“ABBEY? WHAT ARE you doing?”
“Go back to bed, Cordelia.”
“Why, it’s nigh onto two in the morning.”
“I know that.”
“What are you doing with the garden lantern?”
“Lighting it.”
Cordelia closed her night robe around her and drew her shoulders in as she crossed the cold kitchen floor. “I can see that. But why?”
“Where’s Dominic?” Abbey pushed a strand of hair out of her face.
“He’s retired by now. What happened to your skirt? And your arms are covered with mud—”
“It’s sand. Wet sand. Your damned ocean.”
Cordelia palmed Abbey’s back and said, “You’re soaking wet. Where’ve you been?”
“Prowling the shoreline, under the docks. Where do most ranchers’ wives spend their evenings?” For the third time, the lantern refused to take the match. She was doing something wrong, but was too flustered to calm down and correct it.
Taking the matches from Abbey’s hand, Cordelia pushed her gently back, cranked up the wick, tipped the lantern to moisten the wick, then successfully lit it and replaced the glass globe. “There. Now are you going to tell me where you’re going?”
Abbey sealed her lips. Talking about it would only complicate things.
Cordelia broke every personal habit of her own decorum and gripped Abbey’s arm, rather tightly. “What did you find there?”
Only a long breath allowed Abbey to steady herself and realize that Cordelia wasn’t to be fooled, that she needn’t be alone in this, at least in the knowledge of it.
“A tunnel,” she murmured. She looked up into Cordelia’s coal-black eyes and said, “Would you believe it? A tunnel! A mine shaft or something.”
Ominously the housekeeper told her, “There are no mines on Nantucket.”
“Well, there’s certainly a good imitation of one! Right under the houses on Steamboat Wharf.”
Closing her hand over her mouth, Cordelia tightened her features. “Tell me!” she whispered. “I wonder what it’s for. . . .”
“I wonder, too! Excuse me.” Dragging the heavy lantern, Abbey nudged the back door open with one foot and stepped past Cordelia.
“Wait—” Cordelia called, diving for her work shoes, which she kept at the kitchen hearth. “You’re not going alone this time.”
Abbey swung around, loathing the hesitation. “No, Cordelia, please stay here.”
“No, no, I’m coming. If you’re going, so am I. Two are as good as one, and better.” While she talked she pushed her bare feet into the shoes and dragged a cooking smock over her nightclothes.
“You’re not even dressed,” Abbey pointed out.
“And you’re soaking wet. Neither of us is prepared to go out, but here we go.”
She buttoned the smock furiously, breathing rapidly, not blinking at all, seeming actually enthusiastic about having an adventure.
Abbey gazed at her quizzically, then cocked her hip. “I declare, Cordelia, at times I hardly know you.”
Cordelia smiled her minimal smile and pulled the back door shut. “And you thought Lucy Edmonds was the only one who could manage a surprise. Off we go!”
The tunnel was, if possible, worse by lanternlight than it was in pitch dark. Now, on top of feeling and smelling, Abbey could also see the nauseating saturated walls of muddy brick and see the insects and worms sliding in and out of cracks. And she’d actually been touching it before! It was an awful thought. Crawly awful.
Abbey led the way, holding the lantern out before her with both arms. If she’d had her wits about her, she’d have brought a less utilitarian lantern, one of the small ones meant for carrying. This one cast a broad glow down the tunnel, but it was heavy and its weight made it hard to hold. The glow wobbled every time Abbey took a step.
“This is more gruesome than I ever imagined,” she muttered, holding the lantern high and squinting into its glow.
“Aye, it could use a coat of paint and a sweeping,” Cordelia said. Her voice had a lilt to it, despite the fact that she pressed up against Abbey’s left shoulder rather tightly, so tightly that Abbey was being pushed forward faster than she wanted to go. “Keep on going. Every tunnel with a beginning is a tunnel with an end.”
“You’re being uncommonly stout about all this, I must say,” Abbey said to her. “Not everyone would follow a lunatic down a hellhole.”
“True enough,” Cordelia told her, “but I suppose there can’t be anything more ugly down here than I’ve seen lurking in some of the corners I’ve dusted in my time.”
Abbey chuckled nervously. “And I wish we’d brought your hearth poker. I’ve a feeling we’ll need something to strike with before this is over.”
