The Guardship botc-1

by James L. Nelson

  He had forgotten! He had forgotten! But the voices had reminded him. To the ship! To the ship! All of this could wait, all of this would be here, but first Malachias Barrett had to die.

  LeRois felt the scream rising from his bowels, and as the sound came up so his sword seemed to float out of its scabbard and rise with the sound over his head.

  He charged forward. Faces floated by, surprised faces of his own men as they stepped away, and then the great fat man on the floor, a blood-streaked, terrified face, looking up at him, and then his sword came down again and again and again and he could not stop hacking away at the man.

  Malachias Barrett! the voices screamed again, and LeRois stepped back and looked around, the dead man at his feet forgotten.

  “We get back to the ship. I will burn this son of a bitch maison now and go back to the ship.”

  The men stood in silence for a second, and then as if on a signal raced off to destroy and carry off all that they could before the flames drove them away. They would not question LeRois’s decision. He knew that they would not. No one would, who wished to live.

  Thomas Marlowe took a long pull from his rum bottle. Stared through the great cabin windows at the yellow, flickering light on the horizon. He could not move. He could not take his eyes from the sight of his colony, his adoptive home, burning in front of him.

  He was alone in the great cabin. He was not drunk, despite his best efforts.

  He wished the fires would stop. He wished they would just go out and LeRois would leave, but every time he thought that they had, a new fire flared and grew, one after another, following the march of destruction up the banks of the James River.

  How many had LeRois killed thus far? There was no way to know. Perhaps no one. Perhaps they had all fled before him. Marlowe could picture the gentry of Virginia, in all their finery, fleeing like rats before the pirate’s filthy, drunken tribe. Perhaps he had killed them all. And still he, Marlowe, sat there, immobile.

  LeRois was working his way toward the Wilkenson home. Perhaps he would sack that as well, kill all of those bastards, save him the trouble. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing?

  The Plymouth Prize was safe, and her people were safe, and that was his primary concern, his first obligation. He had

  tried to stop the pirates, but he could not, not without killing all of his people in the process, and Elizabeth and Lucy as well. He had done what he could.

  He took another drink from the bottle. He did not really believe any of that.

  “Thomas Marlowe,” he muttered to himself, speaking the words slowly, disdainfully. They tasted bad in his mouth. That was over now. He was no longer Thomas Marlowe. It had been a good run, two years as a member of the tidewater’s elite, but it was over now. He was Malachias Barrett once again.

  He supposed that once LeRois had cleared out he would take the Plymouth Prize to the Caribbean. His men would go with him, he was certain of that. Most men who sailed before the mast were only a few places removed from piracy, and the Prizes were even closer than that, thanks to his guiding influence. It was a short step now to the sweet trade. Bickerstaff would not go with them, of course, and Rakestraw probably would decline. He wondered about Elizabeth.

  And then, as if summoned by his thoughts, he heard the sound of her light footfalls in the alleyway, her soft knock on the door. “Thomas?”

  He turned in his chair, smiled as best he could. “Pray, come in.”

  She closed the door behind her, crossed the cabin, sat on the settee facing him. “I’m sorry for walking out as I did.”

  Marlowe took her hand. As if she had anything to be sorry for. “I am sorry for being such an ass. I am pleased you are safe. I am pleased that the ship and her people are safe.”

  “Are you?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Are you really pleased with your safety?” she asked, and when he did not respond she continued. “You men have a great advantage over us women. When we are humiliated beyond tolerance we can do no more than cut our wrists. You can die in battle and have it said that such was a noble death.”

  “And you think that an advantage?”

  “Having the means to preserve one’s honor is always an advantage. That is why I came to this place.”

  “Me as well. But even here I find honor is like good family: You are either born into it or you can despair of it ever being yours.”

  “I do not believe that. I will not believe that. That may be true for what these arrogant bastards, the Wilkensons and the Tinlings, call honor, but it is not true of real honor.”

