The Guardship

by James L. Nelson

  He turned to Rakestraw, who, with Bickerstaff, was standing behind him. “Keep these men here,” he indicated the sheriff and his company, “and post some men around the jail. Keep a weather eye out for anyone approaching. They may have turned out the militia, for all that they are worth.” He snatched the keys off the nail, grabbed a lantern. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Marlowe pushed open the door to the cells in the other half of the small building. He did not want anyone with him. He did not know what he would find, what they might have done to Elizabeth. That thought had crossed his mind several times during the march to Williamsburg, and each time he had chased it away rather than let himself get worked into a frenzy.

  But he had thought about it enough to come to a single decision: If they had hurt her, then they would pay. If they had…he shuddered to think on it…if they had raped her, then they all would die.

  He stepped through the door. The light from the lantern illuminated the space, and the bars of the cells threw even lines of shadow across the far wall. He looked into the first cell. There was a black man there, manacled, his back to Marlowe. He moved on. The next cell was empty. He continued down to the last in the line.

  Elizabeth was there, half shading her eyes from the light. She looked terrified, seemed to shrink back against the wall, but still there was a quality of pride in her look, and defiance, as if she would kill and die before submitting to any further humiliation. Marlowe felt his love for her welling up, displacing the rage. He wanted to reach out and touch her, caress her, protect her forever.

  “What do you want?” she asked, hand in front of her face. Marlowe felt fear displace love. Did she hate him now, for his part in all this?

  “Elizabeth…I’ve come for you…,” he said.

  She straightened and tried to look into the light. “Thomas? Thomas, is that you?” she asked. With the lantern held low as it was, she could not see his face.

  “Yes, yes, my love, it’s me,” Marlowe said, and held the lantern up so that the light fell across his face. He saw Elizabeth’s body relax and her grim expression turn into a smile. She ran across the small cell, grabbed hold of the bars, pressed herself toward him.

  “Oh, Thomas, you have come for me!” she said.

  Marlowe put the lantern on the floor. There was just enough light from the guttering candle for him to see the keys in his hand and find the keyhole in the iron door.

  “Are you well?” he asked as he fumbled with the key. “Have they…have they hurt you?”

  “No, they have done nothing beyond humiliating me.”

  He inserted the key in the lock—his hands were shaking—and twisted it, and the lock opened with a snap. He swung the door wide and stepped inside and swept Elizabeth up in his arms.

  “Oh, my love, my love,” Elizabeth murmured, hugging him and then reaching her face up to his and kissing him. He kissed her back, longingly, unable to stop or let her go, unwilling to ever let her out of his sight, out of the sphere of his protection.

  At last she pulled back from him, her hands on his chest, and he encircled her with his arms. “Have you seen the governor?” she asked. “How ever have you managed this?”

  “The governor? No. I have just come to get you out of here.”

  “But…do you mean to say that you are just taking me out of here? With no authority?”

  “I am captain of the guardship, and that gives me the authority. The sixty armed men beyond give me the authority.”

  She pushed back, breaking his grip on her, and brushed the hair from her face. “Thomas, this is…God, can you do this? What kind of trouble shall we have now?” She turned from him, as if seeking some answer in the dark corner of the cell. “What will this mean?” she asked, turning back to him. “I…I am not certain what to think. I shall go mad if I spend another minute in here, but…the law…”

  “Sod their damned laws,” Marlowe said with finality. “There are no laws in this colony, save for those that the wealthy make up at their own convenience. Well, I am wealthy too, and I have my men, and I shall do as I see fit. They cannot hold you here, not for some nonsense that the Wilkensons have seen fit to concoct.”

  She met his eyes again, and again there was the defiance, the strength summoned up by a strong woman who has been beaten down but not beaten to death. “Do you know what I stand accused of? The charge that you reckon the Wilkensons have made up?”

  “I do. They say you had some hand in murdering your husband.”

