The Guardship

by James L. Nelson

  The Vengeance needed a great deal of work, a fact that was entirely ignored by the men aboard her.

  Once the ship was under way, and sails trimmed, each man claimed for himself a piece of the deck on which to sit and continue the drinking and gambling and sleeping that had been interrupted by the afternoon’s work.

  LeRois stepped up to the quarterdeck rail. “Écoutez! Écoutez! Listen here, you men!”

  Men put bottles down. Heads turned aft.

  “We’re going to the British colonies on the American coast, do you hear?” LeRois said. “I am setting course for there.”

  The men looked at one another, some nodding agreement, some shaking heads. A low murmur ran across the deck.

  The bosun was the first to speak. LeRois had expected as much. He was a sea lawyer. A new man, volunteered from one of their last victims. He would die by LeRois’s hand in the next minute if he objected too strongly. Set a good example. “I reckon there’s fair pickings down around Panama way, or south of Florida.”

  “Perhaps,” said LeRois, “but we go to the American coast.”

  Silence swept like a cat’s paw across the deck. The bosun coughed, stood up from where he had been leaning on the fife rail around the mainmast. “Reckon we should vote. Says so in the articles.”

  There was a gentle murmur. “Reckon he’s got a right to ask,” someone said, just audible.

  LeRois stepped forward and down the ladder to the waist, moving slowly. He said nothing. The bosun’s face swam before him. He felt the excitement rise as he closed with the man. LeRois the master was back, LeRois the Devil.

  “I reckon we should vote, is all I said,” the bosun began again. He saw that his words had no effect on LeRois, and that the huge man was still advancing. Reached for the knife in his belt.

  LeRois grabbed the knife by the blade just as it cleared the leather, twisted it, cutting his own hand open, and tossed it away. With his other hand he grabbed the bosun’s neck under his wispy, uneven beard and squeezed, watching with delight as the man’s eyes went wide, his fists striking feebly at LeRois’s arm, unable to get past his long reach and strike his face or body. The bosun flailed wildly, growing weaker, growing more frightened and desperate.

  “America, Captain, like you said,” someone called, and there was a chorus of agreement among those men who knew LeRois well enough to still fear him. LeRois tossed the gasping bosun to the deck. He felt the warm blood running down his palm. Dripping off the tips of his fingers.

  “Very good,” he said and stamped aft, then to the helmsman said, “Make your course north-northwest, a quarter west.”

  LeRois did not tell the men about his plans. He had a vague notion that they would not believe him.

  But they would soon enough, when he had made them all wealthy men. Once they reached America. Once they were cruising off the Capes. Once they were in the Chesapeake.

  Chapter 5

  KING JAMES, majordomo of the house, stood in the doorway of Marlowe’s now vacant bedchamber. He ran his dark eyes over the room. The house girls had made the bed with military precision. They had cleared away the bottle of rum and the bottle of wine and the half-empty glasses, had swept up the ashes and the sprinkling of tobacco and placed Marlowe’s pipe carefully on the mantel.

  They had picked up the silk coat and waistcoat from the floor where James knew Marlowe had dropped them, had retrieved the long white wig, worth as much as a laborer might make in half a year, which Marlowe had flung into the corner.

  The room was immaculate, but James knew that it would be. If it was not, the house girls would answer to him, and they had no wish to do that. He took pride in the way that he ran things. Pride was something he had not felt in many, many years. Not since he had been taken by the slavers. Not in all the long twenty years of his slavery. Not until Marlowe had come along and freed them all.

  It was virtually his first act after buying the Tinling place. He had offered no explanation, just freed all of the slaves that had come with the plantation. Offered them wages, based on the success of the tobacco crop, if they would stay and work the land. Which, of course, they all did. They had nowhere else to go.

  James had been a field hand then. Never believed that Marlowe would actually pay them, but the others did, and they doubled their efforts in the fields. Fools, James thought. A white man’s trick, another low white man’s trick to get more labor out of them.

