James Nelson - The Pirate Round

The soft padding of feet beyond the door, the sound of his wife, Elizabeth, coming down the hall. He looked up at the doorway and then down at the chart, then up again, frozen in indecision. He did not want Elizabeth to think he was studying the thing, because he was not. But neither did he want her to catch him trying furtively to hide it from her.

In the few seconds it took him to not make a decision, the decision was made for him when Elizabeth appeared in the door, gave a light rap on the frame. “Thomas, do you have a moment?” She held in her arms the big ledger books for Marlowe House, which were her special charge.

“Yes, my dearest, of course. I was just, well…”

Elizabeth crossed over to the desk, glanced down at the chart that Marlowe was now rolling up with a great show of innocence. “Madagascar and the Indian Ocean?” she said. “I did not know you had such a chart.”

“Yes, well, I have had it these many years. Just wondering about something. Francis and I were wondering about the size of Madagascar, you know. Turns out to be half again as long as I had thought.”

“Hmm-hmm” was all that Elizabeth said. She laid the ledgers down on the desk slowly, a somber and foreboding gesture. “I have brought the accounts up to date. It is not a pretty thing, I fear.”

Marlowe stared at the ledger books, hating them, as if they were to blame. He held them in the same light as he had held all books before he learned to read-as something he did not understand and therefore something to fear.

“Are we in debt?”

“No.”

“Well, thank God for that at least.” Debt was a death knell in the colonies. Once money was owed to merchants in England, men far beyond the reach of careful scrutiny, it was nearly impossible to get out.

It was stunning how quickly a merchant’s fawning respect turned to scornful abuse once a planter owed him money.

“Yes,” Elizabeth agreed. “It is something. But the funds held by the bank are nearly gone, and, I fear, the… ah… contents of your warehouse in Jamestown are all but entirely sold off. There is only the silk you were holding on to and some ivory, but we have never found much of a market for that here.”

“Hmm” was all Marlowe could say to that. The warehouse in Jamestown, up the river from Jamestown, really, was known to only himself and Elizabeth and Francis Bickerstaff. It had been abandoned for years before Marlowe bought it, secretly, and it appeared abandoned still. In it he kept the booty he had gathered from his activities that, if not entirely illegal, would certainly have raised eyebrows-and questions-among those in authority.

That was the bounty that had carried them along thus far, through falling tobacco prices and rising wartime costs. And now it was gone.

Marlowe rubbed his temples. “Very well. What is to be done? I’ll confess I have no notion.”

“Ah, as to that… I did have one thought…”

Thomas looked up at his wife. She was displaying more hesitancy than was usual for her, and it piqued his curiosity.

“Yes?”

“Well, it seems to me there are two things that are making it quite impossible for us to realize any profit from our plantations-any of us here in the Tidewater. The first is the damned shipping rates. With the dearth of seaman and ships, we’ll not pay below fourteen pounds a ton this season, which is madness. In the best of times that would eat up most of our profit.”

Marlowe leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers together. “Mmm-hmm,” he agreed, watching Elizabeth. She had rehearsed this speech, he could tell, so she must be coming to something interesting. Interesting enough for her to be nervous about mentioning it to her husband, a man from whom she had no secrets.

“The other thing of it is the convoys,” Elizabeth continued. “All the ships gather together, we all load our tobacco aboard, and then the navy ships escort the whole lot across the ocean to London. The entire year’s crop arrives on the dock at the same instant, creates an immediate glut. The damned merchants name their price, and they ain’t overgenerous. There is no profit to be made with those considerations.”

“Mmm-hmm. And your thought…?”

“Yes, well… you have a great advantage over the others, you see. You, unlike most in the Tidewater, own a ship…”

He did that. The Elizabeth Galley. She was an old but solid merchantman when he bought her in ’02, and he had refitted her as a privateer. He had been forced to use her in hunting down his old friend King James, after he turned pirate. And once he had returned from that unhappy mission, Governor Nicholson had insisted on having back the Galley’s great guns, which were property of the colony and needed for her defense, now that England was at war.

Thus unarmed, and with Marlowe’s desire for cruising quashed by the horror of what he had had to do the last time he put to sea, the Elizabeth Galley’s rig had been sent down, and she had been moored in the freshets of the James River to keep her free of weed and teredo worm. And there she had remained.

“I do own a ship,” Marlowe agreed. “Are you thinking we should get into the business of shipping?”

“Yes. The cost of manning the ship would be nothing compared to the freight rates, I shouldn’t think, particularly if you were to command her.”

“I’ll warrant you are right about that. Seamen are hard to find, but we could fill out the crew with some of our people here.” By “our people” Marlowe meant the former slaves who worked the plantation. “Some of those young fellows would make first-rate seamen, with just a bit of instruction. But that solves only half the problem. We are still faced with the glut of weed once we are in London.”

“Yes, as to that… I had thought perhaps we could sail before the convoy. They will put to sea in three months’ time. Sure we could have the Galley ready before that. What are you grinning about, you son of a bitch?”

Marlowe was indeed grinning, nearly laughing at this. Elizabeth had not led the most upright life before she had married him, but since then she had shunned any kind of impropriety.

“You are suggesting we become smugglers?” Marlowe asked.

“No, not smugglers. It is not illegal to sail without the convoy, if we get a permit to do so.”

“But you know perfectly well that they grant permits only to well-armed ships, which we are not, not anymore. Besides, there is never enough time now to secure a permit.”

“Well, I had thought…”

“No, no. None of your excuses. I am not saying I don’t like the idea. I do. I just want you to say, ‘Yes, Thomas, I am suggesting we smuggle.’ ”

“Thomas, damn you…”

“Say it…”

Elizabeth glared at him, then seemed to accept defeat. She deflated, flopped down in the chair facing his desk. “Yes, Thomas, I am suggesting we smuggle. There is no way around it-we are lost otherwise. I have no doubt we can carry some of our neighbors’ tobacco as well. They would be as happy to beat the convoy as we would.”

Thomas looked at his wife, her lovely face now touched with sadness. She was twenty-eight years old, and the first twenty-three years had not been easy for her. But together they had managed to build something good at Marlowe House. An honest, respectable life. It was something new to both of them, and there was nothing Elizabeth would not do to hold on to it.

“I think this is a capital idea,” Marlowe said, and he was entirely sincere. “We might even pick up a cargo for the return voyage, perhaps buy some goods to sell when we are home again.”

It was a good plan. With just a little luck they would realize enough from this voyage to keep themselves out of debt for a few more years at least.