The Guardship

Chapter 12

IN THE end Marlowe did not flog to death the man who had fired the first shot. It was not that he did not want to, he simply could not discover who he was. It seemed none of the dozen men standing shoulder to shoulder noticed him, or at least they would not give him up. In any event, Marlowe probably would have let him off with no more than two or three dozen lashes, just as a lesson and an example of his charitable nature.

They spent a nervous night on Smith Island, or at least the men of the Plymouth Prize did. Those pirates still alive were rounded up and deposited near the fire, bound hand and foot, a circle of armed Prizes around them. Marlowe scrutinized each man, anxious to see if he recognized any of them. If he had, Marlowe would have killed the brigand on the spot and not bothered to explain. But as fortune had it, there were none that he knew.

Bickerstaff, Middleton, and his men went out to the pirate ship and took possession of the five rogues aboard her, who, having witnessed the capture of their fellows and having no boats or any means of escape, had become insensibly drunk. They were rounded up, lowered into a boat by way of a gantline, and taken ashore to join their captured brethren.

All the hands stood guard all night. This was not by Marlowe’s orders, but simply because the men were too agitated by the fight and too wary of the pirate captives to think of sleep. Marlowe, Rakestraw, and Middleton stood watch with them by turns, just to make certain nothing went amiss.

“It was a good fight, was it not?” Marlowe said to Bickerstaff as he rose to take his watch. Bickerstaff had been sitting up all that time, away from the men, in contemplative silence. The fire was burning down, and the circle of light had retreated to just a few fathoms out from the red glowing logs. Bickerstaff’s face seemed to glow, light and shadow dancing across it as the fire flared and subsided. Marlowe could see his weariness and his satisfaction.

“It was a good fight, Tom,” he said. “You were born to this kind of command. This honest command. I know of no other that could have made these men stand and fight.”

“I am grateful to you for saying so, sir,” Marlowe said, and he meant it, because he knew that Bickerstaff did. Idle flattery had never polluted Bickerstaff’s lips. “Nonetheless, it was no Agincourt. Had you not shown up when you did, I think we must have been routed by the rogues.”

“But you held your ground. Or your surf, as the case might be.”

They stood there for a few moments in silence, staring into the fire. Enjoying their comradeship. They had been together for six years, six years as friends, shipmates, pupil and tutor. They had seen a great deal together, but they were still, after all of it, very different men.

“Well, good night, Francis,” Marlowe said at last.

“Good night, Tom.” He smiled and ambled off into the dark.

The sight that greeted them in the morning was grotesque, the hellish aftermath of a battle. The bodies of two dozen men at least, Prizes and pirates, lay on the beach or floating in the shallow water. They were black with dried blood, and bloated so their clothing seemed ill-fitting. A swarm of birds clambered over them, tearing at their flesh.

Those corpses in the water seemed as if they were making some halfhearted effort to shoo the scavengers away, their arms waving slightly as the small surf rocked them back and forth. There were dozens of crabs. It was a ghastly sight, and one or two of the Prizes had to race into the dune grass to be sick.

But the rest seemed quite unmoved by the sight, at least after they began to poke around the great piles of booty that had been deposited on the beach. Much of it consisted of manufactured goods taken from English merchantmen: crockery, plate, silks, linen, barrel hoops, great piles of clothing. It was an unusually rich haul.

The pirates had had a successful cruise, were no doubt ready to sell their prodigious capture. In Charleston and Savannah there were plenty of merchants, strangled as they were by the government’s policy toward importation, that were eager to purchase such things. They would not ask embarrassing questions about bills of lading and such.

There was also a tolerable amount of gold and silver, as well as an abundance of weapons: swords, pistols, beautiful muskets. There was a most piratical gleam in the eye of many of the Plymouth Prizes as they fingered the goods, Marlowe’s insinuation about their potential rewards having apparently found an attentive audience.

“Mr. Rakestraw,” he called out to the first officer, who was poking through a crate of muskets. He set aside the gun he was holding, a beautiful musket, and with a sheepish look on his face, as if he had been caught in some indiscretion, he came over to the captain.

