The Guardship

“Just an afternoon’s sail, ma’am, no more. We should put out on the morning tide and return that evening.”

What in all hell is wrong with me? she wondered. Had she been so long among the silly, pretentious people of Williamsburg that she was becoming one herself? She had never been shy about going after what she wanted. And now she wanted Marlowe, and for once in her life she had reason to hope that the thing she wanted would be hers, and would not be her undoing. No one would raise an eyebrow about a mere afternoon’s sailing.

“If that is the case, sir, then I should be delighted to sail with you,” she said. It was one of the most truthful statements she had uttered in a long, long time.

Chapter 15

THE LATE-SPRING weather in the tidewater of Virginia was yielding slowly, day by day, to summer.

The winds, always variable in that region, had hauled around from the predominantly north and northwest of the winter months to something approaching south and southeast. And when the wind came from that quarter it brought with it warm air. In later months that air would be hot and moist and miserable, but in those first days of summertime weather it was just perfectly warm, as if there were no temperature at all.

It was just such a day, an hour before slack water, when Marlowe’s party came aboard the Northumberland. It was not much of a party, consisting only of himself, Elizabeth Tinling, and Lucy, but then, the little sloop did not have the space to accommodate too many more.

Still, King James, now once more in command of the vessel, had prepared for her owner’s arrival as if it were the royal yacht. Bunting was flying from the rigging and flags flapped at every high point aloft. The gangplank was freshly painted, with rails set up and strung with rope handholds, made white through the application of pipe clay and finished off with spritsail sheet knots at the bitter ends.

Marlowe stepped aboard first and offered his hand to Elizabeth, helping her over the gangplank. The Northumberland’s four-man crew, two black men and two white, were dressed out in matching shirts and fresh-scrubbed slop trousers and straw hats. They stood at some semblance of attention as the owner and his guest came aboard, and then with a word James scattered them to the various tasks necessary to get the ship under way.

“Welcome aboard, Elizabeth,” Marlowe said.

“Oh, Thomas, it is magnificent!” she said, and she meant it, entirely. With a hand on her wide-brimmed straw hat, she craned her neck to look aloft. The many-colored flags waving in the breeze, the bunting, the white scrubbed decks and varnished rails and black rigging were all too perfect, like a brand-new, brightly painted toy. “It’s like something from a storybook.”

“Life can be like that, I find,” Marlowe said, “if one is able to write one’s own story.”

They cast off at slack water. The Northumberland drifted away from the dock, King James at the helm and Marlowe and Elizabeth standing by the taffrail, enjoying the morning. Forward, the small crew set the sails-jib, staysail, and the big gaff-headed main-with no orders given and none needed. James swung the bow off and the sloop made her way downriver, close-hauled, making a long board to the east until they were almost aground on the northern bank, then tacking across the river and tacking again.

“Your men work very well together,” Elizabeth commented as the Northumberland settled down for another long run on the starboard tack. “I hear no yelling or confusion, as one often associates with a ship’s crew.”

“They have been together awhile,” Marlowe said.

“They are not the same men as sailed her when my…when the sloop was owned by Joseph, I observe.”

“No. I let those men go. They were not willing to suffer King James as captain of the vessel.”

“They were very foolish, then. King James seems very much the competent master.”

“King James is of the type of man who does well whatever he sets his mind to. That is why I did not dare let him remain my slave. He is not the kind of man one needs as an enemy.”

“Do you not need him to run your household?”

“He does, when he is not running the sloop. But there is not much to the house. Caesar can run things well enough. It is a waste of James’s talent to keep him there.”

The Northumberland continued on down the river, standing right up to the banks with their strips of sandy beach and meadows of tall grass and patches of woods. Overhead marched a great parade of clouds, flat and gray on their bottoms and swelling up into high mounds of white, sharply defined against the blue of the sky.

They sailed past several plantations, the brown-earth fields stretching down to the water, the slaves moving slowly between the hillocks, preparing the earth to receive the young plants.

The finest of them all was the Wilkensons’ home, standing on a hill not one hundred yards from the river, a great white monument to the wealth that family had amassed in just a few generations in the New World. Neither Marlowe nor Elizabeth commented on the place.

It was dinnertime when the Northumberland came about after a short tack to the southwest and stood into the wide bay where the Nasemond and Elizabeth join up with the mighty James River. Marlowe’s cabin steward appeared on the quarterdeck and set up a small table and chairs, and on the table he laid out a meal of cold roast beef, bread, cheese, nuts, fruit, and wine.

Marlowe helped Elizabeth into her seat.

“Your tobacco crop has come in well, I hope?” Elizabeth asked as Marlowe poured her a glass of wine. Tobacco was never far from the minds of anyone in the tidewater.

“Excellently well, thank you. We’ve had a prodigious crop, and it is now all but stowed down…‘prized,’ I believe, is the correct term, into its casks and quite ready for the convoy at the end of May.”

“You have learned a great deal about cultivating tobacco in the past few years, it would seem.”

“Not a bit of it, not a bit of it. Some of this cheese for you? No, I leave it all up to the people, and they do a fine job. They have forgotten more about the weed than I shall ever know. Bickerstaff takes an academic interest in the eultivation, but I content myself with the odd pipeful and a ride through my fields.”

Elizabeth took a sip of her wine. Regarded Marlowe. Such an odd man. “You leave the planting and cultivation up to your Negroes? And they do the work, with never an overseer?”

“Well, of course they do. They are paid a percentage of the crop, do you see? It is in their interest to work just as hard as they can. They are not such fools that they cannot understand that.”

Marlowe took a bite and smiled at her as he chewed. There were times when she thought Marlowe might be quite mad. He seemed perfectly willing to consider a Negro as his equal. Indeed, he treated King James more as his fellow than his servant.

Then forward one of the deckhands dropped a hatch cover with a loud bang, like a pistol. Marlowe’s head shot in the direction of the sound, his body tensed, and his hand moved automatically to the hilt of his sword. In his eyes that quality like a smoldering flame, the suggestion of a predator. To be sure, the pirates on Smith Island had found out how dangerous he could be. There was not a bit of the mad fool in him then.

He smiled, and his body eased, like a rope when the strain is let off. “Clumsy, clumsy,” he said, and poured some more wine.

Once dinner was cleared away they took their place again at the taffrail.

“That is Point Comfort there.” Marlowe pointed to a low headland just off the larboard bow.

“And why do they call it Point Comfort?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it was a great comfort to see it, after the long voyage from Europe.”

“Oh.” Elizabeth thought of the time when she and Joseph Tin-ling had stood on another quarterdeck and viewed that point as their ship stood in from sea. “I can’t say that I had that reaction when first I saw it.”

“Were you not pleased to see this new land?”

She had never considered that before. There had been so many emotions, whirling like an eddy. “Oh, I suppose I was. My…husband was more enthusiastic than I. It was a long voyage, as you say, and a difficult one. I thought one could not-what do you call it?-careen a ship on the Chesapeake.”

“That was what Allair would have the governor believe,” Marlowe said, and Elizabeth was grateful that he did