The Guardship

by James L. Nelson

  “Lucy begs me give you her regards,” Marlowe said as he pulled on the old breeches. “If I am not entirely mistaken, I think she is fairly smitten with you.”

  “Hmmph,” said James, placing the wig on a table stand. “Lucy is just a foolish girl.”

  “Indeed, nor do I think much of her taste in men, but you might be well advised to take advantage of her poor judgment.”

  “Hmmph,” James said again.

  Marlowe grinned at James but could not get a rise out of him, so he sat on his bed and allowed James to help him into his good, honest wool stockings and knee-high boots. He ran his arms into the loose-fitting cotton shirt and then the waistcoat.

  He picked up his old sword, drew the blade from the scabbard. It was a murderous-looking thing, with a wire-bound grip, a brass hand guard, and a straight, heavy double-edged blade over forty inches from hilt to tip. It felt as natural in his hand as his hand felt at the end of his arm.

  And he thought, How very odd this life can be. He thought of the times standing on the channel of some decrepit vessel, screaming like a lost soul, closing, inexorably closing on some terrified victim. He thought of the steel that that blade had beaten back, the gore he had wiped from its edge.

  He shook the memories away, pushed the sword back into the scabbard. He draped the shoulder strap over his shoulder and adjusted it until the sword hung just right. He draped the other shoulder strap, the one that would hold his pistols, over his left shoulder so the two of them made an X across his chest. Like a target.

  “You look quite the villainous rogue,” Bickerstaff said as Marlowe stepped out onto the porch. There was nothing in his tone to indicate that he was joking, though Marlowe knew he was.

  “And you look like some damned Puritan.” Bickerstaff was dressed almost entirely in black—old clothes, like Marlowe’s. “Very well, then, let us go and take command of a man-of-war.”

  They were like an army in miniature as they marched south to Jamestown, where the Northumberland waited to take them to the Plymouth Prize. At the head were the officers, Marlowe and Burnaby, and Bickerstaff, who might have passed for the army chaplain. Behind them marched the main body, twenty-five men strong, and behind the troops came the baggage train, which consisted of one dray piled with the things that King James had packed. Last came the camp followers, half a dozen servants to function as cabin stewards, cook, and the like.

  They arrived in Jamestown late in the day. Marlowe found it a dismal place, even more so than he remembered, with fetid swamps on every hand. The charred ruins of the old capitol building still stood, two years after the fire that had sealed the decision to move the capital to Williamsburg. The town was quickly falling to ruin as more and more people abandoned it with each passing year.

  The Northumberland was tied to one of the sturdier docks that jutted out into the James River. She was around seventy tons burden, fifty feet long on deck and eighteen at the beam. Massachusetts Bay—built and only ten years old when Marlowe bought her as part of the Tinling estate. A quick and lovely vessel.

  He had rerigged her to his own taste, stepping the single mast aft a bit and giving her a longer topmast and increasing the size of her square topsail. Besides that sail she carried a huge gaff-headed mainsail and three headsails. She was fast and weatherly. Marlowe generally used her for commerce on the Chesapeake, but now he intended to make her a tender to the Plymouth Prize.

  They slept aboard that night, Marlowe, Bickerstaff, and Burnaby in the tiny cabin aft, the militia and the servants sprawled out on the deck above.

  The next morning they got under way, with the five men of the Northumberland’s crew elbowing their way through the crowd of militiamen, farmers to a man, to get at the sheets and halyards. Useless as they might be as sailors, the militia was good at least for brute force, and Marlowe gave his people a rest by putting the soldiers on the halyards.

  In short order they had mainsail, topsail, staysail, and jib set, and with that canvas showing they wafted off the dock in the light morning breeze. King James stood at the tiller, keeping the vessel near the middle of the river as they cut their way through the muddy water downstream to where the guardship swung on her best bower.

  It was no great difficulty to find the Plymouth Prize. After Allair’s brief foray into extortion and piracy, stopping those vessels engaged in honest trade and carefully avoiding any that might give him trouble, he had all but worn himself out and had not moved the ship for a month at least. She lay at anchor about fifteen miles down the James River, in a place calculated to be inconvenient for anyone—Governor Nicholson or any of the members of the Council, for instance—to get to.

