“Oh, dear,” she said, recovering.
“Forgive me,” Bickerstaff said, “I did not mean to frighten you.”
“It’s quite all right. I guess I’m a bit jumpy. And I think perhaps it is time to dispense with the ‘Mrs. Tinling’ nonsense. Pray call me Elizabeth.”
“Delighted, if you will do me the honor of addressing me as Francis.”
“The honor is mine, sir.”
They stood silent for a moment, their eyes on the stars and their thoughts elsewhere.
“How does King James do?” Elizabeth broke the silence.
“Very well. The vomit has worked admirably. I had intended to bleed him, but I think perhaps it will not be necessary. Any imbalance of the humors seems to have corrected itself, which I observe more often than not it will.”
“Are you, sir, a physician? I realize I know so little about you.”
And about Marlowe as well, which is doubtless your primary concern, as well it should be, Bickerstaff thought.
“No, I am not. I am…I was, a teacher.” He turned and met her eyes. She was so lovely, and the simple dress she wore and the plain mobcap with her yellow hair spilling out from under just reinforced that natural beauty. Was it any wonder that she was at the center of this storm? The face that launched a thousand ships, and burned the topless towers of Ilium.
He smiled at the irony of that thought.
It was not two years ago that Malachias Barrett had requested his help in concocting a new name. A new name for a new life.
“How does ‘Marlowe’ sound?” Bickerstaff had said.
“‘Marlowe’?”
“It is the name of a man who wrote a play about a fellow who sells his soul to the devil for worldly riches.”
The former brigand smiled. “It suits me passing well,” he said, and at that moment Malachias Barrett died to the world, and Thomas Marlowe was born.
“This morning,” Elizabeth said, hesitating, “after the guns went off, Thomas said…something about his own history, his own black history, he called it. He said he was undone-”
“He did.”
“Oh, Francis, I am so worried. He is so…unhappy. What…” Her voice trailed off. She did not know how to ask such a question.
“You wish to know what it is in his past? What is his history that plagues him so?”
“Yes.” She looked up at him, and her eyes were pleading. “Yes, will you tell me?”
“Thomas’s story is his to tell, not mine. But perhaps if I tell you my own, as it relates to him, it will give you some hint of what he was. I think it is my moral right to do so.”
“Please, sir, I beg of you.”
Bickerstaff looked in her eyes again, dark in the faint light, though he knew them to be blue, like his, but deeper, not the pale blue of a hazy summer sky but the deep blue of the bay. He looked out over the black water.
“I have been a teacher most of my life, in various situations. Greek, Latin, science, philosophy. Fencing, as good fortune would have it. In ’95 I was employed by a gentleman of some wealth who was moving his family to Boston. I was given the choice of going with them or finding other employment.
“I had heard so much about America. But of course, you have lived in England, you know the high talk that goes about. I thought it would be just the thing. A new land.
“In any event, five weeks out we were overhauled by another ship, which turned out to be a pirate. We set all the sail we could, ran like a fox, but these piratical fellows are fast, you know, and rarely are they outrun.
“It took them the better part of a day, but at last they came up with us. They were all lining the rail, as I recall, screaming and chanting, beating drums. Vaporing, they call it.”
Bickerstaff closed his eyes. He had not thought of this in some time. He had quite purposefully not thought of it.
“We chose to fight. That is no easy decision, for it is a sentence of death to fight these pirates and lose. There is no quarter for those who do not surrender, but we had a ship full of gentlemen, and oh, they were so brave in the face of it all…”
Now the images were swimming in front of him, and he lived it again as he spoke. The profound fear in his gut as that pirate ship ranged alongside, the big black ensign with the grinning death’s-head and twin swords snapping in the breeze. He had never been so afraid in his life, before or since.
There were hundreds of them, it seemed, filthy, merciless men clinging to the channels and the shrouds and the rails, howling like one would not expect to hear this side of hell.
The doomed men, crew of the merchant vessel, fired off a few pathetic cannons, but there were not enough men aboard to fire a real broadside, and those who were manning the guns had precious little knowledge of such things. Bickerstaff could see the fury of the pirates building, sweeping through the tribe with each defiant gun.
And then they were on them. Bickerstaff wiped his sweating palms on his coat, took a fresh grip on the sword in his right hand, the long dagger in his left. The pirate ship slammed into the merchantman’s side with a horrible shuddering crash and the brigands poured down on the deck, spilled onto the merchant ship like a boarding sea that sweeps the deck fore and aft.
All of the gentlemen’s plans, all of their high talk about holding the pirates off, meeting their attack with a solid defense, driving them into a corner, were forgotten in that vicious surge of men. Bickerstaff saw his compatriots cut down, shot down; he saw his employer, the one who had urged them all to stand and fight, flee down a scuttle, his pistol and sword discarded.
And then they were on him, and he had no thought for anything save for the blades that were flashing all around. He felt his sleeve plucked by a pistol ball, felt another tear a gash in his side, but he could do nothing about small arms. He could only fight against the swords.
And that, as it happened, he could do exceptionally well.
He knocked a blade aside as it lunged at him, ran the attacker through, slid his sword free as the man fell and met another, thinking, So this is what it is to kill men in battle.
The pirates were not swordsmen, they were barbarians who could do no more than hack and slash. And they were drunk. They would not best him-as long as he had to fight no more than two or three at a time.
Bickerstaff leapt back as a sword hissed down like an ax, and the brigand missed him completely, stabbing his cutlass into the deck. Bickerstaff stepped on the blade, pinning it down, and stuck the man in the chest with his dagger even as he parried and lunged at another.
He heard cursing, shrieking, screams of agony, defiance, madness all around. It was the inner circle of hell on that merchantman’s deck, and he was a poor damned soul who would die on that spot. He was doing no more than putting off that fate for a few seconds more, he knew that, and taking some of the bastards to damnation with him.
Then there was a weird quiet aboard the ship, and Bickerstaff realized that it had been taken, that all of his fellow defenders were dead or, like himself, soon to wish they were. He realized it even as he turned aside the sword of the last of his attackers, knocking the point to the deck, and plunged the dagger into his guts. He watched the man go down, bleeding and clutching at the wound. He stood there, too exhausted to form a rational thought, dumbly watching the man collapse.
Then suddenly his sword was knocked from his hand as another blade slashed down, connecting with his weapon near the hilt. It fell with a clatter to the deck at his feet.
He whirled around, the dagger in his right hand, glued to his palm with drying blood, and leaned against the bulwark, breathing hard. The pirates around him stepped aside. Three feet away stood the man who had knocked his sword from his hand.
“Don’t ever drop your guard to look at your handiwork,” the pirate said.
Bickerstaff regarded him as the fox, weary from the chase, regards the approaching huntsmen. Young, late twenties, perhaps, tall and lean. He held a big and bloody sword in his right hand. A brace of pistols hung from a long ribbon around his neck. He wore a weathered blue broadcloth coat and wool shirt, canvas slop trousers,
