The Guardship botc-1

by James L. Nelson

  man, black against the background of the fire. He moved with rapid, jerky movements. It had to be terribly hot so close to the flames.

  And then the figure abandoned whatever he was trying to do and raced away from the flames, toward the stable, but George’s vision was damaged from looking into the fire and he lost sight of him.

  He swung the horse over to the nearest stand of trees, slid off, looped the reins around a sapling. He stepped across the lawn, toward where the man had disappeared, his footfalls on the grass nearly silent and masked by the crackling fire.

  He saw the person at last, just outside the door to the stable, hunched over, his attention on whatever he was doing. George pulled one of the pistols from his belt, one of Marlowe’s pistols, a beautiful weapon, light and balanced in the hand, and stepped closer.

  He was five feet away before the man sensed that he was not alone. He turned, his face illuminated by the burning house.

  “What the devil…” George could think of nothing else to say. It was the shifty little man whom Matthew had hired to run the river sloop. “Ripley…?”

  “Oh, Mr. Wilkenson…” Ripley’s rat eyes darted to the pistol and then to George’s face. His tongue flicked out and licked his lips.

  “God, but ain’t it horrible, what they done?” Ripley continued, nodding toward the burning house, his eyes never leaving George’s. “I told your father, ‘You don’t want to have no business with them pirates,’ but your father, he wouldn’t listen, not to no one.”

  “Where are they? The pirates?”

  “They gone back to their ship, I reckon. Anchored just off the Finch place, down by Hog Island.” Ripley half turned and pointed across the field. He was being very helpful.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, well, when I heard, I come to see if I could help, maybe defend the place. I didn’t reckon it would just be aban

  doned, but I was too late. I…ah…I tried to save what I could, I got some of it, tried to save it for you and Mrs. Wilkenson and the others, so’s you don’t lose everything…”

  George’s eyes moved down to Ripley’s feet. There was a horse blanket lying on the grass, half tied in a bundle. Spilling out of it were various bits of silver service, an old clock with gold inlay, a couple of china cups.

  George looked up at Ripley, astounded at the depths of the man’s depravity. “You were looting. You were looting my home.”

  “No, no, I was trying to save a few things from them fucking pirates, beg your pardon…”

  George raised the pistol up until it was pointing at Ripley’s forehead, just three feet away. Ripley took a tentative step back, and George cocked the lock.

  “No, Mr. Wilkenson, I was-”

  Those words, that pathetic, lying protest, were the last words that former pirate quartermaster Ezekiel Ripley ever uttered. George pulled the trigger. The gun jolted in his hand, and he had a vague image through the smoke of Ripley blown backward, arms flung out, onto the grass.

  The gun dropped to George’s side. He took a few steps forward and looked down at Ripley’s earthly remains, sprawled out flat, dead eyes staring at the sky. Much as Matthew had been.

  He had thought about this moment many times, what it would be like to kill a human being. He had always imagined terror, revulsion, guilt. But he felt none of that. Just a vague curiosity, no more. He wondered if this was how Marlowe had felt after putting a bullet in Matthew. He never seemed to have been stricken with guilt or any form of remorse.

  George stood over the body and reloaded the pistol. It seemed likely that he would need it again before the night was through. He went into the stable, pushed the stable doors open wide, and opened all of the stall doors as well. If the stables did catch fire, the horses would be able to get out.

  He found Marlowe’s horse, mounted it, and rode toward the fields. He paused to look down Ripley’s body one last time. He still felt nothing. He touched the horse’s flanks with his heels and headed off in the wake of the pirate horde.

  It was easy enough to follow them. The trail was blazed with burning buildings and markers in the form of discarded bottles and loot dropped or tossed aside along the road that ran beside the river. The mill was all but gone, as was the Page house and the Nelson house. The fires were burning down at last, the flames having sucked all of the life they could from the wood and plaster and cloth until there was no more left to consume.

  The Finch house was nearly dark, with only an orange ember here or there, a punctuation of light in that dark, charred heap. There was nothing left to indicate that the huge, smoldering fire pit on top of the small rise had once been a house.

  George could smell the now familiar odor of a burnt house, could hear the crackling of the burning timber, but here the crickets were chirping again, and he could smell the woods and the mud near the river as well. Things were already returning to their natural state.

  He paused and looked at the remains of the Finch home. He thought of all the times he had danced in those rooms, or played piquet or whist, or sat down to dinner with his neighbors. What would they do now? What would any of them do?

  He pulled the head of his horse around and rode off toward the water. He had no plan, did not even know why he had followed the pirates. It seemed a long time since he had had a rational thought; the night had been made up of feelings, instincts, impressions, pushing him along through no conscious decision of his own.

  He came at last to the edge of the water. He could see where the pirates had come ashore, the mud and plants trampled by the many, many feet, the long grooves cut in the bank where the boats had been pulled up.

  The James River was nearly a mile wide at that point. George could just make out the masts of the ships-it seemed

  there were more than one-against the night sky, but their hulls were lost in the darkness.

