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  The Blackbirder

  ( Brethren of the Coast - 2 )

  James L. Nelson

  In a blind rage, King James, ex-slave and now Marlowe's comrade in arms, slaughters the crew of a slave ship and makes himself the most wanted man in Virginia. The governor gives Marlowe a choice: Hunt James down and bring him back to hang or lose everything Marlowe has built for himself and his wife, Elizabeth.Marlowe sets out in pursuit of the ex-slave turned pirate, struggling to maintain control over his crew -- rough privateers who care only for plunder -- and following James's trail of destruction. But Marlowe is not James's only threat, as factions aboard James's own ship vie for control and betrayal stalks him to the shores of Africa.

  James L. Nelson

  The Blackbirder

  To those millions of people stolen from Africa and upon whose long-forgotten backs this country was raised to greatness

  Pirate-a sea-robber, or an armed ship that roams the seas without any legal commission, and seizes or plunders every vessel she meets indiscriminately, whether friends or enemies.

  Privateer-a vessel of war, armed and equipped by particular merchants, and furnished with a military commission by the admiralty, or the officers who superintend the marine department of a country, to cruise against the enemy and take, sink, or burn their shipping, or otherwise annoy them as opportunity offers. These vessels are generally governed on the same plan with his majesty’s ships, though they are guilty of many scandalous depredations, which are very rarely practiced by the latter.

  – William Falconer

  An Universal Dictionary of the Marine

  Chapter 1

  The church was all heat and white sunlight, dust and the smell of dry grass and manure pushing in through flung open doors. Flies swirling, lighting, black specks on white painted pews.

  Sunday. June 14, the Year of Our Lord 1702.

  In the pulpit the preacher droned, on and on.

  Marlowe shifted, felt the sweat running under his heavy coat and waistcoat and shirt. Realized he had had no thought for… how long? No thought, just consciousness. Like an animal.

  The preacher waved his arms, entreated God.

  The air was close, oppressively hot. The church was nearly twenty years old, built when the now-burgeoning Williamsburg was still a backwater called the Middle Plantation. People crammed in like hands of tobacco prized into a cask. A blessing in winter, a misery in summer.

  Marlowe looked at his shoes, then over at Elizabeth ’s legs, the outline of her thighs just discernible through layer upon layer upon layer of silk and taffeta. She had to be even hotter than he was. But she would remain proper, because she needed to feel proper after her many years of secret impropriety.

  Propriety was why he was there in the first place, in his own pew.

  Not in front of the communion table; those pews had been sold long before to the first families of Virginia. Their pew was behind the vestry, which was still perfectly respectable. The important thing was that everyone, today’s newcomers and yesterday’s, knew they could afford a pew in front of the communion table, were one available.

  Marlowe had purchased the pew-at no little cost-because Elizabeth did not wish to jeopardize their place in Virginia society. She did not wish to risk losing this new life they had carved for themselves in this new land. They had position now in tidewater society, and people with position spent Sundays in their own pews.

  As a merchant seaman, Marlowe had had Sundays off. He’d had no duty, save standing watch, unless the ship was run by some petty tyrant who could countenance no idleness among those to whom he paid wages.

  What had it meant when he was on the account, among the Brethren of the Coast?

  Nothing. As often as not they hadn’t any notion of what day of the week it was. It did not matter to the lawless and the godless, whose hours called them only to slothfulness and debauchery.

  Marlowe realized his legs were cramped. He stretched them out full length, flexed the muscles, savored the relief. Stole a glance at his friend Francis Bickerstaff, seated on his other side. He was dressed in conservative, unadorned clothes. He held a Bible in his lap, sat rigid, his eyes intent on the preacher. He looked as if he might have been a preacher himself.

  Bickerstaff was a pious man, after his own fashion. A former tutor, fluent in Latin and Greek and all those things that the overeducated and underemployed seemed to know. He appeared to be absorbing every syllable of the preacher’s harangue.

