The Guardship botc-1

by James L. Nelson

  He stepped slowly up onto the porch, glanced through the window into the sitting room. He could see the big clock on the mantel, and just as he looked at the hands he heard it chiming out nine o’clock, the sound of the bells muffled by the glass. He braced himself, ready to charge down the hall and into the drawing room. Arrest that villain Marlowe for trying to violate the poor widow Tinling.

  His heart was pounding, his palms wet. He felt his fingertips tingling with excitement. He waited.

  And nothing happened.

  The excitement and the heightened awareness began to dissipate as he waited, waited for some sound from within. He looked up at the clock. Five minutes past nine. God damn you, he thought, scream. What are you about, you silly bitch?

  He waited. Ten minutes past nine. It seemed as if he had been standing there for an hour. This would never do. He renewed the grip on his pistol and stepped over to the door. Perhaps something had gone wrong. Perhaps that bastard Marlowe had gagged her.

  He twisted the handle, slowly pushed the door open. The light from the sitting room spilled into the hall, illuminating the foyer, the far end of the hall still in darkness. Wilkenson took a hesitant step forward. He stopped and listened. Felt the sweat trickle down the side of his face. He took another step, and then another. Nothing. No sound, no muffled cry, no indication of a struggle. Had she betrayed him after all?

  “Don’t move! Who the hell are you?” The voice came from behind him, loud and sharp, like a master sergeant’s, and Wilkenson felt his whole body jolt in surprise. It was only by a miracle that he did not discharge his pistol. He spun around, found himself looking into the barrel of a musket. At the far end was an old black man, dressed like a house servant, save for the bare calves and feet.

  The black man squinted his eyes and cocked his head to one side. “You Mr. Wilkenson, ain’t you? The Wilkenson that Mr. Marlowe didn’t kill?”

  Wilkenson straightened and glanced around. Took stock of the situation now that his shock had subsided. There were two more men behind the old man with the gun, both black. There were no white men, just the slaves. He felt the smallest sense of relief.

  “I said, ain’t you Mr. Wilkenson?” the old one repeated. He had an arrogant tone to his voice. Not a hint of subservience. Wilkenson would not tolerate that, not from a nigger.

  “I am Mr. Wilkenson. Now, put down that gun, boy.”

  “Don’t you ‘boy’ me, I’s the one with the gun. Boy.”

  “How dare you? No slave will point a gun at me and-”

  “We ain’t slaves. We free men. And you sneaking around our home with a pistol and we wants to know why.”

  “Ah…” Wilkenson stammered. This situation was unlike anything he had encountered. He would not tolerate such abuse from slaves, or former slaves, or whatever they were. But there were three of them, and if they would not obey him, then what could he do? “I…ah…heard a noise.”

  The old man looked back at the other two, and they just shook their heads. Shrugged. Wilkenson could see that they were younger and looked as strong as horses. What little calm he had found now deserted him.

  “We didn’t hear no noise.”

  “Well, I did, so you will just have to take my word for it. Now, if you have this situation in hand, then I shall leave you to…” He took a step toward the door, but the round hole on the musket barrel followed him, blocked his way.

  “Hold up, there. You come sneakin’ in here at night, with a pistol in your hand, after Mr. Marlowe done killed your brother, some fool story about hearin’ a noise, like you was just passin’ by, and you think we’s going to let you go? No, sir. I think we best call the sheriff.”

  “Sheriff! Now, you look here, boy, I’ve had all of this nonsense as I can take. You stand aside and-”

  “Go sit in the sitting room, Mr. Wilkenson, while I send William to get the sheriff, and we’ll straighten this out.”

  “How dare you!”

  “Mr. Wilkenson, if you don’t sit, we going to have to tie you up.”

  Wilkenson looked from one dark, expressionless face to another. It was the last word in humiliation, being caught here and held at gunpoint by these niggers.

  No, that was not true. The last word in humiliation would be for them to tie him up and let the sheriff find him that way. And they would do it, he could see that, and there was no one there to stop them. What would he do? Appeal to Marlowe?

