somewhat less enthusiasm. Looked over Billy’s shoulder at Marlowe, who gave her a comic raised eyebrow and a smile, and she felt her tension ease away, lessened but not gone.
Finally Billy released her, held her out at arm’s length. “Dear God, look at you! Whatever has Marlowe done? When last I saw you, you were a proper lady, mistress of a great household, and now you are reduced to a common pirate!”
Elizabeth glanced down at herself, her red sash and bare feet. She still had the pistol stuck in the sash. She flushed with embarrassment. “One must be ready, Billy. One never knows what villains and rogues one will meet on the high seas.”
Billy laughed. “Right, right you are! Now, come and have dinner with me! You will remember Mr. Vane, the quartermaster, and Black Tom and all these sundry rascals,” Billy presented them as they stepped aft toward the great cabin.
They spent the next few hours over dinner and wine in there, while boats pulled back and forth between the two ships, and the encounter turned into a great bacchanal. The men of the Elizabeth Galley slaughtered a cow they had taken with them from St. Mary’s. The men of the Bloody Revenge brought over copious amounts of rum and wine. They mixed up a grand rumfustian, and every one of them proceeded to get roaring drunk as their two ships bobbed on the swells, all alone in the middle of the Gulf of Aden.
It was a grand time, exactly the kind of floating brouhaha that would be unheard of in the legitimate maritime trades, the sort of thing that made the sweet trade so very attractive. The men wished to go on a spree and they did, and there was no one who could tell them otherwise. Not Marlowe, not Billy Bird, no one.
In the Bloody Revenge’s great cabin, which Elizabeth knew so well, the festivities were a bit more subdued, but not much. Along with the four guests from the Elizabeth Galley, Billy Bird invited in Quartermaster Vane and Hunter Reid, the Revenge’s first officer, whom Elizabeth had not met.
Like the men forward and on board the Elizabeth Galley, they ate and drank to excess, and the talk was loud and boisterous. The Galleys told the others of their adventures on St. Mary’s. The Bloody Revenge, it turned out, had called there three weeks before. They declared Lord Yancy mad, and the conversation moved on.
Through the night the party continued, and it was only as the sky was growing light in the east that the men began to collapse in drunken exhaustion. For most of the day the two vessels floated there, hove to, while all hands slept off the night’s drunk.
When at last the companies of both vessels were awake and somewhat sober, there commenced some debate as to whether they would do it all again. Given another hour for heads to stop pounding and stomachs to find their sea legs once more, they might have started afresh, but as it was, they voted to eschew their pagan rituals for the time and go off hunting the Moors.
They would work in concert, they decided, the Bloody Revenge sticking to the northern part of the mouth of Bab el Mandeb and the Elizabeth Galley to the south. By remaining within sight of one another, or at least within range that a signal cannon could be heard, they each doubled the territory they could cover, and each could come in support of the other when the fighting got hot.
There was little concern over sharing out the booty between two companies of men. It was well known that the Moorish ships carried enough to make them all very wealthy indeed.
And so with much difficulty and many aching heads, the two ships squared away and set more sail, with the Bloody Revenge sailing a little north of west and the Elizabeth Galley a little south, off to take up their stations for the great hunt.
On the Galley’s quarterdeck Elizabeth and Thomas and Francis Bickerstaff enjoyed the evening air, the regular motion of the vessel underfoot. They felt content, happy, full of anticipation. They had made their way from England to St. Mary’s to this place, and save for their troubles on that island and the hardships inherent to any ocean passage, it had been half a year of generally pleasant voyaging.
And all that time, and right in their wake, Roger Press had been following them like a shark on a trail of blood, and they had not known it.
And they were no more aware, on that night, as they closed with the narrow entrance to the Red Sea, that the shark was there still, closing, pursuing them now with purpose and wicked intent.
Chapter 20
ELEPHIANT, Lord Yancy, sat on his temporary throne and stared out over the top of the stockade, out over the sharp cut of the valley, deep green with its blanket of jungle and shadow, out over the flashing ocean and finally to the low, blue-green, irregular line that was Madagascar in the distance. He held a glass of brandy in one hand and took desultory sips from it. He listened.
To his right, in a slightly shorter chair, sat the ursine figure of Henry Nagel, drinking rum. Nagel was still dressed in the rags of a sodden pirate thrown up on the beach. In his halting way he was relating the events of the past few days.
When he finished, Yancy closed his eyes and said, “Henry, tell it all to me again, please.” He had to be certain he had missed nothing. He had to check for inconsistencies that might indicate betrayal.
“Them two ships come in on the tail of the flood,” Nagel began with the great patience of a man too slow- witted to grow restless, “and they anchored by their best bowers. I knew there was no one still at the house, doing that Dinwiddie’s bidding, so I got four of our lads to act like they was a boat for hire. Dinwiddie comes down to the dock, dressed like it was his fucking coronation and acting the right king. He hires the lads to take him out to the big ship, the Queen’s Venture. Says he has to welcome the new arrival to ‘his’ island.”
“Dinwiddie did not recognize any of the boat crew?”
“No. They was lads never met him. So they take him out, and he’s welcomed aboard with a side party and all. And then Press comes out and starts kicking him around the deck. The lads in the boat, they stayed there the whole time, listening, peeking over the gunnel sometimes, and never a one noticing them.
“So Press beats hell out of Dinwiddie for an hour, and the whole time he’s asking, ‘Where’s Yancy? Where’s Yancy?’ and all the time Dinwiddie’s saying, ‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’ ”
Yancy nodded his approval. How could Press think he would outwit him, catch him by surprise? Press was a pathetic worm, not worthy of the title “adversary.”
“After an hour or so,” Nagel continued, “Press stops, and then he sees the lads in the boat and near shoots them, but they got away. I’m watching from the shore with a glass. They put together a landing party, goddamned lot of men, two hundred or more, I guess.
“They come ashore, and I watched them march by. I’m laying against a wall, like I’m dead drunk, and they just march on past, nothing said. They had that dumb bastard Dinwiddie with them, leading him on a halter like a cow. They go up and take your house with no fight, ’cause there weren’t no one there to fight with.
“That night a hundred men or so come back down to the town, and they search every building, going through the warehouses, the whorehouses-everywhere. And everywhere they are asking, ‘Where is Elephiant Yancy? Where is Yancy?’ and the only answer they get, course, is ‘Dead.’ ”
Again Yancy nodded as he listened to Nagel’s account of events unfolding just as he had set them up. Every man on St. Mary’s who knew unequivocally that he was alive and where he could be found was right here with him. Everyone in the town below would have known about the fire and heard the rumor of his death and would have no reason to doubt it. They were the perfect people to pass the lie on to Press, because they did not think they were lying.
“But here’s the damnedest thing of it,” Nagel continued. “They’re there… a day and a half, I reckon, and then next thing I know here’s Press marching most of his men right back to the ship, and it’s up anchor and away. The tender’s left behind, and maybe seventy of the men to garrison the house, but the rest of ’em just sail off.
“I reckoned you’d want to know why, so I go up to the house, and I bring a bottle, and I start in to talking with the bastard they got guarding the gate and sharing my bottle with him. Tell him I figure to join in with them and can I talk to Press?
“And what does he tell me? Tells me Press is hot to kill that son of a bitch Marlowe, what was just here. I reckon Dinwiddie told Press Marlowe was here and where he gone. Turns out they go way back, Press and Marlowe. So he’s off to hunt Marlowe down, and when he catches him, he’s bound back to St. Mary’s and reckoning
