The Time Pirate
· THE ·
TIME
PIRATE
ALSO BY TED BELL
Nick of Time: An Adventure Through Time
Tsar
Spy
Pirate
Assassin
Hawke
· THE ·
TIME
PIRATE
A NICK McIVER
TIME ADVENTURE
Ted Bell
ST. MARTIN’S GRIFFIN
NEW YORK
This one is for Byrdie, Brownie, and Benji, three kids who exemplify all that’s best about the heroic children who inhabit these pages.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE TIME PIRATE. Copyright © 2010 by Ted Bell. All rights reserved. Printed in March 2010 in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelly & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Illustrations by Russ Kramer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bell, Ted.
The time pirate: a Nick McIver time adventure / Ted Bell.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-57810-7
1. Boys—Channel Islands—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Channel Islands—Fiction. 3. Pirates—Fiction. 4. Kidnapping—Fiction. 5. Rescues—Fiction. 6. Time travel—Fiction. 7. Jamaica—Fiction. 8. Caribbean Area—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.E6455T56 2010
813'.6—dc22
2009040015
First Edition: April 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue: ANCIENT HISTORY
BOOK ONE: INVASION
1. PENNYWHISTLE PARK
2. THE WHIRL-O-DROME
3. SECRETS OF THE BLACK FOREST
4. THE CAMEL IN THE BARN
5. THE SPY IN THE SKY
6. CONTACT!
7. THE LONGEST SERMON EVER
8. CAPTAIN MCIVER’S AEROPLANE
9. STORM CLOUDS OVER PORT ROYAL
10. THE BARONESS AND THE BOMBERS
11. PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE
12. HOME ON A WING AND A PRAYER
13. DEATH FROM ABOVE
14. “WE’LL FIGHT TO THE END, WON’T WE, GUNNER?”
15. TREES WITH WHEELS!
16. ONE GOOD HAND AND ONE GOLD HOOK
17. BLOOD, TOIL, TEARS, AND SWEAT
18. CODE NAME: BLITZ
19. NICK EVENS THE SCORE
20. UP WAS AIR, DOWN WAS DEATH
21. THE DREADFUL KIDNAPPING OF KATE
22. SANCTUARY AT FORDWYCH MANOR
23. THE NARROWEST ESCAPE
24. THE KOMMANDANT AND THE SPY
25. 18 DEGREES NORTH, 76 DEGREES WEST
26. LORD HAWKE’S TROJAN HORSE
27. THE BRETHREN OF BLOOD
28. “GODSPEED, NICK,” HAWKE SAID
29. BLOODTHIRSTY CUTTHROATS GIVE CHASE
30. “WELCOME TO THE BLACK CROW, GENTS”
31 “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!”
32. NICK MCIVER, TRAITOR?
33. “IF THEY SEE YOU, THEY’LL SHOOT YOU!”
BOOK TWO: INDEPENDENCE
34. A HEAVY HEART EN ROUTE TO MOUNT VERNON
35. THE INDIAN IN THE FOG
36. MARTHA WASHINGTON’S NEW BOARDER
37. “DON’T EVER BETRAY MY TRUST, NICHOLAS!”
38. “THE GENERAL IS HOME AT LAST!”
39. AN UNEASY MEETING WITH WASHINGTON AND LAFAYETTE
40. THE MARQUIS AND THE MIDNIGHT RENDEZVOUS
41. ALL ABOARD THE FLAGSHIP VILLE DE PARIS
42. “HOIST THE JOLLY ROGER!”
43. THE GREATEST PIRATE ARMADA EVER
44. “YOU’RE IN A PICKLE, CAPTAIN BLOOD!”
45. TAKING THE FIGHT TO THE ENEMY
46. SNAKE EYE STEPS FROM THE SHADOWS
47. AS BOMBS BURST OVERHEAD
48. ON THE LONG ROAD TO YORKTOWN
49. WHISTLING BRITISH CANNONBALLS
50. THIS IS A HERO, NICK THOUGHT
51. CORNWALLIS HAS SEEN ENOUGH
52. “THIS WAS THEIR FINEST HOUR!”
