The Guardship botc-1

by James L. Nelson

  Let them run. LeRois imagined himself and his men as a great wave, pushing all ahead of it, destroying all in its path

  until at last those people trying to stay ahead would be trapped and dashed to pieces. There was only so far they could run.

  The pirates picked up the pace, stepping faster, then jogging toward that huge house, that repository of comforts and riches. The front door was left open, as if welcoming them in. They swarmed up the small hill on which the house stood and poured across the porch.

  A window was smashed and a musket was thrust out-some hero remaining behind to protect his home-and the musket fired into the crowd. A man screamed and dropped, but the pirates did not hesitate in the least, as if they were not even aware of the gunfire.

  One of them grabbed up a chair and flung it through a window, leering at the satisfying sound of smashing glass and shattering wood. More chairs were taken up, more windows were broken in.

  LeRois caught a glimpse of the hero who had fired the single shot. He was struggling to pull a pistol free from his belt when the horde fell upon him and dragged him through the window and onto the porch, pulling him over the jagged glass he himself had broken. He screamed and disappeared beneath a mass of brigands. There was a brief thrashing, and then he was dead.

  The pirates went in through the door and the windows. They tore through the house, wild with the opportunity to loot and destroy. They pulled down curtains and overturned tables, smashed whatever they could smash, just for the sheer delight of it. A bag was located and stuffed with anything that might be of value, and when that one was full another was started.

  The family had apparently been at dinner when the Vengeances had interrupted them, for the big dining-room table was spread with turkey and fritters and tripe and asparagus. The pirates swarmed around, grabbing handfuls of whatever struck their fancy and stuffing it into their mouths, smashing the plates on the floor as they emptied them.

  They burst into the kitchen. Cooking utensils lay scattered where they had been discarded by the cook as she raced from the house. They ripped through the pantry and the cupboards and feasted on whatever they could find, the freshest food they had had in over two months.

  They pulled paintings off the walls and slashed them with their swords and urinated on the faces of the family’s ancestors. They raced up the wide stairs and tore the bedrooms apart, hacking the mattresses until blizzards of feathers filled the rooms. They found all of the alcohol in the house. It was mostly wine, which was a disappointment, but there was enough of it at least that each man had two or more bottles to himself.

  It was the greatest frolic they had ever had, and the pirates went about their business with a thoroughness and enthusiasm that was rarely seen in men on the account. One by one the rooms were torn apart. Furniture was smashed into cord wood, walls were hacked up, any badge of wealth or privilege was desecrated. Great piles of wreckage filled the place. The screaming and shouting and merriment did not abate for a second.

  LeRois walked slowly from room to room, watching his men have their fun. That was fine. There was no harm done. He enjoyed seeing his men so happy.

  He had no idea how long they had spent in the house. There was an elegant clock on the mantel in the sitting room, covered with cherubs and birds and such, that seemed to ring and ring until finally LeRois could take it no more and shot it to pieces. They had been there for some time, he decided. Long enough. It was time to go.

  “Allez, allez, we go, we go!” he shouted, walking through the house and screaming at the men and after some time of this finally getting their attention. “Burn this son of bitch, we go now!” he ordered.

  The men glanced at one another. The fools did not want to leave. They wanted to stay here, on this one little spot of land, when there was an entire continent lying at their feet.

  “I said, burn this son of bitch! We must go down the road, go to the next house! They are waiting for us there!”

  This seemed to motivate the men. A curtain was torn down and gunpowder spilled on it and then ignited with a flintlock. Soon the cloth was blazing and the pirates piled paintings, broken furniture, and books onto the fire. In just a few minutes the entire sitting room was engulfed. The ceiling above began to cave in and the fire found the second floor.

  The Vengeances shouted and hooted and swilled from their bottles of wine. They understood now that the destruction had just begun.

  Chapter 31

  GEORGE WILENSON was still a good mile from Williamsburg, riding south, when he began to sense that something was wrong.

  He had spent the day, a satisfying day, inspecting the family’s small plantation on the York River near Queen’s Lake. He had found the plantation in good order, with the young plants put in during the last rain and the mill fully repaired and running. It was good to get away from the tense atmosphere at the Wilkenson plantation. To feel like the master of his lands and his people. It was good to get away from his father.

  He pulled his horse to a stop, cocked his ear to the south. He could hear bells ringing, clearly, if faintly, a mile or so away. The bells in the city.

  He frowned and looked in the direction of the sound. Along the horizon, just above the tree line, he could see a long smudge of smoke, tinted pale red as the sun moved toward the west. Something was burning, something big. Perhaps all of Williams-burg was aflame. But no, the smoke looked farther away than that, farther south. Perhaps the bells were ringing to call people to help extinguish the blaze.

  He put his spurs to his horse’s flank and continued on. The smoky haze was in the general direction of the Wilkenson plantation, and that caused him some vague worry, but not a great deal. The chance that it was his own home that was on fire was slight, and there were enough people on the plantation that they should be able to deal with any such disaster before it got out of control.

  It was twenty minutes later that he saw the first of the terrified citizens streaming north out of the city.