  They dropped the Northumberland’s anchor about half a cable upriver from the Prize. Once the hook was secure, the two longboats they had been towing astern were hauled alongside and the militia clambered into them.

  “Your men have their weapons loaded?” Marlowe asked Lieutenant Burnaby.

  “Yes, sir.” He did not look as eager for a fight as he had the day before. Marlowe smiled, thinking of the first time that he himself had gone into a real fight. Like the young lieutenant, he had not been so anxious for it when faced with the reality of the thing.

  “Good. No one is to fire unless I give the command. I should prefer to bring this off without bloodshed.”

  “That would be preferable, sir, I agree.”

  The longboat bearing the militia pulled away from the Northumberland and the sailors rested at their oars, waiting for Marlowe and Bickerstaff and Burnaby to take their places in the other boat and lead the way. A moment later the two boats, rowing in line ahead, dropped downriver toward the Plymouth Prize.

  The guardship was a sorry sight, her sails hanging half out of their gaskets, her yards askew and her standing rigging slack. Great patches of white rope showed through where the tar had worn away from her shrouds and stays.

  The ship’s quarters and stern section were adorned with lovely and intricate carvings, but these, too, were suffering much from neglect. The paint and gilt had mostly flaked away, and the wood underneath was dry and cracked. Three of the carved wreaths that highlighted the ship’s side had fallen off, leaving circles of bare wood around the gunports. A mermaid under the taffrail was missing her head, and the great lion of England had suffered a double amputation.

  The crew of the man-of-war numbered about fifty men, and they were well armed with cutlasses, pistols, pikes, and muskets. Some were sleeping, some playing at cards or cross and pile, some just staring blankly at the approaching boats, their state of readiness notwithstanding. No one raised an alarm.

  Marlowe had been aboard English men-of-war on a few occasions, and he had seen enough of them in his time to appreciate the taut discipline and fastidious attention to detail that characterized the service. He could not believe that the Plymouth Prize belonged to the same navy that had sailed the mighty Royal Sovereign.

  But he did know that what he was seeing was the natural result of a careless and stupid captain on a backwater station far from the eyes of the admiralty. He had never seen a group of slaves on any plantation that looked more sullen, listless, and poorly dressed than the crew of the Plymouth Prize.

  He was about to hail the ship, to inquire if Captain Allair was aboard, when the quiet was shattered by a scream, a female scream, which started low and built to a high-pitched shriek and ended with the words “You miserable godforsaken son of a bitch!”

  This at last caused some stirring of interest among the men, though not nearly as much as Marlowe would have thought appropriate. Heads turned in the direction of the after cabin, the place from which the scream had come. Several of the men who were closest to the doorway stood up and walked out of the way.

  No sooner had they done so than the door flew open and Allair stormed out, head bent, shoulders hunched, while from the darkness of the cabin the filthy insults continued unabated. A fat, red-faced, enraged woman appeared suddenly at the door, holding a bucket over her head. �
��Get back here, you miserable cockroach!” she screamed, and flung the bucket at Allair’s back.

  Allair seemed not to notice. He was raging drunk, Thomas could tell, even from that distance. Had the wind not been contrary, he imagined that he could have smelled the captain’s breath.

  Allair paused, seeing the longboats making for his command. “Marlowe? Is that you, Marlowe, you sheep-biting whoreson villain?” he screamed. “I say, come on aboard and I’ll give you the warm welcome you deserve!”

  “What are we to do, sir?” Burnaby asked.

  “We’ll go aboard and take the ship.” The coxswain gave the tiller a nudge to bring the boat around in a sweeping arc alongside the guardship. Marlowe could see the lieutenant gawking at him as if he were some kind of fearless wonder, walking straight into that kind of danger. But Marlowe had seen enough of Allair’s type to know that the danger was slight.

