THE FIRE QUICKLY ate through the older side walls of the Geary Hat Store, chewing its way slat by slat to the stores on either side, devouring the merchandise to nourish its growth, a crawling demon out to swallow the business district. Soon the fire was sucking from every building on the block. Its great crackle had become a roar, a wave of searing mutilation that branded its shape on the skin of Nantucket. The gunshots which had been pegged as distant thunder were forgotten as buildings began to collapse and flames licked the night sky.
But the back wall, the newly built stock room in back of the Geary Store, held.
Even as the fire ate through the side walls and consumed the block building by building, the stock room became a flameless furnace in which smoke and heat were much more the threats than bare flame.
Jake smashed out the two small windows right away. He and Abbey put their faces up against them and sucked at the fresh air, but even the air from outside was quickly polluted by billows of smoke from out front. The smoke was black and stifling, in every way the antithesis of its radiant source.
“They can’t get away! They cant get away!” Abbey shrieked, a demonic rasp raking out of her throat. She kicked and kicked at the outer wall, drowning in her own rage. Sweat poured down her face and down Jake’s heat-rushed cheeks as he struggled beside her, working to pry away the wall boards with the tip of the broomstick.
“Don’t use up the air,” he said, deceptively calm. He got the broom handle deep into a crack between the wall boards. Using his weight carefully, he bore down upon it. The boards screamed, the broom handle bent to an impossible point, and blood poured from the bullet wound in Jake’s shoulder, but he was unrelenting. With an awful snap, the first board gave way. Beyond it was the cedar shingling of the outside wall in back of the store.
“All right, all right . . .” Abbey pushed back her sweat-soaked hair and rummaged around the room looking for another broom or anything else that could be used as a lever. As she searched, she accidentally pressed her hand to the store wall—and leaped back. The wooden wall was as hot as coals. Beyond it, she heard the laughter of the fire. Smoke was pouring in the crack underneath the store room door. She immediately began stuffing dresses into the crack to save their air.
In the outer room, with a sound as terrible as any gunfire, the ceiling collapsed, crashing into the fire, providing more fuel. Abbey clamped her arms over her ears and whimpered through quivering lips as the sound came through and took half their ceiling with it. Above her now, flames licked their way into the store room. She looked up and bellowed, “No!”
Jake called her name, but didn’t leave his job of breaking the wall away. “Abbey, get away from there! Come by me! Now! Now!”
She covered her head with her arms and stumbled toward him just as the second and third planks broke away. Jake ignored the blood flowing down his arm, driven on in his task by something beyond the limitations of his body. He had taken over Abbey’s fury when it began slipping from her and used it now to batter his way through the cedar shingles until the night air seeped in through an open hole. “Come here!” he shouted over the thunder of the fire. Through funnels of black smoke he reached for her and pulled her to him. “Can you get through? Try.”
Abbey forced her stinging eyes to find the open part of the wall. It looked impossibly small, but Jake was pushing her toward it.
Like a baby, she went headfirst into the world. Nails and splintered spears of wood tore at her skin and her clothing. For an instant she was trapped between hell and heaven, but an unsympathetic shove from Jake smashed her through the hole and she tumbled into a struggling garden that now would never grow.
She fell a full three feet to the ground, and the air slammed out of her, leaving her gasping and aching. Delirium set in as the first sucks of fresh air went immediately to her head, but an instant later came the nightmarish realization that Jake was still trapped. She turned on her hip and struggled to her feet, looking up just in time to see the whole roof of the store plunge inward. Flames struck out like petals of a giant yellow rose where a moment ago there had been structure.
“Jake!” Abbey clawed at the shingles. “Jake! Jake, come on!”
There was no sign of him.
She shrieked his name deliriously in a voice so panicked it didn’t even sound human.
The building was hot to her touch. Half the wall above her head now fell inward, sprinkling like bread crumbs onto the flaming innards of the store. She kept on screaming his name and pulling at the warm cedar. The heat caressed her fingers. The touch of death.
“Jake!”
