That was as much as she could hope for, and there was nothing she could do about Boston until she arrived, and with that realization she allowed herself to relax and feel content, more content and more safe than she had felt in a long, long time.
That feeling, and the fine weather that in part engendered it, held for the next two days as they raised, then left astern, the green hump of Nantucket and then followed the long, low arm of Cape Cod north and west. At last they left the sandy shores of Provincetown in their wake and headed across Massachusetts Bay, and with every mile of open water they covered, Elizabeth found herself growing more tense, more grim, more doubtful.
“Have you been to Boston before, William?” Billy asked, and in her pessimistic introspection it took her a moment to realize he was speaking to her, to recall that she was William. William Barrett, younger brother of the pirate Malachias Barrett, known also as Thomas Marlowe. Damn Billy Bird and his damned perverse sense of humor.
“No, Billy, I have not.” They were at the quarterdeck hances, Billy sitting on the bulwark, a hand resting on one of the main shrouds, Elizabeth leaning on the rail that ran along the forward edge of the quarterdeck. Beyond the Revenge’s bow the green hilly country of Massachusetts Bay Colony took up more than one hundred and eighty degrees of horizon. The shore with which they were closing, which an hour before had appeared as unbroken land, was now revealing itself to be a number of islands scattered across the entrance to Boston Harbor, like a blockading fleet.
“It’s a bloody dreary place, damned Puritans with their somber faces and their black clothes. Any woman there shows the least bit of spirit they hang her for a bloody witch.” He looked around to see if anyone was within earshot and added, “So you best watch yourself.”
“If I am accused I shall make a quick escape upon my broomstick. But as I hear it, they are done with that nonsense.”
“Perhaps. In any event, these Puritans have a bloody lot of money. They can hardly avoid it, they do nothing but work and pray. They are a serious, sober, chaste, and deeply pious people, which is why I find them such intolerable bores.”
“Then why have you spent so much time in Boston?”
“I just said, my dear. These Puritans have a bloody lot of money.”
The Revenge followed the ship channel between Georges and Lovell Islands, winding her way northwest through island after island, pine tree-capped rock thrust up from the bottom of Massachusetts Bay. It was late afternoon when Governors Island and Bird Island passed along the starboard side and before them, two miles away, lay Boston, like a toy city, glowing in the rays of the late-day sun.
The city was arrayed along a tapered hump of land, not much above four miles across, beginning where low, narrow Roxbury Neck clung tenuously to the rest of the colony and running north to where the city ended in a great cluster of buildings and wharves and a tangle of masts at the North End. Rising above the town, like a great sleeping beast, Beacon Hill, with its tall tower, and beyond that, hills that were higher still, looking down on the city, hills that Billy informed Elizabeth were separated from Boston by the Charles River, which they could not see.
There were watercraft everywhere, boats pulled by oars or working under sailing rig, fishing smacks, sloops, brigs, heavy full-rigged merchantmen. The harbor was alive with activity, vessels working in and out, setting and stowing sails. After tiny, sleepy Williamsburg, and the relative peace and isolation of the past five days, this bustling, crowded scene was no little shock to Elizabeth.
And it was not just Boston Harbor. The city itself, rather than ending abruptly at the water’s edge, seemed to ease itself into the bay with a complex array of wharves and shipyards and batteries. There were ships tied to nearly every inch of waterfront, so many ships that one could not tell where one left off and the next began, or which masts belonged to which vessel. Jutting out from the middle of the half-moon harbor was Long Wharf, over half a mile long, and the center of the frenetic harbor activity.
Perpendicular to Long Wharf, and even longer, Old Wharf ran like a connecting street from the middle of Long Wharf north to where it touched the shore at the foot of Clark ’s Wharf. And all along the whole of it, ships, men, trade, and beyond that the city of two- and three-story buildings, shoulder to shoulder and rising one above the next as the city of Boston climbed up the hill at its center.
“Body of me, Billy, I had no notion that Boston was such a city!” Elizabeth said, and to her great annoyance Billy burst into laughter.
“Dear me, you have been too long out of London! Sure, by the paltry standards of America it is some great metropolis, but come now, have you really turned such a country bumpkin? This is no city, not by the standards of the civilized world.”
“Humph.” Billy was right, of course. Perhaps she was becoming a country bumpkin. She might not be fit for the backwoods, but the dozen or so houses and shops and ordinaries in Williamsburg were metropolis enough for her now. She was done with cities. She knew cities, and she knew that little good happened in them.
The sun was disappearing behind the distant hills by the time the Revenge found a clear anchorage among the vessels off Long Wharf and dropped her best bower into the Massachusetts Bay mud. Billy, for reasons that Elizabeth could well guess at, preferred to go ashore after dark in any event, so they had their supper in the great cabin and packed Elizabeth’s chest with those things she might need ashore, such as dresses and her toilet, and when the sun was well down they were rowed to the Long Wharf in the Revenge’s jolly boat.
The Revenge’s boatswain, Ezra Howland, and a foretopman whom Elizabeth knew only as Black Tom, pulled the boat’s oars. In the bottom of the boat lay their swords, wrapped in canvas, beside her chest and Billy’s seabag. Under their coats, mostly hidden, each carried a brace of pistols. It seemed a lot of weaponry for pious, Puritan Boston, but Elizabeth made no comment.
The jolly boat at last drew up to a worn and slime-covered ladder that ran from the Long Wharf, ten feet over their heads, down into the dark water from which it rose.
“William?” Billy gestured toward the ladder and Elizabeth rose on uncertain legs and grabbed the ladder and found one of the rungs with her oversized shoe. She could feel the slickness and she made certain of her foothold before stepping up and up again. The tide, by good fortune, was more than halfway through the flood and she did not have too far to climb before she stepped up onto Long Wharf itself, moving aside for Billy with his seabag over his shoulder and Black Tom with her chest.
The sun was gone, but night had not brought much of a lull in the activity along the wharf. By lantern and moonlight fishermen unloaded catches and cleaned their day’s haul and packed it down in barrels of salt. Serious men hurried along the prodigious length of the wharf on some business of great personal import. Piemen and oystermen and women selling clothes and ribbons still paraded along, calling out the virtues of their wares, hoping to make one last ha’penny before retiring for the night. It seemed wild, frenetic, harried.
Elizabeth smiled and shook her head in wonder at what a naive, simple country girl she had become.
“Here, boy,” Billy snapped, and a young boy with a wheelbarrow grabbed up the handles and maneuvered the vehicle over to them with practiced ease. “You know the Ship and Compass on Crooked Lane, by the Town House?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take this dunnage there, boy, and be quick.” He pressed a coin into the boy’s hand-Billy’s usual excessive payment-which made the young man’s eyes go wide. When the shock had worn off he lifted the trunk and bag into the barrow and hurried off with great alacrity.
“Good lad,” Billy called after him. He nodded his thanks to Black Tom and then, with a gesture as if he were welcoming Elizabeth into his home, he indicated that they might now proceed down the wharf to the town beyond.
They stepped over rough-cut planks worn smooth by the traffic. To their left, the wharf’s single row of permanent buildings, big two- and three-story structures, surprisingly substantial, given that their foundation was just a wooden platform.
Long Wharf ran on to King Street and into the heart of Boston town. A block beyond, Crooked Lane intersected King. The Ship and Compass was two doors down from the corner.
Elizabeth paused, looked up at the sign that hung over the door, a bas-relief ship superimposed on a compass rose.
They had made it, had arrived in Boston at last. On Billy’s urging she had agreed to come all this way, to try and root out Frederick Dunmore’s darkest secret.
