The Guardship

water. He would be trapped.

LeRois turned and began to pace, trying to think. To do that he had to talk out loud, for there was no room in his head for thoughts, not with the screaming and the voices, and even then he had to talk loudly enough to hear his own voice over the noise.

Through it all he could hear Darnall issuing orders to the sail trimmers. They were pursuing Barrett as fast as ever they could. If they did not run them down in the next hour, then they certainly would by end of day. The new Vengeance was fast and clean, and they were on a river.

LeRois shook his head as he paced. It did not seem possible. It did not seem possible. All those years of hating Barrett for what he had done, all those years, and now Barrett was here, and LeRois would have him soon. He could not imagine how he would kill him. He had thought about it for so long that he hardly knew where to begin.

Big guns were firing. The Vengeances were shooting off the bow chasers. LeRois felt relief at the sight of the smoke, proof that there were indeed real guns firing. He did not want guns going off in his head. That would be too much, too much by half.

He had no sense for how long they had been pursuing. There was something crawling around under his clothes. Bugs of some kind. He could feel them. He scratched and scratched, but they were still there.

He had stopped speaking to himself and had begun to listen to what the voices were telling him, and it was extraordinary. Why had he not just listened to the voices before? Why had he fought them for so long?

They told him all he needed to know to take care of Barrett. They told him how he, LeRois, would have all of the tidewater. It was all to be his. He had been brought there for a reason.

“Here, Captain, look here. Captain?”

LeRois recognized Darnall’s voice. He looked up at the quartermaster. “Oui?”

“Guardship’s coming about. I reckon he misses stays and we’ll be right aboard him.”

LeRois squinted forward past the bow. The guardship-Barrett’s ship-was abeam of a point of land around which she would have to sail to continue upriver. He was coming about, tacking around the shoreline, and once more he was broadside to the Vengeance and his speed had dropped off to nothing.

“Run us right aboard of her, eh?” LeRois said. “We don’t tack, we just run right into that fucking cochon.”

“Steady as she goes,” Darnall said, and the helmsman held the tiller straight, pointing the Vengeance’s bowsprit right at the guardship’s waist.

LeRois licked his cracked lips, saw the distance to the king’s ship dropping away. Barrett would never get around the point of land in time. They would run the Vengeance right into him and then it would be over.

No, then it would just begin.

“Forward, you get ready to board this son of bitch, eh?” LeRois shouted, and once more the Vengeances climbed into the head rig, bolder now after the long chase.

LeRois turned to the man next to him and pulled a pistol from his sash. The man did not object. They were in battle, and that meant that LeRois was in command and his word was sacrosanct. As it should be. As it would be from that moment on, battle or no.

The guardship had made it through the wind and they were hauling their foreyards around, but it was too late for them. The Vengeance was no more than a cable length off, closing quickly, the murderous band just starting their slow building chant. LeRois caught a whiff of blood, the smell of fresh spilled blood.

And then the ship jerked under his feet, just slightly, but enough to make him stagger forward. He regained his balance and paused and looked around, then aloft. The sails were still drawing, braced for a larboard tack. He looked over the side. The

green fields were no longer slipping past.

The Vengeance was hard aground.

“No,” LeRois said. It was only a whisper. “No, no…”

There was no sound on deck. LeRois knew that everyone was looking at him. He looked forward again, past the unmoving bow. The stern section of the guardship slipped past the far point of land and disappeared.

LeRois staggered back, off balance. The deck of the Vengeance seemed to heave like she was in a massive sea. The faces and the rigging and the great guns were swirling around him. He could not make them stop. The screaming grew and grew until LeRois had to hold his hands over his ears and scream himself, but it did no good, he could not block it out.

Then Darnall was standing in front of him. “Captain, Captain, they’re still in a fucking river, they can’t get past us! Soon as the tide lifts us off, we’ll murder them sons of bitches!”

“No! No!” LeRois screamed. He heard the words, but they made no sense. He leveled his pistol at Darnall’s head, saw the flash of surprise on the quartermaster’s face, pulled the trigger. Darnall was tossed across the deck. He crumpled in the waterways and did not move.

The screaming and the voices were ripping through his head, and through it all came the cracking and popping of that thing carrying away. He staggered back against the bulwark and looked up, and everything was white again. The popping grew louder and became a tearing, a crashing, a rending, and then Jean-Pierre LeRois’s last tenuous hold on sanity was gone.

Chapter 30

IT WAS absolutely black on the cable tier, save for the little bit of light thrown off by the lantern Elizabeth had carried below. She sat in a far corner of the tier. Whether she was forward or aft, starboard or larboard, she could not tell, for she was all turned around. She was perched atop a burlap bag filled with bits of old, stiff rope. At least that was what it felt like through her skirts and petticoats and shift.

Lucy sat beside her, all but on top of her, clinging to her and crying bitterly on her shoulder. She could feel the dampness of the girl’s tears spreading through the cloth of her dress. Lucy was terrified. Terrified of what the pirates might do to her, terrified of what Marlowe or James or Elizabeth might do to her, terrified at what might happen to them all as a result of her betrayal.

Elizabeth understood. Lucy had just confessed to her what she had done. Or, more correctly, what George Wilkenson had forced her to do. The bastard.

“Oh, Lord, please forgive me, Mrs. Elizabeth, please forgive me…,” Lucy wailed, softly, and then fell to sobbing again.

Elizabeth wrapped her arm more tightly around Lucy’s shoulders and gave her a reassuring hug. “Don’t you fret, sweetheart, there is nothing to forgive. Any woman would have done

the same. It wasn’t your fault.”

At that Lucy wept harder still.

Lucy’s hysteria had gone on far longer than was quite justified by the circumstances, or so Elizabeth felt, given that Wilkenson had made her do what she did and that Lucy had in point of fact betrayed no one, save for the dead cook, so Elizabeth turned her attention from the girl to the ship around them.

She stared off into the dark and tried to get a sense for what was happening. The great guns had fired, larboard and starboard, and there had been a great rushing about, but that was some time ago. She had braced for the sound of fighting on deck, but it had not come. Instead things seemed to have settled down. She could still hear gunfire, but it did not seem to be the Plymouth Prize’s guns; it seemed too muffled and distant for that.

It seemed as if nothing significant had happened for some time, and Elizabeth found her thoughts drifting back to the murder of her ersatz husband. It had shocked her; she had no idea that the slaves had been capable of such a thing. She pictured the old woman putting the poison in Joseph’s food, the smug satisfaction she must have felt serving out death to that bastard.

But the old woman never left the kitchen. She could not have known who would get the poison dish. If Joseph had been the target, then he had to have been poisoned by the person who actually presented him with his plate, which was…