To Glory Arise (Privateers and Gentlemen) Read online

  Privateers and Gentlemen

  TO GLORY ARISE

  WALTER JON WILLIAMS

  Originally published as “The Privateer” by “Jon Williams.”

  Copyright (C) 1981, 2013 by Walter Jon Williams

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

  recording or by any information storage and retrieval

  system, without the written permission of the

  author, except where permitted by law.

  Other Books by Walter Jon Williams

  Privateers & Gentlemen (Historical Fiction)

  To Glory Arise

  Brig of War

  The Macedonian

  The Tern Schooner

  Cat Island

  Dagmar Shaw Thrillers

  This Is Not a Game

  Deep State

  The Fourth Wall

  Diamonds for Tequila

  The Second Books of the Praxis (NEW!!!)

  The Accidental War

  The First Books of the Praxis (Dread Empire’s Fall)

  The Praxis

  The Sundering

  Conventions of War

  Investments

  Impersonations

  Quillifer Series (NEW!!!)

  Quillifer

  Quillifer the Knight (forthcoming)

  Novels

  Hardwired

  Knight Moves

  Voice of the Whirlwind

  Days of Atonement

  Aristoi

  Metropolitan

  City on Fire

  Ambassador of Progress

  Angel Station

  The Rift

  Implied Spaces

  Divertimenti

  The Crown Jewels

  House of Shards

  Rock of Ages

  Short Stories

  Daddy’s World

  Investments (Set in the world of Dread Empire’s Fall)

  Prayers on the Wind

  Collections

  Facets

  Frankensteins & Foreign Devils

  The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

  This book is for

  Elizabeth Ann Cashdan and William J. Chasko, Jr.,

  who allowed me the use of their library cards,

  and who kept me in good humor.

  Thanks to Victor Milan and Carrie Bryan for singing the original choruses of “Bugger the King.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Stripped to his shirt in the sullen heat of the Caribbean day, Captain Josiah Markham, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, watched the long, dark hull of the slave barque slide easily in the harbor of Charlotte Amalie. The slaver was a nimble vessel, with sleek lines and finely raked masts; and although she was flying Dutch colors, Josiah marked the craft as almost certainly American-built— Dutch shipwrights preferred round North Sea butter-tubs to anything with such sleek lines. The blackbirder, its crew aloft and furling canvas, cruised slowly by in the slack wind, then, with a splash and a hollow roar, dropped its anchor. Josiah gagged and reached for his handkerchief. The barque was moored upwind; there were probably several hundred unwashed souls aboard, mixed with a few corpses. The stench was not improved by the heat of the day.

  “Phew!” said Josiah, waving his handkerchief to stir the slack breeze. He soon decided he had enough of the foul air. He called to his coxswain, Barlow, to have his gig’s crew ready as soon as he returned on deck. He would visit his brother’s ship. It was moored upwind of the slaver.

  Josiah descended to his cabin, made an entry in his journal, put on his ill-fitting blue coat and straw hat, and returned on deck. Barlow was still getting the oarsmen into his gig. Josiah ignored him, standing on the flush deck, hands clasped firmly behind his back. Pound, his red-haired first officer, walked up to him and cleared his throat loudly. Tactful, this Pound.

  “Yes, Mr. Pound?”

  “You are going ashore, sir?”

  “I’m going to my brother’s ship. I’ll be back by tonight. In the meantime, send my compliments to Mr. Nyborg and see if you can persuade him to move that blackbirder. I won’t have my crews taken sick with some West African fever.”

  “Aye aye, Cap’n. Gladly.”

  Josiah turned at the sound of Barlow’s footsteps.

  “Gig’s ready, Cap’n.”

  “Excellent. Let’s be on our way.”

  Barlow, careful of protocol, descended first into the gig; Josiah jumped cleanly into the sternsheets, sat down, and adjusted his straw hat.

