you see. The Spanish turned him over to the Inquisition. How he ever escaped from them I cannot imagine, but I reckon his time with them weren’t pleasant. And now, now he will have his revenge, or he will die trying.”
Yancy looked up at Nagel. “It is up to us, my dear Henry, to see it is the latter.”
I failed… Yancy thought. How many times had he said those words? he wondered. Not very many. In fact, he could think of no instance, other than his attempt at delivering Press up to a painful death, where those words might apply.
And then he thought of Elizabeth Marlowe. He had failed there. She was not with him, not submitting to his carnal needs. He had failed to take her.
That being the case, he was pleased to think of her dead. Nagel had told him that the room was well burned out, nothing but the charred remains of the furniture and the walls. But Nagel did admit, after questioning, that they had not actually found charred bodies, and while that could just mean that they were burned up entirely, Yancy did not think so. He had seen men burned; they did not generally burn away to nothing.
He pushed those thoughts out of his mind. They were not productive. He had real concerns that needed his attention.
“Nagel, you must get out of your fine clothes and don the garb of a drunken Roundsman. I need you to take up a place in the town, keep an eye on what is going on. You know people, you can find out all that is happening. Keep me informed.”
“Aye, sir. And, my lord, when do we move on this bastard, this Roger Press?”
“The moment he makes a mistake, my dear Henry.”
Chapter 18
THE SIGHT of St. Mary’s rising before him, the long green coast of Madagascar stretching away to larboard, did much to restore Roger Press’s equilibrium. For weeks now he felt as if his head were spinning around, as if he were in an uncontrollable plummet. But now everything had stopped.
The Queen’s Venture and her tender had encountered chronic and uncharacteristic calms around the Cape of Good Hope. That stretch of ocean between the bottom of Africa and the bottom of the world was well known for its wild weather. A surfeit of wind was most often the problem, not a lack of it.
But a lack of wind was what Press’s expedition had found. After being hurled by strong gales and big seas past thirty-eight degrees south, the storms seemed to blow themselves out, leaving the two ships wallowing in the long ocean rollers and moving in little bursts with the occasional cat’s-paw of a breeze.
They lost a week and a half at least, floating around south of the cape, and it made Press wild with impatience and anxiety. There were no real time constraints, of course. Yancy did not know they were coming; there was no reason for Press to think he would miss him. But all the logic in the world could not keep at bay his desperation to be moving again.
At last the breeze had filled and stayed that way, driving them along, around the Cape of Good Hope, northeast to Madagascar. Forward motion was more soothing to Press than all the rum, all the laudanum he could have ingested.
He stood alone at the weather rail of the quarterdeck, contemplatively rolling his silver toothpick back and forth, back and forth across the roof of his mouth. Silent, taciturn, and angry, he had been that way for the past three weeks.
He was still silent and taciturn. But now he was no longer angry.
“Mr. Tasker,” he said in a conversational tone, and the first officer, always in a state of high readiness, raced across the deck.
“Sir?”
“Let us clear the ship for action. Load but do not run out the great guns. Men will remain at quarters. And let us have the East Indiaman bunting aloft.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” A minute later the ship was a bustle of activity as the large, disciplined, and well-trained crew turned to, clearing away all of those bits of gear and temporary structure that did not involve bringing the ship into battle.
The sea chests and hammocks and hanging tables belowdecks were flung down into the hold. The flimsy walls of the officers’ cabins were broken down and stowed away, the furniture and paintings, the rugs and bunks and cushions and other amenities of the great cabin carefully carted below and stowed in a dry place in the hold so that the men at the guns in the great cabin area could work them unimpeded.
At the forwardmost end of the ship, way out on the little round spritsail top, two hands were bending and hoisting the ensign of the Honorable British East India Company, a flag consisting of red and white horizontal stripes with the red Cross of St. George on a white field in the canton. At the very aftermost part of the ship, two more hands were bending a flag onto the ensign staff, similar in design to that on the spritsail topmast but three times the size. At fore, main, and mizzen mastheads long red and white horizontally striped pennants whipped around in the blessed breeze.
Two hundred yards off the starboard quarter, the Speedwell showed the same bunting. Her master, Israel Clayford, Press’s first officer during the privateering days, was well acquainted with his plans for St. Mary’s. They had had plenty of opportunity to discuss them as they wallowed off the Cape of Good Hope.
Press trusted Clayford as much as he had ever trusted any man. Clayford was a vicious brute, driven entirely by his two base needs: lust and avarice. Press understood what drove the man, and so he could predict Clayford’s behavior. Press knew that Clayford regarded him as the quickest means to his own ends.
They stood on through the morning and into the afternoon, St. Mary’s growing larger before them, St. Mary’s at last. If there was anyone watching from the island-and Press knew there would be-the two ships would look to be East Indiamen, heavily armed and lightly manned, posing no threat. Yancy would not fire on them with his shore batteries. He would think them too valuable as trading partners or prizes for him to drive them away.
By midafternoon the open roads and small island at the head of the harbor at St. Mary’s were under their bows, and the two ships stood in, furling sail as they went, never giving any indication of their bellicose intentions.
Press ran his glass over the big house on the hill. Built by Adam Baldridge a decade or so before. Now the home of the upstart Elephiant Yancy, or so he was told by several reliable informants.
Not taking bloody good care of it, he mused. He could see that there had been a fire there, and not so long ago. A good part of the thatched roof was gone in a great charred hole.
Yancy. He had wanted to get his mangled fingers around that prancing little bugger’s neck for ten years. And now he would, and he would enjoy it.
Past the island and its abandoned battery and in toward the anchorage, the nearly deserted anchorage, to a place one hundred yards from the shore where they dropped their hooks, ship, and tender, and came at last to a stop in three fathoms of water.
“On deck! Boat’s putting off!” the lookout called, jerking Press from his contemplation of the dearth of shipping in the harbor.
He had envisioned St. Mary’s as crowded with vessels-Roundsmen, merchantmen, smugglers-all those who knew how to profit from the sea-lanes. He was going to pull Yancy out like a rotten mast from a ship’s hull, put himself in his place. Press would enjoy his portion of the extraordinary wealth that flowed through the island. And all of it funded by those fat, rich bastards in London.
He had expected more in the way of commerce, there in the harbor.
Bloody stupid Yancy, run it right into the ground, I wouldn’t fucking doubt, Press thought as he found the approaching boat with his glass. Well, I shall just have to fix what he has made a hash of.
The boat was pulled by four men with no apparent enthusiasm for their work. A fifth man sat in the stern sheets, but he was still too far away to see. It might well be Yancy, and that meant that he could not let himself be seen. He did not want to spoil all the fun.
“Tasker, see to some kind of side party. Whoever this is, welcome him with some sort of ceremony. I shall watch from aft.”
With that, Press hurried back under the quarterdeck, back to the point where the bulkhead to the great cabin would have been had the ship not been cleared away, fore and aft. From there he could see the waist and the
