The Pirate Round

by James Nelson

  While Marlowe came aboard with a pleased but subdued greeting, Billy Bird grabbed his hand and pumped and slapped him on the back and said, ‘Damn my eyes! I have not seen you since Port Royal was swallowed up by the sea! Your name is somewhat altered, but the face is the same, if a bit more weather-beat! But, damn me, you look good, sir, damned good!’ Elizabeth wondered how she could love both these men when they were so very different.

  ‘And you, Billy. I am pleased to see you so well,’ Thomas said, shaking Billy’s hand. ‘I am aware that you rendered my wife some service a few years back, and I am grateful for it.’

  Billy waved off the thanks. ‘It is nothing. Nothing I would not do for two old friends.’

  Elizabeth felt like a harp string, stretched to near breaking, quivering with tension as she scrutinized each look, each word, the tone in which every phrase was couched. She was looking for currents below the words: jealousy, hints of cuckoldry, anger, suspicion. She had done nothing wrong – she assured herself of that – nothing she could not tell Marlowe, but that fact did not calm her.

  She was aware of her husband’s potential for violence. More than one man who had insulted her had died for it. She hated to think what he might do to someone he thought had lain with her.

  Nor was Billy Bird to be trifled with, despite his sometimes sophomoric nature. She had seen him take on two men at once with cold steel and best them both. She thought she might snap from the tension.

  And then Billy turned to her, smiled, reached out his arms, and hugged her. She hugged him back, with somewhat less enthusiasm. Looked over Billy’s shoulder at Marlowe, who gave her a comic raised eyebrow and a smile, and she felt her tension ease away, lessened but not gone.

  Finally Billy released her, held her out at arm’s length. ‘Dear God, look at you! Whatever has Marlowe done? When last I saw you, you were a proper lady, mistress of a great household, and now you are reduced to a common pirate!’

  Elizabeth glanced down at herself, her red sash and bare feet. She still had the pistol stuck in the sash. She flushed with embarrassment. ‘One must be ready, Billy. One never knows what villains and rogues one will meet on the high seas.’

  Billy laughed. ‘Right, right you are! Now, come and have dinner with me! You will remember Mr Vane, the quartermaster, and Black Tom and all these sundry rascals,’ Billy presented them as they stepped aft toward the great cabin.

  They spent the next few hours over dinner and wine in there while boats pulled back and forth between the two ships, and the encounter turned into a great bacchanal. The men of the Elizabeth Galley slaughtered a cow they had taken with them from St Mary’s. The men of the Bloody Revenge brought over copious amounts of rum and wine. They mixed up a grand rumfustian, and every one of them proceeded to get roaring drunk as their two ships bobbed on the swells, all alone in the middle of the Gulf of Aden.

  It was a grand time, exactly the kind of floating brouhaha that would be unheard of in the legitimate maritime trades, the sort of thing that made the sweet trade so very attractive. The men wished to go on a spree and they did, and there was no one who could tell them otherwise. Not Marlowe, not Billy Bird, no one.

  In the Bloody Revenge’s great cabin, which Elizabeth knew so well, the festivities were a bit more subdued, but not much. Along with the four guests from the Elizabeth Galley, Billy Bird invited in Quartermaster Vane and Hunter Reid, the Revenge’s first officer, whom Elizabeth had not met.

  Like the men forward and on board the Elizabeth Galley, they ate and drank to excess, and the talk was loud and boisterous. The Galleys told the others of their adventures on St Mary’s. The Bloody Revenge, it turned out, had called there three weeks before. They declared Lord Yancy mad, and the conversation moved on.

  Through the night the party continued, and it was only as the sky was growing light in the east that the men began to collapse in drunken exhaustion. For most of the day the two vessels floated there, hove to, while all hands slept off the night’s drink.

  When at last the companies of both vessels were awake and somewhat sober, there commenced some debate as to whether they would do it all again. Given another hour for heads to stop pounding and stomachs to find their sea legs once more, they might have started afresh, but as it was, they voted to eschew their pagan rituals for the time and go off hunting the Moors.

