hand on the hilt of his sword, the other going for his pistol. Beyond the door, a light rapping, someone politely knocking to wake him.
I have got to bloody relax, he thought. These are not the mutinous villains of a month past.
He released the weapons, put both feet on the deck, stood, stepped out of the sleeping cabin into the great cabin, and called out, “Come!”
Gosling, foretopman, stepped through the door. It was still sometime in the middle of the night-the stern windows were like mirrors with the darkness outside and the single burning lantern within.
“Sir,” said Gosling, “Mr. Fleming’s compliments, sir, and we sees some lights, sometimes, on the rise.”
Marlowe nodded. His heart was still pounding from his coming suddenly awake and ready to fight. He worried that his mind was becoming unhinged by all of this. “Lights, on the rise…” The thoughts began to organize themselves, questions formed. “Where away? How many?”
“Right ahead, sir. Looks like three, right in a row. Looks like taffrail lights, sir.”
Thomas instantly formed a picture in his mind of the big taffrail lights on the French merchantman. Right ahead meant right downwind, right where he would expect King James to be. It was possible that they were not so very far behind that renegade band.
“Very well, I’ll be up directly.”
He went back into his sleeping cabin, found a shirt, and pulled it on.
It was far too much to hope. The arrangement of three lanterns on the taffrail was hardly unusual. There was a plethora of shipping in those waters. Absurd to think it might be James.
But still he could not rid himself of that silly anticipation, and it was with a strange amalgam of emotions that he climbed up onto the dark quarterdeck and looked in the direction that Fleming pointed.
He had to wait a moment, but then there they were, like a little constellation, low down in the water, and moving with a rhythm different from that of the Elizabeth Galley. Three little lights, the center one a bit higher than the outer two. Taffrail lights, beyond a doubt. But whose?
“What time is it, pray, Mr. Fleming?”
“Just gone seven bells, sir.”
Just past three-thirty in the morning. An hour and a half or so until dawn. No need to roust the men up from below, not yet. They’d be up soon enough.
“At the next change of watch we’ll clear for action. Quietly. And let’s have the watch below roused nice and gentle, too. Like mothers kissing their babes.” Marlowe was in fine spirits and he realized it was because he had already decided that this was King James and his outlaw band in whose wake they were sailing.
But that, he recalled, was an absurd assumption, and that realization cooled his ardor a bit.
The next turn of the half-hour glass signaled eight bells, though in the interest of stealth no bells were actually rung. The watch below was called, quietly, and all hands were sent to quarters.
In the predawn dark the Elizabeth Galley was readied for a fight: guns cast off and loaded, temporary cabins under the quarterdeck broken down and stowed in the hold, decks sanded, linstocks supplied with lit match, tubs of water set between the guns, small arms distributed.
And when that was done the men fell to that most ubiquitous of combat duties. They waited.
The men knew exactly as much about the situation as did their captain, at least as far as the chase was concerned. There were three lights to be seen up ahead, steady now, not just on the rise, which meant they were overhauling whoever it was. That was all they knew. The rest was speculation, and it ran thick and fast along the crowded gundeck.
Marlowe and Bickerstaff stood all the way aft, in their familiar position back by the taffrail, where they could speak in almost normal tones with no fear of being overheard. They too knew only that there was a ship ahead, but unlike the men forward, they also understood the tricky political and legal issues involved, niceties that Marlowe had done his best to keep to himself.
“You hope that this is King James?” Bickerstaff said, his eyes on the three bobbing lights.
“I hope with all of my heart that it is him. I hope we are able to kill them all by dinner and have all their ill- gotten booty stowed down in our hold by the first dogwatch.”
“Indeed? That is quite an agenda for one day. But what if it is not King James. Will you let them be?”
“There are three other possibilities. The first is that it is a vessel that belongs to England or Flanders or some such friend of ours, in which case we must bid them a fare-thee-well. The second is that it is a manof-war belonging to one of our enemies and too much for us to handle, in which case we run like a dog. The third is that it is a legal prize, or would be for a ship with a letter of marque, in any event.”
“And if that is the case?”
“Oh, Lord, sir, I do not know.”
Since it was, by Marlowe’s thinking, useless to worry about something he could not change, he didn’t, and instead contented himself with a little breakfast for him and Francis and an extra tot of rum all around, to bolster the spirits of men whose spirits really needed no bolstering at all.
An hour after the ship had been readied, the first hints of dawn began to appear. Marlowe sent the sharpest pair of eyes aboard up into the main topmast crosstrees. He recalled a time when the sharpest pair of eyes aboard meant his. Not anymore. He felt decades older than he had just two months before.
A very long fifteen minutes passed and then the lookout cried, “On deck! I sees her, sir, right ahead, with them lanterns still lit!” From deck the taffrail lights had been swallowed up in the gathering dawn.
Another long few minutes during which Marlowe forced himself to not call out. The lad up aloft was no fool, he would sing out when there was something to sing about.
Finally he did so. “On deck! I can see her proper now…topsails and fore course, nearly the same heading as us… big son of a bitch…”
The anticipation hung like gunsmoke over a battlefield. Every eye was trained aloft or forward. “Breaking out colors, sir! Looks like a Frenchy, sir!”
Smiles, grins, hands rubbing in anticipation. A Frenchman was the best they could hope for, an undisputed prize for a privateer. Every man aboard knew that a Frenchman was fair game. It would all be spelled out in the letter of marque that Marlowe had shown them.
“French colors,” Bickerstaff said, let it hang in the air.
“Still might be King James. It was a French ship they took, after all. He’d have to run something up if he was playing at the innocent merchantman.”
“Yes he would. So in fact this ship yonder still could be the solution to your troubles, or a twofold increase in them, and we still do not know which.”
“Yes, very neatly put. I thank you for that, Francis.”
They plunged on, the Elizabeth Galley spreading more and more sail, as the gray dawn sky turned to the light blue of morning. Up ahead the ship in question was setting more sail as well: the main course, the topgallants, then studding sails to weather, but slowly, methodically. It was not the actions of a ship fleeing pursuit, but the routine setting of more sail with the onset of day.
“Well, damn him for an impudent bastard,” Marlowe said at last. “Whoever he is, James or not, he seems none too concerned with having a well-armed privateer nipping at his behind.”
“Pirate,” Bickerstaff corrected.
“Perhaps. We have yet to see.” Marlowe took the big telescope from the binnacle box, climbed up into the mizzen shrouds to where he could see past the mainsail, and trained the glass forward. They were still too far to make out any of the finer details, but the big telescope told him something, and years of experience with ships and the sea filled in the unknowns. He climbed back down to the deck.
“I take her for an Indiaman. A French East Indiaman, and a damn big one. Of course, they are all damned big, and well armed too, like a man-of-war, really. That’s why she ain’t frightened of us, I reckon.”
“Well… she is a handful, to be certain. Will you run from her?”
“I am loath to give that order. It would not do for me to look shy in front of the men. They are still a volatile bunch, for all the good fortune we have had, Griffin’s untimely demise and all. But they are privateersmen, you know, which means they are after riches and don’t much want to risk their necks for them. So what I will do is let them vote on it.”
“You’ll let them vote? How very republican of you. But is that not at odds with your insistence on absolute command? That sounds more like pirates’ ways to me.”
