he’ll make himself lord of the island. Like he could take your place, my lord.”
Hot to kill Marlowe? Yancy thought. How very odd. He recalled how Press had been obsessed with killing the man named Malachias Barrett, who had marooned him, left him to die. He had been there on that patch of sand eight days when Yancy found him. It did not seem possible that any living thing could have survived that long, with no food and a single bottle of water, under the blistering Caribbean sun. But Press had. He had talked endlessly of Barrett and how he would kill him.
Now he had come to St. Mary’s on a mission of vengeance and was likewise obsessed with this Marlowe. Roger Press collected enemies the way a ship’s bottom gathers barnacles and weeds, just by being.
Yancy thought of this new irony, smiled, and then chuckled. It was all too much. Press marches off, leaves less than half his men behind, vulnerable as a nestful of eggs. And where does he go? Off to kill the man that he, Yancy, has been thinking day and night about killing. The one man who had supplanted even Roger Press as an object of Yancy’s hatred.
Perhaps Press and Marlowe will kill each other, he thought. But no, that was no good. He wanted to personally see them die, both of them.
Perhaps Press will return here with Marlowe as his prisoner. And my dear Elizabeth as well. That thought warmed Yancy extremely. And it was entirely feasible that Press would do so.
“Come, come, Henry, no time to waste.” Yancy stood up, put his glass down on the small table by his chair. “It is time for us to go home.”
The next morning they finished their preparations. It would take them the rest of that day to get from the mountain retreat to the big house, but that was fine, because what Yancy intended to do had to be done in the dark. Night was their ally. They did not need light, because they knew every inch of the house that would soon become their killing field, and the men who occupied it now did not.
Yancy and four handpicked men stripped off the fine clothing that they were accustomed to wearing, and donned tattered, stained, and patched-up rags. They smeared their faces with dirt and blood, then regarded themselves in the big mirror that Nagel had brought out. The effect was perfect.
They strapped on belts with the ubiquitous sheath knives in the small of their backs and secreted daggers inside shirts and breeches, and by midmorning they were off, working their way down the long, winding trail, down from the mountain hideout, through the valley, and over the hill that overlooked the harbor, the hill on which sat the house that Adam Baldridge had built.
It was fifteen miles, and they moved quickly, but still they did not reach the crest of the far hill until an hour after sunset. There they sat and rested and alternated between standing watch and sleeping, save for Yancy, who remained awake and alert, like a deer at a water hole.
Somewhere around midnight they headed out again. As they walked along the crest of the hill, they could see lights in the big house a mile away. They followed the trail down and down toward the water, until at last it met up with the dirt road that ran along the waterfront. They trudged on, past Yancy’s warehouses, past the low, ramshackle buildings in the town.
There was not a person in St. Mary’s who would not have recognized Lord Yancy, but now as he shuffled along, his battered hat pulled low, his clothes in rags, no one paid the slightest attention to him. He looked like any of the human flotsam that washed up on the island’s shore every day.
Up the familiar road, up to the big house. They could see lights burning in windows all over the building, could hear the sounds of men carrying on. Yancy remembered the words in the report that At-wood had sent. “Consent of the queen,” my arse, he thought as he shuffled along, looking hurt and exhausted. Bloody pirates is what they are, and no more, and all the secret dealing with the queen cannot change that…
At last they came to the gate through the stockade wall, the only realistic way in. Two months before there would have been any number of rotten bits in the stockade through which they might have crawled, but by Yancy’s own orders that wooden wall had been strengthened and repaired. Now even the most lax patrol would be alerted by an attempt to scale it or breech it.
No, it was in through the gate. That was the only way.
“Hold, there!” It was the first challenge to their progress, the guard at the gate. In the dark, Yancy saw him swing his musket around, saw a second guard do the same.
“Please, sir, I beg of you,” said Yancy, and his voice cracked most effectively. “Pray, sir, we are shipwrecked on the far side of the island. We have walked over the mountains. Please, food and water, we beg…”
There was silence after that. The guards were not ready for this eventuality. “Go down to the town,” the one guard said at last, taking the initiative. “They have food and water there.”
“Please, sir, they will give us nothing without we pay, and we ain’t got a groat betwixt us five. ‘Go see the lord of the island, do you want charity,’ they say.”
“Humph,” the guard said to that, and then, after another silence, said, “The lot of you, sit down there and keep your hands out.”
He pointed with his musket to an ironwood log, a foot and a half thick and ten feet long, that was rolled up against the stockade wall and used by the guards as a sort of bench. Yancy and his men sat in a row along the log, like birds on a branch, and the guard said to the other, “Go and get Lieutenant Tasker.”
They waited in an uncomfortable silence for five minutes, and then the guard was back and another man with him.
“This fellow says they was shipwrecked on the far side of the island. He’s begging food and water.”
The new arrival-Lieutenant Tasker, Yancy guessed-stepped toward them, looked down on them. “What ship?” he asked suddenly.
“Betsy, snow, from Liverpool, bound for the Bay of Antongil. We… we had business there, like…” Yancy had anticipated these questions, had his answers ready.
“What is your name?”
“Joe Benner, my lord. Boatswain. The officers is all dead, sir. We carried the captain halfway across the mountains, like to save him, but he died and we buried him. The rest and the other hands, they drowned.”
Tasker was silent for a moment, and then Yancy added, “Please, my lord, we suffered something horrid. Food and water, it’s all we ask, and someplace safe to sleep. We been in that wicked, wicked jungle four days now. I beg of you. You are lord of this place. Won’t you see to helping some poor, desperate sailors?”
He watched as Tasker ran his eyes over the five men, assaying the risk. It would appear small, Yancy had made certain of that. Just five men, and they too weak with hunger and exhaustion to cause any trouble.
At last Tasker said, “I am not lord of this island. Captain Press is in charge here, but he is gone and left me in command.”
He considered for a moment more and then said, “Very well. You may come into the kitchen and eat and drink and sleep there under guard.”
“Oh, bless you, sir,” Yancy began, and the others joined in with their authentic-sounding gratitude.
Tasker led them through the gate and into the house and then out a back door to the kitchen, which was connected to the main house only by a roofed-over walkway twenty feet long. Yancy stared about as if seeing the house for the first time. He took note of the guards at the entrance to the great hall, and through the open door could see that it was functioning now as a barracks, with a majority of Press’s men asleep within, like deer run into a pen.
Inside the kitchen they were given food and water, and they fell on both like wolves. They were in fact ravenous and parched, since Yancy had allowed them nothing to eat or drink for the past eight hours, and the effect was complete.
For ten minutes they sated themselves in silence while the two men guarding them grew increasingly bored. At last Yancy pushed back from the table.
“Dear God, but that is good,” he said to the guards. “Pray, give our thanks to- What was the good man’s name?”
“Lieutenant Tasker.”
“Yes, yes, of course. But say now, I had always heard there was a fellow, name of Yancy, who run things on St. Mary’s.”
The guard chuckled. “Yancy? There was. Captain Press come clear from England in order to knock that son of a bitch on the head. Lucky for him he had the good sense to drop dead right before we showed up.”
“Lucky for him,” Yancy said, and thought, You die first.
