The Blackbirder botc-2

by James L. Nelson

  I have enclosed a bank draft to cover your expenses in an amount that I think you will find is Sufficient Payment for the task I request of you.

  The last part she read out loud. “I wish that the said Elizabeth Marlowe and her companion should never leave the town of Boston, except that their immortal souls should join with their Maker in Providence. I think an accident of Drowning in the harbor the most conveniently understood demise. Your obedient, humble servant, Frederick Dunmore.”

  She looked up, stunned. Along with the letter was a draft for one hundred pounds. The papers shook in her hand. “How very kind he is,” said Billy, “to wish our souls at eternal rest.”

  “ ‘Aged about twenty-eight’?” Elizabeth said. “Do I look to be twenty-eight?”

  “Lizzy, what a great kindness our dear Frederick has done us. Here we were, searching for incriminating papers, unable to find a one, and here he has had just the thing delivered right to us. Proof of his conspiring to see us murdered. I think we need look no further.”

  And then from the dark, the click of a flintlock snapped into place. Elizabeth looked up, assumed it was one of the Revenges, but it was not.

  It was the Reverend Wait Dunmore, standing in the door, just at the edge of the lantern’s reach. He looked ominous, frightening, in the deep shadows and flickering flame. He was hastily dressed, his long shirt only half tucked in, waistcoat unbuttoned, no wig to cover the bristle of hair on his head. The light of the single lantern served to deepen and accentuate the lines in his face, the heavy jowls and folds of skin around his eyes.

  Dunmore held the gun out, pointed at Billy Bird’s heart. Behind him, sweating, looking nervous, the night watch fiddled with his short club.

  Billy Bird sighed, shook his head, not the expression one might have expected from a man held at gunpoint. “I have been to governor’s balls that were not as well attended as our little affair tonight. Tell us, Reverend, is your church so filled with people when there is a sermon in the offing?”

  “Shut your gob, you little worm,” Dunmore growled. “I shall give you until the count of five to hand over everything you stole before I shoot you. If you cooperate then I shall do no more than have you arrested. Let the High Court see you hang.”

  “Arrest me? Who, the night watch there? The poor man looks as if he’ll die of fright.”

  At that the night watchman stepped forward, chins waggling, and cleared his throat, and before he could speak, another flintlock snapped into position, and then another, and Billy Bird shook his head, smiled.

  Standing five feet behind Dunmore and the night watchman, Black Tom and Ezra Howland stepped from the side hallway, leveled their guns at the newcomers.

  “Honestly, Reverend, have you ever seen the like?” Billy was smiling. “Now, you could shoot me. Probably should. But if you do, my fellows will kill you and this poor night watchman. So there is your choice. Pull the trigger and three men die, put down the gun and no one dies.”

  The options were clear, but the choice was not as obvious to the Reverend as Elizabeth might have thought it would be. He stood for five seconds, ten seconds, grim-faced, pointing the gun at Billy, looking at him with such hatred that for a moment she thought he might well throw away his own life and that of the watchman just for the chance to put a bullet through the insouciant pirate before him.

  But he did not, and at length he lowered the gun, eased the flintlock down. He seemed to sag, his face, his body, the stiffness gone. He seemed suddenly much smaller.

  Black Tom and Howland stepped around, guns still trained. The night watchman was holding his hands in plain sight, unwilling to be shot on suspicion that he was trying to defend himself.

  “I am afraid we must tie you up. We can’t have an alarm sounded, you know,” Billy said, and Dunmore just stared, said nothing.

  “Tom, pray, go find something with which we can bind all these gentlemen. There must be a rope of some sort attached to the bell.”

  Tom nodded, lit a candle from the lantern, and headed off toward the base of the steeple. “Ezra, you had best shut and bolt the door. We have had quite enough visitors tonight.”

  Ezra did so, and Dunmore and the night watch stepped out of his way. Then Dunmore spoke, and his voice had none of the gravel that Elizabeth had heard before, and for a moment she did not even realize it was him speaking.

