Bring It Close (42 page)

Fifty Four

Tiola was coming up through the scuttle. The men fighting for their lives were not aware that a small area of the deck had warped into a different dimension where time had ceased. Below, caring as best she could for the wounded and the dying, she had sensed the unbalanced shift and fled up the ladder, coming too late, just too late, to save Jesamiah. She ran, heedless of the fight going on around her as suspended Time became right again, and the gun in Charles Mereno’s hand fired. Jesamiah was falling. His head struck the tiller and blood spread beneath him, pooling on the deck.

Here it was, her nightmare dream. The one word tore from her as a single, long, gut-wrenching cry of grief. “Jes…a…mi…ah!”

She threw herself over him, covering his body with her own, her tears falling like a burst of summer rain, her arms going around him, trying to make him sit up, trying to make him come alive. Trying to keep him warm and with her.

She heard the snigger: the humourless giggle of the Malevolents behind her.

~
He is dead, Witch Woman! He is dead! And you are not so clever as to bring the dead back to life, are you? We have won! We have him
! ~ The giggling shrieked in a cacophony of macabre hilarity.

Tiola stared up at Teach, her dark eyes a depth of impenetrable black as he stepped forward, his last pistol aimed at Jesamiah’s head.

His ugly, satisfied smile was repellent. “Let us make sure ‘e be dead, eh?”

In a blur of movement that no human could have made, Tiola was standing astride the man she loved beyond her own life. Head erect, her fingers linked together at her waist, her eyes turning into pools of a glistening blackness that sparked with flecks of gold and silver. As the balance shifted into flux, energy crackled from her body and a great mass of power built and built behind her, swelling and expanding. She stood there, the Old One of Light with her gift of Craft, magnificent and omnipotent.

Slowly, very slowly, she brought her arms out and up, palms upper-most, forming a great circle of power in the air; a circle of bright, white fire trailing where her hands passed, building and building in density. The Circle of Light. At the zenith above her head her fingers touched and joined. The Power invoked; the Circle complete.

Her voice was potent in its commanding chant:

Light enclose the Circle,

All to fill the Air;

Coursing through the deep Earth,

Within the Fire flare.

Light upon the Water

The River and the Sea,

Spirit become the Circle

Protecting him and me.

Power to my Circle,

Power to my Might

Power to my Ageless Craft

Dark shall fear my Light!

The sky had turned black, the rage of the Dark Energy appearing like storm clouds banking overhead. Thunder split the sky, the rage of the Malevolence unleashed. The only light was Tiola’s circle, the white fire that burned but gave no heat.

“You cannot harm me!” she cried to the swelling rage of Darkness. “I have formed the Circle and it cannot be broken!”

The Dark expanded in the sky, thicker, denser, boiling and swirling in its anger, but held at bay by the burning circle, came no closer.

Tiola turned her head slightly with a mixture of contempt and hatred towards the loathsome reptile that was Edward Teach. But for all her disdain, she also held compassion. The Dark had used him, had sent the Malevolents to feed on his vile greed and arrogance. To gorge and bloat and consume, leaving behind nothing of the man, only the sinister control of the Darkness of Evil.

“I cannot kill you for it is forbidden,” she said, “but I can and I will drive out the Dark and those it sends to devour! I can and I will drive out the false promises of its minions, those which claim to protect and keep Death cowering in the shadows. I can and I will defeat the evil of the Dark that threatens those I love and cherish!”

The Darkness above and around roared its fury and howled its rage, a sound like the cannons of a battalion firing a sweeping broadside. But it was impotent against her.

“I can and I will destroy this Malevolence of the Dark!” And Tiola hurled the Circle of Light from her, thrusting it away with both hands. With all the strength she possessed she cast it, not at the broiling clouds of the Dark, but direct at Edward Teach.

He flung up his arms, screeched in fear, warding the blaze of Light off, trying to stop its terrible force from touching his face, his body, his hands. He staggered backwards, tripped, half fell, breath gasping in his lungs as the blaze tore into and through him. The Dark fled and the canker that had inhabited Teach fled with it, racing across the sky as a hare bolts from the hounds. The Circle of Light flared once, and vanished. The sun shone again and the equilibrium of Life and Death returned to its course of balanced stability.

Teach was on one knee. He had dropped his pistol. Desperate, he reached for it, his fingers scrabbling to close around the butt, to lift the weapon, cock it, aim. Maynard was trying to rise to his feet also, his head was spinning from the blow Teach had dealt him, blood trickling from a gash across his eyebrow. Men were fighting hand to hand. Kicking, punching and biting. Not much sound now, except for the thud and thump of blows and the groans of the wounded and the dying; the cry of gulls wheeling overhead, the sound of a wind hurrying, belatedly, across the marshes.

