The Guardship

by James L. Nelson

  They were so close that Marlowe could smell LeRois, even through the sulfur, smell the sweat and the rum and the foul breath and corruption. He could see the dark blood erupting from his mouth as he fell. He watched, unable to move, unable to breathe as the man he feared most in the world collapsed onto the deck.

  He took a step forward, leaned over, unable to believe what he was seeing. It was not possible that LeRois was dead, yet here was his sword, Thomas Marlowe’s sword, dripping with the pirate’s blood.

  And then suddenly LeRois gasped and choked and coughed up more blood that ran black down his cheeks and into his beard. He blinked and looked up at Marlowe with wide eyes, and then with a sound that was equal parts retching and coughing and screaming he rolled over and grabbed the torch and flung it away.

  They were swallowed by the darkness again, the darkness and the diffused yellow smoke from the sulfur pots, and out of the dark came the retching and the coughing as LeRois fought his last battle.

  And then the torch flared and the light grew many times brighter. The yellow smoke was lit up from within, and Marlowe could see the wild death grin on LeRois’s face, but there was still life in his eyes. He coughed and in a weak voice said, “Cochon.”

  From the center of the light Marlowe heard a crackling and a popping and hissing, the unmistakable sound of gunpowder burning. He felt his eyes go wide, despite the pain from the sulfur smoke. LeRois must have laid a powder train to the magazine. Of course he would. He would not have created his own hell without thinking of that.

  “Oh, damn you!” he heard himself say, and at his feet the pirate laughed until he started to choke. Marlowe rammed his sword into the sling at his side and crouched low and raced back in the direction he had come. The ship was going to blow up. He had to get his men off. Did not know how long he had.

  He plunged through the smoke, coughing, gasping, wasting his precious breath cursing LeRois. He stumbled on something and began to fall, arms flung out in front of him, hit something solid and caught himself. He was inches from whatever it was he had run into, but he could not see what it was. He ran his fingers over it. A stack of barrels. There had been no barrels aft that he could recall. He must have run in the wrong direction.

  He felt his head spinning, felt his legs grow weak as the smoke overwhelmed him. He tried to stand, but he could not. His knees buckled, and he fell. He grabbed at the barrels for support, but they slipped from his weak hands and the next thing he knew his face was pressed against the deck and he was gasping and coughing.

  But he was breathing. He was breathing clean air, or at least cleaner air than he had had in some time. Down next to the deck the smoke was not so thick. He felt himself revive, and he breathed deeply until he began to gag again. He crawled away, prayed it was the right direction.

  Off to his right the fire flared and began to race along, illuminating the yellow fog. Marlowe got on his hands and knees and crawled faster. Could hear the hissing sound of burning powder.

  As long as the fire was just consuming loose grains the powder would only burn. It was when it hit the tight-packed barrels that it would explode. He had until then to get his men off, and he did not know how long that would be. Minutes, if he was lucky, but it could just as easily be seconds.

  He scrambled along, and now he could see LeRois’s lifeless body illuminated by the fire he had started as his last act on earth. Surrounded by the glowing light, he looked as if he was being lifted up into heaven, which Marlowe very much doubted. It was a reference point, a landmark in the fog, and Marlowe scurried past.

  The fire flared again, igniting something, and Marlowe leapt to his feet. He had to risk passing out. He had to get on deck fast.

  He careened off a post, stumbled, kept running. He could see a motion in the smoke, a swirl of gray and yellow as the sulfur was sucked up overhead, and he knew that he had found the hatch. He leapt for the space, and his hand found the combing and he pulled himself up.

  “Oh, Lord, help me!” he cried, trying to find the strength in his tired arms and aching lungs to pull himself up through the hatch. His hand touched something—the leg of the cabin table—and his fingers wrapped around it and he pulled himself out of the smoke-filled hold, out of that special hell that LeRois had laid along for them, and up into the great cabin.

