The Guardship

He looked to his left. The beach was scattered with blackened pieces of hull and rigging. Men lay in clumps, some in the surf, some well up in the sand. It would take a closer inspection to see if they were alive or dead.

“You, there!” a voice called, and he looked to his right. A sailor was approaching him, pointing at him, and behind him

came a gentleman with a long white wig and a walking stick and a sword at his side. Wearing a uniform of sorts.

“You there,” the gentleman said again. “I am Captain Carlson of yon man-of-war, HMS Southampton. I am looking for the captain of HMS Plymouth Prize. The guardship.”

“There is no more guardship.”

The gentleman sighed, an exasperated sound. “Well, the captain of the former guardship, then.”

“I am he.”

“You are Captain Allair?”

“No.”

“Well, then, sir, who are you?”

That was an interesting question. He almost said Malachias Barrett, but he did not. There was still the hope that Malachias Barrett was dead. Was he Thomas Marlowe? Would Governor Nicholson still call him that? He did not know if Wilkenson had told the governor the truth of his past. He did not know, after all that had happened, if he would be called a hero and praised for defeating LeRois, or called a pirate and hanged.

He answered the question truthfully.

“I have no idea.”

Epilogue

AS IT turned out, he was Thomas Marlowe.

That at least was what Governor Nicholson called him, as did the burgesses who turned out in welcome when he and the remainder of the Plymouth Prizes were brought ashore at Jamestown. That, their second hero’s welcome, far outstripped even their arrival back from Smith Island.

The praise was much thicker, of course, because it was spread over so many fewer men. Marlowe and Bickerstaff and King James were all there, and all were relatively unscathed due to the simple good fortune of their having been under water at the exact moment that the Wilkenson Brothers exploded.

Rakestraw was there too, though the better part of his right arm was not, having been hacked off by a cutlass in the last minutes of the fight. Only Bickerstaff’s quick work with a tourniquet saved him from bleeding to death.

In addition to them, there were nineteen of the Plymouth Prizes remaining. Of the rest, only ten actual bodies were found. The rest, as well as those pirates who had remained aboard the new Vengeance, were at the bottom of the James or scattered around the shore of Hog Island. No parts large enough to warrant burial were ever found.

And they were all heroes, the survivors and the honored dead, the saviors of the tidewater. Those who came back were paraded through the countryside to Williamsburg, where they were each given a handsome reward, voted them by the Burgesses the day after the fight, and then toasted in the taverns up and down Duke of Gloucester Street.

No one ever asked Marlowe why he had abandoned the fight that first day, and Marlowe satisfied himself with the thought that if he had not, then they surely would have been defeated, having been tricked by LeRois into fighting him on his own terms. The beauty of that excuse was that it was genuinely true, even if it was not the real reason he had run away.

But no one ever asked, and Marlowe was smart enough not to offer an explanation unbidden.

He also learned, after his return to the world, another of the factors that had contributed to the Plymouth Prizes’ victory over the pirates. Those men aboard the old Vengeance, after abandoning her to the flames, had not returned to the Wilkenson Brothers at all, but instead had gone ashore in an apparent attempt to find yet another home to sack. They had stepped right into the arms of Sheriff Witsen and Lieutenant Burnaby and the militia who had finally assembled and who were watching from the shore, trying to find a way to join in the fight.

The pirates surrendered with never a weapon raised, leaving those aboard the new Vengeance with fewer men to fight the Plymouth Prizes and providing the people of the tidewater with the kind of tangible end to the threat that only a good mass public hanging can provide.

Two weeks of celebration and sensational trials culminated in the largest crowd ever to gather for an execution in Virginia, where that sort of thing generally lacked the popularity it enjoyed in London. It was like Publick Times all over again, and Thomas Marlowe was very, very eager for it to end.

He knew that the questions would come sooner or later, the accusations would fly, and he wanted it to be sooner. He did not care to loiter around, letting his worries fester. If there

was one thing that he had learned from LeRois, it was that the anticipation of the fight was at least as bad as the actual event.

But the questions did not come. The questions about his personal history, the questions about Elizabeth’s background, the accusations concerning the death of Joseph Tinling. They were never asked.

Jacob Wilkenson was presumed to have been killed by the pirates, his body burned with the Wilkenson home. George Wilkenson had disappeared, the horse that he had been riding found near where the pirate ships had been anchored. As far as the governor knew or cared, Joseph Tinling had been murdered by a now dead slave, acting alone. A dead man, later identified as one Ripley, captain of the Wilkensons’ river sloop, had been found beside a sack of items he had looted from the Wilkenson home.

There was no one else in Virginia who knew or cared about the history of Elizabeth Tinling, no one who would question the pedigree of so heroic and dangerous a man as Thomas Marlowe.

It was months after the fight, after the adulation had subsided and Marlowe was again just another wealthy planter going unmolested about his business, that he would finally admit to himself that Malachias Barrett was dead, that the man the tidewater recognized as Thomas Marlowe had risen pure from his ashes.

And when he was certain that that was true, he asked Elizabeth Tinling to marry him.

And Elizabeth Tinling said yes.

The wedding ceremony and subsequent supper at the Marlowe plantation was well attended, with the governor and the House of Burgesses there, as well as every other person of note in the tidewater, and their families.

The celebration went on for two days, which was a day and a half longer than Marlowe or Elizabeth would have preferred, but they did not think it would be neighborly to ask the people to leave, so they did not. Instead, King James, whose own marriage to Lucy a week before had caused considerably

less fervor, sent Caesar and his assistants back to the wine cellar again and again to make certain that none of the guests ran dry.

It was some weeks after that that Thomas found himself alone with Francis Bickerstaff on the wide front porch of the plantation house. The evening was cool, the first signs of summer stepping aside, yielding to autumn its rightful place. Little bursts of red highlighted the green oaks, and the fields behind the house were studded with the short brown stalks of cut tobacco. From the big tobacco barn they could smell the rich aroma of the curing leaves.

“Well, Thomas,” Bickerstaff said at last, “it would seem that your metamorphosis is complete.”

Marlowe turned and smiled at him. It was the first that his friend had said on the subject, and he knew it would be the last. “So it would seem. When LeRois died, and Ripley and the Wilkensons, I reckon they took Malachias Barrett down with them.”

“And I think it safe to say, between us two, that Master Barrett died an honorable death. A death in defense of true honor.” Bickerstaff raised his glass.

“True honor. And an end to Master Barrett.”