cabin took shape.
'Shelter!' said the older man, with exultant relief. 'God's grace on us, Matthew!'
It was a fairly new structure, which explained why it hadn't been marked on the map. The nearer they got, the stronger was the smell of freshly axed pinelogs. Matthew noted, perhaps ungraciously, that the cabin's builder had not been the most skilled nor neatest of craftsmen. Copious amounts of red mud had been used to seal the cracks and chinks in crooked walls. The chimney was more mud than stones, spitting smoke through its fissures. The roof sat at a precarious angle, like a tilted cap on the head of a blowzy drunk. The cabin was unadorned by any paint or decoration, and the small narrow windows were all sealed by plain plankboard shutters. Behind the cabin was an even more slovenly looking structure that must be a barn, beside which stood three swaybacked horses in a fenced enclosure. A half-dozen pigs snorted and grumbled in the nasty mire of a second pen nearby. A red rooster strutted about, followed by a number of wet hens and their muddy chicks.
A stake had been driven into the ground beside a hitching rail. Nailed to the stake was a green pinewood placard with the words
'A tavern too!' the older man said, taking the reins from Matthew as if his hands could speed them to that hitching rail any faster. 'We'll get a hot meal tonight after all!'
One of the horses back by the barn began nickering, and suddenly a shutter opened and an indistinct face peered out. 'Hello!' the older man called. 'We're in need of shel—'The shutter slammed closed.
'—ter,' he finished. Then, as the horses made their last slog to the rail, 'Whoa! Hold up!' He watched the shutter. 'Inhospitable for a tavern-keeper. Well, here we are and here we'll stay. Right, Matthew?''Yes, sir.' It was said with less than firm conviction.
The older man climbed down from his seat. His boots sank into the mud up to his ankles. He tied the reins to the hitching post as Matthew eased himself down. Even losing two inches to the mud, Matthew was taller than his companion; he stood ten inches over five feet, an exceptionally tall young man, whereas his companion was a more normal height at five feet seven inches.
A bolt was thrown. The cabin's door opened with dramatic flourish. 'Good day, good day!' said the man who stood on the threshold. He wore a stained buckskin jacket over a brown shirt, gray-striped breeches and gaudy yellow stockings that showed above calf-high boots. He was smiling broadly, displaying peglike teeth in a face as round as a chestnut. 'Come in and warm y'selves!'
'I'm not certain about it being a good day, but we will surely enjoy a fire.'
Matthew and the older man scaled two steps to the porch. The tavern-keeper stepped back and held open the door for their entry. Before they reached him, both wished the pungence of the pinewood was stronger, so as to mask the appalling smell of their host's unwashed body and dirty clothes. 'Girl!' he hollered to someone inside the tavern, just as Matthew's left ear got in the path of his pewter-melting voice. 'Put another log on that fire and move y'self quick!'
The door closed at their backs and gone was the light. It was so gloomy in the place that neither of the two travellers could see anything but the red glimmer of fitful flames. Not all the smoke was leaving through the chimney; a duke's portion of it had made its home in the room, and hung in greasy gray layers. Matthew had the sensation of other shapes moving around them, but his eyes were blurred by smoke. He felt a knotty hand press against his back. 'Go on, go on!' the tavern-keeper urged. 'Get the chill out!'
They shuffled closer to the hearth. Matthew banged into a table's edge. Someone—a muffled voice—spoke, someone else laughed and the laugh became a hacking cough. 'Damn ye, mind your manners!' the tavern-keeper snapped. 'We got gentlemen among us!'
The older man had to cough several times too, to relieve his lungs of the tart smoke. He stood at the flickering edge of the firelight and peeled off his wet gloves, his eyes stinging. 'We've been travelling all day,' he said. 'From Charles Town. We thought we'd see red faces ere we saw white.'
'Yessir, the red demons are thick 'round here. But you never see 'em 'less they wants to be saw. I'm Will Shawcombe. This is my tavern and tradin' post.'
The older man was aware that a hand had been offered to him through the haze. He took it, and felt a palm as hard as a Quaker's saddle. 'My name is Isaac Woodward,' he replied. 'This is Matthew Corbett.' He nodded toward his companion, who was busy rubbing warmth into his fingers.