Her scream reached up to the incinerated rooftops that were crumbling and turning to cinders before her very eyes. The entire block was now roaring. All around her firebells clanged and men ran with hand pumps and buckets. The meager Nantucket fire brigade was joined by citizens, more and more, flooding from the houses by the dozens. Some had dragged a hose from the fire cistern on Water Street, but it would not be enough. Nothing but the ocean itself could be enough now. Nothing, nothing.
Abbey pummeled the edges of the hole in the cedar wall with her fists. “Jake!” Tears poured from her eyes, tears of horror, grief, and the sting of the smoke.
From inside there was no answer; nothing but the subtle shift of collapsed roofing on the floor. Before her she saw a wall of yellow and orange fire, eating its way toward her, toward Jake.
She grabbed a garden rake from where it leaned against a picket fence, heaved it over her shoulder, and began smashing it against the cedar. The shingles splintered under the teeth of the heavy rake, but every blow was enough to sap the power of the next blow from her arms.
“Jake!” Her voice was little more than a screech now, raped by smoke and its own tearing at her throat, its sound destroyed.
Why wasn’t he moving? Where was he, where was he—
Two great smashes from either side of her crushed the wall to bits. The cedar disintegrated and fell away, leaving only a pile of smoldering refuse and a wall of fire beyond it.
Someone pulled Abbey back away from the wall, but the smashing continued. She felt herself being handed over to another pair of hands, and she was leaning against a soft presence that held her on her feet and wiped the soot and grit from her eyes.
“‘Old toight, mum, ’old toight, Abbey—over there! I see ’im!”
Abbey clung to the familiar voice and the strong, narrow arms, blinking desperately. Her vision cleared enough to catch the forms of Matthew and Elias crashing their way through the wall and charging into the burning wreckage. Orange sparks flew and glowing cinders leaped up and swirled around them as their feet churned through the char, and they pawed the wreckage aside like children raising minnows in a stream. All at once they dove for the same spot. They lifted a mess of Jake from the kindling. He gasped and coughed, clawed at his shoulder and leaned on Elias, but he walked out under his own power. They lifted him from the collapsed store, moving slowly and carefully as though to taunt the blaze behind them.
Abbey tried to call his name again, but it gagged her. She stumbled from Lucy’s arms and into Jake’s as his cousins supported him on either side.
Jake crushed her against him, feeling the intense heat still pressing at his back, and he looked up. His head reeled.
The business district was an inferno. The fire was spreading impossibly fast, giving luster to the ocean and glare to the night sky. Fire bells and the clatter of hooves and wagon wheels added a heartbeat to the horror.
“God—” he choked. “Matt! Look at it. . ..”
Matthew had his arm around Jake’s shoulders and was shielding him and Abbey from the floating sparks. Elias was there, too, beside Lucy, captured by the balefire before them.
“We got to get out of here before the air goes,” Matthew said sensibly.
Jake grabbed his cousin, getting a handful of collar. “The tunnel! The slaves! They’ll roast!”
“And do what with ’em?” Matthew demanded. “Hide ’em where?”
“I don’t know! Come on!” He pulled on Matthew and Abbey both, stumbling through the little garden.
Elias reached out and caught Jake. “Not you. Look at you. You’re scorched and shot and what else—”
Jake put a palm against Elias’s chest and shoved him away. “Get your hands off me. We’re getting those people off this island—tonight.”
The younger cousin’s face flushed, and he stepped forward again, but Abbey wedged between them and pushed them apart, snarling at Elias, “You heard him. Lets go.”
The fire crackled and flew in the air above them. Orange sparks and curling bits of burning paper and wood gave a hellish splendor to the night.
Matthew said, “Let’s go.”
Jake didn’t wait. He hobbled off into the night, pushing past the men of Nantucket who were crashing through the streets with their buckets and hoses and horses and crates of sand. Elias set his lips and followed, with Matthew, Abbey, and Lucy close behind.
Lucy caught at Abbey’s sleeve as they ran. “Nicky’s coming to meet us, Abbey—”
“Oh, Lucy!” Abbey hauled up short and grabbed her hard. “He can’t! There are escaped slaves to get off the island! He can’t get involved!”
