The Guardship

Chapter 32

THE VOICES were troubled. They did not think this was good anymore.

LeRois chewed nervously at a long strand of his beard. Something was making the voices upset. It was time to get back to the ship. The ship was safety. This wide-open country was not.

Those thoughts bothered him, but the voices were still soft and soothing, had not reached the point of screaming panic. He walked slowly through the house as if through a museum, glancing at those things that were not yet smashed or stolen. Men ran past, men screamed and beat delicate objects apart with their swords, men guzzled from bottles of wine and rum and whiskey, but LeRois just watched. When they had finished with this house they would go back to the ship. It was time.

At the far end of the hall there was a room that was as yet undisturbed, so he wandered down that way while the men had their fun in the sitting room and the dining room. He could see a wall lined with books, an elegant carpet, a sideboard with bottles. Perhaps he would sit a moment.

He stepped through the door, and his eyes wandered to the windows across the room. A striking view, clear down to the river, a dark band of water in the fading light, running through the fields on either side. It would be lovely, flickering red and orange as it reflected the light from this house, once they had set it on fire.

“LeRois?”

The voice was gruff, demanding. None of his men would speak to him that way. No one who wished to live would speak to him that way. He froze, unsure if his name had really been spoken out loud.

“LeRois!”

He jerked his head around. There was a man sitting in a winged chair, a book open in his lap. LeRois had not even noticed him. And the man knew his name. There was something gnawing at the back of his mind, something troubling, but he could not recall what it was.

“Are you LeRois?” The man stood up and set his book aside.

LeRois squinted at him. “Oui,” he said at last.

“Do you know who I am?” the man demanded. “Do you know who I am?”

LeRois just looked at him. The man had shouted. He could not believe it. This man had actually raised his voice in speaking to him.

“I am Jacob Wilkenson! I am the man who employs you! The one who sent Ripley to set this whole deal up, and now look what you have done! This cannot be tolerated!”

LeRois squinted again. The man’s hands were trembling. He was sweating. He shifted from one foot to another under LeRois’s gaze. LeRois could smell the fear-it was a smell he knew well. The man’s bluster was all merde, shit, nothing more.

“You work for me!” the man screamed, an edge of hysteria in his voice.

LeRois sensed movement at his back. He turned to find a dozen of his men standing behind him, watching the confrontation, and more filing in. They had paused in their destruction to see what was happening.

“All of you, listen to me,” the man was saying. “My name is Jacob Wilkenson. I am the man who has been buying your

goods. I am the one who has provided you with specie. We have a good arrangement, and I do not care to see it fall apart now. We can make each other very wealthy, but you must go back to your ship now!”

LeRois could not fathom what the man was talking about, and he concluded that he was insane. There was no other explanation.

The Vengeances began to step around Jacob Wilkenson, to fill the room, to encircle the man. Wilkenson in turn was forcing himself to stand more straight, to meet LeRois’s eye, but his bravado was running out.

“I order you to leave at once!”

“Order?” LeRois spoke at last. “You ‘order’? You do not order me.”

“Very well, then, I ask that you please-”

“Sweat him.”

The Vengeances were now completely encircling the man, watching LeRois, waiting for the word.

“Listen, you-” the man began again, and once more LeRois said, “Sweat him.”

One of the Vengeances pulled a sword from his belt and with an ingratiating smile poked Jacob Wilkenson with the tip.

“Ow, son of a bitch, stop that!” Wilkenson shouted, and stepped away. Then the man standing beside the first poked him and made him step back farther.

All around the circle swords came out and cutlasses were raised and their dagger points reached out and jabbed at Jacob Wilkenson. He backed away and backed away, but he was surrounded and the points reached out at him from every direction.

He stepped around the winged chair, trying to escape, but they were on his every side. He moved faster, but still the blades found him. He moved faster still, around and around the chair. He began to breathe hard. He began to sweat.

Then one of the brigands grabbed him and pinned his arms, and another pulled a knife. With a motion like skinning a bird, the man with the knife cut away Wilkenson’s coat and

his waistcoat and shirt to reveal an obese, white midriff, already bleeding from a dozen minor wounds.

The pirate that was holding Wilkenson pushed him forward. He stumbled and then flinched as another and another sword point jabbed at him, and soon he was running around the chair again, stumbling, heaving for breath, bleeding.

“Oh God, oh God, no more,” he gasped, falling to the floor. LeRois’s eyes fixed on the strange patterns his blood made on the Oriental rug as the fat man rolled in agony, bleeding from dozens of cuts. They seemed to swim around, swirling and forming more patterns before his eyes. He could not understand the man’s words.

One of the pirates stepped forward and with deft strokes of a dagger stripped Wilkenson of his breeches and socks so that he was lying on the rug naked, save for his shoes.

The voices were now screaming in LeRois’s head, screaming to be heard over the raucous laughter of the Vengeances, the gunshots, the breaking glass, the gasping pleas of this Jacob Wilkenson.

