The Blackbirder botc-2

by James L. Nelson

  “I thank you, sir. I know that you suffer no delusion about why I did it. Purely selfish reasons, didn’t care to live surrounded by a great crowd of people-clever people, and stealthy, you know, can come and go as they please-who wish to cut our throats in the night.

  “I think it no exaggeration to say that our people love us for what we did, paying them, treating ’em like human beings. We’re the only plantation owners in the tidewater that don’t lay awake nights worrying about an uprising. I know from my… former days…what men in bondage are capable of.”

  “Well, whatever your motives, it was a decent thing. Though it seems to greatly offend this Dunmore, the upstart little bastard.”

  There was no more that needed saying on that subject, so as they rolled south Marlowe and Bickerstaff talked of preparedness, of future plans.

  Elizabeth participated a little in the talk, then fell silent, looking out the window at the green fields and patches of oak and maple and yellow pine.

  Marlowe glanced her way a few times, but she did not notice. Whatever was troubling her, he would hear about it before he slept that night.

  And then they were there. The coachman gave a shout, a command in some African tongue, punctuated by a flick of the reins. The horses stopped and Thomas and Elizabeth rocked forward and the loud clatter of hooves was replaced by the whine of insects and the ringing of a single hammer.

  That would be King James, Marlowe thought. King James, former prince of the Kabu Malinke, former slave, now Marlowe’s majordomo, captain of the Northumberland, the plantation’s river sloop, which he could see tied to the quay.

  King James. His comrade in arms. No day off for him. He would be too impatient to get to sea to observe the Sabbath.

  Marlowe was on his feet and out the door, anxious for an uninterrupted look, anxious to take her in before Page struggled out of his carriage and began talking.

  He strode forward, toward the dock. Heard Bickerstaff behind him, giving Elizabeth a hand down from the carriage. Doing his office. He would apologize later; she would understand.

  Thomas stopped, breathed deep. Jasmine, pine, brackish water. Fresh-cut wood and tar and new cordage. Paint drying in the hot sun.

  She lay tied to the dock, floating on a perfectly even keel, the slow-moving river breaking around her bows and sweeping aft, giving the illusion that she was already under way.

  Marlowe’s eyes moved up, slowly up, sweeping along her lofty rig, now rising to its full height with topgallant masts in place. Her spars were tapered like a woman’s leg, her masts raked at a jaunty angle, as if she were fully aware of her beauty and did not feel the need to flaunt it. Marlowe made a low, guttural noise in his throat.

  She was eighty-four feet on her waterline, one hundred and twenty-three feet sparred length, from the end of her bowsprit, on which sat the little doubling of the spritsail topmast, all the way aft to the big lantern that stood proudly over the taffrail.

  The black muzzles of guns, eight along each side, jutted audaciously out of their gunports, gleaming in the sun. Fore, main, and mizzen masts rose from her decks, bright oiled wood crossed by black spars. Gangs of thick black shrouds sprouted from the doublings and ran down and aft, terminating at their deadeyes with symmetrical perfection.

  One hundred and eighty tons of fighting ship, laid out to Marlowe’s specifications under his oppressively watchful eye.

  The Elizabeth Galley. His savior, financially, spiritually. His private man-of-war.

  Chapter 2

  Old King Charles was dead. He had missed ruling over Spain ’s greatest era by two generations, had weakened his country further with his relentless fighting with Louis XIV of France. And now he was gone.

  It seemed odd to Marlowe that the death of one old man he had never met, in a city that he had never seen, could have so profound an effect on his life, but there it was.

  King Charles had died leaving behind no offspring, no one to occupy that place on the throne of Spain on which his royal arse had sat for the past thirty-nine years.

  But in his last days he had declared Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip, his heir. Philip, great-grandson to Spain ’s Philip IV. Philip, a Frenchman and a Bourbon.

  With that one declaration the old man had ended years of maneuver and haggling by the nations of Europe, dashed the ambitions of the House of Hapsburg in Austria, shown England the frightening visage of France and Spain united under Bourbon rule.

