“Marlowe, Marlowe, I give you joy again on a great victory!” Bickerstaff fairly leapt up the stairs leading to the quarterdeck, hand outstretched. Marlowe automatically extended his own, and Bickerstaff pumped it with enthusiasm.
“It all happened just as you predicted, Thomas, I swear, like staging a play! We had one fellow wounded when a gun ran over his foot-the fool could not stand clear of the recoil-and another was unlucky enough to get a pistol ball in the shoulder, but beyond that there was not one casualty, and not the least wounding of the ship. I daresay you did for a good half of that brigand’s company. I should think the ship owners will reward you with some recognition of your meritorious service.”
Bickerstaff, in the flush of victory, was far more garrulous than was his nature, and Marlowe was relieved to find that he was not being called upon to respond. He seemed to have lost his voice.
“Did you see that villain, King James, circling around in the Northumberland, quite ready to board over the unengaged side if we-I say, Marlowe, are you unwell?”
“What? Oh, no, no, I’m fine. I think the great guns have unsteadied me a bit.”
“Unsteadied you? You look as if you had seen a ghost.”
Marlowe stared over the rail. The pirate ship was a quarter of a mile away at the end of a long, deep wake, and drawing farther away by the minute. But he could still see that black flag snapping at the ensign staff, the horrible death’s-head with the twin cutlasses, the hourglass. He had not reckoned on seeing that flag again.
“A ghost?” Marlowe turned to Bickerstaff. “No, Francis, I have not seen a ghost. God help us all, I have seen the very devil himself.”
Chapter 21
THEY HAD brought this disaster down upon their own heads. No, not they. Him. Jacob Wilkenson. And his beloved son Matthew. Those two, the unthinking, reactionary Wilkensons, had brought this plague upon their house.
George Wilkenson found that that realization made him oddly calm, even in the face of what was, for him, the most unthinkable of nightmares: financial ruin, a choice between poverty and tremendous debt.
How many times in the past had his father brushed him aside, cursing his timidity and showing him how the bold move was the right move? And how many times had his father been right? Every time. Until now.
Now Marlowe had done to the Wilkensons just what the Wilkensons had set out to do to Marlowe, and both, apparently, were ruined. Like two men who shoot each other in a duel.
“I have some people scouring Williamsburg and Jamestown, looking for sailors, and I have requested of the governor that he find us some men, as it was his own appointed captain who robbed us, but I despair of it doing us any good,” George said.
The two men were seated in the library, the same room that a month before Jacob Wilkenson had torn apart in his rage. Now the old man was sitting in a winged chair, half staring out the window and listening to his son. He seemed utterly calm. George found it somewhat frightening.
“Bah,” Jacob Wilkenson said with a wave of his hand. “It’s of no use. Even if we manage to get the damned ship to London without it being taken by some bloody pirate, the market for tobacco will have fallen out. The whole goddamned fleet will have arrived two weeks before, and we’d be lucky to pay the cost of the shipping.”
George Wilkenson pressed his fingertips together and made an arch of his fingers. They looked like an old-fashioned helmet to him, like the kind one pictured John Smith wearing. “The tobacco won’t last until the next convoy. Are you saying, then, that we admit defeat? That Marlowe has beaten us? That we have managed to destroy one another?”
“Marlowe beaten us? Not likely. We have not begun with Marlowe, oh no. We shall crush him. That has not changed.”
“Perhaps not,” George said sharply. His father seemed not to grasp the gravity of the situation. “But our circumstances most certainly have. The tobacco crop was our year’s income, almost. Without it we are not able to secure what we need for next year’s crop. We are not able to pay the overseer nor the master of the Wilkenson Brothers, nor the masters of the sloops. We have equipment that needs replacing. We shall have to borrow a tremendous amount or sell off land and slaves, but either way it is our ruin. If you paid the slightest attention to the books, you would know that.” There was a perverse pleasure in talking to the old man that way, even though it was George’s ruin as much as his father’s.
Jacob stood up from the chair and began to pace. “We are not ruined, not by any means.”
“You have not seen the books-”
“Sod the damn books! I have more kettles on the fire than are shown in the books. Engaged in a business right now that’ll make us twice what the damned tobacco would yield.”
“What…business? Why have you not told me about it?”
“You ain’t got the stomach for it, boy. Matthew set it up, Matthew and me. More in his line. Not the kind of thing for a man who worries about books.”
George felt his face flush, felt his calm give way to anger. Humiliated, once again. If there was one thing in which he took pride, it was his responsible handling of the Wilkensons’ business affairs. Now here was his father telling him that there was some entire enterprise of which he was not even aware, something more lucrative even than the plantation, as if all the work he did amounted to no more than a side business, some minor amusement. From the grave Matthew had trumped him again.
George sat in silence as he waited for the flush of the humiliation to pass. At last he said, “You are telling me, then, that there is money enough?”
“There is money enough, and there’ll be a damn sight more, as well.”
“Might you tell me where this money is coming from?”
“No, I will not. It ain’t a business for you.”
“I take it, then, that it ain’t legal, either?”
“That’s none of your affair. I’ll tell you how much money we got, and you can look in your damn books and tell me what we need for the plantation, and things’ll work out just fine. We have no concerns now but to do for Marlowe. We can live with the loss of our crop, but I don’t reckon he can. We have to watch close and see if he borrows money, or if he tries to sell the Tinling place.”
George Wilkenson balled one hand into a fist and softly, rhythmically, punched it into the palm of his other hand. Everything had changed now. The arrogance, the triumph over his father’s failure, gone. Seemed as if the old man had been right again, as if he really had saved the Wilkenson fortune and finished Marlowe all at once.
“Very good, then,” George said. He stood up quickly. “Let me know how I may be of assistance.” He could not meet his father’s eye. He coughed, glanced up, and then turned and strode out of the room. Could not stand to be there another second.
They were all swimming in his head-Marlowe, his father, Matthew, Elizabeth Tinling-as he climbed the wide oak staircase, taking the stairs two at a time. He did not know where he was going, what he was doing. He was just moving by instinct. Getting away from the old man, trying to get away from his thoughts.
At the top of the stairs he stopped and looked down the hallway, flanked on either side by bedroom doors. His room was at the end, and next to it was Matthew’s. He walked down the hall, approaching cautiously-why, he did not know. He grabbed the knob and twisted it and stepped inside.
The room had not been altered since Matthew’s death, and George doubted that it ever would be. He knew that his father and mother sometimes went in there and sat on Matthew’s bed. Sometimes he could hear sobbing. He wondered if his own death would cause so much grief, if his room would be left as some kind of shrine if he was killed.
“I wonder,” he said softly, left it at that.
He stepped farther into the room, brushing his hand over the bedpost, the side table, the small secretary. He sat down in the chair in front of the secretary and began to rummage through the contents of the various pigeonholes in the desk. Notes, letters, a number of ribbons given him by young girls anxious to marry into the Wilkenson fortune.