The cabin's dark overhead beams were musty from the heat and its air still dense with smoke from the cannon. The stern windows were partly blocked now by the two bronze demi-culverin that had been run out aft, "stern-chaser" cannon that could spit a nine-pound ball with deadly accuracy—their lighter bronze permitting longer barrels than those of the cast-iron guns below decks. He strode directly to the oil lantern swaying over the great center desk and turned up the wick. The cabin brightened slightly, but the face of the English lute wedged in the corner seemed suddenly to come alive, shining gold over the cramped quarters like a full moon. He stared at it wistfully for a moment, then shook his head and settled himself behind the large oak desk. And asked himself once more why he had ever agreed to the voyage.
To prove something? To the Company? To himself?
He reflected again on how it had come about, and why he had finally accepted the Company's offer. . . .
It had been a dull morning in late October, the kind of day when all London seems trapped in an icy gloom creeping up from the Thames. His weekly lodgings were frigid as always, and his mind was still numb from the previous night's tavern brandy. Back from Tunis scarcely a month, he already had nothing left to pawn. Two years before, he had been leading a convoy of merchantmen through the Mediterranean when their ships and cargo were seized by Turkish corsairs, galleys owned by the notorious dey of Tunis. He had finally managed to get back to London, but now he was a captain without a ship. In years past this might have been small matter to remedy. But no longer. England, he discovered, had changed.
The change was apparent mainly to seamen. The lower house of Parliament was still preoccupied fighting King James's new proposal that Scotland be joined to England, viewed by most Englishmen as a sufferance of proud beggars and ruffians upon a nation of uniformly upright taxpayers; in London idle crowds still swarmed the bear gardens to wager on the huge mastiffs pitted against the chained bears; rioting tenant farmers continued to outrage propertied men by tearing down enclosures and grazing their flocks on the gentry's private hunting estates; and the new Puritans increasingly harassed everyone they disapproved of, from clerics who wore vestments to women who wore cosmetics to children who would play ball on Sunday.
Around London more talk turned on which handsome young courtier was the latest favorite of their effeminate new king than on His Majesty's enforcement of his new and strict decree forbidding privateering—the staple occupation of England seamen for the last three decades of Elizabeth's reign. King James had cravenly signed a treaty of peace with Spain, and by that act brought ruin to half a hundred thousand English "sea dogs." They awoke to discover their historic livelihood, legally plundering the shipping of Spain and Portugal under wartime letters of marque, had become a criminal offense.
For a captain without a ship, another commission by a trading company seemed out of the question, and especially now, with experienced seamen standing idle the length of London. Worst of all, the woman he had hoped to return to, red-haired Maggie Tyne of Billingsgate, had disappeared from her old lodgings and haunts leaving no trace. Rumor had her married—some said to the master of a Newcastle coal barge, others to a gentleman. London seemed empty now, and he passed the vacant days with brandy and his lute, and thoughts of quitting the sea—to do he knew not what.
Then in that cold early dawn appeared the letter, requesting his immediate appearance at the Director's Office of the East India Company, should this coincide with his convenience. He found its tone ominous. Was some merchant planning to have him jailed for his loss of cargo to the Turks? But he'd been sailing for the Levant Company, not the East India Company. He debated with himself all morning, and finally decided to go. And face the mercantile bastards.
The new offices of the Company already seemed embalmed in the smell of lamp oil and sweat, their freshly painted wood timbers masked in dull soot. A stale odor of ink, paper, and arid commerce assailed his senses as he was announced and ushered through the heavy oak door of the Director's suite.
And he was astonished by what awaited. Standing hard by the Director's desk—was Maggie. He'd searched the length of London in vain for her, and here she was. But he almost didn't recognize her. Their two years apart had brought a change beyond anything he could have imagined.