“Or a good round skillet. Fancy a kitchen cupboard being such an arsenal.”
“Shhh—I hear voices,” Abbey blurted, halting.
“I hear them, too. From overhead. People walking and talking in the houses up there.” Cordelia swiveled her face upward. “Wager they don’t know what’s under their houses any more than we do. Funny, doesn’t it seem?”
“I’ll laugh later, if you don’t mind,” Abbey drawled. Then she turned her head and whispered harshly, “No, listen! That’s not what I hear! I hear voices from in front of us. I’m sure of it. Listen. . . .”
They stopped moving, bothered by the swinging lantern. Its disregarding light wobbled on shiny tunnel walls.
“Yes,” Cordelia whispered. “Yes, I hear them . . . you’re very right.”
Abbey’s eyes scanned the darkness up ahead. “Cordelia, look! There’s a light!” she whispered harshly.
The two women stopped in their mushy tracks. Sure enough, twenty yards or so ahead of them there was indeed a light showing which had nothing to do with their lantern.
Abbey hovered there, not wanting to take another step, unsure about what to do next. Finally Cordelia said, “Are you not going on?”
Abbey bit her lip. “We should’ve brought a weapon or something. We’ve no idea what’s there. Or who. And I tell you there are people on this island we don’t want to confront head-on.” She turned her head toward Cordelia, taking care not to make the lantern wobble and attract attention. “I understand if you want to turn back.”
Cordelia barely let her get the words out. “No need on account of me. Might as well cook the whole pie, mightn’t we?”
Strengthened by her companion’s resolve, Abbey set her lips, nodded, and pushed forward through the wet grit. “Let’s see what Nantucket hides.”
The twenty-some yards went quickly. Too quickly, Abbey thought. She knew it was only her imagination that an inexorable arm was pulling her deeper toward the unknown light while Cordelia’s presence close behind her seemed to be pushing her in that direction, but she couldn’t gain control over the draw.
As they came close to the opening they saw it was a child-sized doorway. The quavering glow of firelight played at their feet. Within, there was light.
And whispers. Then, silence.
The two women stooped down. Abbey’s knees barely held her. She was trembling as she lowered herself and the lantern.
There was a room, and in its center a stout iron stove. The stove’s door was open, letting the fire flicker out.
Abbey stopped breathing. Over her head the pounding of grog mugs and the storm of music thudding from The Brotherhood made the tunnel quake. Would the noise protect her, or be her undoing? Taking a deep breath, she looked inside.
The faces that greeted her were as unmoving as if they were painted on the wall. An antediluvian scene. A mural of a foreign place, etched and carved into the wall. Young faces, shiny and out of context, the color of Jake’s eyes.
The women’s heads were rows of tight braids, ink black. Or wrapped in some kind of turbaned cloth. The men—hardly older than sapling trees—wore tattered shirts whose tails hung from beneath heavy woollen sweaters. The women—they were young, too—clutched tiny children, at least two to each woman. One woman had four children clustered around her. Tiny faces gathered like acorns around a tree stem.
“Oh, dear God!” Abbey gushed, nearly falling through the opening. Her skirt dragged beneath her knees as she crawled in, leaving the lantern behind in the tunnel.
The people clutched each other tighter and pressed closer against the walls, as though trying to push through the sod and get away from her.
“Oh, God,” she stammered again, lurching to her feet and standing in the midst of them like a white queen. Or a devil, judging from the way they were looking at her. She circled the room, making a small, senseless pattern in the dirt—no, it wasn’t dirt at all. She looked down. Rugs. No, pelts. Sheepskin pelts butted up against each other all over the floor to cushion their sore feet. Her circling had knocked the edges up to curl over themselves like burned paper.
On one side of the room there were a few cots, the kind that stack on top of one another like bunks, probably for the children since they didn’t appear sturdy enough for adults. In fact there were two bundles on them that looked like sleeping babies. Stacked on one of the cots were folded woollen blankets. Nearby was a basket, a big one, brimming with miniature ships, tiny horses carved from ivory and wood, rag and husk dolls, and a miniature wagon well enough crafted that the wheels turned.