  “Out oars! Give way all!” Barlow bellowed, and after a few false starts occasioned by a crewman who, Josiah suspected, was tipsy, the gig began to slide smoothly and swiftly over the blue, transparent water of the bay. They passed across the stern of the slave barque, Josiah raising his handkerchief to his nose again— that stench was revolting; it was a sin to confine men like that. The master of the slaver, a rounded wine-cask of a man, was taking the air on the weather poop and tipped his hat as Josiah slid by. Josiah bowed. The slaver was Nubian Pride, and although her home port was alleged to be Willemstad— Curaçao was the headquarters of many a slaver— she was almost certainly American-built. Such a sleek ship would make a fine privateer.

  Upwind of the barque, Josiah recovered his breath as Barlow steered the gig for the loading port of Alexander Pope, his brother’s ship. Pope was ship-rigged and New England-built, with masts taller and waist more slender than was currently the European fashion. Originally a smuggler, she was built for speed, and with her new armament of sixteen twelve-pound cannon and two long nine-pounder chasers on her fo’c’sle, she became dangerous as well as swift. The seaman in the bows of the gig hooked the boat onto Pope’s main chains, and Josiah scrambled up the side of the ship to the entry port. He rarely worried about getting his feet wet while executing such mundane tasks.

  A startled young man, thin and horse-faced, jumped up from a hammock chair set under an awning abaft the mainmast, and hastened to the entry port to meet him.

  “Captain Markham, sir!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t see you!”

  “Evidently not, Stanhope.”

  Stanhope was his brother’s third officer. He had only been taken aboard to compliment his father in Portsmouth, a shipbuilding friend of the family to whom a few favors were owed. The man was three parts a fool and nearsighted besides.

  “I’ve come to see my brother. Is he aboard?” Josiah said gruffly, hands behind his back.

  “Aye, sir. I’ll tell him you’ve arrived.”

  “I’ll tell him myself,” Josiah said. “See to my gig’s crew. Mind they don’t touch liquor.”

  “Ah—” Stanhope hesitated, on the verge of speech, but Josiah brushed past him and ducked down the hatchway beneath the poop overhang. He walked down a short, cramped hallway and knocked on the door of his brother’s day cabin.

  “What d’ye want, damn you?”

  It was assuredly his brother’s voice; and what’s more, the oath was followed by what was definitely a female giggle. Josiah scowled.

  “It’s me, Malachi,” he said. “I came for a visit. If you’re, ah, occupied, I’ll come another time.”

  “By the nailed Christ! I thought it was Stanhope with another of his blasted requests for me to do his job for him. One moment.”

  Josiah waited patiently in the ill-lit corridor, his hands behind his back. It was his habitual pose, acquired after years of serving under his father at sea. He’d been beaten for keeping his hands in his pockets; lacking else to do with them, he’d clasped them firmly behind his back in a posture that no tyrannou
s, pious old Yankee hypocrite could criticize.

  The door was flung open from the inside, and Josiah unclasped his hands, took off his hat with his left, and extended the right. Malachi, his younger brother, shook the hand.

  “Have ye dined?” Malachi asked. He thrust his head out the narrow door. “I’ll call for vittles. Shaw!” The last word was a hoarse bellow. “Shaw, blast your eyes!”

  Josiah’s frown, which had grown deeper with each oath from his impious brother, turned into a positive scowl when he saw the other occupant of the cabin. She was a young black girl in her teens. Her upturned nose and tea-colored skin bespoke some European ancestry. She was dressed prettily in a cream-colored dress that almost reached her bare and dainty feet, and wore long earrings of polished silver. She smiled. Smiled. Intolerable.

  “Josiah,” said Malachi, “may I present Roxana. Roxana, my brother.” Roxana curtsied gracefully. Josiah bowed stiffly, supremely uncomfortable.

  Malachi spoke to the girl in some incomprehensible, gobbling language; she answered in the same tongue, curtsied to Josiah once again, and received his bow. Then she opened the partition into Malachi’s sleeping cabin and closed it behind her.

  “What were you speaking?” Josiah asked; he hadn’t understood a word.