  Which it was. And even though Marlowe had indeed paid them, quite handsomely, it did not change the fact that it was a trick. And it had worked.

  The white people in Williamsburg had been stunned, horrified at what Marlowe had done. But now, two years later, the freed slaves still had not run amok, had not cut Marlowe’s throat or risen against the white people in the colony. They kept to themselves and grew tobacco, a prodigious output of fine, sweet-scented tobacco. As good as any in the tidewater.

  But King James’s anger would not be quenched by such a simple thing. Nor had Marlowe’s taking him in from the fields and making him majordomo of the household caused that fire to burn less bright.

  King James, born a ruler. Now that he was free he would never let a white man find him wanting. For Marlowe that meant that his household was run with perfect efficiency. He seemed to have known that such would be the case.

  King James shut the door behind him, stepped over to the big wardrobe. He opened the doors and ran his eyes over the clothes hanging there.

  “Lay out my working clothes, James, if you would,” Marlowe had said that morning. “You know the ones I mean. I’ll be away ’til noon, and when I return we’ll be going aboard the Plymouth Prize for a while, me and Bickerstaff, so pack up whatever we’ll need.”

  “Yes, Mr. Marlowe.”

  “You’ll be coming as well, so pack a kit for shipboard. You’ll be commanding the Northumberland.”

  “Yes, sir.” The Northumberland was the sea sloop that Marlowe used for transportation and cargo on the Chesapeake Bay and beyond. It had been owned by Joseph Tinling, then called the Duke of Gloucester, had come to Marlowe with the sale of the plantation.

  Marlowe had renamed it and had trained King James as a deckhand, and then mate and eventually master. James worked hard at the sailor’s arts, learned fast, at first just to prove to Marlowe that he could, to prove to himself that he was not afraid. His only other experience with ships had been aboard the slaver, and that had colored his perception of all seagoing craft. But soon, and much to his surprise, he found that he loved the sloop, the freedom of being under way.

  “And tell me something, James,” Marlowe said. “Can you fight?”

  “Fight?”

  “In a battle. Hand to hand. Can you use a gun?”

  King James smiled, just a hint of a smile. He thought back to a different life, twenty years before, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

  He had not been a king, of course, no matter what the other slaves said. He had been a prince, a Malinke prince of Kabu, near the Gambia River, from the House of Mane. Could trace his ancestary back to the great general of Sundiata Keita, Tiramang Traore.

  “Yes, sir, I can fight.”

  James shuffled through the coats hanging in the wardrobe, searching out the “working clothes.” He did indeed know the ones that Marlowe meant. They were old and well-worn, had once been repaired with great ungainly patches put in place with a sailmaker’s needle before he had had the house girls redo the repairs with their expert hands. They were clothes from some other lifetime of Marlowe’s, a lifetime about which James knew nothing but often speculated.

  He found first the old blue broadcloth coat. The fabric was bleached a light color save for those places under the collar and on the turnback of the cuffs where the sun had not reached. There the cloth was still a dark blue, the color of the Chesapeake Bay water on a clear autumn day.

  He ran his fingers over one of the newly replaced patches, checking the seamstress’s work. He could find no cause for complaint. He looke
d at the inside of the coat, at the hole that was covered by the patch. Made by a pistol shot at close range.

  He laid the coat on the bed and with it the silk-embroidered waistcoat, which had once been a fine garment, the canvas breeches, worn as soft as chamois, and the cotton shirt, the only new part of the ensemble. Marlowe’s old wool shirt still hung in the wardrobe, but he had no interest in wearing that. Not when he could afford cotton.

  His hat was a three-cornered affair, battered, like the rest of the working clothes. It was plain and black. Actually, it was more of a dark gray, bleached out through long exposure to sun and salt air, comfortable in a way that the more dandified things were not.