The room was a rectangular one shaped roughly like the main area of the pub above it. Two of the walls were dirt, and two brick. In one brick wall was a small dumbwaiter, no doubt leading up to Matthew’s kitchen. Perfect—food delivered without arousing suspicion.
Her hands flopped down against her skirt. Her shoulders fell. “Oh, Cordelia . . . look at them.”
“I see them,” Cordelia’s voice threaded through the little door, though in the odd light her face was mostly hidden. She made no move to come into the hideaway.
Abbey turned around in place, then around again, absorbing each terrified face, her palms flattened against her skirt. “Don’t be afraid,” she said gently. “How long have you been here?”
They refused to speak. The children pressed into the heavy breasts and skirts of the young women or hid behind the young men. No one would answer.
“You were in the jail, weren’t you? Some of you,” Abbey said. “I know you were,” she added, pointing at the young slave she herself had protected from a beating that first day on the wharf. “And you . . . and you . . . but not all of you. Not these children. Have you been hidden down here all this time, or longer?” Her tone must have intimidated them, because they cowered, pressed up against the wall like sticks inside a spinning bucket, and no one would speak to her. Some of them stared at the short door and Cordelia.
“Why don’t you come in?” Abbey called then. “You’re making them nervous.”
Cordelia paused, then her skirt moved, which was all that could be seen for now. One glance had evidently been enough for her. “No, I’m happy here, thank you. Conduct your business. I’ll just keep an ear out.”
Abbey turned to what appeared to be the oldest of the young men and asked, “Do you know of a man named Pollock? I think he was going to transport you. He was going to resell you, did you know that?”
Wide black eyes widened still more, and each face in the room that was old enough to understand instantly matted over with horror. If Negroes could pale, these were very frightened people. Obviously they hadn’t known what was going on.
“Oh, poor Jake,” she whispered.
“Pardon?” Cordelia’s voice filtered from the tunnel.
Abbey sighed and shook her head. “He saw me beating on that slaver and he knew I’d get myself into this if he told me about it. He’s right, too, I would have. And I’d probably do something rash just because I do things like that. Poor Jake . . . God, I love that fellow. Even I didn’t know how much until this moment.”
“For running slaves, you love him?” Cordelia’s disembodied voice asked.
“For shielding them. Look here.” Abbey fanned her arms around the room. “A fire for warmth, food stacked in the corners, sheeps’ pelts on the floor instead of bare dirt . . . toys for the children every bit as fine as the ones Luella plays with . . . they’re wearing sweaters over their rags . . . heavy shawls . . . and none of these people has a shackle on. They could have walked down that tunnel and out the hatch at any time. He’s not holding these people. He’s protecting them.”
“So kindhearted,” came the muffled comment.
Abbey gave a short ironic laugh. “Yes. He refused to deal with Pollock, but he couldn’t seek Dominic’s help, could he? Even in concealing these people, he’s still breaking federal laws regarding run-away slaves. Pollock tried to trick him by promising to transport them. When Jake saw through his plan, Pollock tried to beat their location out of him. Just imagine it. Imagine it!”
“I can,” Cordelia’s voice muttered formlessly. “But I wonder why they didn’t simply leave them in jail until they were ready to take them off the island. No one would have noticed, then.”
“Oh, Cordelia, they’re not just doing a job. They’re on a quest, don’t you see? The jail is cold and damp. The children would have become sick, perhaps died.”
“No one in Nantucket would let children die, even in jail. Mostly we let our convicts go home at night, even.” She paused. “Not escaped slaves, of course.”
“Oh, of course. They’re crime is unforgivable, this wanting to be self-governing. Such a dangerous notion, I’d want them off the street!”
She looked around at the dark faces that understood only the surface meaning of her words and none of her sarcastic tone. She clamped her lips tight and tucked them in, biting them to keep herself quiet.
“Abbey,” Cordelia softly called, “if you don’t mind, I’ll slip back topside. The mustiness is making me nauseous. Should I meet you out on the street?”
Abbey smiled at Cordelia’s unstoppable politeness. “Of course. And take the lantern, Cordelia,” she said.
“No, thank you. I’ll leave it for you. The way out is easy enough. I’ll be waiting.”
