James Nelson: The Blackbirder

Marlowe turned, too late to help Elizabeth down from the carriage or across the broken ground, Bickerstaff having served those functions.

In the past she had forgiven him these lapses, but as the moment of his sailing approached she was becoming less and less understanding. He could see from her face that he had misjudged her present mood.

“Pray, forgive me, my dearest one. In my enthusiasm I have quite ignored you,” Marlowe said, as obsequious as he could be.

“Quite.” It was a humorless response.

“What think you of your namesake? Is she not beautiful enough to carry your name? The most beautiful ladies in the New World, both Elizabeths and both mine.”

Such silly flattery would not move Elizabeth Marlowe in the best of times, and it did not now. “I know little of such things. If you say she is beautiful then I take your word on it.”

“Will you come on board? Allow me to show you her finer qualities?”

“No, Thomas, I think not. I shall go and keep company with poor Mrs. Page, who has been so heartlessly abandoned by her husband.”

With that she turned and walked quickly back to the carriages, leaving Marlowe and Bickerstaff alone on the dusty landing.

“Well, Bickerstaff, it is you and me alone again. Let us go aboard before Page is able to do too much damage.”

They stepped up the gangplank and through the gangway into the waist of the ship. The new-vessel smells overwhelmed the competing scents from the land and the river, marsh and warm pine needles yielding to tar slush, pitch, resin, and varnish. It was a welcome change. Marlowe preferred those scents over any that God and the land could provide.

He paused, leaned back, looked aloft. A reflex action, the first bit of business when coming on deck. Meaningless, really, with the ship tied to the dock, the sails lying in great bundles on the quay.

Still, his eyes ran up the masts and along the yards and down the black standing rigging, looking for some flaw, something that needed correcting-running rigging led wrong so it might chafe through, deadeyes not perfectly aligned, any bits of rope hanging loose-but there was nothing. Just as there had been nothing the last time he had engaged in that exercise, early morning of the day before.

“Very good, Marlowe, very good!” Page came stamping up. “Tell me again where you found her. Boston?”

“ New York. She was a merchantman, of course. Named Nathaniel James. Owned by a merchant of the same name who got a bit overextended. Invested in some fool pirating nonsense to Madagascar, or some such. In any event, lost nearly everything. This ship had been dockside for two years, something of a wreck from the gunnels up. But sound, you know. In her heart, sound.”

“Shame you couldn’t have started from scratch. Man-of-war built from the keel up.”

“Ah, Hartwell, I am not so rich as you that I could do that!” Marlowe said, though it was a lie. He could have, had considered doing so, but big-ship building was largely unknown in America, and all but nonexistent in Virginia.

That meant England, which would have taxed his resources too greatly. At thirty-six years old, or thereabout, he was not so reckless as he had been a decade before. He might gamble most of what he had, but he would not gamble it all.

What was more, Marlowe did not care to linger around London ’s waterfronts, with the chance of being spotted by one of his old associates, or, more dangerous, one of his old victims.

“She is sturdy, nonetheless,” Marlowe continued, leading Page to the bulwarks. “Stripped her down to the frames from the waterline up, redid it all with live oak, two and a half inches thick. Now she is all predied for a fight. Should do for what I have in mind. We’ll not be fighting the French navy, you know. Fat, slow, underarmed merchantmen are what we are after.”

“Marlowe, you make me sick, sick, sir, with envy. Oh, the adventure of it all, not to mention the damned money you shall make! You’ll be back within the year and you’ll buy us all out, make yourself king of Virginia!”

Marlowe laughed. But the idea had merit.

Page slapped the barrel of one of the guns, grown hot under the insistent sun as if it had been fired again and again in some sea battle. He squatted, sighted down the gun, grunted as if he had gleaned some information from that exercise. “Salvaged off the wreck of the Plymouth Prize, are they?”

“Indeed they are.” The Plymouth Prize was Marlowe’s last command, his first legitimate one. She had been the guardship on the Virginia station, sent there by the Royal Navy to protect the colonies against pirates. Governor Nicholson had asked Marlowe to replace her corrupt and incompetent captain.

The cat, as it were, asked to guard the canary.

In fact, the cat had tricked the governor into giving him that enviable assignment, but that truth had never been discovered.

Marlowe’s foray into command of a Royal Navy vessel, decrepit as she was, had ended the year before, when the Prize and the pirate she was fighting had both blown apart like twin volcanoes, fire touching off their powder magazines.

Less than two dozen men had come through the explosion with their lives. Marlowe had been one. Had come through not just with his life, but with his reputation and fame secured for the bold act of fighting and beating the pirates who had laid waste to the countryside. Less publicly known, he had come through with a fortune in loot, secreted away in his Jamestown warehouse, taken from the sea robbers he had arrested.

It had been a successful year. He was eager for more of the same.

“How’d you raise them?” Page asked. “Grapple for ’em?”

“No, I had my people dive for them. Some of them are prodigious great divers.”

“Your Negroes?”

“Yes, indeed, my Negroes. They were able to slip harnesses around them, and we hauled them up.”

“Don’t know how you manage it. They’re terrified of the water, those Negroes, most of ’em. Pagan African water gods live there, or some nonsense. I don’t reckon I could get any of my niggers to dive like that with all the whipping in the world.”

“I shouldn’t imagine you could,” Bickerstaff interrupted. Such talk annoyed him greatly. “But if you treat them as men and pay them wages commensurate with the danger, you would be surprised what they might do.”

“Well…indeed…” Page’s voice trailed away into a cough.

“Nicholson’s let me have the guns on loan-still government property, of course. Reckons it official thanks and all that.”

“Damned hard to come by, great guns. I imagine I’d be privateering myself, but for want of great guns.”

The hammering, to which their ears had grown accustomed, stopped and a moment later King James stepped up through the hatch at the forward end of the waist.

He was dressed in a sailor’s loose pants and linen shirt, with a leather jerkin over that. His shirt and the waist of his pants were soaked through with perspiration; it looked as if he had been standing in the thin material clung to his chest and arms and the small of his back and accentuated the bold lines, the curve and ripple of muscle, the only benefit he had derived from years of heavy forced labor in the fields.

In his right hand he held a five-pound maul. With his left hand he wiped the sweat from his face, ran his hand back over his short cropped hair, took a chestful of the fresh air.

“Here’s that buck, King James!” Page exclaimed. “Might have guessed it was him doing all the pounding away, the eager dog!”

James looked over at the three men, noticing them at last. “Ah, Captain Marlowe, good day, sir. I didn’t hear you come aboard. Misser Bickerstaff, Misser Page.”

“James, what are you about, pounding away, and on the Sabbath, no less?” Marlowe asked.