James Nelson - The Pirate Round

“Richier offered you one? Just like that? Did he think it his duty as host? Is that a consideration he extends to all his guests?”

“Well, I may have offered him some little token, I do not recall.”

Bickerstaff just looked at him, making a small shaking motion with his head, and Marlowe could see he was taken aback by what he was hearing.

After all these years, and you are still surprised by me, Marlowe thought. But wait, my friend, it gets better yet.

“Very well, privateering,” Elizabeth said. “You have a commission, it is as legal as it is wont to be.” As a young woman, beautiful and destitute, Elizabeth had been forced into prostitution. She understood the occasional need for pragmatism over loftier moral considerations. “But Madagascar is halfway around the world. We have no provisions and no money to buy them.”

“Ah, as to that, I do happen to have a bit tucked away,” Marlowe said. “Enough certainly to provision for the voyage.”

“ ‘Tucked away’?” Elizabeth asked. “You mean to say you have money-specie-that I did not know about?”

“Well, yes, in fact. I buried it on the property, just after I bought it. Before we were married, ages before. Quite forgot about it, really. Just thought to dig it up before we left.”

Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to look stunned. Before she could speak, Bickerstaff said, “I know the Moors are considered easy game, but we have no cannon, no small arms, no powder. Sure they are not so cowardly that they will surrender to an unarmed vessel?”

“I think the small pittance I have should be enough to buy us those things. Cannon, small arms, powder-yes, I reckon we can stretch it enough that we might get what we need.”

“But where? What chandler will you apply to for those articles?”

“We shall get them in Madagascar, my dear Francis! All things are to be had in Madagascar.”

“Hold a moment.” Elizabeth found her voice at last. “Do you mean to say that you have specie enough to provision and arm this ship? That you have all this time been in possession of enough money to do all that, and you let me think we were on the very edge of ruin?”

“Ah…” Marlowe stalled. From the moment he decided to dig up that hidden booty, he had envisioned this scene. It had been like watching a great storm building on the horizon, knowing it could not be avoided, that it would lash him eventually. And here it was.

“Yes, I suppose so,” he said. “But I cannot tell you all my secrets, now can I? You would fast grow bored with me if I did not retain just a little mystery.”

Marlowe did not think that his flip answer would placate her, and he was right. He saw her eyebrows come together, her lips purse, her arms fold, and he knew he had not yet felt the brunt of the storm. We’ll run before it under bare poles, he thought. There is naught else to do.

“Well, I reckon you got this all thought out!” Peleg Dinwiddie said. His voice was loud and enthusiastic, and it startled the others, who, being wrapped up in layer upon layer of emotion and personal history and the subtleties of their relationships, had entirely forgotten that he was there.

Bickerstaff looked sharply at Marlowe. “Thomas, I find your coyness frankly offensive. Pray do not pretend you have not planned this for some time.”

Bickerstaff was right, of course. Marlowe had been planning it for some time. Years. Ever since the horrible memory of his pursuit of King James had begun to fade. Ever since his fortunes had begun to ebb and his boredom and disgust with the gentry of the Tidewater, of the idle life of a lord of the manor, had begun to flood. Ever since then he had been planning this, even if he had never said so explicitly, not even to himself.

He was sick of playing the gentleman around Williamsburg. He was sick of worrying about money. He was sick of the small beer of tobacco cultivation. He was ready for a big payoff.

“Perhaps I have. And a damned good job, too. Because we would be shipwrecked, ruined, with no options, if I had not.” Marlowe was growing weary of the coy act as well. “So I have steered us to a place where we might find some real money. If any of you can advise some other course, then I am pleased to listen.”

The great cabin was silent, an uncomfortable, grim, angry silence, as each person’s eyes shifted from one to another. Dinwiddie alone did not look angry. He looked worried, and Marlowe guessed that he was afraid someone might talk the captain out of steering for Madagascar.

But Marlowe knew that would not happen.

“No,” Bickerstaff said at last, his words clipped. “No, we have no choice. That is your genius, Thomas, it always has been. You do not ask others to follow you; you maneuver them until they have no choice. You did it with the Plymouth Prize, you did it when we hunted for King James, and you are doing it now. I am in awe, sir, of your skill.”

“I will accept your compliment, whether you meant it as such or no,” said Marlowe.

“Of course, tricking us into acquiescence is one thing. Your plans are for naught if the men will not agree.”

At that, Peleg Dinwiddie actually chuckled, an odd sound in such a charged atmosphere. “Oh, sir, I do not reckon you’ll get much fight out of them!”

Dinwiddie was right about that. Once those in the great cabin had agreed to Marlowe’s plans-or had at least yielded to the dual thrusts of logic and coercion-they made their way to the quarterdeck. Thomas could see the curious glances, the eyes following them as they climbed up the ladder aft. Every man aboard the ship understood what had taken place in London, the predicament that Marlowe was in, the fact that they were each owed money. They knew that the ship’s decision makers had spent the entire morning in the great cabin, and they guessed that some word was imminent.

“Mr. Honeyman, pray assemble the men aft,” Marlowe said. Honeyman nodded, called the word down the deck. Men came up from below, down from aloft, back to the after end of the waist, where they assembled, some standing, some sitting, all of them looking up at the quarterdeck like groundlings before a stage.

Marlowe looked down at them. Half of the faces looking up at him were black, and that surprised him. He did not often see the whole crew en masse, and so accustomed had he become to their odd makeup, so integrated into the shipboard life were the former field hands, that Marlowe had lost track of the fact that this was something unusual.

He had always counted the field hands as his own faction on board. He, after all, had freed them from slavery. They were the men of Marlowe House, his people, standing between him and whatever mutinous, piratical villains they might be forced to ship.

But now, looking out over the hands, he was not so sure.

The men no longer grouped themselves by race. Though they appeared to stand in a loose mob, black and white, Marlowe could see that they were in fact gravitating into their watches, starboard and larboard, each with his own, and also into that most intimate of shipboard divisions, the mess.

The clothes that the young men from Marlowe House had made new on the passage to England were now worn and tar-stained and patched. The men themselves had the loose-limbed, casual stance of the true deep-water sailor, like men possessing enormous strength of arm and endurance but not willing to waste any of it. They had the sailor’s cocksure, jaunty quality. They seemed to swagger even when they were standing still.

The blacks were no longer the men of Marlowe House, they were Elizabeth Galleys now, loyal to their ship, loyal to their mates foremost. Once he could have counted on their support, but now they would be as unpredictable as any crowd of sailors.

The lower deck was the most heterogeneous workplace in the world.