Abbey turned back to the slaves. “Do any of you know what’s been going on? Tell me if you do, because I’m here to help you. You must be gotten off the island as soon as possible. As long as Thomas Pollock knows you’re here somewhere, he’ll never give up trying to find you.” She pressed her hand to her head and imagined the weeks they had spent living cooped up like this. “Sakes, you must be going stir-crazy! Where was Mr. Ross going to move you to? Do you know?”
A small boy brightened, and before his young mother could pull him back he stepped forward, blurting, “Canada.”
He bounced into his mother’s heavy skirts as she pulled him against her.
“It’s all right,” Abbey told the terrified girl. “I’m going to make sure that Canada is where you end up if I have to sail you there myself.”
Something in her voice must have spoken her conviction more eloquently than her words could, because the young teenaged buck she’d saved on the wharf suddenly bolted from his place at the wall, stooped to peek into the tunnel for some reason, then straightened up and hurried back toward Abbey. Nervously he wiped his hands on his battered trousers.
“Missy . . . missy, I gots to tell yawl somethin. Yawl gots t’know!”
“What is it?” Abbey asked.
“Dat lady . . . dat lady out yonder . . . she no good, missy. She no good!”
Abbey slammed her fists into her sides and demanded, “Oh, now, what are you talking about? She’s our housekeeper.”
“No, missy, she ain’t no housekeeper. I dun saw her in No’th Ca’lina afores dey brung me here. Miss, she a fed’al slave agent. We knows ’bout her. Missy . . . missy, yawl gots to bleeve us, she no good!”
“Are you talking about Cordelia? How could you know? She didn’t even come in here!”
The boy straightened. “Yes’m,” he said. The panic went out of his voice. “Dat’s why she don’t come in.”
Cold dread washed over Abbey. Dread and realization. A federal agent, hidden here on the island.
Nantucket—a station for the Underground Railroad.
How many slaves had been rerouted out of here by Jake and his cousins, only to be headed off and returned to their owners? Desperately she tried to remember how long Cordelia told her she’d been living on Nantucket. Long enough to build an ironclad guise.
Now two other runaways came forward, a chubby woman in her twenties and another teenaged boy.
“He right, ma’am,” the woman said. “Dat lady, she go round breakin’ up freedom stations and roundin’ up ’scape slaves. She work for plantation owners and de gub’ment.”
“Yes’m,” the boy agreed. “But we hear tell only ’bout half de slaves gits back to dere plantations. Dem others, dey jus’ disappear.”
Abbey pressed her hand over her eyes. “Disappear . . . and I led her here.” Her own words hung on her with the weight of a ball and chain. “Oh, God . . . oh, God . . .”
Her shoulders drooped and suddenly she was the one who was nauseous. The slaves made room for her on one of the cots as she sank down and slumped against the brick wall beside the dumb-waiter, whispering self-deprecations over and over again.
One of the women left her children behind and brought Abbey a cup of hot milk from the stove. Abbey stared into the warm drink, seeing only the starkness of what she had done.
“You din know, miss,” the woman said. “We knowed we wuz in trouble, mind. We shoulda been outa here long time past, and wees still here. We knowed somethin’ gone wrong. Ain’t your fault.”
Abbey stood up abruptly. “Is there anything in here that could be used as a weapon? Anything at all?”
The slaves turned their heads back and forth, sharing glances, then looking around the room, but there was little more than blankets and toys. Abbey looked around, too, and as her eyes passed over the dumbwaiter beside her, they suddenly stopped. She turned fully to face it. “Where does this go?”
“Upstairs, missy,” the woman answered. “But it ain’t big enough for you.”
“But it’s big enough for one of the children, isn’t it?” Abbey looked around at the children and said, “Is one of you brave enough to ride up to the kitchen and take a message? Is there a pencil here?”
“Yes’m, we gots a pencil,” a girl about eight years old piped up and dove for a bunch of pencils and paper on the floor. She supplied Abbey with a pencil and a piece of paper, and said, “I goes up for you, ma’am.” And she looked scrawny enough to do it.
Abbey paused as she scrawled a note. “Can you?”
The girl was plainly terrified of the prospect as she glanced at the tiny, coffinlike dumbwaiter, but she straightened and said, “Yes’m, I kin go.”
“Take this message to Jacob Ross. No one else, do you understand? Jacob Ross.”