  The cabin was filled with smoke as well, but after the hold it seemed like the freshest of air, and Marlowe wanted to just collapse on the settee and breathe, just breathe. He took a staggering step aft, recalled that the ship was about to explode. How had his mind become so addled?

  He turned and lurched out of the great cabin and down the alleyway, careening off the cabin doors as he struggled to get to the waist. The door was open, and he stumbled out into the open space.

  The old pirate ship was still burning, though not as bright now, and Marlowe’s damaged eyes could see nothing but a few shapes moving about. The fight was over, apparently, but he did not know who had won. He tried to shout a warning, but all that came was coughing and retching.

  “Marlowe! Marlowe, dear God!” It was Bickerstaff, standing in front of him. His face came in and out of focus, and he looked so very concerned.

  “Bickerstaff…,” Marlowe managed to get out, and then broke into a coughing fit again.

  “Marlowe, pray, sit! We have won the day!” Bickerstaff said, but Marlowe just shook his head and pointed feebly down. “Magazine…,” he said, “…fire…”

  Bickerstaff stared at him as if not comprehending. Marlowe tried to summon the power to explain further, but Bickerstaff said, “The magazine is on fire?”

  Marlowe nodded. It was all he could do.

  “Shall we get the Plymouth Prize under way?”

  Marlowe shook his head. No time for that, not by half. He glanced over at the guardship, still riding against the pirate’s side. They would never save her. He pointed toward the other bulwark, the one closest to shore, and staggered toward it, hoping Bickerstaff would understand.

  And he did. The teacher let go of Marlowe’s arm and turned to the dark shapes in the waist that Marlowe guessed were his men. “The magazine is on fire!” he heard Bickerstaff shout. “Over the side! Everyone over the side! Throw the wounded over, we shall get them to shore! If you cannot swim, grab something that will float!”

  Marlowe sensed the stampede to the side but could see no more than dark shapes rushing past, men carrying other men. He heard the pounding of bare feet and shoes on the deck, voices full of fear and pain, the cries of the wounded. He could still smell the sulfur, but mostly it was sweet night air, the most delicious sensation he had ever had. He paused by the main hatch and closed his eyes and just breathed.

  And then he felt rough hands on his arms. He opened his aching eyes to see King James and Bickerstaff on either side of him, hustling him to the side of the ship. Men were leaping over the rail. He could hear splashing and shouting in the river below.

  They reached the bulwark, and he heard Bickerstaff say, “Marlowe, can you swim? Isn’t it odd that I don’t know?”

  But Marlowe did not know either. Can I swim? He could not recall.

  He felt the deck heave under his feet, thought that he was going to pass out again. It was the strangest sensation, the solid deck moving thus. Wanted to comment on it, felt hands lift him up. Realized that the ship was about to explode.

  “Dear God!” he shouted, regaining some of his senses. He put a foot on the pin rail and stood up, and on either side James and Bickerstaff did the same, then he launched himself out into the air.

  He felt himself plunging down through the dark, and then the warm water was all around him, covering him, smothering him with its blackness.

  And then the water was lit up like it was daytime, only much brighter than that, and the colors were brilliant reds and oranges, not the pale yellow of sunlight. He felt himself shoved through the water as if pushed by a giant hand.

  He kicked and kicked again, and his head broke the surface and he gasped for
air, that precious element. Flaming bits of the Wilkenson Brothers were falling all around him, splashing and sizzling in the water.

  He could see things—people, wreckage, he could not tell—bobbing in the water, lit up by the great flames that were consuming the merchantman turned pirate. A night of fire, a night of death.

  There was something beside him, floating, and he grabbed it. It was a section of a yard. The main topsail yard, he thought. He could see the footropes trailing off of it, a charred section of the sail still made fast by its robands. He held on as a child clings to its mother. Drifted until he felt sand scraping the bottom of his feet.

  He drifted a few more feet and then realized that he could stand, so he began to walk for shore, pushing through the water, dragging the section of the yard behind him, because suddenly it was very important for him to save it from the flames.

