His heart leaped at sight of the familiar vesseclass="underline" there was the quarterdeck whereon he'd debated with Bertrand the right demeanor for a poet and from which he'd been cast providentially into the sea; there on the poop stood Captain Meech, grim-faced, exhorting his men as before not to jeopardize the passengers' safety by resisting the assault, even though he had mounted a brand new eight-pounder in the bow.
Ebenezer clucked his tongue. "Poor wretch!"
There in the waist the ladies squealed and swooned as before, while the gentlemen, frowning nervously, were led off to their cabins for robbing; there by the foremast the sailors huddled. Ebenezer saw several of his molesters, including Ned, and many new faces as well. The pirates, having been at sea for at least the six weeks since their last encounter, took no pains to disguise their lust for the ladies and the female servants: they addressed them in the lewdest terms; pinched, poked, tweaked, and stroked. Captain Pound had his hands full preventing wholesale assault. He cursed the crew in his quiet hissing voice and threatened them with keelhauling if they did not desist. Even so, the mate himself, black Boabdil, driven nearly berserk by the sight of an adolescent beauty who, perhaps seasick, had been brought up on deck in her nightdress, flung her over his shoulder and made for the railing, clearly intending to have at her in traditional pirate fashion; it took the Captain's pistol at his temple to restrain the Moor's ardor and send him off growling and licking his lips. The girl, happily, had fainted at his first approach, and so was oblivious to her honor's narrow rescue.
So desperate did the situation become that at length the Captain ordered all hands back aboard the shallop, though the pillaging was not entirely finished, and cast off the grapples. He carried with him Captain Meech, two members of the Poseidon's crew, and one of her longboats, giving as his reasons the need for a consultation on the subject of longitude and the possibility that not all of the eight-pounder's ammunition had been confiscated; he would set them free, he declared, as soon as the shallop was out of range. Then he set the still grumbling crew to stowing the fresh provisions in preparation for the formal dividing of the spoils, and retreated with his hostage to the chartroom.
Now Ebenezer had of course abandoned his observation post when the pirates came back aboard, and so dangerous was their mood that before the first barrel of port came down the hatch he hid himself far aft, behind the old cargo, to avoid their wrath. His hiding place was a wide black cranny, perhaps three feet high, that extended on both sides of the keel under the cabins, as far aft as the rudderpost in the stern. Since the space provided access to the steering-cables running from the wheel on deck through blocks to the rudder-post itself, it was provided with a false floor over the bilge, on which the Laureate lay supine and still. Over his head, which was not two feet from the stern, he heard the sound of chairs scraping on the floor, and presently a pair of chuckling voices.
"By Heav'n, the black had like to split her open!" said one, and Ebenezer easily identified Captain Pound. "I thought he'd pitch me to the fishes when I stopped him!"
The other laughed. "He'd ha' spitted her through for all I'd cross him, Tom, I swear't! 'Twere a pity, though, I'll grant ye; she's a gentleman's morsel, not a beef-bull's, and I mean to try her ere we raise Lands End."
Ebenezer was not surprised to hear the voice of Captain Meech, but he was horrified at the intimacy suggested by their conversation.
"Do ye look for trouble?" Meech asked.
"God knows, Jim. Boabdil is a wild one when he sets his cap for coney. They all need a week ashore, or I'm a dead man."
"Well, I've no orders for ye about your poet, but I did bring ye this — they smuggled it aboard at Cedar Point."
There was a pause while Meech brought forth whatever it was he referred to, then a slap as of papers on the table. Ebenezer strained his ears, though every word thus far he had heard distinctly. He forgot completely about the original purpose of his concealment.
"A Secret Historie of the Voiage Up the Bay of Chesapeake," Pound read aloud. "What foolery is this?"
"No foolery," Meech laughed. "Old Baltimore would cut your throat for't! Look on the backsides."
The papers rustled. " 'Fore God!"
"Aye." Meech confirmed whatever realization his friend had reached. "They got it off Dick Smith in Calvert County — God knows how! He's Baltimore's surveyor general."
"But what am I to do with it?"
"They said Coode himself will come for't in a month or so. This is only a part of the whole Journal, from what I gather; if he can find the rest ere things get settled, then Nicholson can't touch him. Right now the place is a bedlam, Tom: ye should see St. Mary's City! Andros came and went; Lawrence is back in; Henry Jowles hath Ninian Beale's old job; old Robotham's back in, that hath the daughter ye liked — remember Lucy?"
"Aye," said Pound, "from the last time. She hath a birthmark on her arse, you told me."
"Nay, Tom, no birthmark! 'Tis the Great Bear in freckles, I swear't, and the pointers point — "
"No more!" Pound laughed. "I remember where the pole-star was, that all men's needles aimed at. Go on with Maryland, now, ere ye have to leave."
"Marry, what a wench!" Meech said. "Where was I? Did I tell ye about Andros?" He went on to relate that John Coode's brother-in-law, Neamiah Blackistone, so influential under the late Governor Copley, had died in disgrace last February after the Commissioners of the Customs-House, on evidence from the "Burlingame's Journall documents" smuggled to Lord Baltimore by Nicholson, had charged him with graft. Sir Edmund Andros of Virginia had returned to St. Mary's in May with Sir Thomas Lawrence, whom Copley had impeached and made him President of the Council and acting Governor of Maryland — to the rebels' dismay, since it was Lawrence who had smuggled the notorious Assembly Journal of 1691 to Nicholson. Then Nicholson had landed, embraced his good friend Lawrence, and made a Maryland councillor out of Edward Randolph, the Jacobite Royal Surveyor so well known up and down the colonies for his prankish contempt of provincial authorities. But so far from thanking his old superior Andros for governing in his absence, Nicholson had promptly called that government illegal, declared null and void all statutes passed thereunder, and demanded (thus far in vain) that Andros return the five-hundred-pound honorarium awarded him for his services by Lawrence's Council! The insurrectionists, Meech declared, were making the most of this rebuff to turn Andros against Nicholson; their leader Coode still held with impunity the post of sheriff in St. Mary's County and a lieutenant-colonelcy in the county militia under Lawrence himself, and in these capacities drew his salary from the very government he was doing his best to overthrow. Andros had already allowed Coode the services of his "coast-guard" Captain Pound, of course, and in addition had virtually promised Coode asylum in Virginia if, as was feared imminent, Nicholson opened cases against him, his ally Kenelm Cheseldyne of the Assembly, and old Blackistone's widow. The insurrectionists, Meech said further, were engaged both defensively and offensively: they were ransacking the Province for the other portions of the incriminating Journal, which they understood to be cached with various Papists and Jacobites, and at the same time they were inciting the Piscataway Indians to rebel, perhaps in league with other Indian nations.
"Marry, 'tis a perilous game they play!" said Pound. "I'm happy to be at sea!"
"I'm happy to be sailing east to London, Tom; this Coode would burn a province on a bet. Yet he doth pay handsomely."
"Speaking whereof — "
"Aye," Meech said. There was another pause. "They gave me this to give ye for holding Cooke, and there's another like it for keeping these papers." Nicholson had learned of the Journal's absence, he explained, and was turning the Province upside down to find it — hence the rebels' decision to remove it from the colony altogether until things settled down. Pound was to cruise in his present latitude for six weeks, or until a ship came out from Coode to fetch the papers. At that time he would receive his fee and, in all likelihood, instructions concerning his prisoners.