“Yes’m, I understands.” The girl held her hand out flat for Abbey to put the paper in her palm, then clutched it tight and squeezed into the dumbwaiter, her knobby knees tucked against her chin.
Abbey watched, the breath holding tight in her body, as two young men wordlessly hauled on the dumbwaiter line and, stroke by stroke, lifted the little girl into the shaft within the wall. The rope strained and squeaked as though an omen.
There was nothing left for her to do. She was as trapped as these people were, caught between the brick wall and Cordelia. Cordelia, of all people. A perfect position, Abbey realized coldly, to have a station in the very house of the magistrate, where every conversation could be overheard and every paper examined after dark. It made perfect sense.
“I have to get out,” she blurted. The young Negroes looked at her, their fates determined by her presence. “I have to confront her. And if I do that out there, at least she won’t come back down the tunnel. If there’s a fight, it shouldn’t be where the children are. I’m going. All of you stay here.”
They didn’t argue, having been taught all their lives never to dispute the decision of a white person. If they were inclined to try to protect her from her own foolishness, they showed no sign of it. They assumed she knew what she was doing. It was a good thing, too, because her logic could have been shredded with a butter knife.
Before she knew it she was in the tunnel again, lifting the heavy lantern. As the light slithered along on the wall, she paused.
She put the lantern down and left it behind her. The tunnel was straight, and she had been down it once before. Once was enough. She didn’t need the light.
She bumped the wall twice because she couldn’t see it. It jabbed against her shoulder and reminded her that the trouble of this night had just begun.
And she had given it a push. Why didn’t she tell the child to give the note to Matthew or Elias? Or anyone? That child would hunt and search until she found Jake, and that could take all night. She had Jake on her mind, that was her problem, and it could be her undoing before this night was over. She prayed that someone would be smart enough to wonder why a Negro child would show up in the dumbwaiter. Her heart begged for someone to be in the kitchen when she came up.
The tunnel opening was quiet, deathly quiet. The quiet of death on the way, the last breaths of chance. When she saw the pewter outline of it against the pitch darkness she knew she had been right to leave the lantern behind.
She crept to the opening and listened.
The sea washed against the pebbles and pilings. A quivering wind brushed the tops of Nantucket’s trees. Wooden hulls scratched, grated, whined against their bumpers. Masts groaned. Sail bags rattled. In the distance horses’ hooves rattled over the cobblestones, chased by the racket of wheels.
And, faintly, under it all, was the creak of footsteps on the dock above. Footsteps that went nowhere, came from nowhere. Footsteps that made the moves of waiting.
When Abbey heard the steps, the shell of her fear crumbled. From the nest rose unabridged insult and a sustaining kind of anger. She didn’t need a weapon.
Her astonishment and disbelief had thawed halfway back in the tunnel. When she looked upon the smallish face and severe hair of a woman who had minutes ago been a stalwart companion, she could see only the fact that she had been used. Professionally used.
She came out of the tunnel, pressing close to the bank. From the gritty bank she dug out a handful of sand and closed it in her fist. Seaside darkness provided a cloak, and Abbey skipped quickly along, using the pilings as cover. The dock planks creaked above her as Cordelia paced, the gray skirt swishing over Abbey’s head. Cordelia—
—who was there, holding a gun.
A gun. Somehow she had hidden a pistol in her nightclothes. Who knew how long she had kept it with her, slept with it, swept with it, made food with it tucked in her clothing, waiting for the moment when Abbey would lead her to her prize. Of course, it had become obvious early on that Abbey would provide the key in uncovering the runaway slaves. This interest in Jake Ross fell beautifully into the hands of the government agent—a double agent. A criminal herself if the Negroes were right.
Abbey hated herself as she watched the dark form of Cordelia move above her through the cracks in the dock.
The wad of sand bit into her skin. When the skirt above her swirled outward and moved toward the dock’s edge, Abbey stepped out and flung her wad upward, letting instinct do her aiming.
Sand and pebbles smacked Cordelia’s chin. Her head snapped back and she staggered, her free hand clawing at her face. Even the gun hand went up, falling off its aim to press against her spattered cheek.
