The world, Marlowe knew, consisted of the strong and the weak, and the strong preyed on the weak, as it was in nature. Emotion could not be allowed to hold too great a sway.
But sometimes he found himself listening to Bickerstaff’s arguments and finding some sense in them.
He had never told Bickerstaff about his having served aboard a blackbirder, never told Elizabeth or James or anyone that he could think of. The shame of it still clung to him, the way the stink of the ship had clung to his clothes until at last he had stolen a new set and burned the ones he had. He did not know why he felt such humiliation still for something he had done so long ago. Surely he had done worse since?
He shook his head. Seeing the whitewashed city of Whydah growing more distinct amid the thick forest was making his thoughts turn morbid and morose. He was not a man for such introspection, and the more he found his mind turning over such ideas, the more he told himself he was becoming an old woman, or a philosopher like Bicker-staff, and it did not suit him.
“Good morning, Captain,” said Bickerstaff, stepping up from the waist with two pewter mugs full of the fine, pungent black coffee they had picked up in Sao Miguel. Marlowe took the proffered mug gratefully, awkwardly, holding it in his left hand. His right arm hung in a sling around his neck. A clean break, no reason to think it would not heal, but it still hurt like the devil.
The coffee was hot, but no steam would rise in the warm, tropical morning air.
“Good morning.” The sun had all but broken free of the horizon, a blaze of brilliant orange off the starboard bow. The sky was a brittle blue, cloudless, promising heat. The shore that lay under their bows, running from horizon to horizon, was still mostly indistinct, a thick, dark shadow and only the white, white buildings were visible at all. Those, and the smattering of vessels that lay at anchor in the roads, no more than a few miles off.
“Whydah, is it?” Bickerstaff asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you been, before?”
“No.”
The two men were quiet, watching the rising sun reveal what lay before them: more buildings, with smoke curling up into the nearly white sky from a dozen, two dozen points among the trees, more vessels of all sizes. White sand and a line of white surf that ran the whole length of the shore, as far as they could see. Birds wheeling around overhead, seabirds, and occasionally the bright-colored natives of Africa.
“It would be odd to find them here, would it not?” Bickerstaff asked. “Whydah is notorious for its traffic in slaves. One would think it the last place they might come.”
“One would think. I have all but despaired of guessing what is in King James’s mind. If I can only go back and tell the governor that I have truly looked in every port they might have ventured to, then at least I will be satisfied. The world is a damned big place, even Nicholson must realize that, and they could be any damned where in it.”
He had not meant for his reply to be as bitter as it was, but as the words came out, they drew the venom with them. He was tired of this, tired of putting such superhuman effort into a search he did not think was his responsibility. A search that he did not want to be a success. But neither did he want it to fail.
James, damn your black hide…
The French East Indiaman, after blowing away the Elizabeth Galley fore topmast, had simply sailed off. They apparently had more important things to do than capitalize on their victory, or they did not think the cost in blood was worth whatever they might get from the Galley. Whatever their thinking, Marlowe was glad of it, glad to see the big ship disappear beyond the horizon.
It took the crew of the Elizabeth Galley a full twenty-four hours to repair the damage they had suffered in fifteen minutes of fighting. With the threat of being blown from the sea gone, they were able to salvage a great deal of the wreckage, and happily they had on the booms a spare topmast, so in the end there was little apparent damage.
Once things were squared away they set sail, again hunting for King James, the men still eager for the fortune carried by those fabled black pirates.
Two days later they made their African landfall at Cape Verde, the northernmost point to which Marlowe thought James might be heading. They had looked there and into the mouth of the Gambia, gone around to Cacheu and Bissau, poked into those few anchorages in the Bissagos Islands, and then southeast along the Guinea Coast.
The only thing in their favor was the sparsity of anchorages along Africa’s west coast, the few places where they had to negotiate their way into a well-defined harbor. Most of the coast was open roads, great long stretches of beach where the treacherous surf pounded and pounded and vessels took their wary moorings far from the land, relying on the skills of native boatmen to get them to shore and back.
In that case they had only to sail by, to make their way inshore close enough to survey the vessels there and see if any were the French merchantman taken by James and his pirate band.
And none of them were.
Past Cape St. Anna and Cabo Monte, southeast along the Pepper Coast, then northeast at Cape Palmas and along the Ivory Coast to Axim. They doubled Cape Three Points and stood on to the Gold Coast, Ashanti country, past the open roads of Shama and Komende and Elmina and Cape Coast with its great, looming castle, the best anchorage for a thousand miles and the least likely place to find fugitive slaves. And indeed they did not.
They checked the vessels anchored at the mouth of the Volta River and made their easting into the Bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, not a place that Marlowe had any hope of finding them.
Up until that point the search had been a simple matter. Once they passed Lagos, however, and entered the area of the Niger River Delta, then there would be hundreds of creeks and rivers and backwaters where they might have hidden, indeed where they probably had. He would have to check them all, all the fetid breeding grounds of yellow jack and black fever, and he dreaded even the thought of it.
Damn, damn, damn you to hell, James, for putting me through this! He was angry enough that the idea of James being hanged was not so terrible. When he thought of what they had been through already, what more they had to do, he was ready to hang the man himself.
The sun was fully up and the shore with which they were closing quite visible. Marlowe took the last swig of coffee, spit a few errant grounds over the side. The native canoes were starting to close with them. He could see the boatmen working their paddles, racing out to the new arrival. Some would be grumete, come out to offer their services in getting the white men safe through the surf, some would be bumboats offering for sale those things that sailors long at sea hankered for. That would be rum, chiefly, and he would have to tell Fleming to see that the men did not get their hands on enough of it to cause trouble.
He ran his eyes over the ships and brigs and snows at anchor, more out of habit than any thought that he might find the one he was searching for. His eyes settled on one ship anchored further to the east, away from the central part of Whydah, and he stared at it but his thoughts were elsewhere, with Governor Nicholson, explaining how he had searched the entire coast and had found nothing.
And as he stared, and as his mind traveled back over the Atlantic, back over the water they had just crossed, an odd something began to gnaw at him, like a dream he had told himself in his sleep to remember but on waking could not. It was the dull sensation of knowing there is something one must not forget, but forgetting what that something is.
And so he stared and he mucked around in the silt of his mind, trying to find what it was under there. So much had he come to accept the fact that he would not find James’s ship, it took him a good five minutes before he realized that it was the French merchantman, or something very like it, that he was looking at now.
“Dear God…” He stood up straight, knocked the pewter mug off the caprail. It bounced once on the channel and then plunged into the blue water, but Marlowe spared it never a thought.
“Whatever is it?” Bickerstaff asked, but Marlowe turned and fled aft and picked up the big telescope from the binnacle box and trained it forward. He shook his head as he stared through the glass. The ship was a mile and a half away-he could see none of the little details that would give him absolute confirmation-but nothing that he saw told him he was wrong.
He felt the emotions crashing together like surf coming across either side of a sandbar: the thrill that he might have found them, the relief that it might soon be over, the fear of disappointment, the dread of finding King James and killing him or bringing him back to an even worse death, the confusion of conflicting loyalties and desires.
The more he tried to make his life a simple thing-a wife, a home, a planter’s life-the more it eluded him, the