  They would work in concert, they decided, the Bloody Revenge sticking to the northern part of the mouth of Bab el Mandeb and the Elizabeth Galley to the south. By remaining within sight of one another, or at least within range that a signal cannon could be heard, they each doubled the territory they could cover, and each could come in support of the other when the fighting got hot.

  There was little concern over sharing out the booty between two companies of men. It was well known that the Moorish ships carried enough to make them all very wealthy indeed.

  And so with much difficulty and many aching heads, the two ships squared away and set more sail, with the Bloody Revenge sailing a little north of west and the Elizabeth Galley a little south, off to take up their stations for the great hunt.

  On the Galley’s quarterdeck Elizabeth and Thomas and Francis Bickerstaff enjoyed the evening air, the regular motion of the vessel underfoot. They felt content, happy, full of anticipation. They had made their way from England to St Mary’s to this place, and, save for their troubles on that island and the hardships inherent to any ocean passage, it had been half a year of generally pleasant voyaging.

  And all that time, and right in their wake, Roger Press had been following them like a shark on a trail of blood, and they had not known it.

  And they were no more aware, on that night, as they closed with the narrow entrance to the Red Sea, that the shark was there still, closing, pursuing them now with purpose and wicked intent.

  CHAPTER 20

  Elephiant, Lord Yancy, sat on his temporary throne and stared out over the top of the stockade, out over the sharp cut of the valley, deep green with its blanket of jungle and shadow, out over the flashing ocean and finally to the low, blue-green, irregular line that was Madagascar in the distance. He held a glass of brandy in one hand and took desultory sips from it. He listened.

  To his right, in a slightly shorter chair, sat the ursine figure of Henry Nagel, drinking rum. Nagel was still dressed in the rags of a sodden pirate thrown up on the beach. In his halting way he was relating the events of the past few days.

  When he finished, Yancy closed his eyes and said, ‘Henry, tell it all to me again, please.’ He had to be certain he had missed nothing. He had to check for inconsistencies that might indicate betrayal.

  ‘Them two ships come in on the tail of the flood,’ Nagel began with the great patience of a man too slow-witted to grow restless, ‘and they anchored by their best bowers. I knew there was no one still at the house, doing that Dinwiddie’s bidding, so I got four of our lads to act like they was a boat for hire. Dinwiddie comes down to the dock, dressed like it was his fucking coronation and acting the right king. He hires the lads to take him out to the big ship, the Queen’s Venture. Says he has to welcome the new arrival to “his” island.’

  ‘Dinwiddie did not recognize any of the boat crew?’

  ‘No. They was lads never met him. So they take him out, and he’s welcomed aboard with a side party and all. And then Press comes out and starts kicking him around the deck. The lads in the boat, they stayed there the whole time, listening, peeking over the gunnel sometimes, and never a one noticing them.

  ‘So Press beats hell out of Dinwiddie for an hour, and the whole time he’s asking, “Where’s Yancy? Where’s Yancy?” and all the time Dinwiddie’s saying, “He’s dead! He’s dead!”’

  Yancy nodded his approval. How could Press think he would outwit him, catch him by surprise? Press was a pathetic worm, not worthy of the title ‘adversary’.

  ‘After an hour or so,’ Nagel continued, ‘Press stops, and then he sees the lads in the boat and near shoots them, but they got away.
I’m watching from the shore with a glass. They put together a landing party, goddamned lot of men, two hundred or more, I guess.

  ‘They come ashore, and I watched them march by. I’m laying against a wall, like I’m dead drunk, and they just march on past, nothing said. They had that dumb bastard Dinwiddie with them, leading him on a halter like a cow. They go up and take your house with no fight, ’cause there weren’t no one there to fight with.

  ‘That night a hundred men or so come back down to the town, and they search every building, going through the warehouses, the whorehouses – everywhere. And everywhere they are asking, “Where is Elephiant Yancy? Where is Yancy?” and the only answer they get, course, is “Dead.”’

