The Blackbirder

Chapter 34

He was dead. Marlowe laid his fingers gently on James’s face, eased his eyelids shut, laid him back on the dirt floor. He stood and looked at the fresh blood that covered his hands. James’s blood. He did not try to wipe it off.

The room was crowded with men: Bickerstaff, the Elizabeth Galleys. Less than a minute before, the Galleys had been a howling, blood-crazed mob, set on looting and tearing apart whatever fell in their path, but now they stood silent, respectful.

They all knew King James from the Elizabeth Galley’s fitting out. They had witnessed his final act as they raced for the factor’s hut, had seen him fling himself headlong into the pistol’s barrel, charging blade-first with such momentum that he had skewered his enemy and driven the sword right through him and through the mud wall of the hut, leaving the man pinned upright, even after he had suffered his mortal wound. The Elizabeth Galleys could respect such a man.

“A minute. A bloody goddamned minute more and we would have been here,” Marlowe said.

“And then what?” asked Bickerstaff. “Prevent James from dying thus, so that he could fulfill his promise to go back and be hanged like a dog? This thing”-Bickerstaff nodded toward the corpse pinned to the wall-“must be the infamous Madshaka. We should all be so lucky as to die quick at the moment of our ultimate triumph.”

Marlowe smiled a weak smile. “You are right, of course. As always. Now I pray, Francis, that you will be kind enough as to live until we return to Virginia? I shall tell the governor that we did indeed hunt King James down and we saw him dead, but I am not certain he will take my word on it. He will believe you, if you say it is so, but I am not convinced he would take my word alone.”

“I shall certainly endeavor to live that long and I will be happy to confirm your story. There is nothing in it that is not the truth.”

Marlowe looked around the wreckage of the room. A big ring of keys hung from a hook on the wall and he crossed the room, snatched them up. He turned to his men. “I need ten of you with me, the rest are free to find whatever is worth carrying away from here. Francis, you will never object to our looting slave traders, I assume?”

Bickerstaff sniffed. “I do not care to be involved with your moral relativism, Thomas.”

“Good, then come with me.”

They crossed the compound, approached the trunk carefully. To Thomas’s great relief there was one among the captives there who had a small amount of English and a small amount of the coastal pidgin, enough that Marlowe could convey to him what he intended, and he to some others, and those to others, until everyone in the trunk was reasonably sure that they were not in for greater torment from these new white men. And when Marlowe was sure they were sufficiently mollified, he opened the iron door and let them shuffle out and knocked the chains and yokes off those who were still so encumbered.

They met up with the rest of the Elizabeth Galleys, who had found a small quantity of gold and some firearms worth the taking. They wrapped King James’s body in a sheet stripped from the factor’s bed and fashioned a litter from the tablecloth and carried him back down the trail.

On the beach they found the men who had not fared well in the surf; some of them were well recovered and some were not, and of those that were not, three were dead.

At the edge of the tree line they dug graves, four of them, eight feet deep and two wide, and in them they put King James and the three seamen who might have been James’s shipmates but instead had died while hunting him down.

Francis Bickerstaff said a few words and they covered them over with the African soil.

The sun was just below the horizon and starting to light the eastern sky. Soon the land breeze would fill in to lift the Elizabeth Galley and her prize off the shore and out to sea.

Marlowe watched the last bit of dirt being thrown on the grave, took a deep breath, looked up and down the beach. The longboat had been hauled back down to the water’s edge and his men and the people freed from the factory were milling about on the hard-packed sand.

“To hell with this damned place,” Marlowe said to no one in particular. “Let us be gone from here.”

He turned toward the sea, marched off toward the waiting boat. James was not the first good man he had left to his eternal rest, not the first friend, and Marlowe did not think he would be the last.

Beware, beware, beware…

Billy Bird made the proposal to allow a woman, one Elizabeth Marlowe, to take passage with them to Virginia, and the Bloody Revenges agreed by formal vote.

They took their democracy very seriously, and though there was not one aboard who was not aware of the real facts of the matter, there was never a hint from one of them that he had ever set eyes on Elizabeth before. They all viewed Elizabeth as something between a talisman and a pet, which was their singular reason for agreeing to override an otherwise iron-clad rule.

They would take her to Virginia, but no more. Seven days down the coast and they hove to in Hampton Roads in the dark hours of the morning and took Elizabeth ashore by boat, depositing her amid the tiny cluster of homes that constituted the town of Newport News. And despite Billy’s profuse apologies for such treatment, and his promise to return shortly for another visit, he seemed as anxious as the others to be back aboard the Revenge and gone.

A few hours later, when the sun broke from the water and burned off the late-summer mist that clung to the top of the bay like cotton batting, the Bloody Revenge was nowhere to be seen.