  It was unacceptable. It meant war.

  For thousands of officers and gentlemen from England, from France and Spain and the Netherlands and Bavaria and Savoy and a handful of others it meant glory, promotion, the majesty of leading men in a noble fight.

  To those people who stayed at home and dealt in weapons, cloth, and food, it meant high prices for guns, uniforms, and barrels of salt pork and salt beef.

  For the tens of thousands of men who filled the ranks of the armies it meant mud and hunger and disease, bitter nights and mornings of terror and death in distant countries for causes they only vaguely understood.

  And to Marlowe, standing in the bright sun, two thousand nautical miles away from that unholy quagmire, in a land which, on a day such as that, was as close to Paradise as one might find on earth, it meant privateering.

  It meant venturing forth on the great ocean, his element. An end to the monotony of domestic life, the possibility of great riches. Action. It meant a letter of marque and reprisal, a license to play the pirate against half the shipping in the world.

  Before him was the ship. On the morrow he would receive the letter of marque. In a week he would be at sea, stalking the fat merchant ships, as he had so many times before. But this time it would be legal. Patriotic, in fact.

  “Damn me, damn me!” Thomas felt Page’s meaty hand slap him across the back; it made him stagger forward a step. “Lovely, Marlowe, damned lovely, this ship!”

  “Thank you, Hartwell. Will you come aboard, allow me to show you around?”

  “Delighted, delighted. Mrs. Page will wait in the coach. But look, son, you see to your little lady there, reckon you’ve put her nose out of joint. None of the old flourish tonight, hey? Hey?” The elbow struck home. Page walked toward the gangplank, chuckling all the while.

  Marlowe turned, too late to help Elizabeth down from the carriage or across the broken ground, Bickerstaff having served those functions.

  In the past she had forgiven him these lapses, but as the moment of his sailing approached she was becoming less and less understanding. He could see from her face that he had misjudged her present mood.

  “Pray, forgive me, my dearest one. In my enthusiasm I have quite ignored you,” Marlowe said, as obsequious as he could be.

  “Quite.” It was a humorless response.

  “What think you of your namesake? Is she not beautiful enough to carry your name? The most beautiful ladies in the New World, both Elizabeths and both mine.”

  Such silly flattery would not move Elizabeth Marlowe in the best of times, and it did not now. “I know little of such things. If you say she is beautiful then I take your word on it.”

  “Will you come on board? Allow me to show you her finer qualities?”

  “No, Thomas, I think not. I shall go and keep company with poor Mrs. Page, who has been so heartlessly abandoned by her husband.”

  With that she turned and walked quickly back to the carriages, leaving Marlowe and Bickerstaff alone on the dusty landing.

  “Well, Bickerstaff, it is you and me alone again. Let us go aboard before Page is able to do too much damage.”

  They stepped up the gangplank and through the gangway into the waist of the ship. The new-vessel smells overwhelmed the competing scents from the land and the river, marsh and warm pine needles yielding to tar slush, pitch, resin, and varnish. It was a welcome change. Marlowe preferred those scents over any that God and the land could provide.

  He paused, leaned back, looked aloft. A reflex action, the first bit of business when coming on
deck. Meaningless, really, with the ship tied to the dock, the sails lying in great bundles on the quay.

  Still, his eyes ran up the masts and along the yards and down the black standing rigging, looking for some flaw, something that needed correcting-running rigging led wrong so it might chafe through, deadeyes not perfectly aligned, any bits of rope hanging loose-but there was nothing. Just as there had been nothing the last time he had engaged in that exercise, early morning of the day before.

  “Very good, Marlowe, very good!” Page came stamping up. “Tell me again where you found her. Boston?”

  “ New York. She was a merchantman, of course. Named Nathaniel James. Owned by a merchant of the same name who got a bit overextended. Invested in some fool pirating nonsense to Madagascar, or some such. In any event, lost nearly everything. This ship had been dockside for two years, something of a wreck from the gunnels up. But sound, you know. In her heart, sound.”

  “Shame you couldn’t have started from scratch. Man-of-war built from the keel up.”