Blood was soaking through Teach’s clothing, matting his beard and hair; the fuses entwined there had sputtered out. He pushed himself up, stood swaying, his vision blurring, dazed, bewildered and disorientated. This was not how it was meant to be. He could not die. He had been promised, promised that Death would not come for him. But Death stood there, bold and brazen before him.

“I have come for you, Edward,” Charles Mereno said, bending to pick up Jesamiah’s cutlass and to step in front of Teach. “I did a great wrong when I was a young man. Because of lust I got a woman with child and I spurned her plea for help. They said she was a Dark Witch and that she had conjured the Devil to protect her son.”

He stood before Teach, the cutlass blade pressing into the pirate’s throat through the matted blood-soaked beard.

“And that child became a monster who found me, his father, and deliberately set out to make my life and the lives of others a misery of despair. I knew, when first I saw you, Edward Teach, that you were my son.”

Charles glanced at Tiola who was kneeling beside Jesamiah, cradling him, her tears spilling, her power gone, faded. “I had to raise Phillipe as my own; it was my duty to do so. I knew, to my shame, that he was my grandson. I tried to deny it, to ignore him. Out of cowardice, hid away and did nothing to stop the wickedness. But now at last I will find peace by ending what I so selfishly began. I must destroy the son I so foolishly and carelessly created.”

He drew the cutlass back and struck, slicing the blade through flesh, sinew and bone, severing the head of his firstborn, illegitimate son, Edward Teach, with the one blow.

Fifty Five

The aftermath of battle was a mess. The sea around where the two sloops,
Adventure
and
Jane
, drifted was tainted red by the blood draining through the scuppers. More than half the men were killed; most of the others wounded. Among the dead, Nat Crocker and Sandy Banks. Wounded, badly but not mortally, Isiah Roberts, Joe Meadows – Skylark, and Crawford. Finch, though he had fought as fiercely as the next man, had not a scratch on him.

No one knew who had killed Blackbeard. The fighting had been confusing and intense; there had been so much smoke that for a while it had seemed as if the very sky had turned black, split only by a blast of flame from cannon fire. That the
Jane
carried no cannon, and none aboard the
Adventure
had been loaded, were facts that no one, except Tiola, realised or understood.

They found twenty cutlass slashes on Blackbeard’s body, with five gunshot wounds, and although they marvelled at his great strength at attempting to cheat death, none felt sorry for him as they tossed his corpse over the side without word or prayer for his passing. The tide was on the turn and his remains swept in and out, bumping against the side of the
Jane
as if seeking its severed head, which Maynard had hung as a trophy from the bowsprit.

Those pirates who survived were locked, defeated and broken, in the hold. All of them were wounded. They would be taken to Williamsburg, tried and hanged without mercy.

Before the tide fell too low and dusk encroached, the
Jane
and the
Ranger
, with the
Adventure
as a Prize, limped away from the Ocracoke towards Pilot Point on the Pamlico River, leaving the corpses of those pirates who had died to the fish and crabs to devour. Their own dead would receive honoured burial.

Tiola was relieved to see the
Sea Witch
waiting there, as beautiful as ever she was. They took the
Jane
alongside and transferred the wounded of Jesamiah’s crew to their rightful ship, and with subdued farewells and promises to return the boats to la Sorenta, Maynard sailed on to Bath Town where Captain Brand and his men were waiting, not needed. The fight was over.

Under Rue’s solemn, guiding hand, the
Sea Witch
weighed anchor and set sail, bound for England as had been Jesamiah’s order.

Jesamiah himself was an exasperating patient. He grumbled about the stitched wound that throbbed and ached at the back of his head, he mithered about the bruising to his chest and the pain of the broken collarbone in his right shoulder. But of his father he said nothing, not even after Tiola had tried to explain the why of it all, in an effort to help him understand.

The thoughts were there, though. As
Sea Witch
ploughed her way through the rough Atlantic rollers he remembered those days when, as a child, he had been alone with his father. He realised now, that they had been good days; days when the both of them had set aside grief and torments and had taken pleasure in each other’s company. Realised too, as he lay there in his bed those first few days, watching the glittered reflection of the sea or the night shadows shape-shift on the low beams overhead, why the things of his childhood had happened in the way they had.

It had begun with the passing lust for and abandonment of a serving woman, and as with the neglect of all mistakes, the one had led to another and the injustices of retribution had marched too close. Out of guilt, Charles Mereno had taken on a lad as midshipman; a lad whom he had realised from the first was his bastard son. Because of guilt over his drunken and cowardly inability to prevent the death of a friend and the rape of a woman by that son, he had brought up the resulting child, Phillipe, as his own. And Jesamiah had paid the price of it all.

The ghost of the man who was Jesamiah’s father had made those mistakes in life, but in death had tried to ensure that his son, Jesamiah, stayed alive. Deliberately, he had taken aim at the bronze buckle of the baldric belt strapped across Jesamiah’s shoulder; enough to wound, but not enough to kill. Enough to put him out of the fight against Teach; a fight he could never have won.