  “Real honor? Real honor is no more than what these arrogant bastards, as you style them, say is real honor. Is there such a thing as honor in an objective sense?”

  They paused, Marlowe with the bottle halfway to his lips, and listened to a sudden commotion on deck. It had been going on all night, something or other causing the men to hoot and howl. They were all drunk, celebrating their escape. But this time it was louder, more sustained. He put the bottle down, looked questioning at Elizabeth, and she shrugged in reply.

  He heard footsteps outside the cabin door, loud, rude voices, a gang of men pushing toward the captain’s sanctuary. Perhaps it was a mutiny, Marlowe speculated. He hoped it was. He hoped they would hang him.

  But rather than a foot kicking in the door there came a polite knock. Marlowe sat for a second more, then stood and tugged his waistcoat into place. “Come,” he called.

  The door opened and Bickerstaff stepped in. “Captain, a gentleman has come out to see you,” he said stiffly.

  A gentleman? The governor, perhaps, or Finch or one of the burgesses. Marlowe could well imagine what they would have to say.

  “Very good, show him in.” There was a pushing and wrestling in the alleyway. Whoever the visitor was, he was getting rough treatment from the men. If it was the governor, this would go even harder on them.

  The gang of men parted like tearing cloth and the gentleman stepped forward. Marlowe’s eyes went wide, his mouth dropped open. He took an involuntary step back, so shocked was he, for the visitor was George Wilkenson, hat and wig

  gone, clothes twisted, sweating with fear, standing there in the door of the guardship’s great cabin.

  The questions swirled around in his head. His eyes narrowed. He glared at Wilkenson.

  It occurred to him that he could hang the bastard then and there. If he just said the word he felt confident his men would put a halter around Wilkenson’s neck and run him up to a yardarm. At the very least, they would not try to interfere if he did it himself. From the look in Wilkenson’s eyes Thomas guessed it had occurred to him as well.

  “Come in,” Marlowe said, and Wilkenson stumbled into the cabin, pushed from behind. “Get back on deck, you men!” Marlowe shouted, and the men dispersed, laughing, howling. Bicker-staff shut the door.

  They stood there, the three men and Elizabeth, silent, staring at one another. Finally, Marlowe spoke.

  “This is most unexpected.”

  “I would imagine so.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I have come to beg you, with all humility, to come to the aid of this colony. You-you and your men-are the only force in the tidewater that can stand up to these animals.”

  Marlowe stared hard at him. He was telling the truth. This was no trick. “Indeed. You have come to ask that I lay down my life, and the lives of my men, to save the great Wilkenson estate? Is that it?”

  George took a step aft and peered out of the big stern window of the great cabin. “That fire, the closest one, that is the Wilkenson estate. It is quite beyond saving. It is the rest of the colony that concerns me now.”

  “And do you know who these ‘animals’ are? Who their captain is?”

  “He is some pirate named LeRois, that is all I know. And he is here in part because of my father. I am utterly ashamed of my family’s role in this. Had I even an ounce of pride left I could not have come to you, but I do not, and so I am />
  willing to admit here and now that you, and you,” he nodded to Elizabeth, “have been horribly used by me and my family.”

  Marlowe just stared at him, then sat down behind his desk and continued to stare. He did not understand how Jacob Wilkenson was responsible for LeRois’s presence on the bay. That was an intriguing bit of news. He did not know what to say.

  “My father is dead by now, I should think,” Wilkenson continued, “and if you do this, if you stop them from killing anyone else, then you shall never have any trouble from my family again, I swear to that.”

  Marlowe swiveled around and stared out the window, at the flames reaching up over the trees that surrounded the Wilkenson home. The only thing more pathetic than Wilkenson’s pleading was the fact that it was necessary for him to plead at all, to plead with Marlowe to do what he had sworn he would do. If the Wilkensons had used Marlowe poorly, then they, too, had been poorly used by him. They were all of a kind: Wilkenson, Marlowe, LeRois. Pathetic.

