Frederick Dunmore reined the horse to a stop from a full gallop, braced with his legs to keep from pitching forward over the animal’s head. Jumped down from the saddle, ran across the dark lawn, lit only by the stars, took the stairs to the porch two at a time, pistol held in one sweaty palm.
Bold man, when you know it is only the woman at home, and not even her, most likely, he thought. Coward, bloody coward.
He stopped at the door, listened. Nothing. Nothing from within, nothing without, save for crickets, the far-off screech of some night creature.
I am a night creature too, he thought. A hunter by night. I am the fox.
He crossed the porch with bold strides, seized the doorknob, the white sleeve of his coat a dull gray in the black night.
He was alone. Even his watchers were dismissed, the useless bastards.
They had come to him, heads down in deserved shame. “She’s gone again,” one had said. “Didn’t see her all day, so we got closer, looked through the windows even, but she ain’t there. Might have gone back with them niggers…”
Of course she had not done that! Dunmore was furious, but he did not let any of that show, just dismissed the men with a “Very well,” and a wave of the hand.
He had had Marlowe House watched from the moment the woman and the Negroes had fled into the woods. He knew she would come back, a delicate creature like that could never live like a savage in the forest. And he had been right. After their last raid, the one in which they had nearly taken them all, it was right after that that the watchers saw her again, saw her through the windows, moving about.
They had reported to him. He had been right. And that only reinforced his knowledge that he, Frederick Dunmore, was controlling events entirely.
Talking to the governor, talking to the burgesses, seeing what charges might be leveled against her: arming Negroes, aiding the escape of slaves. (How legal was it, what Marlowe had done? Really, now, are we to think of his people as freemen, able to come and go as they please?)
And those people, Nicholson, the burgesses, were listening. A day or two more, a few more carefully worded arguments, and the bitch would have been in jail.
It was something. It was all that was left. He could not catch the Negroes in the woods. He had realized that at last. The others had realized it too, had given up the hunt, left him alone.
No matter. The so-called free blacks were in exile, run off, pushed far from civilization where they might spread their poison, and that was almost as good as rounding them up and selling them off. Better, perhaps. And she was still within his reach.
He rested his left hand on the doorknob, readjusted his sweating grip on the pistol in his right hand.
What if I do find her home? What will I do to her?
He felt a surge of conflicting desires and passions, dark and ugly and secret things. He twisted the knob and pushed the door open.
It was blackness within, perfect dark, and he stepped into it and closed the door behind him.
In the foyer, he stood absolutely still. He let the tiny sounds of the house fill him, the sounds and the faint smells of past fires and past meals and traces of perfume, until he was as much a part of the darkness as they were.
When he was certain the house was empty, he stuck his pistol in his belt, fished in his haversack for his tinder-purse, and pulled that out. He knelt down, feeling for flint and steel and match and arranged them with practiced hands. He struck steel on flint and the sparks that drifted down to the match gave him a faint glimpse of black and white checks painted on the floor.
And then the match caught and flared and he picked it up and with it lit a candle. The room revealed itself in dull yellow light. A wide staircase up to the second floor, a sitting room opening up to the right, a hallway leading to the back of the house on the left of the stairs.
Against the wall nearby stood the tall case of a clock, silent, unmoving, like a dead man propped up there. Was that some indication of how long she had been gone? There was no way to tell.
He moved to the bottom of the stairs, looked up as far as the throw of the single flame would allow him to see.
Why am I here? To find out where she has gone. To bring her to justice, to help stop the spread of the plague…
Liar, liar, liar. Coward.
He stepped onto the first step, tried his weight. It did not creak; his shoe was silent on the plush runner that covered the center of the steps. The next and the next, he stepped up, thrilled, terrified, filled with righteous purpose and self-loathing. The storm battering his brain.
He was in Marlowe’s house, inside Marlowe himself, it felt like.
Swaggering, self-assured Marlowe, who would step into a fight to the death with never a thought.
As would I, Dunmore thought. I am in that now, a fight to the death, and I will fight till my last breath to keep the pestilence out of these colonies.
But you are careful not to give Marlowe leave to call you out. Coward.
But is a coward worse than any friend of the black man? One who would see them all free if he could, populating his country with their little black babies? He felt his courage spread as it did with the first effects of an excess of wine.
Those few times he had had an excess of wine. Twenty-eight years as a Boston Congregationalist, from a long line of preachers, he could no more abandon certain habits than he could change the color of his eyes.
The top of the stairs, and at the far end of the hall an open door. He walked down that way, stepped in. It was the bedroom: a big canopy bed, dressing table, chest of drawers. A wardrobe, the doors gaping open, a row of wig stands, several empty. Signs of a rapid departure, but why would Elizabeth take wigs?
He stepped over to the bed, ran his hand along the smooth silk cover. Stepped over to the chest of drawers, a tall affair standing on fine carved legs, claws gripping balls on the floor. A lot of damned money this bastard has, Dunmore thought. Wondered if perhaps Marlowe was richer than he, an uncomfortable idea.
He stuck his candle in a candleholder on a side table, pulled open the first drawer in the chest. They were her things, underclothing, silky things, things that would cling against her naked skin. He ran his hands lightly over them, let his fingertips thrill to their silkiness, let the rustling of them release their perfume.
He grabbed a handful of silk, picked it up, buried his face in it, ran his tongue over the smoothness, let the sensations wash over him. His erection was pressing hard against his breeches. He wondered if she rutted with one of those black bucks, maybe while Marlowe watched. He pushed the silk into his face.
He thought about killing her, recalled what it was like to see the life go out of a person’s eyes as he squeezed, squeezed her throat. He thought about his strong hands on that long and perfect neck, what she would look like as she fought him for her life.
And then the storm hit him from another quarter, the reality, the black despair at what he was and he moaned out loud, dropped the silk cloth to his feet, his cock wilting.
He shook his head hard, recalled that he was there ostensibly to find information. He looked around the room, at the windows set in deep cases, the long curtains that pooled on the floor. He stared at the curtain, then at the candle flickering on the chest of drawers. He watched the flame, the cleansing flame, dancing, dancing, as it might dance over those curtains, consuming all of Marlowe House in fire, purifying the ground on which it stood.
But he did not have the courage to do it, and he knew it, and he pushed the thought aside.
Where could she have gone? She had just disappeared, never a word from anyone in Williamsburg or Jamestown or Norfolk or Newport News.
Where would she run to escape from him? Or might she be plotting some counterstroke? Where would she go to do that? Where would he go, were he her?
Boston.
Dunmore felt a wave of panic break over him and he looked suddenly around, as if the threat were there in the room, and not just a fresh realization in his mind alone.
She might go to Boston. He thought he had left all that behind, washed it off him with a voyage to London and then a new life in Virginia, the fox losing the pursuing hounds over a long and convoluted trail. No one in Williamsburg knew the rumors, he was certain of it.
