The Blackbirder

Chapter 9

King James stood at the rail, watched Madshaka drop easily into the jolly boat’s stern sheets, watched the bowman push off. With a word from the grumete the oars came down, pulled together, up again, pulled again. The men of the boat crew were from those coastal tribes that bred boat handlers, and they worked as a unit as well as any unpracticed crew could.

James watched the boat claw swiftly past the ship. It was just disappearing from his sight under the counter when Madshaka opened the shutter of the lantern he had brought, held it low over the water. James heard his big voice ring out, “Kusi! Kusi!” and then he called something in Kusi’s native tongue. James cocked his head aft, listened, strained to hear some reply from beyond the taffrail, but there was only the slap of water, the bang of gear aloft, and then Madshaka’s loud voice again.

Cato and Joshua, Good Boy and Quash were hovering around, as they did when James was not too distant to approach. He turned to them. “How did Kusi fall overboard?” he demanded.

The four young men exchanged glances, shrugs. “I didn’t see it,” said Good Boy, and that was followed by murmured concurrence from the others.

“We was up for’rd,” offered Cato. “Kusi was all the way aft, I reckon. I didn’t see him. Didn’t even hear nothing. We was just talking and then that Madshaka started in yelling something to them others. We couldn’t understand none of it. Didn’t even know what was acting, at first.”

More nods from the others. “Right,” said James. From overhead came a whap whap whap as a fluke of the breeze caught an edge of sail and flogged it against the mast. He leaned over the rail. From out over the dark water he could see the bobbing light, could hear Madshaka’s voice, distant now, still calling out Kusi’s name.

“We best get this rig sorted out,” James said at last. “You men, get with your watches and we’ll see what we can do.”

They moved forward, the five of them, calling out in English and waving and gesturing, and by that means got the sail trimmers to their stations. James stood on the main hatch, looked aloft, looked at the men lining the pinrails, the women keeping out of the way and holding their children back from being trampled in the mysterious goings-on of the men’s work.

With pointing and pantomime James managed to communicate what it was he wanted, and the foresails were hauled around until they came aback and the helm put over and at last the ship was hove to properly, balanced there on the surface of the water. Lines were belayed, coiled down, and then there was nothing left but the waiting.

James walked aft, past the motionless helm. He leaned on the taffrail. The jolly boat was no more than a prick of light out in the blackness, dimmer even than most of the stars overhead and going up and down with the swells. He could not hear Madshaka’s voice but imagined he was still yelling. He shook his head. It was not good. If they had not found Kusi yet, James did not think they would.

Men began to sit at their stations, to talk quietly, but only a few. James could feel the ship’s company overcome with that somber mood that follows a burst of excitement, the rush of an emergency. When people can do nothing in a crisis but wait, their spirits are dragged down to some low place, and only slowly do they climb up and out.

He had no notion of how long the jolly boat had been gone. They had never bothered with bells and half-hour glasses. Little grains of sand creeping through glass tubes were meaningless to Africans who ran their lives by the natural progression of dawn and noon and sunset. There was no mark of passing time, but still it seemed it had been quite a while before they finally heard the creak of the oars, the quiet drip of water from the blades.

James watched over the taffrail as the light from Madshaka’s lantern grew brighter. Cato and the others crowded around, watching as well, and behind them word spread among the Africans and they too ran to the rail, looked into the night.

At last the boat was close enough to see the men at the oars, Madshaka aft, his big hand on the tiller.

“Kusi ain’t there,” Quash said.

“Oh, damn, damn,” said Good Boy. A buzz ran through the others, and James imagined they were saying in their own way the same thing that the young Virginians had said. He remained silent. There was nothing to say. And he was not in the least surprised.

All that way across the Atlantic, and partway back, and the sea had finally swallowed poor Kusi up.

From behind, a wail, a shriek of anguish. James turned, saw the woman dressed in the curtain fall to her knees, tears streaming down her face. She fell forward, as if in supplication, and her back heaved with her sobbing.

Kusi’s wife? His sister? James did not realize that the woman had had some special connection to the grumete. Why hadn’t he known that? What other relationships were at play here, about which he was unaware?

The jolly boat passed below then; Madshaka’s eyes stared ahead, never looking up at the many faces looking down at him. James turned and walked slowly to the gangway, reached that place just as the boat was pulling up below. Madshaka stood and stepped forward and scrambled up the boarding steps as if he had been shot upward from the boat. Stepped through the gangway, somber, frowning. He met James’s eye, shook his head.

“We couldn’t find him.” His voice was subdued, hoarse from the shouting. “We searched, back and forth, a mile back…” A catch in his throat and then from his big, dark eyes, tears, and he said, “We looked, Captain, God bless us, we looked as much as we could.”