  King James reached into the back of the wardrobe and pulled out Marlowe’s boots, old leather knee-high boots that he had shined to the highest polish they would take. He reached in again and pulled out Marlowe’s sword.

  Marlowe had a number of swords, most of them the kind of silly, frail, ornamental weapons that the white gentlemen wore; gentlemen who did not need a sword and would not know what to do with one if they did. But this sword was a killing machine. The sword Marlowe used for the work that a sword was meant to do.

  It was a great clumsy thing, poorly balanced, ugly. King James grabbed it by the grip and slowly pulled it from the scabbard, enjoying the feel of the cold wire-bound handgrip, enjoying the weight and the gleam of the late-morning light coming in through the window as it glinted off the straight, double-edged blade. He rarely had the chance to hold a weapon in the twenty years that he had been a slave. It felt good to do so. It felt natural for a prince of warriors.

  He dropped the scabbard to the floor and held the great sword in the manner he had been taught by the fighting men of the Malinke who saw to the education of princes. They had not had such fine steel, of course, but great iron swords, half again as heavy as Marlowe’s. Marlowe’s big sword felt like a stilletto in his hands.

  His boyhood seemed unreal to him now. Magical. Like the Christian heaven he had heard so much about. Once he had had slaves and others to serve him, and he answered to no man save his father. A long time ago. Another lifetime. After all of the years, all of the hatred and anger, the agony and terror, he had little more than wisps of memory of the Guinea Coast.

  The Guinea Coast. He was using the white man’s name now. Could no longer recall the Kabu Malinke name for his own home.

  He lunged at an imaginary enemy. Thought of his father, as he had every day since the time the Bijago slave raiders had ambushed their hunting party, bursting into the camp at dawn with swords, spears, muskets given them by the white men for exactly that purpose.

  His father had fought like an enraged bull, slaying them all, all who came at him, flinging himself at the attackers to save his people. No man who was stronger, fiercer than his father, not even the deadly Bijago islanders, no man that was his match. But his father was no match for a musket ball.

  “Tell me, James, can you fight?” Marlowe had asked. Yes. Side by side with his father that morning. Killed five men for certain, probably more.

  But slavers did not murder valuable young men of fifteen. They waited their chance. Hit him on the side of the head. When he woke he was in chains, and in chains he had been ever since.

  There had not been one day since that James did not wish he had been killed at his father’s side.

  He picked up the scabbard and thrust the sword back into its sheath. The weapon was too heavy to be comfortably worn on a belt. Instead the scabbard was attached to a frog on a buff leather shoulder strap, which Marlowe wore over his right shoulder. Over the left went another strap with loops to hold a brace of pistols.

  James had seen him wearing those weapons only on the few occasions he had been asked by the neighbors to help hunt down fugitives. Whatever it was that Marlowe once did—captaining a privateer, presumably—whatever it was that required him to be so heavily armed, he did no longer.

  James placed the big sword on the bed beside the other things, ran his eyes over the entire ensemble to make certain everything was in order. Considered what of his own he would take. He did not know where they were going, but wherever it was it apparently would involve fighting.

  King James felt the pleasure of anticipation, a feeling he could not recall having had once in his adult life. Marlowe had given back much of what the other white men had taken away. He had to admit as much, however grudgingly. Marlowe had given him back some semblance of leadership. He had given him back his pride and his freedom. And now Marlowe would give him back his warrior’s soul.

  The old man was in a rage, an absolute rage. George Wilkenson had never seen the like. Twenty-four hours after the death of his second son, his favored son, he was still in a fury, as if possessed by Satan himself.

  Jacob Wilkenson paused for a moment in his tirade, catching his breath. The two men were in the library in the big Wilkenson plantation house, the finest library in the colony. Walls lined with massive oak shelves supporting the hundreds of books that the old man had purchased over the years. Which George, alone of all the Wilkenson clan, had actually read.