  Again Yancy nodded as he listened to Nagel’s account of events unfolding just as he had set them up. Every man on St Mary’s who knew unequivocally that he was alive and where he could be found was right here with him. Everyone in the town below would have known about the fire and heard the rumor of his death and would have no reason to doubt it. They were the perfect people to pass the lie on to Press, because they did not think they were lying.

  ‘But here’s the damnedest thing of it,’ Nagel continued. ‘They’re there … a day and a half, I reckon, and then next thing I know here’s Press marching most of his men right back to the ship, and it’s up anchor and away. The tender’s left: behind, and maybe seventy of the men to garrison the house, but the rest of ’em just sail off.

  ‘I reckoned you’d want to know why, so I go up to the house, and I bring a bottle, and I start in to talking with the bastard they got guarding the gate and sharing my bottle with him. Tell him I figure to join in with them and can I talk to Press?

  ‘And what does he tell me? Tells me Press is hot to kill that son of a bitch Marlowe, what was just here. I reckon Dinwiddie told Press Marlowe was here and where he gone. Turns out they go way back, Press and Marlowe. So he’s off to hunt Marlowe down, and when he catches him, he’s bound back to St Mary’s and reckoning he’ll make himself lord of the island. Like he could take your place, my lord.’

  Hot to kill Marlowe? Yancy thought. How very odd. He recalled how Press had been obsessed with killing the man named Malachias Barrett, who had marooned him, left him to die. He had been there on that patch of sand eight days when Yancy found him. It did not seem possible that any living thing could have survived that long, with no food and a single bottle of water, under the blistering Caribbean sun. But Press had. He had talked endlessly of Barrett and how he would kill him.

  Now he had come to St Mary’s on a mission of vengeance and was likewise obsessed with this Marlowe. Roger Press collected enemies the way a ship’s bottom gathers barnacles and weeds, just by being.

  Yancy thought of this new irony, smiled, and then chuckled. It was all too much. Press marches off, leaves less than half his men behind, vulnerable as a nestful of eggs. And where does he go? Off to kill the man that he, Yancy, has been thinking day and night about killing. The one man who had supplanted even Roger Press as an object of Yancy’s hatred.

  Perhaps Press and Marlowe will kill each other, he thought. But no, that was no good. He wanted to personally see them die, both of them.

  Perhaps Press will return here with Marlowe as his prisoner. And my dear Elizabeth as well. That thought warmed Yancy extremely. And it was entirely feasible that Press would do so.

  ‘Come, come, Henry, no time to waste.’ Yancy stood up, put his glass down on the small table by his chair. ‘It is time for us to go home.’

  The next morning they finished their preparations. It would take them the rest of that day to get from the mountain retreat to the big house, but that was fine, because what Yancy intended to do had to be done in the dark. Night was their ally. They did not need light, because they knew every inch of the house that would soon become their killing field, and the men who occupied it now did not.

  Yancy and four handpicked men stripped off the fine clothing that they were accustomed to wearing, and donned tattered, stained, and patched-up rags. They smeared their faces with dirt and blood, then regarded themselves in the big mirror that Nagel had brought out. The effect was perfect.

  They strapped on belts with the ubiquitous sheath knives in the small of their backs and secreted daggers inside shirts and breeches, and by midmorning they were off, working their way down the long, winding trail, down from the mountain hideout, through the valley, and over the hill that overlooked the harbor, the hill on which sat the house that Adam Baldridge had built.

  It was fifteen miles, and they moved quickly, but still they did not reach the crest of the far hill until an hour after sunset. There they sat and rested and alternated between standing watch and sleeping, save for Yancy, who remained awake and alert, like a deer at a water hole.

  Somewhere around midnight they headed out again. As they walked along the crest of the hill, they could see lights in the big house a mile away. They followed the trail down and down toward the water, until at last it met up with the dirt road that ran along the waterfront. They trudged on, past Yancy’s warehouses, past the low, ramshackle buildings in the town.

  There was not a person in St Mary’s who would not have recognized Lord Yancy but now as he shuffled along, his battered hat pulled low, his clothes in rags, no one paid the slightest attention to him. He looked like any of the human flotsam that washed up on the island’s shore every day.

