The Guardship

do this? What kind of trouble shall we have now?” She turned

from him, as if seeking some answer in the dark corner of the cell. “What will this mean?” she asked, turning back to him. “I…I am not certain what to think. I shall go mad if I spend another minute in here, but…the law…”

“Sod their damned laws,” Marlowe said with finality. “There are no laws in this colony, save for those that the wealthy make up at their own convenience. Well, I am wealthy too, and I have my men, and I shall do as I see fit. They cannot hold you here, not for some nonsense that the Wilkensons have seen fit to concoct.”

She met his eyes again, and again there was the defiance, the strength summoned up by a strong woman who has been beaten down but not beaten to death. “Do you know what I stand accused of? The charge that you reckon the Wilkensons have made up?”

“I do. They say you had some hand in murdering your husband.”

“He was not my husband!” Elizabeth said, low, through clenched teeth. “I was not his wife, I was his whore! I guess you had better know the truth, Thomas, so you can figure if you really want to do this thing.”

She looked up at the ceiling and ran her fingers through her hair. “Oh, dear God,” she said, half under her breath, then looked at Marlowe again. “His real wife is back home in England. I reckon she had had enough of the beatings.”

Marlowe stared at her, surprised but not shocked. There was little in life that could shock him, after all of it he had seen.

Elizabeth folded her arms across her chest. Her face was set, as if she were challenging Marlowe to reject her, to call her a slut and lock her up again. “He found me in a bawdy house in London,” she continued. “Oh, not some low nunnery, selling mutton at a penny a throw-no, it was a fine place, catering to the gentry-but a whore is a whore, isn’t she, no matter what the price? Joseph Tinling took me away from there, to be his own mistress, promised me a new beginning,

playing at his wife in the new world, and like the stupid tart I am

I believed him, and you see what has become of that.”

“That was what Matthew Wilkenson knew-”

“Matthew, and now his brother, and soon all of the goddamned colony, I reckon.”

They stood there, silent, looking at each other across the cell, Marlowe off balance, Elizabeth planted like an oak, arms still folded, waiting for whatever would come next. “But…” Marlowe began, “they have no evidence for the crime of which you are accused…”

She did not move, just held his eyes in that hard stare. “The Wilkensons need no evidence. This isn’t about the death of Joseph Tinling, can’t you see that? They don’t hope to convict me of that. They want only to question me before a judge, make me publicly admit that I am a whore. That will be quite enough to ruin me-and ruin anyone stupid enough to stand beside me.”

Marlowe nodded. There was nothing he did not know about desperation, and that was the final act. Elizabeth’s ruination, for her sins, and with it his own destruction, for loving her. It was that or sacrifice his manhood by turning his back on her. Elegant, symmetrical, simple vengeance.

He crossed the cell and swept her up again. She resisted at first, pushing him away, but he pulled her toward him with powerful arms and she yielded to him, draping her arms over his shoulders, allowing him to press her close. They stood there like that for a long time, silent, swaying slightly, holding each other.

Here we are, thought Marlowe. Two fallen people, making believe we are something we are not and hoping no one in this new world will ask.

Here we are, outlaws both.

Chapter 25

LEROIS PRESSED the telescope to his eye, watched the river sloop for as long as he could. The image began as a complete thing, one single sloop, and then began to shimmy and divide, until there were two distinct, overlapping vessels, though neither had quite the substance of a solid object. He lowered the glass and shook his head hard, and then, happily, there was one sloop again.

Overhead there came a high-pitched, keening sound, like a gale wind blowing through taut rigging. He looked up in surprise. The day had been calm up until that point. The flags on the two ships, the Vengeance and the near wreck that had formerly been the Vengeance, were hanging limp, barely moving in the breeze. He did not know what was making that sound.

The two ships were made fast to each other, riding at a single anchor in one of the many small inlets branching off from the Elizabeth River, just north of Norfolk. A deserted place, an area where people generally ignored what others were doing, so the approach of the sloop was cause for some caution. LeRois would not be caught with his breeches around his ankles again. That would be an end to his command.

“Hmmph,” he grunted, putting the glass back to his eye.

He licked his dry lips and felt the sweat on his palms slick on the leather covering of the glass. He was afraid of whom he might see on board the sloop. These images of Malachias Barrett were becoming more and more frightening, more real and less apt to dissipate quickly.

Just as the sloop was beginning to divide again he caught sight of Ripley, standing at the helm, holding the sloop on course to luff up alongside the new Vengeance.

“C’est bien, c’est bien, it is all right, stand down there,” he called to the men who were crowded around the great guns and hiding behind the bulwark, small arms in hand. The silence that had held the deck broke into a dozen conversations as the men got back to their drinking, their gambling, their staring at the approaching sloop, and, in some cases, their work.

The new Vengeance was in excellent condition, having just been readied for a voyage across the Atlantic, and so there was not very much that needed doing. She was fully provisioned with victuals and water, loaded with tobacco and sundry other things, including a quantity of specie, her bottom clean, her rigging well set up, her sails new. She did not stink belowdecks. There was considerably less vermin aboard. She needed only a little finessing to turn her into the perfect raiding platform.

With the crisis passed, the carpenter and his mates had resumed their part of the finessing. They were hacking off the high forecastle to create more open deck space and expose the great guns in a clean sweep fore and aft. When it came to a bloody fight, they did not need bulkheads and such impeding their movement.

Likewise, the boatswain and his mates were working overhead, turning their new ship into a more manageable barque. She was a big vessel, and while the hundred or so men of LeRois’s tribe could have easily handled her, they did not care to expend any more energy than was necessary. Thus the cro’-jack and mizzen topsail yard and all their attendant rigging was struck down to the deck.

Another gang of men were over the side, painting the oiled hull black. Still more were over the transom, cutting away the fashion piece with the vessel’s former name carved in it and replacing it with her new, proper name.

The river sloop luffed up and her forward momentum carried her alongside the new Vengeance. She came to a stop with a shuddering crash into the hull, and her small crew threw lines aboard the bigger ship, which were caught and made fast.

Ripley stomped across the sloop’s deck and scrambled up the side of the ship that had been, until two days before, the Wilkenson Brothers.

LeRois took a long drink of rum, wiped his mouth, and regarded the wiry man approaching him. Ripley looked mad about something, but LeRois could not guess what that might be, nor could he care less. They had captured a big ship with a valuable cargo, and without a drop of blood spilled. Ripley’s master should be delighted.

“LeRois, you stupid drunk bastard, goddamn your eyes, what do you think you’re about?” Ripley called as he stamped aft and up to the quarterdeck.

LeRois squinted at him and chewed at something that had just dislodged from between his teeth. It was not possible that Ripley had just said what he, LeRois, had thought he heard. The shrieking in the rigging grew louder. LeRois dismissed it all as sound, just sound.

“Quartermaster, eh, qu’est-ce que c’est?” LeRois spread his arms in an expansive