probably more. They must have come ashore as there clearly weren’t anything like that many still on board. But where had they gone?        

He pushed his nose forward, nudging it into the breeze. Tilting his head, he gazed down a row of pastel painted seafront cottages. There was no sign of them. He looked the other way and immediately noticed something unusual, a copper coin (but not one minted in Jamaica) lying on the ground. He reached out and picked it up. Thank God, he’d not been seen. He thrust it into his pocket, alongside the ones he’d snatched from his mum’s purse earlier, and felt its markings.

It had a king’s head on one side and some embossed words on the other. Dawn wasn’t far away. He’d try and read it then. For now, he had a bunch of pirates to track down. He felt reasonably certain the coin had fallen out of someone’s purse or pocket quite recently. It was too clean to have been lying in the gutter for long. Perhaps it had been dropped when the captain paid the harbourmaster for the privilege of leaving his ship on the wharf. Anyway, it made sense whoever had dropped it walked away to his right.

He followed. There was a sign somewhere ahead, slapping in the wind. Maddox guessed it was the sort of sign that hung vertically from its own jib, reaching out over a busy shop. His eyes flicked up, looking for it. There was the end of the cobb and the mouth of the bay far ahead of him, veiled in driving rain.

It was a startling thing, to glimpse the open ocean again, boiling like a cauldron full of hot fat. There was no way any ship, no matter how sound its construction, could survive all night on it. The pirates were lucky they’d found this place, Port Cullis, when they had. They could have been drowned otherwise. The other ship, the one with the fires burning on its deck, must still be out there somewhere, struggling to stay afloat. 

Maddox swept the horizon, not even realising he was doing it. ‘Maybe Port Cullis could launch a rescue mission to save it?’ he thought. A man dressed from head to toe in scraped waterproof leathers suddenly strode out in front of him. Maddox stopped dead, flattening himself against the nearest wall. He thought about reaching out to touch him, asking the man for help. He really wanted to tell someone about Rose Park, his recent escape from his parents and the yellow boa that had so spectacularly saved his life. 

But before he got a chance, the man moved away. Maddox watched him march down the long cobb, his coat tails flapping up and down behind him. He looked like a mermaid, swimming upstream. He stopped and began fiddling with a telescope, trying to put it to his eye. 

‘Worthless,’ he cursed. Maddox was surprised how clearly he could hear him. The wind must have been blowing in just the right direction. ‘Don’t want it.’
What did he mean? What was he talking about? Maddox crept closer, as far as he dare go without putting himself in any more danger. Was it his telescope he was so unhappy with? Or something else?

He had an iron rod bent into an ‘S’ shape on his hip. With a square nut on one end and a grip on the other, it could have been a key of some kind, like the ones used to open the sluice gates on the plantation. The man unclipped it from his belt, waved it idly at the sea and said, ‘You keep ‘em. We’re full.’

He shrank his telescope back into his palm and rammed it into a specially made holster slung round his waist. Maddox had no idea what he was up to. He watched him kneel down and insert his key into a stone column. He turned it through three hundred and sixty degrees. Nothing happened. He turned it again, and again and again. It was like watching someone wind up a giant clock. What was he hoping to do, turn back the tide?

He found his rhythm. His head was going up and down and up and down. His shoulders rocking backwards and forwards like a metronome. He had clearly done this before, turning the key one full rotation every few seconds. 
Who was he? Who lived in this strange town, less than two miles from his parent’s front door? People who never visited his dad’s plantation, never did business with anyone he knew? They must be an introverted lot, not speaking to the slaves his mum and dad used. 

And what were they about? Greeting pirates with a friendly ‘Hello’, reining in the ocean when it got too rough, and apparently burying people for fun... None of it made sense.
He tried to run his fingers through his hair, remembering as he did so he hadn’t got any. Port Cullis creaked and groaned all around him like a nervous animal. Something moved in the jaws of the bay over his shoulder and finally, Maddox understood how the place had got its unusual name. 

