The Guardship

gesture and looked aloft. “The new Vengeance, what you think?”

Ripley approached until he was a few feet away and then stopped and spit on the deck. “I think, what the fuck are you about?”

“Quoi?”

“What are you doing on the bay, you stupid, drunk son of a whore?”

LeRois squinted at him again. That time he had heard it. Ripley had actually insulted him. He said nothing in reply.

“I told you not to take the tobacco ships, we have all the buggering tobacco we needs! It was general goods inbound,

Spanish stuff, that was what you was after! Are you too dull to remember?”

LeRois shifted uncomfortably. If Ripley went on like this he would have to do something. The quartermaster had apparently forgotten what happened to those who made LeRois angry, such as the old guardship captain in the tavern. “This ship, she is a good one. I can make us richer still with it.”

“That ain’t the point, you sodden, stupid wretch of a-”

That was it. LeRois’s hand shot out, and he grabbed the former quartermaster by the throat and squeezed with the crushing power of a shark’s jaws.

Ripley’s eyes went wide and he flailed out, trying to pry LeRois’s hand away, but with each second he grew weaker, while LeRois’s grip did not diminish in the least. After a minute of that, Ripley began to hammer weakly at LeRois’s arm. He might as well have been hammering at the mainmast.

After a minute and a half LeRois could see the terror in Ripley’s eyes, the terror of pending death, and that was what he had been looking for. He released his grasp and shoved Ripley to the deck, stood over him as he coughed and retched and rubbed his damaged throat.

“You do not talk to me that way, eh?” LeRois said, but Ripley was still far from being able to speak, so LeRois drained his bottle, tossed it over the side, and went forward to hunt up another.

By the time he returned to the quarterdeck Ripley was standing, after a fashion, and leaning against the pinrail, his arm entwined in the mizzen running gear for support. He was still wheezing and coughing in a most pathetic manner.

He looked up at LeRois, and the Frenchman saw fear in his eyes, which was as it should be. LeRois took a pull of his rum and offered the bottle to Ripley. Ripley took it and drank, gagging and coughing but getting the rum down at last. He took another drink and handed the bottle back.

“You listen to me now, quartermaster,” LeRois said. Some thoughts had come to him while he had been waiting for Ripley to recover.

Ripley looked at him with watery eyes and nodded.

“We cannot keep on, eh, with the old Vengeance. She is too weak, too rotten. With this ship we blow that fucking guardship right to hell.”

The mention of the guardship caught the quartermaster’s ear.

“Yes…,” Ripley croaked, and broke into a fit of coughing. “Yes,” he said again when he was done, “you can blow the fucking guardship to hell! That’s an idea that will sit well.”

“Bien, bien,” LeRois said, putting a brotherly arm around Ripley’s shoulder and leading him forward and down to the waist. “You go tell your friends ashore we make more goddamned money with his ship than they ever dream of, eh?”

“I’ll tell them, Capitain, I’ll tell him,” Ripley said, his voice hoarse. “But you are going after the guardship, ain’t you, like you said you was?”

“Oui, we go after the guardship,” LeRois assured him. And meant it. The insult he had suffered at the guardship’s hands was not to be endured.

He did not tell Ripley about the trap the old Vengeance had sailed into, the slaughter the guardship had caused. Perhaps he would later, after they had murdered every one of those filthy bastards, after he had served that Marlowe out in grand style, but not now. He could not bear to think on it now.

The Plymouth Prize was warped back out into the stream and rode there on her best bower. There was a spring rigged from the anchor cable to the capstan so that the vessel could be turned in any direction. The great guns were loaded and run out. Marlowe did not know what to expect, but he certainly would be ready for it.

It had been a long night, a violent, brutal night. When the Prizes had discovered that the beaten black man in the first cell was in fact King James they had not taken it well, for they had come to respect James and look upon him as one of their own.

James would not say who had done that to him, but the Prizes had a pretty good idea, knew the sheriff and his men were involved in some manner. Even if they had not actually done it themselves. That was enough.

They might well have killed the men, and the jailer as well, if Marlowe had not made them stand down.

As it was, the four men were considerably worse off when Marlowe finally locked them in the cell that James had occupied and formed his men up on the lawn outside. A stretcher was fashioned for James. There was talk of finding a chair for Elizabeth, but she assured them that she could walk, and so after much protest they took her at her word.

A small detachment was sent to Elizabeth’s home, where Lucy was roused out and told to dress and pack her things, and clothes for Elizabeth as well. They could not remain in Williamsburg, could not remain within the reach of the law. There was no safety for them anywhere in the colony, save for in the midst of the Plymouth Prizes.

Lucy was frightened, nervous, like a deer. Even the assurance that she would be there with King James did not seem to mollify her.

At last Rakestraw drew the men up into two rough lines and marched them out of town, with Elizabeth and Lucy and James on his stretcher sandwiched between them, and at the tail end six men carrying the three big trunks that Lucy had packed.

There was little chance that the alarm would be raised, with the sheriff and the jailer locked away, and little chance that the militia would welcome the opportunity to face this unknown band on the dark road. The march back to Jamestown was uneventful.

They arrived in the early-morning hours, exhausted, and filed back aboard. They warped the vessel away from the dock, anchored, rigged the spring, cleared for action, and collapsed on the deck.

King James was laid out carefully on the upholstered settee in the great cabin, and there he slept. Lucy curled up next to him and slept as well.

Without a word spoken between them, Elizabeth followed Marlowe into his small cabin. She held his eyes as she took off her hat and kerchief, then reached up and untied the lacing of her bodice and pulled it free.

Her dress and petticoats were torn and dirty from the rough treatment she had suffered, and she shuffled them off and let them fall to the deck. She untied the neck of her shift, as she had done before, and let it drop on top of the other clothing and then slid into Marlowe’s bunk.

Marlowe followed her with his eyes, then quickly pulled off his own clothing, pausing only to hang his sword on its hook and place his brace of pistols in their box.

He slid in beside her, wrapped his arms around her, feeling her perfect skin against his, her small shoulders under his big and callused hands. She murmured something he could not understand. He held her tighter.

Five minutes later, they were both asleep. They were far too exhausted, physically and otherwise, for anything beyond that.

The first light of the morning drove Marlowe from their bed, though he could have happily slept another ten hours, waking, perhaps, to make love to the flawless beauty beside him and then sleeping again.

But there were other concerns beyond that, such as what the day would bring, and so he extracted himself from her arms, taking care not to wake her, dressed quickly, and made his way to the deck. Bickerstaff was there, early riser that he was, and he nodded his greeting.

“Good morning, Francis,” Marlowe said. Bickerstaff would not lecture him further on the morality of what he had done the night before, plucking Elizabeth from jail. The deed was done. There was nothing more to say.

Rather, Bickerstaff turned to him and said, “I am greatly relieved to see that Mrs. Tinling has not been harmed. I like her very much. I think she may be just the thing to make a

gentleman out of you, something I have quite despaired of doing.”

“I thank you, Francis,” Marlowe said, and he smiled. “Were I you, however, I should not give up on me