their greetings, Marlowe thanking him once more for dinner.
“Delighted to have you, delighted,” the governor assured him, indicating a chair in front of the desk. Marlowe sat, and the governor sat as well.
“You mentioned ‘sundry affairs’ last night. Is there something your ship requires, something I might be of assistance in arranging?”
“Perhaps,” Marlowe said. “As to stores and such, my first officer is seeing to that. But there is one thing that is more your domain…”
Marlowe leaned back, crossed his legs, assumed a casual air. He had planned this moment for weeks but still was not sure what he was doing, or why.
He had not lied to Elizabeth about wanting to show her the island, but that alone would not have been enough to justify calling there.
He had, in fact, lied to Peleg and Bickerstaff about not finding enough sailors in Norfolk. He had purposely held off buying sufficient cordage and salt beef for the voyage, claimed he could not find them in the colonies, that they would have to look in at Bermuda for them. All those lies, just to arrive at this moment.
What am I doing?
“We are taking tobacco to London, as you know. Arranged one of those permits to sail without convoy. But after that, I had a thought to not return to Virginia right off. I was thinking, what with the war, perhaps privateering might be the thing-”
“Oh, privateering, yes!” The governor threw up his hands. “Everyone wants to go privateering, think they’ll make their fortune.” He laid his hands palms down on his desk, looked Marlowe in the eye. “You are looking for a commission, I’ll warrant. Certainly I have the authority to grant a commission, like any royal governor. And I daresay I wish I could.
“I perceive you are a gentleman, sir, and not of the same kidney as some of these other villains. They get a commission and then it is ‘Steer for Madagascar!’ and they are pirating any vessel crosses their path. No, my dear Marlowe, I fear that the government is quite fed up with privateers, and they would not look with favor upon my granting one more commission.”
Coy bastard, Marlowe thought. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a leather purse that was heavy enough to serve as a formidable weapon. He held it up, just for a second, then let it fall on the governor’s desk. It made a heavy chink sound as it hit, the unmistakable tone of gold coin upon gold coin.
“Of course,” Thomas said, as if Richier had never spoken, “I understand that there are certain administrative costs involved in such a thing…”
For the next ten minutes they did not speak. Marlowe stared out one of the tall windows at the lovely harbor, the Elizabeth Galley like a toy far below, while Governor Richier wrote out the commission for privateering.
Chapter 4
IT TOOK them four weeks to raise England, once the Elizabeth Galley cleared out of Hamilton Harbor and Marlowe set her great sweeping northerly arc of a course to cross the Atlantic.
It was with some sadness that they left that beautiful island. Their stay had lasted five days, taking on stores and giving the hands a run ashore, enough time for them all to feel some attachment to the place. Thomas and Elizabeth were daily guests of the governor’s, a skilled host, and Richier invited Bickerstaff and Dinwiddie on two other occasions.
Dinwiddie, of all of them, seemed most heartbroken to leave. For the five days that they had remained at anchor, his usual active, hardworking and hard-driving spirit abandoned him. He strolled the decks like a gentleman aboard his yacht, retold bits of his memories of dining with the governor, described the mansion to the sailors, recalled snippets of droll conversation. He left the bulk of the work to the stolid William Flanders, second officer, and Honeyman, the bosun.
Honeyman, for his part, did not seem to mind, did not seem to view Dinwiddie’s strange behavior as any more of an imposition than he viewed most of life.
Duncan Honeyman was an odd one; Marlowe could not seem to peg him. He had all the attributes of a whiner, a malingerer, a sullen troublemaker, except that he worked like a horse and made all those in his charge do the same.
There was no genuine fault to be found in his performance as bosun.
Nor in his recruiting efforts. He went ashore and did not return for a day and a half, and Marlowe was ready to make his displeasure known, emphatically, when Honeyman appeared on the quay with five prime seamen in tow. Marlowe did not question his techniques after that.
Five days on that lovely island, and then they rigged the capstan and heaved the anchor up from the bottom and stood out into the open sea, hearts yearning for Bermuda, heads pounding from the excesses in which they had there indulged.
With each mile made good, Dinwiddie the governor’s guest settled back into Dinwiddie the first officer, the man whom Marlowe had so actively recruited. A man whose conversation with the crew consisted not of descriptions of dinner but terse orders to haul the bloody main-sheet, you damned buggers, I’ll thank you to mind your work, the mainsail looks like bloody washing hung out to dry.
Their first Sunday since leaving Bermuda, and Thomas Marlowe had the pleasure of watching his crew-a contented crew, a crew of tolerable size and expertise-sprawled out along the warm deck, taking their ease on their day off.
They were almost evenly divided between black men and white, odd proportions, even among the pirates. Marlowe kept a weather eye out, waited for a spark, an angry word, a shove, waited for someone to pull a knife, growl, “I’ll show you, nigger, playing the man!”
But it didn’t happen, because the one thing that was most offensive to a sailor, the one thing that overshadowed race or religion or political leanings, was a refusal to do one’s share of work, and in that the black men could not be faulted. They worked hard and learned fast, and the more experienced white hands had no complaints.
Still… as Marlowe looked across the deck he saw a divided crew.
There was no animosity that he could see, no forced racial divides, but all the black men were clustered together to larboard, near the bow, and the white men, off watch, were sitting amidships. When the trouble came, in whatever form it would, they would have to act as one clan. They would have to be the Elizabeth Galleys, not white men and black.
The next day he surprised them all. “Mr. Dinwiddie,” he called the mate aft, “some of the men, I perceive, are still in their shore clothes, and that won’t do. I think today we will have a ‘make and mend’ day.”
The “some” whom he meant were the black men; the white hands were all sailors and had come aboard in their wide slop trousers and work shirts, sheath knives and neckerchiefs. The black men still wore the clothes in which they had labored in the fields at Marlowe House.
“Make and mend, aye, sir, and they’ll be glad of it.” A make and mend day was almost as much a holiday as was a Sunday.
“Issue out cloth and needles and thread to those that need it. Have the hands that know how to run up clothes help their watchmates who don’t.”
“Make and mend?” Francis Bickerstaff asked an hour later as he stepped onto the quarterdeck and joined Marlowe in observing the work going on forward. All over the deck men were paired up, the sailors helping the new men make their wide-legged slops, their work shirts cut in the seaman’s way.
Marlowe knew that the former field hands would not know how to sew clothes. The deep-water sailors, however, the men who sailed ocean voyages and were used to being long out of the company of women, all were adept at the necessary chores that landsmen left to wives and daughters. Now the white sailors were patiently instructing the young black men in the tailor’s arts.
“Clothes make the man, Francis, be he a gentleman or a sailor man.”
And while the clothes might not, in fact, make the man, they did much to help the men make themselves. The newly minted sailors laughed at their new rigs, pretended to be unimpressed with them, felt a certain degree of
