Marlowe smiled. Bickerstaff was right, and it was a good indication that this was the right ship and he, Marlowe, had missed it entirely. He was too busy looking at the steeve of the bowsprit, the sheer, the number of black-painted wales, the somewhat archaic lift at the peak of the mizzen yard, to even notice the more obvious clues. Sometimes knowledge just got in the way.
“You think it is King James?”
“I think it might well be,” Marlowe said. “I am sorry now we put those mad Frenchmen ashore in Sao Miguel, they could have told us for certain.” Then after a moment’s reflection he said, “No, I am still glad to be shed of them. But I think we will clear the ship for action and go to quarters and be ready when we come up with them.”
This order he passed to first mate Fleming who had it relayed in bellowing voices along the deck and below, an order that took the Elizabeth Galleys entirely by surprise. None of them were still abed; it being past dawn, the watch below had been roused and were making a clean sweep fore and aft and seeing to breakfast and attending to those many jobs that needed doing before breakfast and the change of watch. It was a steady routine that had gone unbroken for several weeks now, since their fight with the Frenchman, and there had been no indication that things would be different that morning.
For that reason there was more staggering around, more dumb looks, more questions than Marlowe would have preferred. But still the men fell to with credible speed, casting off guns, arranging tubs of match and buckets of water, fetching out cutlasses and pikes.
They were a good crew, disciplined, happy enough. Griffin’s death had been like pulling a rotten tooth: painful at first, but in the end a vast improvement.
Fifteen minutes later they were ready, as the sea breeze carried the Elizabeth Galley inshore, closing, closing with the Frenchman. Marlowe kept the glass trained on the ship, but he could see nothing out of the ordinary. A few figures moved around the deck, and they looked to be Africans, though it was still too far to tell. A plume of smoke rose from just abaft the foremast, but it looked like nothing more sinister than a galley fire.
“Where there is smoke, there is breakfast,” Marlowe observed to Bickerstaff.
“Where there is breakfast, there is no fear of imminent attack.”
That was true enough, and it added to the confusion of the thing. And then overhead the Galley’s main topsail gave a slap as it collapsed and then snapped full again in a fluke of wind. They were losing the sea breeze. Soon it would be dead calm, and after that the wind would fill in right on their nose.
“Mr. Fleming, let us see to the anchor. We’ll carry on as close as we can.”
The wind held for ten minutes more, then came in puffs that began to box the compass, and then died away altogether, leaving the Elizabeth Galley to drift beam on to the incoming seas. She wallowed side to side in those swells that marched on under her keel and then flung themselves in breaking foam onto the beach a mile away.
The anchor was let go and the bow came around to point into the waves, making the ship pitch rather than roll, an altogether more comfortable motion. And when she finally snubbed to a stop at the end of the anchor hawser, they were no more than one hundred yards from the suspect ship.
Both ships were pointing into the waves and so were nearly in line with each other. Thomas stood at the taffrail, scrutinizing the other.
He could see that the people aboard were indeed Africans, but they appeared to be women. He could see no one that he could positively identify as a man. Perhaps all the men were ashore. That would explain the absence of alarm. But how odd. Why would they do that? Why would James go ashore in Whydah, of all places? It made no sense at all. The disparate parts could not be made to fit.
But that was all right. He did not have to understand everything. The facts were these: He had found a ship that looked very like the one James had taken. Aboard that ship were African women. Not slaves bound in chains and ready to be stowed down but women walking the decks free, cooking, going on with life.
That was not at all what one would expect to see aboard a ship anchored off Whydah.
And that meant that he had found King James.
Chapter 31
James did little that day but watch and hide. When the others awoke, they crept down to the tree line and knelt beside James and watched the Elizabeth Galley coming to her anchor. They watched as her men brailed up the sails, laid out along her yards, and stowed the canvas as the ship finally came to a rest one hundred yards to seaward of their captured French merchantman. They said nothing.
Each one of the men crouching at the forest edge was intimately familiar with that ship. Indeed, so obsessed had Marlowe been with her fitting out that there was not one of his people who had not had a hand in it, from the men who had pounded home trunnels and drifts and stepped masts and hove out rigging gangs, to the women who had seen to making hammocks and outfitting the great cabin with curtains and cushions and even building some of the lighter sails, to the children who had been given tar brushes and buckets of slush and put to work at the messier jobs for which their juvenile indelicacy made them ideally suited.
The Elizabeth Galley was a part of their home, a fixture from the docks at Jamestown. After all they had endured, and all the miles they had sailed, there was something unreal about seeing her here. It was as if they had walked down the forest trail and come upon Marlowe House itself, transported whole and set down on that strange land.
Good Boy was the first to speak. “Goddamn, I ain’t never been so happy to see anything in my life.” A muttering of agreement followed.
James frowned, kept his eyes on the ship. The boys were reacting, they weren’t thinking. They were so far from everything they knew, hunted by strangers with whom they could not speak, in a land such as they had never seen before. Of course they would be relieved to see something, anything, familiar, even if that thing had come to carry them all back to the gallows.
Or perhaps not.
He himself was a dead man, he knew that. Everyone knew him, the black man who had fought at Marlowe’s side, the arrogant nigger who commanded the Northumberland. There would be nothing but the noose for him if he returned, and if the court did not deign to put it there, the mob surely would, and the white-suited Frederick Dun-more, Esq., leading the way.
But it was just possible that no one knew the identity of the young men with him. If Sam and William had kept their mouths shut, then Quash and Cato and Good Boy and Joshua might be able to return and blend back in with the others at Marlowe House and no one the wiser.
But the first step was begging Marlowe for his mercy, and that was asking a lot: asking a lot of Marlowe and of himself. He had never asked anyone for mercy before, and not surprisingly he had received little of it during his life. He would never ask for himself. But for these others, whose lives had been destroyed by his own unchecked rage, for them he would humble himself.
He was about to lead them out onto the beach when he saw movement on the Elizabeth Galley’s deck. “Hold a moment,” he said. They remained where they were, crouched at the tree line, watching as the Galley’s longboat was swayed over the side, as a party of men climbed down and took their place on the thwarts. The sunlight flashed on the white oar blades as they were raised up in two lines, and then the boat was under way, pulling for the French merchantman.
It covered the distance quickly, the oars pulled by expert hands. It swept around the stern, circled, disappeared from sight around her bow, then reappeared again.
“What he doing?” Joshua asked.
“Marlowe don’t know it ain’t a trap,” James said. “He don’t understand why he don’t see no men on board. He going to take a good look before he goes aboard her.”