  Up the familiar road, up to the big house. They could see lights burning in windows all over the building, could hear the sounds of men carrying on. Yancy remembered the words in the report that Atwood had sent. ‘Consent of the queen,’ my arse, he thought as he shuffled along, looking hurt and exhausted. Bloody pirates is what they are, and no more, and all the secret dealing with the queen cannot change that…

  At last they came to the gate through the stockade wall, the only realistic way in. Two months before there would have been any number of rotten bits in the stockade through which they might have crawled, but by Yancy’s own orders that wooden wall had been strengthened and repaired. Now even the most lax patrol would be alerted by an attempt to scale it or breech it.

  No, it was in through the gate. That was the only way.

  ‘Hold, there!’ It was the first challenge to their progress, the guard at the gate. In the dark, Yancy saw him swing his musket around, saw a second guard do the same.

  ‘Please, sir, I beg of you,’ said Yancy, and his voice cracked most effectively. ‘Pray, sir, we are shipwrecked on the far side of the island. We have walked over the mountains. Please, food and water, we beg …’

  There was silence after that. The guards were not ready for this eventuality. ‘Go down to the town,’ the one guard said at last, taking the initiative. ‘They have food and water there.’

  ‘Please, sir, they will give us nothing without we pay, and we ain’t got a groat betwixt us five. “Go see the lord of the island, do you want charity,” they say.’

  ‘Humph,’ the guard said to that, and then, after another silence, said, ‘The lot of you, sit down there and keep your hands out.’

  He pointed with his musket to an ironwood log, a foot and a half thick and ten feet long, that was rolled up against the stockade wall and used by the guards as a sort of bench. Yancy and his men sat in a row along the log, like birds on a branch, and the guard said to the other, ‘Go and get Lieutenant Tasker.’

  They waited in an uncomfortable silence for five minutes, and then the guard was back and another man with him.

  ‘This fellow says they was shipwrecked on the far side of the island. He’s begging food and water.’

  The new arrival – Lieutenant Tasker, Yancy guessed – stepped toward them, looked down on them. ‘What ship?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Betsy, snow, from Liverpool, bound for the Bay of Antogil. We … we had business there, like …’ Yancy had anticipated these questions, had his answers ready.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Joe Benner, my lord. Bo
atswain. The officers is all dead, sir. We carried the captain halfway across the mountains, like to save him, but he died and we buried him. The rest and the other hands, they drowned.’

  Tasker was silent for a moment, and then Yancy added, ‘Please, my lord, we suffered something horrid. Food and water, it’s all we ask, and someplace safe to sleep. We been in that wicked, wicked jungle four days now. I beg of you. You are lord of this place. Won’t you see to helping some poor, desperate sailors?’

  He watched as Tasker ran his eyes over the five men, assaying the risk. It would appear small, Yancy had made certain of that. Just five men, and they too weak with hunger and exhaustion to cause any trouble.

  At last Tasker said, ‘I am not lord of this island. Captain Press is in charge here, but he is gone and left me in command.’

  He considered for a moment more and then said, ‘Very well. You may come into the kitchen and eat and drink and sleep there under guard.’

  ‘Oh, bless you, sir,’ Yancy began, and the others joined in with their authentic-sounding gratitude.

  Tasker led them through the gate and into the house and then out a back door to the kitchen, which was connected to the main house only by a roofed-over walkway twenty feet long. Yancy stared about as if seeing the house for the first time. He took note of the guards at the entrance to the great hall, and through the open door could see that it was functioning now as a barracks, with a majority of Press’s men asleep within, like deer run into a pen.

  Inside the kitchen they were given food and water, and they fell on both like wolves. They were in fact ravenous and parched, since Yancy had allowed them nothing to eat or drink for the past eight hours, and the effect was complete.

  For ten minutes they sated themselves in silence while the two men guarding them grew increasingly bored. At last Yancy pushed back from the table.

  ‘Dear God, but that is good,’ he said to the guards. ‘Pray, give our thanks to— What was the good man’s name?’