“Pray, sir, sit.” She indicated a chair, and as Marlowe sat she called out, “Lucy, please fetch some chocolate for Mr. Marlowe.”
A moment later Lucy appeared with the service, and as she poured Elizabeth said, “Now, tell me, sir, how do you enjoy your celebrity?”
“It wears a bit, I find. This morning has been a trying one. Bickerstaff tells me that the conquering heroes of Rome, as they drove through the streets, would have a slave standing behind them whispering in their ear that fame was fleeting.”
“Well, Mr. Marlowe—”
“Please…Thomas.”
“Very well, I shall call you Thomas if you will address me as Elizabeth. I was going to say that if you had not freed your slaves, you would be able to do the same.”
“I don’t need a slave for that, Elizabeth. I have Bickerstaff, who acts wonderfully as my conscience. Though I reckon much more of this and I’ll think fame ain’t fleeting enough.”
She smiled at him and sipped her chocolate. His false modesty did not fool her. She could see from the moment he stepped off the Plymouth Prize how much he enjoyed the adulation. But that aspect of his personality did not bother her. Quite the opposite. She found that it made him more attractive still. It was the way of all great men, or all men destined for greatness.
“I fear you will have to suffer this hero worship a while longer. The people of this colony live in constant dread of the pirates, and you are practically the first man in living memory to do anything against them.”
“You are too kind by half, Elizabeth. But in fact I shall be free of this for a while, at least while we careen the Plymouth Prize down by Point Comfort.”
“Careen? I fear I do not follow your nautical jargon.”
“‘Careening’ is how we clean and repair the ship’s bottom. It is an onerous task. First we strip the vessel of all of her top hamper—her masts and yards and such—and her great guns as well, and all of the provisions in her hold. Then we run her up on a beach, and as the tide goes out we heave her down—that is to say, we cause her to roll on her side and thus expose the bottom.”
“Yes, I’ve heard how that is done, now that you explain it. But are you to be absent from Williamsburg for a time?” Her voice conveyed far more disappointment than she had intended. She could see that her tone had registered with Marlowe. Giving too much away. It was her intention to be more coy than that.
“I shall be away for a short time. But indeed, I had wished to ask you—and I beg you will not think my proposal in the least bit indecent, for I mean nothing of the kind—but might you be interested in accompanying me? I shall be sailing aboard my own sloop, the Northumberland. You are welcome to bring Lucy, if you wish. King James shall be captaining the sloop, and I am certain he would wish to see her, despite his pretensions of indifference. It could be something of a yachting holiday.”
“Indeed, sir…” The various implications swirled through Elizabeth’s mind. Such a trip might be cause for much whispering among the society people. On the other hand, one could do no better at present than to be seen in company with Captain Thomas Marlowe.
“…to sail off with you, I don’t know…”
She wanted very much to go, but she was afraid. Not of Marlowe, not at all, though that smoldering, dangerous quality that she had first seen in him had not dissipated in the past two years. She was afraid of what the others might think.
“Just an afternoon’s sail, ma’am, no more. We should put out on the morning tide and return that evening.”
What in all hell is wrong with me? she wondered. Had she been so long among the silly, pretentious people of Williamsburg that she was becoming one herself? She had never been shy about going after what she wanted. And now she wanted Marlowe, and for once in her life she had reason to hope that the thing she wanted would be hers, and would not be her undoing. No one would raise an eyebrow about a mere afternoon’s sailing.
“If that is the case, sir, then I should be delighted to sail with you,” she said. It was one of the most truthful statements she had uttered in a long, long time.
Chapter 15
THE LATE-SPRING weather in the tidewater of Virginia was yielding slowly, day by day, to summer.
The winds, always variable in that region, had hauled around from the predominantly north and northwest of the winter months to something approaching south and southeast. And when the wind came from that quarter it brought with it warm air. In later months that air would be hot and moist and miserable, but in those first days of summertime weather it was just perfectly warm, as if there were no temperature at all.