  At last he was in only a few inches of water and he could not pull the yard any farther, so he decided that it would be all right where it was. He just wanted to sit down for a moment, and then he would find Bickerstaff and King James and they could start cleaning all this up.

  And then he was sitting. And then he was lying with his cheek pressed against the rough sand of the beach. He was very warm and comfortable. He felt himself sinking into the earth, and the darkness enveloped him like a blanket and then all thought just floated away.

  It took him some time to realize that the voices were not in his head, that what he was hearing was not a dream. When he finally realized that he was indeed awake, he lay very still and listened and tried to reckon what was going on. He did not open his eyes.

  His body ached as if he had not moved for some time. Where he was pressed into the sand he was still damp, but his face was warm and the parts of him exposed to the air were dry, and he guessed that it was daytime, a warm, sunny day. What day, he could not begin to imagine.

  Then memories began to filter back of the last night that he could recall. He could still taste the sulfur in the back of his throat. He remembered the fight on the deck, the brimstone-filled hold, LeRois.

  He opened his eyes and was greeted with a face full of sunshine that made him blink and turn away. He could feel the tears rolling down his cheeks, and he groaned out loud. He put a hand down in the warm sand and began to push himself up, and that made him groan even louder with the pain and the effort. At last he sat up and held his face in his hands.

  “Here, sir!” he heard a voice call out, a voice that he did not recognize, so he ignored it. “Here’s one still alive!”

  He heard the soft sound of footsteps in the sand, getting closer. Guessed that he was the one they meant. He opened his eyes again and blinked, easing them into the full brunt of daylight. He let the tears run unimpeded down his cheeks.

  At last he looked up. He was on the edge of the James River. It was a fine day, the sky blue and the sun warm, the few clouds overhead white and pleasing to the eye. It was all quite at odds with the way he felt.

  Forty feet off the beach the charred bones of the former Wilkenson Brothers and the Plymouth Prize reached up from the brown water, skeletal hands from the grave, two enemies locked together in death. Wisps of smoke still rose from the black timbers. He could not see the Northumberland but guessed she was down there too. Half a cable length beyond that the burned stumps of the other pirate vessel’s masts stuck up from the river like old pilings.

  None of those things were a surprise, of course, now that he had pieced together his memories of the night.

  What was a surprise was the man-of-war, anchored just beyond the farthest wreck, her lofty rig towering over the river, sails furled to perfection, her many gunports open, great guns run out. Colorful bunting flew from all her masts and yards. She did not look real.

  He closed his eyes and then opened them again. The ship was still there.

  He looked to his left. The beach was scattered with blackened pieces of hull and rigging. Men lay in clumps, some in the surf, some well up in the sand. It would take a closer inspection to see if they were alive or dead.

  “You, there!” a voice called, and he looked to his right. A sailor was approaching him, pointing at him, and behind him came a gentleman with a long white wig and a walking stick and a sword at his side. Wearing a uniform of sorts.

  “You there,” the gentleman said again. “I am Captain Carlson of yon man-of-war, HMS Southampton. I am looking for the captain of HMS Plymouth Prize. The guardship.”

  “There is no more guardship.”

  The gentleman sighed, an exasperated sound. “Well, the captain of the former guardship, then.”

  “I am he.”

  “You are Captain Allair?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, sir, who are you?”

  That was an interesting question. He almost said Malachias Barrett, but he did not. There was still the hope that Malachias Barrett was dead. Was he Thomas Marlowe? Would Governor Nicholson still call him that? He did not know if Wilkenson had told the governor the truth of his past. He did not know, after all that had happened, if he would be called a hero and praised for defeating LeRois, or called a pirate and hanged.

  He answered the question truthfully.

  “I have no idea.”

  Epilogue

  AS IT turned out, he was Thomas Marlowe.

  That at least was what Governor Nicholson called him, as did the burgesses who turned out in welcome when he and the remainder of the Plymouth Prizes were brought ashore at Jamestown. That, their second hero’s welcome, far outstripped even their arrival back from Smith Island.