  Above the books and circling the room, portraits of Wilkensons dating back to those who had fought against Cromwell and his Puritans, and lost, and a few even earlier than that. They seemed to George to be glaring down on their two living descendants, waiting with scant patience for them to do something to avenge the great wrong done their family.

  Jacob, whose thoughts were no doubt running along the same lines, was standing by the massive fireplace that made up a majority of one wall of the room. He picked up a poker from the rack by the fireplace and jabbed at the burning logs within the brick confine. Then the rage swept over him again.

  “God damn his black soul to hell!” he screamed, turning and flinging the poker across the room. It smashed into the etched glass front of a cabinet containing the family’s Restoration chinaware, shattering the glass and the plates within.

  George Wilkenson flinched at the sound of the destruction, but his father seemed not to notice. George had seen the old man in fits before, but he had never seen anything like this. He would have expected mourning, sorrow, weeping at the death of his son. But Jacob had done none of that. He had only raged.

  “If you didn’t have the courage to kill him, why in God’s name did you not have the whore’s son arrested for murder?” Jacob Wilkenson turned on his son. “Arrest him, have him strung up in public. I want you to send word to Sheriff Witsen. It ain’t too late, your lethargy aside.”

  George Wilkenson held his father’s eyes. He was growing weary of this. “Matthew was called out, Father. It was an affair of honor.” He felt a profound grief at his brother’s death. Unlike the old man. But he knew that Matthew could be a hot-head. He hated Marlowe for what he had done, but he could not see the crime in it.

  “Honor? What does that son of a bitch Marlowe know of honor? Tell Witsen to arrest him. I own that bastard’s soul, he’ll do as I say.”

  “I have no doubt that he’ll do as you say, but no jury will convict Marlowe of murder, and then we’ll look the fools for having tried to attack him thus.”

  Jacob Wilkenson glared at his son, white eyebrows coming together across his freckled and wrinkled forehead. “You’ve got no spine, boy.”

  “Perhaps not, but at least I have retained my wits.” The logical thing, of course, was for George to call Marlowe out to avenge his brother’s death. The very thought made him sick to his stomach. He imagined himself on that wet grass, his own blood running out from under his lifeless body. He prayed that his father would not suggest it.

  “Your brother was the one with spine, and you’re the one with wits,” Jacob spat. “Are you telling me that the governor won’t back us up against this bastard Marlowe? The Wilkensons are the first family of Virginia. Are you saying that Nicholson would stand behind this upstart?”

  “This upstart seems to have the governor’s ear, and his confidence. He is doing Nicholson a great turn with
the guardship, and Nicholson will be in his debt.”

  “What do you mean, ‘with the guardship’?”

  “Nicholson has stripped Allair of command and has asked Marlowe to take over the ship.”

  At that Jacob Wilkenson stopped his pacing and his arm-waving. Stared at George as if his son had told him the colony was sinking into the sea.

  “Apparently, Marlowe was some kind of privateer captain in the last war,” George continued. “In any event, he has accepted the governor’s offer. Had you not heard?”

  “Marlowe…is taking command of the guardship?”

  “As I understand it. And I reckon if he does anything at all well, then he shall have his way with the governor.”

  The elder Wilkenson was silent for a long moment. George shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. Then the old man turned and stared into the fire.

  “This will not do,” he said at last. “This will not do at all. That little bastard will not murder my son and then become some kind of hero in this colony. Never!” He turned and faced his remaining son. “You will do something about this, is that clear?”

  “Well, Father, what I can do—”

  “Oh, don’t shit yourself, I’m not suggesting you call Marlowe out. If he could kill Matthew, then he sure as hell could kill you, and that would do me precious little good. I want Marlowe disgraced, arrested, hung like the goddamned cur he is.”

  “But how—”

  “Do it! Think of something!” Jacob Wilkenson roared, flipping over a small table as his rage overcame him once more. A porcelain vase shattered on the hearth. “You’re the one with the wits, pray, do not forget!”