“You underestimate him, Abbey,” the cockney girl insisted. “You jus’ don’ understand him.”
“That may be true, but you know how he is about smugglers and slavers! He’s bound to feel the same about the Underground Railroad. Stall him, Lucy! Stall him, please! Please! I’m begging you!”
“But, Abbey . . .”
“Please!” Her final request was hardly more than a squeal as she pressed her point home on Lucy’s narrow shoulders and dashed off into the crackling night after Jake and his cousins.
Behind them, the Geary Hat Store and all its adjacent colleagues crumbled and were consumed in a hail of orange glitter.
• • •
Abbey and the three men were forced to take the long way through town to the end of Steamboat Wharf, turned back several times by the fire as it spread. There hadn’t been rain in two weeks. Everything was dry. Everything burned.
The town had gone into an organized flurry in its attempt to curb the fire, but buckets and cisterns and desperation were not enough tonight. The Nantucket Fire Brigade discovered its own impotence that night. With water all around them, they could only burn.
The tunnel was wet, and it was hard to breathe, hard to drag heavy, moist air down their scorched gullets, but they stumbled down it toward the cellar hideaway without as much as a candle to light their way.
Jake plowed into the cellar room first and collapsed against the bunks, staring. Abbey came after, then the cousins.
Abbey gaped and choked out, “Where are they?”
The room sprawled before them, its bales of hay no longer serving as chairs, the sheepskin rugs cool now, the toys scattered as though kicked about, everything broken and in disarray. Even the bundles of sleeping children were gone from the bunks, with only blankets left discarded on the floor. A struggle, clearly. Stolen. Against their will.
“Oh, Jake—” Abbey gasped. “They got here first! They took them!”
“But where?” His gentle face was smeared with black soot, his eyes tortured. “Where do we even begin to start looking?”
Abbey staggered toward him and filled her fists with his sleeve. “I destroyed Pollock’s ship! I destroyed it, I tell you!”
“He’ll steal another. Do you think he won’t?”
“They probably started a few extra fires downtown just to cover their tracks,” Matthew suggested.
Abbey spun on him. “Standing here doesn’t get them stopped. Let’s get out of here!”
Elias ducked back out the short opening and they all followed. Matthew waited behind to help Jake, but Abbey was consumed, obsessed, with something else.
How many times would the core of her heart be threatened before she reached her point of intolerance? She’d seen Jake nearly die twice now, and that was too much. She’d felt his death nipping at her ankles and stinging her fingertips, and she knew unequivocally that she couldn’t live without him. But he was with her now, only paces behind, and she felt him as fully as if they were pressed against each other beneath the covers, separated only by a thin film of perspiration. She reached back and caught his hand as they went through the tunnel, and the enthusiasm she felt in his grip drove her onward as though she were no longer earthbound. He was pushing her on, so intense was his presence there. In moments he had caught up with her, and they were running side by side through the tunnel, bursting out onto the sandy shoreline against the flames that washed the sky.
Poor Nantucket Town suffered under a swift and merciless hand of flame. What had been a nightmare when they entered the tunnel was the portal to Hades when they emerged. Silhouetted between black shapes of buildings and the pearl-gray sky, the fire possessed a kind of horrid resplendence.
“Which way?” Matthew asked.
“Christ knows,” Jake growled. “I’ll find them if I have to pull every strand of shoregrass on this island.”
“No need,” Abbey said, standing firm on the slanted bank. “I know where they are.”
Jake pushed past Matthew and gripped her arms, a flood of both warmth and desperation.
“They needed time to corral a boat,” she said. “Where’s the one place in town to hide the slaves where nobody’ll look?”
“Abbey, don’t toy around!”
“The jail. Jake, the jail.”
“We’ve no time for guesses.”
“It’s no guess. Something Cordelia said in the tunnel—never mind. Follow me.”
The town was hot, plain hot. The air itself moved with a terrible smothering presence as they ran through town. A block away the businesses of Nantucket handed fire from one to the next. Through the town, down the little warm streets, to the most innocuous jail ever built by any man’s hand, a tiny jail that was almost sweet in its smallness and its lack of security. A simple bolt on a big wooden door kept the jail locked; no key, just a bolt.