  “Ah, Hartwell, I am not so rich as you that I could do that!” Marlowe said, though it was a lie. He could have, had considered doing so, but big-ship building was largely unknown in America, and all but nonexistent in Virginia.

  That meant England, which would have taxed his resources too greatly. At thirty-six years old, or thereabout, he was not so reckless as he had been a decade before. He might gamble most of what he had, but he would not gamble it all.

  What was more, Marlowe did not care to linger around London ’s waterfronts, with the chance of being spotted by one of his old associates, or, more dangerous, one of his old victims.

  “She is sturdy, nonetheless,” Marlowe continued, leading Page to the bulwarks. “Stripped her down to the frames from the waterline up, redid it all with live oak, two and a half inches thick. Now she is all predied for a fight. Should do for what I have in mind. We’ll not be fighting the French navy, you know. Fat, slow, underarmed merchantmen are what we are after.”

  “Marlowe, you make me sick, sick, sir, with envy. Oh, the adventure of it all, not to mention the damned money you shall make! You’ll be back within the year and you’ll buy us all out, make yourself king of Virginia!”

  Marlowe laughed. But the idea had merit.

  Page slapped the barrel of one of the guns, grown hot under the insistent sun as if it had been fired again and again in some sea battle. He squatted, sighted down the gun, grunted as if he had gleaned some information from that exercise. “Salvaged off the wreck of the Plymouth Prize, are they?”

  “Indeed they are.” The Plymouth Prize was Marlowe’s last command, his first legitimate one. She had been the guardship on the Virginia station, sent there by the Royal Navy to protect the colonies against pirates. Governor Nicholson had asked Marlowe to replace her corrupt and incompetent captain.

  The cat, as it were, asked to guard the canary.

  In fact, the cat had tricked the governor into giving him that enviable assignment, but that truth had never been discovered.

  Marlowe’s foray into command of a Royal Navy vessel, decrepit as she was, had ended the year before, when the Prize and the pirate she was fighting had both blown apart like twin volcanoes, fire touching off their powder magazines.

  Less than two dozen men had come through the explosion with their lives. Marlowe had been one. Had come through not just with his life, but with his reputation and fame secured for the bold act of fighting and beating the pirates who had laid waste to the countryside. Less publicly known, he had come through with a fortune in loot, secreted away in his Jamestown warehouse, taken from the sea robbers he had arrested.

  It had been a successful year. He was eager for more of the same.

  “How’d you raise them?” Page asked. “Grapple for ’em?”

  “No, I had my people dive for them. Some of them are prodigious great divers.”

  “Your Negroes?”

  “Yes, indeed, my Negroes. They were able to slip harnesses around them, and we hauled them up.”

  “Don’t know how you manage it. They’re terrified of the water, those Negroes, most of ’em. Pagan African water gods live there, or some nonsense. I don’t reckon I could get any of my niggers to dive like that with all the whipping in the world.”

  “I shouldn’t imagine you could,” Bickerstaff interrupted. Such talk annoyed him greatly. “But if you treat them as men and pay them wages commensurate with the danger, you would be surprised what they might do.”

  “Well…indeed…” Page’s voice trailed away into a cough.

  “Nicholson’s let me have the guns on loan-still government property, of course. Reckons it official thanks and all that.”

  “Damned hard to come by, great guns. I imagine I’d be privateering myself, but for want of great guns.”

  The hammering, to which their ears had grown accustomed, stopped and a moment later King James stepped up through the hatch at the forward end of the waist.

  He was dressed in a sailor’s loose pants and linen shirt, with a leather jerkin over that. His shirt and the waist of his pants were soaked through with perspiration; it looked as if he had been standing in the thin material clung to his chest and arms and the small of his back and accentuated the bold lines, the curve and ripple of muscle, the only benefit he had derived from years of heavy forced labor in the fields.

  In his right hand he held a five-pound maul. With his left hand he wiped the sweat from his face, ran his hand back over his short cropped hair, took a chestful of the fresh air.

  “Here’s that buck, King James!” Page exclaimed. “Might have guessed it was him doing all the pounding away, the eager dog!”

