The Blackbirder

Chapter 21

The BLOODY Revenge had been five days under way, running north along the coast with the wind and the Gulf Stream under her coattails, before Elizabeth worked up the courage to ask even one of the questions that plagued her.

She had stayed in the great cabin for the chief of the time, and Billy Bird had not encouraged her to come out. After the fight on deck, after she was secured aft and Billy had taken his leave of her and ordered the Revenges to up anchor and creep away under topsails, she had sat, silent, waiting for the sounds of Billy Bird’s men murdering him for having smuggled a woman aboard.

But after a while he had come back to the great cabin and she let him examine the slight wound across her stomach as she held her breasts in cupped hands.

“Whatever was that about?” she had asked, then gave a little gasp as Billy gently swabbed her cut with whiskey. “Who were those men?”

“Bloody villains. We had an arrangement, you know, for certain goods, and those damned thieves were hoping to storm the ship and take it all. God’s body, I don’t know what is happening these days. Is no one to be trusted?”

“Humph.” There was more that she wanted to ask, but she was afraid, and more afraid of the answer, and so she remained silent and waited for the moment when Billy would be killed and the others would come for her.

But five days later it had yet to happen, and she could discern nothing but the routine operations of a ship at sea, the change of watch, the clanging of the bells, the men tramping below for their regular meals. So on that fifth day, when Billy stepped into the cabin bearing their dinner, she said, “Billy, my dear, I am pleased to see that you have not been knocked on the head or thrown overboard.”

“As am I. But why ever would you think such a thing would happen?”

“Well”-she spoke softly so that her voice would not carry through the skylight-“you did tell me that there was a rule concerning the smuggling of women on board.”

“Oh, that? I suppose there could be some trouble, if I had brought a woman aboard, but you are the honored younger brother of Malachias Barrett. Besides, the punishment is marooning, and it ain’t so bad, you know. The guilty party is given some water and a loaded pistol for when that runs out.”

“The soul of mercy, to be sure. But Billy, I fear that during the fight on deck I might have revealed my true colors, as it were…my hair and my… the tear, you know, in my shirt. And I believe I was screaming a bit.”

“Oh, nothing of the sort. You were the very picture of manhood. I was screaming as well, you know.”

“Billy, tell me the truth.”

“Ah, the truth…well… let me say first that those lovely breasts of yours were never for a moment revealed to those who should not see them, not even to me, in fact, who should. But the hair, and the screaming, that may have given you away. In truth, it did.

“But as it happens, we never suspected those rogues were laying for us. That’s why the chief of my guns was still below. They had insisted on no firearms. Would have taken us quite by surprise had you not kindly dumped piss on them. And even with that warning the fight was going badly for us, damned badly. Without you had come on deck when you did and shot such a string of them we might well have been taken. You saved Quartermaster Vane’s life, and he knows it. Saved mine as well.”

“Shot a string of them, you say? For the life of me I cannot recall but a few images. Well, in any event, I am glad to have helped.”

“You more than helped, my dear. I’ve been keeping a weather eye out for some grumbling amongst the men, but there is none. Not a word has been said. I do believe they are inclined to overlook the one little fact of your sex, in gratitude for the great service done them.”

“I am pleased to hear that your people were pleased. But they will not turn on you?”

“They will not. Though if I try to pull such a thing again, I must make sure the lady is of the same heroic bent as you. Now will you not come on deck and see Long Island? Long Island in New York?”

Elizabeth did indeed go on deck, gladly, for she was heartily sick of looking at the inside of the great cabin, even for all its fine appointments and grand store of books and wine.

The warm air that blew in through the after windows below was stronger still on deck. Her long hair would have plagued her, blowing forward and whipping her in the face, had it not been tightly clubbed, with a cocked hat shoved down on her head for good measure.

She was still dressed in a thoroughly masculine fashion, she and Billy agreeing that if the Revenges were inclined to be so charitable as to ignore a capital offense, then they should not push their luck by flaunting it. So she stepped up to the quarterdeck, awkwardly, in Marlowe’s too-big shoes, her breasts and her feminine contours again hidden by shirt, waistcoat, and coat. She was greeted with enthusiastic smiles and nods-which she returned with what she hoped were manly gestures-and knowing smiles and lascivious stares, which she ignored.

“William, good day to you,” said Quartermaster Vane without the least hint of irony. He pointed with his bearded chin over the larboard side. “That land yonder is Long Island, in New York. This wind holds, I reckon we’ll fetch Boston in a day or two.”