  But the preacher was, to Marlowe’s certain knowledge, a fool. He doubted there was anything the man could say that Bickerstaff would find enlightening. He concluded that Bickerstaff was as far removed from the sermon as he himself was, but that Bickerstaff, as usual, was better at hiding it.

  Three years. Three years they had been coming to that cursed church.

  He lowered his head, hoping it made him look pious. It had not been so bad before, with the old Reverend Hathaway, who was a good man, godly and thoughtful, and could spin a sermon that was not so oppressively dull. But he had taken fever and died a year back, and the Right Reverend Ezekiel Trumbell had taken his place. What the congregation had done to deserve him, Marlowe could not figure.

  His thoughts wandered away from those considerations as his eyes wandered to the hem of Elizabeth ’s dress, then slowly up her leg. He pictured her thighs under all that cloth, the smooth white skin, the flat, lovely stomach, the curve of her hips, the way she looked lying naked in their big bed.

  He felt himself becoming aroused, had a vague sensation that that was not appropriate in church. And then the warm sensuous drowsiness lapped over him and he felt his eyes close, felt delicious sleep pulling him down…

  Felt a sharp elbow in his ribs that jerked him back to church.

  “Stop that, Thomas,” Elizabeth hissed, never taking her eyes from the preacher, her expression of pious attention never wavering.

  “What?” Marlowe felt himself flush. He wondered, did she mean his falling asleep, or had she guessed at his salacious thoughts?

  “I do believe Reverend Trumbell is speaking to you, dear.”

  Marlowe straightened and focused on the Reverend’s words. Trumbell’s head was turned in their direction, and his eyes flickered toward the Marlowe pew, like fingertips testing a hot griddle, then pulling away fast before they are scorched

  Oh, God. Will you not even look me in the eye, you little worm?

  It was the speech about the danger of free Negroes again. Dressed up with some nonsense about Cain and Abel, but at its heart it was the same old speech. Marlowe wanted to curse out loud.

  “And the precursor to Cain’s sin of the blood? Was Adam’s failure to obey God’s command to keep dominion over all the beasts of the field, yea, all the living creatures.

  “And so today, like Adam, are we not commanded to have dominion over all the beasts of the field, and all the heathen creatures, be they man or beast, who have not the benefit of knowing God? It is our duty as Christians to prevent the wicked idleness into which man must fall if the Godly do not keep dominion over them. We fail in our duty if we do not hold the reins tight. And most especially must we keep dominion over those poor children of Africa, whose childlike innocence…”

  “Oh, God, I pray, preserve me from such blather…,” Marlowe said, a bit too loud. A few heads turned, Elizabeth ’s sharp elbow struck home.

  It was his slaves, of course. His former slaves, actually, the ones that had come with the plantation he had purchased from the estate of Elizabeth ’s late husband. He had freed them all and then employed them as wage labor.

  It was not a popular decision in the tidewater.

  Marlowe saw Trumbell’s attention shift from his pew to those in front of t
he communion table and he followed the Reverend’s gaze. In the second pew back sat Frederick Dunmore, arms folded, listening with great care to the words. He had the entire pew to himself. He had no family that anyone knew of.

  Of course, Marlowe thought. Check with Dunmore, the Lord and Master, make sure you’re delivering the speech the way he told you. How had Bickerstaff put it, from one of his plays? “Speak the speech, I pray, as I pronounced it to you…” That was Dunmore.

  He was dressed in white, as he always was: white silk coat and waistcoat, brilliant white breeches and socks, a great white river of ringlets from his periwig cascading down the front of him. He blended into the pew like a deer blends into an autumn field. He looked as if he were trying to dress like God himself.

  “You dog…,” Marlowe muttered, and then to Bickerstaff whispered, “It is that dog Dunmore that is behind this blather, you know.”

  Dunmore was a newcomer to the colony, late of London and just turned plantation owner. In the year he had been there he had wormed his way into the House of Burgesses, had somehow arranged that enviable pew. It took a vast sum of money, spread judiciously and thick, to achieve all that.