  “It’s not true, you know,” Wait Dunmore said.

  “What? What is not true?” Billy asked. “That your son murdered an innocent old black woman? Killed her with his bare hands?”

  The words were like a slap to the Reverend’s face. He frowned, shook his head slowly. “That I do not know. He might have, the poor creature. The evidence was there that he did. Had he been tried he probably would have been hanged. Never was a trial, of course, but in my heart I fear it is true.

  “No, the lie is about Frederick’s blood, my blood. There was never a child by Nancy. My father, Isaac, was the progeny of my grandfather, Richard, and my grandmother, Anne, and never did my grandfather fornicate with a slave.

  “That story, the thing about Frederick…me… being in part Negro was made up by someone and it spread fast, as such a story will. You see, Frederick hated the Negroes. Always did. I don’t know why. Some are like that. I think Negroes frightened him. It made Frederick insane to think it true, that he was…part…”

  “Why would someone make up such a story?” Billy demanded, and at that Dunmore actually gave a weak smile.

  “You two are acquainted with Frederick, that much is obvious. And it is just as obvious that you hate him. You have gone to great lengths to destroy him.

  “Well, you are not the only ones who felt thus. Frederick was never one to make people love him. There were plenty in Boston who might have started such a rumor. Plenty who knew of the loathing Frederick had for Africans, what it would do to him to think he was part Negro himself. To have all of Boston think it.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. Incredible. Frederick Dunmore moved to a murderous rage by a well-placed rumor, an untruth. She did not think old Dunmore was lying. Whoever had thought of that trick to drive young Frederick mad was more conniving than she could ever hope to be, leagues more.

  “And so,” Reverend Dunmore continued, and this time there was a hint of the old iron in his voice, “this burglary of yours has been for naught. If you were looking for proof of Frederick’s blood, or his crime, you have not found it, because it is not there.”

  “No, it is not,” said Billy. “But your son was kind enough to have delivered to us proof enough of his murderous spirit. See here.” He took the letter from Elizabeth’s hand, picked up the lantern, held the paper up for Wait Dunmore to read.

  Elizabeth watched the old man’s face as he read, saw the horror spread over his features, his mouth moving as he read but no words coming out. When he was done he looked up at Billy, as stunned as Elizabeth had been. More so, actually. He looked as if he wanted to speak but no words came.

  And then Black Tom was back with the bell rope. Dunmore and the night watch were escorted back into the office, the still-unconscious murderers were dragged back, and all four men were bound tight where they would remain until morning at least. Enough time for the Bloody Revenge to be under way.

  Elizabeth and Billy stood at the office door, took one last look around, one last check that the men were well bound. Out in the church Black Tom and Howland carefully opened the door-from the office they could hear that all too familiar creak-and checked that the streets were still empty.

  Elizabeth met Dunmore’s eyes and held them. They considered each other, the two of them, the minister and the lady of Marlowe House, the father of a murderer and the former whore. The old man looked much older than he had that morning.

  Billy Bird turned, led the way out, and Elizabeth followed, turned her back on Reverend Dunmore, on Boston, on the lot of it.

  Out into the church and out the side entrance. The big door squeaked closed behind her. Before it sh
ut tight she listened for some sound, some reaction-sobs, curses-from the Reverend Wait Dun-more, but the church was as quiet as a tomb.

  Chapter 30

  Whydah.

  Marlowe stood grim at the break of the quarterdeck, watched that city of slave traders emerge from the predawn black.

  He had been up and down the African coast in his varied career at sea, from Cape Verde to the Congo. Mostly during his time with the pirates. Wealth bled from the continent’s dark interior, streams of blood money that poured over the Europeans that gathered on her shores. And Marlowe and his former mates had been there to relieve them of some of it. Africa was a good place for pirates.

  Yes, Marlowe had tasted Africa. Had eaten the spicy, peppered food of the Kroomen, had slept in the mud and grass huts of the fierce men of the Bissagos Islands, had lain with dark-skinned girls in Cabo Monte and Elmina and Brass and Old Calabar.