It was just such a day, an hour before slack water, when Marlowe’s party came aboard the Northumberland. It was not much of a party, consisting only of himself, Elizabeth Tinling, and Lucy, but then, the little sloop did not have the space to accommodate too many more.
Still, King James, now once more in command of the vessel, had prepared for her owner’s arrival as if it were the royal yacht. Bunting was flying from the rigging and flags flapped at every high point aloft. The gangplank was freshly painted, with rails set up and strung with rope handholds, made white through the application of pipe clay and finished off with spritsail sheet knots at the bitter ends.
Marlowe stepped aboard first and offered his hand to Elizabeth, helping her over the gangplank. The Northumberland’s four-man crew, two black men and two white, were dressed out in matching shirts and fresh-scrubbed slop trousers and straw hats. They stood at some semblance of attention as the owner and his guest came aboard, and then with a word James scattered them to the various tasks necessary to get the ship under way.
“Welcome aboard, Elizabeth,” Marlowe said.
“Oh, Thomas, it is magnificent!” she said, and she meant it, entirely. With a hand on her wide-brimmed straw hat, she craned her neck to look aloft. The many-colored flags waving in the breeze, the bunting, the white scrubbed decks and varnished rails and black rigging were all too perfect, like a brand-new, brightly painted toy. “It’s like something from a storybook.”
“Life can be like that, I find,” Marlowe said, “if one is able to write one’s own story.”
They cast off at slack water. The Northumberland drifted away from the dock, King James at the helm and Marlowe and Elizabeth standing by the taffrail, enjoying the morning. Forward, the small crew set the sails—jib, staysail, and the big gaff-headed main—with no orders given and none needed. James swung the bow off and the sloop made her way downriver, close-hauled, making a long board to the east until they were almost aground on the northern bank, then tacking across the river and tacking again.
“Your men work very well together,” Elizabeth commented as the Northumberland settled down for another long run on the starboard tack. “I hear no yelling or confusion, as one often associates with a ship’s crew.”
“They have been together awhile,” Marlowe said.
“They are not the same men as sailed her when my…when the sloop was owned by Joseph, I observe.”
“No. I let those men go. They were not willing to suffer King James as captain of the vessel.”
“They were very foolish, then. King James seems very much the competent master.”
“King James is of the type of man who does well whatever he sets his mind to. That is why I did not dare let him remain my slave. He is not the kind of man one needs as an enemy.”
“Do you not need him to run your household?”
“He does, when he is not running the sloop. But there is not much to the house. Caesar can run things well enough. It is a waste of James’s talent to keep him there.”
The Northumberland continued on down the river, standing right up to the banks with their strips of sandy beach and meadows of tall grass and patches of woods. Overhead marched a great parade of clouds, flat and gray on their bottoms and swelling up into high mounds of white, sharply defined against the blue of the sky.
They sailed past several plantations, the brown-earth fields
stretching down to the water, the slaves moving slowly between the hillocks, preparing the earth to receive the young plants.
The finest of them all was the Wilkensons’ home, standing on a hill not one hundred yards from the river, a great white monument to the wealth that family had amassed in just a few generations in the New World. Neither Marlowe nor Elizabeth commented on the place.
It was dinnertime when the Northumberland came about after a short tack to the southwest and stood into the wide bay where the Nasemond and Elizabeth join up with the mighty James River. Marlowe’s cabin steward appeared on the quarterdeck and set up a small table and chairs, and on the table he laid out a meal of cold roast beef, bread, cheese, nuts, fruit, and wine.
Marlowe helped Elizabeth into her seat.
“Your tobacco crop has come in well, I hope?” Elizabeth asked as Marlowe poured her a glass of wine. Tobacco was never far from the minds of anyone in the tidewater.
“Excellently well, thank you. We’ve had a prodigious crop, and it is now all but stowed down…‘prized,’ I believe, is the correct term, into its casks and quite ready for the convoy at the end of May.”
“You have learned a great deal about cultivating tobacco in the past few years, it would seem.”