  “He was not my husband!” Elizabeth said, low, through clenched teeth. “I was not his wife, I was his whore! I guess you had better know the truth, Thomas, so you can figure if you really want to do this thing.”

  She looked up at the ceiling and ran her fingers through her hair. “Oh, dear God,” she said, half under her breath, then looked at Marlowe again. “His real wife is back home in England. I reckon she had had enough of the beatings.”

  Marlowe stared at her, surprised but not shocked. There was little in life that could shock him, after all of it he had seen.

  Elizabeth folded her arms across her chest. Her face was set, as if she were challenging Marlowe to reject her, to call her a slut and lock her up again. “He found me in a bawdy house in London,” she continued. “Oh, not some low nunnery, selling mutton at a penny a throw—no, it was a fine place, catering to the gentry—but a whore is a whore, isn’t she, no matter what the price? Joseph Tinling took me away from there, to be his own mistress, promised me a new beginning, playing at his wife in the new world, and like the stupid tart I am I believed him, and you see what has become of that.”

  “That was what Matthew Wilkenson knew—”

  “Matthew, and now his brother, and soon all of the goddamned colony, I reckon.”

  They stood there, silent, looking at each other across the cell, Marlowe off balance, Elizabeth planted like an oak, arms still folded, waiting for whatever would come next. “But…” Marlowe began, “they have no evidence for the crime of which you are accused….”

  She did not move, just held his eyes in that hard stare. “The Wilkensons need no evidence. This isn’t about the death of Joseph Tinling, can’t you see that? They don’t hope to convict me of that. They want only to question me before a judge, make me publicly admit that I am a whore. That will be quite enough to ruin me—and ruin anyone stupid enough to stand beside me.”

  Marlowe nodded. There was nothing he did not know about desperation, and that was the final act. Elizabeth’s ruination, for her sins, and with it his own destruction, for loving her. It was that or sacrifice his manhood by turning his back on her. Elegant, symmetrical, simple vengeance.

  He crossed the cell and swept her up again. She resisted at first, pushing him away, but he pulled her toward him with powerful arms and she yielded to him, draping her arms over his shoulders, allowing him to press her close. They stood there like that for a long time, silent, swaying slightly, holding each other.

  Here we are, thought Marlowe. Two fallen people, making believe we are something we are not and hoping no one in this new world will ask.

  Here we are, outlaws both.

  Chapter 25

  LEROIS PRESSED the telescope to his eye, watched the river sloop for as long as he could. The image began as a complete thing, one single sloop, and then began to shimmy and divide, until there were two distinct, overlapping vessels, though neither had quite the substance of a solid object. He lowered the glass and shook his head hard, and then, happily, there was one sloop again.

  Overhead there came a high-pitched, keening sound, like a gale wind blowing through taut rigging. He looked up in surprise. The day had been calm up until that point. The flags on the two ships, the Vengeance and the near wreck that had formerly been the Vengeance, were hanging limp, barely moving in the breeze. He did not know what was making that sound.

  The two ships were made fast to each other, riding at a single anchor in one of the many small inlets branching off from the Elizabeth
River, just north of Norfolk. A deserted place, an area where people generally ignored what others were doing, so the approach of the sloop was cause for some caution. LeRois would not be caught with his breeches around his ankles again. That would be an end to his command.

  “Hmmph,” he grunted, putting the glass back to his eye. He licked his dry lips and felt the sweat on his palms slick on the leather covering of the glass. He was afraid of whom he might see on board the sloop. These images of Malachias Barrett were becoming more and more frightening, more real and less apt to dissipate quickly.

  Just as the sloop was beginning to divide again he caught sight of Ripley, standing at the helm, holding the sloop on course to luff up alongside the new Vengeance.

  “C’est bien, c’est bien, it is all right, stand down there,” he called to the men who were crowded around the great guns and hiding behind the bulwark, small arms in hand. The silence that had held the deck broke into a dozen conversations as the men got back to their drinking, their gambling, their staring at the approaching sloop, and, in some cases, their work.