Two of the pirates hauled the fat man to his feet again, and again he was made to stagger around the chair. His white skin was streaked with blood, which ran freely now down his sides and legs. Bottles were smashed over his head and shoulders and gouged into his flesh. He was whimpering and pleading and praying, and that made his tormentors laugh harder still.

Malachias Barrett! Malachias Barrett! The voices broke through the din, screaming their warning in LeRois’s brain. The room seemed to swirl around, the faces undulating, the fat man coming in and out of focus.

He had forgotten! He had forgotten! But the voices had reminded him. To the ship! To the ship! All of this could wait, all of this would be here, but first Malachias Barrett had to die.

LeRois felt the scream rising from his bowels, and as the sound came up so his sword seemed to float out of its scabbard and rise with the sound over his head.

He charged forward. Faces floated by, surprised faces of his own men as they stepped away, and then the great fat man on the floor, a blood-streaked, terrified face, looking up at him, and then his sword came down again and again and again and he could not stop hacking away at the man.

Malachias Barrett! the voices screamed again, and LeRois stepped back and looked around, the dead man at his feet forgotten.

“We get back to the ship. I will burn this son of a bitch maison now and go back to the ship.”

The men stood in silence for a second, and then as if on a signal raced off to destroy and carry off all that they could before the flames drove them away. They would not question LeRois’s decision. He knew that they would not. No one would, who wished to live.

Thomas Marlowe took a long pull from his rum bottle. Stared through the great cabin windows at the yellow, flickering light on the horizon. He could not move. He could not take his eyes from the sight of his colony, his adoptive home, burning in front of him.

He was alone in the great cabin. He was not drunk, despite his best efforts.

He wished the fires would stop. He wished they would just go out and LeRois would leave, but every time he thought that they had, a new fire flared and grew, one after another, following the march of destruction up the banks of the James River.

How many had LeRois killed thus far? There was no way to know. Perhaps no one. Perhaps they had all fled before him. Marlowe could picture the gentry of Virginia, in all their finery, fleeing like rats before the pirate’s filthy, drunken tribe. Perhaps he had killed them all. And still he, Marlowe, sat there, immobile.

LeRois was working his way toward the Wilkenson home. Perhaps he would sack that as well, kill all of those bastards, save him the trouble. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing?

The Plymouth Prize was safe, and her people were safe, and that was his primary concern, his first obligation. He had

tried to stop the pirates, but he could not, not without killing all of his people in the process, and Elizabeth and Lucy as well. He had done what he could.

He took another drink from the bottle. He did not really believe any of that.

“Thomas Marlowe,” he muttered to himself, speaking the words slowly, disdainfully. They tasted bad in his mouth. That was over now. He was no longer Thomas Marlowe. It had been a good run, two years as a member of the tidewater’s elite, but it was over now. He was Malachias Barrett once again.

He supposed that once LeRois had cleared out he would take the Plymouth Prize to the Caribbean. His men would go with him, he was certain of that. Most men who sailed before the mast were only a few places removed from piracy, and the Prizes were even closer than that, thanks to his guiding influence. It was a short step now to the sweet trade. Bickerstaff would not go with them, of course, and Rakestraw probably would decline. He wondered about Elizabeth.

And then, as if summoned by his thoughts, he heard the sound of her light footfalls in the alleyway, her soft knock on the door. “Thomas?”

He turned in his chair, smiled as best he could. “Pray, come in.”

She closed the door behind her, crossed the cabin, sat on the settee facing him. “I’m sorry for walking out as I did.”

Marlowe took her hand. As if she had anything to be sorry for. “I am sorry for being such an ass. I am pleased you are safe. I am pleased that the ship and her people are safe.”

“Are you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Are you really pleased with your safety?” she asked, and when he did not respond she continued. “You men have a great advantage over us women. When we are humiliated beyond tolerance we can do no more than cut our wrists. You can die in battle and have it said that such was a noble death.”

“And you think that an advantage?”

“Having the means to preserve one’s honor is always an advantage. That is why I came to this place.”

“Me as well. But even here I find honor is like good family: You are either born into it or you can despair of it ever being yours.”

“I do not believe that. I will not believe that. That may be true for what these arrogant bastards, the Wilkensons and the Tinlings, call honor, but it is not true of real honor.”

“Real honor? Real honor is no more than what these arrogant bastards, as you style them, say is real honor. Is there such a thing as honor in an objective sense?”

They paused, Marlowe with the bottle halfway to his lips, and listened to a sudden commotion on deck. It had been going on all night, something or other causing the men to hoot and howl. They were all drunk, celebrating their escape. But this time it was louder, more sustained. He put the bottle down, looked questioning at Elizabeth, and she shrugged in reply.

He heard footsteps outside the cabin door, loud, rude voices, a gang of men pushing toward the captain’s sanctuary. Perhaps it was a mutiny, Marlowe speculated. He hoped it was. He hoped they would hang him.