  He felt his stomach convulse with panic, felt the sweat on his palms and forehead. Wouldn’t they summon Marlowe? Would Marlowe find him, pistol in hand, held at gunpoint by the house servants? It was too horrible to consider. Would Marlowe charge him with attempted murder? His carefully conceived plan could turn into a nightmare beyond belief.

  As if in a dream, he let the old man take the pistol from him. He stepped into the sitting room and sat on the edge of the settee. The old man with the gun sat as well, facing him from across the room, the round eye of the musket staring at him.

  The next hour and a half was the worst in all of George Wilkenson’s thirty-seven years. He sat unmoving, red-faced, as a servant, a nigger, stared at him, held him prisoner while another stood in the doorway, arms folded, staring at him as well.

  It was utterly humiliating, and all the while his stomach churned with dread, waiting, knowing that any minute Marlowe would walk through the door, led by some other servant, who would point and say, “There he is, Mr. Marlowe,” and Marlowe would start and say “Wilkenson, what the devil? This is mighty irregular.”

  He clamped his teeth together and took comfort in the one thought that could provide him with comfort-the thought of what he would do to Marlowe, and what he would do to that bitch.

  Sheriff Witsen came at last, breathing hard, his round face red and lathered in sweat, his stockings falling down. He had clearly dressed in a hurry. If he had not, then Wilkenson would have crushed him like a bug.

  “Mr. Wilkenson, what have they done?” he huffed.

  “Nothing. It was all a mistake,” Wilkenson said, and said nothing more. With the sheriff there, the servants could hold him no longer. He did not meet Witsen’s eyes, or the black men’s, as he stormed out of the house, more frightened than ever that Marlowe would make an appearance.

  George Wilkenson had never been more humiliated in his life. Not while being flogged as a boy by his father and his tutor, not after puking at his brother’s death and shrinking from Marlowe’s threats, not from Jacob Wilkenson’s insinuations of his inadequacy. Never. Had never understood the concept of blind rage. Until now.

  And he swore that Marlowe would pay for that humiliation. He would pay. Not just for what he himself had done. For what they all had done.

  Elizabeth Tinling stood behind the big oak, unquestionably hiding, and watched George Wilkenson and Sheriff Witsen, illuminated by the lights from the house, as they stepped across the porch and down onto the lawn. Wilkenson was practically running. The sheriff, one of Wilkenson’s foremost lickspittles, was racing to catch up with him, though Wilkenson seemed to be ignoring him.

  She put her hand over her mouth. She could not let herself laugh out loud. Her note telling Wilkenson not to come, which he would find upon returning to his home, along with her protests that she had not gone to Marlowe’s that night, would create enough doubt in his mind that she might not get the full brunt of his wrath. But if he discovered her hiding behind the tree, she would be undone.

  She shook her head as she watched him swing himself up in his saddle and thunder blindly past. She wondered what perverse aspect of her personality drove her to play such tricks, even when she knew that she would pay for them later.

  But it was more than that, and she knew it. It was war now, war between Marlowe and the Wilkensons, and she could not hope to be a neutral party. She had to choose sides, and she had chosen the side that she thought was the stronger. The decision had not been arrived at lightly.

  She had immediately dismissed any hope of Wilkenson tearing up the note of han
d. He would never do that, not when he realized the power he wielded over her as long as he held it.

  Nor would he call in the note. Ruining her would do him no good. No, he would hold her in limbo, as he did with all

  his debtors. Make use of her. Demand her help in tricking some poor bastard one night. Demand a quick fuck the next.

  But Marlowe was also a force to be considered. He had already killed one of the Wilkensons. He commanded the guardship, had the governor’s ear, and the governor probably would not care to see his choice of captains hanged. If she bore false witness against him, and he was not hanged, then she would suffer his vengeance.

  But it was more than just that. She had chosen Marlowe for more than mere pragmatic reasons. Marlowe seemed a decent man, and what Wilkenson proposed to do to him was despicable, and Elizabeth Tinling was sick of doing despicable things. She had chosen to side with Marlowe because she liked him, and that actually surprised her.