  The new Vengeance was in excellent condition, having just been readied for a voyage across the Atlantic, and so there was not very much that needed doing. She was fully provisioned with victuals and water, loaded with tobacco and sundry other things, including a quantity of specie, her bottom clean, her rigging well set up, her sails new. She did not stink belowdecks. There was considerably less vermin aboard. She needed only a little finessing to turn her into the perfect raiding platform.

  With the crisis passed, the carpenter and his mates had resumed their part of the finessing. They were hacking off the high forecastle to create more open deck space and expose the great guns in a clean sweep fore and aft. When it came to a bloody fight, they did not need bulkheads and such impeding their movement.

  Likewise, the boatswain and his mates were working overhead, turning their new ship into a more manageable barque. She was a big vessel, and while the hundred or so men of LeRois’s tribe could have easily handled her, they did not care to expend any more energy than was necessary. Thus the cro’-jack and mizzen topsail yard and all their attendant rigging was struck down to the deck.

  Another gang of men were over the side, painting the oiled hull black. Still more were over the transom, cutting away the fashion piece with the vessel’s former name carved in it and replacing it with her new, proper name.

  The river sloop luffed up and her forward momentum carried her alongside the new Vengeance. She came to a stop with a shuddering crash into the hull, and her small crew threw lines aboard the bigger ship, which were caught and made fast.

  Ripley stomped across the sloop’s deck and scrambled up the side of the ship that had been, until two days before, the Wilkenson Brothers.

  LeRois took a long drink of rum, wiped his mouth, and regarded the wiry man approaching him. Ripley looked mad about something, but LeRois could not guess what that might be, nor could he care less. They had captured a big ship with a valuable cargo, and without a drop of blood spilled. Ripley’s master should be delighted.

  “LeRois, you stupid drunk bastard, goddamn your eyes, what do you think you’re about?” Ripley called as he stamped aft and up to the quarterdeck.

  LeRois squinted at him and chewed at something that had just dislodged from between his teeth. It was not possible that Ripley had just said what he, LeRois, had thought he heard. The shrieking in the rigging grew louder. LeRois dismissed it all as sound, just sound.

  “Quartermaster, eh, qu’est-ce que c’est?” LeRois spread his arms in an expansive gesture and looked aloft. “The new Vengeance, what you think?”

  Ripley approached until he was a few feet away and then stopped and spit on the deck. “I think, what the fuck are you about?”

  “Quoi?”

  “What are you doing on the bay, you stupid, drunk son of a whore?”

  LeRois squinted at him again. That time he had heard it. Ripley had actually insulted him. He said nothing in reply.

  “I told you not to take the tobacco ships, we have all the buggering tobacco we needs! It was general goods inbound, Spanish stuff, that was what you was after! Are you too dull to remember?”

  LeRois shifted uncomfortably. If Ripley went on like this he would have to do something. The quartermaster had apparently forgotten what happened to those who made LeRois angry, such as the old guardship captain in the tavern. “This ship, she is a good one. I can make us richer still with it.”

  “That ain’t the point, you sodden, stupid wretch of a—”

  That was it. LeRois’s hand shot out, and he grabbed the former quartermaster by the throat and squeezed with the crushing power of a shark’s jaws.

  Ripley’s eyes went wide and he flailed out, trying to pry LeRois’s hand away, but with each second he grew weaker, while LeRois’s grip did not diminish in the least. After a minute of that, Ripley began to hammer weakly at LeRois’s arm. He might as well have been hammering at the mainmast.

  After a minute and a half LeRois could see the terror in Ripley’s eyes, the terror of pending death, and that was what he had been looking for. He released his grasp and shoved Ripley to the deck, stood over him as he coughed and retched and rubbed his damaged throat.

  “You do not talk to me that way, eh?” LeRois said, but Ripley was still far from being able to speak, so LeRois drained his bottle, tossed it over the side, and went forward to hunt up another.