  “Dutch, mostly,” Malachi said. “With a lot of Arabic and a little Danish. It’s what they speak in her village in Santa Cruz.” He had a gift for languages and mimicry; he could communicate successfully with most of the inhabitants of the Caribbean, be they French, English, Spanish, Dutch, or Danish— he could even communicate, with reasonable success, with some few of the native Indians.

  “She’s from Santa Cruz?” Josiah asked.

  “Aye,” Malachi said carelessly. “Would you like a pipe? I've some decent local tobacco.”

  Both brothers had been constructed on very much the same lines. They were agile and slender, burned very brown from the sun as were all sailors; they both had brown hair, but there were obvious differences between them. Josiah was the taller by an inch; his face was built sturdily, constructed in planes as if with an adze— his nose was beaklike, his mouth stern, his brows were level above hazel eyes. His hair was parted neatly in the middle and braided into a short queue behind. Possessed of a profound conviction that clothes were mere ornaments and vanities, he was heedless of apparel: his blue coat hung on him like a sack, his tattered straw hat had lost its black ribbon, and his white shirt had been mended in several conspicuous places.

  Malachi was a more dynamic variation on the same theme; he was more agile, with a heedless, feline grace to his movements. His clothes, though chosen with no great taste, complemented his natural agility and were worn with an unconscious style that was often striking— the black silk handkerchief knotted around his neck, for example, setting off the gold earring. His face was more mobile, expressive, than that of Josiah; his eyes were the color of the green sea and his queue was braided with silk and hung to the small of his back. His full mouth was surrounded by a surprising, reddish growth of beard.

  Josiah disapproved of beards.

  Shaw, Malachi’s servant, appeared in the doorway. He was breathing hard, probably having run from the fo’c’sle. Shaw’s hair was the color of flame, and, as he was clerk as well as steward, his fingers were stained with ink.

  “Did ye call me, Captain?” he puffed.

  “I did,” said Malachi. “Bring me a bottle of the good port, and dinner for the two of us.” He pulled out a chair from the table for his brother and threw himself down on the settee beneath the glazed, stern windows, one bare foot up beside him.

  “You just ate, sir,” said Shaw guilelessly.

  “Do as I say!”

  “Aye aye, Cap’n.” Shaw, still panting, disappeared.

  Josiah sat down on the chair his brother had given him. Malachi filled a pipe and offered it to him.

  “No, thankee,” Josiah said. “I no longer smoke. It’s an extravagant waste of money, to say nothing of the soot it deposits in your lungs.”

  “And Reverend Gill disapproves, eh?” asked Malachi.

  “That he does.”

  The Reverend Gill was a preacher Josiah had taken aboard his ship for the spiritual well-being of his crew; the man was young and zealous, just out of Yale, with vigorous notions about preaching in pothouses and brothels, the very abodes of the devil. Presumably, as ship’s chaplain, he was given plenty of opportunity to do so.

  Josiah glanced around his brother’s day cabin. It was small and neat, as ships’ cabins of necessity had to be; the furniture consisted solely of the settee, running the length of the cabin, built beneath the stern windows, a battered table, six equally battered chairs, and a wardrobe that held Malachi’s sou’wester and boots. His everyday blue coat, sword, and three-cornered hat hung from a peg. Above the table, swaying very slightly with the motion of the ship, hung a great brazen lantern. Very much like a ship’s cabin anywhere, save that it had been defiled.

  “Must you bring your whores on board?” Josiah demanded. “It sets a bad example for the rest of your crew.”

  Malachi was unruffled. His limber hands massaged the sole of his foot. “How else was I to get her from Santa Cruz?” he asked.

  “D’you mean to say you brought her from Santa Cruz on this very ship?” Josiah cried in horror. “A whore, in this cabin, for the entire voyage!”

  “ ’Twas less than a day’s voyage, Jo,” Malachi said. “And she’s not a whore; she’s a concubine of sorts. It’s legal here, or at least tolerated. I paid her father ten guineas when I rode up to her village, and took her back with me. We’re fond of one another.

