The Guardship

Chapter 4

JEAN-PIERRE LEROIS staggered out of his tent, squinting and blinking in the late-morning Caribbean sun. Tears rolled down his cheeks. His head pounded with the onslaught of light. He pulled his battered hat lower over his eyes, took another pull from the whiskey bottle in his hand, and surveyed his domain.

Off to the east, scattered among the green forest, was the small town of Nassau, in reality no more than a few houses, shops, and taverns. The majority of the island’s population, some two hundred or so men and perhaps fifty women, were scattered along the half-mile stretch of beach on which LeRois’s tent was pitched. But they were not, strictly speaking, citizens of New Providence or any other place. They were men on the account. The Brethren of the Coast who had just recently discovered the sparsely inhabited island as a nearly ideal base for their tribe. They were pirates.

The lot of them, the crews of the three decrepit ships at anchor just off the beach, were making their home on the white sand. Sleeping wherever they had passed out, or gambling, or cooking, or eating, or fornicating. And they were all drinking, all those who were still conscious-drinking bitter wine or “kill devil” rum or rumfustian, made of beer, gin, sherry, raw eggs, and whatever else happened to be available.

LeRois scowled. He looked around. His skin was burned so dark, he looked more like an Arab than a Frenchman. Those parts of his face not covered with beard were splattered with dark spots where burned gunpowder had embedded itself in his skin.

He scratched distractedly at his jaw. There was something dried and crusty in his beard, he did not know what. He could smell the stink of his own clothes, his black and faded broadcloth coat, his wool waistcoat and cotton shirt, all of which had, at one time, been fine apparel. It was his custom twice a year to shed his clothes-coat and waistcoat, his shirt and breeches and stockings, the wide red sash he wore around his waist-and burn them all, replacing them with whatever new clothes he could buy or take.

The new clothing was a mark of his good fortune and his God-given right to command. But their last cruise had not been a success. He had found no clothes worth taking, no money with which to buy new. Another blow to his already waning authority.

He took a long drink from the bottle. The liquor burned as it went down, but it was a reassuring sensation. The edges of his sobriety dulled. The beach, the tents, the blue sky, and the clear aqua sea seemed too sharp, too vivid, too real. He drank again.

He squinted against the harsh glare of the sun on the sand and the water and searched among the bodies for William Darnall, the quartermaster of the Vengeance, that much-battered ship that was his command. His command for now. His command as long as those men who sailed her agreed that it should be his command. As long as he could, through success, intimidation, and brutality, make them obey.

It was twenty-five years since LeRois had deserted from the navy of his most Catholic Majesty of France. He had been a very junior master’s mate then, but he had been telling people that he had been a maitre, a master, for so long that he now believed it himself.

For nearly twenty years he had been on the account, an extraordinarily long career for a pirate. His name was well

known among those who used the sea. It carried with it suggestions of the most egregious debauchery and violence. Accurate suggestions, and much to LeRois’s liking.

Six years before, seven years before, no one would have questioned LeRois’s right to the rank of captain. He was one of those few of the pirate tribe who was strong enough and mean enough and lucky enough that he could consider himself the undisputed master of his ship. No voting, no arguing, no threats to his authority. Such things were the practice aboard other ships. Not his.

But that was before he had fought young Barrett, and lost.

He scowled as his eyes swept the beach. He paused, squinting at a familiar face. Not Darnall. It took LeRois a few seconds to place it-the face seemed to shimmer like heat off the beach-but then he gasped in surprise, staggered back a few feet in the soft sand.

It was Barrett. He stood not twenty feet away, leaning against a stack of casks, grinning. Just as LeRois remembered him all those years before, a frightened young seaman of fifteen aboard a little English merchantman, a victim of LeRois and his tribe.

“Son…of…bitch!” LeRois shouted, the protracted curse starting as a low rumble in his throat and building to a scream. He brought the bottle back over his head. The boy changed into the man as he had last seen him, sword dripping gore and blood, LeRois’s blood, bidding farewell.

LeRois heaved the bottle, and even as he did he realized that Barrett was no more than a hallucination, another of those ghostly images that were appearing to him with disturbing frequency.