  By the time he returned to the quarterdeck Ripley was standing, after a fashion, and leaning against the pinrail, his arm entwined in the mizzen running gear for support. He was still wheezing and coughing in a most pathetic manner.

  He looked up at LeRois, and the Frenchman saw fear in his eyes, which was as it should be. LeRois took a pull of his rum and offered the bottle to Ripley. Ripley took it and drank, gagging and coughing but getting the rum down at last. He took another drink and handed the bottle back.

  “You listen to me now, quartermaster,” LeRois said. Some thoughts had come to him while he had been waiting for Ripley to recover.

  Ripley looked at him with watery eyes and nodded.

  “We cannot keep on, eh, with the old Vengeance. She is too weak, too rotten. With this ship we blow that fucking guardship right to hell.”

  The mention of the guardship caught the quartermaster’s ear.

  “Yes…,” Ripley croaked, and broke into a fit of coughing. “Yes,” he said again when he was done, “you can blow the fucking guardship to hell! That’s an idea that will sit well.”

  “Bien, bien,” LeRois said, putting a brotherly arm around Ripley’s shoulder and leading him forward and down to the waist. “You go tell your friends ashore we make more goddamned money with his ship than they ever dream of, eh?”

  “I’ll tell them, Capitain, I’ll tell him,” Ripley said, his voice hoarse. “But you are going after the guardship, ain’t you, like you said you was?”

  “Oui, we go after the guardship,” LeRois assured him. And meant it. The insult he had suffered at the guardship’s hands was not to be endured.

  He did not tell Ripley about the trap the old Vengeance had sailed into, the slaughter the guardship had caused. Perhaps he would later, after they had murdered every one of those filthy bastards, after he had served that Marlowe out in grand style, but not now. He could not bear to think on it now.

  The Plymouth Prize was warped back out into the stream and rode there on her best bower. There was a spring rigged from the anchor cable to the capstan so that the vessel could be turned in any direction. The great guns were loaded and run out. Marlowe did not know what to expect, but he certainly would be ready for it.

  It had been a long night, a violent, brutal night. When the Prizes had discovered that the beaten black man in the first cell was in fact King James they had not taken it well, for they had come to respect James and look upon him as one of their own.

  James would not say who had done that to him, but the Prizes had a pretty good ide
a, knew the sheriff and his men were involved in some manner. Even if they had not actually done it themselves. That was enough.

  They might well have killed the men, and the jailer as well, if Marlowe had not made them stand down.

  As it was, the four men were considerably worse off when Marlowe finally locked them in the cell that James had occupied and formed his men up on the lawn outside. A stretcher was fashioned for James. There was talk of finding a chair for Elizabeth, but she assured them that she could walk, and so after much protest they took her at her word.

  A small detachment was sent to Elizabeth’s home, where Lucy was roused out and told to dress and pack her things, and clothes for Elizabeth as well. They could not remain in Williamsburg, could not remain within the reach of the law. There was no safety for them anywhere in the colony, save for in the midst of the Plymouth Prizes.

  Lucy was frightened, nervous, like a deer. Even the assurance that she would be there with King James did not seem to mollify her.

  At last Rakestraw drew the men up into two rough lines and marched them out of town, with Elizabeth and Lucy and James on his stretcher sandwiched between them, and at the tail end six men carrying the three big trunks that Lucy had packed.

  There was little chance that the alarm would be raised, with the sheriff and the jailer locked away, and little chance that the militia would welcome the opportunity to face this unknown band on the dark road. The march back to Jamestown was uneventful.

  They arrived in the early-morning hours, exhausted, and filed back aboard. They warped the vessel away from the dock, anchored, rigged the spring, cleared for action, and collapsed on the deck.

  King James was laid out carefully on the upholstered settee in the great cabin, and there he slept. Lucy curled up next to him and slept as well.

  Without a word spoken between them, Elizabeth followed Marlowe into his small cabin. She held his eyes as she took off her hat and kerchief, then reached up and untied the lacing of her bodice and pulled it free.