“I know you did,” James said softly. Silence on the deck as the boat crew climbed up and through the gangway. There was nothing more to say. On the quarterdeck the woman still sobbed with abandon.

“Let us get this boat back aboard and get under way,” James said. Madshaka nodded, turned to the others, gave orders in a quiet tone, and the men shuffled off to their several tasks.

James stepped aft, watched Madshaka handle the swaying in of the boat. Kusi. He had hardly known him, of course, had known him just long enough to like him. James pictured his strong, dark body floating down, down, farther than he could imagine.

The boat came in over the rail and settled down on the booms, and with a few quick words from Madshaka men scrambled in and unhooked the boat falls and the stay tackle.

Kusi had been half of King James’s link to the others, but now he was gone. It occurred to James that he could never again know what anyone aboard the ship was saying, only what Madshaka told him they were saying.

There was no reason that that should make him uncomfortable, but in a vague and undefinable way it did.

The men of the Elizabeth Galley were sweating, streaked with grime, their eyes white holes in smoke-blackened faces. Most were stripped to the waist, neck cloths tied around ears. But they were smiling, genuinely happy.

For the two hours since dawn, as they sailed before a steady quartering wind under topsails and topgallants, with courses hanging in their bunts, the men had drilled at the guns, the former Plymouth Prize’s guns. For an hour they had run in and out in dumb show, pretending to handle cartridges, pretending to ram home, pretending to load with round shot, pretending to stand clear of the recoil.

They had been fast to begin with: the men were all seamen and all seamen had some experience with great guns, and they had grown faster still in an hour’s work. So after that first hour Marlowe had ordered the powder up for some drilling in earnest, live firing by broadside and gun by gun. There was nothing that inspired the men to a fine, fighting mettle quite as much as the concussion of the muzzle blast, the gun flinging itself back against the breeching.

The men were ready for blood and riches, and they were in good form to garner both.

An hour of blasting away, expending precious powder and round shot, military stores that Marlowe had purchased with his own coin, and he figured that was enough. “Well done, men, well done,” he called down to the grinning, eager crew. “House your guns and I will turn you over to Mr. Bickerstaff’s good offices.”

The men swabbed out and leaned into train tackles and hauled the guns up to the gunports and lashed them in place. Then Bickerstaff, well versed in training gentlemen in swordplay, stepped down into the waist, drew a cutlass from the barrel, and told the others, those designated to boarding parties, to do the same.

He arranged them in long lines, ignored their silly grins, their snide muttering, and began to instruct them in sword work. First position, second position, third position, the men moved awkwardly through the drill. It seemed pointless to them, but they followed directions.

It had once seemed pointless to Marlowe as well, who knew the unsubtle slash and hack of hand-to-hand combat along a ship’s deck. But Bickerstaff had almost bested him once with a sword, the only man to come that close since Marlowe had mastered the blade, somewhere around his twenty-first year.

Since then Bickerstaff had taught him the subtleties of swordplay, had made him an even better swordsman, along with teaching him to read and write, to move in proper social circles.

Once Marlowe had said, while reading through one of Bickerstaff’s folios, “Hoa, Francis. Hear this. ‘I pitied thee, took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour one thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like a thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes with words that made them known.’ That sounds like us, don’t it?”

“Humph,” said Bickerstaff. “You a Caliban to my Prospero? No, I think not. Not entirely, in any event.”

Not entirely. But still Bickerstaff had helped Marlowe become the man he was, transformed him from a pirate most brutish. That, after Marlowe had saved Bickerstaff from death at the hands of the pirate raiders-Marlowe’s fellows-who had overrun the ship aboard which he sailed. In one manner or another they owed each other their lives. Their friendship ran deep now. It pleased Marlowe to be able to provide Bickerstaff with the time and place for his intellectual pursuits.

Why Bickerstaff continued to go to sea with him was a mystery.

The clash of cutlasses forward. Bickerstaff had the men facing off in pairs, thrusting, parrying, slow and methodical. Their ardor that had been sparked by the great guns had not cooled, and Francis was having to keep them in check, making them go slow, lest someone be accidentally slashed thanks to his partner’s enthusiasm.

Spirits were high. That was good. They would need spirit in reserve.

“Sail, ho!”

The cry from the lookout at the main topmast crosstrees, and all sound, all motion on deck ceased, every eye turned aloft.

“Broad on the starboard bow, and just hull down! A Spaniard, maybe!”

Don’t give me your buggering opinion, Marlowe thought. He scowled, looked down at the deck. A buzz ran through the men in the waist. They ran to the rail, peered over, but they would never be able to see the distant ship from the deck.

Forward a few hands had the audacity to leap into the shrouds, start scrambling aloft. “Forward, there! In the fore shrouds! What the hell do you think you’re about?”