  She hoped that she had chosen well.

  Chapter 12

  IN THE end Marlowe did not flog to death the man who had fired the first shot. It was not that he did not want to, he simply could not discover who he was. It seemed none of the dozen men standing shoulder to shoulder noticed him, or at least they would not give him up. In any event, Marlowe probably would have let him off with no more than two or three dozen lashes, just as a lesson and an example of his charitable nature.

  They spent a nervous night on Smith Island, or at least the men of the Plymouth Prize did. Those pirates still alive were rounded up and deposited near the fire, bound hand and foot, a circle of armed Prizes around them. Marlowe scrutinized each man, anxious to see if he recognized any of them. If he had, Marlowe would have killed the brigand on the spot and not bothered to explain. But as fortune had it, there were none that he knew.

  Bickerstaff, Middleton, and his men went out to the pirate ship and took possession of the five rogues aboard her, who, having witnessed the capture of their fellows and having no boats or any means of escape, had become insensibly drunk. They were rounded up, lowered into a boat by way of a gantline, and taken ashore to join their captured brethren.

  All the hands stood guard all night. This was not by Marlowe’s orders, but simply because the men were too agitated by the fight and too wary of the pirate captives to think of sleep. Marlowe, Rakestraw, and Middleton stood watch with them by turns, just to make certain nothing went amiss.

  “It was a good fight, was it not?” Marlowe said to Bickerstaff as he rose to take his watch. Bickerstaff had been sitting up all that time, away from the men, in contemplative silence. The fire was burning down, and the circle of light had retreated to just a few fathoms out from the red glowing logs. Bickerstaff’s face seemed to glow, light and shadow dancing across it as the fire flared and subsided. Marlowe could see his weariness and his satisfaction.

  “It was a good fight, Tom,” he said. “You were born to this kind of command. This honest command. I know of no other that could have made these men stand and fight.”

  “I am grateful to you for saying so, sir,” Marlowe said, and he meant it, because he knew that Bickerstaff did. Idle flattery had never polluted Bickerstaff’s lips. “Nonetheless, it was no Agincourt. Had you not shown up when you did, I think we must have been routed by the rogues.”

  “But you held your ground. Or your surf, as the case might be.”

  They stood there for a few moments in silence, staring into the fire. Enjoying their comradeship. They had been together for six years, six years as friends, shipmates, pupil and tutor. They had seen a great deal together, but they were still, after all of it, very different men.

  “Well, good night, Francis,” Marlowe said at last.

  “Good night, Tom.” He smiled and ambled off into the dark.

  The sight that greeted them in the morning was grotesque, the hellish aftermath of a battle. The bodies of two dozen men at least, Prizes and pirates, lay on the beach or floating in the shallow water. They were black with dried blood, and bloated so their clothing seemed ill-fitting. A swarm of birds clambered over them, tearing at their flesh.

  Those corpses in the water seemed as if they were making some halfhearted effort to shoo the scavengers away, their arms waving slightly as the small surf rocked them back and forth. There were dozens of crabs. It was a ghastly sight, and one or two of the Prizes had to race into the dune grass to be sick.

  But the rest seemed quite unmoved by the sight, at least after they began to poke around the great piles of booty that had been deposited on the beach. Much of it consisted of manufactured goods taken from English merchantmen: crockery, plate, silks, linen, barrel hoops, great piles of clothing. It was an unusually rich haul.

  The pirates had had a successful cruise, were no doubt ready to sell their prodigious capture. In Charleston and Savannah there were plenty of merchants, strangled as they were by the government’s policy toward importation, that were eager to purchase such things. They would not ask embarrassing questions about bills of lading and such.

  There was also a tolerable amount of gold and silver, as well as an abundance of weapons: swords, pistols, beautiful muskets. There was a most piratical gleam in the eye of many of the Plymouth Prizes as they fingered the goods, Marlowe’s insinuation about their potential rewards having apparently found an attentive audience.