EPILOGUE: HOME AT LAST!
Illustrations by Russ Kramer
Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers, which they dare not
dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
PROLOGUE
ANCIENT HISTORY
· Greybeard Island, 1880 ·
1
The godforsaken isle took its name from the thick pea-soupy fogs that persistently haunted the place.
It was aptly named Greybeard Island. Dangerous terrain and weather fueled my misery trekking across the island’s rocky headland. Tired and bone cold, serious doubts about this adventure crept round the edges of the noggin: one truly nasty fall and my frozen carcass wouldn’t be found till next morning.
The low-hanging sun, once a comfort, was now merely a hazy yellow wafer sliding toward the sea.
Still, I was determined to reach the old Greybeard Inn before nightfall. I am by trade a naval historian, and I’d learned that Mr. Hornby, the inn’s proprietor, had a bewitching tale to tell.
Martyn Hornby was a rare bird, one of a small number of Royal Navy veterans of the Napoleonic Wars remaining alive, the sole living survivor of the crew of the famous H.M.S. Merlin, under the command of Captain Nicholas McIver.
McIver’s small 48-gun English man-o’-war fought a courageous and pivotal naval battle against a massive French 74-gun frigate back in 1805. When I say pivotal, I do not speak lightly. I mean I believed that Merlin’s victory had changed the course of history.
And no other historian, to my knowledge, had ever heard tell of it!
Seventy-five years ago now, in the summer of ’05, a huge French frigate, Mystère, was lurking off this very coast. She sailed under the infamous Captain William Blood, an Englishman and a traitor of the first order. Old Bill was a rogue who had betrayed our greatest hero, Admiral Lord Nelson, for a very large sum of capital offered by the French. Captain Blood’s formidable services were now at the disposal of Napoleon and his Imperial French Navy. And it was only the purest of luck that put that villain at last in British gun sights.
Distracted by such thoughts, I slipped then, and nearly lost my footing on a sharply angled escarpment, at the bottom lip of which I spied a cliff, one that dropped some four hundred feet to the sea! Well, I clung to a vertical outcropping of glistening rock and paused trembling on the edge of the precipice. Once my heart slowed to a reasonable hammering, I pressed on.
Historians, I was rapidly learning, need an adventurous streak. Tracking down far-flung witnesses to history is neither for the faint of heart nor weak of limb. Far better were I one of those stout-hearted, broad-shouldered chappies one reads about in penny novels. The lads off felling trees in the trackless Yukon, scaling Alps, or shouting “Sail hot” from atop a wildly pitching masthead. Such were my musings when a sudden thunderclap boomed behind me and lightning strikes danced on the far horizon, revealing a fork in the road. I chose the more treacherous seaward route, for I had no choice.
There was precious little width to be had on this path, and in some spots it was little more than a shaley rock-cut ledge about ten inches or a foot wide. Far below, I heard the crash of waves on jagged rocks. Dicey, to put it mildly.
The sheer face of the vertical rock wall to my right seemed to bulge, animated, as if it wished to push my body out into space. A trick of mind? I inched along, trying to ignore the rising bile of panic and the agitated sea waiting to
embrace me. Not once but thrice, I considered turning back. Only to realize I had passed the point of no return.
At last I came to a spot where could be seen, on a jutting finger of rock, a warm glow of yellow lights in the rainy gloom. The beckoning two-story house on that stony promontory was aglow with promised warmth and food. My steps quickened.
I pushed inside the inn’s heavy wooden door and found the old Jack Tar himself, clay-piped and pig-tailed, sitting in silence by the fire. I pulled up a chair and introduced myself. Had I the good fortune of speaking to Mr. Martyn Hornby? I inquired with a smile.
“Aye, I’m Hornby,” he said, removing his pipe. After a long silence in which clouds of geniality seemed to float above the man’s head, he spoke.
“Weather slowed you up, I reckon,” he stated, and I could feel his inspection of my person.
He himself was a sturdy, handsome figure who looked to be in his late eighties. He wore faded breeches and a ragged woolen fisherman’s sweater, much mended. He had a full head of snow-white hair, and his fine, leathered features were worn by years of wind and water. But, in the firelight, his twinkling blue eyes still held a sparkling clarity of youth, and I was glad of my perseverance on that final narrow ledge.