  The praise was much thicker, of course, because it was spread over so many fewer men. Marlowe and Bickerstaff and King James were all there, and all were relatively unscathed due to the simple good fortune of their having been under water at the exact moment that the Wilkenson Brothers exploded.

  Rakestraw was there too, though the better part of his right arm was not, having been hacked off by a cutlass in the last minutes of the fight. Only Bickerstaff’s quick work with a tourniquet saved him from bleeding to death.

  In addition to them, there were nineteen of the Plymouth Prizes remaining. Of the rest, only ten actual bodies were found. The rest, as well as those pirates who had remained aboard the new Vengeance, were at the bottom of the James or scattered around the shore of Hog Island. No parts large enough to warrant burial were ever found.

  And they were all heroes, the survivors and the honored dead, the saviors of the tidewater. Those who came back were paraded through the countryside to Williamsburg, where they were each given a handsome reward, voted them by the Burgesses the day after the fight, and then toasted in the taverns up and down Duke of Gloucester Street.

  No one ever asked Marlowe why he had abandoned the fight that first day, and Marlowe satisfied himself with the thought that if he had not, then they surely would have been defeated, having been tricked by LeRois into fighting him on his own terms. The beauty of that excuse was that it was genuinely true, even if it was not the real reason he had run away.

  But no one ever asked, and Marlowe was smart enough not to offer an explanation unbidden.

  He also learned, after his return to the world, another of the factors that had contributed to the Plymouth Prizes’ victory over the pirates. Those men aboard the old Vengeance, after abandoning her to the flames, had not returned to the Wilkenson Brothers at all, but instead had gone ashore in an apparent attempt to find yet another home to sack. They had stepped right into the arms of Sheriff Witsen and Lieutenant Burnaby and the militia who had finally assembled and who were watching from the shore, trying to find a way to join in the fight.

  The pirates surrendered with never a weapon raised, leaving those aboard the new Vengeance with fewer men to fight the Plymouth Prizes and providing the people of the tidewater with the kind of tangible end to the threat that only a good mass public hanging can provide.

  Two weeks of celebration and sensational trials culminated in the larges
t crowd ever to gather for an execution in Virginia, where that sort of thing generally lacked the popularity it enjoyed in London. It was like Publick Times all over again, and Thomas Marlowe was very, very eager for it to end.

  He knew that the questions would come sooner or later, the accusations would fly, and he wanted it to be sooner. He did not care to loiter around, letting his worries fester. If there was one thing that he had learned from LeRois, it was that the anticipation of the fight was at least as bad as the actual event.

  But the questions did not come. The questions about his personal history, the questions about Elizabeth’s background, the accusations concerning the death of Joseph Tinling. They were never asked.

  Jacob Wilkenson was presumed to have been killed by the pirates, his body burned with the Wilkenson home. George Wilkenson had disappeared, the horse that he had been riding found near where the pirate ships had been anchored. As far as the governor knew or cared, Joseph Tinling had been murdered by a now dead slave, acting alone. A dead man, later identified as one Ripley, captain of the Wilkensons’ river sloop, had been found beside a sack of items he had looted from the Wilkenson home.

  There was no one else in Virginia who knew or cared about the history of Elizabeth Tinling, no one who would question the pedigree of so heroic and dangerous a man as Thomas Marlowe.

  It was months after the fight, after the adulation had subsided and Marlowe was again just another wealthy planter going unmolested about his business, that he would finally admit to himself that Malachias Barrett was dead, that the man the tidewater recognized as Thomas Marlowe had risen pure from his ashes.

  And when he was certain that that was true, he asked Elizabeth Tinling to marry him.

  And Elizabeth Tinling said yes.

  The wedding ceremony and subsequent supper at the Marlowe plantation was well attended, with the governor and the House of Burgesses there, as well as every other person of note in the tidewater, and their families.