  The longboat came alongside the Plymouth Prize and the bowman hooked the mainchains with the boat hook. Marlowe grabbed on to the boarding steps and made his way up to the deck, Bickerstaff at his heels.

  “Marlowe, you son of a whore!” Allair roared. He had retreated to the great cabin and fetched a pistol, which he now held in his hand. “Think you can play me for a fool? Bloody bastard, come asking me to find you a silver table setting! How’d you know that bloody Nicholson’s silver was due in, eh? How’d you know?”

  As it happened, Marlowe had noticed the invoice for the silver lying on Nicholson’s desk one afternoon while meeting with the governor on some other unrelated business, had devised the entire scheme in those few seconds, but to Allair he said, “I have no notion of what you are talking about, Captain Allair, but as I am now legally in command of this ship let me suggest—”

  Standing in the doorway twenty-five feet away, Allair aimed the pistol at Marlowe’s head and pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a great bang, Allair having apparently used twice the amount of powder needed. Marlowe felt the rush of air, heard the scream of the ball passing by his head.

  It was close, though not as close as young Wilkenson had come. Still, it occurred to Marlowe that he should get out of the habit of allowing others to shoot at him. But now the gun was discharged, and Allair had only his sword with which to fight.

  “Cock your firelocks!” he heard Lieutenant Burnaby shout from the boat below. What he intended, Marlowe did not know. He leaned through the entry port and shouted, “Belay that! Weapons on half-cock, all of you,” and happily they obeyed before someone was hurt.

  “Now, up on deck.” One by one the militiamen climbed awkwardly up the side of the ship and fell into line with firelocks shouldered. To Marlowe’s great relief, none of the Plymouth Prizes made a move to resist.

  “Captain Allair, I have orders from Governor Nicholson, Vice Admiral of the Virginia Station,” Marlowe began.

  “Vice Admiral, my arse! He’s got no authority over me, not to remove me from command!”

  “Oh, but I say he does.”

  “You do? And who are you, whore’s git? Black villain. You knew about that bastard’s silver, you tricked me.”

  “Perhaps, but that’s behind us now. I shall ask you to remove yourself from my ship.” He held up the orders that Nicholson had written out.

  “Sod off.”

  He did not take his eyes from Allair, but he could hear more militia coming aboard and fanning out behind him, and beyond Allair he could see the uncertain looks on the faces of the Plymouth Prize’s men. As unimposing as the militia may have looked on Marlowe’s lawn, they were commanding quite a bit of respect now, among men even less disciplined and less anxious to fight. It seemed as if Allair was the only one interested in defending the Plymouth Prize.

  “I should prefer it if you were to leave now,” Marlowe said, as reasonably as he was able. “You may take your gig and your gig crew. Anything of yours that will not go in the gig I shall be pleased to send along forthwith.”

  “Oh, you’re a cool one, you bastard,” Allair spit, “but you’ll not use me like you done that Wilkenson git. Come, Monsieur Privateer, see what you can effect against a king’s officer!” Allair drew his sword with some difficulty and took a drunken step toward Marlowe.

  Marlowe looked at Bickerstaff, and Bickerstaff gave him a raised eyebrow. This was ridiculous. Allair could never best him with a sword, even if he was stone sober.

  “Draw your sword, you coward!” Allair roared, gaining courage from Marlowe’s sideways glance at Bickerstaff.

  So Marlowe drew his sword. He wielded the weapon with great authority, so accustomed was he to its heft and size, and though the past two years of leisure had somewhat weakened his strength of arm, it was not so much that any but Marlowe himself would notice.

  That fact, and the size of the straight blade, did not escape Allair’s drunken gaze. He faltered a bit in his advance, scowled, then summoned up all of the courage that the copious rum in his stomach afforded him and came at Marlowe again.

  “I’m for you, God damn you!” he shouted, and charged, slashing down with his blade. Marlowe met the attack with the flat of his own sword, stopping Allair’s blade as if he had struck a rock and knocking it aside.

  Allair was full open, his chest quite exposed and wanting only a quick thrust to end it all, but Marlowe could not. He took a step back. Allair lifted his sword again and slashed away, and Marlowe again turned the attack aside. They went on like that down the deck, one step at a time, attack and parry, attack and parry, with Allair’s breath coming faster and his sword coming slower with each advance.