“Ye’ve come a long way, Mr. Tolliver.”
“Indeed, sir, I have.” I nodded. “As a student of history, I’ve a keen interest in your encounter with the French off this island, Mr. Hornby. I’d appreciate your recollections on that subject, if you’d be so kind.”
“Aye,” Hornby said, and then he fell silent. “I’m the last one . . . so I suppose I should tell it, if it’s to be told at all. If my memory’s up to it, of course.” He gave a hearty shout for his barman in the next room, ordering food and ale.
The drinks soon arrived, along with a steaming meat pie for me, and we both sipped, staring into the merry blaze, each alone with his thoughts. Mine, at the moment, were solely of my poor tingling feet, more painful in the thawing than the freezing.
Suddenly, without warning, the man began to speak, eyeing me in a curious manner. “I was one of Captain McIver’s powder monkeys, y’see, back in those glorious days, and—”
“Powder monkeys?” I interrupted, unfamiliar with the term.
“Boys who would ferry black powder from the holds below up to the gun crews when things got spicy. Listen. I’ll tell you how it all started, Mr. Tolliver, if you want to start there at the beginning . . .”
I nodded, smiling encouragement, discreetly whipping my pen and a well-worn leather notebook from my pocket.
“We had a fair wind home to Portsmouth en route from our station in the West Indies where we’d recently captured a Portugee,” Martyn Hornby began. “A spy.”
“A spy.”
“Aye, one much encouraged to speak his mind to avoid the tar-pot and cat-o’-nine-tails during the crossing. We eventually learned from his lips of a wicked plot, hatched in the evil brain of Billy Blood, the turncoat captain of the French frigate.”
“That would be Captain William Blood?”
“Few alive today have heard the name, sir. But Old Bill was a holy terror in his day. Gave Lord Nelson fits at every turning, he did. His plot was this: our natural enemy, the King of Spain, and the scurrilous French meant to join their naval forces and surprise Nelson en route to Trafalgar, and send the outnumbered British fleet to the bottom. It would have worked, too, had it not been for the heroism of our captain. And a few ship’s passengers.”
“Passengers?”
“Hawke was his name, Lord Hawke. A peer of the realm, but an adventurous sort, being descended directly from the pirate Blackhawke. Lord Hawke and a young lad named Nick McIver.”
“Lord Hawke, you say?” I was scribbling furiously now.
“Long dead, now.”
“And the McIver boy. Related to the captain, was he?”
“Mere coincidence they shared the exact same name, I think, though some disagreed with me.”
“How did this Lord Hawke and the boy come to be aboard the Merlin, sir?”
“Hawke’s daughter, Annabel, and his young son, Alexander, had been kidnapped and held for ransom by the French. It was Bill’s way to kidnap children of the aristocracy and extort great sums for their release. Hawke had learned Blood had his children aboard the frigate Mystère, and Hawke was of a mind to rescue them.”
“And the McIver boy?”
“There was some mystery surrounding the boy and His Lordship’s sudden presence onboard. Indeed, there were rumors as to how they appeared onboard.”
“Rumors?”
“Shipboard rumors. Stuff and nonsense, if you ask me. Something about some kind of ancient time machine the McIver boy was said to possess. How he come to be aboard, in fact.”
“Time machine, you say?” My confidence in the old salt’s mental state was beginning to waver.
“The Tempus Machina, it was called. Supposedly invented by Leonardo da Vinci himself. Allowed a bloke to travel back and forth in time just easy as you please. A brilliant golden orb, word had it, that glowed with an otherworldly light. Contained a mechanism filled with jewels and such.”
“Foolishness. Tommyrot.”
“I agree most heartily. Absolute rubbish. But many of the crew swore Hawke and the boy had appeared out of thin air. Those that claimed to have witnessed it said they seemed to shimmer into place like fiery ghosts before becoming humanlike.”
“So, you were actually seeking out this frigate, Mystère, for more than military reasons? A kidnap rescue as well?”