  For a long time he just sat, staring at the dark, skeletal masts with the same morbid disinterest with which he had looked at Ripley’s dead body, the round hole in his forehead. Anyone who heard the tale of his going to plead with Marlowe would think it an act of altruistic humility, but that was not all of it. His family had nothing now, nothing but their good name, and if LeRois lived to tell of his father’s entanglements with the pirates, then that too would be gone. He needed LeRois destroyed, and he hoped and prayed Marlowe could do it.

  His eyes moved over to a clump of bushes on the bank twenty feet away. Behind the bushes he knew he would find a canoe. The Finches had kept one there for years, to use for fishing or other recreation. He looked out at the pirates again, then back toward the canoe. Was there anything he could do to hurry the pirates’ destruction along?

  The instinct that had been driving him that night forced him to ride down to the bushes, to dismount, to see that the boat was still there and the paddles still lying on the thwarts. He looked out toward the pirate ships. He had no idea of what he might do.

  He felt a spark of fear and panic flash through him, but there was something delicious about it, something thrilling and redemptive. He had no thought of dying, because he no longer had any thought of living. He was ruined, he was humiliated, he was a part of the clan that had unleashed the terror on the colony. He was as much a burnt-out shell as his family’s home.

  He pushed the canoe into the water, just as he and the Finch boys had done so many times in the past. He climbed in, carefully, and found his balance, then dipped the paddle into the river and started for the other side.

  Chapter 34

  THEY WERE feeling their way down the James River under fore and main topsail alone, a blind man with arms outstretched trying to keep to the center of a bridge. In the fore chains, larboard and starboard, experienced hands swung lead lines, their soft chants relayed aft down the length of the deck by the men stationed at the guns.

  Marlowe stood by the break of the quarterdeck. He could just see the face of the man below him, calling up, “And a half four, and five, and a half four…” A smoky
haze hung over the trees and the river and carried the sharp smell of wanton destruction. It blotted out most of the natural light from the moon and stars, making it that much more difficult for Marlowe to get his ship and men into battle.

  He looked to either side. He could not see the distant shores. But he knew that stretch of water well enough to know from the depths alone that they were running down the center of the stream. That and the glow of the burnt and burning houses, standing like lighthouses on the north shore, told him that they were closing with the enemy.

  He stared blankly at the flames half a mile away. The Wilkenson home. He considered all the things that he should be feeling-elation, pleasure, the glow of vengeance reaped- and he wondered why he was not. He was too tired, he concluded, too tired of it all, and too frightened of what was to come.

  “And three, and three…,” the man below him said.

  The water was shoaling, which meant they were nearing Hog Island. Marlowe turned to Rakestraw, who was standing ten feet away. “We shall bear up a bit, pray see to the braces,” and when the first officer had done that he said to the helmsmen, “Bear up, three points.”

  The Plymouth Prize turned to larboard, the change, of course, imperceptible save for change in the bearing of the fires on the shore.

  “And four and a half, and four and a half…”

  Marlowe turned to say something to Bickerstaff, but Bickerstaff was not there. He was off on the Northumberland with King James and a dozen other of the Plymouth Prizes, somewhere ahead in the dark.

  They were employing their old tactic, the one that had worked so well on Smith Island. Once the Plymouth Prize was alongside and fully engaged, then those aboard the Northumberland would swarm up the other side and come at them from behind. It was not much of a plan, but any edge was better than none, particularly as they were outnumbered two to one in ships and men, and the men they were facing were very experienced killers indeed, with no reason at all to surrender and every reason to fight to the death.

  Marlowe took some comfort from the plan, from the thought that they were not just going right at the pirates but instead were using some of their God-given cunning. He took comfort from the thought that the pirates had been on a rampage for some time now, were probably drunk and collapsed on the deck of the Vengeance, near comatose. He was comforted by the thought that the Plymouth Prizes were drunk as well, not blind drunk but fighting drunk, and he was keeping them that way. He took comfort from the fact that Francis Bickerstaff and King James would be with him on the killing ground.

  But for all the comfort that he gleaned from those thoughts, he was not optimistic about their chances. He of all of them knew what they were up against. The Vengeances under LeRois had never been bested in all the time he sailed with them.

  Of course, these were not the same men. Most of the men aboard now would have signed the articles after Marlowe had given up the life on the account. But he did not think that they would be any less capable than the others who had sailed under LeRois.

  He turned and glanced at the place where Bickerstaff would have been standing had he been aboard. He missed his friend’s steadying presence. They had been through so much together: bloody fights, and lessons in Latin and history, and two years as landed gentlemen. He owed his brief but glorious career as a member of the tidewater gentry, and his brilliant flash of passion with Elizabeth, to his friend and teacher. He would miss him.

  And he would miss King James as well, belligerent, surly King James. Marlowe understood the man perfectly, understood what drove him, and he had used that knowledge shamelessly to manipulate James into doing him great service. But he liked James, respected him.

  And he had given back to James as much as he had taken. Pride, honor, those things that most of the first men of Virginia did not think a black man capable of having. James, he knew, would not mind dying, as long as he died with a blooded sword in his hand.