  At first it was just a few men who passed him on horseback, riding rather swiftly, and he did not immediately make the connection between them and the ringing bells and the smoke. And while it was odd that they did not stop and exchange a word with him, or even acknowledge his existence, and that there were more riders on the road than one generally saw, still George did not see any cause for concern.

  It was when he saw the people following in their wake, common people with wagons piled with possessions, pulled by their pathetic animals, that he realized something was very wrong indeed. Something more than just a plantation on fire. Williamsburg was being abandoned.

  “I say…” Wilkenson reined his chestnut around and fell in beside a farmer who was leading an old plow horse north along the road. The horse in turn was pulling a dray piled with the farmer’s family and a few possessions. From the look of his worldly goods George could not imagine why he had gone to the effort to save them.

  “What is this about? Where is everyone going?”

  “Anywhere. Away. The devil’s in Williamsburg. Tidewater’s under attack. Burning all the plantations along the James.”

  “What? Who? Who is burning the plantations?”

  “Don’t know. I heard a rumor it’s the Dutch again, but it don’t really matter, does it?”

  To a certain extent the man was right, though George had an idea that it was not the Dutch. In fact, he had a good idea of who it really was, and that idea gave him a sour feeling in his stomach. He had heard it from the master of the Wilkenson Brothers. Pirates. Inhuman, savage. A force beyond the pale of human conduct.

  He wheeled his horse around again and continued south, riding hard, pounding past the ever-growing stream of people fleeing the capital city.

  He came at last to the great pile of earth and material that would soon be the governor’s palace and continued on into the heart of Williamsburg. It was absolute chaos, from what he could see, with horses and wagons crowding the street and people rushing out of their houses with armfuls of
possessions, piling them on whatever vehicle they had and then hurrying in for more.

  He could hear loud, angry shouting, screaming, children crying, the thud of dozens of horses rushing in every direction and the drunken cursing of those of the lower sort who were finding their refuge in a bottle.

  He pulled to a stop beside the jailhouse. Sheriff Witsen was rounding up those men who would stand with him. Five, thus far.

  “Sheriff, Sheriff!” Wilkenson leapt down from his horse and hurried over to him. “Sheriff, what the devil is going on?”

  “It’s them goddamned pirates, damn their black souls. Good Lord,” Witsen turned to one of his volunteers, “that gun is from the last age, it will blow you to hell should you fire it. Go to the armory and fetch another.”

  Witsen turned back to George Wilkenson. “They come ashore around noon, just north of Hog Island. Went for the Finch place first. I reckon it was the first one they seen. Most of the family got away, slaves too, but when they were done having their fun they burned it. Moved on to the Nelson plantation and done for that, too. Last I heard, which was about half an hour ago, they was at the Page plantation.”

  The two men were silent for a moment as the noise and the confusion swirled around them. There was no need to say what both were thinking. The Page house was just up the road from the Wilkensons’.

  “What of the militia?” Wilkenson asked.

  “Called them out, but most of them are too worried about getting their own families safe to turn out. I have a man trying to round them up, but I ain’t too hopeful.”

  The pirates were descending on his home, and there was no defense that the colony could offer. George felt as if he were standing there on the green completely naked.

  And then another thought occurred to him and he felt himself flush with anger. “But where is the guardship? Where is the great Marlowe and his little precious band? This would seem to be his purview.”

  “The guardship went down this morning, and they fought it out, him and the pirate, for an hour or so. Don’t know what happened, but the guardship is anchored up by Jamestown now. Just sitting there.”

  “Well, why doesn’t someone order them to go and fight these brigands?”

  “I suggested the same to the governor. Governor said Marlowe’s beyond taking orders from anyone.”

  “Indeed. Well, we should have expected this. Marlowe is as much a pirate as any of those bastards. No doubt he will be sacking the countryside himself by week’s end.”

  “I’ve no doubt, if there’s anything left to sack. But see here, your father has requisitioned a deal of supplies from the militia-powder, shot, small arms. Guess he thought this might happen. I reckon he’s set up for some kind of defense. Once we get some men together here we’ll get down to your plantation, and maybe we can hold them off there, or drive ’em back into the river.”

  “I hope you are right,” Wilkenson said as he swung himself up into his saddle. “I shall go to our plantation directly and see what can be done.”

  It was like riding into battle, trotting down the familiar rolling road from Williamsburg to the Wilkenson plantation. The sun was just below the trees in the west and the southern sky was blotted out by a great cloud of smoke, rising in columns from several locations and tinted red and pink and yellow.

  The farthest dark column was the Finch plantation. Wilkenson could tell by the location of the smoke. The next was

  the Nelsons’. A third he was not so certain of; it might have been the grist mill that was on that road. It did not look as if the Page house was burning, and that most likely meant the pirates had not made it to the Wilkenson plantation. Not yet.

  The logic of that did little to relieve the absolute panic that George felt as he hurried toward his home. He was terrified to think of the danger that his family might be facing, with the marauders closing in on them. He was even more terrified of the danger that he himself was in, though he would not acknowledge that.

  The acrid smell of the fires became more pronounced as George covered the last half mile to the Wilkenson plantation. He charged down the long road that led to the house, hunched over the neck of his horse, cowering from what, he did not know.

