30

Great-aunt Esther opened the front door and pulled Snow inside and locked and bolted the door behind her. “He’s upstairs,” she whispered excitedly.

Snow peeled off her mackinaw, stamped her boots to get the snow off and followed Esther into the house. “How is he?” she asked her great-aunt, who was bareheaded and bald and wore an enormous cashmere shawl wound around her frail body.

“He’s sleeping like a baby,” Esther told her. “He didn’t admit it in so many words, but he’s had a bad time of it. Whoever he was running from must have caught up with him. It’s written on his face. It’s written in his eyes.”

With Snow limping after her, Esther tiptoed around the hairless dog stretched out on the carpet and went upstairs. She eased open the door to a bedroom at the end of the hallway. The flame from a single candle dispatched flickering shadows across the walls of the room. Fully dressed except for his shoes, with a needlework bedspread thrown over him, Silas was curled up in a fetal position in the middle of a four-poster. “He wouldn’t go to sleep until I lit the candle,” Esther whispered. “I think he’s afraid of the dark.”

Esther drew Snow out of the room. “Let him sleep it off,” she whispered.

“He doesn’t have a hangover,” Snow protested.

“I wasn’t suggesting he had,” Esther said. “I was suggesting he could use a rest.” Esther regarded her grandniece. “You are a little bit jumpy yourself, if you want to hear the truth.”

Snow smiled sadly. “It took me a while but I know the truth.”

Esther snapped a bridge into place. “That’s more than most can say.”

Snow sank into a rocking chair next to the four-poster, pulled a blanket up under her armpits and mounted guard over the figure sleeping on the bed. When the candle burned down she lit a new one from the sputtering flame of the old one and embedded it in the holder. She dozed off toward midnight but came awake when Silas started moaning. A moment more, he seemed to mutter under his breath, and it will all be over. He shifted position on the bed, arching his spine as if something was jabbing into it, then settled back onto the mattress. The sight of him curled up on the bed aroused emotions in Snow she had considered dead. She had been ambushed by grief. Then, like a hostage who becomes emotionally involved with her captor, she had become attached to her grief; it had been her habit. Now she was being ambushed once more-this time by love.

She must have dozed again around first light but woke with a start to find Silas sitting on the edge of the bed staring at her. “Did I say anything in my sleep?” he wanted to know.

Esther had been right about his face, his eyes, Snow realized. “You were asking for a moment more. You were saying it would all be over.”

The Weeder stood up and Snow came off the rocking chair into his arms. They clung to each other. After a while Snow took his hand and examined it. The scab had fallen off. His life line was visible again. The sight of it seemed to reassure her. She returned to her chair and began rocking back and forth on it. The Weeder settled onto the floor at her feet. “Tell me what happened,” she urged him.

Hesitantly at first, gathering momentum as he went along, the Weeder described his ordeal: how he had been anesthetized by the men who picked him off the Boston street; how he had come to on a boat, manacled to a piece of metal jutting from a bulkhead; how the Admiral had promised he would be shot before being thrown overboard; how, thanks to Snow, Toothacher had phoned up and instructed Huxstep to release him; how Mildred and Huxstep had argued after the Admiral’s phone call-

Snow kept the chair rocking in the same rhythm. “All this happened-when?”

“The Admiral phoned Huxstep a few hours after you phoned me. It was the Ides of March. Huxstep put me ashore late that night.”

“Was Huxstep with you on the boat the day before the Ides of March?”

The Weeder nodded. “He was there the whole time I was there.”

Snow said, “Huxstep’s the one who does tricks with numbers.”

“That’s right.”

“Go on with the story,” Snow ordered. She smiled encouragingly.

The Weeder described Mildred pulling out a minuscule pistol. She had been ready to shoot him herself if Huxstep wouldn’t do it. Huxstep had looked as if she had convinced him. He had fitted a silencer to his gun. It had been a terrible moment-the Weeder had been certain Huxstep was going to shoot him. His head had started spinning, his heart had started sinking under the weight of pure fear. He remembered hearing the beat of a kettledrum, the hiss of a gun going off as he fainted. When he had regained consciousness the boat had been heading toward Nantucket, the lights of which were visible on the horizon.

“What happened to Mildred?” Snow asked.

The Weeder shrugged. “She was gone. So was the block of cement. So were the handcuffs.”

Snow rocked forward and cradled his head against her thighs. “You put your life on the line to stop an atrocity,” she said. “You’re every inch the patriot Nate was.”

“You really think that?” the Weeder asked.

“Anyone who knew the nightmare you’d been through would think that,” she assured him.

The Weeder’s head burrowed into her lap. When he spoke again his words were muffled. “Knowing you believe in me changes the way I look at the world,” he said.