trying to draw him out. Billy Bird remained in command, drove the ship around the Cape of Good Hope and into the northern trades and across the broad Atlantic. They never saw more than a glimpse of a distant sail, and wind and weather were their allies the entire time.
And for the whole of the crossing, Marlowe remained in his private hell, wallowing in his half-life of grief and recrimination, and in that twilight time the only real things were Elizabeth and the excruciating pain in his arm that was no longer there.
Then one morning Marlowe felt the motion of the ship change, and the sailor in him registered the change, despite his utter lack of interest in anything, and he knew that it was not a change in sea state but the feel of water that is embraced all around by land. Still that was not enough to stir him from his seat, staring out the stern windows.
Two hours later he could see on the starboard side the familiar outline of Cape Charles and to larboard Cape Henry, and he knew that they were once again within the confines of the Chesapeake Bay.
Half an hour after that he heard Elizabeth’s soft steps outside the cabin door. She opened it, stepped over to him, said, “Thomas, won’t you come up on deck?” It was the first thing she had asked of him in two months, the first time she had asked him to put aside his self-indulgent grief, and so without a word he stood and followed her out.
He climbed up on the quarterdeck, ignored the embarrassed looks and half nods of greeting from men who did not know what to say to him. He stood at the weather rail, that familiar spot; it was like putting on a well-worn glove one has not put on in years. Looked forward, past the mainsail.
Fine on the starboard bow was Point Comfort, the headland that marked the entrance to the James River, the last stretch of water between them and home.
Spring in Virginia. The sky was blue, the air rich with the smell of a fertile and living land. All around them green, where for months there had been only blue.
Point Comfort. Home. Marlowe’s hands began to shake, his lip began to quiver, and without a word he stamped off and down the ladder and aft to the privacy of the great cabin. He heard Elizabeth’s feet behind him. Of course she would know that he needed her at that moment. He needed her at every moment.
He swung the door open, crossed to the lockers aft, and she with him, and they sat down together, and he wrapped his one arm around her and buried his head in her shoulder and cried and cried, and he thought he would never stop.
He cried for Francis Bickerstaff and for all the others and for all he had lost and for his own stupidity. He cried because he understood that once upon a time he had had everything he had ever wanted with Marlowe House, had become the man he had once dreamed of being, the man Francis had taught him to be, and then he nearly threw it all away because he thought he could be richer still.
“Oh, God, God, Elizabeth, how could I be so stupid?” he asked into her shoulder. She did not give him an answer, and he did not need one because he knew the answer, and he knew he would never be so stupid again.
It had cost him his arm. It had cost him Francis. It had nearly cost him Elizabeth, several times over. He wept for all of it, all the way up the James River, and when at last they dropped the anchor, he had cried his grief out. He came up on deck again. A new man in a new season.
They took a boat to the shore and were able to hire a carriage back to Marlowe House. They left Billy Bird in command, left it to him to divide out the booty in the hold of the Elizabeth Galley. They had yet to make an official count, but even lacking that, the men knew that every one of them, every man aboard, was terribly rich, that if they did not spend it all in one wild, frenzied debauch, as their type was wont to do and as so many ashore would readily encourage them to do, then not a one of them would ever have to work again.
Thomas and Elizabeth Marlowe rode in silence down the long drive that led to Marlowe House. The flowers were just showing, the young leaves on the trees almost iridescent green. The home had been well cared for, as Marlowe knew it would be. It looked as if they had been gone only a fortnight, no more.
The carriage stopped, and Marlowe got out and helped Elizabeth out. They stood in front of their home and held one another and breathed deep, smelling the flowers and the woods and the fields. Thomas smiled, the first time he could recall doing so since they had sailed from St. Mary’s.
They were home. He was home. It was a home from which he did not intend to stray, ever again.
He thought of Yancy, and Press, and their struggle to be king of the island. Idiots. Like the moth beating itself against the glass of a lantern, they fought for power and money and did not even understand why they wanted those things.
What they wanted, in truth, was exactly what he had here at Marlowe House, and they did not know it, and neither did he, until that moment. The lesson had come at the highest price he had ever paid, but he had learned it at last. He had reached the confluence of two streams: what he wanted and what he had. He stood now where those floods met, and by those waters he would live his life.
Epilogue
THE SLOOP Mercy of Newport stood into the harbor of St. Mary’s island. On her quarterdeck, Captain Patrick Quigley surveyed the batteries that leered out at him from Quail Island, big guns that could blow his vessel to bits before he had even cleared the headlands.
There was an unusual silence on deck as the others, the fifty men who had sailed with him, also stared up at those vicious guns, waiting.
There was no smoke from the battery, no flags flying from the flagpole. Nothing moving that he could see. He felt himself relax, just a bit.
As much as he tried to project a fierce and piratical nature, he was new to this sort of thing, this Red Sea Roving, and he was not at all certain of what his reception might be.
He had been informed by others, who knew, that St. Mary’s was the place to call for provisions, powder, shot, information on where one might be most likely to intercept the Great Mogul’s ships. He had envisioned a lively place, bustling with people, crowded with shipping, a sort of buccaneer’s version of Newport, with rum flowing and buxom young women willing to do whatever a sailor far from home might wish.
He was surprised, for that reason, to find the harbor seemingly deserted. A few decrepit ships drifted at their anchors, another was half sunk and another appeared to have been hove down on the beach and left abandoned.
“Stand by with your anchor, there!” Quigley called out to the mate up by the cathead, then to the helmsman said, “Round up, right over there.”
The Mercy rounded up into the wind, the topsails came aback, and the anchor was let go in five fathoms of water.
Captain Quigley stood aloof as the men bustled around the deck, squaring things away. He looked over the town with his telescope. He could see a few people moving around, no more than that. He looked up at the big house on the hill. Part of the roof was charred, it looked as if it had caught fire at one point, but not recently. It had never been repaired.
He started to get an uncomfortable feeling in his gut. He had expected to be greeted with saluting cannons and dipped flags and all that sort of formality. He had expected a boat to come out, inquire of who he was. “I am Captain Patrick Quigley, of the sloop Mercy of Newport. We are bound away on the Pirate Round!” He had been practicing those words for two months, but now it looked as if no one was going to ask.
The mate directed the hands to get the longboat over the side, and the armed boat crew took their places on the thwarts, and when they were ready, Captain Quigley climbed down and sat in the stern sheets. They pulled silently across the harbor for the old wooden dock, all eyes darting around, the men waiting for something, they did not know what. Something.
But there was nothing, nothing in the way of human greetings. Now Quigley could not even see those few figures he had seen earlier through his glass, and he began to wonder if he had really seen them at all.
The boat pulled up to the dock, and Quigley stood and hooked a shoe on the creaking ladder and climbed up fast, then stepped aside for the others.