  But Whydah. He had been there only once before, as a very young man. Thirteen, perhaps. Experienced enough by then to be rated ordinary seaman. He had been seduced into joining a blackbirder’s crew. Good money, damned good money, and at thirteen he felt himself quite impervious to the fevers that struck down white men by the score along the Bight of Benin.

  It had been worse than a nightmare, worse than anything he could have imagined. Those poor people, led down into the hold, terrified, beaten, wailing in their despair. And then the stink and the moaning and the rattling of chains. There was no escape from it, like being separated from hell itself by a few inches of oak planking.

  And the bodies. Carried up every day and tossed overboard. Stiff, wide-eyed, covered in their own filth, body after body, and every day he had to help carry them up, had to go down into that place, look into the eyes of the living and fetch the dead ones up. Over the leeward side, to the trail of sharks that kept constant company with the ship.

  They had arrived in Jamaica with half the number of Africans they had left with, and young Malachias Barrett had jumped ship, fled into the city, not even bothered to collect his pay.

  A year later he was a pirate.

  And in all his years with that marauding clan he had never sailed with a more depraved and soulless bunch as the crew of that black-birder.

  It was odd, he realized, that he had never once felt the same pity for the victims of his piracy that he did for those slaves he had helped transport. The Lord knew he had seen terror aplenty in their eyes, had seen atrocities carried out against them, was guilty of enough himself to see him damned many times over.

  Perhaps he did not think of those people as helpless victims as he did the slaves. Certainly those who had not resisted the pirates’ attack had not been harmed-they had that opportunity to save themselves- whereas nothing the Africans could have done would have spared them their awful fate.

  He wondered if perhaps that experience with the blackbirder was the real reason he had freed his people at Marlowe House. But that would suggest an emotional rather than a pragmatical reason for his actions, and he rejected that outright. He had always scoffed at Bickerstaff’s notion that slavery should be abolished the world over. The world, Marlowe knew, consisted of the strong and the weak, and the strong preyed on the weak, as it was in nature. Emotion could not be allowed to hold too great a sway.

  But sometimes he found himself listening to Bickerstaff’s arguments and finding some sense in them.

  He had never told Bickerstaff about his having served aboard a blackbirder, never told Elizabeth or James or anyone that he could think of. The shame of it still clung to him, the way the stink of the ship had clung to his clothes until at last he had stolen a new set and burned the ones he had. He did not know why he felt such humiliation still for something he had done so long ago. Surely he had done worse since?

  He shook his head. Seeing the whitewashed city of Whydah growing more distinct amid the thick forest was making his thoughts turn morbid and morose. He was not a man for such introspection, and the more he found his mind turning over such ideas, the more he told himself he was becoming an old woman, or a philosopher like Bicker-staff, and it did not suit him.

  “Good morning, Captain,” said Bickerstaff, stepping up from the waist with two pewter mugs full of the fine, pungent black coffee they had picked up in Sao Miguel. Marlowe took the proffered mug gratefully, awkwardly, holding it in his left hand. His right arm hung in a sling around his neck. A clean break, no reason to think it would not heal, but it still hurt like the devil.

  The coffee was hot, but no steam would rise in the warm, tropical morning air.

  “Good morning.” The sun had all but broken free of the horizon, a blaze of brilliant orange off the starboard bow. The sky was a brittle blue, cloudless, promising heat. The shore that lay under their bows, running from horizon to horizon, was still mostly indistinct, a thick, dark shadow and only the white, white buildings were visible at all. Those, and the smattering of vessels that lay at anchor in the roads, no more than a few miles off.

  “Whydah, is it?” Bickerstaff asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been, before?”

  “No.”

  The two men were quiet, watching the rising sun reveal what lay before them: more buildings, with smoke curling up into the nearly white sky from a dozen, two dozen points among the trees, more vessels of all sizes. White sand and a line of white surf that ran the whole length of the shore, as far as they could see. Birds wheeling around overhead, seabirds, and occasionally the bright-colored natives of Africa.