  Marlowe heard a firelock cock and heard Bickerstaff say, “No, no.” The militia parted as they moved down the deck, the Plymouth Prizes and the soldiers watching the drama as if it were staged for their amusement. But Marlowe did not want them to interfere. As long as the fight was just between Allair and him, no one would get hurt.

  At last his heel touched on the base of the fife rail around the foremast and he knew he could go no farther back. Allair managed something like a smile, apparently thinking that he had his enemy on the run and now he was trapped.

  He brought his sword down, and Marlowe turned it aside once more. Then Marlowe held his own blade down, point on the deck, his head fully exposed. Allair drew his sword back like an ax and slashed down, intending to cleave Marlowe’s head in two.

  He would have, too, had he connected, for he put all the strength he had left into that last final blow. But Marlowe stepped aside at the very second that Allair was committed to the blow. The blade came down on an oak belaying pin and split that, rather than Marlowe’s skull, and there it stayed.

  Allair struggled and cursed and tried to wrench the sword free from the pin, but it would not budge. He looked desperately over at Marlowe, waiting to be finished off, but Marlowe only stared back, waiting for Allair to free his sword or collapse in fear and exhaustion.

  “Very well, Marlowe,” he panted, falling against the fife rail. “Kill me.”

  “Never in life, sir, a king’s officer. I ask only that you obey Governor Nicholson’s legal orders and turn the Plymouth Prize over to my command.”

  Allair glared at him for a second more, then shuffled aft, leaving his sword wedged in the belaying pin. The militiamen stared at him, as did the men of the Plymouth Prize.

  Another tale of my great daring, Marlowe thought, to be carried back to Williamsburg. A tale of how Marlowe spared the life of the man who tried to kill him. Such the gentleman, they will say, such a man of noble birth.

  Only he and Bickerstaff and Allair understood that killing the man would have been the more merciful act.

  “Now, men,” Marlowe addressed the crew of the Plymouth Prize, “I beg of you, lay down your weapons.”

  Fifty muskets fell clattering to the deck.

  An hour later the captain’s gig disappeared around a bend in the river, heading upstream to Jamestown. Along with Captain Allair went his great beast of a wife, who had happily decided to remain in the cabin du
ring the confrontation. Had she been on deck, Marlowe would have actually been frightened.

  As it was, her presence in the gig left little room for the Allairs’ personal belongings, which Marlowe assured them he would send back with the militia the next day. With the former captain properly disposed of, he took his place on the quarterdeck and summoned the crew aft.

  “Good afternoon, men,” he said in as cheerful a tone as he could manage. “I am sorry for the little altercation that I had with your former captain, but I have no doubt it gave you some pleasant diversion.”

  There were a few smiles at this, weak smiles. No one laughed. “My name is Captain Thomas Marlowe, and I have here orders from Governor Nicholson instructing me to take command of the Plymouth Prize.” He quickly read through the orders, added some banal thing about attending to duty, and then dismissed them.

  “Pray, sir,” one of the men spoke up, “but what shall we be doing now?”

  Marlowe smiled. “We’ll be doing what the Plymouth Prize was sent here to do,” he said. “We shall be going forth and hunting down those roguish pirates.”

  Chapter 8

  A SHIP is a vegetable affair. Every part of it, save for those little bits of metalwork, was once a plant of some description. The frames and planks and decking, the hanging knees and clamps and wales, the very fabric of the vessel, all once were living oak, fir, longleaf yellow pine.

  It is wood that holds the great mass together—pegs called tree nails, driven into holes bored through plank and frame and hammered home with great force. Then, between these wood planks, are pounded dried plant fibers in the form of oakum to render the hull watertight. And between the planks of the deck is poured the melted pitch of pine trees.

  The masts rise from the deck like the great trees they once were. Their roots go down through weather deck, gun deck, and berthing deck to where they terminate in the dark hold, set into a notch in the keelson called a step.