  But at least he would see them one more time, albeit across a smoke-filled deck as they fought their last in defense of their adopted colony and in defense of their own honor, their own genuine, unvarnished honor. He could not say the same for Elizabeth. He did not think that he would ever see Elizabeth again.

  He had found the time to scribble out a will, leaving to her everything that was his-the house, the land, the specie-a brief document that unbeknownst to Elizabeth was included in the packet he had sent back with her and Lucy. It was something.

  He thought of her smile, her smooth and perfect skin, the way her long yellow hair had a habit of falling across her face, the way she would whisk it away. He would never see her again, and for that, and that alone, he was truly sorry.

  George Wilkenson swallowed hard, made a bold stroke with the paddle. The hulls of the pirate ships seemed to materialize out of the night, the formless dark suddenly coalescing into solid and unyielding shapes not forty feet ahead. From the low vantage of the canoe they seemed to loom overhead, forbidding black cliffs, and rising above the cliffs the dead forest of masts, the spiderwebs of rigging.

  George gave another stroke and pulled the paddle from the water, letting the nimble, silent boat glide along. The farther ship was the bigger of the two, and even in the dark night he could see that she was the Wilkenson Brothers. The pirates had altered her in some way-the line of her deck did not look the same-but still George knew the family ship well enough that he could never mistake her for another.

  The closer ship, the small one, he did not recognize, and he assumed it was the vessel that had brought the pirates to the Chesapeake Bay. He stared as he drifted closer. He began to see a few dim, square patches along her side, aft, some muted light from within gently illuminating the open gunports.

  It was fantastic to be that close to so frightening, mysterious, and alien a world.

  Once when he had found himself alone in Norfolk he had ventured into a whorehouse, stayed long enough to have two glasses of ale. He had not managed the courage to indulge in the main attraction of the place, but still it had been thrilling to be in the presence of such debauchery and danger. And this was the same, only many times more.

  He dipped the paddle carefully back into the river and gave another stroke, and the canoe surged ahead again. He was still more curious than afraid, which surprised him and pleased

  him as well. Of course, he had seen no one moving on either ship, had heard no voices, seen no lights. He was perfectly aware that he might lose all of his courage, might even soil his breeches, if even one voice called out a challenge. But the smaller ship was only fifteen feet away, and he was closing with it, and as yet it seemed that no one had noticed him.

  The canoe was still making good way through the water when he came alongside. He put the paddle in the water and with an experienced twist of the blade brought the boat to a stop right against the pirate’s hull.

  He hit with just the tiniest of thumps, but it sounded like a thunderclap to Wilkenson. He reached up and grabbed on to the main chains and sat, absolutely silent, waiting for the shouts of alarm, the blasphemous curses of the pirates, the musket shots that would end his life. But there was only quiet, the seamless quiet that he had heard since leaving the shore.

  Then he heard a snort, like a wild pig, just a few feet away, and he almost leapt off the thwart. Felt the fear ripple through him. He sat entirely still and listened, and the snort became a more rhythmic breathing, someone snoring on the other side of the bulwark.

  He sat for what seemed a very long time, but nothing more happened, so he put his hands flat against the side of the ship and slowly worked the canoe aft. The main channel jutted out over his head like a roof, blocking his view of the ship. And then he was past it and directly under one of the open gunports, the black muzzle of the gun thrust out above him.

  He reached up and grabbed the edge of the port and checked the canoe’s sternway. Slowly, silently, taking great pains not to breathe out loud, he stretched his back and craned his neck upward.

  He coul
d just see over the port sill, with the top of his head brushing the underside of the gun, and in that awkward position he took his first look at the terrible and forbidden world of the pirates.

  The man who was snoring was no more than four feet from Wilkenson’s face. George could smell the stale sweat from

  his body, the foul drunken breath that came in puffs with every porcine sound. He toyed with the thought that he could draw one of his pistols and shoot the man right through the head. One second he would be sleeping, the next he would be dead, and he would never know what had killed him. Here was a man over whom he had the power of life or death, a soul that he, George Wilkenson, could send hurtling down to hell.

  That thought thrilled him, and he stared at the sleeping pirate for some time before running his eyes over the rest of the ship. The gunport opened onto the waist. He could see a few dim stars overhead, but where he would have expected to see the break of a forecastle there was only empty space. The pirates must have ripped that structure down, for what purpose Wilkenson could not imagine.

  He could see a few heaps of stuff lying about the deck. They might have been sleeping men or discarded gear-he could not tell in the dark. In any event, there did not seem to be many men aboard, at least not topside, and those that were there did not seem to be awake. It was no wonder that his approach had gone unchallenged. He settled back down on the thwart and began to work the canoe aft once more.

  He came at last to the aftermost gunport, save one. It was that one and its neighbor that he had seen softly outlined by some light aboard the ship. There could well be men within, men who were awake, who would see him. He stopped, gripping the bottom of the port with sweating palms, and let the rush of fear and exhilaration pass.

  He sat still for a moment more, feeling the canoe’s gentle motion in the river, and wondered who he was, who he had become, taking such risks for no purpose.