James Nelson - The Pirate Round

He closed the book, nodded, and the men at the inboard end of the plank lifted it high.

Marlowe did not see the body of Francis Bickerstaff slide off the plank, splash into the Indian Ocean, a dull white spot, circling down and finally swallowed up by the blue-black depths. He did not see it, and that was a blessing as far as Elizabeth could figure, because the grief would have killed him faster than the fever ever would.

Marlowe remained in a state of burning delirium for another week, sweating and shivering, racked by wild, disjointed dreams with profound overtones of guilt and loss, liquid dreams that made no sense save for the horrible emotions suspended within them.

Elizabeth stayed by his side, feeding him, bathing him, talking and singing to him, sleeping in a cot set up at his side. The Doctor came regularly, checked Marlowe’s condition, bled him and applied poultices and administered Peruvian bark.

Overhead, on the brightly lit deck, the ship settled into a routine of sorts, Billy Bird in command of the Elizabeth Galley, Honeyman elected quartermaster, the crew shaken down to their watches. But Elizabeth saw little of it, sequestered below in her twilight netherworld, stinking of disease and medicine and bilge.

Just after noon on the tenth day, around thirty-three degrees forty-five minutes south latitude, Marlowe’s fever broke. His mind was suddenly clear, and his skin felt cool. Not the unhealthy chill that led to trembling and chattering teeth, but cool, comfortable. He opened his eyes, turned his head, and he was looking at Elizabeth and she was looking at him, and tears streamed down her cheeks, and he wanted to reach out and comfort her.

He reached his right hand over to her, but there was something wrong because move as he might he could not see his hand, or his arm. He looked down, puzzled, looked to Elizabeth for some explanation.

She smiled, and the tears came faster, and she swallowed and reached over to him and stroked his face. “It’s not there anymore, my love,” she whispered, “but you will not need it because I am here.”

She fed him, gave him water, changed his clothes. She told him what had happened and called for Billy Bird, who was pleased to see him alive and likely to stay that way. Billy filled in those parts of the fight that Elizabeth did not know.

“But what of Francis? Where is Francis?” Marlowe asked, and he was not happy to see the looks on the others’ faces.

There followed on the heels of Marlowe’s recovery and his finding out what had happened in those last moments on St. Mary’s the blackest sort of grief, from which he could not surface. Nor did he try very hard, like a man overboard who has given up and lets the ocean take him.

He sat in the great cabin, staring out the windows at the sea rolling away astern of them, pictured Francis Bickerstaff’s body sinking down, down, down to depths the likes of which no living man could go, inhabited by creatures no one could imagine. He pictured the bound body coming to rest in the sand and the blackness.

Over and over, day after day, he tortured himself with that image. He ate little, spoke little. Elizabeth stopped trying to draw him out. Billy Bird remained in command, drove the ship around the Cape of Good Hope and into the northern trades and across the broad Atlantic. They never saw more than a glimpse of a distant sail, and wind and weather were their allies the entire time.

And for the whole of the crossing, Marlowe remained in his private hell, wallowing in his half-life of grief and recrimination, and in that twilight time the only real things were Elizabeth and the excruciating pain in his arm that was no longer there.

Then one morning Marlowe felt the motion of the ship change, and the sailor in him registered the change, despite his utter lack of interest in anything, and he knew that it was not a change in sea state but the feel of water that is embraced all around by land. Still that was not enough to stir him from his seat, staring out the stern windows.

Two hours later he could see on the starboard side the familiar outline of Cape Charles and to larboard Cape Henry, and he knew that they were once again within the confines of the Chesapeake Bay.

Half an hour after that he heard Elizabeth’s soft steps outside the cabin door. She opened it, stepped over to him, said, “Thomas, won’t you come up on deck?” It was the first thing she had asked of him in two months, the first time she had asked him to put aside his self-indulgent grief, and so without a word he stood and followed her out.

He climbed up on the quarterdeck, ignored the embarrassed looks and half nods of greeting from men who did not know what to say to him. He stood at the weather rail, that familiar spot; it was like putting on a well-worn glove one has not put on in years. Looked forward, past the mainsail.

Fine on the starboard bow was Point Comfort, the headland that marked the entrance to the James River, the last stretch of water between them and home.

Spring in Virginia. The sky was blue, the air rich with the smell of a fertile and living land. All around them green, where for months there had been only blue.

Point Comfort. Home. Marlowe’s hands began to shake, his lip began to quiver, and without a word he stamped off and down the ladder and aft to the privacy of the great cabin. He heard Elizabeth’s feet behind him. Of course she would know that he needed her at that moment. He needed her at every moment.

He swung the door open, crossed to the lockers aft, and she with him, and they sat down together, and he wrapped his one arm around her and buried his head in her shoulder and cried and cried, and he thought he would never stop.

He cried for Francis Bickerstaff and for all the others and for all he had lost and for his own stupidity. He cried because he understood that once upon a time he had had everything he had ever wanted with Marlowe House, had become the man he had once dreamed of being, the man Francis had taught him to be, and then he nearly threw it all away because he thought he could be richer still.

“Oh, God, God, Elizabeth, how could I be so stupid?” he asked into her shoulder. She did not give him an answer, and he did not need one because he knew the answer, and he knew he would never be so stupid again.

It had cost him his arm. It had cost him Francis. It had nearly cost him Elizabeth, several times over. He wept for all of it, all the way up the James River, and when at last they dropped the anchor, he had cried his grief out. He came up on deck again. A new man in a new season.

They took a boat to the shore and were able to hire a carriage back to Marlowe House. They left Billy Bird in command, left it to him to divide out the booty in the hold of the Elizabeth Galley. They had yet to make an official count, but even lacking that, the men knew that every one of them, every man aboard, was terribly rich, that if they did not spend it all in one wild, frenzied debauch, as their type was wont to do and as so many ashore would readily encourage them to do, then not a one of them would ever have to work again.

Thomas and Elizabeth Marlowe rode in silence down the long drive that led to Marlowe House. The flowers were just showing, the young leaves on the trees almost iridescent green. The home had been well cared for, as Marlowe knew it would be. It looked as if they had been gone only a fortnight, no more.

The carriage stopped, and Marlowe got out and helped Elizabeth out. They stood in front of their home and held one another and breathed deep, smelling the flowers and the woods and the fields. Thomas smiled, the first time he could recall doing so since they had sailed from St. Mary’s.

They were home. He was home. It was a home from which he did not intend to stray, ever again.