Elizabeth nodded, smiled, a sort of crooked grin. She did not trust her voice, but neither did she feel she could remain silent, so she swallowed and said, “I look forward to that, Mr. Vane,” in as manly a tone as she could muster without sounding like she was trying to sound manly. Such an absurd charade! She would be glad to shed herself of it.

But she could not until they were in Boston, and then she would be faced with a new set of problems. She was going there to find out what secret Dunmore held in his breast, what truth she might reveal to the world to destroy him before he destroyed her and Thomas and all that they had.

It had seemed daunting enough in Virginia, but now, faced with the real question of how she would begin that search, the problem seemed insurmountable. And to make it worse, it was all based on a vague recollection of Billy Bird’s, a fact on which she quite purposely did not dwell.

She turned her face into the breeze, cocked her head to feel the sun direct on her skin. It was warm and the air was fresh and the brig rolled along on a rich blue sea under a robin’s-egg sky.

The Bloody Revenges were delighted with her presence, and it appeared that they would not leave her old, dear friend Billy Bird to die on a barren stretch of sand.

That was as much as she could hope for, and there was nothing she could do about Boston until she arrived, and with that realization she allowed herself to relax and feel content, more content and more safe than she had felt in a long, long time.

That feeling, and the fine weather that in part engendered it, held for the next two days as they raised, then left astern, the green hump of Nantucket and then followed the long, low arm of Cape Cod north and west. At last they left the sandy shores of Provincetown in their wake and headed across Massachusetts Bay, and with every mile of open water they covered, Elizabeth found herself growing more tense, more grim, more doubtful.

“Have you been to Boston before, William?” Billy asked, and in her pessimistic introspection it took her a moment to realize he was speaking to her, to recall that she was William. William Barrett, younger brother of the pirate Malachias Barrett, known also as Thomas Marlowe. Damn Billy Bird and his damned perverse sense of humor.

“No, Billy, I have not.” They were at the quarterdeck hances, Billy sitting on the bulwark, a hand resting on one of the main shrouds, Elizabeth leaning on the rail that ran along the forward edge of the quarterdeck. Beyond the Revenge’s bow the green hilly country of Massachusetts Bay Colony took up more than one hundred and eighty degrees of horizon. The shore with which they were closing, which an hour before had appeared as unbroken land, was now revealing itself to be a number of islands scattered across the entrance to Boston Harbor, like a blockading fleet.

“It’s a bloody dreary place, damned Puritans with their somber faces and their black clothes. Any woman there shows the least bit of spirit they hang her for a bloody witch.” He looked around to see if anyone was within earshot and added, “So you best watch yourself.”

“If I am accused I shall make a quick escape upon my broomstick. But as I hear it, they are done with that nonsense.”

“Perhaps. In any event, these Puritans have a bloody lot of money. They can hardly avoid it, they do nothing but work and pray. They are a serious, sober, chaste, and deeply pious people, which is why I find them such intolerable bores.”

“Then why have you spent so much time in Boston?”

“I just said, my dear. These Puritans have a bloody lot of money.”

The Revenge followed the ship channel between Georges and Lovell Islands, winding her way northwest through island after island, pine tree-capped rock thrust up from the bottom of Massachusetts Bay. It was late afternoon when Governors Island and Bird Island passed along the starboard side and before them, two miles away, lay Boston, like a toy city, glowing in the rays of the late-day sun.

The city was arrayed along a tapered hump of land, not much above four miles across, beginning where low, narrow Roxbury Neck clung tenuously to the rest of the colony and running north to where the city ended in a great cluster of buildings and wharves and a tangle of masts at the North End. Rising above the town, like a great sleeping beast, Beacon Hill, with its tall tower, and beyond that, hills that were higher still, looking down on the city, hills that Billy informed Elizabeth were separated from Boston by the Charles River, which they could not see.

There were watercraft everywhere, boats pulled by oars or working under sailing rig, fishing smacks, sloops, brigs, heavy full-rigged merchantmen. The harbor was alive with activity, vessels working in and out, setting and stowing sails. After tiny, sleepy Williamsburg, and the relative peace and isolation of the past five days, this bustling, crowded scene was no little shock to Elizabeth.

And it was not just Boston Harbor. The city itself, rather than ending abruptly at the water’s edge, seemed to ease itself into the bay with a complex array of wharves and shipyards and batteries. There were ships tied to nearly every inch of waterfront, so many ships that one could not tell where one left off and the next began, or which masts belonged to which vessel. Jutting out from the middle of the half-moon harbor was Long Wharf, over half a mile long, and the center of the frenetic harbor activity.

