by Mark J Rose
'But there's a lofty ship to windward, and she's sailing fast and free,
A cruising down the coast of High Barbary.'
'O hail her! O hail her!' our gallant captain cried.
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we;
'Are you a man-o'-war or a privateer,' asked he,
'A cruising down the coast of High Barbary?'
'O, I am not a man-o'-war nor privateer,' said he.
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we;
'But I'm a salt-sea pirate a-looking for my fee,
A cruising down the coast of High Barbary.’
O, 'twas broadside to broadside a long time we lay,
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we;
Until the…Norfolk shot the pirate's mast away.
A cruising down the coast of High Barbary.
'O quarter! O quarter!’ those pirates then did cry.
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we;
But the quarter that we gave them was we sunk them in the sea,
A cruising down the coast of High Barbary.
They broke out in roaring laughter after the song was over, and Matt joined heartily in their cheer. “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”
Chapter 2
Madam Grace Miller
Grace stopped to gather herself for the next exercise. She used the silence to pick up the full strand of barley that lay at her feet. Hay bales hadn’t been stored in this barn for many years, and it was spotless, but pieces of hay still managed to find their way onto the polished wooden practice floor. Grace suspected that an angel sat up there, somewhere, and flicked chaff from the rafters to remind them of who they were. She looked around at the walls and then up at the roof and its skylights hoping for some tangible proof of the God she knew permeated a building that had remained so central to their lives.
Grace watched the hypnotic flapping of the faded green strand of hay as she rolled it between her thumb and finger and her mind filled with images from a time, long ago, when her passion and fancy had been almost overwhelming. It was a time when an unconscious young stranger had laid there on the bench roughly where she stood now. She remembered trying to dismiss the feeling that there was something different about him, something unexplained.
Even her younger brothers had felt it. They told stories of this newcomer being from an exotic country, and their certainty only grew as he walked about the farm and spoke in his unrecognizable accent. Her youngest brother, Jonathan, suggested that the newcomer was a pirate running from the English authorities, but her other brother, Jeb, guessed that he was a French deserter escaping the war on the frontier. Grace had scoffed at their theories since it was uncommon sure that the young man was a drunkard with soft hands.
It had unsettled her that her father had put their family’s honor at risk by bringing a drifter onto their farm and she had told him as much. Back in those days, her father often made her very angry. She recalled the frustration she felt when his only reaction to her concern was to shrug. Grace and her mother had grown used to Thomas Taylor’s fits of compassion and the need he had for redemption for whatsoever he had done in his past. Much of the Taylor’s silver went to help the poor, but this was the first time he had offered their home to a pauper.
She was a haughty young girl then, but this didn’t keep her from stealing into the barn to make her investigation of the stranger as he lay sleeping. She thought about what she’d do if he suddenly woke to catch her spying as she tried to guess where he was from and why he was dressed so peculiarly. Drifters were common where they lived, and farmers mostly ignored them. Once he woke, this young intruder insisted that he had been born and raised in Philadelphia, but they all knew he was hiding something. She had contemplated him as he walked about the farm on those first days and she noticed how he looked at the simplest of things as if he was seeing them for the first time.
The more that Grace interacted with the young man, though, the more she wished that he fit the simple explanations of her brothers. Soon after realizing that he wasn’t a pirate or a soldier, Grace joined Jonathan on his mission to discover the stranger’s identity. She had encouraged her youngest brother to visit this interloper every day and report back as they clandestinely worked through the possibilities of his existence. It had taken about a week, though, for Jonathan to forget the alliance he had made with his sister and begin an original mission to help this stranger. After that, Jonathan’s reports disappeared almost entirely, and this obliged Grace to discover the man’s intentions on her own.
To Grace, there was nothing worse than a lettered city-boy, so the young man had irritated her right from the start. She saw how quickly he used words to win her family over. He was handsome in some odd sort of way, but so were other suitors who visited the farm to ingratiate themselves to her father, or the great men who came to buy their horses.
There was much about her father, Thomas Taylor, that Grace had admired, but his obsession with building the prominence of their family through her marriage had put a wedge between them. Grace’s vexation with her father had grown worse after her sister Kathryn had passed, and his ambitions had fallen entirely on her. She had loved her father and knew that he wanted what was best, but his treating her like a pawn in his social-status game was hard to accept. It made it worse, too, that even when Kathryn had been alive, that Grace had been singular in challenging their father. Her sister had been madly in love with Paul Payne, a wealthy Virginia horseman, and there could have been no better family alliance in her father’s eyes.
Grace was now far enough from those years to realize that her rebellion had caused her to drop her guard. A penniless commoner with a dark past was the advantage she needed to teach her father a lesson. As hard as she tried now, though, she couldn’t remember precisely what lesson she had been trying to impart. Grace had planned to keep the stranger at arm’s length and flirt with him enough to concern her father. She had lost control of the situation over the month that the uncouth young man spent working on their farm and gaining favor with her family. Even the dog, who had growled at the man almost unexplainably for an entire week, started to walk happily beside him and even sleep with him in the barn.