The half-full bottle shattered against the stack of casks, showering the man sleeping in their shade with glass and whiskey. He startled up, looked around, and saw LeRois standing there, shaking, sword drawn.

“LeRois, you are a goddamned crazy son of a whore. Fucking lunatic,” the man growled, pulling himself to his feet and walking away. LeRois followed him with his eyes. Did not

move. There was a time when no man would have dared to say that to him, no man would have insulted him and then turned his back. That was before he had been bested by the whore’s git.

He felt something inside him snapping, breaking with the strain. Like the slow bending crack of a yard springing under the pressure of a sail. Like shoring giving way. The vision of the boy had unnerved him. Now this bastard was ignoring him as if he presented no threat at all. That was too much. Too much by half. Jean-Pierre LeRois was indeed a threat, and it was time to remind the others of that fact.

He had let things slip, but now there was a plan, a plan that would make them all rich, and the means to carry it off. That thought gave him back the confidence he had enjoyed in the early days. It was time to regain his control.

He wiped his sweating hand on his coat, took a fresh grip of his sword. He headed off across the beach, his eyes fixed on the back of the man he had disturbed. His shoes sunk deep in the sand, and he felt the hot grit under his stockings. His footsteps made no noise. He picked up his pace, his breath coming faster, though he had walked no more than a dozen yards.

He was ten feet away when the man sensed the threat, the loom of LeRois’s six-foot-two-inch, two-hundred-and-ninety-pound frame coming up behind. He turned fast. His eyes leaped from LeRois’s sword to his eyes and back to his sword. He jerked a pistol from a sash around his waist, cocked it, and pointed it, but it had been many years since LeRois was bothered by the sight of a pistol pointed at his gut and his advance did not falter.

LeRois raised the sword over his head. An animal scream began to build in his throat. The lock of the pistol snapped and nothing happened. The man’s eyes went wide as he looked up at the gleaming sword that the big man held aloft.

“LeRois!”

LeRois stopped and glanced to one side, then the other. He had heard his name, clear as a pistol shot: “Ler-wah,” spo

ken with that ugly English pronunciation, as if the fucking Roast-beefs could not work their tongues to create the elegant French sound.

But had he, really? Or had he just imagined it? There were men around him, watching him. Were they real? He was suddenly very uncertain. He could taste the terror in the back of his throat.

“LeRois!” William Darnall came trudging up. He paused, reached his hand under his wool shirt, and scratched hard. Spit a stream of tobacco into the sand. “Reckon we should get under way today.”

LeRois stared at him. Darnall had called his name. His quartermaster. He had not imagined it at all. “Oui, we get under way.”

Darnall squinted at him, and his eyes moved toward the sword. “What do you reckon to do with that?”

LeRois looked at the sword in his hand as if he had never seen it before. He remembered the man he was about to kill.

He turned, but the man was gone and he could not see him anywhere among the pirates and whores who were watching the confrontation. A fight to the death in the pirates’ camp was considered a fine amusement. Like a good cockfight or bull baiting.

LeRois shrugged and slid the sword back into its scabbard. “The fucking cochon. I let him live,” he said to Darnall by way of explanation.

Darnall took a long and contemplative chew of his tobacco and then spit another brown stream onto the sand. With the sleeve of his light blue wool coat, which had once been a dark blue wool coat, he wiped away that part of the spittle that had not cleared his long black beard. He resettled the faded, battered, and salt-stained cocked hat on his head.

Like LeRois, he wore a red sash around his waist and under that a leather belt that supported a cutlass and a brace of pistols. Rather than breeches he wore the wide-legged trousers of the common seaman. Flea-bitten calves and ankles protruded from the frayed ends of his trousers. He was barefoot.

As quartermaster, Darnall was second in command of the Vengeance, though in fact, like most pirate quartermasters, he ran the ship, save for those times when they went into a fight.

LeRois squinted at him. Darnall was being very familiar with him, as if they were old friends. More and more the quartermaster had been treating him that way. LeRois did not see in Darnall’s manner the hesitancy and the underlying fear that he had once evoked in all men, and that irritated him.