  The road was dark, lost in the long shadows of the trees that lined the way. He nearly missed seeing a group of the Wilkensons’ slaves, field hands, standing beside a big oak one hundred feet from the house. They each held a cloth with a few things tied in a bundle. They looked very frightened.

  He pulled his horse to a stop. “What are you doing here?”

  An old man stepped forward. “We afraid to stay in them slave quarters, on account of them pirates, but Master Wilkenson, he say we got to stay on the plantation.”

  George Wilkenson regarded the pathetic people huddled beneath the tree. He wondered what he should do with them.

  His first thought was to arm the Negro men so they could participate in the defense of the plantation, but the idea of an armed slave frightened him even more than the idea of a marauding pirate. There would be nothing to stop the slaves from killing all of the white people in the house and throwing in with the pirates. If they thought about it they would realize that they were better off doing just that.

  “You know where the Queen’s Lake plantation is? You know how to get there?”

  “Yes, Master George.”

  “Good. I want you to lead all these people there. When you get there tell the overseer what is happening here. You should

  be safe, and we’ll send for you when this is over.”

  “Yes, Master. But, Master Jacob-that is…your father-says-”

  “Never mind that, just go. And remember, I’ll be looking for you soon. If you have any thought of running, I will see you all hunted down and punished, depend upon it!”

  George found himself shouting the warning at the slaves’ backs as the relieved people streamed past him and hurried up the road. He rode a planter’s pace the last hundred yards to the house and swung down from the saddle. He looped the reins over the hitching rail-the stable boy was already a quarter mile down the road with the others-and climbed the steps to the front door two at a time.

  The scene that greeted him inside the door was much like that he had encountered under the oak, but the faces were white, the clothes were fine, and the few possessions were worth more than the accumulated wealth of every Negro in Virginia. George’s mother and his two sisters, his aunt and uncle who had unhappily chosen that month to visit from Maryland, and his maternal grandparents were there in the wide foyer. They were all dressed to travel. They all looked like trapped and frightened animals. He could sense their near panic, and it brought him near to the brink of panic as well.

  “What is going on here?” George asked. “Where is Father? Why are you all still here?”

  “Your father is in the library,” Mrs. Wilkenson said. She drew herself more erect, trying not to look angry or afraid. “He has ordered us to remain, as he thinks we are in no danger.”

  “No danger…?” George stared, incredulous, at his mother. She could never openly defy her husband, just as George could not defy the man, and that was why they had come to the threshold of fleeing and stopped.

  It was no use arguing with her. He turned and raced down the hall to the study.

  Jacob Wilkenson was sitting in the winged chair, a book open in his lap. He looked up as George burst into the room.

  “Have you forgotten about knocking?” Jacob demanded.

  “What in all creation are you doing, sitting here as if you had not a care in the world? Did you not see the smoke? You cannot be ignorant of the brigands that are laying waste to the countryside.”

  “I am aware of them, and I shall tell them in no uncertain terms that this is not to be tolerated. This was not our agreement. There shall be some penalties, count on it.”

  “Penalties? What are you talking about?”

  “This…this brigand, as you style him, is Captain Jean-Pierre LeRois. He works for me. It i
s the little arrangement which I have mentioned. Matthew and I set it up with that fellow Ripley, who captains our river sloop.”

  George stared, shook his head. “I do not understand.”

  Jacob sighed and closed the book on his lap. “I have arranged through Ripley to purchase what this man has to sell. The profit will be tremendous. How do you think we are able to survive with the loss of our year’s crop?”

  “‘This man’? Surely you do not mean this brigand who has taken the Wilkenson Brothers?”

  “Of course I do. And here’s more news. I spoke with Ripley just this morning, and what do you think? He says that Marlowe is in fact a bastard named Malachias Barrett. A former pirate! A pirate! I knew there was something queer about him, and there it is! Oh, we shall have a merry time with his reputation now!”

  It was coming too fast for George, like a heavy rain that the earth cannot absorb. “You have struck a deal with the pirate who has just taken the Wilkenson Brothers?”

  “And now I shall have him engage the guardship and blow her to hell. The Brothers is better armed than the Plymouth Prize, LeRois’s crew is bigger. He’ll do as I say. That’s why I have allowed him to keep the vessel. That and the fact that I have every expectation of the underwriter paying us for the loss.”

  “But…the man is a pirate, for God’s sake! Did you not just condemn Marlowe for being a pirate? What are we, that we will put such men in our employ?”

  “Goddamn it, George, how are you even able to stand with no backbone at all?” Jacob rose, paced the room. “That is the beauty of the whole thing, do you not see? We send this one pirate up against the other. Marlowe is killed and his memory is blackened by what he has done, what he was. Like plowing the earth with salt. We destroy the man, we destroy his name, his reputation, everything, wiped away. There can be no more complete revenge for your brother’s murder.”

  “And the entire thing hinges on this brigand doing as you wish?”

  “He does as I tell him. Ripley informed the man of who is in charge of this affair, I made quite certain of that. Marlowe is killed, and then it is on with our business.”