Chapter 11
Eleven
With nobody left behind, the five of them paid their way to Boston.
There, they acquired another press, more carefully this time, with D’Arcy and Bellingham St. Clare sharp at pistols outside the printshop as the transaction was made, as a cart was hired to carry the many crates to the harbour.
There was a sense of urgency to Vitaliy, though he said he had only just crossed the end threshold of time he’d promised his pirate crew that it would take to acquire the thing and return.
Three months, he said he’d told them, at the most. It’d been four.
Everard understood. Piracy was a business in hearsay and reputation but also goods and services.
V. Varfolomey’s legacy would go on everlasting with or without him, but though the physical logistics themselves had continued in spite of his rumored capture, it was only because they’d already been meant to.
And because Varfolomey apparently had an extremely competent second-in-command.
“Milly is capable enough for two captains,” Vitaliy insisted. “Ten, even. And the crew will realise I haven’t deserted them, once it’s known I’m not dead.”
Which it would be, soon; already reports had been printed about Varfolomey’s escape.
It would grow like flame up and down the North Atlantic coast, singeing his reputation at edges—saved by an Englishman!
—at least until Everard’s satires ran in this week’s printings, and they changed the shape of it.
Conveniently anchored there in Boston harbour, loyally awaiting Varfolomey’s word in spite of its absence, was the Enemistad. She was a two-masted brig with eighteen guns, a complement of sixty-odd, and a regular, thrice-a-year path between Boston and the Gulf.
Her American papers were so legitimate-looking, even Everard’s forger’s eyes couldn’t have told anyone differently.
“But who are you?” he exclaimed, turning them over and back within the safety of the brig’s greatcabin.
Vitaliy looked amused. D’Arcy beside him was skeptical and arms crossed, still resentful—he hadn’t yet forgiven Everard for the matelotage.
The captain of the Enemistad, a Mr. Allen Forsythe, who was quite an ordinary, bookish-looking man, for being the first pirate captain to whom Everard had politely introduced himself (aside from Vitaliy), insisted angrily:
“They are legitimate! From Madison’s own hand—not even his secretary!”
Everard had suspected this himself, though it seemed impossible. But there it was in his hands, a president’s signature endorsing a pirate’s ship.
“Right,” he said. “Well.” He rolled them back into their case, still marvelling.
Small wonder V. Varfolomey was infamous, with that kind of internal reach.
He began to see why the Navy had wanted his execution kept quiet, under wraps in rural Upper Canada.
Anything to avoid a martyr—especially one with influence upon the United States President.
“Onward,” he jested weakly.
The voyage lasted eight days. And several times along Enemistad’s trajectory south, rolling over in his little, singlewide merchantman’s bunk, D’Arcy snoring above him, Everard caught himself wondering Why, and especially Why with So Many Persons.
But there was no help for it. D’Arcy had clenched his teeth and said Wherever you Go, Ever, I Go, and had always gone with the wind in any case, so Why Not; Thom was manservant steadfast, instantly coveted.
Bellingham, donning vicar’s accoutrements, which Everard was unclear if were a disguise or not, clung to D’Arcy like a waifish, deep-voiced duckling.
Vitaliy didn’t seem to mind his tagalongs, but Everard, matelotage agreement or not, felt the responsibility of them all very keenly. He consoled himself by remembering that they were sailors all, and what was a sailor if not quite used to being sent to all the obscure corners of the seas?
And the corner that V. Varfolomey occupied was obscure indeed.
“Your flagship,” Everard asked at breakfast, because V. Varfolomey was of course important enough to have his own flagship, like a bloody admiral, “is called Sévère?”
Vitaliy nodded, thumb between his teeth, slurping off melted butter and American honey—Everard had tried hard not to notice any of this—and said, “She’s in Matagorda Bay.”
Matagorda Bay, Nueva Espana, a tiny, dangerously uninhabited bay on the western curve of the Gulf of México.
“Do you expect… problems… in retaking her as captain?”
The thumb came free, sank to break apart another bit of saturated bread, and back in it went, ’til it was sucked clean and shiny wet. “No,” he said thickly.
Vitaliy would not eat sugar, in his coffee or otherwise, but yet clearly had a voracious fondness for sweets.
He swallowed, and shrugged. “I may have to fight for her. Some of the crew insist on… older ways and means.”