He was swimming up to the surface of the sea from the black depths. He had been bested by Barrett all those years before, and it had dragged him down. But now he could see daylight again, overhead. He would break through. He would see the fear again.

“What say you, Captain? We get under way on the ebb this afternoon?”

LeRois was certain that the men of the Vengeance had been discussing this, had indeed already decided. They had finished careening her a week before, had set her rig to rights and loaded stores aboard. She was ready for sea.

He felt the shoring in his mind slipping further, cracking and splintering. Soon there would be no more playacting like this. He would take absolute command again.

“Oui, farirez plus de voiles, we make sail at the first of the ebb.”

LeRois’s eyes moved across the beach to the narrow strip of water between New Providence and Hog Island that constituted Nassau Harbor. The Vengeance was riding at a single anchor, her sails drying to a bowline. She looked like a wreck from that distance, hardly good enough for the breaker’s yard. It was time for LeRois to change ships, his men’s attitude, his own fortunes.

And now there was a plan. A great partnership. Set up through the conduit of his former quartermaster, Ezekiel Ripley. As much of a plan as LeRois’s mind was capable of formulating after twenty years of violence and disease, near starvation, and the most abject debauchery.

But that was no matter. The finer points were the purview of those ashore. He just had to plunder the helpless merchantmen who carried their cargoes throughout the Caribbean. And that he was certainly capable of doing.

It was well past noon when they began to ferry the men out to the Vengeance. The longboat had been unwisely hauled up on the beach and left to bake under the tropical sun. The planking had dried and shrunk, opening up the seams and requiring those not pulling an oar to bail.

All save LeRois. He was captain, he would have none of that. He caught the few askance looks thrown aft at him by those of the ship’s company who resented his assumption of superiority. Ignored them. They would learn soon enough who was in charge, and those who did not would die.

It took seven trips back and forth before all of the Vengeance’s men were aboard. The preponderance of them were English and French, but there were Scots and Irishmen too, and Dutchmen and Swedes and Danes. One hundred and twenty-four men all told, three quarters of them white, representing nearly all of the seafaring nations of Europe.

Black men made up the other quarter of the crew. Some were escaped slaves who had learned all there was to know about cruelty on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. Some had been on their way to the auction houses when they were taken from the Vengeances’ victims, brought aboard to do the menial tasks aboard the pirate ship-cooking and manning the pumps, tarring rigging and slushing down masts-and had earned their way into the pirate tribe through hard use in battle.

However the black men had arrived, they were now Brethren of the Coast, full members of the ship’s company. The only place in the Old World or the New where black men and white stood side by side as equals.

And they were, all of them, black men and white, heavily laden with weapons. And they were all drunk.

“Ship the capstan bars, rig the swifter,” Darnall called from the waist, and the crew of the Vengeance shuffled off in various

directions to perform those tasks. They could do them just as well

drunk as sober. It was how they generally did them.

“Rig the messenger! Nippers, stand ready!”

It was half an hour of shuffling, tossing gear aside, and digging more gear out from the piles of junk that littered the deck before the capstan was rigged for weighing anchor. “Heave away!” Darnall shouted, and the pawls began their steady click click click as the men stamped the capstan around.

In the bow, the nippers lashed the heavy anchor cable to the messenger, shifting their nips as the eight-inch thick rope came inboard and was fed down the hatch.

The job of stowing the wet cable away on the cable tier, wrestling the tons of rope into neat coils, was a hot, filthy, horrible job, and since there were no slaves or captives aboard to do it, it was not done. Rather, the cable was allowed to pile up where it fell, and if it rotted from being stowed wet it was no matter. Every ship had anchor cable aboard. They could always take more.

LeRois stood aft on the quarterdeck, arms folded, watching, saying little. Gave the occasional order to the men on the helm. Darnall was the quartermaster and he was running the evolution, just as he ran all the mundane aspects of the Vengeance’s operation.

LeRois had only one thing to do, and that was to give the order for their destination. He wondered how receptive the Vengeances would be. Wondered if he would have to kill anyone to get his orders obeyed. Perhaps it would be best if he did, get things off on the right foot. The incident on the beach had left him anxious for blood.

