Indian gave no indication of knowing they were there.
An hour after the sounds of Dunmore’s party had faded in the east, Plato headed off into the woods, leaving Elizabeth alone with only a brace of loaded pistols for company. She spent a long time examining them, for lack of anything else to occupy her mind, holding them close to her face, studying every detail of the weapons, the muted colors of the flints, the ridges and valleys left where they had been chipped into shape.
When she could bear that no more she leaned back and looked up at the forest canopy, watched chickadees flashing through the trees in their frenetic bursts of flight, nuthatches hopping headfirst down the trunks, cardinals the color of fresh blood fluttering limb to limb.
Elizabeth secretly hated the woods, and all of her mental activity was calculated to prevent her from panicking at the realization that she was now alone in that wilderness. She was a city girl, born and raised in Plymouth and then a resident of London until the age of twenty-one. She felt more safe in those close-packed, filthy, crime-ridden streets than she did in the uninhabited forest. Tinling House-Marlowe House-was the most rustic living she had encountered and she was only now coming to embrace it. Being alone in the woods like that was too much.
The crack of a twig and she jumped, gasped, brought the cocked pistol around fast and only just avoided shooting Plato right through the heart at a distance of thirty feet. The black man stood, hands up, a look of surprise on his face. Behind him, George and Wallace. George carried two of Thomas Marlowe’s fine muskets. Wallace carried what looked like a giant scroll, six feet long.
It was not a scroll, of course, but a litter: two stout pine saplings with a piece of number-two canvas lashed between them. Once Elizabeth had lowered the gun and eased the lock back down, Wallace laid the thing beside her and unrolled it and without a word he slipped his hands under her calves and Plato apologetically slipped his hands under her arms and they eased her onto the cloth.
Elizabeth wanted to protest, but that was pointless because she knew she could not walk all the way back to Marlowe House on her injured ankle. She tried to find some position that made her feel like she was retaining some modicum of dignity, but there was no such thing. So she lay back, stiff, looking up at the trees overhead in the late-afternoon sun and tried to pretend she was enjoying the ride back down the trail.
Her arms were crossed under her breasts and she held a pistol loosely in each hand and that at least made her feel less like a helpless and pathetic child.
George scouted ahead, hurrying off down the trail, and they did not see him again until they came to the edge of the forest, three miles down. The hunters were gone. He had not seen anything that was worth warning them about.
They were actually on Marlowe’s land by then, in the trees that marked the furthest point of clearing and cultivation. The big plantation house was a mile away and between it and their hiding place, and away to their left, were the former Tinling slaves’ homes.
Wallace and Plato set the litter down and Elizabeth insisted that they help her to her feet. She stood on her good ankle and balanced against a mature oak tree and regarded her home in the distance. She cursed herself for not thinking to bring one of Marlowe’s telescopes, but George assured her that he had approached as close as one hundred feet to the house and he could see no one there, inside or out.
They waited until it was dark, and while they waited Elizabeth insisted that they fashion her a crutch. Her dignity, which had been so under assault during the past week, would not allow her to be carried that last mile to the front door of her own home.
An hour after the sun set and it had gone full dark and there were no lights to be seen anywhere-no fires, no lanterns, no orange glow of pipes-the four of them emerged from the woods and covered the last mile back to Marlowe House.
Elizabeth had never in all the time she had lived there, as Mrs. Tin-ling and as the widow Tinling and as Mrs. Marlowe, been so happy to climb the steps of that porch and throw open the big front door.
She thanked the men for bearing her back home, asked them if there was anything more they might take back with them, but they said there was nothing they needed. She pressed one of Marlowe’s telescopes on them, instructed them to keep an eye on the house, and they promised they would. She might be gone for a while, she told them, but when either she or Marlowe was back they were to send someone for news.
They would be able to return to their homes, she assured them, to their former lives as free men and women under Marlowe’s protection.
The black men thanked her. They did not seem too certain.
For a full day she rested, let her ankle recover from its wrenching, let herself recover from her unwelcome sojourn into wilderness living. She watched from the window as Dunmore led his hunting party into the woods again, and then back out, with nothing that she could see by way of accomplishment.
They left Marlowe House unmolested. They did not even approach. Even in his absence, Thomas Marlowe’s reputation as a dangerous man threw a net of protection over his home, at least.
Around midnight she left Marlowe House. She had no notion of when she might return.
Nothing moved on Duke of Gloucester Street. At various irregular intervals buildings loomed up, square patches of black against the stars, inns and ordinaries, mostly, and taverns and a few shops and homes.
She looked down the length of the street. A light appeared, how far off it was impossible to tell, a yellowish, bobbing light. A lantern, carried no doubt by a man on horseback. The night watch, she imagined.
Elizabeth stepped into the side street that ran like a tributary off Duke of Gloucester, pressed herself against the high wooden fence that separated some private garden from the traffic. She stood silent, watching the light approach.
The rider went past on Duke of Gloucester Street, the light of his lantern illuminating his face from below. The night watch, on rounds. He looked bored, as well he might be on that uneventful night.
Once he was well past, Elizabeth stepped from the gate and hurried up the side street, past the back gates of private homes, past the blacksmith and the familiar brick wall surrounding the Burton Parish Church.
She turned again at the next corner and walked down that street, more of an alley, really, to where it joined with the streets bordering the long strip of village green. To her right, the church loomed high against the stars. To her left, and half a block distant, was the King’s Arms.
She stepped quickly up the street to the front door of the inn, looked up and down, saw nothing, and so stepped inside.
The King’s Arms was not the finest inn in Williamsburg, but neither was it some mean hovel. Across the wide front room, scattered with tables and chairs, was a huge fireplace, clean and unused in those summer months.
A couple of candles burned in sconces on the walls, providing light for any of the inn’s patrons that might come stumbling in at that late hour. They illuminated the place with a dull light and left deep shadows in the wake of the furniture. The ceiling was low and made up of heavy beams with wattle and daub between. The smell of pipes and roast beef and rum still hung in the air.
There was a desk in one corner, and on it an inkstand, paper, and a ledger that Elizabeth hoped would give her some idea of which room Billy Bird occupied, or indeed if he was still there.
She moved across the room and flipped the book open to the last written page, angling it so that the light of the candle fell across it. Names, rooms, receipts, all in neat columns. She squinted at the words, turned back a page, squinted again. There was Billy’s name and “Room Five” beside it and no amount yet received so she had to imagine that he had not yet left.
A footfall creaking on the floor and she froze, held her breath. Another, and the sound of a doorknob turning and she shut the book and stepped quickly back, finding the dark hall, stepping back and back into the shadows.
A door opened, another flickering light was added to the front room, and Elizabeth could see the proprietor in his nightshirt frowning and looking around. She pressed herself against the wall, silently pleading with the man to forgo making a complete tour of the premises.
What would that do for her reputation, to be found lurking around an inn at four o’clock in the morning? Whore. Whispers of Marlowe the cuckold. Would he believe her?
Then to Elizabeth ’s vast relief the proprietor shook his head and turned and went back the way he had come, satisfied that nothing was amiss. She closed her eyes and threw back her head and took several long and silent breaths, waited for the pounding of her heart to subside.
When at last it did she proceeded down the hall, the light from the front room reaching far enough that her now-accustomed eyes could see the numbers painted in white on the doors. One, two, three…
