The Guardship

Vengeance shuffled off in various

directions to perform those tasks. They could do them just as well

drunk as sober. It was how they generally did them.

“Rig the messenger! Nippers, stand ready!”

It was half an hour of shuffling, tossing gear aside, and digging more gear out from the piles of junk that littered the deck before the capstan was rigged for weighing anchor. “Heave away!” Darnall shouted, and the pawls began their steady click click click as the men stamped the capstan around.

In the bow, the nippers lashed the heavy anchor cable to the messenger, shifting their nips as the eight-inch thick rope came inboard and was fed down the hatch.

The job of stowing the wet cable away on the cable tier, wrestling the tons of rope into neat coils, was a hot, filthy, horrible job, and since there were no slaves or captives aboard to do it, it was not done. Rather, the cable was allowed to pile up where it fell, and if it rotted from being stowed wet it was no matter. Every ship had anchor cable aboard. They could always take more.

LeRois stood aft on the quarterdeck, arms folded, watching, saying little. Gave the occasional order to the men on the helm. Darnall was the quartermaster and he was running the evolution, just as he ran all the mundane aspects of the Vengeance’s operation.

LeRois had only one thing to do, and that was to give the order for their destination. He wondered how receptive the Vengeances would be. Wondered if he would have to kill anyone to get his orders obeyed. Perhaps it would be best if he did, get things off on the right foot. The incident on the beach had left him anxious for blood.

“Anchor’s a-peak!” Darnall called out. “Hands to the sheets and halyards! Come along, you bloody laggards, haul away all!”

The Vengeance’s sails had never been stowed, since they were prone to rot when stowed and, more to the point, stowing them was a great effort that would just have had to be undone once it was time to get under way. For that reason the Vengeances had only to sheet topsails home and haul away on the

halyards, then heave a pawl on the capstan to break the anchor loose and they were under way.

“Fall off, fall off, meet ’er,” LeRois growled at the helmsmen as the bow of the Vengeace swung off. Forward, the men at the braces heaved away, trimming sail to the new course with never an order shouted, never the least bit of confusion. Lazy drunkards that they were, the Vengeances were prime seamen to a man, like most pirate crews, and they knew their business.

The Vengeance steadied on her course, sailing west out of Nassau Harbor, as more and more canvas was spread to the trade winds: courses, topgallants, the lateen mizzen, the spritsail and spritsail topsail, set and trimmed with all the speed and efficiency an expert though drunken crew could display.

The ship itself was a pathetic sight. Running gear piled in heaps along the waterways and on top of the six pounder guns that lined the weather deck. The long quarterdeck and forecastle that she had sported when LeRois and his men had first taken her had been cut back to give more fighting room in the waist. It had not been neatly done. The jagged edges of hacked-off planks still protruded here and there. The wood on the once-covered areas of the deck was altogether darker then that of exposed places. Great white patches showed in the standing rigging where the tar had worn away. The paint was blistered by the sun and flaking off.

The Vengeance needed a great deal of work, a fact that was entirely ignored by the men aboard her.

Once the ship was under way, and sails trimmed, each man claimed for himself a piece of the deck on which to sit and continue the drinking and gambling and sleeping that had been interrupted by the afternoon’s work.

LeRois stepped up to the quarterdeck rail. “Ecoutez! Ecoutez! Listen here, you men!”

Men put bottles down. Heads turned aft.

“We’re going to the British colonies on the American coast, do you hear?” LeRois said. “I am setting course for there.”

The men looked at one another, some nodding agreement, some shaking heads. A low murmur ran across the deck.

The bosun was the first to speak. LeRois had expected as much. He was a sea lawyer. A new man, volunteered from one of their last victims. He would die by LeRois’s hand in the next minute if he objected too strongly. Set a good example. “I reckon there’s fair pickings down around Panama way, or south of Florida.”

“Perhaps,” said LeRois, “but we go to the American coast.”

Silence swept like a cat’s paw across the deck. The bosun coughed, stood up from where he had been leaning on the fife rail around the mainmast. “Reckon we should vote. Says so in the articles.”

There was a gentle murmur. “Reckon he’s got a right to ask,” someone said, just audible.

LeRois stepped forward and down the ladder to the waist, moving slowly. He said nothing. The bosun’s face swam before him. He felt the excitement rise as he closed with the man. LeRois the master was back, LeRois the Devil.

“I reckon we should vote, is all I said,” the bosun began again. He saw that his words had no effect on LeRois, and that the huge man was still advancing. Reached for the knife in his belt.

LeRois grabbed the knife by the blade just as it cleared the leather, twisted it, cutting his own hand open, and tossed it away. With his other hand he grabbed the bosun’s neck under his wispy, uneven beard and squeezed, watching with delight as the man’s eyes went wide, his fists striking feebly at LeRois’s arm, unable to get past his long reach and strike his face or body. The bosun flailed wildly, growing weaker, growing more frightened and desperate.

“America, Captain, like you said,” someone called, and there was a chorus of agreement among those men who knew LeRois well enough to still fear him. LeRois tossed the gasping bosun to the deck. He felt the warm blood running down his palm. Dripping off the tips of his fingers.

“Very good,” he said and stamped aft, then to the helmsman said, “Make your course north-northwest, a quarter west.”

LeRois did not tell the men about his plans. He had a vague notion that they would not believe him.

But they would soon enough, when he had made them all wealthy men. Once they reached America. Once they were cruising off the Capes. Once they were in the Chesapeake.

Chapter 5

KING JAMES, majordomo of the house, stood in the doorway of Marlowe’s now vacant bedchamber. He ran his dark eyes over the room. The house girls had made the bed with military precision. They had cleared away the bottle of rum and the bottle of wine and the half-empty glasses, had swept up the ashes and the sprinkling of tobacco and placed Marlowe’s pipe carefully on the mantel.

They had picked up the silk coat and waistcoat from the floor where James knew Marlowe had dropped them, had retrieved the long white wig, worth as much as a laborer might make in half a year, which Marlowe had flung into the corner.

The room was immaculate, but James knew that it would be. If it was not, the house girls would answer to him, and they had no wish to do that. He took pride in the way that he ran things. Pride was something he had not felt in many, many years. Not since he had been taken by the slavers. Not in all the long twenty years of his slavery. Not until Marlowe had come along and freed them all.

It was virtually his first act after buying the Tinling place. He had offered no explanation, just freed all of the slaves that had come with the plantation. Offered them wages, based on the success of the tobacco crop, if they would stay and work the land. Which, of course, they all did. They had nowhere else to go.

James had been a field hand then. Never believed that Marlowe would actually pay them, but the others did, and they doubled their efforts in the fields. Fools, James thought. A white man’s trick, another low white man’s trick to get more labor out of them.

Which it was. And even though Marlowe had indeed paid them, quite handsomely, it did not change the fact that it was a trick. And it had worked.