When the morning had progressed enough that she felt she could go abroad without arousing suspicion, she made her way into town and hired a horse and from there rode the twelve miles to Marlowe House.

She had no notion of what to expect after her five-week absence. Charred ruins, perhaps, or Frederick Dunmore living there, having found some way to lay legal claim of possession?

What she hoped more than anything was to find Thomas home, to ride up and see him sitting there on the big porch in his familiar position, booted feet kicked up on the rail, a glass or a pewter mug in his hand, engrossed in some philosophical discussion with Francis Bicker-staff, or goading his friend with silly banter.

But he was not there, no one was there, and the house was little changed. The garden was overgrown, and the grass looked wild, more field than manicured lawn, and the house itself forlorn, empty, musty, but still generally in the same shape it had been in when she left. The animals were still alive, and looked well fed, which meant that her neighbor had sent a boy over to tend to them, as she had asked he might in the note she had dispatched to him.

Tired as she was, and sore from the long ride, she built a fire and boiled bucket after bucket of water and took a long and luxurious bath in the big copper tub. She lay there for hours as the water went from hot to warm to cool, and finally she pulled herself out and crawled naked into the big bed that she and Thomas shared and then she slept.

She woke at dawn the next morning. She woke alert, ready. She dressed in a riding outfit, saddled a horse, and left Marlowe House once again.

It took her an hour to reach the big house that Frederick Dunmore owned on the Jamestown Road, a mile from Williamsburg proper. She reined her horse to a stop on the road and looked down the long drive leading to the front door. She could see some people moving around in the fields beyond the house. They would be indentured servants. Dunmore kept no black slaves-an anomaly for a wealthy man in the tidewater-and now Elizabeth understood more of why that was.

She dismounted, tied her horse to a sapling on the edge of the road, pulled a leather pouch from the saddlebag. She did not want Dun-more to know she was coming until she was there, so she walked down the drive and stepped quietly onto the porch.

She paused, drew a breath, considered again what she would do, what she would say. Then she lifted the brass pineapple knocker and rapped it hard, three times.

Movement inside, and Elizabeth expected a housekeeper to answer, but it was Frederick Dunmore himself. He was dressed in a loose-fitting banyan of flowing silk. On his shaved head a sort of turban hat. He clearly was not expecting visitors at that hour, and judging by his expression Elizabeth guessed that he was expecting her least of all. His mouth fell open and he stared at her and tried to speak, and after a moment all that would come from his mouth was “Damn me…”

“Damn you, indeed, Mr. Dunmore. Does it shock you to find me alive?”

“What? Why should…What do you want?” He made no move to welcome her inside.

“Might I have a word with you? I have certain information…”

“Where have you been all these weeks?” His eyes narrowed as he regarded her, as if squinting might reveal something that direct sight could not. “There has been some high talk, you know. Pirates raiding the public armory, making off with a great cache of weapons, their captain staying right at the King’s Arms, spying things out, so the rumor goes. And you not to be found just a day later. Some mighty big talk…”

“Yes, well, talk is not evidence, is it? If you have evidence I would beg to know what it is,” she said, and in her mind she felt all the disparate and seemingly unrelated pieces fitting together: Billy Bird’s appearance, the ship quite hidden in the Pagan River, Charleston, the Revenges’ unwillingness to be discovered once more in the Chesapeake Bay.

Billy Bird. That bloody villain.

Frederick Dunmore was scowling at her but apparently had nothing more to say regarding her possible connection to the pirates that raided the armory. Instead he added, “If you’ve come back to beg for your niggers you can forget it! If any of them show their faces in this town they will be arrested and sold, do you hear? Carrying arms against white people, running wild all over the countryside. They are a menace and they will be hunted down!”

“You do not give up easy, considering your less than impressive success so far. But see here. I have been away. I have been to Boston. You are familiar with Boston, I believe?”

She saw the flicker of anticipation and concern across his face, the subtlest of change in his expression, but he did not waver in his raw bluster. “I lived once in Boston, there is no secret. Are you trying to imply something, you little…”

“I have here a document,” Elizabeth continued, pulling a paper from her leather pouch, “that relates to your family. Your family tree, Mr. Dunmore, do you know what I mean?”

Now the fear was in his expression, the uncertainty, eyes shifting from the paper to Elizabeth ’s face and back. He snatched the document from her hands, scowled as he studied it.

“This is a record of my uncle’s birth… this means nothing. How did you come by this? You stole this!”

“That record means nothing, it is true. I show it to you merely to demonstrate that I do have your family records. I would not put the important one in your hand. The record of your grandfather Isaac’s birth. The record of his father, Richard, and his mother…Nancy. The slave girl Nancy.”

Dunmore stared at her for a long time without speaking, then slowly crumpled the paper in his hand and tossed it away. “It is a lie. It was always a lie. Do you think I’m such a fool that I would not figure it was a lie?”

