James Nelson - The Pirate Round

On her word the boatswain’s chair lifted off again, flew back over the water to Honeyman on the sea anchor, back for the next man and the next.

It seemed odd to Marlowe-he did not think Elizabeth had the authority to issue such orders-but she was doing it, and the others seemed to be obeying.

The men supporting Marlowe, Hesiod and Burns-one of Honeyman’s hard cases-carried him under the quarterdeck and down the alleyway and into the great cabin. They stepped through the door, and the heat from the small wood stove hit him with a shock like that of plunging into the ocean. His head swam, and his knees buckled, and he would have fallen if he had not been supported by strong arms.

They set him down on the locker aft, by Elizabeth’s orders, and began to strip him of breeches and waistcoat and shirt and underclothes. They dried him with rough towels, and he began to feel sensations coming back to his limbs, and he was overcome with fatigue.

“I must go back on deck,” he said, a weak protest.

“Nonsense,” Elizabeth said. “Mr. Dinwiddie has things well in hand. Put him in the bunk, pray.” This last she said to Hesiod. The former slave hefted up the now-naked Marlowe, and he and Burns carried him into the small sleeping cabin and put him in the bunk. He stretched out full length, and they pulled the blankets over him, and he could not recall anything ever feeling so good.

The two men disappeared, and Elizabeth stood over him, looking down. “Francis told me what you did. Risking everything to save those men. Stupid, stupid, going into the sea that way,” she said, but there was no anger in her voice.

Then, as Marlowe watched, she untied her bodice and let it fall and pulled down her skirts and let them pool on the floor. She lifted her shift over her head, and for a moment she stood there, naked, perfect, and then she slid into the cot with him, pressed up against him, warm and soft and so alive.

“Thomas, I swear I cannot tell if you are the biggest bastard in the world or the greatest man that ever lived.”

“Somewhere in between, I should think,” Marlowe muttered. He wondered if he had actually redeemed himself in her eyes, with his idiotic and ill-conceived heroism. It had never occurred to him that such might be the result.

In fact, as they had hauled him back aboard the Elizabeth Galley, his only thoughts had been a dull relief that it was over and the satisfaction of knowing he now had a dozen more hands to help him plunder the fabled treasure of the Moors.

“HEAR ME, Yancy,” said Obadiah Spelt, waving a chicken leg at the king of St. Mary’s, “when I am king here, we shall have a regular army, see? Drills, uniforms, the whole thing.”

Spelt took another bite and wiped his mouth with the wide sleeve of his coat, which was, incredibly, even less clean than the mouth he wiped.

Yancy just nodded and pressed his handkerchief to his mouth and coughed. Spelt was off again, spewing ideas as if he might spew dinner in the alley behind some penny ordinary. Not worth interrupting. Spelt was, after all, Yancy’s handpicked successor.

The disease was still ostensibly a secret, the cancer that was eating away at Lord Yancy’s guts, but rumors were spreading like yellow jack through St. Mary’s.

The symptoms could not have gone unnoticed: the weakness, the coughing, the spots of blood on the handkerchief. They had first appeared a few months before, grew worse to the point where Yancy could no longer deny it, at least not to his own people, the Terrors. He could not deny that the time had come to pick a successor.

Not from among his elite. For them, the secret place in the mountains. No, the successor had to come from down below, from the population who called St. Mary’s home. The successor could not know about Roger Press.

The town of St. Mary’s, if such it could be called, boasted two roads, sandy, deeply rutted, not built so much as beaten from the undergrowth. One road bordered the water, running along the shallow, open roadstead to where it terminated at a jetty, thrust out into the harbor bounded by shoreline on either side and Quail Island to seaward.

The other road crossed the harbor road at a right angle. It continued on up the side of the hill on which sat Lord Yancy’s home. The hill itself had been cleared years before, by Baldridge and his men, for material to build the home and to create open ground with no cover for a clandestine approach.

The high ground on which the house sat was really no more than a hump at the feet of the higher hills that stood behind the town, but it was on this hump that Baldridge had built the great house and encircled it with a wooden stockade. The road ran right to the big gate in the stockade and through it, where it spread out like a river delta into the acres of courtyard that surrounded the house.

The courtyard’s open ground might be a place for casual amusements such as bowling or cockfighting, but it was not designed as such. It was intended as a killing field where attacking troops, caught between the stockade and the big house, could be shot down from the high windows and balconies. Amusement was all well and good, but defense was primary.

It was through this gate, down this road, that the visibly ailing Lord Yancy and his entourage made their way for an ostensible and uncommon inspection of the town. Since first occupying the big house, Yancy had not often left it, and those forays had grown even less frequent over the past year.

Down the hill, with Yancy riding in a sedan chair and Henry Nagel walking by his side. St. Mary’s had prospered, Yancy could see that. He thought of the few dilapidated shacks that had stood at the intersection of the roads when he had first stepped ashore there; the dozen or so drunken wrecks, both pirates and natives, that inhabited them; the empty, rotting warehouses that Baldridge had left behind; the two half-sunk ships in the harbor.

The ships were gone, torn apart bit by bit to build the taverns and whorehouses that would serve the burgeoning town. Now there were half a dozen wooden buildings clustered around the crossroads and twice that number of permanent tents set up.

The population of the island fluctuated with the coming and going of the ships. There were never fewer than three hundred men there, and occasionally the number swelled to nearly a thousand. They sat at little tables outside the taverns and drank until they fell over, walked arm in arm with their whores along the harbor as if it were Pall Mall; they slept in upstairs rooms if they had been lucky in their hunting the Mogul’s ships or in the alleys between the buildings if they had not.

They were pirates. Wild, ostentatious clothes, money spent as though they could dig it from the ground, utter debauch. It amused them to ape the aristocracy in their clothes and manners, but they adhered to none of the self-imposed public restraint of the people of quality.

And why should they? They were the aristocracy here, and there was no one-no lords, no kings, no army, no navy, no magistrates-to tell them otherwise. Yancy would not. For all his rule over the place, he would not upset the fine balance of things that kept the money pouring in. The pirates were freer than any men on earth, because they took what they wanted and they truly, genuinely, did not give a tinker’s damn.

It was into this world, which had once been his world, that Yancy rode in his chair, borne by four strong native men. They moved slowly along the dusty road, and the pirates who were promenading there stepped aside and swept off their plumed hats and bowed deep with graceful and exaggerated moves, and the whores that were with them lifted their tattered petticoats and curtsied like women who still possessed a tiny portion of modesty and dignity.