Only once did Jesamiah speak of his father to Tiola. They had made love – gently, for the sake of his shoulder – and after, in the brightening dawn that was peeping through the salt-grimed stern windows, he had said, “The fathers in my family have not done so well, have they? I would, were I to be a father, learn from their mistakes and be there, always, for my son. Were I to have one.”

Tiola had smiled, had kissed him in the way that only a wife who loved her husband could. And had said nothing.

Charles Mereno turned away from the River and walked towards where the sea lay flat and calm and blue beneath a sun-warmed sky. He thrust his hands deeper into his pockets and whistled a jaunty tune. He wondered if he would meet his friends again, the crewmen he had called brothers – his closest friend, Carlos. Surely they were here, gone ahead?

Peace, he realised, was contentment and happiness. There was only one thing that slightly bothered him. Something the Witch Woman had said when she had accompanied him back to the River.

“It is unwise to bring the Dark too close,” she had said, “for the Dark does not always reveal the truth. We hear what we think we should, or want to hear, but guilt can whisper falsehoods. Unlike the Dark, the Light would never command. The human will is free to make its own choices.”

Walking across the heather-clad moor, the sound of the bees busy and a lark trilling high in the sky, he wondered what she had meant. And then it occurred to him.

Had his actions, from that very first day when a black-haired boy called Edward had asked to serve aboard his ship, been nothing more than a guilt-burdened assumption? Had resemblance to a woman he had once tumbled, and then forgotten, been naught but an illusion? He would never know the truth, not now. It no longer mattered; he had put right a wrong. And with that knowledge the burden that had followed him beyond the grave lifted from his shoulders.

He walked on, whistling, content, knowing he had done his best for the one truth that was, without any doubt, certain. He was proud of, and loved, his son. Jesamiah.

Author’s note

I like to think of my
Sea Witch
series as stories that are akin to a typical sailor’s yarn – some bits are accurate, others are blatant fantasy, but most of it is not quite one or the other. The trick of a good yarn is to blend the reality with the imaginary so it all becomes plausible, and belief is suspended in deference to enjoyment. I hope I have achieved that.

Had I intended to write these books as serious fiction, as with my other historical novels, I would have been scrupulous with the facts of history, but these sea adventures are a blend of reality and fantasy so, with my apologies, I have gone for the character of the story rather than attention to fine detail. That is not to say the historical parts are entirely inaccurate though!

With editing assistance from my good friend and maritime author
par excellence
James L. Nelson, my nautical scenes are as correct as I can make them; any errors are my fault not his. I do confess that I have taken liberties with
Sea Witch
herself, however, for a couple of things about her are not quite right. Her rigging and copper-clad bottom are a few years in advance of her time. This was a deliberate decision on my part as I wanted to model her on the tall ship the
Rose
, a replica of which was built by another friend of mine, John F. Millar of Virginia. Fans of sea-stories may know the
Rose
in her alter ego part of HMS
Surprise
in the movie
Master & Commander.
I feel justified with this ‘poetic licence’ as the
Sea Witch
is, after all, a major character in a fantasy adventure novel, and I do state in the first book of the series,
Sea Witch
, that she is a new-built ship – so who is to say when the new designs first took place as innovative, unrecorded, experiments?

In
Bring It Close
many of Blackbeard’s scenes happened – but without Jesamiah and Tiola of course. Blackbeard did take sixteen-year-old Mary Ormond as his 14th wife, and she did suffer the abuse I described on their wedding night – although her ultimate fate is my invention as we do not know what became of her. So too, did the fate of Jonathan Gabriel occur, although the name and character detail is made up, as is Perdita’s; all we know is that Blackbeard took his revenge on a girl who spurned him. Her reaction to the horror has various unsubstantiated accounts, I have merely chosen to use one of them.

Governors Eden and Alexander Spotswood existed, as did Lt Robert Maynard and Tobias Knight; their parts concerning Blackbeard’s demise are also accurate as are the dates for that final battle in the shallows of the Ocracoke. Eden was implicated in a subsequent investigation, as was Knight, but both were clever enough to be acquitted. Some reports mention that Maynard disappeared a few months later – others say it was a year or so. It was said he had died, but given that very little of value was officially retrieved from Blackbeard’s ship, the
Adventure
, I think this is unlikely. Maynard would have been able to search at leisure, and the Royal Navy was known for its extreme slowness – and gross unfairness – in paying out prize money. It therefore does not take much of a leap of imagination to work out what happened to Maynard – or where the bulk of Blackbeard’s treasure hoard went!

