The Guardship botc-1

by James L. Nelson

  “Marlowe,” Bickerstaff said after Middleton was gone, “I urge you not to do anything to further exacerbate this situation.”

  “Never in life, sir. More chocolate with you?”

  Twenty minutes later, they heard Middleton’s voice hailing the sloop through a speaking trumpet, then hailing again, and then a great gun went off forward as the sloop’s master, apparently, required a less subtle persuasion to heave to and repair on board the guardship.

  They listened to the bustle abovedecks, and finally Middleton knocked again and said, “Sloop’s master is on the quarterdeck, awaiting your pleasure, sir.”

  “I shall be up directly,” Marlowe said, and then to his company added, “Pray, excuse me. I shall not be long.”

  He stepped through the scuttle, then around and up to the quarterdeck. The sloop’s master had his back to Marlowe, looking upriver at his own vessel. He was a thin, bony man. Dirty clothes, worn shoes. The queue that fell from under his cocked hat looked more like spun yarn than hair. Greasy spun yarn.

  And there was something familiar about him, even from behind. Marlowe felt an odd sensation, an alarm in his gut, as if that man did not belong to the present time and place.

  “Here, you,” said the seaman standing loose guard on the sloop’s master, “here’s the captain. Show some sodding respect.”

  The sloop’s master turned and faced Marlowe. Their eyes met and held each other, and widened as recognition spread across both their faces.

  “Dear God…Ripley,” Marlowe whispered.

  “Barrett…it’s you, you son of a whore…”

  It took both men less than a second to realize the implications of this meeting. Ripley turned and leapt up onto the quarterdeck rail, balancing there, arms flailing. “Grab him! Grab him!” Marlowe shouted, but the stunned guard just watched as Ripley plunged over the side.

  “Shoot that son of a bitch! Shoot him when he comes up!” Marlowe shouted next, rushing to the rail, but again the guard was so shocked, and so generally dull, that he did not respond.

  “Give me this, you idiot!” Marlowe jerked the musket from his hand and pulled back the lock as he pointed the barrel over the side. Ripley’s head appeared above the brown, muddy water. He swiveled around and looked up with wide eyes, then dove again as Marlowe pulled the trigger.

  A small spout of water shot up from the place where Ripley’s head had been, and Marlowe recalled, with despair, that Ripley was one of those oddities, a sailor who could swim, and swim well.

  “Get me another gun, damn your eyes!” Marlowe roared. He saw another of the Prizes rushing aft onto the quarterdeck, drawn by the gunfire, a musket in his hands. Marlowe ran up

  to him, pulled the weapon from his hands, ran back to the quarterdeck rail.

  Ripley was fifty feet away, pulling himself up the sloop’s side. Marlowe aimed and fired. The ball punched a small hole in the bulwark beside Ripley, slowed him down not one second.

  Ripley tumbled over the side of the sloop, ran aft, calling for his men to cut the cable and set the sails. Marlowe turned forward. “Get some hands to the capstan!” he screamed. “Get the guns to bear on that sloop! I want him blown right to hell, damn you all, blow him right to hell!”

  The Prizes moved fast, for there was no equivocation in their captain’s voice. They grabbed up the handspikes, thrust them into the capstan, heaved around. The spring lifted out of the river and grew taught, and the Plymouth Prize began to turn under the stain, bringing her broadside around.

  The river sloop had her jibs up and taut and her mainsail half hoisted when Ripley himself brought an ax down on the cable and cut it in two. The sloop drifted free, drifted downwind, down toward the Plymouth Prize, before her sails filled and she began to gather momentum.

  “That’s well!” Marlowe shouted. The guns would not bear perfectly, but they would bear, and he could not afford to let the sloop get too far away. He saw Bickerstaff and Elizabeth step out onto the waist, look around, then disappear below again, realizing, quite correctly, that they would do best to stay out of the way.

  “Hand to the guns! Go!” Marlowe shouted, but the men, anticipating that order, were already training the guns around to bear on the sloop. One by one the guns found their targets and the gun captains brought their match down on the train of powder and the big cannons went off. The water around the sloop was torn up and a few holes appeared in the big mainsail and the low bulwark, but the sloop was not slowed and she was not stopped.