But rather than a foot kicking in the door there came a polite knock. Marlowe sat for a second more, then stood and tugged his waistcoat into place. “Come,” he called.

The door opened and Bickerstaff stepped in. “Captain, a gentleman has come out to see you,” he said stiffly.

A gentleman? The governor, perhaps, or Finch or one of the burgesses. Marlowe could well imagine what they would have to say.

“Very good, show him in.” There was a pushing and wrestling in the alleyway. Whoever the visitor was, he was getting rough treatment from the men. If it was the governor, this would go even harder on them.

The gang of men parted like tearing cloth and the gentleman stepped forward. Marlowe’s eyes went wide, his mouth dropped open. He took an involuntary step back, so shocked was he, for the visitor was George Wilkenson, hat and wig

gone, clothes twisted, sweating with fear, standing there in the door of the guardship’s great cabin.

The questions swirled around in his head. His eyes narrowed. He glared at Wilkenson.

It occurred to him that he could hang the bastard then and there. If he just said the word he felt confident his men would put a halter around Wilkenson’s neck and run him up to a yardarm. At the very least, they would not try to interfere if he did it himself. From the look in Wilkenson’s eyes Thomas guessed it had occurred to him as well.

“Come in,” Marlowe said, and Wilkenson stumbled into the cabin, pushed from behind. “Get back on deck, you men!” Marlowe shouted, and the men dispersed, laughing, howling. Bicker-staff shut the door.

They stood there, the three men and Elizabeth, silent, staring at one another. Finally, Marlowe spoke.

“This is most unexpected.”

“I would imagine so.”

“What do you want?”

“I have come to beg you, with all humility, to come to the aid of this colony. You-you and your men-are the only force in the tidewater that can stand up to these animals.”

Marlowe stared hard at him. He was telling the truth. This was no trick. “Indeed. You have come to ask that I lay down my life, and the lives of my men, to save the great Wilkenson estate? Is that it?”

George took a step aft and peered out of the big stern window of the great cabin. “That fire, the closest one, that is the Wilkenson estate. It is quite beyond saving. It is the rest of the colony that concerns me now.”

“And do you know who these ‘animals’ are? Who their captain is?”

“He is some pirate named LeRois, that is all I know. And he is here in part because of my father. I am utterly ashamed of my family’s role in this. Had I even an ounce of pride left I could not have come to you, but I do not, and so I am

willing to admit here and now that you, and you,” he nodded to Elizabeth, “have been horribly used by me and my family.”

Marlowe just stared at him, then sat down behind his desk and continued to stare. He did not understand how Jacob Wilkenson was responsible for LeRois’s presence on the bay. That was an intriguing bit of news. He did not know what to say.

“My father is dead by now, I should think,” Wilkenson continued, “and if you do this, if you stop them from killing anyone else, then you shall never have any trouble from my family again, I swear to that.”

Marlowe swiveled around and stared out the window, at the flames reaching up over the trees that surrounded the Wilkenson home. The only thing more pathetic than Wilkenson’s pleading was the fact that it was necessary for him to plead at all, to plead with Marlowe to do what he had sworn he would do. If the Wilkensons had used Marlowe poorly, then they, too, had been poorly used by him. They were all of a kind: Wilkenson, Marlowe, LeRois. Pathetic.

He turned back to the men in his cabin, and his eyes met Elizabeth’s. “What think you of all this?” he asked, as if Wilkenson were not there.

“I think George Wilkenson is vermin, but what he has done, coming here, asking this of you, is the bravest act I have ever seen from any man.”

“Hmmph. Well, you may be right. But he asks something that I cannot do. I cannot beat LeRois. Nor do I feel much compelled to see all my men die to defend people who have behaved with so little honor.”

Bickerstaff spoke for the first time. “You asked me once, you may recall, what I thought was the difference between a commoner and a person of gentle birth.”

“I do recall. You said that the one had more money than the other, and the one with more money made a greater pretense at honor, though in fact he had it in no greater measure.”

“That is what I said, and I should think all that we have seen this past year would bear that out. But that does not mean

that honor is not worth striving for, even if you are the only one in the land doing so.”

Marlowe leaned back in his chair. His eyes moved from Bickerstaff to Wilkenson to Elizabeth, and then back to Bickerstaff.

“I cannot beat him,” he said again.

“That is unfortunate,” said Bickerstaff, “but it is not important. It is only important that you try.”

Marlowe looked down at his desk and rubbed his temples. What Bickerstaff was saying, what Elizabeth had been saying, was right. He knew it. And he was afraid. That was the truth, distilled to its purest essence. He was afraid of LeRois because he knew all that LeRois was capable of doing. His head was starting to ache. He was sick of being afraid.

“Very well,” he said at last. He put his hands down flat on his desk, pushed himself to his feet. “We are all to die eventually.” He looked at Elizabeth, held her eyes. “Let us take the advantage given us by our sex. Let us have it said that we died with honor.”