strangeness of these Moorish waters, then Elizabeth, who for all her wild and unsettled life had never seen anything beyond Portsmouth and London and Williamsburg- and Boston, which was the worst of the lot-found herself being drawn into the thing with double the force.
She crossed the great cabin, stepped out under the quarterdeck. Her legs felt strong and muscular, the result of months and months of walking on a rolling deck. It no longer bothered her to step in the warm pitch and feel it cling to her feet and leave little black marks on the deck as she walked. The bottoms of her feet were hard and most unladylike, but she loved the feel of strength and agility she had walking barefoot across the hot deck planks.
She climbed up to the quarterdeck, where Marlowe and Honeyman and Bickerstaff were in conference, all looking forward and on occasion ducking to see under the foot of the mainsail. She ducked, too, looked forward, and her eyes-now accustomed to such things- caught the flash of sail, square-rigged, before the Elizabeth Galley plunged down and the foresail smothered the horizon.
“What ho, gentlemen?” she asked.
The three heads turned in her direction, and the men smiled. “Look at you, my dear,” said Marlowe, “as vicious a pirate as ever sailed the Spanish Main or the Pirate Round!”
“I am that. Now, what of this sail?”
“It is a brig, and I’ll warrant it for European or American. I do believe it is a pirate, though they shall run scared when they take one look at you.”
“And if not,” Bickerstaff said, “I do believe you have progressed in your blade work enough that you might take on the lot of them.”
For the rest of the morning they closed with the vessel, which continued on its slow course for an hour or so and then hove to, not making any attempt to meet up with the Elizabeth Galley, but not running either. They were like strangers meeting on a dark road, approaching warily, each ready to fight or flee or exchange pleasantries, however things developed.
Elizabeth remained on the quarterdeck, looking occasionally at the brig, and as she did, an odd thought occurred to her. She knew little about ships, could rarely tell one from another, but there was something familiar about that one, something that sparked a memory.
It did not seem possible, there, half a world away from Virginia, that it could be the brig she was thinking of, but still the thought nagged at her. She borrowed Thomas’s telescope, stared at the strange vessel, now no more than a mile distant. There was nothing she saw that lessened her suspicions.
They drew closer, and more and more detail was revealed, and Elizabeth grew silent as she grew certain she was right. Lord, what in hell are the chances? she wondered. If she was right, she did not think this would be a very comfortable meeting. At least not for her.
It could not be… what are the chances? But of course those piratical fellows tended to gravitate toward the same spots: Port Royal, Nassau, the Red Sea. Birds of a feather. Perhaps it was not so great a coincidence.
The sun was near its zenith by the time the Elizabeth Galley hove to, half a cable length from the brig. The unknown vessel was definitely colonial built, probably from Massachusetts, most likely from Scituate, or so the speculation went among the more experienced hands who stared across the water at her. Elizabeth did not know. She would not necessarily have known that the vessel was a brig if she had not been told. But the different levels of the deck, the red and yellow paint scheme on her sides, the odd sort of female figurehead-those things she did recognize.
Then, from across the water, a voice hailed them through a speaking trumpet. “What ship is that?”
Marlowe picked up his own trumpet. “Elizabeth Galley, out of Virginia! What ship is that?”
“Bloody Revenge, out of the sea!” came the reply. That name, that voice with the slightly insouciant tone.
“Thomas, it’s Billy Bird,” Elizabeth said.
“Pardon?”
“The captain of the Bloody Revenge. It is Billy Bird. I believe you know him.”
Marlowe looked at her, an odd expression on his face. “I did know a Billy Bird, back in Port Royal. A somewhat showy fellow. This is the same Billy Bird?”
“I believe it is.”
“But however do you know him? How do you come to know his ship?”
Elizabeth sighed. She had been somewhat sketchy about her activities of a few years back, while Thomas had been chasing around the Atlantic after his old boatswain-turned-outlaw, the freed slave King James. Billy had taken her to Boston aboard that very brig and helped her find the root cause of the persecution waged against the former slaves of Marlowe House. But she and Billy Bird went much further back than that.
“I have known Billy for years, Thomas. From back in Plymouth. And then, when you were gone after King James, and Dunmore was hunting us, Billy was there to help. Perhaps this is not the time to go into it,” she added, and her tone was sharper than she had intended.
She looked at him, all defiance, daring him to question her, to ask, “In what way did you know him? Is he a former lover? When last did you lie with him?” but he did not. Marlowe had enough unsavory history of his own to understand he had no right to call hers into question.
In fact, she and Billy had found themselves in bed together on several occasions, as much out of mutual loneliness and affection as any kind of eternal love. But that was long before Elizabeth had met Thomas, and though Billy had made every effort to taste her sweet charms again, she had rebuffed him.
And Billy, true friend that he was, had accepted the rebuff, had helped her anyway, to the point of putting his own life in great danger on several occasions.
“Well, my dear, perhaps you had best speak to him.” Thomas held out the speaking trumpet.
Elizabeth looked into his eyes. Her past was like the silted bottom of a clear, still pool, ready at any time to be swirled up, to make the clear water black. She feared censure, suspicion, condemnation. She kept a wary lookout for it, and she was ready to meet it with rage. But it was not there. She could see nothing disingenuous in Thomas’s remark or his manner. She took the trumpet.
“Billy Bird? Is that you, you villain?”
There was a pause, and then, “Aye? And who are you?”
“Elizabeth Marlowe!”
A much longer pause followed that revelation, and then Billy’s voice again, saying, “Well, damn my eyes, come aboard, come aboard! And bring your rogue of a husband, if you must!”
They put the jolly boat into the water, and Elizabeth and Thomas and Bickerstaff and Honeyman went across, where they were greeted with great enthusiasm by Billy Bird, captain of the sometime pirate brig Bloody Revenge.
Billy was in many ways the polar opposite of Marlowe: loud, buoyant, exuberant, and flashy. Elizabeth guessed that he had hurried below and shifted his clothing as they were rowing over. He was dressed in his usual cape with the red silk lining-oddly like Lord Yancy’s, Elizabeth thought-and a silk shirt and breeches, red stockings, shoes with gold buckles, and a vast, wide-brimmed hat with a big plume trailing off it.
While Marlowe came aboard with a pleased but subdued greeting, Billy Bird grabbed his hand and pumped and slapped him on the back and said, “Damn my eyes! I have not seen you since Port Royal was swallowed up by the sea! Your name is somewhat altered, but the face is the same, if a bit more weather-beat! But, damn me, you look good, sir, damned good!” Elizabeth wondered how she could love both these men when they were so very different.
“And you, Billy. I am pleased to see you so well,” Thomas said, shaking Billy’s hand. “I am aware that you rendered my wife some service a few years back, and I am grateful for it.”
Billy waved off the thanks. “It is nothing. Nothing I would not do for two old friends.”
Elizabeth felt like a harp string, stretched to near breaking, quivering with tension as she scrutinized each look, each word, the tone in which every phrase was couched. She was looking for currents below the words: jealousy, hints of cuckoldry, anger, suspicion. She had done nothing wrong-she assured herself of that-nothing she could not tell Marlowe, but that fact did not calm her.
She was aware of her husband’s potential for violence. More than one man who had insulted her had died for it. She hated to think what he might do to someone he thought had lain with her.
Nor was Billy Bird to be trifled with, despite his sometimes sophomoric nature. She had seen him take on two men at once with cold steel and best them both. She thought she might snap from the tension.
And then Billy turned to her, smiled, reached out his arms, and hugged her. She hugged him back, with
