Hunting Midnight

to my room, where I and the letter could be alone.

I paid for my treasures one month later, just as I had promised, with coins earned helping Papa to clean his study and our storeroom.

I slept with the book and the letter under my mattress for months. The two objects became as inseparable in my mind as Joaquim and Lucia themselves.

It is more than likely that my mother and father discovered the letter while tidying my room, but they never mentioned it. Years later, I gave it to my bride — along with The Fox Fables — as my wedding gift.

Upon her death, I clung to them as though they might save me from a shipwreck. I have them with me still.

*

Since my purchase of The Fox Fables, I have jeopardized my eyesight with thousands of evenings spent reading by my hearth or in bed by the light of a candle. Long acquaintance with the art of storytelling has made me aware that a tale such as the one I am about to tell ought to have a man or woman of universal sympathy or special bravery at its heart. And yet I feel myself wholly lacking for such a role. Furthermore, I am unsure of my own talents in giving an accurate account of the events that brought me from Portugal to America.

I therefore feel that the proper and most honest way to begin is with a lad of twelve named Daniel, whom I had the good fortune to meet by accident some twenty-four years ago. It was he who would set in motion the ripples that would later carry me across the Atlantic Ocean to America. If I am worthy of the central place in this story that I shall come to occupy later on, then it is, in part, due to the courageous example he set.

As I prepare to write of Daniel and many other things besides, I find myself speculating on what secret messages may flutter out of the pages of this tale of mine and fall at your feet. I can only hope that whatever reaches your hands encounters a receptive heart and an unbiased soul.

I

I

Though a child of tattered clothing and bad manners, Daniel has always held a special place in my heart. Had our life together been an adventure novel, he would have continued to train himself through many hours of candlelit study to become a great sculptor, revered far and wide, by the last page. But life, as Father used to say, is at best a game of Pope Joan played on a slanted table with the dealer hiding all the best cards up his ruffled sleeve. And so my friend was prevented from accomplishing such wonders.

Had fortune smiled upon him, or more importantly, had I, John Zarco Stewart, greater strength in my arms, then my own life might have gained by proximity as well. After all, we sometimes only realize the effects we have had on our loved ones years later.

*

I met Daniel in June of 1800, when I was nine years old. More than two years had passed since I’d discovered The Fox Fables in the British Isles. I was heading out early, fortified only by a cup of tea and a crust of corn bread that I’d smeared with honey and gobbled — to my mother’s great displeasure — in an instant.

My destination was a wee lake — or tarn, as Papa called it — far beyond the walls of our city, in the wooded hinterland along the road to Vila do Conde. It was a wondrous spot for watching all manner of birdlife, especially just after the dawn. I was at the time, and still am today, a great lover of those handsome creatures of feather, air, and light — a keen appreciator and imitator of avian song as well. Back then, if I could have begged a beak and wings from God, I surely would have considered becoming one.

I was already approaching the granite steps at the end of our street that led down to the riverside neighborhood when raucous shouting reached me from a nearby alley. Racing there at top speed, I discovered Senhora Beatriz, a widowed washerwoman to whom we gave our soiled sheets every Wednesday, splayed on the cobbles outside her house. Whimpering like a beaten dog, her bony knees were drawn protectively into her belly. A periwigged brute in the livery of a coachman was standing threateningly over her, his countenance distorted by rage.

“You careless bitch!” he shouted, fairly spitting out the words. “You pilfering, lying Marrana.”

Marrana was a new word to me. Later, my tutor informed me that it meant both swine and converted Jew, an epithet that had confused me, since I had never heard Senhora Beatriz described as anything but a good Christian soul. Indeed, I had only the vaguest idea of what a Jew might be, for though my grandmother had spoken to me of them on two or three occasions, I had not learned anything more than a few legends in which Jewish sorcerers always seemed to be foiling the work of nefarious kings with their magical prayers.

The villainous coach driver now finished his diatribe by snarling, “I’m going to sell you for glue-making, you lazy whore.”

Then, after kicking Senhora Beatriz several times, he grabbed hold of her thinning hair, preparing to pound her head against the cobbles.

My heart was battering against my ribs and I began to feel dizzy. I wondered whether I ought to let loose a scream and if it would be able to fly over the rooftops separating my father from me and shake him awake. In those days, I was fully convinced that — at nearly six feet in height — he possessed unsurpassed power to restore order to the entire world.

I would surely have given voice to this bloodcurdling shriek if out of nowhere a rock hadn’t caught our brute straight on his cheek. It had been hurled so perfectly and with such righteous force that our evildoer staggered back in shock. Falling to one knee, he seemed puzzled by what had happened, until he spotted the culprit stone sitting innocently at his feet. Looking around for the willful David who had dared to challenge him, he soon fixed me with an enraged stare. In my frilly white shirt, black-and-red-striped breeches, and buckled boots, I was a most unlikely enemy. I even had angelic bangs back then and what my father referred to as “doelike” blue-gray eyes. Nevertheless, I took several steps backward and began to hiccup — a reaction provoked by shattered nerves that I had suffered many times before.

I intended to scurry off if he threatened me, but instead, he turned to gaze at an urchin on the other side of the street. The lad looked at least three years my senior and wore a ragged shirt and soiled breeches. So filthy were his bare feet that they looked like roots pulled from the soil. His head was shaved.

This was the early summer of 1800, and despite the dawn of a new century, it was still a time when children never spoke to adults without first being invited to do so. A rock hurled by a miserably clothed waif at a liveried coach driver in the service of a man of riches was tantamount to heresy.

The injured man stood up with difficulty, dabbing at his cheek with his fingertips. Staring in disbelief at the blood left on his hand, he lurched forward. “You little son of a bitch!” he sputtered. Summoning his flagging strength, he hurled the stone with a grunt.

The weapon sailed over and past its youthful target and rebounded off the granite facade of the house belonging to Senhor Aurelio, the shoemaker. That was the last act our evildoer was going to attempt that day. His eyeballs rolled back in his head and he crumbled to the ground, his head meeting the street with a dry thud that did not sound promising.

I was shivering with fear and anticipation. I had never felt so alive. Imagine — a rock hurled by a filthy urchin felling an ugly brute not two hundred paces from my house!

Senhora Beatriz was sitting up now, her arms clasped around her belly as though protecting an unborn child. She was shaking her head in confusion, plainly trying to understand what had happened. Blood flowed from her