An enormous line of sharp, wooden teeth emerged from beneath the waves completely sealing it off. Each tooth was like a sharpened tree trunk, pointing inland at an angle of about sixty degrees. Massive joists ran parallel to them, joining them all together. It took Maddox a moment to think of a word to describe it properly. Then it came to him. It was a fifty-foot wide, ten tonne Seagate. He realised at once you could also have called it a port cullis.

Clearly, it was controlled from the cobb. The little figure with the key had pulled away from the stone pillar (which must have been linked to some kind of underground winding mechanism). He had his head down and was doing his best to keep the foul weather out of his collar. It was a good job he was too otherwise he’d have seen Maddox for sure. 

Maddox was frozen with fear and wonder, yards from any kind of cover. At last, he closed his mouth and turned away from the entrance to the bay. Darting sideways, he began to search for somewhere to hide. Bang. Bang. He could hear that sign again, clattering about in the wind. He found an alley, ducked into it without looking, and nearly lost his head. 

A window shutter had blown loose on its hinges and swept round, ready to knock him clean off his feet. Just in time, he ordered his knees to fold and dropped to the floor. BANG! The shutter smashed into the brick wall again, somewhere beyond his left ear.
‘Odd,’ he thought as he stood up again. There wasn’t a single brick or nail, anywhere on the docks, out of place. Why had this shutter been allowed to swing so dangerously free? He tried to fasten it in place, but its catch appeared to have been shot off. Instead, he lifted it over the top of its cast iron, barrel hinges and lay it flat on the ground. 

The man in the waterproof leathers shuffled past the end of the alley without looking down it. Maddox was relieved. Cautiously, he re-entered the exposed waterfront. The driving rain caught him off guard and he squinted. The man was drifting away from him, his coat doing its best to push him on, as before, by flapping its split tail in the wind. His silhouette crossed the boundary between the quayside and the high street and disappeared altogether. 

Maddox thought he’d been quite self-controlled until now, not letting his emotions get the better of him. But suddenly, he felt sick inside. He was completely alone, confused by his impossible surroundings. Caring less than he should have done who saw him, he ran to the gangplank of the galleon and strode across it. 

He tried to think what his life would be like if he managed to escape the island of Jamaica on board. The idea of stowing away began to take hold of him. Maybe the ship was on its way to Tortuga, the Spanish Maine or even better, Northern Europe.
London held a special fascination for Maddox. His mum mentioned it from time to time. He knew almost nothing about her past, but imagined she’d been there, years ago. He’d love to see the bridges over the Thames, which she described as works of art. The Palace of Westminster, which she thought of as the most spectacular building in the world. And the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which she considered a modern marvel. 

Images began to form in his mind of a great city, nursing a broad, silver river right through its heart. But the sound of the galleon’s mooring ropes slapped against the wooden beams of the quay shook his dream to pieces. The deck he was standing on was running with water. He lifted his feet up and splashed them down again. The ship’s timbers had expanded, closing gaps that would otherwise have let it drain away. Huge puddles had formed all over the place. 

He moved through them. Luckily, the deck was empty. He daren’t enter the crew’s quarters. Or the officer’s mess. But surely there was somewhere onboard a ship this size he could go to hide. He scoured the main deck for a lifeboat (wasn’t that where stowaways usually ended up?) For some reason though, there didn’t seem to be one. Maybe pirates didn’t bother with lifeboats? 

He picked up the corner of a waxed tarpaulin covering a pyramid of cannonballs. It wasn’t exactly luxury accommodation, but it would have to do. He crawled underneath it, bringing his knees up tight under his chin. All he had to do now was wait. Wait for the storm to pass. Wait for the crew to return. And then, wait for them to set sail. Maddox felt his knowledge of the world was about to explode. He was half right…

An ear-splitting scream suddenly filled the air. It was like fingernails being drawn down a tall blackboard, like a blade drawing itself through a granite block.  It was the sound of death. Maddox felt his stomach lurch upwards into his mouth. He knew at once he could not ignore it. He had to know what was going on beyond the tarpaulin skin covering his body.

