Blood Diamond: A Pirate Devlin Novel by Mark Keating Page A

could with the chain dragging him round. The cell filled with gasps and blows like a bullring and Devlin began to fade.
    Soon. Be here soon.
     
    The inmates of Newgate, be their internment short or long, felt the sounds of the night deeper than most. A prison set in a city, rather than excluding those inside from the world, only magnifies the life outside denied.
    The thrum of the music of the streets during the day, the laughter and the curses sifting through the open windows, served more justice than the most boiling and fuming judge could ever pen. But it is at night when the dread most comes and for those of the common and felon wards the withdrawing of the day leaves a loneliness like an ossuary upon men’s hearts, and sounds that no man should hear are commonplace:
    Throats choking on linen, swallowed to end the guilt. Sobs of children hushed by women lamenting their hunger. The drip of blood from necks and wrists of those not wanting to see the dawn.
    Now came a new sound, the clap of an explosion from beneath their feet. Those capable sprang upright from their wooden benches or straw-strewn floors, eyes scouting the dark for some account of its origin. Only the large hall of the Felon and Common ward, arched and cloistered like a church, was privy to the dusty cloud pushing up from the staircase below, heralding two dark shapes cut out from the smoke. These were two men with weapons for hands, outstretched and seeking for heads straining through the smoke. The largest of them was silhouetted with the bulbous bulk of a blunderbuss held out from his hip.
    The constables of the ward were those prisoners chosen for their ability to keep order. Often they were the most violent men whose price for not being hung was to make sure that their ward was kept clean and peaceful. They had their garnish lifted, their punishments forgotten. And they knew there was always someone straining to take their place, so they protected their corners like wolves.
    Bill Dunn owned this hall. He slipped out of his bed, halfway down the wall of the ward, his hardened bull’s pizzle dropping out of his sleeve and into one hand, his gully blade from under his pillow held fast in the other. Dunn felt his stewards and the other prisoners look to him as his eyes locked on the big man with the other smaller one now at his back, pistols swinging left and right as they approached together. Two more came behind them, coughing away the sulphurous smoke.
    Dunn raised himself out of the dark and into their path. Boldly. Drunkenly. This was his ward by right and scars. The devil to those who entered it. He had raped, robbed and cut his way through London for years, but slept peaceful and deeply despite it all. He had a lot to lose and damn any bastard who dared enter his realm.
    ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he asked, his weapons dipping. He had too much gin in his head to fear the lead against him. And he was too used to men backing down from his bullying to expect any different.
    Peter Sam was ignorant of Bill Dunn’s power. His weapon bellowed and lit the room as much with its noise as its flash – enough muzzle flare to show Dunn’s insides painting those too close with a red mist. His body landed with a wet slap upon the stone floor, twenty years of evil deeds finally paid for.
    Peter Sam stroked his hot barrel as Hugh Harris at his back ran his pistols around the room to belay the curious. Peter Sam quietened them all with a command to stay in their beds.
    ‘ That’s who the fuck I am!’ He glanced behind him. ‘Dandon! Where away?’
    Dandon pushed aside Richard Maynard, who was clinging to his yellow coat. The warden realised his ordeal was over and sank onto a bench in relief.
    ‘I think out of here, Peter, to be the best course.’ He held out Adam Cowrie’s map and walked toward the only other door in the hall, far to their left under coffered arches and past dozens of beds. Pale faces from the walls watched their weapons as the pirates