Chapter 34
He was dead. Marlowe laid his fingers gently on James’s face, eased his eyelids shut, laid him back on the dirt floor. He stood and looked at the fresh blood that covered his hands. James’s blood. He did not try to wipe it off.
The room was crowded with men: Bickerstaff, the Elizabeth Galleys. Less than a minute before, the Galleys had been a howling, blood-crazed mob, set on looting and tearing apart whatever fell in their path, but now they stood silent, respectful.
They all knew King James from the Elizabeth Galley’s fitting out. They had witnessed his final act as they raced for the factor’s hut, had seen him fling himself headlong into the pistol’s barrel, charging blade-first with such momentum that he had skewered his enemy and driven the sword right through him and through the mud wall of the hut, leaving the man pinned upright, even after he had suffered his mortal wound. The Elizabeth Galleys could respect such a man.
“A minute. A bloody goddamned minute more and we would have been here,” Marlowe said.
“And then what?” asked Bickerstaff. “Prevent James from dying thus, so that he could fulfill his promise to go back and be hanged like a dog? This thing”-Bickerstaff nodded toward the corpse pinned to the wall-“must be the infamous Madshaka. We should all be so lucky as to die quick at the moment of our ultimate triumph.”
Marlowe smiled a weak smile. “You are right, of course. As always. Now I pray, Francis, that you will be kind enough as to live until we return to Virginia? I shall tell the governor that we did indeed hunt King James down and we saw him dead, but I am not certain he will take my word on it. He will believe you, if you say it is so, but I am not convinced he would take my word alone.”
“I shall certainly endeavor to live that long and I will be happy to confirm your story. There is nothing in it that is not the truth.”
Marlowe looked around the wreckage of the room. A big ring of keys hung from a hook on the wall and he crossed the room, snatched them up. He turned to his men. “I need ten of you with me, the rest are free to find whatever is worth carrying away from here. Francis, you will never object to our looting slave traders, I assume?”
Bickerstaff sniffed. “I do not care to be involved with your moral relativism, Thomas.”
“Good, then come with me.”
They crossed the compound, approached the trunk carefully. To Thomas’s great relief there was one among the captives there who had a small amount of English and a small amount of the coastal pidgin, enough that Marlowe could convey to him what he intended, and he to some others, and those to others, until everyone in the trunk was reasonably sure that they were not in for greater torment from these new white men. And when Marlowe was sure they were sufficiently mollified, he opened the iron door and let them shuffle out and knocked the chains and yokes off those who were still so encumbered.
They met up with the rest of the Elizabeth Galleys, who had found a small quantity of gold and some firearms worth the taking. They wrapped King James’s body in a sheet stripped from the factor’s bed and fashioned a litter from the tablecloth and carried him back down the trail.
On the beach they found the men who had not fared well in the surf; some of them were well recovered and some were not, and of those that were not, three were dead.
At the edge of the tree line they dug graves, four of them, eight feet deep and two wide, and in them they put King James and the three seamen who might have been James’s shipmates but instead had died while hunting him down.
Francis Bickerstaff said a few words and they covered them over with the African soil.
The sun was just below the horizon and starting to light the eastern sky. Soon the land breeze would fill in to lift the Elizabeth Galley and her prize off the shore and out to sea.
Marlowe watched the last bit of dirt being thrown on the grave, took a deep breath, looked up and down the beach. The longboat had been hauled back down to the water’s edge and his men and the people freed from the factory were milling about on the hard-packed sand.
“To hell with this damned place,” Marlowe said to no one in particular. “Let us be gone from here.”
He turned toward the sea, marched off toward the waiting boat. James was not the first good man he had left to his eternal rest, not the first friend, and Marlowe did not think he would be the last.
Beware, beware, beware…
Billy Bird made the proposal to allow a woman, one Elizabeth Marlowe, to take passage with them to Virginia, and the Bloody Revenges agreed by formal vote.
They took their democracy very seriously, and though there was not one aboard who was not aware of the real facts of the matter, there was never a hint from one of them that he had ever set eyes on Elizabeth before. They all viewed Elizabeth as something between a talisman and a pet, which was their singular reason for agreeing to override an otherwise iron-clad rule.
They would take her to Virginia, but no more. Seven days down the coast and they hove to in Hampton Roads in the dark hours of the morning and took Elizabeth ashore by boat, depositing her amid the tiny cluster of homes that constituted the town of Newport News. And despite Billy’s profuse apologies for such treatment, and his promise to return shortly for another visit, he seemed as anxious as the others to be back aboard the Revenge and gone.
A few hours later, when the sun broke from the water and burned off the late-summer mist that clung to the top of the bay like cotton batting, the Bloody Revenge was nowhere to be seen.
When the morning had progressed enough that she felt she could go abroad without arousing suspicion, she made her way into town and hired a horse and from there rode the twelve miles to Marlowe House.
She had no notion of what to expect after her five-week absence. Charred ruins, perhaps, or Frederick Dunmore living there, having found some way to lay legal claim of possession?
What she hoped more than anything was to find Thomas home, to ride up and see him sitting there on the big porch in his familiar position, booted feet kicked up on the rail, a glass or a pewter mug in his hand, engrossed in some philosophical discussion with Francis Bicker-staff, or goading his friend with silly banter.
But he was not there, no one was there, and the house was little changed. The garden was overgrown, and the grass looked wild, more field than manicured lawn, and the house itself forlorn, empty, musty, but still generally in the same shape it had been in when she left. The animals were still alive, and looked well fed, which meant that her neighbor had sent a boy over to tend to them, as she had asked he might in the note she had dispatched to him.
Tired as she was, and sore from the long ride, she built a fire and boiled bucket after bucket of water and took a long and luxurious bath in the big copper tub. She lay there for hours as the water went from hot to warm to cool, and finally she pulled herself out and crawled naked into the big bed that she and Thomas shared and then she slept.
She woke at dawn the next morning. She woke alert, ready. She dressed in a riding outfit, saddled a horse, and left Marlowe House once again.
It took her an hour to reach the big house that Frederick Dunmore owned on the Jamestown Road, a mile from Williamsburg proper. She reined her horse to a stop on the road and looked down the long drive leading to the front door. She could see some people moving around in the fields beyond the house. They would be indentured servants. Dunmore kept no black slaves-an anomaly for a wealthy man in the tidewater-and now Elizabeth understood more of why that was.
She dismounted, tied her horse to a sapling on the edge of the road, pulled a leather pouch from the saddlebag. She did not want Dun-more to know she was coming until she was there, so she walked down the drive and stepped quietly onto the porch.