  “We've been living here this season,” Malachi said, scratching his beard. “I've managed to keep her out of your way till now. I've always had warning of your visits.”

  “I call a whore a whore and a sinner a sinner,” Josiah said. Malachi grinned back. Josiah did not know whether he was more horrified at the blatancy of the hussy or at the extravagant ten guineas paid for her.

  “I know you do; that's why I told her to leave the cabin. She can speak English as well as we, and I don't want her insulted.”

  “It is her behavior that is an insult.”

  “It is perfectly proper in these surroundings,” said Malachi. “And I'll treat her well; when I go to war, she'll be left behind a hundred golden guineas the richer. She'll be able to live respectably, if that's what she wants.”

  Josiah was speechless. A hundred guineas! Malachi grinned again; he'd been unable to resist that last goading shot, knowing his brother's parsimony.

  “And your men?” Josiah demanded. “Their moral guidance? What of them— do they live with their strumpets as well?”

  “Here or ashore, aye,” Malachi said. “I think it’s bad enough that we must take the men to sea in these narrow hulls, but we need not force them to live unnaturally when in port. I know your opinion differs.”

  “I cannot prevent what the men do ashore,” Josiah said, “but whoring and drunkenness I can forbid on my vessel, and do. The men are poxy enough, I’ll be bound, without my encouraging syphilis among ’em— and mercury is expensive. And you speak of natural— the only natural life for a man is marriage and children.”

  Josiah fit his own definition of natural; he had married a New Hampshire girl, and had fathered two children, with a third on the way. Malachi knew that Josiah kept a daily journal, which he would send to his wife— as soon as a safe method of delivery presented itself— in place of daily letters, which would probably never reach her.

  “Why, I’ll marry a girl to any Jack of my crew that asks,” Malachi said. “Perhaps, now that we’re privateers, a military-style marriage, where the couple jump over th’ sword— d’ye know it?—

  Leap, rogue, and jump, whore,

  Be man and wife forevermore.

  With a marriage oath like that, you didn’t need a parson.

  “How many bastards have you spawned?” Josiah demanded.

  “Three t
hat I know of. They’re provided for. When they’re old enough I’ll take ’em to sea, though they’d do better in a French or Spanish ship. No Yankee will take orders from a mulatto, but the Frogs and Dagoes will.”

  Josiah sniffed. His brother was only twenty-three and had spent half his life before the mast; his bad habits were those of sailors everywhere— Josiah could hope that the life of the quarterback might yet refine them away. From the advanced age of twenty-six he could afford to be generous; he did not blame Malachi overmuch for his faults. He had a better idea where to lay the blame.

  Their father, Adaiah, had hated the boy, for what reason it was difficult to say. Malachi’s back was scarred with the old man’s drunken beatings, and his soul scarred as well. Even now, five years after Adaiah had been hacked to bits by pirates off Taipei, Malachi could only rarely let slip an opportunity to outrage Adaiah’s ghost: whoring, blaspheming, drunkenness, laziness, insolence, sharpness, walking with hands in pockets, and more— the old man’s oft-repeated list of Malachi’s faults was quite long. Josiah devoutly hoped Malachi would moderate with age, as Adaiah’s tyrannous memory began to fade. With the years, Josiah prayed, Malachi might become less Adaiah’s creation and more his own man, perhaps even accept the Lord...

  Malachi, for his own part, was only rarely offended by Josiah’s insensitive questions or his intolerance. Josiah was a blunt man and spoke the honest language of the King James Bible with a Calvinist probity: and what’s more he’d been raised by their pious, harsh father almost from the cradle. It was to Josiah’s credit that he had not adopted their father’s hypocrisy along with his severe opinions. Josiah at least practiced what he preached.

  Shaw returned, bent over a tray with several dishes and a black bottle; Malachi, bounding from the settee, joined Josiah at the table. Shaw put a dish before each and served out portions of cold beef, pickled onions, fresh local fruit, yams, and a pepperpot. Malachi drew the cork from the bottle and, not bothering to let the wine breathe, poured it out.