The men froze, looked back at Marlowe. He could see their sheepish expressions down the full length of the deck. He was about to call for Griffin to take their names when he saw the acting boatswain was leading the men aloft.

“Mr. Griffin, what in the hell are you about? Get out of those damned shrouds, all of you! This is not a damned bloody pirate ship, do you hear me? You do not go aloft without my orders!”

Slowly the men climbed down again, trying inconspicuously to glance at the horizon before they lost their vantage. Marlowe looked outboard, muttered curses. He had overreacted to the men in the fore shrouds, but this was a damned awkward situation, and his temper was short.

“Sir?” It was Fleming, standing before him, saluting. “I beg your pardon about that, sir, they was in the rigging before I even seen them.”

“Not your fault, Mr. Fleming, never think on it.”

“Sir, would you like me to take a glass aloft? See what I can of this fellow?”

“No, no. Good of you to offer, but I will go myself.” He shed his coat, slung the big glass over his shoulder, and pulled himself into the main shrouds and headed aloft, the familiar feel of thick cable-laid shrouds in his hands, thin ratlines underfoot. He was less accustomed to making this trip with shoes, and as the shrouds grew closer together near the masthead he had to squeeze his toes against the soles to keep from stepping clean out of them.

Boots, he thought. I must wear boots, or no shoes at all. He clambered up over the futtock shrouds and up onto the main topmast shrouds, leaving the round maintop below him as he climbed.

Perhaps I shall roust out a pair of slop trousers, he thought.

He was taking pains not to think about what he might see through the glass, what he might do about it.

He arrived at last at the main topmast crosstrees. The lookout had already shifted himself to the larboard side to give Marlowe the favored vantage. Marlowe nodded, planted his feet on the crosstrees, an arm through the topgallant shrouds, and ran his eyes along the horizon.

She was there, broad on the starboard bow, just as reported. Topsails, topgallants, a glimpse of courses on the rise of the swell. Ship rigged, of moderate size, perhaps a bit bigger than that. Sailing roughly the same course as they were. All that he knew without looking through the glass, which meant the lookout knew it as well.

At last he lifted the glass to his eye, twisted the tube until the horizon was sharp, and swept it along until the sails jumped in the lens. Now a whole new world was revealed to him. On the rise he could see gun-ports, but not so many of them. Oiled topsides, glinting every now and again in the morning sun. Spritsail, spritsail topsail, everything shipshape, but not man-of-war fashion.

No, he would not have taken her for a man-of-war, even if she had not been flying the French merchantman’s ensign off her ensign staff.

A French merchantman. She’s bound back to France, no doubt, he thought, her hold bloody well loaded with goods traded from their new allies, the Dons, and all their bloody rich colonies to the south.

A fat prize. He could make their whole voyage that morning. If he was a privateer with a letter of marque.

“Hmmm,” he said gravely. “Spanish. Frigate or perhaps a two-decker, hard to tell. But a man-of-war, to be certain.”

He took the glass from his eye, glanced at the lookout. There was disappointment on his face. Resignation. That was it, as far as Marlowe

could see.

“Damned luck, eh?”

“Aye, sir, damned luck.”

Marlowe slung the glass back over his shoulder, grabbed the shrouds with both hands and swung outboard, then with his foot found the ratline on the futtock shroud and stepped down. Less than a minute later his feet hit the caprail on the quarterdeck. He stood there, balancing with one hand on the main shrouds, looking down at the men in the waist.

“What of her, sir?”

Griffin. Damn that man. He was done.

“Spaniard. Man-of-war. Frigate, I take her for, but could be a two-decker.”

More buzzing through the crowd of men forward, and Marlowe did not think it was all concern for their possible capture. The Elizabeth Galleys were experienced enough seamen that they would think to wonder why a powerful man-of-war did not seem interested in them, why they weren’t tacking and coming in pursuit, and what a Spanish man-of-war was doing knocking around the coast that far north in the first place.

“Helmsman,” Marlowe called, hoping to distract them. “Let us make our head more northerly, two points. Mr. Fleming, I’ll thank you to see to the braces.”

“Aye, sir! Come along, you lot, hands to the braces!”

They went, but they were not happy about it, and Marlowe could see glances shot back his way. The high spirits of the morning were gone, replaced by something more sullen.

God, if I get away with this, I shall not be able to do it a second time, Marlowe thought.

He had to find James and come to grips with him and end it. Then back to Virginia, his good name restored, and the proper papers for a privateer.

He thought of that fat French merchantman, an easy run south of them. They all might have been wealthy, with a morning’s effort.

Oh, Lord, if I do not end this soon I shall find myself pirating again, like it or not.