“Not a bit of it, not a bit of it. Some of this cheese for you? No, I leave it all up to the people, and they do a fine job. They have forgotten more about the weed than I shall ever know. Bickerstaff takes an academic interest in the eultivation, but I content myself with the odd pipeful and a ride through my fields.”
Elizabeth took a sip of her wine. Regarded Marlowe. Such an odd man. “You leave the planting and cultivation up to your Negroes? And they do the work, with never an overseer?”
“Well, of course they do. They are paid a percentage of the crop, do you see? It is in their interest to work just as hard as they can. They are not such fools that they cannot understand that.”
Marlowe took a bite and smiled at her as he chewed. There were times when she thought Marlowe might be quite mad. He seemed perfectly willing to consider a Negro as his equal. Indeed, he treated King James more as his fellow than his servant.
Then forward one of the deckhands dropped a hatch cover with a loud bang, like a pistol. Marlowe’s head shot in the direction of the sound, his body tensed, and his hand moved automatically to the hilt of his sword. In his eyes that quality like a smoldering flame, the suggestion of a predator. To be sure, the pirates on Smith Island had found out how dangerous he could be. There was not a bit of the mad fool in him then.
He smiled, and his body eased, like a rope when the strain is let off. “Clumsy, clumsy,” he said, and poured some more wine.
Once dinner was cleared away they took their place again at the taffrail.
“That is Point Comfort there.” Marlowe pointed to a low headland just off the larboard bow.
“And why do they call it Point Comfort?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it was a great comfort to see it, after the long voyage from Europe.”
“Oh.” Elizabeth thought of the time when she and Joseph Tinling had stood on another quarterdeck and viewed that point as their ship stood in from sea. “I can’t say that I had that reaction when first I saw it.”
“Were you not pleased to see this new land?”
She had never considered that before. There had been so many emotions, whirling like an eddy. “Oh, I suppose I was. My…husband was more enthusiastic than I. It was a long voyage, as you say, and a difficult one. I thought one could not—what do you call it?—careen a ship on the Chesapeake.”
“That was what Allair would have the governor believe,” Marlowe said, and Elizabeth was grateful that he did not remark on her abrupt change of subject. “But he was just too lazy to try. One can careen a ship just about anywhere there is beach and tide enough. Why, I’ve…I’ve careened ships in some very odd places indeed.”
An hour later they passed Point Comfort, rounded up, and dropped anchor a cable from the beach. There on the dark wet sand was the Plymouth Prize. She looked sorry and vulnerable, her rig completely gone save for the lower masts: fore, mizzen, and the bright new main. Her guns were gone too, and her gunports stared up at the sky like the hollow eyes of a skull. She was rolled over on her larboard side, and all of her great worm-eaten, weed-covered bottom was exposed to the world. The Plymouth Prizes swarmed around her like ants on a mound of spilled sugar.
“Oh, my goodness,” Elizabeth said. It looked as if something had gone terribly wrong. “Is she wrecked? What’s happened to her?”
“No, believe it or not, this is what we do. Those fellows with the torches are breeming her, burning all the weed and barnacles and such off of her bottom. Then, once we’ve made the repairs we need, we’ll coat her anew with stuff made from tallow, sulfur, and tar.”
“You astonish me, sir, the depth of your knowledge,” Elizabeth said. Marlowe was clearly an experienced seaman as well as an experienced fighting man. There was no faking that.
Had he earned all of his wealth at sea? No one became as rich as he was by sailing as an honest merchant captain or naval officer. Was it family money?
He rarely mentioned his personal history prior to arriving in Virginia, and she had the distinct impression that he would rather she didn’t ask. She knew so little about him. She found it intriguing and irritating all at once. She could imagine any number of possibilities, many of which she did not care to think about.
Marlowe nodded toward the Prize’s long boat, which was pulling toward the sloop, Lieutenant Rakestraw in the stern sheets. “I reckon we’ll know soon how much work needs to be done before we can go a-hunting pirates again,” Marlowe said.