Abbey vaulted up onto the dock, tangled for a horrible moment in the folds of her own skirt. With a great wrenching howl she pulled her skirt free and lunged toward Cordelia.
Strangely it wasn’t the gun that finally convinced her. It was Cordelia’s fighting back. Abbey’s assumptions about eastern women shattered in the blow that struck the side of her shoulder and cast her cleanly down onto the dock. Or perhaps Cordelia wasn’t an eastern woman at all.
By the time Abbey rolled over, she was staring into the barrel of the pistol, and Cordelia was spitting sand from her mouth. She held the pistol extended in one hand and backed off a few steps to gain an advantage.
“I was afraid one of them might recognize me,” she finally said, in a tone prohibitively calm. “You’re smart, not to announce yourself with lanternlight.”
“I knew you wouldn’t willingly give me an advantage,” Abbey told her, rolling to her feet.
“Correct there.” Cordelia wiped grit from the corner of her eye.
Abbey parted her lips to speak, but a hard thump on the dock behind her drew both their attention. She turned, and her glance met a pair of moon-shadowed eyes.
“Jake . . .” she whispered. Aloud she said, “You had to come alone?”
He moved to her side, staring at Cordelia. Something in his eyes said he wasn’t surprised that this snag had developed, only surprised that the snag was Cordelia.
“Mrs. Goodes,” he said, his tone saying Of course.
“You’re under arrest for illegal transport of runaway slaves, Mr. Ross. I’m a bonded agent with the United States Federal Government, and I’m taking charge of the slaves down that hole. Don’t interfere, Abbey, or I’ll have to arrest you as an accomplice.”
Abbey stepped in front of Jake and spoke as soon as she felt his warning touch on her arm. “Then you’ll have to arrest yourself, Cordelia. It’s also illegal to take possession of runaway slaves under the pretext of returning them to their owners, only to resell them at some vulgar profit.”
Cordelia’s face hardened, her secret revealed. From behind Abbey came Jake’s cursing breath.
“What are ready-made, trained, English-speaking darkies going for on the hidden market?” Abbey demanded. “You know, I don’t suppose the U.S. government will be too approving of how you’re using your authority.” Abbey waited to see if she read the situation right, to see how far she could push Cordelia, and in which direction. She licked her lips. “Let us go, Cordelia. Let the slaves go this time. Or you’ll never hear the end of it from me. Either none of us go to jail, or all of us do.”
Cordelia’s hand tightened on the pistol, and her tongue pressed against the insides of her lips. She had nothing to say to the open accusation and the solemn dare from a woman she knew would make good on her promise.
“Abbey, are you sure of this?” Jake whispered, anxiety giving a hiss to his voice.
“Look at her face,” Abbey said by way of an answer.
Cordelia snapped an angry glare at her, proving Abbey was right.
“Judas,” Jake murmured.
“I told you they wouldn’t go for it,” another voice popped from the darkness behind them, and there was a clutter of footsteps with it.
Jake and Abbey spun around. Pollock. Behind him were Sumner and Maynard.
Instinctively Jake pulled Abbey against him, partially to protect and partially to keep her from diving into impossible odds.
Pollock made a broad shadow on the dock, his face shaded by the brim of his hat, bracketed by his two accomplices.
Cordelia snapped, “Damn you, why must you make things worse? I told you to stay away.”
“Don’t worry about her,” Pollock said, his voice wrapping around Abbey coldly and tightly. “She’ll be sent so far from here she couldn’t find her way back with a guiding star. I know where I can get a sky-high price for someone like her.
Sucking in a breath, Jake pressed against Abbey, ready for a fight, but Abbey dug her fingers into his sweater and held him back just long enough for sense to sink in.
“Don’t be a pig,” Cordelia blurted, a spray of saliva giving body to her contempt for her associate. “I’d kill her first.”
“Why?” Pollock demanded. “She remind you too much of yourself?”
He was astonishingly cold. Such coldness mystified Abbey as she listened. Cordelia was somewhat agitated, but Pollock was impassive. That doubled, then tripled the insult of his being here, of his being the one to get the upper hand on her, of his being the one to engineer her defeat and perhaps even her death.
As the insult burned within her, Abbey decided—no, she knew that she would refuse to give in to him. She would claw and fight her way back from hell if necessary before allowing Thomas Pollock to win. Obstinacy rose around her like a shell.
