it.”
“Ah, yes, but it is also the way of these ‘Roundsmen,’ as you style them, or pirates if one prefers to eschew euphemism, that any may leave the company if he so desires. Allegiance to none, a short life and a merry one, and all of that. That is what Dinwiddie did, no more.”
“Humph,” said Marlowe. “Well, damn you and your roundabout logic.”
At that, Bickerstaff shrugged and smiled. There were certain kinds of dueling at which Marlowe would never best him.
The men forward were happy to be free of Dinwiddie’s brooding and to labor under the more benign rule of now-First Lieutenant Flanders. They were also happy because the hull was clean and repaired and the ship provisioned with food and water, both freshly put down, and the magazine held barrels and barrels of gunpowder and the shot locker was full.
Before Madagascar there had been the nagging fact that they had left from England, bound away for the hunting grounds of the Red Sea, with never a cannon on board with which to hunt. That had been the source of much concern and considerable discussion fore and aft, heated debate between those who thought that it would be no great difficulty to procure guns and those who believed that it could not be done.
But now they had them. Sixteen fine six-pounders, the King’s mark on each of their black barrels, arranged starboard and larboard, housed with identical tackling and equipment, standing silent like soldiers on sentry duty. The once-great expanse of deck seemed crowded now with their presence, but no one was complaining. The sight of those big guns did more to improve spirits than anything Marlowe could think of, save for the capture of the Great Mogul’s treasure ship. And now that they had the guns for the job, that possibility did not seem so very remote.
North by east, and then the Elizabeth Galley was turned to a course more like north by west as they pricked off the miles on the chart. The sun was blistering hot, melting caulking on the decks and making the tar drip from the rig, making it soft to the touch so that hands and feet and clothes were smeared with the black stuff when the men came down from aloft. But the breeze was steady, and that mitigated the heat some, and the forward motion it gave them kept them in good humor.
They were seventeen days out of St. Mary’s, with Raasiga Caluula, the cape forming the southern entrance to the Gulf of Aden, bearing due west and two leagues distant, when they sighted the first sail.
Excitement ran through the company, and it did not diminish much with the discovery that the vessel was a dilapidated fishing boat not worth the bother of stopping. They were near the Red Sea, the legendary hunting grounds. The men of the Elizabeth Galley could practically smell the wealth.
They came up with several more fishing boats as they worked their way into the gulf and one larger sail, which they pursued but lost in the night. Still, the enthusiasm only grew stronger as they felt the presence of the land around them, the hot dry air off the desert, the gritty sand borne on the wind. It was all tangible proof of their being at last at the place they had all dreamed of being: the Red Sea, the Moorish countries, the place of the Red Sea Rovers.
There was something particularly foreign and exciting about the heat and the dust and the strange color of the sea as they drew closer to the land. They all felt it. They were in a very distant place, far from the gray, cold Europe or the green, wooded America that they knew. And somehow, because they were not a part of that place, because it was so unreal, they had a sense of invincibility, as if one could not be killed in so exotic a land.
The men donned their loose shirts and slops, their red sashes and bright cloths around their heads and strutted the deck, ready to conquer the Moors. It took a truly extraordinary place to make experienced seamen feel the lure of the exotic.
Twenty days out from St. Mary’s, and the lookout called down another sail, right ahead, and once more the men cleared the ship for action. It did not take long. The men kept the Elizabeth Galley in a state of general readiness. This was not a deep-sea voyage. They were in among the Moorish shipping now. They had to be ready at all times.
That fact aside, Marlowe, standing on the main topmast crosstrees, did not think it was a Moorish ship he was looking at through his glass.
It was not a ship at all, in fact, but a brig, under easy sail, making way with no apparent destination in mind. She looked European, or colonial. She flew no flag.
“I believe this is one of us,” Marlowe said offhandedly to the lookout standing on the crosstrees on the other side of the topgallant mast.
“Cap’n?”
“This brig. I reckon she is a Red Sea Rover, here on the account.”
The lookout nodded. “I’ll keep a sharp eye, then. You know what villains them pirates be.”
Marlowe shut his telescope, made his way back to the quarterdeck, repeated his suspicions to Honeyman and Flanders and Bickerstaff. “We must speak her, see what news,” he added. “Perhaps she has got wind of some treasure ship or one of these fat fellows carrying pilgrims to Mecca.”
“Maybe she will want to work with us. In consort, like,” Flanders suggested.
“Or maybe she’ll reckon us as good a prize as a Moorish ship and try and take us,” Honeyman added.
“Also a possibility,” Marlowe said. “We will go to quarters, approach this fellow with caution. And grape over round shot in the great guns, I should think.”
Elizabeth made one last attempt to coax her hair into looking like something she would consider presentable, but the heat and the dry air and the months of washing in salt water had rendered it as uncooperative as new ten- inch cable. Finally, disgusted, she bound it up in a ribbon and then found a square of red silk and tied that around her head. She looked at the results in the mirror and smiled.
“I do believe I have become a pirate myself,” she said out loud.
She had come aboard the Elizabeth Galley in Virginia carrying with her all her social decorum and strict adherence to proper dress and manners and the protocol of society. During all of her poor, abused childhood, during the years she had been a high-paid doxy, she had dreamed of the day when she would have respectability and standing. She had them now, in Virginia, and she would not yield them gladly.
The sea, however, is the enemy of propriety, and soon Elizabeth found herself slipping.
At first it was her shoes. She had tried to walk while under way with the silly, impractical footwear that was the rage in London and thus, six months later, the rage in the colonies. Featuring pointed toes and big, chunky heels with leather soles, they presented a greater threat of injury to her on a rolling deck than all the raging seas and flying shot she might encounter.
She did away with the shoes in favor of her slippers, which were better, despite her initial embarrassment at being seen on deck in such footwear. She imagined that everyone was looking at her, snickering.
It took her a few days to realize that no one gave a tinker’s damn what she wore on her feet-or anywhere else, for that matter.
For all the voyage to England and then the hasty departure, her general suit of clothing served her well: jacket, straw hat, bodice, apron, and simple skirts. But once they had left the cold behind and the men began to strip further and further, Elizabeth began to feel cumbersome, overdressed.
The slippers went first. She loved the feel of the hot, smooth planks under her bare feet. And suddenly she found that she was surefooted when moving on the deck and no longer felt as if she were going to slip and break her neck with every roll of the vessel.
It was not long after that when the lessons in swordplay began, and she discovered that she could hardly move with all the clothing she had. The bodice was next to go, and from the few surreptitious glances she caught from the men, she did not think this would meet with any vocal disapproval.
It was a treat to live without the bodice’s confines, and she felt a new freedom of movement as she parried and riposted with Bickerstaff on the weather deck. The apron went after that, and then she was down to her shift and a single skirt, and for the first time since getting under way she was comfortable and able to move freely. Had there been even one other woman present, she would have felt abashed, humiliated, like some cheap punk or fishmonger. But there on board the Red Sea Rover she felt a kind of freedom she had never before enjoyed.
She looked at herself in the glass, at her thick blond hair tied back, the red cloth tied over it. She smiled, grabbed up a red sash, tied it around her waist. It looked good, a bold touch that accentuated her figure. She picked up one of Marlowe’s pistols and stuck it in the sash. Perfect.
If all of the sailors forward, who had roamed great portions of the world, were still enchanted with the
