The Pirate Round

by James Nelson

  She smiled, and the tears came faster, and she swallowed and reached over to him and stroked his face. ‘It’s not there anymore, my love,’ she whispered, ‘but you will not need it because I am here.’

  She fed him, gave him water, changed his clothes. She told him what had happened and called for Billy Bird, who was pleased to see him alive and likely to stay that way. Billy filled in those parts of the fight that Elizabeth did not know.

  ‘But what of Francis? Where is Francis?’ Marlowe asked, and he was not happy to see the looks on the others’ faces.

  There followed on the heels of Marlowe’s recovery and his finding out what had happened in those last moments on St Mary’s the blackest sort of grief, from which he could not surface. Nor did he try very hard, like a man overboard who has given up and lets the ocean take him.

  He sat in the great cabin, staring out the windows at the sea rolling away astern of them, pictured Francis Bickerstaff’s body sinking down, down, down to depths the likes of which no living man could go, inhabited by creatures no one could imagine. He pictured the bound body coming to rest in the sand and the blackness.

  Over and over, day after day, he tortured himself with that image. He ate little, spoke little. Elizabeth stopped trying to draw him out. Billy Bird remained in command, drove the ship around the Cape of Good Hope and into the northern trades and across the broad Atlantic. They never saw more than a glimpse of a distant sail, and wind and weather were their allies the entire time.

  And for the whole of the crossing, Marlowe remained in his private hell, wallowing in his half-life of grief and recrimination, and in that twilight time the only real things were Elizabeth and the excruciating pain in his arm that was no longer there.

  Then one morning Marlowe felt the motion of the ship change, and the sailor in him registered the change, despite his utter lack of interest in anything, and he knew that it was not a change in sea state but the feel of water that is embraced all around by land. Still that was not enough to stir him from his seat, staring out the stern windows.

  Two hours later he could see on the starboard side the familiar outline of Cape Charles and to larboard Cape Henry, and he knew that they were once again within the confines of the Chesapeake Bay.

  Half an hour after that he heard Elizabeth’s soft steps outside the cabin door. She opened it, stepped over to him, said, ‘Thomas, won’t you come up on deck?’ It was the first thing she had asked of him in two months, the first time she had asked him to put aside his self-indulgent grief, and so without a word he stood and followed her out.

  He climbed up on the quarterdeck, ignored the embarrassed looks and half nods of greeting from men who did not know what to say to him. He stood at the weather rail, that familiar spot; it was like putting on a well-worn glove one has not put on in years. Looked forward, past the mainsail.

  Fine on the starboard bow was Point Comfort, the headland that marked the entrance to the James River, the last stretch of water between them and home.

  Spring in Virginia. The sky was blue, the air rich with the smell of a fertile and living land. All around them green, where for months there had been only blue.

  Point Comfort. Home. Marlowe’s hands began to shake, his lip began to quiver, and without a word he stamped off and down the ladder and aft to the privacy of the great cabin. He heard Elizabeth’s feet behind him. Of course she would know that he needed her at that moment. He needed her at every moment.

  He swung the door open, crossed to the lockers aft, and she with him, and they sat down together, and he wrapped his one arm around her and buried his head in her shoulder and cried and cried, and he thought he would never stop.

  He cried for Francis Bickerstaff and for all the others and for all he had lost and for his own stupidity. He cried because he understood that once upon a time he had had everything he had ever wanted with Marlowe House, had become the man he had once dreamed of being, the man Francis had taught him to be, and then he nearly threw it all away because he thought he could be richer still.

  ‘Oh, God, God, Elizabeth, how could I be so stupid?’ he asked into her shoulder. She did not give him an answer, and he did not need one because he knew the answer, and he knew he would never be so stupid again.

  It had cost him his arm. It had cost him Francis. It had nearly cost him Elizabeth, several times over. He wept for all of it, all the way up the James River, and when at last they dropped the anchor, he had cried his grief out. He came up on deck again. A new man in a new season.

  They took a boat to the shore and were able to hire a carriage back to Marlowe House. They left Billy Bird in command, left it to him to divide out the booty in the hold of the Elizabeth Galley. They had yet to make an official count, but even lacking that, the men knew that every one of them, every man aboard, was terribly rich, that if they did not spend it all in one wild, frenzied debauch, as their type was wont to do and as so many ashore would readily encourage them to do, then not a one of them would ever have to work again.

  Thomas and Elizabeth Marlowe rode in silence down the long drive that led to Marlowe House. The flowers were just showing, the young leaves on the trees almost iridescent green. The home had been well cared for, as Marlowe knew it would be. It looked as if they had been gone only a fortnight, no more.

  The carriage stopped, and Marlowe got out and helped Elizabeth out. They stood in front of their home and held one another and breathed deep, smelling the flowers and the woods and the fields. Thomas smiled, the first time he could recall doing so since they had sailed from St Mary’s.

  They were home. He was home. It was a home from which he did not intend to stray, ever again.

  He thought of Yancy, and Press, and their struggle to be king of the island. Idiots. Like the moth beating itself against the glass of a lantern, they fought for power and money and did not even understand why they wanted those things.

  What they wanted, in truth, was exactly what he had here at Marlowe House, and they did not know it, and neither did he, until that moment. The lesson had come at the highest price he had ever paid, but he had learned it at last. He had reached the confluence of two streams: what he wanted and what he had. He stood now where those floods met, and by those waters he would live his life.

  EPILOGUE

  The sloop Mercy of Newport stood into the harbor of St Mary’s island. On her quarterdeck, Captain Patrick Quigley surveyed the batteries that leered out at him from Quail Island, big guns that could blow his vessel to bits before he had even cleared the headlands.

