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
“Yes, Mr. Marlowe.”
“You’ll be coming as well, so pack a kit for shipboard. You’ll be commanding the
“Yes, sir.” The
and beyond. It had been owned by Joseph Tinling, then called the
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 looked 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.
