James Nelson - The Pirate Round

“Here,” Yancy said, flicking his handkerchief at Bartleby Finch’s Black Dog tavern, the larger of the two official taverns in St. Mary’s, which stood on the northeast corner of the single crossroads.

The natives lowered the chair, and Nagel helped Yancy out, and the entourage paraded into the Black Dog. It had a low wattle ceiling supported by heavy beams-former deck beams-and had it been in London or New York or Norfolk, it would have been dark and smoke-filled.

But it was not. It was on a tropical island, and in keeping with that ideal climate, the tavern had big windows in each of the four walls, windows that were no more than square holes cut into the walls, unencumbered by glass or frames or shutters. They let in quite a bit of light, which unfortunately made the filth all the more visible. Still, the steady breeze kept the room largely free of smoke, despite the prodigious output of the many pipes clenched in rotting teeth.

Yancy’s entrance produced a brief pause in the bacchanalia going on in the Black Dog, as heads turned and greetings were called out to the lord who had come down from the hill. A table was vacated, and Yancy sat wearily down. Finch appeared, twisting a towel in his hand, saying, “Lord Yancy, ’tis an honor, sir, you blessing us, like this, with Your Lordship’s presence. Ale with you, sir? Or wine, or rum, sir?”

Yancy waved the man away with his handkerchief, did not waste the effort to speak. He ran his eyes over the low room. All there had gone back to whatever they were doing before he entered. He was not pleased, but he said nothing.

The Black Dog was something out of Yancy’s past, the ugly, rough waterfront taverns where fearless men gathered and drank hard and became even more fearless and more dangerous.

It was not the kind of place for a man like Yancy, a small man, a man who understood that it was brains, not strength of arm, that would set someone on top. It was all strength of arm in places like this. Brains were left with the horses, hitched to the post outside.

Yancy had never liked the Black Dogs of the world. They frightened him and still would, if he had not brought his own strength of arm in the form of Nagel and the others.

So he sat quietly and watched. Watched the big men in their blustering bravado, drinking hard and scratching and spitting tobacco on the bare wooden floor and groping the whores who fed off them. Thick, matted beards covering brown faces, flecked with the black freckles of embedded powder; sailor’s slops and long, sea-worn coats; ripped stockings thrust into battered shoes; crude cutlasses hanging from shoulder belts or fine swords-the bounty of some fortuitous strike, taken perhaps from the dead body of a merchantman’s officer or gentleman passenger-hanging from their belts. All these things, these familiar scenes from Newport and Port Royal, those traditional pirate havens, now transported half a world away.

And he was king of it. He sat and searched the crowd and tried to find the man, just the right man, who could occupy his throne after he had made his exit. He saw many who might be right, but no one who absolutely was.

And then, through the crowd, came Obadiah Spelt. Nearly as big as Nagel, with a beard bursting like an unattended hedgerow from his face and falling almost to his belly, dark eyes peering out from the thatch, a long black coat and waistcoat that still showed some embroidery through the filth.

Spelt, mug in hand. Without asking, he sat down at Yancy’s table and started to speak, and Yancy had to put his hand on Henry Nagel’s arm to restrain him from beating the man to death.

“Lord Yancy, damn me!” He held out a hand that Yancy did not accept and then withdrew it as if they had shaken. “Yancy, sir, I’ve a proposition I’ve wanted to lay at yer feet, so to speak, a main chance which I think we, being gentlemen of fortune, like we are, might just find to be a profitable enterprise.”

Yancy nodded as Spelt spoke, though he did not listen. Some nonsense about charging harbor fees and hiring Spelt as harbormaster or some such-it was of no interest to Yancy.

Rather, the reigning king listened to Spelt’s stupidity, his high opinion of himself, the megalomania that seemed to burst from him as if he were an overstuffed sack, and Yancy thought, You are the man for me.

The foul weather that the Elizabeth Galley had endured came to a welcome end, inboard and out, and quickly. It put Marlowe in mind of how Noah must have felt, feet on dry land, looking at that great arcing rainbow.

The storm blew itself out in the late afternoon, leaving only a lumpy, irregular sea as a reminder, and over the dark hours that, too, subsided into the ocean’s usual steady march of waves.

The next morning the wind was brisk, the sky blue, and it was up topgallants and all plain sail set as the Elizabeth Galley plunged along southwest, ever southwest, a heading she would hold until she had crossed the line of the equator and found the contrary winds in the Southern Hemisphere.

Her namesake, Elizabeth Marlowe, was recovered from her mal de mer and her conviction that her husband was a worthless, manipulative, sneaking bastard. Her awe with his daring, her appreciation of the risk he took to save the lives of strangers, gave her the leeway to reexamine her bitterness and anger. Her polarized feelings, like opposing forces that cancel one another out, gave her the chance to view her husband dispassionately.

In the end she decided that “manipulative” and “sneaky” were fair descriptions but that Thomas did not deserve “worthless” or “bastard.”

He was not wrong about the wealth to be had on the Pirate Round or the extent to which it could help them in their fiscal crisis. He was not wrong about the degree of protest he would have received from her and Francis. So he had made arrangements on his own. It was his ship, his right to do so. He had not wished to involve her. She had insisted on going along.

Thomas could not have foreseen what had happened in London or known how very fortunate it would be that he had made his arrangements. In the end his clandestine activities might be the very thing to save them all. He could be damned lucky that way.

The hidden money irked her still, the anxiety she had felt over their looming poverty, while all along he had a buried treasure, just the thing that pirates were supposed to have.

The irony, of course, was that real pirates did not bury treasure, despite the romantic notions that people harbored. They spent it long before they could get it interred. It took a retired pirate to have such self-control.

In the end she was willing to forgive him his foibles. By the first dog watch of the first glorious day after the storm, it was as good between them as it had been right after they met, the morning after the first time they had made love in the tiny cabin of Marlowe’s sloop.

It made her very happy to have that back again. As she stood on the quarterdeck, near him, watching him, she was very happy to not be angry with him anymore.

She thought of Madagascar and the Red Sea. If Thomas had proposed such a cruise back in Virginia, she would have scoffed at the notion, been horrified at the thought of leaving her home for so barbaric a place.

But Elizabeth was not of a docile bent; she did not suffer boredom easily. She would never admit it to Marlowe or to anyone, but in her heart she was thrilled with their pending adventure.

Bickerstaff was not so thrilled, though in his heart he was eager to see that strange, distant country. It was an intellectual curiosity, and if they were bound away for Madagascar and the Indian Ocean for any reason other than piracy, he would have been very excited indeed. As it was, he expressed nothing beyond an acceptance of the inevitable, like a prisoner aboard a man-of-war.