“Mr. Rakestraw, here is what I would have you do. Divide the gold and silver in half. One half shall be for the governor. Then count up how many of our men are still living and divide the other half of the gold and silver into equal shares. Two shares for the officers. And those that suffered wounds, the ones you believe will recover, are to get two shares as well, so figure that in. Never mind those you reckon are done for. Then we shall draw numbers and each man by number will be allowed to choose a new suit of clothes and a sword and pistol. Officers first.”

“Yes, sir,” Rakestraw said, but he seemed to hesitate. “But, sir, you know that all of this, rightly speaking, sir, is prizes of the Crown. This…ah…what you’re doing here, sir, it ain’t regular.” Rakestraw’s protests were weakened, Marlowe thought, by the fact that he kept glancing over at the gun he had been holding, and seemed near panic when someone else picked it up and examined it.

“You, there,” Marlowe called to the man holding the musket, “bring that over here.”

Grudgingly the man shuffled over and handed him the gun. It was indeed beautiful, not the kind of crude weapon turned out by second-rate gunsmiths in dark and tiny back alley shops, but a custom-made piece with beautiful engravings on the lock plate and an ivory inlay on the bird’s-eye walnut stock. If Rakestraw was to be led into temptation, Marlowe was pleased to see that he would not settle for second best.

He handed the gun to the lieutenant.

“Mr. Rakestraw, you fought well last night, damn well, we should have been bested without you. And you have done a good job of getting the ship in fighting order,” he said, which was no lie. “I wish you to have this gun.”

“Oh, thank you, sir. But, sir…”

“Listen, Lieutenant. Each of the officers and men are entitled to prize money, are they not? We all have a legal claim to a portion of what has been captured. But we both know that it will take a year at least to see any of it, assuming the Lords of Admiralty don’t find some means of cheating us of our share. All I wish to do is see that the men get what is rightfully theirs, without having to wait an age for it. I’m just cutting through red tape, no more.”

“Oh, I see, sir,” said Rakestraw, and he did see, largely because he wanted to. With that fine gun in his hand and the piles of gold and silver ten feet away, he was quite willing to ignore the more dubious parts of Marlowe’s justification, such as the fact that the men were getting far more than they ever would in prize money, and that what the captain was doing would be considered no more than pilfering if it was found out.

But it would not be found out. Both men knew that it would not. The pirates were unlikely to tell, nor was anyone likely to believe them. And Marlowe would see that they were locked down in a dark hold before the division of loot began.

The Plymouth Prizes, who in the next hour would make more money than they had in their entire lives up until that moment, were even less likely to tell. What Marlowe was doing for them was only just, after their ill usage by the navy, and must be kept secret. At least that was how they would see it.

Rakestraw, with his new musket tucked under his arm, hurried off to order the prisoners ferried out to the Plymouth Prize and to oversee the dividing up of the booty.

“Yonder comes the Northumberland,” said Bickerstaff, stepping up beside Marlowe and nodding toward the harbor. The little sloop was standing into the bay under mainsail, jib, and topsail, the canvas white in the morning sun. They stood there for a moment, watching the small ship sail into the harbor on the quartering breeze.

“Excellent,” Marlowe said at last. “Now, I need you to-”

“Marlowe, pray, what is Lieutenant Rakestraw about?”

He turned and looked in the direction that Bickerstaff was looking. Rakestraw had all of the specie and gold and silver plate piled up on a couple of chests, and an impressive pile it was. He was counting it out into numerous small piles and placing them like chess pieces on the second chest.

“Well,” Marlowe said, “he is counting out the specie, you see. Just getting a fair accounting of it for the inventory.”

“Indeed? It looks very much to me as if he was dividing it up like plunder. In order that each man might be called up to receive a share.”

“Oh, well, I had a notion that the men, lacking as they are in the most basic things, might at least get a shift of clothing out of all this, and perhaps decent weapons to aid in future fighting.”

Bickerstaff turned, looked him in the eye. Marlowe wondered why he was unwilling to simply tell Bickerstaff the truth, that he was indeed giving each man a share of the take. Be

cause Bickerstaff would disapprove, deeply disapprove, and he would make it worse by keeping his disapproval to himself. He would think that it smacked of a life that Marlowe had forsworn.