Hornby nodded. “We’d extracted from that blasted Portugee where Blood’s ship might lie. And more. We knew he had geographical details of his scheme etched on a golden spyglass, and—”
“I’m sorry—etched on a spyglass you say?”
“Aye. And not just any glass, mind you, but one Bill stole from Admiral Lord Nelson himself the night of the mutiny! According to that damnable Portugee, the location of the intended naval ambush was so secret that Bill had scratched the longitude and latitudinal coordinates right into the metal barrel of his glass. Now, since Bonaparte himself had a hand in the planning of the thing, it was likely a cunning trap. We had to get our hands on that glass before Nelson and the whole British fleet sailed from Portsmouth . . . and, by God, we did!”
“But how?”
He laughed heartily. “Therein lies the tale, don’t it, Mr. Tolliver?”
2
I took a quick sip of my drink and said, “This Lord Hawke—it was he who saved the day?”
“Beg pardon, sir, but it was the boy Nick who carried the day. A scrappy one, this young Nick McIver, only one year older than myself at that time,” the old fellow said, tilting his chair suddenly backward at a precipitous angle against the wall. “Nick and me became fast friends soon enough, our ages being so similar. I was ten; he was twelve, I believe, when he got his first taste of battle.”
“When we laid alongside that enemy frigate after a vicious exchange of rippling broadsides, young Nick and myself secretly boarded the Mystère and found ourselves in the thick of things, grapeshot and all. Never saw the like of such bloody struggle in all my years before the mast.”
Somewhere in the inn, a ship’s bell struck. The wee hours drew nigh. A fresh blow had rushed up to haunt the eaves, and the fire had died down somewhat, lending a discernible chill to the room.
“Please continue, Mr. Hornby,” I said, getting to my feet and throwing another log or two onto the embers.
“Well, it was strangely quiet when Nick McIver and me emerged from the aft companionway. The cannons on both vessels had ceased their thunder and for’ard we could see a press of sailors from both vessels gathered on her quarterdeck, with an occasional cheer in French or English rising from their midst. We heard, too, the vicious sound of two cutlasses clanging against each other. A brutal swordfight from the sound of it.
“Anyway, I looked aloft and saw the battle-torn French flag was still flapping at the top of the enem
y mizzen, so I knew Old Bill had not surrendered. This despite the volume of lead and grapeshot we’d poured into him. Nick and I each took a cutlass off dead sailors, and we crept for’ard and climbed atop the pilot house so as to look down on the quarterdeck unobserved. We inched ourselves along on our elbows until we could just peek down and see the action not ten feet below. The crews of both vessels were pressing aft, trying to get a glimpse of the fight taking place at the helm and—”
“The main fighting had stopped?”
“Aye. A great sea battle had come down to a two-man war. Captain William Blood and Lord Hawke were locked in a death struggle. What a sight! Old Bill was a spectacle, wearing what must have been magnificent finery, white silk breeches and a great flaring white satin captain’s coat, but now all this flummery was torn and soiled with black powder and red blood. He had Nelson’s spyglass, all right, jammed inside his wide belt. Hawke had a terrible gash down his right cheek, and his shirtfront was soaked with his own blood. Still, he had his left hand rigidly behind his back, fighting Blood in classic dueling fashion but with more fury in his eyes than I ever thought possible—another drink, sir?”
“Yes, of course! Please press on, though . . .”
Hornby called out for another round and continued. “Hawke parried Blood’s wicked blows each and all and thrust his cutlass again and again at the darting pirate. But despite Hawke’s geniuslike finesse with the sword, it was immediately clear to us boys that this was the fight of his life, as Blood brutally laid on three massive resounding blows in quick succession.
“ ‘It’s finished, Hawke, surrender!’ Billy cried, advancing. ‘There’s not a swordsman alive who can best Billy Blood! I’ll cut yer bleedin’ heart out and eat it for me supper!’
“ ‘I think you shall go hungry, then, sir!’ Hawke replied, slashing forward. ‘No, it’s the brave kidnapper of small children who’s finished, Blood,’ Hawke said, deflecting with his own sword a tremendous cut, which would surely have split him to the chine had he not intercepted it in the nick of time.