  The Prizes leapt to reloading, working like demons to get one more shot off before the sloop disappeared around the

  bend, upriver. They were frantic to stop the little vessel because they saw Marlowe was frantic to stop it.

  Marlowe watched the sloop pulling away. He thought for a moment that she might run aground, but Ripley put her about on a tack that would take them around the bend upriver and beyond the Plymouth Prize’s guns.

  It was useless to try to pursue. The wind was right over their bow, and the big, square-rigged vessel would barely be able to move in the confines of the river, let alone catch the nimble sloop.

  “Secure the guns,” he called. Hoped that the despair that he felt was not conveyed by his voice. The sloop’s low hull disappeared behind the sandy point, and a moment later her rig was gone as well.

  “Marlowe, what the devil was all that about?”

  Bickerstaff stepped up onto the quarterdeck with Elizabeth right behind.

  “That, my friend, was the sound of my own black history overtaking me.” Marlowe turned to Bickerstaff and smiled, a weak effort. “I am undone, sir, quite undone.”

  Then he looked at Elizabeth, saw the concern in her face. “It seems this is the season for ghosts.”

  Chapter 26

  CURIOSITY. IT was eating at Elizabeth, like vultures, like wolves. Bickerstaff could see that, could see it in her eyes, in the way she watched Marlowe. Curiosity, as natural a part of the female condition as vapors.

  At the same time he could see that Marlowe was in such a state of mind as to not invite inquiry even into his present concerns, let alone an examination of the past that so disturbed him. And Elizabeth was sensitive enough to realize this as well.

  And so, Bickerstaff knew, she would come to him.

  He stepped out onto the deck and strolled forward, avoiding the quarterdeck that so easily communicated with the great cabin. It was dark, being nearly eleven o’clock, but there was light enough from the abundance of stars for him to see all he needed to see.

  He wanted to give her the chance to approach him. Did not want her curiosity to drive her to distraction.

  He was leaning on the rail and looking up at the stars-or rather, the few planets that he could see-for no more than ten minutes before she stepped through the scuttle. He watched her climb up the quarterdeck ladder and look around, then make her way back to the waist and forward.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Tinling,” he said, and saw her start.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, recovering.

  “Forgive me,” Bickerstaff said, “I did not mean to frighten you.”

  “It’s quite all right. I guess I’m a bit jumpy. And I think perhaps it is time to dispense with the ‘Mrs. Tinling’ nonsense. Pray call me Elizabeth.”

  “Delighted, if you will do me the honor of addressing me as Francis.”

  “The honor is mine, sir.”

  They stood silent for a moment, their eyes on the stars and their thoughts elsewhere.

  “How does King James do?” Elizabeth broke the silence.

  “Very well. The vomit has worked admirably. I had intended to bleed him, but I think perhaps it will not be necessary. Any imbalance of the humors seems to have corrected itself, which I observe more often than not it will.”

  “Are you, sir, a physician? I realize I know so little about you.”

  And about Marlowe as well, which is doubtless your primary concern, as well it should be, Bickerstaff thought.

  “No, I am not.
I am…I was, a teacher.” He turned and met her eyes. She was so lovely, and the simple dress she wore and the plain mobcap with her yellow hair spilling out from under just reinforced that natural beauty. Was it any wonder that she was at the center of this storm? The face that launched a thousand ships, and burned the topless towers of Ilium.

  He smiled at the irony of that thought.

  It was not two years ago that Malachias Barrett had requested his help in concocting a new name. A new name for a new life.

  “How does ‘Marlowe’ sound?” Bickerstaff had said.

  “‘Marlowe’?”

  “It is the name of a man who wrote a play about a fellow who sells his soul to the devil for worldly riches.”

  The former brigand smiled. “It suits me passing well,” he said, and at that moment Malachias Barrett died to the world, and Thomas Marlowe was born.

  “This morning,” Elizabeth said, hesitating, “after the guns went off, Thomas said…something about his own history, his own black history, he called it. He said he was undone-”

  “He did.”