  “Mr. Rakestraw,” he called out to the first officer, who was poking through a crate of muskets. He set aside the gun he was holding, a beautiful musket, and with a sheepish look on his face, as if he had been caught in some indiscretion, he came over to the captain.

  “Mr. Rakestraw, here is what I would have you do. Divide the gold and silver in half. One half shall be for the governor. Then count up how many of our men are still living and divide the other half of the gold and silver into equal shares. Two shares for the officers. And those that suffered wounds, the ones you believe will recover, are to get two shares as well, so figure that in. Never mind those you reckon are done for. Then we shall draw numbers and each man by number will be allowed to choose a new suit of clothes and a sword and pistol. Officers first.”

  “Yes, sir,” Rakestraw said, but he seemed to hesitate. “But, sir, you know that all of this, rightly speaking, sir, is prizes of the Crown. This…ah…what you’re doing here, sir, it ain’t regular.” Rakestraw’s protests were weakened, Marlowe thought, by the fact that he kept glancing over at the gun he had been holding, and seemed near panic when someone else picked it up and examined it.

  “You, there,” Marlowe called to the man holding the musket, “bring that over here.”

  Grudgingly the man shuffled over and handed him the gun. It was indeed beautiful, not the kind of crude weapon turned out by second-rate gunsmiths in dark and tiny back alley shops, but a custom-made piece with beautiful engravings on the lock plate and an ivory inlay on the bird’s-eye walnut stock. If Rakestraw was to be led into temptation, Marlowe was pleased to see that he would not settle for second best.

  He handed the gun to the lieutenant.

  “Mr. Rakestraw, you fought well last night, damn well, we should have been bested without you. And you have done a good job of getting the ship in fighting order,” he said, which was no lie. “I wish you to have this gun.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir. But, sir…”

  “Listen, Lieutenant. Each of the officers and men are entitled to prize money, are they not? We all have a legal claim to a portion of what has been captured. But we both know that it will take a year at least to see any of it, assuming the Lords of Admiralty don’t find some means of cheating us of our share. All I wish to do is see that the men get what is rightfully theirs, without having to wait an age for it. I’m just cutting through red tape, no more.”

  “Oh, I see, sir,” said Rakestraw, and he did see, largely because he wanted to. With that fine gun in his hand and the piles of gold and silver ten feet away, he was quite willing to ignore the more dubious parts of Marlowe’s justification, such as
the fact that the men were getting far more than they ever would in prize money, and that what the captain was doing would be considered no more than pilfering if it was found out.

  But it would not be found out. Both men knew that it would not. The pirates were unlikely to tell, nor was anyone likely to believe them. And Marlowe would see that they were locked down in a dark hold before the division of loot began.

  The Plymouth Prizes, who in the next hour would make more money than they had in their entire lives up until that moment, were even less likely to tell. What Marlowe was doing for them was only just, after their ill usage by the navy, and must be kept secret. At least that was how they would see it.

  Rakestraw, with his new musket tucked under his arm, hurried off to order the prisoners ferried out to the Plymouth Prize and to oversee the dividing up of the booty.

  “Yonder comes the Northumberland,” said Bickerstaff, stepping up beside Marlowe and nodding toward the harbor. The little sloop was standing into the bay under mainsail, jib, and topsail, the canvas white in the morning sun. They stood there for a moment, watching the small ship sail into the harbor on the quartering breeze.

  “Excellent,” Marlowe said at last. “Now, I need you to-”

  “Marlowe, pray, what is Lieutenant Rakestraw about?”

  He turned and looked in the direction that Bickerstaff was looking. Rakestraw had all of the specie and gold and silver plate piled up on a couple of chests, and an impressive pile it was. He was counting it out into numerous small piles and placing them like chess pieces on the second chest.

  “Well,” Marlowe said, “he is counting out the specie, you see. Just getting a fair accounting of it for the inventory.”

  “Indeed? It looks very much to me as if he was dividing it up like plunder. In order that each man might be called up to receive a share.”