“See here,” Marlowe said, “I know that this is not quite in line with the rules of the admiralty, but look at these poor bastards. They’re in rags, and the navy has done nothing to better their lot. You think if I ask Nicholson for new clothing for these men he’d do anything but laugh? They fought well. The least I can do is give them some reward.”

“They deserve decent clothing, I’ll grant you that-” Bickerstaff said, and Marlowe cut him off before he could continue.

“Exactly. Now I need you to go out to the pirate ship and begin an inventory of what is aboard. See if you can discover her original name, owners, what have you. If there is not aboard as far as records, I suppose she can be considered our prize. Perhaps we shall name her the Plymouth Prize Prize, eh?”

Bickerstaff did not laugh, did not even smile. “Very well, then, I shall be off.” He called out for the boat crew.

It took only an hour to purge from the men the last vestige of despondency that Allair had built up in his four years of command. That was the hour that it took to call each man up and put in his hands a little pile of gold and silver, then to draw numbers and allow each man a choice of weapon and a shift of clothing. Just as Marlowe had done so many, many times before. It made him a bit uneasy for just that reason.

Soon the beach was littered with discarded rags and the men were prancing around in their new garments, sashes tied around waists, pistols and cutlasses thrust in place. They were a happy tribe, a band of brothers ready for more fighting and more booty. And they would not be disappointed.

Marlowe viewed with some satisfaction the scene on the beach. In less than a week he had turned these men around, fought a desperate battle, captured a band of vicious pirates, and in the next hour would greatly increase his own worth. Once word got back to Williamsburg he would be the great

hero of the age, his star rising fast in the firmament of the Virginia aristocracy. He would be a gentleman of note, and Elizabeth Tinling, for one, would be impressed. And he had only just begun.

“Mr. Rakestraw,” he called. The lieutenant picked up his new musket and hurried over. “I fear we are most vulnerable here, spread out over the beach. If another of these pirates were to sail in, we should be undone. I want to get as much of this prize cargo to safety as soon as we can.”

He looked out at the Plymouth Prize, pretending to consider his options. “The Prize will need a jury mainmast before she sails. Here’s what we shall do. Let us load as much as we can aboard the Northumberland, just to get it out of here, and the rest can go on the guardship once she’s ready.”

Then, with Rakestraw in tow, he went through the piles of booty, indicating what among them should be loaded aboard the Northumberland. There were three trunks of ladies’ clothes, and he found among them a gold cross on a tiny gold chain, as thin as a spider’s web. The cross itself had a diamond in the center, and a delicate swirling pattern was etched in the gold, so fine that one might miss it. It was a beautiful piece, and he tucked it in his coat pocket. “Put these trunks of ladies’ things aboard the Plymouth Prize,” he instructed, “and the rest of this aboard the sloop.”

It was only natural, of course, that the most valuable things should be sent off first, and it was those things that the men set to loading aboard the sloop. Neither Lieutenant Rakestraw nor any of the officers or men was in a mood to question Marlowe’s decision or his motives. Not after what he had done for them.

And King James did not object, did not even raise an eyebrow, when Marlowe told him to carry the cargo of pirate treasure to his little-used warehouse in Jamestown and unload it there, placing it in a discreet corner with barrels of tobacco piled in front of it. “Yes, sir” was all he said, and twenty minutes later the Northumberland was standing out of the harbor, carrying Marlowe’s part of the take.

It would take him a month, perhaps more, to convert those sundry things to hard money, but they would, in the end, greatly augment his already considerable wealth. He knew who those merchants were, in Charleston and Savannah, as well as any buccaneer.

He had to smile as he watched his little sloop pass from sight around the headland.

What a great frolic, he thought, thieving from the most notorious thieves on earth! Why did I not think of this years ago?

Bickerstaff stood on the quarterdeck of the captured pirate ship and watched the Northumberland standing clear of the harbor. Forward, and in the cabin below, he could hear the half-dozen men he had brought with him searching the ship with great gusto, looking for anything worth carrying off.