“Anchor’s a-peak!” Darnall called out. “Hands to the sheets and halyards! Come along, you bloody laggards, haul away all!”

The Vengeance’s sails had never been stowed, since they were prone to rot when stowed and, more to the point, stowing them was a great effort that would just have had to be undone once it was time to get under way. For that reason the Vengeances had only to sheet topsails home and haul away on the

halyards, then heave a pawl on the capstan to break the anchor loose and they were under way.

“Fall off, fall off, meet ’er,” LeRois growled at the helmsmen as the bow of the Vengeace swung off. Forward, the men at the braces heaved away, trimming sail to the new course with never an order shouted, never the least bit of confusion. Lazy drunkards that they were, the Vengeances were prime seamen to a man, like most pirate crews, and they knew their business.

The Vengeance steadied on her course, sailing west out of Nassau Harbor, as more and more canvas was spread to the trade winds: courses, topgallants, the lateen mizzen, the spritsail and spritsail topsail, set and trimmed with all the speed and efficiency an expert though drunken crew could display.

The ship itself was a pathetic sight. Running gear piled in heaps along the waterways and on top of the six pounder guns that lined the weather deck. The long quarterdeck and forecastle that she had sported when LeRois and his men had first taken her had been cut back to give more fighting room in the waist. It had not been neatly done. The jagged edges of hacked-off planks still protruded here and there. The wood on the once-covered areas of the deck was altogether darker then that of exposed places. Great white patches showed in the standing rigging where the tar had worn away. The paint was blistered by the sun and flaking off.

The Vengeance needed a great deal of work, a fact that was entirely ignored by the men aboard her.

Once the ship was under way, and sails trimmed, each man claimed for himself a piece of the deck on which to sit and continue the drinking and gambling and sleeping that had been interrupted by the afternoon’s work.

LeRois stepped up to the quarterdeck rail. “Ecoutez! Ecoutez! Listen here, you men!”

Men put bottles down. Heads turned aft.

“We’re going to the British colonies on the American coast, do you hear?” LeRois said. “I am setting course for there.”

The men looked at one another, some nodding agreement, some shaking heads. A low murmur ran across the deck.

The bosun was the first to speak. LeRois had expected as much. He was a sea lawyer. A new man, volunteered from one of their last victims. He would die by LeRois’s hand in the next minute if he objected too strongly. Set a good example. “I reckon there’s fair pickings down around Panama way, or south of Florida.”

“Perhaps,” said LeRois, “but we go to the American coast.”

Silence swept like a cat’s paw across the deck. The bosun coughed, stood up from where he had been leaning on the fife rail around the mainmast. “Reckon we should vote. Says so in the articles.”

There was a gentle murmur. “Reckon he’s got a right to ask,” someone said, just audible.

LeRois stepped forward and down the ladder to the waist, moving slowly. He said nothing. The bosun’s face swam before him. He felt the excitement rise as he closed with the man. LeRois the master was back, LeRois the Devil.

“I reckon we should vote, is all I said,” the bosun began again. He saw that his words had no effect on LeRois, and that the huge man was still advancing. Reached for the knife in his belt.

LeRois grabbed the knife by the blade just as it cleared the leather, twisted it, cutting his own hand open, and tossed it away. With his other hand he grabbed the bosun’s neck under his wispy, uneven beard and squeezed, watching with delight as the man’s eyes went wide, his fists striking feebly at LeRois’s arm, unable to get past his long reach and strike his face or body. The bosun flailed wildly, growing weaker, growing more frightened and desperate.

“America, Captain, like you said,” someone called, and there was a chorus of agreement among those men who knew LeRois well enough to still fear him. LeRois tossed the gasping bosun to the deck. He felt the warm blood running down his palm. Dripping off the tips of his fingers.

“Very good,” he said and stamped aft, then to the helmsman said, “Make your course north-northwest, a quarter west.”

LeRois did not tell the men about his plans. He had a vague notion that they would not believe him.

But they would soon enough, when he had made them all wealthy men. Once they reached America. Once they were cruising off the Capes. Once they were in the Chesapeake.