  He turned back to the men in his cabin, and his eyes met Elizabeth’s. “What think you of all this?” he asked, as if Wilkenson were not there.

  “I think George Wilkenson is vermin, but what he has done, coming here, asking this of you, is the bravest act I have ever seen from any man.”

  “Hmmph. Well, you may be right. But he asks something that I cannot do. I cannot beat LeRois. Nor do I feel much compelled to see all my men die to defend people who have behaved with so little honor.”

  Bickerstaff spoke for the first time. “You asked me once, you may recall, what I thought was the difference between a commoner and a person of gentle birth.”

  “I do recall. You said that the one had more money than the other, and the one with more money made a greater pretense at honor, though in fact he had it in no greater measure.”

  “That is what I said, and I should think all that we have seen this past year would bear that out. But that does not mean

  that honor is not worth striving for, even if you are the only one in the land doing so.”

  Marlowe leaned back in his chair. His eyes moved from Bickerstaff to Wilkenson to Elizabeth, and then back to Bickerstaff.

  “I cannot beat him,” he said again.

  “That is unfortunate,” said Bickerstaff, “but it is not important. It is only important that you try.”

  Marlowe looked down at his desk and rubbed his temples. What Bickerstaff was saying, what Elizabeth had been saying, was right. He knew it. And he was afraid. That was the truth, distilled to its purest essence. He was afraid of LeRois because he knew all that LeRois was capable of doing. His head was starting to ache. He was sick of being afraid.

  “Very well,” he said at last. He put his hands down flat on his desk, pushed himself to his feet. “We are all to die eventually.” He looked at Elizabeth, held her eyes. “Let us take the advantage given us by our sex. Let us have it said that we died with honor.”

  Chapter 33

  THEY WALKED back the way they had come, across the fields and along the dirt paths running beside the wide James River and down the smooth rolling roads. Pockets chinked with coins and silverware and other trinkets stuffed hurriedly into them. Pirates labored under bags filled with the bounty of their raid.

  It was a dark night, but they had little difficulty in seeing their path. The flames from the last house they had set off reached far into the sky and danced and leaped across the ripples on the river’s surface in bright flashing patterns, just as LeRois had hoped.

  And when the light from that conflagration grew too distant to do them any good they came to the mill, which was still burning well, and then to the other house, and then the house before that, their own destruction lighting their way back.

  They returned at last to the first house they had torched that night. It was no more than a heap of glowing embers, but there were embers enough to light the bank of the river where their boats remained fast in the mud.

  “Vite, vite, come along, hurry,” LeRois prompted the men. They had covered in their round trip perhaps six miles, and the Vengeances were dragging along, shuffling. The fire had gone out of them. It had been a long night, even for men well used to demanding physical activity, a long night of constant motion, screaming, drinking, destruction.

  But it was not yet over, at least not as far as LeRois was concerned. There still remained the most important job, that of ushering Malachias Barrett through the gates of hell.

  The heap of debris that earlier that evening had been a plantation house glowed red and orange, and the river picked up the muted colors and threw them back. Any light that might have come from the stars or the new moon was largely blotted out by the haze of smoke that hung over the countryside, a bitter, stinging smoke, smelling of charred wood and burnt paint and the ashes of three generations of tidewater wealth.

  They stumbled down the long field, filing past the hillocks with their tobacco plants, and loaded their sacks into the boats. Then one by one they pushed the boats out into the stream and pulled themselves aboard and took their places on the thwarts.

  LeRois went last, climbing into the longboat before it was pushed off. He did not want to get his shoes wet. It was not fitting for the capitain to walk through the mud like a pig.

  The small crew aboard the old Vengeance had managed to work the decrepit ship upriver and drop anchor just below Hog Island. The Nouvelle Vengeance was at anchor as well, having floated free once the tide had lifted her off the sand.

