James Nelson - The Blackbirder

That was not at all what one would expect to see aboard a ship anchored off Whydah.

And that meant that he had found King James.

James did little that day but watch and hide. When the others awoke, they crept down to the tree line and knelt beside James and watched the Elizabeth Galley coming to her anchor. They watched as her men brailed up the sails, laid out along her yards, and stowed the canvas as the ship finally came to a rest one hundred yards to seaward of their captured French merchantman. They said nothing.

Each one of the men crouching at the forest edge was intimately familiar with that ship. Indeed, so obsessed had Marlowe been with her fitting out that there was not one of his people who had not had a hand in it, from the men who had pounded home trunnels and drifts and stepped masts and hove out rigging gangs, to the women who had seen to making hammocks and outfitting the great cabin with curtains and cushions and even building some of the lighter sails, to the children who had been given tar brushes and buckets of slush and put to work at the messier jobs for which their juvenile indelicacy made them ideally suited.

The Elizabeth Galley was a part of their home, a fixture from the docks at Jamestown. After all they had endured, and all the miles they had sailed, there was something unreal about seeing her here. It was as if they had walked down the forest trail and come upon Marlowe House itself, transported whole and set down on that strange land.

Good Boy was the first to speak. “Goddamn, I ain’t never been so happy to see anything in my life.” A muttering of agreement followed.

James frowned, kept his eyes on the ship. The boys were reacting, they weren’t thinking. They were so far from everything they knew, hunted by strangers with whom they could not speak, in a land such as they had never seen before. Of course they would be relieved to see something, anything, familiar, even if that thing had come to carry them all back to the gallows.

Or perhaps not.

He himself was a dead man, he knew that. Everyone knew him, the black man who had fought at Marlowe’s side, the arrogant nigger who commanded the Northumberland. There would be nothing but the noose for him if he returned, and if the court did not deign to put it there, the mob surely would, and the white-suited Frederick Dun-more, Esq., leading the way.

But it was just possible that no one knew the identity of the young men with him. If Sam and William had kept their mouths shut, then Quash and Cato and Good Boy and Joshua might be able to return and blend back in with the others at Marlowe House and no one the wiser.

But the first step was begging Marlowe for his mercy, and that was asking a lot: asking a lot of Marlowe and of himself. He had never asked anyone for mercy before, and not surprisingly he had received little of it during his life. He would never ask for himself. But for these others, whose lives had been destroyed by his own unchecked rage, for them he would humble himself.

He was about to lead them out onto the beach when he saw movement on the Elizabeth Galley’s deck. “Hold a moment,” he said. They remained where they were, crouched at the tree line, watching as the Galley’s longboat was swayed over the side, as a party of men climbed down and took their place on the thwarts. The sunlight flashed on the white oar blades as they were raised up in two lines, and then the boat was under way, pulling for the French merchantman.

It covered the distance quickly, the oars pulled by expert hands. It swept around the stern, circled, disappeared from sight around her bow, then reappeared again.

“What he doing?” Joshua asked.

“Marlowe don’t know it ain’t a trap,” James said. “He don’t understand why he don’t see no men on board. He going to take a good look before he goes aboard her.”

The longboat stopped under the Frenchman’s counter, and though they were too far to hear any conversation, King James could well imagine the one that was taking place. Marlowe was looking for the white crew, trying to find out why this ship was manned by African women alone. Marlowe could speak a bit of the patois of the coast; he might even be able to communicate with one of them.

Five minutes of that, and then the longboat pulled up to the Frenchman’s side and one by one the men boarded her. James could not identify any of them in particular, but he had no doubt that one was Thomas Marlowe and another was Francis Bickerstaff.

Bickerstaff. He would be the key to this thing. He would be the calm voice of reason. If there was to be any cooperation, any mercy or forgiveness or contrition between two headstrong, arrogant, stubborn men such as King James and Thomas Marlowe, then it would be through the intercession of Francis Bickerstaff.

They watched for another ten minutes, but nothing of note happened, nothing at all that they could see. Marlowe and his men would be searching the ship, deck to keelson, moving carefully in case it was a trap.

It was time to confront him, time to prostrate himself before Thomas Marlowe and beg for the lives of his men. James looked up and down the beach, as far as he could see from their place of concealment, saw a dugout canoe pulled up in the sand. It would be a tricky thing, getting through the surf, but they would do it.

He turned to his men, was ready to order them forward, when he heard something else: voices, a number of them. They were not close, and were all but drowned by the crashing surf, but in the lull between the breakers he could hear them, talking loud.

“Come along,” he said, and rather than leading his boys out onto the exposed beach he led them back into the forest, deeper than where they had slept that night, to a place where the thick undergrowth hid them completely. “Wait here. I be back.”

James headed off through the woods, moving fast, despite the thick tangle of vegetation. He knew instinctively where each foot should fall, and the next, and the next. He moved silently, more silent than was necessary with the crash of waves a scant fifty yards away, following the line of the beach, moving toward the voices. He was amazed at how quickly the woodcraft he had known as a child came back, as if the knowledge of it was embedded in the ancient earth of that continent, and he needed only to be reunited with her to have all that dormant skill wake again.

They were standing at the trailhead, where the packed forest floor gave way to the fine sand of the beach. James could hear them clearly even before he could see them, and though he did not understand the words, he recognized the rapid, clipped sound of the Kwa language. They were Kru, Madshaka’s elite.

Another dozen steps and he could see them at last, in glimpses through the foliage, but it was enough to tell him what he needed to know. They were heavily armed, a hunting party, eight out of about twenty of the Kru who had stood by Madshaka. Apparently his place at the slave factory was not so secure that he was willing to send off even a majority of his private army.

The Kru might have been sent to hunt for James and the rest, but they were not hunting now. Rather, they were pointing out to sea, talking fast among themselves, with wild gestures, and again James did not need to know the language to understand what was being said. They were discussing the arrival of the Elizabeth Galley, the significance of the longboat going over to her.

Despite the rudimentary seamanship that James had drilled into them, ships and the sea were not their world. They would not recognize the Elizabeth Galley from the brief encounter they had had on the other side of the Atlantic. They would not know how to interpret this new development.

James knew already what they would do-send two men back to inform Madshaka of the Galley’s arrival, post two to watch the ships for further activity, send the remaining four off to hunt the Virginians- and five minutes later they did just that.