And none of them was more surprised than Abbey herself when Elias and Matthew hauled aside the big bolt and pulled the door aside to find a row of stunned black faces gawking out at them.
Jake grabbed Abbey and pulled her against him, spinning her around until her skirt opened like a bell, and he howled, “I love you!”
Abbey laughed and howled back, “I know! I know!”
For what she hoped would be the last time, she found a need to squeeze out of his arms and plow into the jail, into the coven of dark faces she was so relieved to see.
The rush of delight and any smugness she might have enjoyed were snuffed, though, as three of the young women stumbled into her, clutching her, begging her, wailing and blubbering in misery, incoherent. At first Abbey took the blubbering as gratitude and the delirium brought on by renewed hope, but then she caught the key words—
Babies . . . dem chillun . . . never seen again . . . took . . . stole . . . gone . . . skipjack . . . Steamboat Wharf . . .
Coldness dropped over her. The waves of heat from the town fire weren’t enough to warm her as the meaning sank in.
“Jake!” Abbey shoved her way through the clinging women to where Jake and his cousins were giving each other congratulatory hugs. “Jake, the children!”
The three men looked up at her cry, and even in the unnatural orange glow of the great fire, she saw the color drop from their faces.
“The children are gone!”
“What’s a skipjack?”
“It’s a cutter rig,” Matthew supplied. “Small.”
“That must be why they took only the children,” Abbey gasped.
“That,” Jake said hurriedly, his eyes wide with near panic, “and they’re easy to smuggle, easy to scare into keeping quiet, easy to resell—a year from now they’ll be so changed their own parents wouldn’t know them—damn it to hell! Damn it! Steamboat Wharf, is that what you said?”
Jake’s strength was rapidly waning as the blood continued to seep from his shoulder. A pallor had come across his features, and the depth had left his eyes, but he struggled onward with frightening doggedness, his mouth set hard and his eyes narrowed.
Abbey longed to hold him, to make him lie back in the shoregrass and draw him into her lap, caress him and soothe him and tend his wounds and stroke him as she had when he was healing before. To remind him of other sensations. Other compassions. The one thing they’d never had was enough time. She could have done it, done it in a minute. She could have forced herself to dismiss Cordelia from her priorities, even to let Pollock disappear into the past if it meant a future with Jake, well and whole again, his body healed from the battering that had violated his smooth flesh. She could have brought herself to forget everything and move forward, gladly, with relief, with her one great prize—Jake Ross against her heart where he belonged.
Except for the slave children. Except for those trusting, frightened little faces looking up at her through a clear glass memory. They had trusted Jake and he had stuck with them, no matter the trouble it had caused. Abbey had been the one to stumble over his well-laid plans and scatter them. This was her fault, and she would see it out.
“The stables,” she said all at once. “We can’t just run all over town, but we surely can ride.”
She started off toward the nearest stables. Behind her she heard Jake bark an order.
“Matt, you come with us. Elias, get those people down to the shoreline, away from the fire.”
“And then what?” Elias snapped back. “We got no boat!”
“Shut up and do it!”
Then there were footsteps racing after her.
Matthew helped Jake keep moving, kept him from falling when he wavered, but knew better than to argue with this ferocious determination that had come over his cousin and this woman who had battered her way into his life.
It was one thing to fight when you didn’t have a hole in your shoulder, and something else to keep up when you did. Abbey swelled with adoration for Jake as she heard his effort to keep up with her. Somehow he was right at her side when she pulled three skittish horses from the neat little stable down the street and yanked their bridles on faster than she thought she could. The horses were mulish now, agitated by the smell of fire and the looks of it against the dark buildings around them. Certainly by now the fire could be seen from many miles out at sea, and from close up it was that much more a terror.
At the last moment, as Abbey climbed up on the edge of a stall and dropped onto her horse’s back—a fat, well-fed horse, nothing like the lean animals of the range—Jake paused and dropped his forehead against his horse’s broad red flank. Exhaustion showed in his face now, and he couldn’t get onto the horse without Matthew’s help.