  There was an unusual silence on deck as the others, the fifty men who had sailed with him, also stared up at those vicious guns, waiting.

  There was no smoke from the battery, no flags flying from the flagpole. Nothing moving that he could see. He felt himself relax, just a bit.

  As much as he tried to project a fierce and piratical nature, he was new to this sort of thing, this Red Sea Roving, and he was not at all certain of what his reception might be.

  He had been informed by others, who knew, that St Mary’s was the place to call for provisions, powder, shot, information on where one might be most likely to intercept the Great Mogul’s ships. He had envisioned a lively place, bustling with people, crowded with shipping, a sort of buccaneer’s version of Newport, with rum flowing and buxom young women willing to do whatever a sailor far from home might wish.

  He was surprised, for that reason, to find the harbor seemingly deserted. A few decrepit ships drifted at their anchors, another was half sunk and another appeared to have been hove down on the beach and left abandoned.

  ‘Stand by with your anchor, there!’ Quigley called out to the mate up by the cathead, then to the helmsman said, ‘Round up, right over there.’

  The Mercy rounded up into the wind, the topsails came aback, and the anchor was let go in five fathoms of water.

  Captain Quigley stood aloof as the men bustled around the deck, squaring things away. He looked over the town with his telescope. H
e could see a few people moving around, no more than that. He looked up at the big house on the hill. Part of the roof was charred, it looked as if it had caught fire at one point, but not recently. It had never been repaired.

  He started to get an uncomfortable feeling in his gut. He had expected to be greeted with saluting cannons and dipped flags and all that sort of formality. He had expected a boat to come out, inquire of who he was. ‘I am Captain Patrick Quigley, of the sloop Mercy of Newport. We are bound away on the Pirate Round!’ He had been practicing those words for two months, but now it looked as if no one was going to ask.

  The mate directed the hands to get the longboat over the side, and the armed boat crew took their places on the thwarts, and when they were ready, Captain Quigley climbed down and sat in the stern sheets. They pulled silently across the harbor for the old wooden dock, all eyes darting around, the men waiting for something, they did not know what. Something.

  But there was nothing, nothing in the way of human greetings. Now Quigley could not even see those few figures he had seen earlier through his glass, and he began to wonder if he had really seen them at all.

  The boat pulled up to the dock, and Quigley stood and hooked a shoe on the creaking ladder and climbed up fast, then stepped aside for the others.

  At first he thought that someone had dropped a hundle of clothes on the planks and had left them where they fell. He took a step closer, sucked in his breath, whispered, ‘Goddamn my eyes …’

  Two skeletons, still bearing the remnants of their clothes, shoes still slipped over bony feet, lay across one another. A sword through one, a dagger through the other. Quigley might have retched at the sight, but the bones had been so long exposed that they were picked clean and bleached white and had more or less collapsed into a heap, largely undisturbed, so that one could see clearly how the pair had fallen, taking each other to hell.

  Quigley smiled, amused by the folly of such men. What had they gained? Around him the rest of the boat crew climbed up and spred out on the dock and gazed at the strange and morbid sight.

  Patrick Quigley, having seen as much of the skeletons as he wished to see, stepped back and looked up the road to the big house on the hill. It was impressive, even from a distance, but he could see the signs of neglect: the charred roof, the wild grass sprouting around the stockade fence that was fallen down in places. Such a fine house. What a waste that it should be abandoned thus.

  And then he felt the stirring of an idea, and he looked around, as if he might see whether the others were thinking as he was. He had fifty armed and loyal men with him. Not a terrific force, but stronger than any the island could muster, as far as he could see.

  How hard would it be to take St Mary’s for his own? Who was there to resist him?

  He had thought to sail the pirate wind, take some rich prize in the Red Sea, head for home a wealthy man. But what were the chances of that? He’d be damned lucky even to find a treasure ship, and even if he did, there was every chance that he would end up like old Thomas Tew, holding in his bowels with his hands.

  But here, here he could set up as a middleman of sorts, buy and sell from the Roundsmen and the legitimate merchantmen who plied those waters. That was real wealth, and it did not depend upon luck or exposing oneself to flying shot.

  He had an image of himself in that big house, looking down on the harbor just as he was now looking up. Native girls in attendance – he had heard of their legendary compliance. Suddenly the thought of returning to Newport, bitter cold, windswept, wintry Newport and his scrawny shrew of a wife and unpleasant children seemed unthinkable.

  Unthinkable, certainly, in light of the realization that he had only to march his armed band inland and take the island. Then he could set up as the lead merchant there. A governor of sorts.

  Governor? No, lord of the manor. Quigley smiled to himself. Lord, hell. He would be king of St Mary’s.

  Why had no one else ever thought of this?

  About the Author

  James Nelson has served as a seaman, rigger, boatswain and officer on a number of sailing vessels. He is the author of the five books comprising his Revolution at Sea saga and The Brethren of the Coast trilogy. The first two books in The Brethren of the Coast trilogy, The Guardship and The Blackbirder, are also published by Corgi. He lives with his wife and children in Maine.

  His website can be found at www.jameslnelson.com

  Also by James Nelson

  The Brethren of the Coast:

  THE GUARDSHIP

  THE BLACKBIRDER

  THE PIRATE ROUND

  The Revolution at Sea Saga:

  BY FORCE OF ARMS

  THE MADDEST IDEA

  and published by Corgi Books

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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  Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies

  whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  First publication in Great Britain in 2002 by Corgi

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © James L. Nelson 2002

  Ship diagram and map by James L. Nelson

  James L. Nelson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473509436

  ISBN 0552148431

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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