Matthew Miller had refused to act like the one-dimensional rascal that she needed him to be. He had empty pockets, but he didn’t act poor, and then he worked hard despite the blisters he hid on his hands, hands that gave him away as someone who hadn’t worked a day in his life. His white smile and his arrogant nature irritated her to her soul, and this irritation became worse when everyone in her family began conspiring against her in treating him as an equal. Who did he think he was, walking proudly about their farm? And more so, what was he hiding?
**********
Grace was ready to exercise again, so she looked away from the strand of barley and took the few steps to the wooden rack on the wall that held their swords, to drop the hay into the small tin garbage can that waited below. She returned to her position in the center of the polished wooden floor and retook her ready stance. With a shout, she stepped to the front target, went into a spinning sidekick and connected squarely with the thick wool pad supported almost twelve inches above her head. The target teetered across the floor to take a new position as it rocked rigidly on its sand-filled pedestal. She snapped into motion from where she stood, spun in a complete circle and hit the pad to drive the target back to where it had started. The feeling of satisfaction she felt every time she connected was something that remained unexplained.
Grace walked again to the center of the floor and began her final flurry of kicks and punches against the targets and leather bags positioned about the barn. When her barrage was finished, she stood there to catch her breath and reach down to feel the hardening bump in her belly; it would be a while before the swelling was enough to restrict her movements. The thought of a new baby in her arms flooded her with joy, and she felt her breasts flush at the feeling of another baby there. The mood was fleeting though and readily replaced wi
th concern for everything that should be done before the new arrival.
Plans always bounced endlessly around in her head after training, and even when they concerned some care, she welcomed the thoughts. She would come here in the late afternoon, shut and latch the big sliding door, change into her white robe, wrap the black belt around her waist and practice for an hour. She’d step through her poomsae and then stalk about the room in an all-out simulation of combat to become what her husband had described humorously as “the primal mother.” On the best days, the feeling intoxicated her, and she fancied herself having the prowess to protect all the children of the world. Somewhere near the end of her workout, though, her mindset transformed from that of an enraged mother grizzly to what she could only call a concerned mother hen.
She felt her belly again for the movement that was likely still a month away. Grace hoped that her husband returned from England in enough time. Sometimes he was too involved with the children, almost like a woman, and she wished merely that he’d go away. There’d be arguments during those times, like when Rebecca had first come to the farm as a wet nurse for Katie. After all his objections to the necessity of another woman nursing her child, she still could not understand his aversion to something so ordinary. Despite his stubbornness, she had come to depend on him to be there at the births when she was bruised, bloody and hopelessly weak. Grace felt some uneasiness, then, in an unrecognizable feeling of chaos that lay around the corner. It made her look upward again for that angel.
Knocking on the latched barn door interrupted Grace’s meditation and shocked her back into the present, and it was enough to be irritating. Everyone on the farm knew she was not to be disturbed during practice, but a quick glance at the clock told her that she had been there long past her usual time. “Yes,” she called.
“Madam,” she heard Rachael say. Grace walked to the door, unlatched it and slid it open.
“Yes,” Grace repeated, now facing Rachael, a pretty woman, in her mid-twenties. Rachael was the wife of Charles, their farm foreman.
Rachael gazed quietly into Grace’s eyes for longer than was comfortable, and then she spoke. “With child again, madam?”
Grace peered back at her, surprised. “Is it that noticeable?”
Rachael offered a knowing smile. “The Jefferson party is here,” she said. Her smile turned to something else.
Grace ignored the younger woman’s scrutiny and checked the clock in the corner. “He was expected this evening.”
Rachel shrugged. “Mr. Jefferson can be…enthusiastic.”
Grace looked again, thinking to address the disapproval she heard in Rachael’s tone, but the judgment had left the younger woman’s face. “Delay him until I can bath and dress for dinner,” Grace said.
“Yes, madam.”
Chapter 3
Sea Dog
Matt opened his eyes to the dim grey light that sifted through the porthole of his stateroom. Despite overdrinking the night before, his sleep had been heavy and refreshing. The tossing waves usually woke him many times during the night. Calm seas!
Matt jumped from his hammock in stocking feet onto the horizontal wooden floor of his stateroom. There hadn’t been a time since their journey began that he didn’t need to grab the rail for support after leaving his hammock. Matt stepped to the portal to see the Norfolk stopped in the water and engulfed in a dense grey fog. He pulled his shoes on, grabbed a jacket and rushed topside, surprised that there hadn’t been a ship-wide call to quarters. He stepped outside into a grey soup that obscured the entire deck. The mist made it difficult to tell whether any crewmen were about at all.
Matt scanned the surrounding sea looking for a shadow of the pirate ship, but visibility was too poor even to see the water. He pulled his jacket on against the cold wet air and made his way to the quarterdeck. The Captain was looking through a folding telescope as he turned on the deck. His first lieutenant stood next to him. They noticed Matt walking to them and each, in unison, put their fingers to their lips. Neither said a word until Matt was directly under the station, and when they did, their voices were low.
“Top of the morning, Mr. Miller,” First Lieutenant Jay said. “Capital you could join us.”