A minute later Rakestraw climbed up the side, saluted Marlowe, and gave Elizabeth a shallow bow. He was dressed in old clothes, the same as were worn by the sailors, and he was quite filthy.
“Forgive my appearance, I beg, sir, but I have been all day climbing about the hull,” he said.
“Please, Lieutenant, don’t think on it,” Marlowe said. “If you were clean, I should think you weren’t seeing to the job properly.”
Elizabeth had seen Rakestraw in Williamsburg on several occasions over the past few years. He looked happier now, and more like an officer, than she had ever seen, his dirty, common clothes notwithstanding.
“It appears, sir,” Rakestraw continued, “that the chief of the water was coming in where the butts was pulled apart. We found the four on the larboard side, like I reported the other day, and six on the starboard today. There was some soft wood around the sternpost and three planks needs replacing near the turn of the bilge, but the worms haven’t got at the bottom nearly as bad as I would have thought.”
“No. Allair spent a great deal of time at anchor in the freshes where the water’s brackish at best. That might have done for the worms.”
“The only constructive thing that Allair has ever done, to the best of my knowledge,” Rakestraw said, the disgust evident in his voice.
“Indeed. Well, Mr. Rakestraw, I do not wish to keep you from your work.”
“No, sir. Will you be sailing back tonight, sir?”
“I had intended to do so, but we had slow going coming down and I fear we have missed the tide now. I think we must spend the night here,” Marlowe answered, not meeting Elizabeth’s eyes but looking instead at Rakestraw, “and wait for the flood tomorrow.”
“Oh, quite right, sir, quite. Tide is quite gone,” Rakestraw agreed. Had he kept his mouth shut Elizabeth might have believed what Marlowe said, but Rakestraw was not nearly as accomplished a liar as Marlowe.
“I apologize profusely, ma’am, and trust that that will not inconvenience you?” Marlowe turned at last to Elizabeth, looking his most contrite. “You and Lucy shall have my cabin, of course, and I shall take the small cabin. If you wish, I shall send ashore for a coach.”
“That will not inconvenience us at all, sir. If we are to be kidnapped by pirates, I am pleased at least that we
have found one who is such a gentleman.”
“Oh, a former pirate, ma’am. Fear not, I have forsworn that life.” He was smiling, but his eyes suggested there might be something deeper, more personal, to his simple joke.
It was one of the possibilities that Elizabeth had considered.
The Northumberland was absolutely quiet. All hands were below and asleep, and the sloop rode perfectly still at her anchor, held steady in the soft arms of the current. The only sounds that King James could hear were the occasional call of a night bird from shore, the buzzing of the distant insects, the gentle gurgle of the water.
He crouched over the compass, taking a bearing on Point Comfort and a tall stand of trees just abeam, which he was just able to discern against the background of stars. Once he had taken the bearings he would wait for an hour or so and then take them again and thus make certain the sloop was not dragging her anchor. That was why he was still awake and on deck.
Or at least that was what he told himself. Why he felt the need to fool himself he did not know, especially because he was not. He was perfectly aware of why he was loitering in that place. He was hoping that Lucy would come to him.
He heard the low creak of the after scuttle opening, did not react. It could be anyone—Marlowe or the cabin steward.
But it was not. Lucy stepped hesitatingly on deck, looking forward and then aft. She looked directly at him, but he could see that she was struggling to make out who it was she was looking at.
“Come on back here, girl,” he called out softly.
Lucy squinted aft again, then lifted her skirts and climbed up the two short steps to the quarterdeck and came aft. There was just the faintest light on deck, the stars and the dim glow of the covered candle James was using to see the compass, but it was enough for him to see her lovely face, her soft brown hair hanging around her shoulders, her shapely form under her petticoats. Lucy and Elizabeth. They made quite a pair.
She leaned against the rail where King James stood, an inch closer than a casual acquaintance might stand. “What are you doing up at this hour?” she asked.
The Guardship Page 15