“You do not sound so certain. Are you?”

“Yes, goddamn your eyes, you goddamned pirate’s whore! It is a lie!”

Elizabeth shrugged. “Perhaps. And perhaps not. Perhaps I have the document I say I do, and perhaps I do not. But pray, allow me to show you one more.”

She pulled another document from her pouch, handed it to him. “It is in my hand,” she explained. “I transcribed the original, which is signed by you. I see you are too rough with papers for me to trust you.”

Dunmore ’s eyes ran over the words. Elizabeth could all but recite them, having read the note so many times. “I wish that the said Elizabeth Marlowe and her companion should never leave the town of Boston…”

Incredible. She was actually grateful for the letter. If there was ever a moment when she doubted the morality of what she was doing, she had only to think of that, and of the hired killers who had almost carried out those instructions.

Dunmore looked up at her. Again he could not speak, but this time his mouth hung open.

“The original was taken from a man who was trying most diligently to carry out your wishes. He had nearly one hundred pounds on his person. I am flattered.”

That wasn’t true, of course, about the money; there was only the bank draft that Billy Bird, the villain, had insisted on cashing the morning after the fight in the church. They had nearly missed the tide, thanks to his audacity, and only just made it to the ship ahead of the sheriff. But the money, divided among the men of the Bloody Revenge, had done much to improve esprit de corps.

They stood there for a moment more, Dunmore unable to think of anything else to say, Elizabeth not feeling the need to.

Finally she broke the silence. “I will take my leave, Mr. Dunmore. I have enjoyed this talk, more than you will know. And now I have no doubt that my people will be allowed to return unmolested to Marlowe House, and that you will be their champion, and that I, in turn, will keep secret papers secret. Good morning.”

She nodded, turned her back on Frederick Dunmore, and walked away.

He stood in the door and watched her go. Tried to pin a thought down long enough to examine it, tried to calm the tempest so that he could see above the churning water, see what was beyond, what he might do, where he was, but he could not.

The storm was on him again, raging as it had never raged before, smashing him, smashing him as it had on the ship, sending him reeling off the cabin door, puking on himself, unable to stop. Just when it had been calm for so long.

It was the eye of a hurricane, a false calm before it hit from an entirely new direction, and worse than before. He felt the urge to bathe, to scrub his skin until it bled, as if he could wash the impurity from him. He saw his hands once more around the old woman’s throat…

He turned from the door, staggered away, unseeing. He moved from room to room, trying to focus on something, anything, but he could not. He could not make his mind stop, could not even slow it long enough to have a rational thought.

Room to room he wandered, and back again. He bounced off a wall in the hallway, turned over a small table, sent a vase shattering to the floor, but he did not even notice. On his way around again he stepped on the broken shard, cut his foot through his silk slipper, left marks of blood in an even trail as he walked, but still he was not aware.

He paused, looked up at a big portrait of himself that stood above the fireplace. An epic work: he was on horseback, leading some fictitious charge, his great white wig flowing nobly down his shoulders.

He looked into his own eyes, rendered in oil, and as he stared the eyes seemed to stare back and he stood for some time, just looking.

And then a voice spoke to him. He did not know if it was the painting, or himself speaking out loud, or if he had just thought the words in his head. But no matter. They spoke clear, one sentence, that was all.

You are the fox.

Yes, yes, he thought. I am the fox. Quick, nimble. Vicious when cornered, able to fight with razor teeth. But that was rare, because the fox was too crafty to be cornered, too crafty by half. Doubling back, wading through streams, the fox knew how to elude capture, how to keep on the run.

Dunmore tore his eyes from the painting, raced up the stairs. In a back room, he found the old chest, pulled it out, dragged it to his bedroom, flung open his wardrobe, and began to toss suit after white suit into it.

There was money in the study, specie, quite a bit of it. He could send for the rest. Have the factor sell the house, the land, the horses.

But where?

He stopped in his packing, stood up straight, stared out the window. Where in that great world?

France. Yes, France, of course. England and France were at war, no one would find him there.

But would he be welcome in France? Of course… if he were a papist, seeking to escape from Protestant persecution at home. Of course. He had been a Congregationalist in Boston, Church of England in London, an Anglican in Virginia, why not a Roman Catholic in France?

He was the fox. He could make them lose his scent.

He grabbed up his three best wigs and threw them in the trunk. The damned Romish church had all sorts of nonsense in its service, kneeling and babbling in Latin and eating its bread. But it was not so different from the High Church of England. He could learn all that. He could be a papist.

He slammed the trunk shut. Sent for one of the field hands to drive him by carriage to Newport News. A bit of business in Boston, he would tell them. And then, to France, by way of whatever route he had to take, with the dogs lost and baying further and further behind him.