“Jake,” Matthew began, “why don’t you—”
“No,” Jake said, lifting his head. “No, I’m going. Get me up there.”
Matthew shrugged and did as he was told.
“You lead, Abbey,” Jake said, drawing himself straighter as he gathered the reins. He was trying not to appear weak as he sat the horse and they steered out of the yard. “You’re the best rider. You know how fast a horse can go through the streets.”
“On cobblestones?” she blurted back. “I’ll just be guessing!”
With that, the last cheer left her mood and pure anger settled in. Pollock’s face wobbled before her in the rising heat over the town, with Cordelia’s right behind him. She urged her horse through the streets with Jake’s on the right and Matthew’s on the left. Even the horses seemed to catch their sense of purpose.
Through the burning streets of Nantucket they rode, their horses’ hooves clattering a riot across the cobblestones, making another din within the roar of the fire. Then the clatter changed instantly to a loud drumming, and they knew they were on the docks.
What a sight they made to Thomas Pollock and Cordelia Goodes from the wide transom stem of their skipjack as it pulled away from the dock under the power of a half-raised sail. Frantically they tried to urge the little boat away from the riders who broke right out of the flames and thundered down the dock toward them.
When Jake saw the skipjack moving against the end of Steamboat Wharf, he could tell the little boat was making good its escape. He’d brought no gun to shoot with, and a man could only jump so far. Bitterness struck his soul as he envisioned himself, Abbey, and Matthew forced to haul rein and watch as Pollock and Cordelia and their henchmen urged up the broad triangular sails and skimmed out to sea, forever getting a head start.
“Abbey, slow down!” he bellowed over the din of their hooves. “It’s too late—we can’t get out to them.”
Matthew pulled his horse up, but even as Jake drew his own reins in he saw that Abbey was lifting her elbows for a final order to her mount.
“Abbey, we can’t reach them!”
But her jaw suddenly set itself and she shouted back, “You just don’t know how to sail a horse!”
Her elbows came down and her legs dug into the horse’s shoulders. She sent the end of her reins down with a slap on the animals flank, and, like lightening, the horse bolted forward between Jake and Matthew.
The edge of the dock rushed up beneath her, and at the last second she gave the horse a signal that it instinctively understood—now.
The horse gathered itself and stretched out over the water, its mass passing between dock and boat with the grace of a bird.
However, it landed like a horse. Hard.
The skipjack floundered under the terrible sudden weight and wavered sickly in the water, fallen off the breeze. The horse hammered the deck, shrieking at the unfamiliar sensation of the floor moving beneath its hooves, and it stumbled into a pile of tools on the foredeck. The tools scattered across the deck with a terrible racket.
Abbey had no weapon, so she used her horse as one. She drew back hard on the reins, making the beast rise on its hind legs. Fore, hooves pawed the air inches from the faces of Sumner and Maynard, who stumbled wide-eyed against the rail and then toppled into the water with two great splashes.
Without a moment of hesitation—both Pollock and Cordelia carried guns—Abbey twisted the horse back across the flat deck and scooped up the nearest rope, hoping it was long enough. It was no lariat, but a rope was a rope. Abbey wrestled the coil into place in her hand, swirled it over her head, and let it fly back toward the dock. It writhed outward, playing toward Jake. He reached out with his good arm and caught the coil. He and Matthew wound it around the nearest piling and began hauling the skipjack closer and closer to the dock.
Cordelia was still on the stern, knocked aside by Abbey’s insane jump. She held desperately onto the mast and watched numbly. But it was Pollock who wasn’t surprised, Pollock who had spent enough of his life around horses and range riders that he could act against her now without the handicap of shock.
For a moment Abbey lost sight of him as the maddened horse twisted beneath her, but then he appeared—holding a Negro girl no more than two years old.
Holding her high in the air.
“No!” Abbey shrieked. But too late. Pollock knew the one thing that would call her off him.
He heaved the toddler hard into the sea.