  “Oh, Francis, I am so worried. He is so…unhappy. What…” Her voice trailed off. She did not know how to ask such a question.

  “You wish to know what it is in his past? What is his history that plagues him so?”

  “Yes.” She looked up at him, and her eyes were pleading. “Yes, will you tell me?”

  “Thomas’s story is his to tell, not mine. But perhaps if I tell you my own, as it relates to him, it will give you some hint of what he was. I think it is my moral right to do so.”

  “Please, sir, I beg of you.”

  Bickerstaff looked in her eyes again, dark in the faint light, though he knew them to be blue, like his, but deeper, not the pale blue of a hazy summer sky but the deep blue of the bay. He looked out over the black water.

  “I have been a teacher most of my life, in various situations. Greek, Latin, science, philosophy. Fencing, as good fortune would have it. In ’95 I was employed by a gentleman of some wealth who was moving his family to Boston. I was given the choice of going with them or finding other employment.

  “I had heard so much about America. But of course, you have lived in England, you know the high talk that goes about. I thought it would be just the thing. A new land.

  “In any event, five weeks out we were overhauled by another ship, which turned out to be a pirate. We set all the sail we could, ran like a fox, but these piratical fellows are fast, you know, and rarely are they outrun.

  “It took them the better part of a day, but at last they came up with us. They were all lining the rail, as I recall, screaming and chanting, beating drums. Vaporing, they call it.”

  Bickerstaff closed his eyes. He had not thought of this in some time. He had quite purposefully not thought of it.

  “We chose to fight. That is no easy decision, for it is a sentence of death to fight these pirates and lose. There is no quarter for those who do not surrender, but we had a ship full of gentlemen, and oh, they were so brave in the face of it all…”

  Now the images were swimming in front of him, and he lived it again as he spoke. The profound fear in his gut as that pirate ship ranged alongside, the big black ensign with the grinning death’s-head and twin swords snapping in the breeze. He had never been so afraid in his life, before or since.

  There were hundreds of them, it seemed, filthy, merciless men clinging to the channels and the shrouds and the rails, howling like one would not expect to hear this side of hell.

  The doomed men, crew of the merchant vessel, fired off a few pathetic cannons, but there were not enough men aboard to fire a real broadside, and those who were manning the guns had precious little knowledge of such things. Bickerstaff could see the fury of the pirates building, sweeping through the tribe with each defiant gun.

  And then they were on them. Bickerstaff wiped his sweating palms on his coat, took a fresh grip on the sword in his right hand, the long dagger in his left. The pirate ship slammed into the merchantman’s side with a horrible shuddering crash and the brigands poured down on the deck, spilled onto the merchant ship like a boarding sea that sweeps the deck fore and aft.

  All of the gentlemen’s plans, all of their high talk about holding the pirates off, meeting their attack with a solid defense, driving them into a corner, were forgotten in that vicious surge of men. Bickerstaff saw his compatriots cut down, shot down; he saw his employer, the one who had urged them all to stand and fight, flee down a scuttle, his pistol and sword discarded.

  And then they were on him, and he had no thought for anything save for the blades that were flashing all around. He felt his sleeve plucked by a pistol ball, felt another tear a gash in his side, but he could do nothing about small arms. He could only fight against the swords.

  And that, as it happened, he could do exceptionally well.

  He knocked a blade aside as it lunged at him, ran the attacker through, slid his sword free as the man fell and met another, thinking, So this is what it is to kill men in battle.

  The pirates were not swordsmen, they were barbarians who could do no more than hack and slash. And they were drunk. They would not best him-as long as he had to fight no more than two or three at a time.

  Bickerstaff leapt back as a sword hissed down like an ax, and the brigand missed him completely, stabbing his cutlass into the deck. Bickerstaff stepped on the blade, pinning it down, and stuck the man in the chest with his dagger even as he parried and lunged at another.

  He heard cursing, shrieking, screams of agony, defiance, madness all around. It was the inner circle of hell on that merchantman’s deck, and he was a poor damned soul who would die on that spot. He was doing no more than putting off that fate for a few seconds more, he knew that, and taking some of the bastards to damnation with him.