  James looked over at the three men, noticing them at last. “Ah, Captain Marlowe, good day, sir. I didn’t hear you come aboard. Misser Bickerstaff, Misser Page.”

  “James, what are you about, pounding away, and on the Sabbath, no less?” Marlowe asked.

  The black man smiled, a conspirator’s grin. “Jest setting a few drifts to rights, Captain. Under way by week’s end and it all gots to be done by then.”

  “Well, in that case I forgive your irreligious activities,” Marlowe said. For the past three years he had been taking James along as a seaman. He would ship aboard the Elizabeth Galley as boatswain. He had already proved his worth as a fighting man.

  James was as eager as Marlowe to get under way, to plunge into that life again.

  “I do not know as Reverend Trumbell would forgive you, though, James.” Marlowe continued his ribbing. “He did not sound overly forgiving at sermon this morning.”

  “Don’t matter. Reverend Trumbell listens to that Dunmore, and that Dunmore don’t think a black man got any more immortal soul than a rock. When I sees him praying for a rock’s salvation, then I’ll listen to what he gots to say to me.”

  Page was beginning to wander off, and Marlowe, aware of his social obligations, said, “I will leave off your soul for now, James. I must show Mr. Page the rest of the ship.”

  With that he led Page and Bickerstaff forward, under the overhang of the foredeck, where the big brick oven housed gleaming copper pots, just abaft the foremast. They poked through bosun’s lockers and sailmaker’s stores, and then climbed down to the lower deck, where even the five-foot-four-inch-tall Page had to stoop a bit to avoid striking his head on the deck beams.

  They made their way aft, stopping to peer down through the main hatch to the hold below. Marlowe showed his guest the tiny cabins of the minor officers who would sail under him, the spirit room, the pantry where the private stores of officers and captain would be kept. Three years as a gentleman planter had dulled his taste for rotten meat packed in casks of salt and for bread crawling with weevils.

  It was with evident relief that Page allowed his host to lead him up the scuttle to the great cabin aft and offer him a seat on a plush velvet cushion atop the lockers under the aft windows.

  Sunlight glanced off the river below and threw undulating patches
of white light across the sides and overhead of the cabin. The windows, propped open, let in the smells of the warm riverbanks, the gurgle of water, the occasional thump of the rudder as it was pushed side to side by the current. It was a sleepy, peaceful moment, quite at odds with the violent raison d’etre of the Elizabeth Galley.

  Bickerstaff went to the wine rack, perused the bottles. “Claret? Yes? Let us enjoy this now, it will soon be damned hard to come by, what with this war against France. I do not foresee a quick end to it.”

  “Those are words to gladden a privateer’s heart,” said Marlowe, accepting a glass.

  “But not a tobacco planter’s, Marlowe, and you are still that as well,” Page reminded him. “We’ll lose all the markets in Europe with this damned war. England cannot begin to buy all the crop we grow. Prices will plummet. I fear we shall all be ruined.”

  “I fear you are right,” said Bickerstaff, who was more knowledgeable and interested in such things as agriculture and world markets than was Marlowe. This, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, Marlowe was the plantation owner and tobacco farmer, and Bickerstaff merely his guest.

  “And to make matters worse,” Bickerstaff continued, “the planters in this country are redoubling their crops. They hope to make as much as they can by selling twice as much, but the prices are falling fast as a result. Less money for more work.”

  “Yes, well… don’t know what else might be done…,” Page mumbled, with a defensive tone. “Hey, Marlowe, how are you manning this ship? Sailors are damned scarce in these parts. Can hardly man the tobacco convoys, and them merchantmen need less hands than you will.”

  “Sailors will be drawn to money like filings to a lodestone,” Marlowe said. “I cannot say that it has been an easy thing, manning the Galley, but there is such a potential for profit that I have attracted enough hands. I shall fill out the crew with some of my people. King James, of course, and a few others. The difficulty is that such men are impatient for results. If we have no success early on I might well find myself in some port or other with not enough men to win the anchor.”