The pirate ship has been taken, he thought, but there are pirates aboard her still.

He was worried. Worried about Marlowe. Did Marlowe actually think he had kept his pillaging a secret? he wondered. Did he think that he, Bickerstaff, was not aware of the great piles of stolen goods that had been loaded aboard the sloop, bound away, no doubt, for the smaller warehouse in Jamestown?

In his six-year association with Marlowe, Bickerstaff had been careful to avoid doing anything that went contrary to his moral grain, difficult as that was in the circumstances. He had stayed with Marlowe at first because he had no choice, and then because he had become curious, and at last because he had come to like the man.

And he had come to believe that Marlowe was, ultimately, a good and moral man who for all of his life had been deprived of solid instruction in honor and Christian decency.

They had come to Virginia to start over. For Bickerstaff that meant finally becoming more than a half-starved pedagogue who for all of his learning was still regarded as some kind of inferior because he had Latin and Greek but no money.

For Marlowe it meant taking his place in society, real society, society where one’s worth was not measured by ability with a sword or accuracy with a pistol.

But what measure did this colonial society use to gauge a man’s worth? His money? The number of acres he had under cultivation, the number of slaves doing his work? Bickerstaff found himself wondering if this society was indeed better than the brutal but utterly egalitarian world of the pirates.

Bickerstaff shook his head and turned to the task to which he had been assigned. He could not be Marlowe’s moral compass forever; at a certain point Marlowe would have to find his own way.

He walked to the break of the quarterdeck and then down into the waist. The pirate ship, he saw, was in fact a former merchantman, as they generally were. She had been taken by the brigands at some time and converted, in the pirate way, to a blackguard’s man-of-war.

There were half a dozen new gunports pierced through her bulwark. Bickerstaff thought of them as gunports, having no other term for them, but in reality they were little more than holes chopped out with an ax and adorned on either side with eyebolts for the breeching.

There had once been a quarterdeck and a forecastle, but the pirates had taken a saw or an adze and hacked them off, leaving the vessel flush-decked fore and aft. The white and weathered deck planking ended abruptly where the bulkhead had once stood and turned to a darker, less worn wood that had until recently been shielded from the weather. It looked like the high-tide line on a beach.

The gangways had been torn down and most of the fine trim was gone, with only bare patches of wood to indicate where it once had been. The original figurehead was gone as well, replaced by some pirate’s carving. Bickerstaff could not venture a guess as to what the new head was supposed to be.

He heard the creak of oars in tholes, and looking over the side saw the Prize’s gig pulling out, Marlowe in the stern sheets. A moment later, he stepped through the gangway.

“Ah, Marlowe,” he called, “I have yet to write out the inventory, but there’s little aboard. They were going to careen, as we reckoned, so most everything is on the beach.”

“Have you discovered what ship this is? Or was?”

“Yes. Come see this.”

Bickerstaff led the way aft to what was once the great cabin but was now the quarterdeck. The entire weather deck, bow to stern, was littered with empty wine bottles, some broken, and various articles of clothing, discarded bones, and the odd cutlass or pistol. Just to starboard of the binnacle box was a small cask of gunpowder, a pile of bullets, and another pile of made cartridges. Beside that was a leather-bound journal from which the pirate who was making up the cartridges was tearing paper for that purpose. Bickerstaff picked it up and handed it to Marlowe.

“As it happens, this is the ship’s log. The villain started from the back, so the name of the ship and crew remain.”

Marlowe flipped open the cover, holding it so both men could read. There in a neat hand was written “Journal of the ship Patricia Clark, Boston. Mr. Paul McKeown, Master.” He flipped to the back. The last twenty or so pages were gone. The last entry read “Winds light from the SSE. Up topgallant yards, set topgallant sails.” No indication of what had become of the crew of the Patricia Clark.

No doubt some of them had thrown in with the pirates, and were now in irons in the Plymouth Prize’s hold or being torn apart by crows on the beach. As to the others, Bickerstaff hoped that they had got off as easy, but he reckoned they had not.

God have mercy on their souls, he thought. The sea was a dangerous place, he knew that all too well. A dangerous place for thieves and honest men alike.