Elizabeth, apparently, did not know that. And judging from her expression, whatever the secret was, it was damning indeed.
“Very well,” she said at last. “What is it you want of me?”
“You have become close with Marlowe, I understand.”
“He called on me once. Is that ‘close’?”
“Nonetheless, he has an eye for you,” Wilkenson continued, “and we shall use that to our advantage. You will go to his house at some time that he is there and…seduce him into some illicit liaison. I shall arrive, prepared to issue a challenge, and when I do you shall scream that you are being violated, at which point I will burst in and catch him in flagrante delicto. We shall arrest him for rape and see him tried and convicted. You, of course, shall testify against him.”
Even as he said it Wilkenson realized how utterly craven a plan it was. But in order to see Marlowe hanged he had to catch him in a provable crime, and this was the easiest and most humiliating that he could manufacture.
Elizabeth shook her head, disgusted. “That is the most cowardly, pathetic thing that I have ever heard.”
“Perhaps. But you will do it nonetheless.” Wilkenson felt his cheeks burning with embarrassment. Maybe when this was all over he would show her what it was really like to be taken by force. Show her that he was not the timid little man she thought he was.
He shook those thoughts aside. “I will expect a note from you by week’s end indicating when you will be at Marlowe’s house and the exact moment that I am to arrive. If I do not receive word by then…”
“Pray, don’t say it.” Elizabeth’s tone was equal parts weariness and contempt. “You have been none too subtle with your threats already.”
“Then we understand each other?”
Elizabeth glared at him, her lips pressed together. “Yes, yes, whatever you wish. I have no choice, it seems, but to be part of your pathetic plan.”
“Quite true.” He had applied the stick, and she had moved in the right direction. Now he would show her the carrot. “Incidentally, that new home of yours is very nice. Very nice indeed. It could not be inexpensive.”
She looked hard at him, wary. “It is not, but it is within my means.”
“Unless, of course, the note of hand should be called in. Then I imagine you would exhaust your funds paying it off.”
“Perhaps. But the note is held by Mr. David Nelson, who is a man of honor, and who assures me he will not call it in.” She could see what was coming. Clever little slut, Wilkenson thought.
“Ah, but that is no longer the case, you see, because I purchased the note from Mr. Nelson, along with several others, and now it is mine to call in whenever I so choose. If I have your cooperation in this matter, I may well be persuaded to
tear up the note, and you will own your home, free and clear. If not, then I fear you shall be bankrupt paying it off, once I call it in.”
He let the words hang in the air. George Wilkenson knew a great deal about persuasion.
“If I…I shall have my house, free and clear, if I do this?”
“Indeed.”
“Very well, then. I shall do as you wish.” She seemed to deflate in resignation.
“Good. I shall bid you good day.” He gave her a curt bow, turned on his heel, and turned back again. “You will send a note, then, by week’s end?”
“Yes, yes. I said yes.”
“Good.” He turned again and strode away. He could feel his cheeks burning, and his neck and palms were covered with sweat.
Still, it was a good plan, because the crime would be perfectly believable. It would take no art to show that, after killing Matthew Wilkenson for her honor, Marlowe came to expect certain favors from Elizabeth, and when they were not forth-coming he tried to take them.
It was perfectly believable that George should go to Marlowe’s house to issue a challenge. His claiming that he was doing so would quiet those people who were asking abroad why George did not call Marlowe out, while at once assuring Marlowe’s death by hanging and saving George from having to fight the rogue. Perfect.
Nor would it be any great effort to get the others to do his bidding: Sheriff Witsen and the jury and even Governor Nicholson.
George was careful never to put the family into debt, not to their agent in London or to anyone in the tidewater. Owing money meant owing allegiance, and George Wilkenson would owe allegiance to no one.
Instead he accrued the allegiance of others through his generous lending of money to any who asked with the proper
humility, and he never demanded that it be repaid on any schedule.
But he understood, and his debtors understood, that the entire sum was always due in full upon demand, even if it meant the debtor’s ruination. In this way George Wilkenson exercised control over half of the population of Williamsburg.
He suddenly felt a desperate need for this all to be over, for Marlowe to be hanged and buried so that he could get on with his business.
I am not Achilles, he thought. No, I’m not the warrior. I am Odysseus, the clever one.
George Wilkenson took some comfort from that notion.
Chapter 10
IT TOOK twenty hours, dropping down the James River, then standing east-northeast with an average eight knots of breeze over the starboard quarter for the Plymouth Prize to cover the sixty miles from her former anchorage to Smith Island. They had all sail set, including the little spritsail topsail that set on the spritsail topmast at the far end of the bowsprit. The great lumbering guardship pushed along, seemingly as reluctant as her men to go into battle. But like her men, go she must, and one by one Marlowe pricked the miles off the chart.
In all it was a fine sail. The weather in Virginia, when it is good, is the best in the world. And those two days were good, with the warm breeze making cat’s paws on the blue water of the bay. The sky from horizon to horizon was a fine clear blue, just a little lighter in color than the water.
Off the starboard beam, framed by Cape Charles to the north and Cape Henry to the south, the Atlantic Ocean stretched away, glittering and flashing and melding at last with the pale blue sky on the indeterminate horizon. In their wake was the low green coast of Virginia’s mainland, and forward the long peninsula that ended at Cape Charles. Overhead a variety of birds wheeled around the trucks of the masts, and under their keel the bay rolled with barely perceptible swells.
A good thing, for the Plymouth Prize might well have sunk in anything worse.
One hundred yards off the larboard quarter the Northumberland kept station. It was only with much difficulty that King James was able to sail slowly enough so as not to headreach on the Plymouth Prize.
There is so much to do, Marlowe thought, so very much to do. The Plymouth Prizes were tolerable seamen, but they had grown lethargic and unmotivated under Allair’s command. Nor was their seamanship his immediate concern. More pressing was their training for combat, so that they could acquit themselves well, or at least so that he and Bickerstaff and King James would not die as a result of their incompetence.
“First position,” he heard Bickerstaff call out, and the fifty men drawn up in a line in the waist moved into the first position for sword work: feet at right angles, left hand behind their backs, cutlass held before them. They were as graceful as pelicans waddling on shore, and just as intimidating.
“Second position,” Bickerstaff called, and fifty right feet came forward, ready to lunge or parry. It was all very pretty and nice, and a few years before Marlowe would have thought it a waste of time. Fancy drills had nothing to do with the bloody, desperate hack and slash of a real fight. But he trusted Bickerstaff, and Bickerstaff had convinced him of the importance of learning the fine points first, and then later the grim reality of the thing.
“Extension in three motions,” he called, and fifty men lunged at an imaginary enemy. Two of them stumbled while attempting this, fell to the deck. Marlowe turned and stared out at the blue water and the wooded shoreline far away. The time had come to reconsider his strategy.