permission to board, not even bothering to tie the boat to the chains. It drifted well clear of the Elizabeth Galley’s side even in the few seconds that it took them to come aboard, but they seemed entirely oblivious, as if gaining the Galley’s deck was the singular goal in their lives and nothing beyond that mattered.
They stopped short at the gangway and looked around at the armed men, the row of guns, Marlowe and Bickerstaff. Their eyes were wide, bloodshot. Their hands were trembling. Marlowe had seen that look on men’s faces before. It was how they looked when the pirates were done with them.
“Who are you? What ship is that?” Marlowe asked, but the men just looked at him, dumb.
“What ship is that?” he asked again.
One of the men uttered a sound. It was not a word that anyone could tell, but it seemed to break the impasse in his throat and suddenly sentences were spilling out. But they were not English. Marlowe shook his head to indicate that he did not understand; the man kept on talking.
And then Bickerstaff interrupted, talking the same language, and Marlowe realized it was French. The man turned to Bickerstaff and continued his explanation. At last Bickerstaff turned to Marlowe.
“You were right. This is indeed James’s slaver. Or was, in any event. These men are from a French merchantman. They were attacked by black pirates, he says, from this ship.” He nodded toward the slaver, drifting away downwind. “The whole crew was butchered, save for them, because they were in the yawl boat when the attack took place. I must say, James is a man of some passion, but I am hard pressed to see him killing unarmed sailors in cold blood, white though they may be.”
“As am I. But I was surprised to hear of his sticking a knife in the blackbirder’s captain, so it is hard to know what he is capable of.”
Bickerstaff turned and asked the French sailor a question, nodded as the man made a lengthy reply, and then turned back to Marlowe.
“They abandoned the slaver, which is in a wretched state, and took the merchantman. They carried away the merchantman’s chief mate, who was also in the yawl at the time of the attack.”
“Oh, God!” Marlowe threw his head back, let out a long sigh of aggravation that built into a frightening shout as he tried to vent his pent-up anger. Then he turned to the first officer.
“Mr. Fleming, pray see that the Frenchmen have some rum and some food. These poor bastards need some drink, some strong drink, I should imagine. Mr. Griffin, clear the longboat away and tell off a boarding party.”
The slaver, her sails all aback, had drifted a good distance downwind from the Elizabeth Galley. An hour later she was safely to leeward when the fire that Marlowe and the boarding party had built in her hold worked its way through the main deck and up the rigging, turning the entire stinking affair into a great pyre.
James and the others had tried to clean it. Marlowe could see the signs: the recently scrubbed decks, the faint trace of sulfur in the hold where they had apparently lit brimstone to drive out the even more horrid smells of people locked down for weeks.
But he could imagine that all the cleaning in the world would not wash away the horror that that ship carried aboard. They must have been glad to be rid of her. In her state she would not have carried them back across the ocean.
Now he and Bickerstaff stood together on the Elizabeth Galley’s quarterdeck, all the way aft, out of earshot of the helmsmen or any of the crew. In the gathering dark they watched the bright column of flame that rose above the hated vessel and danced across the ocean swells.
Damn that ship, Marlowe thought. He hated her as much as James must have. Damn her, she was the cause of all this.
Burn, you whoreson villain.
“Ah, Francis,” he sighed. “It was all so much simpler once. Being a barbarous pirate has its advantages, you know. When one operates beyond all morality, then one never suffers such a thing as a moral dilemma.”
Bickerstaff sniffed. “Neither does a frog or a maggot concern itself with moral considerations, but I couldn’t recommend the life. But let me ask you, Thomas, why were you so distraught to find they had carried off the chief mate? It did not seem to be from concern for his safety.”
“No, faith, it was not. The damned annoying thing is now they have someone who can navigate. If it had just been James I reckon he would have tried to beat to the eastward against the trades-he would not guess at any other way to fetch Africa. We could have run him down easy, put an end to this. As it is we are but a day or two behind them.
“But now they have someone who knows the sailing route. Now they can sail to Africa and we have to follow and I have to convince these dogs forward that we’re doing it all for their greater glory and riches, or who knows what they will do.”
He stared at the flames. They were all he could see now, with night having come full on them while they talked.
Chapter 12
Frederick Dunmore wheeled his horse around, took in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of Marlowe House, the big white plantation house, deserted, the barn that waited for that season’s harvest, the row of slave quarters, abandoned.
But not slave quarters at all, of course. Houses for free Negroes. All trim and neat with paint and shingles bought with the wages that Marlowe paid and laid out in the circular pattern of an African village. Some were white, some were crazy colors, reds and blues. Some had African symbols painted on their walls. It was the most egregious kind of effrontery. He spun his horse again, could not bear to look on it.
Twenty or so men-well-to-do planters, their overseers, indentured servants, even some common mechanics and laborers-had now joined him in hunting down the escaped Negroes. They were gathered on the big lawn that stretched away from the back of the house, relaxing, waiting. The dogs raced all around the grass, barking, howling, tearing up this and that.
Between his legs Dunmore could see the wide black smudges from his saddle that stained his white breeches. Mud was splattered over his white socks. A constellation of little black holes spread across his dustcovered coat where sparks from the pan on his firelock had floated down and burned through the fabric.
But the clothing did not matter. He was happy to see the hard use it was getting. It was evidence of the great effort he was exerting in routing out this plague on the colony.
The people were starting to listen to him. They were starting to listen to reason.
Dunmore wanted slavery gone, abolished, made illegal. He did not wish to ever see another black man in America. Could not understand how the others failed to see that they were importing a plague, paying good money to bring into the land the means of their own destruction. Soon there would be more blacks than whites. And then, agitation, more and more liberties for the Negroes.
And then, with the lower sort of whites, inbreeding. Inbreeding. It was intolerable.
He turned again and looked at the Negroes’ houses. Neat, even comfortable and homey. Unbelievable.
Sailing to London, years before, his ship had been caught in a storm, midocean, a wild, disorganized blow with the wind boxing the compass and big seas rising up from all directions, knocking the ship first here and then there. Lightning from every quarter. It was a black, freezing madness.
Dunmore had never forgotten that storm, coming as it had mere weeks after his own steady life had been blown to ribbons. It seemed then such a perfect physical manifestation for the rage that ran wild in his head, coming from all quarters, overwhelming him from directions in which he was not even looking.
“You men!” he shouted. “Those niggers’ houses! Burn them!”
Glances back and forth, questioning looks. The storm in Dunmore ’s head raged harder. “They built these houses with money that was not theirs, by law! I say burn them!”
A few of the men, the overseers and mechanics, got to their feet. They would do it, willing or not.
Oh, I am so very brave while Marlowe is off to sea, Dunmore thought. Man enough to burn his property, threaten his wife.
Coward!
But what other approach? What good could he do if Marlowe put a bullet through his head? Who would carry on
