He paused and looked at the remains of the Finch home. He thought of all the times he had danced in those rooms, or played piquet or whist, or sat down to dinner with his neighbors. What would they do now? What would any of them do?
He pulled the head of his horse around and rode off toward the water. He had no plan, did not even know why he had followed the pirates. It seemed a long time since he had had a rational thought; the night had been made up of feelings, instincts, impressions, pushing him along through no conscious decision of his own.
He came at last to the edge of the water. He could see where the pirates had come ashore, the mud and plants trampled by the many, many feet, the long grooves cut in the bank where the boats had been pulled up.
The James River was nearly a mile wide at that point. George could just make out the masts of the ships-it seemed
there were more than one-against the night sky, but their hulls were lost in the darkness.
For a long time he just sat, staring at the dark, skeletal masts with the same morbid disinterest with which he had looked at Ripley’s dead body, the round hole in his forehead. Anyone who heard the tale of his going to plead with Marlowe would think it an act of altruistic humility, but that was not all of it. His family had nothing now, nothing but their good name, and if LeRois lived to tell of his father’s entanglements with the pirates, then that too would be gone. He needed LeRois destroyed, and he hoped and prayed Marlowe could do it.
His eyes moved over to a clump of bushes on the bank twenty feet away. Behind the bushes he knew he would find a canoe. The Finches had kept one there for years, to use for fishing or other recreation. He looked out at the pirates again, then back toward the canoe. Was there anything he could do to hurry the pirates’ destruction along?
The instinct that had been driving him that night forced him to ride down to the bushes, to dismount, to see that the boat was still there and the paddles still lying on the thwarts. He looked out toward the pirate ships. He had no idea of what he might do.
He felt a spark of fear and panic flash through him, but there was something delicious about it, something thrilling and redemptive. He had no thought of dying, because he no longer had any thought of living. He was ruined, he was humiliated, he was a part of the clan that had unleashed the terror on the colony. He was as much a burnt-out shell as his family’s home.
He pushed the canoe into the water, just as he and the Finch boys had done so many times in the past. He climbed in, carefully, and found his balance, then dipped the paddle into the river and started for the other side.
Chapter 34
THEY WERE feeling their way down the James River under fore and main topsail alone, a blind man with arms outstretched trying to keep to the center of a bridge. In the fore chains, larboard and starboard, experienced hands swung lead lines, their soft chants relayed aft down the length of the deck by the men stationed at the guns.
Marlowe stood by the break of the quarterdeck. He could just see the face of the man below him, calling up, “And a half four, and five, and a half four…” A smoky haze hung over the trees and the river and carried the sharp smell of wanton destruction. It blotted out most of the natural light from the moon and stars, making it that much more difficult for Marlowe to get his ship and men into battle.
He looked to either side. He could not see the distant shores. But he knew that stretch of water well enough to know from the depths alone that they were running down the center of the stream. That and the glow of the burnt and burning houses, standing like lighthouses on the north shore, told him that they were closing with the enemy.
He stared blankly at the flames half a mile away. The Wilkenson home. He considered all the things that he should be feeling-elation, pleasure, the glow of vengeance reaped- and he wondered why he was not. He was too tired, he concluded, too tired of it all, and too frightened of what was to come.
“And three, and three…,” the man below him said.
The water was shoaling, which meant they were nearing Hog Island. Marlowe turned to Rakestraw, who was standing ten feet away. “We shall bear up a bit, pray see to the braces,” and when the first officer had done that he said to the helmsmen, “Bear up, three points.”
The Plymouth Prize turned to larboard, the change, of course, imperceptible save for change in the bearing of the fires on the shore.
“And four and a half, and four and a half…”
Marlowe turned to say something to Bickerstaff, but Bickerstaff was not there. He was off on the Northumberland with King James and a dozen other of the Plymouth Prizes, somewhere ahead in the dark.
They were employing their old tactic, the one that had worked so well on Smith Island. Once the Plymouth Prize was alongside and fully engaged, then those aboard the Northumberland would swarm up the other side and come at them from behind. It was not much of a plan, but any edge was better than none, particularly as they were outnumbered two to one in ships and men, and the men they were facing were very experienced killers indeed, with no reason at all to surrender and every reason to fight to the death.
Marlowe took some comfort from the plan, from the thought that they were not just going right at the pirates but instead were using some of their God-given cunning. He took comfort from the thought that the pirates had been on a rampage for some time now, were probably drunk and collapsed on the deck of the Vengeance, near comatose. He was comforted by the thought that the Plymouth Prizes were drunk as well, not blind drunk but fighting drunk, and he was keeping them that way. He took comfort from the fact that Francis Bickerstaff and King James would be with him on the killing ground.
But for all the comfort that he gleaned from those thoughts, he was not optimistic about their chances. He of all of them knew what they were up against. The Vengeances under LeRois had never been bested in all the time he sailed with them.
Of course, these were not the same men. Most of the men aboard now would have signed the articles after Marlowe had given up the life on the account. But he did not think that they would be any less capable than the others who had sailed under LeRois.
He turned and glanced at the place where Bickerstaff would have been standing had he been aboard. He missed his friend’s steadying presence. They had been through so much together: bloody fights, and lessons in Latin and history, and two years as landed gentlemen. He owed his brief but glorious career as a member of the tidewater gentry, and his brilliant flash of passion with Elizabeth, to his friend and teacher. He would miss him.
And he would miss King James as well, belligerent, surly King James. Marlowe understood the man perfectly, understood what drove him, and he had used that knowledge shamelessly to manipulate James into doing him great service. But he liked James, respected him.
And he had given back to James as much as he had taken. Pride, honor, those things that most of the first men of Virginia did not think a black man capable of having. James, he knew, would not mind dying, as long as he died with a blooded sword in his hand.
But at least he would see them one more time, albeit across a smoke-filled deck as they fought their last in defense of their adopted colony and in defense of their own honor, their own genuine, unvarnished honor. He could not say the same for Elizabeth. He did not think that he would ever see Elizabeth again.
He had found the time to scribble out a will, leaving to her everything that was his-the house, the land, the specie-a brief document that unbeknownst to Elizabeth was included in the packet he had sent back with her and Lucy. It was something.
He thought of her smile, her smooth and perfect skin, the way her long yellow hair had a habit of falling across her face, the way she would whisk it away. He would never see her again, and for that, and that alone, he was truly sorry.