  “It would be odd to find them here, would it not?” Bickerstaff asked. “Whydah is notorious for its traffic in slaves. One would think it the last place they might come.”

  “One would think. I have all but despaired of guessing what is in King James’s mind. If I can only go back and tell the governor that I have truly looked in every port they might have ventured to, then at least I will be satisfied. The world is a damned big place, even Nicholson must realize that, and they could be any damned where in it.”

  He had not meant for his reply to be as bitter as it was, but as the words came out, they drew the venom with them. He was tired of this, tired of putting such superhuman effort into a search he did not think was his responsibility. A search that he did not want to be a success. But neither did he want it to fail.

  James, damn your black hide…

  The French East Indiaman, after blowing away the Elizabeth Galley fore topmast, had simply sailed off. They apparently had more important things to do than capitalize on their victory, or they did not think the cost in blood was worth whatever they might get from the Galley. Whatever their thinking, Marlowe was glad of it, glad to see the big ship disappear beyond the horizon.

  It took the crew of the Elizabeth Galley a full twenty-four hours to repair the damage they had suffered in fifteen minutes of fighting. With the threat of being blown from the sea gone, they were able to salvage a great deal of the wreckage, and happily they had on the booms a spare topmast, so in the end there was little apparent damage.

  Once things were squared away they set sail, again hunting for King James, the men still eager for the fortune carried by those fabled black pirates.

  Two days later they made their African landfall at Cape Verde, the northernmost point to which Marlowe thought James might be heading. They had looked there and into the mouth of the Gambia, gone around to Cacheu and Bissau, poked into those few anchorages in the Bissagos Islands, and then southeast along the Guinea Coast.

  The only thing in their favor was the sparsity of anchorages along Africa’s west coast, the few places where they had to negotiate their way into a well-defined harbor. Most of the coast was open roads, great long stretches of beach where the treacherous surf pounded and pounded and vessels took their wary moorings far from the land, relying on the skills of native boatmen to get them to shore and back.

  In that case they had only to sail by, to make their way inshore close enough to survey the vessels there and see if any were t
he French merchantman taken by James and his pirate band.

  And none of them were.

  Past Cape St. Anna and Cabo Monte, southeast along the Pepper Coast, then northeast at Cape Palmas and along the Ivory Coast to Axim. They doubled Cape Three Points and stood on to the Gold Coast, Ashanti country, past the open roads of Shama and Komende and Elmina and Cape Coast with its great, looming castle, the best anchorage for a thousand miles and the least likely place to find fugitive slaves. And indeed they did not.

  They checked the vessels anchored at the mouth of the Volta River and made their easting into the Bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, not a place that Marlowe had any hope of finding them.

  Up until that point the search had been a simple matter. Once they passed Lagos, however, and entered the area of the Niger River Delta, then there would be hundreds of creeks and rivers and backwaters where they might have hidden, indeed where they probably had. He would have to check them all, all the fetid breeding grounds of yellow jack and black fever, and he dreaded even the thought of it.

  Damn, damn, damn you to hell, James, for putting me through this! He was angry enough that the idea of James being hanged was not so terrible. When he thought of what they had been through already, what more they had to do, he was ready to hang the man himself.

  The sun was fully up and the shore with which they were closing quite visible. Marlowe took the last swig of coffee, spit a few errant grounds over the side. The native canoes were starting to close with them. He could see the boatmen working their paddles, racing out to the new arrival. Some would be grumete, come out to offer their services in getting the white men safe through the surf, some would be bumboats offering for sale those things that sailors long at sea hankered for. That would be rum, chiefly, and he would have to tell Fleming to see that the men did not get their hands on enough of it to cause trouble.

  He ran his eyes over the ships and brigs and snows at anchor, more out of habit than any thought that he might find the one he was searching for. His eyes settled on one ship anchored further to the east, away from the central part of Whydah, and he stared at it but his thoughts were elsewhere, with Governor Nicholson, explaining how he had searched the entire coast and had found nothing.