And beside her, rigid and just as adamant not to be taken easily, was Jake. Beside her, where he had belonged from the beginning, as she had somehow known. Beside her for whatever was to come. She wouldn’t be separated from him anymore by these people nor by his own goals. If the slaves in the cellar room died or found even worse fates on the plantations of people who would deal with such as Pollock and Cordelia, if Abbey and Jake found only this one moment of true unity, so be it—but Abbey was sure as she stood here that she was indomitable, that she and Jake couldn’t be completely defeated tonight. They may be vanquished, for certainly the fight was yet to happen, but they would forever have won something for the sake of honor. There would always be the glitter of chance turning their way, if only in the futures of the little slave children down there who had seen clearly that there were white people on the face of this earth who would give up life so black hands could know the sensation of holding coins they’d rightfully earned.
With all this behind her and Jake behind her, too, Abbey squared her narrow frame and gave Thomas Pollock a glare that would burn him for the rest of his life. She felt Jake’s hands take hold of her upper arms as though he knew, and without looking she was certain he was spiking Pollock with the very same glare—a horrendous unity for the two of them, something that would never leave them. They were invincible.
“Get rid of them,” Cordelia tonelessly ordered.
Pollock stepped aside. Sumner and Maynard pounced upon Jake and Abbey and dragged them from the wharf.
High night winds howled over Nantucket. Nature, for all its flamboyance, is perpetually thoughtless and, the late-hour chill belied the fact that it was summer. Wind coming down from the Arctic. Either that or Abbey simply could not feel warmth in the world right now.
She and Jake walked side by side through downtown Nantucket, flanked on their right by Sumner. Maynard walked in front of them, his small head swiveling from side to side, watching the empty street. Several paces behind, Pollock himself walked with Cordelia, discussing their plans for the fates of the slaves in the cellar room. Abbey strained to hear and before long had heard enough. Enough to know that the families were to be broken up, the children taken from their mothers, so that in time all of them would forget and there would be no thread of unity left. In time the names of Cordelia Goodes and Thomas Pollock would flicker and wink away from the Negroes’ memories because they would be forever alone, so desolate and despairing that their will to fight back would be snuffed out. And even if they did mention those names, what was the difference? They would be owned by people who had done business with these despicable people. There would be no one to listen.
Horrible. Horrible. Unthinkable and unforgivable. Cordelia especially, who used her position to deceive and profit. She who carried the sanction of the law. To steal was one thing, but to be trusted and use that trust for corruption—she was worse than Pollock. At least Pollock had never pretended.
Jake strode beside her, glancing periodically at the man who flanked them several paces away and the one who led the way through the sleepy streets. “That was a thickheaded thing to do,” he said privately.
“I know,” she said.
“I love you for it.”
“I know.”
His lips turned up at one corner, and he smiled at her in spite of the situation.
“Quiet, you two,” Maynard barked from in front of them. His thin shoulders and long arms and gangling gait gave no hint of the power given to him by his own viciousness, which Abbey had experienced firsthand on the wharf. She owed him a small remuneration as well, didn’t she?
She leaned closer to Jake. “What are we going to do?” she whispered.
“Get killed, probably.” The cool breeze pulled at his yellow hair, teasing his eyes.
She looked at him, ready to rail him for giving up, and was met with a little wink that told her he was going to do no such thing. A warmth folded around her hand as he tightened his grip. She squeezed back, flooded with sudden passion. Of all the hours she’d spent wanting him, she never wanted him more than at this moment when his hand took hold of hers and drew her against him to walk beside him into the face of their plight.
“We’ve got the whole island,” she whispered lower than before. “Just break away—”
He shook his head. “Can’t. People below.”
Abbey let out a long, tight sigh. “I hate it when you’re right.”
“Shut your mouths!” Maynard ordered, his pointed face swiveling toward them in profile.
“Split up,” Jake whispered, hardly more than a breath now. He waited until she looked up at him again and counted on her to read his lips. “Draw off . . . I’ll empty the tunnel.”
Without nodding, she let her eyes agree with him. They fell silent and continued the ominous march. Abbey concentrated on listening to Cordelia and Pollock talking as they brought up the rear of the procession, and even dragged her feet a little until she felt the jab of Sumner’s pistol in her ribs.
