James Nelson - The Pirate Round

He stepped aft to the quarterdeck. Bickerstaff and a very worried-looking Dinwiddie were there.

“Things did not go well?” Bickerstaff asked.

“Not so very well, no. Not well at all, in fact.” He looked around. Honeyman had saved his life by coming to his aid, but that meant that word had not been passed to Dinwiddie to ready the ship to sail.

Marlowe folded his arms, looked down the length of his deck, tried to get his thoughts in some order. Press was dead-he had to be, or he would have gotten back into the fight-but the others, Press’s men, had escaped. How much did they know of Marlowe’s past? Of why Press had arrested him? Who might they tell? Did he, Marlowe, still need to flee?

If they sailed now, they would be leaving behind their tobacco and that of their neighbors. The parsimonious Dickerson was not going to pay them unless they demanded payment in person. If they did not, they would be ruined.

“Mr. Dinwiddie, what is the state of the tide?”

“On the ebb now, sir. We’ll have low water in two glasses. I was just getting ready to drop the second bower to moor her.”

“No, no. We need no more anchors. Let us roust up all hands, quietly, and rig the capstan. We will win our anchor and drop downriver. A mile or two, I should think.” The wind was light, but they had an hour more of ebb tide that would sweep them along, a few miles at least.

That should do for now, just to see how things lay. Perhaps cover up the ship’s name on the transom.

Dinwiddie passed the order. Grumbling, half asleep, the men staggered up from below and went through the paces of rigging the capstan. Marlowe saw glances shot back aft, men in huddled conversation, the signs of fear and discontent. Trouble building like thunderheads.

Goddamn it all, not bloody again, he thought.

He wondered if there would ever come a day when some worthy genius would invent a miraculous engine that would replace all sailors, so that he might never again have to suffer their whining malcontent.

“Might I inquire, Thomas, what happened ashore?” It was Bicker-staff, pulling him from his foolish reverie.

“Do you recall, Francis, when I told you of the raid I undertook on Nombre de Dios, when I was a young man? And the captain, Roger Press, who betrayed us?”

“I do. You marooned him, as I recall.”

“Yes, well, he did not stay marooned. In fact, I saw him this very night. He claims to have a queen’s commission, which I doubt very much. But he did have four armed men with him, which were harder to deny.”

Bickerstaff began to say something else, but they were interrupted by Duncan Honeyman, coming up from the waist, taking the quarterdeck steps two at a time. “Capstan’s rigged, Captain,” he said in his nonchalant way. He glanced up at the rig overhead, then forward, and then in a different tone said, “Lads forward ain’t happy, Captain, I got to tell you. They don’t know what’s acting, and they ain’t happy.”

Marlowe looked hard at Honeyman, said nothing for a minute. “I could care less if the men are happy or not. They have their orders. I am in command here, not you.”

“Don’t mistake me, Captain. This ain’t any of my doing. I’m a messenger, no more.”

“Indeed. Well, Honeyman, in my experience, the message usually starts with the messenger.”

“Usually does. But not here. Thing of it is, sir, the men thought they was signing on aboard a merchantman, and maybe for the Red Sea. They didn’t reckon on being taken in London. They don’t care to hang as pirates.”

“They will not hang as pirates.”

“They don’t know that, sir. And, respectfully, you don’t neither.”

Marlowe and Honeyman stood two feet apart, staring at one another. I should have reckoned Honeyman for a sea lawyer, damn his eyes, Marlowe thought. If Honeyman thought that coming to his aid in that street brawl would give him leave to take such liberties, he was mistaken.

But Thomas understood, and he knew that Honeyman understood, that a sailor was not a soldier. He would not risk his neck if there was no reward for it. Loyalty was a precarious thing with men who moved easily from one ship to another.

“Very well, tell the men that it is an extra shilling for every man for tonight’s work.”

“Very good, sir.” Honeyman betrayed no reaction to this, just turned and went forward.

Bickerstaff stepped up beside him. “You must bribe the men to do your bidding?”

“If the bidding smacks of the threat of arrest, yes, I do. On the open sea I could bully them more, but I can do only so much with the shore two cable lengths away.”

Marlowe paused for a moment, watched as Honeyman passed the word of his offer of a bonus, saw faces brighten considerably. “If there was nothing… questionable about what was acting, then the threat of being accused of mutiny would keep them in line. It is my damned luck that these villains always seem to have the upper hand because I always seem to be doing something that skirts the law.”

“Your ‘damned luck’? I think luck has very little to do with it, my dear Thomas. I should look more to your own natural tendencies.”

“Whatever it might be, we need their cooperation. If they desert and we lose this tobacco, we are done for.”

“Done for indeed. Whatever did Honeyman mean by ‘maybe for the Red Sea’?”

“The Lord knows. I think that Honeyman is something of a rogue. I am sorry now I shipped him aboard.”

Marlowe turned slightly until he could feel the light breeze on his cheek, glanced aloft at the rig and then over the taffrail at the vessel moored astern of them. In his mind he could see the fore topsail set aback, the helm over, the Elizabeth Galley turned downwind and tide. They were close to the vessel astern, but once they had pulled up to the anchor, there would be room enough for that turn.

In his mind the whole evolution was a done thing. He had now only to make the ship follow his vision.

“Mr. Dinwiddie, hands aloft to loosen tops’ls, and then let us haul up to the best bower,” he called, and Dinwiddie relayed the orders. He had been impressed with the need for quiet, so he modified his volume, though his tone did not change, with the result that it sounded like listening to Peleg Dinwiddie from a far way off.

The men moved fast up the ratlines and out along the yards-a single shilling could buy a lot of pleasure along the London waterfront- and a minute later the topsails were hanging in big baggy folds under the yards.

Down to deck again, and the capstan bars were shipped and the swifter rigged and the men in place, ready to heave ’round.

Marlowe glanced fore and aft. Haul up to the anchor, set the fore topsail, break out the anchor, and away they go, lost in the fog. Find a safe place in the river to hide, and then deal with the money he was owed. Simple.

“Very well, Mr. Honeyman, heave ’round!” he called.

“Heave ’round!” Honeyman called, soft but clear, and the men began to move in their slow circle, the cable began to come in, black and dripping through the hawsepipe, and Marlowe tried to contain the very uneasy feeling churning in his guts.

STUMBLING, CURSING, Roger Press ran down the road that bordered the river. Ten minutes of searching, with the fog like a veil that he could not push aside, and he managed to find one of the few hired boats still operating at that hour. The boatman was asleep on the thwarts, snoring obscenely, as was his one-man crew, until Press gave him a sharp poke with his sword.

The man bolted awake, furious and ready to fight, an emotion that died an untimely death with his first look at Press’s wet, bedraggled clothing, bright sword, and pocked face, twisted in an anger that the boatman could not hope to match.