Perpendicular to Long Wharf, and even longer, Old Wharf ran like a connecting street from the middle of Long Wharf north to where it touched the shore at the foot of Clark ’s Wharf. And all along the whole of it, ships, men, trade, and beyond that the city of two- and three-story buildings, shoulder to shoulder and rising one above the next as the city of Boston climbed up the hill at its center.

“Body of me, Billy, I had no notion that Boston was such a city!” Elizabeth said, and to her great annoyance Billy burst into laughter.

“Dear me, you have been too long out of London! Sure, by the paltry standards of America it is some great metropolis, but come now, have you really turned such a country bumpkin? This is no city, not by the standards of the civilized world.”

“Humph.” Billy was right, of course. Perhaps she was becoming a country bumpkin. She might not be fit for the backwoods, but the dozen or so houses and shops and ordinaries in Williamsburg were metropolis enough for her now. She was done with cities. She knew cities, and she knew that little good happened in them.

The sun was disappearing behind the distant hills by the time the Revenge found a clear anchorage among the vessels off Long Wharf and dropped her best bower into the Massachusetts Bay mud. Billy, for reasons that Elizabeth could well guess at, preferred to go ashore after dark in any event, so they had their supper in the great cabin and packed Elizabeth’s chest with those things she might need ashore, such as dresses and her toilet, and when the sun was well down they were rowed to the Long Wharf in the Revenge’s jolly boat.

The Revenge’s boatswain, Ezra Howland, and a foretopman whom Elizabeth knew only as Black Tom, pulled the boat’s oars. In the bottom of the boat lay their swords, wrapped in canvas, beside her chest and Billy’s seabag. Under their coats, mostly hidden, each carried a brace of pistols. It seemed a lot of weaponry for pious, Puritan Boston, but Elizabeth made no comment.

The jolly boat at last drew up to a worn and slime-covered ladder that ran from the Long Wharf, ten feet over their heads, down into the dark water from which it rose.

“William?” Billy gestured toward the ladder and Elizabeth rose on uncertain legs and grabbed the ladder and found one of the rungs with her oversized shoe. She could feel the slickness and she made certain of her foothold before stepping up and up again. The tide, by good fortune, was more than halfway through the flood and she did not have too far to climb before she stepped up onto Long Wharf itself, moving aside for Billy with his seabag over his shoulder and Black Tom with her chest.

The sun was gone, but night had not brought much of a lull in the activity along the wharf. By lantern and moonlight fishermen unloaded catches and cleaned their day’s haul and packed it down in barrels of salt. Serious men hurried along the prodigious length of the wharf on some business of great personal import. Piemen and oystermen and women selling clothes and ribbons still paraded along, calling out the virtues of their wares, hoping to make one last ha’penny before retiring for the night. It seemed wild, frenetic, harried.

Elizabeth smiled and shook her head in wonder at what a naive, simple country girl she had become.

“Here, boy,” Billy snapped, and a young boy with a wheelbarrow grabbed up the handles and maneuvered the vehicle over to them with practiced ease. “You know the Ship and Compass on Crooked Lane, by the Town House?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Take this dunnage there, boy, and be quick.” He pressed a coin into the boy’s hand-Billy’s usual excessive payment-which made the young man’s eyes go wide. When the shock had worn off he lifted the trunk and bag into the barrow and hurried off with great alacrity.

“Good lad,” Billy called after him. He nodded his thanks to Black Tom and then, with a gesture as if he were welcoming Elizabeth into his home, he indicated that they might now proceed down the wharf to the town beyond.

They stepped over rough-cut planks worn smooth by the traffic. To their left, the wharf’s single row of permanent buildings, big two- and three-story structures, surprisingly substantial, given that their foundation was just a wooden platform.

Long Wharf ran on to King Street and into the heart of Boston town. A block beyond, Crooked Lane intersected King. The Ship and Compass was two doors down from the corner.

Elizabeth paused, looked up at the sign that hung over the door, a bas-relief ship superimposed on a compass rose.

They had made it, had arrived in Boston at last. On Billy’s urging she had agreed to come all this way, to try and root out Frederick Dunmore’s darkest secret.

And suddenly all of the fine arguments Billy Bird had made in the inn in Williamsburg seemed insane, the task before them impossible.

Whatever had she been thinking?