The Guardship

off, once I call it in.”

He let the words hang in the air. George Wilkenson knew a great deal about persuasion.

“If I…I shall have my house, free and clear, if I do this?”

“Indeed.”

“Very well, then. I shall do as you wish.” She seemed to deflate in resignation.

“Good. I shall bid you good day.” He gave her a curt bow, turned on his heel, and turned back again. “You will send a note, then, by week’s end?”

“Yes, yes. I said yes.”

“Good.” He turned again and strode away. He could feel his cheeks burning, and his neck and palms were covered with sweat.

Still, it was a good plan, because the crime would be perfectly believable. It would take no art to show that, after killing Matthew Wilkenson for her honor, Marlowe came to expect certain favors from Elizabeth, and when they were not forth-coming he tried to take them.

It was perfectly believable that George should go to Marlowe’s house to issue a challenge. His claiming that he was doing so would quiet those people who were asking abroad why George did not call Marlowe out, while at once assuring Marlowe’s death by hanging and saving George from having to fight the rogue. Perfect.

Nor would it be any great effort to get the others to do his bidding: Sheriff Witsen and the jury and even Governor Nicholson.

George was careful never to put the family into debt, not to their agent in London or to anyone in the tidewater. Owing money meant owing allegiance, and George Wilkenson would owe allegiance to no one.

Instead he accrued the allegiance of others through his generous lending of money to any who asked with the proper

humility, and he never demanded that it be repaid on any schedule.

But he understood, and his debtors understood, that the entire sum was always due in full upon demand, even if it meant the debtor’s ruination. In this way George Wilkenson exercised control over half of the population of Williamsburg.

He suddenly felt a desperate need for this all to be over, for Marlowe to be hanged and buried so that he could get on with his business.

I am not Achilles, he thought. No, I’m not the warrior. I am Odysseus, the clever one.

George Wilkenson took some comfort from that notion.

Chapter 10

IT TOOK twenty hours, dropping down the James River, then standing east-northeast with an average eight knots of breeze over the starboard quarter for the Plymouth Prize to cover the sixty miles from her former anchorage to Smith Island. They had all sail set, including the little spritsail topsail that set on the spritsail topmast at the far end of the bowsprit. The great lumbering guardship pushed along, seemingly as reluctant as her men to go into battle. But like her men, go she must, and one by one Marlowe pricked the miles off the chart.

In all it was a fine sail. The weather in Virginia, when it is good, is the best in the world. And those two days were good, with the warm breeze making cat’s paws on the blue water of the bay. The sky from horizon to horizon was a fine clear blue, just a little lighter in color than the water.

Off the starboard beam, framed by Cape Charles to the north and Cape Henry to the south, the Atlantic Ocean stretched away, glittering and flashing and melding at last with the pale blue sky on the indeterminate horizon. In their wake was the low green coast of Virginia’s mainland, and forward the long peninsula that ended at Cape Charles. Overhead a variety of birds wheeled around the trucks of the masts, and under their keel the bay rolled with barely perceptible swells.

A good thing, for the Plymouth Prize might well have sunk in anything worse.

One hundred yards off the larboard quarter the Northumberland kept station. It was only with much difficulty that King James was able to sail slowly enough so as not to headreach on the Plymouth Prize.

There is so much to do, Marlowe thought, so very much to do. The Plymouth Prizes were tolerable seamen, but they had grown lethargic and unmotivated under Allair’s command. Nor was their seamanship his immediate concern. More pressing was their training for combat, so that they could acquit themselves well, or at least so that he and Bickerstaff and King James would not die as a result of their incompetence.

“First position,” he heard Bickerstaff call out, and the fifty men drawn up in a line in the waist moved into the first position for sword work: feet at right angles, left hand behind their backs, cutlass held before them. They were as graceful as pelicans waddling on shore, and just as intimidating.

“Second position,” Bickerstaff called, and fifty right feet came forward, ready to lunge or parry. It was all very pretty and nice, and a few years before Marlowe would have thought it a waste of time. Fancy drills had nothing to do with the bloody, desperate hack and slash of a real fight. But he trusted Bickerstaff, and Bickerstaff had convinced him of the importance of learning the fine points first, and then later the grim reality of the thing.

“Extension in three motions,” he called, and fifty men lunged at an imaginary enemy. Two of them stumbled while attempting this, fell to the deck. Marlowe turned and stared out at the blue water and the wooded shoreline far away. The time had come to reconsider his strategy.

It was three hours past sunset when the Plymouth Prize made her ponderous way around the east shore of Smith Island. The moon was almost full, and in that silver light Marlowe had a clear view of the bay and the pirate ship still at anchor. A huge fire was burning on the beach, and sounds of the

distant bacchanal drifted over the water. Everything was as perfect as he dared hope.

They had parted company with the Northumberland at sunset after ferrying over Francis Bickerstaff and a force of ten of the best men the Plymouth Prize had to offer. Lieutenant Middleton, second officer aboard the Plymouth Prize, was sent to take command of the sloop and King James was returned to the guardship. The black man was not happy about that development, Marlowe knew, but there was no choice. He needed King James by his side.

“Sir?” Lieutenant Rakestraw stepped up to Marlowe and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper, glancing over to the leeward side of the quarterdeck where King James stood.

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“Sir, it’s…ah…about the nigger, sir? King James?”

Marlowe glanced over at the man in question. He looked a dangerous sight, to be sure. A bright red rag was tied around his head, and he wore nothing but a waistcoat, unbuttoned, a loose cotton shirt, and baggy trousers. A cutlass and two braces of pistols were hanging from crossed shoulder belts, pressing the cloth of his shirt down and revealing the powerful chest beneath. His right hand rested on the quarterdeck rail, his left on the hilt of his cutlass. The muscles of his arms rippled with the slightest movement.

“Yes, what of him?”

“Well, sir, is it wise to arm a nigger that way? I mean, to give him guns? I don’t think it’s legal, sir.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Marlowe said. “Why don’t you go take them away from him?”

“Sir?”

“Go disarm the man, Lieutenant. I daren’t.”

“Oh. Well.” Rakestraw apparently did not think it so important, under those conditions, that King James be disarmed.

“See here, Mr. Rakestraw, I know this is irregular, but King James is a vital part of the thing, and I reckon he’ll be a good man to have at our side when the fighting starts.”

“Well, if you say so, sir…” Rakestraw said, and said no more.

Marlowe stepped down off of the quarterdeck and into the waist, where the men were gathered. Each held a musket cradled in his arms and two pistols in his belt and a cutlass dangling from a shoulder strap.

They were a motley and ragged bunch, and Marlowe had no fear that they would be recognized as a man-of- war’s men. Nor was it likely that the pirates would guess the Plymouth Prize was one of