Blackbeard himself had a variety of names, he may have changed identity, or it was common in the Eighteenth Century to have alternative spellings for the same name. He was known as Edward Teach or Thatch, but it seems he came from Bristol, England, so I believe the difference in his names is accountable because of his West Country accent. ‘Teach’ could have been pronounced as something like “T’ach” – Thatch.

But ‘Blackbeard’ is his more infamous name.

He did indeed live at Bath Town, North Carolina for a few months as a ‘respectable’ citizen and had Governor Eden eating out of his hand. North Carolina was not as wealthy as the prospering Virginia and corruption was rife throughout all the Colonies. The initial plan hatched between governor and pirate could have worked beautifully, if only Edward Teach had stuck to it.

The crew members I have named (Garrett Gibbens for instance) were his real crew – we know their names because they were captured and hanged at Williamsburg. Israel Hands was arrested in Bath Town, seriously wounded from being shot in the knee by Teach. He gave evidence against those men captured and was pardoned. Legend says he ended his days begging in the streets of London. The only crew member of note whom I made up is Red Rufus. Sam Odell was indeed at the Ocracoke – he had to prove he was an innocent bystander, even though he had spent the night drinking with Teach.

I used several textbooks for my research – and found it most frustrating when they differed in detail. The Midshipman who commanded the
Ranger
in the attack against Blackbeard, for instance. In one book his name was Baker, in another, Hyde, so for the final word I stayed with UK maritime expert David Cordingly.

Anyone visiting Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia can see the gaol (jail), the courtroom in the Capitol Building, John Brush’s house, and the palace for themselves. I have researched the detail as well as I could (with the kind help of my friend Judy) but inevitably there will be a few discrepancies. You will not find the ‘
Acorn
’ tavern that Alicia will be investing in, for instance, but the
Raleigh
and the
King’s Arms
are certainly there (though the
Raleigh
is of a much better standard now!) I hope to return Jesamiah to Williamsburg one day – he will have to see how Alicia is getting on, after all, and I need an excuse to go back to do more research!

La Sorenta, a few miles north of Urbanna along the Rappahannock River is entirely fictitious, as are most of the ‘incidental’ characters. My apologies to the ancestors of any ‘real’ people if I have not portrayed them in a favourable light – the necessity of drama in story telling, I’m afraid.

For those who are interested, when he is talking to Governor Spotswood, Jesamiah mentions various territories and towns named after monarchs, and that the king at the time, George of Hanover, (George I) had no such honour. As far as I am aware he never did. The Colony of Georgia was named after his successor, George II. And George III, of course, lost it all towards the end of the century when the American Colonies rebelled and fought the War of Independence. Which, contrary to general belief in the UK, did not start with the famous Boston Tea Party where a cargo of tea was thrown into the harbour. Tea was involved, but the animosity between America and England was because of smuggling tea as contraband. As a minor historical note of interest, in revolt against the British Government’s heavy import duty of tea the American settlers resolved to drink coffee instead. It remains the favoured US beverage to this day. The original
Rose
, mentioned above, played an important part at the outset of the War. She was very effective against the Colony Smugglers in and around the Chesapeake – too effective, for rebellion against her constant prowling soon occurred.

One pedantic little note to those readers who tut over the minutiae of historical detail – it is perfectly correct for Jesamiah to have called Blackbeard ‘Sleeping Beauty’. The original story (Sleeping Beauty –
La Belle au Bois dormant
– The Beauty Asleep in the Wood) was written by Charles Perrault and published in 1697.

My apologies for my attempt at portraying Teach’s Bristol accent. I took advice from a noted English Dialect book – so any laughable nonsense is not entirely my fault. Charles St Croix Mereno may appear again in Voyage Four –
Ripples in the Sand
, but should you wish to discover more about Jesamiah’s grandfather, Alexander, you will find him in my editor Joe Field’s own excellent novel of the English Civil War –
Rogues & Rebels
. I heartily recommend the read. Thank you Jo for allowing me to steal Arabella and Alexander’s son. The book is out of print at the moment, but I am hoping Jo will consider putting it on Kindle.

Had I realised when I set out to write this series how popular Jesamiah was to become, maybe I would have considered writing these books as straight historical adventure – but then maybe fact and fantasy has a tighter blend of authenticity than we realise? Or perhaps there is a Parallel Universe where things happen similar to our existence, but not quite the same?

In my imagination things once happened as I have written them. To me, Jesamiah Acorne, Tiola Oldstagh,
Sea Witch
and her crew are very real, they exist – but not in this world.

No one knows for certain the full detail of any event that happened in the past – for instance, a charming rogue of an ex-pirate could indeed have insisted on having his name left out of the official records concerning the demise of the man known as Blackbeard.

And please let me know if you find a blue ribbon hanging mysteriously on a bush, branch or gatepost. It seems Jesamiah has taken to leaving them in unexpected places for his growing crew of loyal fans to find…

Helen Hollick

2011