want of another term they referred to those slaves born in Virginia as “the English.”
Madshaka frowned, stared out the door at the courtyard. How could James not be there? He had been with them when they charged the wall, he had made certain of it. But somehow he had not been part of the group that had been tricked into the prison.
If he was not in the trunk, then he was out there, somewhere, hiding, watching.
Madshaka thought that he should be angry about this, should be raging and turning the furniture over in his wrath. Someone should die for this blunder, but he did not know who.
His plan had worked perfectly, as flawlessly as ever one did in an ancient story told by elders around a fire. And now, a kink, a flaw, and, of all things, King James, loose, out there. He was not so foolish as to doubt that King James was a dangerous man.
He should have been burning with rage at the news, but he was not.
Madshaka was not angry. He was afraid.
Chapter 28
Boston at night. The streets that seemed so narrow in the daytime crowds now seemed impossibly broad. A sharp report from the waterfront-a pistol shot or a dropped hatch cover. Raucous laughter, but small, far off, and it died away and the streets were quieter still. And dark. The pious people abed, the frugal Yankees did not burn their candles.
Only the night watch stirred, and his shoes could be heard some distance away. The night watchman and Billy Bird and Elizabeth Marlowe. They walked in the shadows, paused to listen, Billy Bird and Elizabeth, Elizabeth chiding him for his secretiveness because she felt foolish. The more effort they made to be stealthy, the more she had to admit they were doing a bad thing.
But Billy Bird shook his head, put his finger to his lips, pulled her into the deep shadows of an alleyway. A rat squealed, ran away on tiny scratching feet. A block away, seen through the narrow gap between buildings, and only for an instant, the night watch, moving in the other direction, slowly, bored. So little crime in Boston he was no longer on the lookout for it.
They headed off again, moving from shadow to shadow. The greater good, Elizabeth reassured herself, and envied Billy Bird, who had no qualms about it, or if he had, hid them as well as his black cape hid him.
They skirted the Town Dock, then went down Anne Street, paused, looked up and down the length of the wide road, and took a quick step across, into an alley. Nothing illegal about being abroad that time of night, Billy explained to her, but it would raise questions. Better if they were not seen.
They stepped down the alley, stumbling once in the dark, turned right into another alley and then across a courtyard to meet up with Middle Street. Billy seemed to know back-alley Boston as she knew her own garden.
And then, looming above them, a black place against the stars. Middle Street Church.
They paused in a dark corner at the edge of the courtyard. Billy put a finger to his lips again and Elizabeth was silent. They waited, listened, listened for anything, but there was no sound to be heard. Billy nodded and they stepped out of the shadows, around the far side of the church, to a side entrance under a small slate roof.
They stopped and waited again but they were alone. A minute passed, then another, and Elizabeth was about to announce that Sally was not coming when they heard a step behind that made Elizabeth jump. She turned and Sally was standing there. She looked tired, frightened. She held up a key for Billy, could not go so far as to actually open the door herself.
Billy took the key and fit it in the lock and turned it and the heavy door opened with a creak of exaggerated volume. He pulled the key out, handed it back to Sally. Sally slipped the key into her pocket. Their eyes met and Sally made a move as if to speak, but she did not. She just nodded her head and Billy nodded back and she turned and was gone.
Billy glanced around once more, then held the door open for Elizabeth. She stepped through, into the darkness of the church’s interior, the only negligible light being that which came in from the night sky through the open door. Then Billy came in behind her and closed the door and it was absolutely black.
“Just hold tight a moment, Lizzy,” Billy said in a whisper. The words seemed absurdly loud. She could not recall the last time either of them had spoken.
At her feet she could hear Billy clicking steel on flint and then a little trail of sparks spilled down on the dry tinder, which glowed orange and flared. Billy blew on it, gently, gently, and when it was finally burning with some legitimacy he used it to light a candle he pulled from his tinderbox.
The flickering light fell on the oak wainscot and crept up the white plaster, finally to be lost in the deep gloom that engulfed the upper reaches of the big church. The door they had come through had led them into the side of the church proper. To their left and ten feet away, the door they recognized as leading to the Right Reverend Dunmore’s office.
Billy gestured Elizabeth forward with a welcoming sweep of his arm, the way he had done when bringing her first aboard the Bloody Revenge and again when welcoming her to Boston.
It occurred to her that Billy genuinely believed that all of the world was his for the taking, that wherever he wished to go it was his absolute right to do so, and thus wherever he was, he was welcoming people onto his own property. That was why he felt justified in making that gesture.
It must be a fine thing, she thought, to be so damned sure of your place in the world. She smiled and made her way past Billy’s pews, headed for Billy’s office.
Down the narrow hall and back through the door through which Wait Dunmore had just that morning ordered them to leave. The office was unchanged, save for Dunmore’s absence, but that one omission made the space look much bigger, as if the force of Reverend Dunmore’s personality pulled the walls in to him when he sat at his desk, and when he was gone they eased back to their normal positions.
Billy found another candle and lit it, and a lantern as well, and the room was filled with a tolerable amount of light. Against the wall, the chests of papers that Elizabeth had that morning noticed. “Let us hope these are organized after some fashion, some fashion we can discern,” Elizabeth whispered.
“You look there, Lizzy, and I shall look to this Bible. If it is the Dun-more family Bible, it may have something of Wait Dunmore’s true parentage written there.”
Elizabeth nodded and took up one of the candles. She knelt before the first blanket chest as if it were a little altar and began to thumb through the papers. Records of births, records of deaths, records of marriage, just as Sally had said. They appeared to be a great jumble, in no particular order, and Elizabeth began to despair at the thought of going through all of the chests, paper by paper. She did not think there was time enough in one night to do it.
But as she made her way through the papers, a system, a kind of order, began to emerge, seemingly random clusters of papers resolved into rational groupings by name and date and she nodded as she began to understand.
She heard Billy close the heavy Bible with a dull whump. He stepped up behind her. “The Good Book says nothing of this, just a legitimate line of succession, right down to Roger Dunmore’s no doubt monstrous child William, born two years ago. Have you anything?”
Elizabeth nodded again. “I have not found the Dunmore family, but I see how they have put this all together. What was the name and birth date of the first Dunmore in the Bible?”
Billy paused. “I’ll have to look again,” he said, and a minute later, “Ezekiel Dunmore, born 1563 in Kent, died 1646, Boston. Father of…”
“That should do.” Elizabeth stood and opened the next trunk and the next, thumbed through the papers, not finding the Dunmore clan but seeing at least that they were organized the way she had thought. The next trunk, and her fingers moved confidently and there, at last, she found them. The Dunmore family, bound together with red tape. Ezekiel, died 1646, written out with the fine lettering and archaic language of a former age.
She pulled the papers out, put them down on Dunmore ’s desk, pulled off the red tape. Billy set his candle down beside them, leaned in close, his curiosity on a par with hers. She spread the papers out, arranging them like a family tree. Ezekiel, father of Elisha and Zacharias and Benjamin. The last, father of Sarah and Jonah and Rachel and Richard.