  Marlowe sighed, purposely loud, leaned back, arms folded, and thought of old Reverend Hathaway. He had been a man of his own mind, a man who led his congregation and would not be its puppet. In fact, he was one of the only men in the tidewater, he and Bickerstaff, who supported Marlowe in his decision. He believed it was God’s will that the blacks be free-the same reason Trumbell was now using to insist on their bondage.

  Dunmore carried his support of Negro bondage with missionary zeal. When he heard what Marlowe had done he had gone apoplectic, had been waging a silent war on Marlowe ever since. He had seen to it that the laws concerning Negroes carrying firearms-laws that had been hitherto rarely enforced-were strictly adhered to.

  He hired minions to keep up a loose surveillance of Marlowe House, hoping to find some cause for complaint, some clear breach of the law. Marlowe knew that Dunmore was investigating the legality of his freeing, then hiring, his former slaves, was considering bringing suit.

  And, of course, Dunmore had convinced Trumbell to speak from the pulpit on that issue. He had somehow arranged to have his own opinions flow from the Reverend’s mouth.

  Cowardly little bastard, Marlowe thought. His anger was a smoldering thing, a glowing spot in a pile of coals, not the hot flash that made him act without thinking, that led to so much trouble.

  But what could he do? He would have happily called Dunmore out and put a bullet through the man’s head or a sword through his chest-Dunmore’s choice-but Dunmore always maneuvered his way around blatant offense, like a lady stepping carefully through a stable. He was clever about never doing anything that would give Marlowe cause to demand satisfaction.

  People were standing now, shuffling out of pews. Marlowe looked up. It was over, thankfully over. His thoughts had carried him through the end of the service, had put one more torturous Sunday morning in his past. He stood, stretched, and smiled the first genuine smile of the morning.

  “Come, my love,” he said, extending a hand to Elizabeth, “let us have dinner and then get us down to the river. I am with child to see her with her topgallant gear sent up.”

  “You saw her yesterday morning.”

  “But then she did not have her topgallant gear sent up.”

  “Thomas, you are insufferable,” Elizabeth said, but the end of the service and the prospect of the sight that awaited him at the river were making Marlowe giddy, reckless.

  “And you, my love,” he said in a voice so low that only she could hear, “are so beautiful I wish nothing more than to give your arse a good squeeze, right here.”

  “If you do, I shall cut your throat in your sleep,” she said with the sweetest of smiles as she brushed past him and stepped down into the aisle between the long row of pews.

  Marlowe followed docilely behind his wife as she wound her way out of the church, flashing white-tooth smiles to those she passed, receiving smiles back from the women, appreciative glances from the men.

  Appreciative but furtive glances, a quick up-and-down and then eyes averted. No man in Williamsburg wanted to offend Thomas Marlowe. Men who had done that had died. Men who had once tried to bring him down by bringing Elizabeth to shame had died brutally. His fellow gentlemen-planters viewed Marlowe as a pet tiger: tame, domestic, but still wild inside, dangerous and unpredictable. He knew it and encouraged it.

  Elizabeth led them to a side entrance, not through the main doors where Trumbell was greeting the parishioners as they made their exit. They stepped out of the little Jacobean-style brick building and into a small garden that served as a buffer between the church and the dusty Duke of Gloucester Street.

  Marlowe squinted against the brilliant sun. It blazed in a clear blue sky and bounced its light off those patches of granite not shaded by the small maples lining the arbor. He savored the smell of jasmine baking in the sun. A cardinal flashed by, a streak of red, calling with its odd liquid voice.

  He breathed deep, taking the warmth and the jasmine into his lungs. The heat felt good, not the close-pressed heat of a packed church but the full, honest warmth of a perfect summer day in Virginia.

  “Hey, Marlowe, there you are!” Hartwell Page pushed his way between two saplings and came huffing up, his round face red with the heat, in startling contrast to the white sculptured wig that sat on his head.

  He wore a brocade coat with an intricate pattern, the weight of which was causing the sweat to run down his cheeks. Under his left arm he carried his hat, which would never have fit over his wig. With his right arm he worked a walking stick as if it were the bilge-pump handle on a sinking ship. He was built like a cannonball and carried himself with as much subtlety.

