there like a broken snake.
Five agonizing, embarrassing moments later and he was across the room. He reached his arms around as best he could, found the clasp knife in the pocket of his coat, and pulled it out. With numb fingers he struggled to unfold it and then held it awkwardly as he sawed at the bonds.
Four times he dropped the knife, and he was near weeping with despair when he felt a little give in the rope, and he knew that a strand had parted. With a renewed effort he sawed at the cordage, and soon he felt the rope part altogether, felt the rock-hard lashing fall away.
He let out a great groan of relief, brought his hands around in front, rubbed the raw flesh, felt a sharp tingling as the blood flowed unimpeded to his fingers. He snatched up the knife and cut his legs free and stood, shaking, to his feet.
What now, what now…? Get the bitch back.
He had saved himself from the humiliation of being discovered bound like a pig for slaughter on the floor, but still it would not go well for him if the tribe he ruled found he had been bested by a woman.
Find that whore, bring her back, bloody well teach her…
Where would she go? The waterfront? What would she do?
She’ll free Marlowe!
“Goddamn it!” Yancy said out loud. Of course she would try to free Marlowe. “Goddamn it!”
He limped across the room and tried to open the door, but it was locked. He cursed, looked around the table for the key, but he could not find it. He snatched up a candle and looked closer, looked on the floor around the table, but the key was not there.
He was locked in, but it did not matter. He abandoned the door, limped back across the room, pulled aside an ancient tapestry that hung from the wall on the other side of the bed. A small door was concealed behind it, and he pushed that open and stepped into the dark passage beyond.
The air was dusty and smelled of sealed-off spaces, the odor of the tomb. Adam Baldridge was a man of foresight; he had envisioned the need for a second way out of the master bedchamber. But Yancy was also a man of foresight. He understood that if he had to use that exit, he would probably need weapons as well, and so he kept them there, ready.
He took down the brace of pistols, their butts bound by a ribbon, draped them around his neck. A sword belt hung from a hook, with a sword and dagger hanging from it. He took that down next, strapped it around his waist.
Down he went, down the steep, narrow stairs built into the smallest possible space, his shoulders brushing either wall as he hurried down, the candle guttering and wavering and threatening to go out.
He came to the bottom door and unlatched it and pushed it open as best he could. It, too, was concealed behind a tapestry that adorned the grand entrance, and Yancy had to push against the heavy cloth as he slipped out the door and into the big open space.
There was nothing amiss that he could see. The door leading to the cells was closed. It was silent, everything silent. Either she had not come that way or they were long gone. He raced across the grand entrance, flung open the door to the prison, took the steps fast.
From the landing he could see the guard, passed out or dead on the floor, two steps below, his arm broken and twisted under him.
“Bitch!” Yancy shouted, jumping down the steps and past the guard. The door to the cell that held Marlowe and his men was open. The cell was empty.
“Bitch!” Yancy shouted again, his voice high-pitched, too wild with fury even to think of what he would do next.
Then a voice beside him, thick with urgency. “Yancy!” Roger Press pushed himself against the bars, looked down on Elephiant Yancy.
“Press, what happened here?” Yancy demanded.
“Marlowe’s little doxy let him out. Was she not in your care?”
“She escaped from the idiots guarding her. After I was done with her,” Yancy added, and then realizing how inappropriate it was to address Press as if he were an equal-or even a human being-he added, “though it’s no concern of yours. You are a dead man either way.”
Yancy turned and headed back for the stairs, moving fast, but Press called, “Wait! Wait, Yancy, there is something you don’t know!”
Yancy stopped but did not turn, considered whether or not he should listen. Press was like a snake, and his words could be as hypnotizing as a snake’s eyes.
But that was for weaker men. Yancy knew he was not fool enough to be drawn in, to be charmed and persuaded by Press’s rhetoric. He turned. “What?”
“Marlowe will go for the harbor, try to make it out to his ship-”
“You reckon that didn’t occur to me?”
“No, wait for it. This is what you don’t know. While I was out hunting Marlowe, I captured the Great Mogul’s treasure ship. My ship, and Marlowe’s, is stuffed with treasure, more wealth than even you would see in a lifetime. Without my help, Marlowe will sail off with it!”
“Without your help?” At that Yancy laughed out loud. “You have been help enough, bringing it to me. I can take it from Marlowe and his pathetic little band! But thank you for telling me this.”
“It ain’t just Marlowe!” Press said, and Yancy heard the genuine note of conviction in his voice. “I left two hundred men aboard when I come ashore. You have the force to take on two hundred trained men? Men-of-war’s men? If Marlowe gets out to those ships and convinces them I’m dead, they’ll sail off with a fare-thee-well, and you can’t stop ’em. Maybe they’ll kill Marlowe, maybe not, but either way the treasure is gone. They have to see me alive or they’ll sail, and you can’t stop them. Do you hear?”
Yancy hesitated, felt himself slipping down the ways of Press’s logic.
Then Press drove home the final argument. “You can have half the treasure or none of it, simple as that.”
Yancy made up his mind. He would, in fact, have all the treasure. He would simply double-cross Press after the booty was secured, lock him up again. He had men enough to keep Press in check until then. He crossed the narrow alleyway, retrieved the keys hanging from the other cell door, and let Press and his men go free.
“How long have Marlowe and the others been gone?” Yancy asked as he twisted the key in the lock.
“Half an hour, thereabouts,” Press said. There was an eagerness, a hint of triumph in his voice that made Yancy uncomfortable, but the lock was unlocked and the door half opened, and it was too late to close it again. “Probably clear to the harbor by now.”
Yancy swung the door open all the way. “Follow me,” he said, and hurried for the stairs, his unlikely allies at his heels.
Marlowe and his band were at the harbor, pulling across the harbor, in fact, spread out over four boats. They had met no resistance. The big house was asleep. The guards at the stockade gate were looking for threats from the outside, not from within.
They showed only a dull curiosity when Marlowe pulled the gate open behind them, turned to see who it was, and were clubbed down by Honeyman wielding a heavy stick he had found on the ground. They fell with no more sound than that made by a bread bag dropped from five feet. Their inert forms were dragged into the shadows and relieved of weapons.
Down the hill, down the dark road with dawn still four hours off. They moved fast, silent, and if anyone saw them, he did not raise an alarm. Marlowe realized that there would be no telling who they were in the dark, and if anyone mistook them for Yancy’s men on some clandestine mission, he would not be eager to give them away.
From the stockade all the way to the wooden wharf, they heard nothing but quiet night sounds, saw nothing unsettling in the motionless, dark, and disinterested world.
They stepped out along the wharf, their shoes making hollow sounds on the boards. Across the water they could make out the dim shapes of the four anchored ships. Closest to them, anchored by herself, was the Bloody Revenge. Beyond her the dark mass, the seeming tangle of spars and rigging of the Queen’s Venture with the Elizabeth Galley tied to her seaward side and hidden from the men on the dock. And one hundred feet beyond the Elizabeth Galley, the tender Speedwell. All four ships like stepping-stones across the water. They seemed peaceful, asleep.