As though it were nothing.
“Fight? D’you mean dueling? Or…”
D’Arcy snorted. “Nothing so civilised for pirates.” He sipped at coffee—heavily doctored with rum—and was reclined in a chair. His shiny-booted ankles were crossed over Everard’s knee.
Everard had allowed this intimacy at first only out of sheer curiosity towards Vitaliy’s reaction.
When there was none, he let it continue with conflicted, slightly shameful pleasure, for D’Arcy had been short and distant with him since he’d returned to Maud’s that day in Kingston.
Nigh-delirious with fatigue and caffeine, Everard had felt the agreement he’d made with Vitaliy stick suddenly in his throat as D’Arcy’s expression slid into disbelief and hurt.
Now D’Arcy’s—frankly territorial—message was plain.
Vitaliy received it without a blink.
But then, he had been carefully explicit as they signed the legalities. Their agreement didn’t preclude Everard from relations with others, and he himself cared not at all. It felt pointed, especially with D’Arcy sitting glumly as witness, Bellingham St. Clare at his side.
“Matelotage,” Vitaliy had explained, “is not a marriage as most understand. Not anymore. It is mostly inheritance, convenience. No pirate on the Sévère will care if you are found outside my bed. And,” he’d said thoughtfully, “the existing relationship explains the lieutenant’s presence, even if we leave him out of the papers.
” He signed his elaborate majuscule V with a flourish; Everard signed his own meager initialed scrawl; and that was that. It was done.
Naturally, he’d said nothing about relations with his own person.
“I mean a fight to the death,” Vitaliy clarified now. “Which is not by any means excluded from civilisation,” he said pointedly.
D’Arcy rolled his eyes.
“But aren’t pirates supposedly democratic?” Everard asked.
“Yes,” Vitaliy said firmly. “But as I was never turned out nor campaigned against, but only presumed dead, I may challenge my elected replacement, if there is one, and defend my own prior election. And they also may choose a fight to defend the crew’s most recent election.
” He pushed the last of the honeyed bread into his mouth, though seemed now to savor it less as he chewed.
“It may be pistol proof, but more likely fists.”
“Why not have another election?”
“Expediency,” D’Arcy quipped.
“Bloodsport,” Vitaliy said. “We don’t yet live in an age where violence isn’t valued at utmost, and crew want a leader who will defend them to the last, and prove they did not desert them willingly.”
Hither to last week, Everard never had and never would’ve deserted a posting of his own, but Vitaliy spoke of captaincy like a privilege instead of duty or right.
He spoke of captaincy and leadership as though it wasn’t often like herding bouncing seals, hanging on to authority’s slippery fur for dear life, only one’s read-in admiralty papers and the occasional reluctant striping backing him.
Perhaps piracy was different in that way also.
“‘Government: the greatest of all reflections on human nature,’” Everard quoted. “They want a man after their own hearts.”
Vitaliy smiled. “Yes. But I’m not worried. If they’ve chosen anyone, it will be Milly, and she is too fond of her own command of the Birch. And does not want me dead, last I asked.”
She, her. Command.
“She? Milly—your fleet master—is a woman?” Everard said, aghast. Sailors sometimes had feminised sobriquets, so he hadn’t thought anything of the name—Milly, how ridiculous—upon first mention. But the pronouns plunked down like stones, undeniable.
“Mmm,” Vitaliy confirmed; he sucked his thumb clean of the last swipes of honey from his tin plate.
“Mind, I hope she hasn’t tried to take the Sévère after all.
She claimed her own captaincy via election, whereupon the previous captain was only two days gone ashore.
He returned, claimed his prior election, enraged…
Milly defended the Birch’s crew faster than I’ve seen prior or since. ”
D’Arcy removed his feet from Everard’s knee and leaned forward, fascinated. “Pistols, surely? Was the other captain a drunk?”
Vitaliy chuckled. “No.” He didn’t offer further.
“And the crew?” Everard asked, though now it seemed a given. “They accepted her henceforth?”
Vitaliy stood, brushed off his trousers, and took the stack of tin mess plates into his arms. “They elected her. They loved her.” He smiled slightly, admiration and pride clear on his face. “And then she replaced them. One by one.”
Everard frowned. “With whom? Other… electors?”
“A select crew,” Vitaliy said cryptically, walking away. “You’ll see. And they love her even more.”