  “Thought I’d catch you here, Marlowe, didn’t reckon you’d wish to shake hands with that rascal Trumbell! Beating around the bush this morning, about your Negroes, eh? Not going right at it like last time, the dog. He’s as mad on the subject as that Dunmore! Ah, Mrs. Marlowe, charmed!” He bowed as much as his ample waist would allow, just as Mrs. Page struggled up behind him. She was much the same shape as her husband, though quiet, as if she were forever bowled over by Hartwell’s effusiveness, as, indeed, most people were.

  “Well, I reckon Reverend Trumbell is entitled to his opinion, as is any man,” Marlowe ventured.

  “Oh, balls, Marlowe, beg your pardon. Wasn’t a man of the cloth you’d have put a bullet through his head by now, eh?” He gave Marlowe a suggestive jab of the elbow. Page seemed to enjoy the proximity to danger that being with Marlowe suggested.

  “If he wasn’t a man of the cloth he would probably keep his mouth shut,” Bickerstaff said, squinting off at some distant point. “But the greater coward is Frederick Dunmore, who puts the words in his mouth and makes great speeches when Thomas is not about. I don’t know what is more craven than cowering behind a collar. Cowering behind a woman, perhaps?”

  “Well said, Bickerstaff, well said!” Page gave Francis the elbow jab.

  “This is a new thing for you, Francis,” Marlowe said. “You have been quite reserved in your judgment of the Reverend and his handler before now.”

  “Let us say just that my cup of tolerance runneth over.”

  “Right, well, now,” said Hartwell, tiring of that line of talk, “reckon I know where you’re bound, after dinner.”

  “I was thinking to head down to the river…”

  “Course you were, course you were. But I must insist that you dine with me and the wife. Have ’em laying out a feast for the king himself down to the tavern. Pray, bring your lovely wife here and the good Dr. Bickerstaff and join me.”

  Bickerstaff had told Page on at least three occasions that he was not a doctor of any kind, but Page either could not recall or could not be convinced.

  “We would be delighted, I believe,” said Marlowe. Page was a bit much, but he could be amusing, and he did not exaggerate
the quality of food he would have ordered up. The straining of his waistcoat against his midriff bore silent testimony to his proclivities where food was concerned.

  But, of course, accepting the invite would mean…

  “And after dinner, then, Marlowe, if it ain’t too much bother, I’d be honored if I might accompany you down to the river. Haven’t been down since you stepped the masts. But even then, magnificent! Navy could never do the like. She ain’t another Plymouth Prize, I’ll warrant.”

  Marlowe thought of the decrepit, half-rotten Plymouth Prize, his former command. “No, she ain’t the Plymouth Prize.”

  “I’ve a mind for something along those lines myself…,” Page added. “So, what say you? Dine with me?”

  Why not? It was hard to refuse Hartwell Page’s invitation, which he gave with such force.

  “Delighted. And we should be pleased to have you along afterward, Hartwell. I would welcome your advice.”

  “Ah, Marlowe, you are a lying dog, but I thank you. You know I’ll give advice, whether I know a thing or not.”

  And advice he gave, through a protracted dinner of hominy, hashed beef, squirrel, asparagus, red herring, and sallet, advice on everything from plantation management to growing tobacco to Marlowe’s current enterprise.

  And Marlowe and company listened, ate, laughed, drank, enjoyed themselves thoroughly. Page was one of those few who could pull off an hour of running monologue without being insufferable.

  That fact aside, it was still a relief when the two parties took to their separate carriages for the seven-mile ride to Jamestown and the docks that thrust out into the James River.

  They settled in their seats, Marlowe, Bickerstaff, and Elizabeth, the first private moment they had had since morning, and Bickerstaff said, “I am sorry, Thomas, that you must suffer that idiot Dunmore. And of all things, for freeing your slaves. I have said it before, it is the most decent act you have ever committed.”