“No one woke me,” Matt said in a hushed tone. “How long have we been stopped?”
“Three hours, thereabouts,” Jay replied. “Since sunrise anyway.”
“Shouldn’t there be an alarm or something?” Matt asked.
The Captain took the telescope from his eye and looked down at him. “Let them finish their berth,” he answered. “Once we beat quarters, all hands until the wind returns.”
Matt crept up the steps to join them on the quarterdeck. “Any sight of the pirate ship?” he asked.
“No,” Pearce replied. He shrugged his shoulders. “They could be next to us in this fog, and we’d not know until their hooks were set.”
Matt looked all around the ship in response to Pearce’s comments.
Jay snickered. “Our heading is unchanged,” he said. “Not likely they’d circle full ‘round us.” He pointed to the port.
Matt followed the man’s finger. He smiled to himself thinking of how much he had once relied on Google Maps to tell him where he was going. Now he was in a time when men navigated across an entire ocean with only a clock, a compass, and a sextant. Finding London after ten weeks in the open sea seemed nearly impossible with the simple navigation instruments they possessed.
“Mr. Jay,” Pearce whispered loudly. “Pick three men. Take a jolly to see what you can see.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Jay replied. He looked toward Matt. “Have some rowing in you, Mr. Miller?”
Captain Pearce shook his head. “Paying passenger.”
“With all respect, Captain,” Matt replied. “I’d appreciate accompanying Mr. Jay.”
Pearce nodded. “Very well, carry on,” he said looking at Jay. “Return him safe and dry.”
“Some salt in his clothes would do him well, sir.”
“Safe and dry, Mr. Jay,” Pearce repeated. “And not a sound.”
Jay motioned for Matt to follow him as he walked across the deck to enlist two seamen. “Porter…Grey,” Jay whispered while motioning to the young men. “We’re taking a jolly to find our pirates.” The men stopped what they were doing and followed as they walked to a longboat rigged to one side of the ship. Both sailors were boys in Matt’s eyes.
“They are strong lads, Mr. Miller,” Jay said noticing his expression. “They’ll take care of the rowing. Pray, are your eyes sharp enough to scout?”
“Good enough,” Matt replied.
They watched the young sailors lower the boat into the water. Matt searched his memory for some recollection of this event, but there was nothing. It had been a long time since he had been able to see the future with any sort of clarity. He concentrated again, harder and desperate, and now felt a hint of connected images and shadows. Then, suddenly, there it was, a dark ship in the fog, flying pirate colors, rushing to him at full speed.
“Mr. Miller!” Jay said. “Are you ill?” Jay’s voice stunned Matt back to the conscious world. Matt had no idea how long he had been lost in his vision.
“Not ill, Mr. Jay,” Matt said. “Only thinking. Let there be no doubt that this is a pirate ship. We should be prepared to confront them before day’s end.”
“They are still leagues away,” one of the young sailors, Tom Porter, said.
“They are as lost in this soup as us,” the other young sailor, Ebenezer Grey, added.
“There’s some truth in it,” Jay corrected. “Arm yourselves.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Grey replied.
The young men scurried off, and Jay motioned to Matt. “Best take your sword,” he said. “I intend only to scout, but I too feel we’ll meet these rascals before the light has gone. My mind is heavy with it.”
Matt nodded and hurried backed to his cabin. He reached to grab his sheathed saber and a knife that he slipped onto his belt. When M
att returned, the two younger men had already crawled down the rope ladder into the boat. Jay waved Matt to the side of the ship to help lower a cache of oilcloth wrapped muskets down to the jolly. Once they had situated the weapons, they held the boat steady against the hull of the Norfolk while Matt and Jay made their way down. The sword was awkward and cumbersome in Matt’s hand as he descended, but he knew its value if they were surprised. Matt felt a twinge of regret at having left the Walther back in Virginia, but he knew too that there was no way to use a modern handgun without arousing suspicion.
Matt dropped onto the rowboat, took some time to steady himself, and stepped to a bench to sit. The wood was wet with condensation from the fog, so Matt reached down to try to sweep the water away with his hand, but this was only minimally effective. Jay threw a cloth. “No sense soaking your arse all at once,” he said. “We may be rowing for a while.” Matt nodded thanks and wiped the bench. Once seated, Matt checked his knife and set the sword at his feet making sure that it was secure but easy to reach. It was a quality weapon, made of the hardest steel and given as a gift by his instructor, Henry Duncan. It had become as familiar to him as his own hand.
The two young men sat one behind the other in the middle of the boat, and each grabbed a set of oars. Jay motioned to remind them to be quiet as they dipped the paddles into the water and began rowing away from the port side of the Norfolk. It took only a few minutes of rowing for their ship to disappear entirely into the fog on the smooth glassy waters of the Atlantic. For Matt, even in the company of his three shipmates, the desolation and loneliness of the open sea were overwhelming.
Chapter 4
Overlong
Grace was walking Thomas Jefferson through her half-completed home, and they had entered the library when Jefferson motioned casually for them to stop. He stepped to the canvas covered shelves, then turned partially backward and looked over his shoulder to Grace.