  Then there was a weird quiet aboard the ship, and Bickerstaff realized that it had been taken, that all of his fellow defenders were dead or, like himself, soon to wish they were. He realized it even as he turned aside the sword of the last of his attackers, knocking the point to the deck, and plunged the dagger into his guts. He watched the man go down, bleeding and clutching at the wound. He stood there, too exhausted to form a rational thought, dumbly watching the man collapse.

  Then suddenly his sword was knocked from his hand as another blade slashed down, connecting with his weapon near the hilt. It fell with a clatter to the deck at his feet.

  He whirled around, the dagger in his right hand, glued to his palm with drying blood, and leaned against the bulwark, breathing hard. The pirates around him stepped aside. Three feet away stood the man who had knocked his sword from his hand.

  “Don’t ever drop your guard to look at your handiwork,” the pirate said.

  Bickerstaff regarded him as the fox, weary from the chase, regards the approaching huntsmen. Young, late twenties, perhaps, tall and lean. He held a big and bloody sword in his right hand. A brace of pistols hung from a long ribbon around his neck. He wore a weathered blue broadcloth coat and wool shirt, canvas slop trousers, battered shoes.

  He seemed to regard Bickerstaff with some curiosity, then looked at the five men, dead or dying, at Bickerstaff’s feet.

  “You done this?” he asked, gesturing toward the dead men with his sword. He seemed not in the least concerned about the fate of his shipmates, bleeding out their lives on the deck.

  “I did. I did not see as I had a choice.”

  “Some hand with a sword, are you?”

  “Fencing is a gentlemanly pursuit.”

  At that the pirate smiled and looked Bickerstaff square in the eye, his intelligent, bemused brown eyes locking with Bickerstaff’s pale blue. “And you reckon yourself a gentleman?”

  “I instruct gentlemen.”

  “And what the fuck do you mean by that?”

  “I am a teacher. I was taking passage to the colonies to act as instructor to the children of the gentleman who sails with his family aboard this vessel.”

 
; “Sailed,” the pirate corrected. “He’s dead. Run through while he was cowering like the pile of shit he was. Like all them gentlemen. Cowardly bastards. You’re the only one that fought worth being called fighting. We lost eight of our men, and you done for five of them.”

  “You do not seem very distraught over the death of your comrades,” Bickerstaff said. It was unreal, like a nightmare, standing there, surrounded by death, death waiting for him, having this conversation with a murdering brigand.

  The man shrugged. “A short life, but a merry one. Now come, teacher, cross swords with me.” He gestured with the point of his sword for Bickerstaff to retrieve his weapon from the deck. “I’ll know who’s the better man.”

  Bickerstaff bent over and picked up his sword, his eyes fixed on the pirate. Then the pirate gestured for Bickerstaff to

  move to a clear part of the deck.

  “You wish to fence with me?”

  “No, I wants to fight with you, and fight I will.”

  “You are the captain of this villainous bunch?”

  “No, I’m the quartermaster. Now, come along.”

  “I’ll fight you, on condition that the children aboard this ship are not hurt.”

  At that the man laughed out loud. “You’ll make no demands, teacher. If you fight and lose, you’ll get a better death than them others.”

  “And if I win?”

  “You’re no worse off than you are now, and you gets the pleasure of taking another of us to hell with you.” At that he raised his sword and slashed down at Bickerstaff, so fast that Bickerstaff just had time to turn the sword away. He lunged, and the quartermaster leapt back, keeping just inches from Bickerstaff’s blade, smiling.

  They faced off, Bickerstaff holding his sword in the prescribed manner of a gentleman fighting a duel, the pirate gripping his great sword with two hands, like a savage Celt. The pirate attacked, slashing right then left, driving Bickerstaff back with the ferocity of the onslaught, and Bickerstaff worked sword and dagger together to keep him off.

  He had no form, no style, but he was incredibly strong, and that gave him speed, and his reflexes were unfailing. Bickerstaff had never before seen such a natural swordsman. He would never have believed that any man as ill-trained as this one could both beat off his attack and put up a formidable attack of his own.