James Nelson: The Guardship

He had reason to be agitated. Marlowe had seen to that as well.

“Marlowe, Marlowe, how the devil are you?” Nicholson asked, plowing through the last of his guests and extending a hand.

“I find I am well, Governor, thank you. And yourself?”

“Fine, fine. As well as can be expected, with what I must endure. Bickerstaff, how are you, sir?”

“Very well, Governor, thank you,” said Bickerstaff, giving the governor a shallow bow.

“Listen, Marlowe, I know you did not come here to conduct business, and I must beg your forgiveness for making this request of you, but might we have a word in private?”

Marlowe had quite expected this, but still it was annoying, just at the moment when he was intent on approaching Mrs. Tinling. He looked across the room, but the dancers filled the floor and he could no longer see her. “I would be delighted, Governor.”

It took the two men another ten minutes to extract themselves from the ballroom. No one had come to the ball to conduct business, but still it seemed no one could resist the opportunity for a private word with the governor, even if it meant speaking into his ear over the sound of the music.

At last they came to the governor’s office, just down the hall from the chief entrance to the building. It was a beautiful room with shelves full of leather-bound books, an enormous desk, and racks of firelocks and pistols. The ceiling was twelve

feet high, and one wall was composed almost entirely of windows, which, mercifully, were flung open. The cool air wafted in, as refreshing as a rain shower. Marlowe wanted desperately to shed his wig and coat and enjoy the night air to its fullest, but that would never do in front of the governor.

“Sit, please,” Nicholson said, indicating a chair in front of his desk. He sat, and the governor called for his servant to bring a sneaker of punch, which he did, and pipes as well, and soon the governor and Marlowe were enjoying a private glass and a smoke.

“I suspect you know why I wish to speak with you,” the governor began.

“If it is about the silver, I pray you put it out of your mind. The fault is entirely my own. I should have expressed more curiously as to its origins…”

“Nonsense. It was in no way your fault, and your returning it thus was a noble gesture,” said Nicholson. “A noble gesture.”

A noble gesture, thought Marlowe. Indeed.

He had purchased an extensive set of silver tableware from Captain John Allair, captain of His Majesty’s Ship Plymouth Prize . The Plymouth Prize was the Royal Navy guardship on the Virginia Station, sent to enforce the customs laws and protect the colony against pirates. Virginia was the most valuable colony in all of America, but for all that the admiralty still considered the Chesapeake to be something of a backwater, a place to send their most rotten ships and failed captains. In Allair and the Plymouth Prize they had quite outdone themselves.

Like most in the long line of inept guardship captains, Allair had a number of businesses on the side, most of them illegal. One such business consisted of confiscating “contraband” goods off of arriving vessels and then selling them himself.

His luck in that venture came to an end on the day that he confiscated what was, unbeknownst to him, Governor Nicholson’s personal silver.

Less than a week after he sold the silver to Marlowe, Marlowe invited Governor Nicholson to dine with him. The governor had instantly recognized the tableware that he had ordered from London half a year before. For Nicholson, that was Allair’s final, intolerable act.

“I have suffered that rascal quite long enough,” the governor said, reaching across his desk for a pile of paper stacked near the edge. “The fact that he holds a commission as captain in the Royal Navy does not impress me. A thief’s a thief, no matter what his rank.”

Through the open windows Marlowe could hear the unrestrained revelry of the crowd in the square, the sound of which nearly overwhelmed the delicate music drifting in from the ballroom away down the hall.

The wide sleeve of Nicholson’s coat floated over the various things on the desktop-ink pots and quills and his glass of punch-as he reached for the papers. Marlowe tensed, waiting for him to knock something over, but he did not.

“See here, Marlowe,” Nicholson said, locating the paper he wanted in the stack. “This is a copy of the invoice for my silver.”

He handed the paper over, and Marlowe ran his eyes down the list. “One sugar bowl, silver, with king’s arms, one punch bowl, ditto,” he read. He nodded his head. It was not the first time he had seen that invoice, though Nicholson did not know that. “There is no question, sir, but that this invoice describes the silver I purchased from Captain Allair. By God, I do apologize.”

“No apology needed from you, Marlowe.” It was an awkward situation, awkward for both men. “As I said, it’s none of your fault. It’s all on that thief, Allair.”

“I am loath to think the worst of a King’s officer,” Marlowe said, “but I can’t imagine how he came to have your silver.”

But of course that was not true, not true at all. Marlowe knew perfectly well how Captain John Allair had come by the governor’s silver.

He had asked him for it.

THE DANCERS came together, meshing like the gears of a clock, and blocked Elizabeth Tinling’s view of Thomas Marlowe at the far end of the room.

Or, more to the point, they blocked Marlowe’s view of her. For Marlowe had been looking, had been bracing himself to ask her for a dance. She recognized the look, the posture, and she would have welcomed the overture.

On the one hand, it would have saved her from having to further endure the vapid young Jamestown fop in the brocade coat who was trying to engage her in conversation.

On the other, it would have saved her from Matthew Wilkenson, who was also eyeing her and was ever so casually approaching, a wolf circling toward an animal too wounded to escape.

Of lesser consideration was the thought that she might do well to become better acquainted with Mr. Thomas Marlowe, might even enjoy his company. But now the open space was filled with dancers and she feared the moment was lost.

“I swear,” she replied to whatever the fool from Jamestown had said, “this heat will be the undoing of me. I feel positively faint.”

She flashed him a quick smile, cast her eyes over the room.

Governor Nicholson was making his way over toward Marlowe, which would end any chance of Marlowe’s rescuing her, but it was an interesting development nonetheless.

“…and so I said to him, ha, ha, ‘Well, sir, if this is the finest horse you have to offer-’” the idiot in the brocade coat was saying.

“Oh, I beg, sir,” she interrupted, “but at the banquet table they have an everlasting syllabub for which I absolutely perish. Might I trouble you to fetch me one?”

“But of course. Your servant, ma’am.” The young gentleman bowed and grinned, delighted to have some service to perform. He pushed his way through the crowd toward a table that to Elizabeth’s certain knowledge contained no syllabub at all, everlasting or otherwise.

She smiled at his back, wondering how long he would search for it. Quite a while, she imagined. He would not wish to come back empty-handed. She felt just the tiniest glimmer of guilt at using him thus, but she could not bear to listen to him for one moment more, and such practical jokes were her secret delight.

And men could be such fools.

She turned back to the endlessly fascinating crowd, social interplays, the feints and attacks and flanking movements of the colony’s ruling class. A good deal of surreptitious attention was being paid to the governor, who was leading Marlowe out of the ballroom, a development that piqued her curiosity as well.