The Guardship

those who could still move, climbed back up on the rail, ready for the leap onto the enemy and the murderous sweep across his decks.

The cloud of smoke rolled away, revealing the unscathed enemy now closer still. The impact of the broadside had slowed the Vengeance’s momentum, but it was building again, sweeping the pirate ship down on her victim.

LeRois could see them desperately reloading the guns, leaning into the gun tackles, hauling them out. Along the rail more men-there seemed to be hundreds of them-took up the curved wooden handles of the falconets and swiveled them around, finding where the Vengeances had bunched together and blasting them with deadly fire.

And Barrett was still there.

“No, no, no! Son of a bastard, no!” LeRois screamed. He felt the hands of despair clasping his throat, choking off his words. He could not be there. He had to go. The vision had to go, to be taken up by the thin air like the times before. He fired on it again, but still it floated in front of him, pale, like a ghost, but moving with that animal intensity that he remembered, could never forget.

“No!”

The big guns fired again, from ten yards away, tearing great sections out of the Vengeance’s rails and rigging, killing more of his men, sending them running, leaping off the rails to the protection of the bulwarks. None of them would run below, for anyone who did would be put to death by the pirate tribe,

but neither would they remain on the rail. Better to die shoulder to shoulder with one’s brethren, and better still not to die at all.

There was no more than five yards between the two ships. Aboard their enemy, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the men were standing on the rail, screaming, waving cutlasses, ready to board the Vengeance, just as the pirates had been ready to board them a moment before. A grappling hook soared through the air and caught in the shrouds above LeRois’s head. LeRois whipped out his dagger, severed the line.

“Fall off, fall off!” LeRois screamed at the helmsmen who had been shielded from the gunfire by the men on the rails, and without hesitation the helmsmen spun the wheel and the Vengeance’s bow turned away from their intended victim, turned away from the convoy and turned toward the open sea.

LeRois looked down into the waist of his ship. He had seen carnage before, lots of it, but he had never seen anything like that. Men lying in clumps, men crawling uselessly across the deck, men holding their guts to prevent them from spilling out. The vaporing, the triumphant shouts of a conquering tribe, had been replaced with the sobbing and whimpering and pathetic moans of wounded and dying men.

LeRois glanced quickly over his shoulder. The enemy was setting more sail, but it did not matter. The Vengeance had all her canvas already set, and she was a fast ship. She would get away this time. She would be back.

He shifted his gaze back inboard, quickly, blocking all vision of that death ship from his field of view. He glanced around to see that no one was watching him, then closed his eyes and begged God to never allow the vision of Barrett to appear again.

“Stern chase, Captain Marlowe? Captain Marlowe?”

On hearing his name the second time, Marlowe realized he was being addressed. Turned from the sight of the fleeing pirate ship, met the quartermaster’s eye.

“Huh? Beg your pardon?”

“I asked, sir, stern chase? Shall we follow?” The quartermaster jerked his chin in the direction of the battered enemy.

“Oh…” Marlowe looked aloft. The foresail and mainsail were cast off, ready for setting. A gang of men were putting the fore topgallant gear to rights, and another was doing the same to the spritsail topsail. There was no other damage done to the Plymouth Prize beyond that which they had manufactured themselves.

He glanced again at the pirate. The Plymouth Prize could not overhaul them. Nor could they abandon the convoy and go chasing all over the ocean after the bastard. No, they had their duty. They truly did.

“Sir, are you quite all right?” the quartermaster asked with genuine concern.

“Yes, yes, fine, thank you. No, we must rejoin the convoy. Can’t go running off to hell and back after him. I reckon we’ve done for him.”

“Aye, sir,” the quartermaster said, just the faintest note of disappointment in his voice. They were going to let all the plunder that the pirate might have in her hold sail off beyond their reach.

But Marlowe knew, as the quartermaster did not, that the greatest reward of all would be if that ship were to sail off and never return.

“Marlowe, Marlowe, I give you joy again on a great victory!” Bickerstaff fairly leapt up the stairs leading to the quarterdeck, hand outstretched. Marlowe automatically extended his own, and Bickerstaff pumped it with enthusiasm.

“It all happened just as you predicted, Thomas, I swear, like staging a play! We had one fellow wounded when a gun ran over his foot-the fool could not stand clear of the recoil-and another was unlucky enough to get a pistol ball in the shoulder, but beyond that there was not one casualty, and not the least wounding of the ship. I daresay you did for a good half of that brigand’s company. I should think the ship owners will reward you with some recognition of your meritorious service.”

Bickerstaff, in the flush of victory, was far more garrulous than was his nature, and Marlowe was relieved to find that he was not being called upon to respond. He seemed to have lost his voice.

“Did you see that villain, King James, circling around in the Northumberland, quite ready to board over the unengaged side if we-I say, Marlowe, are you unwell?”

“What? Oh, no, no, I’m fine. I think the great guns have unsteadied me a bit.”

“Unsteadied you? You look as if you had seen a ghost.”

Marlowe stared over the rail. The pirate ship was a quarter of a mile away at the end of a long, deep wake, and drawing farther away by the minute. But he could still see that black flag snapping at the ensign staff, the horrible death’s-head with the twin cutlasses, the hourglass. He had not reckoned on seeing that flag again.

“A ghost?” Marlowe turned to Bickerstaff. “No, Francis, I have not seen a ghost. God help us all, I have seen the very devil himself.”

Chapter 21

THEY HAD brought this disaster down upon their own heads. No, not they. Him. Jacob Wilkenson. And his beloved son Matthew. Those two, the unthinking, reactionary Wilkensons, had brought this plague upon their house.

George Wilkenson found that that realization made him oddly calm, even in the face of what was, for him, the most unthinkable of nightmares: financial ruin, a choice between poverty and tremendous debt.

How many times in the past had his father brushed him aside, cursing his timidity and showing him how the bold move was the right move? And how many times had his father been right? Every time. Until now.

Now Marlowe had done to the Wilkensons just what the Wilkensons had set out to do to Marlowe, and both, apparently, were ruined. Like two men who shoot each other in a duel.

“I have some people scouring Williamsburg and Jamestown, looking for sailors, and I have requested of the governor that he find us some men, as it was his own appointed captain who robbed us, but I despair of it doing us any good,” George said.

The two men were seated in the library, the same room that a month before Jacob Wilkenson had torn apart in his rage. Now the old man was sitting in a winged chair, half staring out the window and listening to his son. He seemed utterly calm. George found it somewhat frightening.

“Bah,” Jacob Wilkenson said with a wave of his hand. “It’s of no use. Even if we manage to get the damned