She dared not guess where they were being taken. Somewhere to be murdered, of course. Sequestered until their bodies could be dumped and not found before their killers were safely off the island with the hapless slaves shackled in the hold.
Abbey had no intention of allowing herself to be led to such a place, to go there under her own power. At the moment she was stalling, and she knew Jake was playing the same game. She wasn’t even afraid of the pistols, for they were only iron and bullets and she had wrath on her side.
“Get ready,” came a soft breath at her left. His voice was a buoy.
Her arms involuntarily tightened against her sides. She worked to keep her pace from wavering and giving them away. There was no point in being afraid. Fear would just get her killed. If they were going to kill her anyway, she might as well fight. Pollock’s coldly murderous ways and Cordelia’s inflexibility gave Abbey nothing to lose.
They were walking past a closed dry goods store. In front of the store were two empty barrels. As they passed these barrels, Jake suddenly spun around. He shoved Abbey forward into Maynard—a rough move, but it worked—then continued his spin and kicked one of the barrels into Sumner’s legs. Another whirl, and he had the second barrel by the rim and was heaving it into the air.
Abbey lost her balance when he pushed her forward, and for a split second she resisted when her shoulder rammed into Maynard’s back. But her anger bore her up, and she pointed her elbow and buried it into Maynard’s lower back. He grunted and catapulted forward off the clapboards, sprawling headlong into a stack of firewood. By the time Abbey caught herself on an awning pole and hauled around, Jake loomed with his barrel over his head like some great colossus about to heave its thunderbolt.
Cordelia shrieked and forgot she was holding a gun. She raised her hands to protect herself and reeled backward as Jake heaved the barrel toward her and Pollock.
Writhing to one side, Cordelia stumbled off the sidewalk and let Pollock take the full force of the barrel alone. Force struck force, and Pollock was driven to the ground, dazed and confused.
Jake wobbled on the clapboard porch, regaining his balance, searching for some kind of weapon. On the cobblestones, Sumner was gathering himself after the initial surprise. He was raising his gun and aiming it.
Abbey didn’t hesitate. She grabbed one of the logs from the pile where Maynard now lay senseless and hurled it at Sumner. It struck him butt-end in the shoulder. His pistol clattered to the cobblestones with a dull ring.
Pollock was getting to his feet. Jake saw him and was about to lunge into the big man when a pistol shot boomed through the night, worse than thunder. Abbey yelped instinctively, frightened by the sound, but it was Jake who stumbled.
“Jake!” she shrieked.
A protective rage boiled up in her, and she dove headlong into Cordelia with a growl much more like an animal’s than a woman’s. Cordelia’s eyes widened when she caught sight of Abbey coming toward her, arms outstretched, hands clawed, and she brought the smoking gun around.
Abbey’s hands closed around Cordelia’s throat, the flesh soft and giving, muscles beneath it corded with terror. The power that started in the factory of her heart now came flooding out the tips of her fingers, piercing Cordelia’s neck with an unbreakable grip and a threat that couldn’t be ignored. Abbey paid no attention to the pressure of the pistol barrel trapped flat against her side, a hot shaft scorching her dress. She pushed Cordelia back, back, back toward the awning pole until it slammed between the woman’s shoulder blades. Then Abbey started pulling and pushing, bashing Cordelia’s head against the squared wood.
There were sounds behind her—more fighting—but she was ghostlike in her persistence. Relentlessly she fought against Cordelia’s struggles and the cold threats that poured from Cordelia’s mouth, but finally the threats fell away and the housekeeper went limp. If there was any sympathy in Abbey for the struggling woman, it dissolved in the look of contempt from Cordelia’s eyes as consciousness slid from them.
Abbey threw the woman down and spun around, reaching for Jake.
He stumbled toward her, one hand pressed into a bleeding shoulder. Behind him on the clapboards, Pollock was rolling over and reaching for a discarded pistol someone had dropped.
Dazed by his bullet wound, Jake let Abbey pull him away, off the porch and across the cobblestones toward the dark south side of the street. Behind them was a clatter of motion and the clap of gunfire, and Abbey ran for her life and for the life of the man she needed as a drum needs a beat.