'From Charles Town, do y'say?' Shawcombe's grip was still clamped to the other man's hand. 'And how are things there?'
'Livable.' Woodward pulled his hand away and couldn't help but wonder how many times he would have to scrub it before all the reek was gone. 'But the air's been troublesome there these past few weeks. We've had hot and cold humours that test the spirit.'
'Rain won't quit 'round these parts,' Shawcombe said. 'Steam one mornin', shiver the next.'
'End a' the world, most like,' someone else—that muffled voice—spoke up. 'Ain't right to wear blankets this time a' year. Devil's beatin' his wife, what he is.'
'Hush up!' Shawcombe's small dark eyes cut toward the speaker. 'You don't know nothin'!'
'I read the Bible, I know the Lord's word! End a' time and all unclean things, what it is!'
'I'll strop you, you keep that up!' Shawcombe's face, by the flickering red firelight, had become a visage of barely bridled rage. Woodward had noted that the tavern-keeper was a squat, burly man maybe five-foot-six, with wide powerful shoulders and a chest like an ale keg. Shawcombe had an unruly thatch of brown hair streaked with gray and a short, grizzled gray beard, and he looked like a man not to be trifled with. His accent—a coarse lowborn English yawp—told Woodward the man was not far removed from the docks on the river Thames.
Woodward glanced in the direction of the Bible-reader, as did Matthew, and made out through the drifting smoke a gnarled and white-bearded figure sitting at one of several crudely fashioned tables set about the room. The old man's eyes caught red light, glittering like new-blown coals. 'If you been at that rum again, I'll hide you!' Shawcombe promised. The old man started to open his mouth for a reply but had enough elder wisdom not to let the words escape. When Woodward looked at the tavern-keeper again, Shawcombe was smiling sheepishly and the brief display of anger had passed. 'My uncle Abner,' Shawcombe said, in a conspiratorial whisper. 'His brain pot's sprung a leak.'
A new figure emerged through the murk into the firelight, brushing between Woodward and Matthew to the edge of a large hearth rimmed with black-scorched stones. This person—slim, slight, barely over five feet tall—wore a patched moss-green woolen shift and had long dark brown hair. A chunk of pinewood and an armload of cones and needles were tossed into the flames. Matthew found himself looking at the pallid, long-chinned profile of a young girl, her unkempt hair hanging in her face. She paid him no attention, but moved quickly away again. The gloom swallowed her up.
'Maude! What're you sittin' there for? Get these gentlemen draughts of rum!' This command had been hurled at another woman in the room, sitting near the old man. A chair scraped back across the raw plank floor, a cough came up followed by another that ended in a hacking gasp, and then Maude—a skinny white-haired wraith in clothes that resembled burlap bags stitched together—dragged herself muttering and clucking out of the room and through a doorway beyond the hearth. 'Christ save our arses!' Shawcombe hollered in her miserable wake. 'You'd think we never seen a breathin' human before in need of food or drink! This here's a tavern, or ain't you heard?' His mood rapidly changed once more as he regarded Woodward with a hopeful expression. 'You'll be stayin' the night with us, won't you, sirrah? There's a room right comfortable back there, won't cost you but a few pence. Got a bed with a good soft mattress, ease your back from that long trip.'
'May I ask a question?' Matthew decided to say before his companion could respond. 'How far is Fount Royal?'
'Fount Royal? Oh, young master, that's a two, three hour ride on a good road. The weather bein' such, I'd venture it'd take you double that. And dark's comin' on. I wouldn't care to meet Jack One Eye or a red savage without a torch and a musket.' Shawcombe focused his attention once more on the older traveller. 'So you'll be stayin' the night then?'
'Yes, of course,' Woodward began to unbutton his heavy coat. 'We'd be fools to continue on in the dark.'
'I suspect you have luggage in need of cartin'?' His smile slipped off as his head turned.
The girl had been standing motionlessly with her back against a wall, her face downcast and her bare arms crossed over her chest. She made no sound, but walked at Shawcombe's drumbeat toward the door, her feet and