  LeRois grabbed hold of the cleats on the side of the Nouvelle Vengeance and pulled himself up onto her deck. There was no one there to greet him, no one conscious, in any event. Bodies were sprawled here and there, passed out in the warm night air, some still gripping the bottles they had drained.

  “Uhh,” LeRois grunted. Let them sleep. Let them all sleep. He would remain awake and vigilant. He would watch, because he knew that Malachias Barrett would come to him once again, and he would send his old quartermaster on that long voyage of the damned. They would all go, if it came to that.

  George Wilkenson was surprised at the quality of the horse he was riding, the steady planter’s pace it was able to maintain, the good manners it displayed. He was surprised because it was

  Marlowe’s horse, taken right from his stable, the old Tinling stable. George had thought Marlowe knew nothing about horses.

  Perhaps he did not. Perhaps it was his Negroes who had trained the beast, just as his Negroes had been responsible for that fine crop of tobacco that he and his father had burned. Free Negroes, who stayed and worked of their own volition. George shook his head at the very thought of it. Marlowe was an enigma, and George was almost sorry that he would never have the chance to fathom him.

  He had left the Plymouth Prize shortly after his meeting with Marlowe. Marlowe had actually asked him to stay, suggesting that it would be safer for him to remain aboard the guardship, but that was too much. Coming to Marlowe, begging for his help, was all the humiliation he could endure. Remaining in the man’s protective care was beyond the pale.

  Instead, he had done Marlowe a favor by escorting Elizabeth Tinling and Lucy to the Tinling-the Marlowe-house in Marlowe’s coach, which had been sent down for that purpose. He was well armed, Marlowe had seen to that, with a brace of fine pistols and a musket, and he sat in silence on the seat across from the women. No one said a word. They were careful not to meet one another’s eyes. It was not a comfortable trip.

  When at last they arrived at Marlowe’s home, having encountered no one on the road, George spoke.

  “Might I have a horse? Any will do. I do not know when I will be able to return it.”

  Elizabeth glared at him, made no effort to conceal her dislike. “The horses here are not mine to let out, but under the circumstances I think Captain Marlowe would not mind.”

  “Thank you.” He turned to go, then paused and turned back. He had the urge to reach out and hug her, an all-but-irrepressible need for some human contact, a touch, an embra
ce. But he knew the kind of rebuff he would suffer if he tried.

  “Elizabeth…I am sorry. I can say no more than that.”

  She had looked at him for a long and awkward moment. “I am sorry too,” she had said, then turned and disappeared into the house.

  He slowed the horse to a walk as the loom of the fire from the Wilkenson house became visible over the trees. The road he had taken ran roughly parallel to the river, an almost direct route from Marlowe’s home to the Wilkensons’. The last time he had ridden that way was when they had returned from burning Marlowe’s tobacco. Now it was his own family suffering the ravages of the flame.

  He turned the horse down the long road, past the oaks, to the front of the house. The second floor had collapsed. The entire place looked more like a giant bonfire than a home, and even from one hundred feet away he could feel the blast of the heat.

  He stopped and watched as the fire consumed the only home he had ever known. He imagined his father was in there somewhere. His funereal pyre was made up of all the things that three generations of Wilkensons had struggled to accumulate in that new world, all the dreams of wealth that had first brought them over the wide ocean.

  George shielded his eyes from the blaze and looked off to the side of the house. The stable was still intact. The fire had not managed to jump across the fifty feet of close-cropped grass that separated it from the main house. That much at least was a relief, for the Wilkensons’ horses were the only thing left on earth that George cared about.

  He flicked the reins against his horse’s neck and the animal headed off toward the stable, taking skittish steps away from the burning house and looking at the fire in wide-eyed fear. Under a less-skilled rider the horse would have bolted already, but George Wilkenson had a certain authority with the beasts. It had always been a source of pride for him, one of the few.

  Around the far side of the burning building he caught a movement, a flickering shadow against the yellow and red flames. He pulled the horse to a stop. There was someone there, a figure darting away from the house. He watched the