He cringed and crawled out, hardly daring to breath. A bolt of sheet lightning flashed across the sky far out to sea. There, sticking through the Seagate like a gigantic rose thorn poking through an ogre’s garden fence, was the bowsprit of another great ship. Behind the dark lattice framework of the gate itself, Maddox could see its decks glowing bright red, awash with flames. It had to be the other vessel he’d seen from the cliff top. 

Its foremast waved dangerously from side to side. The ropes holding it upright strained and snapped. It must have been weakened by the force of the impact. Sooner or later, it was going to collapse through the burning hull.
Remembering what a vulnerable position he was in, trespassing on a pirate ship in the middle of the night, Maddox checked over his shoulder. Nothing moved. No one was about. Did that mean he was the only person who’d witnessed the accident on the horizon? Was it up to him to tell somebody? That was assuming somebody, anybody else, wanted to know. 

What had the man in the weatherproof leathers said? ‘You keep ‘em. We’re full.’ Did he mean the sea should take this merchant ship and its crew? A feeling of intense loneliness gripped Maddox’s heart once more. And then, the worst thing imaginable happened. Suddenly, horribly, he wasn’t alone anymore. There was a figure, waving at him from the deck of the wrecked ship! 

Fear must have heightened Maddox’s senses. He didn’t know how, but he was able to see the person’s clothes billowing in the wind, their pleading hands, clinging to the faintest hope he could save them. It was obvious he could do nothing. The figure looked half dead already. But whoever it was wouldn’t give up. They were too far away to hear, yet he sensed how desperately they were screaming.

The ship’s hull was split. Water must have been gushing into the hold. Its bow was raised above sea level by the gate, so its stern was steadily sinking. The foremast moved, rolling to one side. Then, dramatically, it rolled back again, arcing into the shrouds amidship. The silent soul on deck could only stand there, watching it. 

It swept towards him. One second he was there, the next, he wasn’t. He had been hit full in the chest by a fourteen-inch diameter tree trunk and fired overboard, into the sea. Maddox’s blood ran cold. He’d never watched anyone die before. It seemed so terrifyingly simple. There was no funeral, no twenty-one-gun salute. Just the brutal absence of life. He’d never felt so utterly useless. He didn’t care whether it made sense or not. He had to try and stop anyone else from drowning, or being crushed to death on that ship. 

He ran towards the gangplank, stretching from a gate in the opposite gunrail. He knew as he approached it, he didn’t even need to set foot on it. He could jump it easily. He launched himself over the narrow channel of water separating the ship from the wharf, and landed lightly on solid ground, saving himself several previous seconds. The window whose shutter he’d removed flew past him in a blur. He hadn’t a clue where he was heading. He followed the alley to a T-junction. Then turned left, right and finally, left again. 

An airy piazza opened up in front of him. In the centre, a stone statue had been reduced to a pile of sharp rubble by a cannon ball. The four-pound sphere of iron was still lying on top of it, gradually staining it a rusty pink colour. Once again, Maddox was struck by how out of place the broken piece of classical sculpture looked. The buildings surrounding it all had painted front doors adorned with moulded brass knockers. They were extremely well presented. 

One of them was decorated with a giant mural depicting a hangman’s noose. ‘The Stretched Neck Inn’ read the scrolling letters above its first floor windows. For the pirate who simply had to have the very best of everything, it looked like the perfect drinking hole. The smell wafting towards Maddox was enticing; cooked meat, wood smoke, barley and hops. The sound of raised voices and laughter billowed out over the square. Maddox tried to peer inside but the shutters were backed by tight-weave curtains. The curtains, Maddox discovered, were gathered very thickly. There was no way he could ever see past them. 

He tried the door but it was locked. He drifted on, circling the statue several times.