Abbey spun from the horse’s back and landed on the deck at the same moment Jake let loose a roar of anger. But she was much closer than Jake, and he couldn’t swim, anyway.
Couldn’t swim. Yes, that’s good.
“Can you swim?” she raged at Pollock, scooping up a sledgehammer from the nest of tools on the deck. She swung it over her head and brought it down sideways into Pollock’s right knee. Bones splintered.
Pollock’s mouth fell open with a soundless gasp of pure agony. Abbey pushed him back, his right leg flopping at an impossible angle, and together they plunged into the cold, engulfing waters of the Atlantic.
She pushed him aside and dove for the struggling child. The toddler was gulping chunks of air, her little black face almost impossible to see in the dark ocean water, visible only by virtue of the skittering lights from the fire in town as they ran across the swells. Abbey dove for her and got her hand around a thin arm just as the child slipped under a swell. She pulled hard, the water dragging against her.
From behind her a hand clawed at her hair. Pollock—gasping and bellowing in pain, unable to tread water with a shattered leg. He caught her shoulder and dragged her down under the water. It was all she could do to maintain a grip on the spindly little arm while she fought off Pollock’s hard grip. In the chill darkness underwater, she kicked at the big man, landing a few lucky blows on flesh, and finally he fell away beneath her. When she finally struggled to the surface, she heard only the echoes of his terrible shrieks.
She shook her wet hair to one side and pulled the sputtering child up against her. She was disoriented. She couldn’t find the skipjack, couldn’t find the town, couldn’t find the dock, couldn’t find the island. But she had the child, she had the child. Why was it so dark? Where was the fire?
Firm hands took hold of her arms. She twisted and fought them off with a maniacal shout.
“Abbey! Don’t—it’s me, it’s Jake. . .. I’ve got you.”
She surrendered instantly, as she had always dreamed of doing. The child was lifted from her arms, and finally she was pulled from the water. A moment later she was pressed against him, ringing wet, slumped against his chest as they knelt together on the dock. And there it was. The great fire. Still burning.
“Jake,” she whispered. “We did it. . ..” She melted against his warm throat, pressed her face beneath his chin, and buried herself there.
Beyond expression, Jake simply moaned his relief and caressed her against him. “I didn’t think you could surprise me any more,” he said softly, “but you did.”
Beside them, the skipjack grated against the dock, and Matthew tied it up without a word. The muffled sobs of children from the closed hold were their simple victory chimes.
Abbey pressed the salty water from her eyes and forced herself to think. “Maynard . . . Sumner . . . don’t let them get away. . ..”
“They won’t get away,” a strong voice said from behind them on the dock—an unwelcome voice.
Jake pulled Abbey to her feet and they turned.
“Oh, Dominic,” Abbey murmured. “Please . . . not these people. Please.”
“Save your breath, young woman,” Dominic said flatly. His trousers were pulled hastily on over his nightshirt, and he was scorched and dirty, but still possessing the stateliness that made him who he was. Beside him, Lucy stood somber and resolute in her own way, cuddling the sopping Negro child. Behind them, a handful of men awaited orders.
Dominic made a gesture, and the six men he had brought with him instantly dispersed to pull Sumner and Maynard from the water and to take possession of Cordelia, who was still hugging the skipjack’s mast.
“Dominic,” Abbey said hoarsely, “I’m begging you.”
“Don’t beg,” he said. “It’s undignified.” He gazed at her, at Jake, at Matthew, and he listened to the sound of sobbing from inside the skipjack hold. “Well, what are you waiting for? Get moving before I see you getting away.”
Jake stepped toward him. “What?” He and Dominic stood facing each other, two handsome men, both sooty and tousled, somehow commanding a mutual grandeur as Abbey stared at them.
“Am I under arrest?” Jake asked, barely above a whisper.
“You are, shall I say, officially requested to leave the island,” Dominic said, “with all your . . . possessions. Tonight, or there’s little more I can do. Will that suit your needs?”
Speechless, Jake could only nod in his befuddlement.
Dominic raised his red brows in a shrug. “Well, I have to do my job,” he said, “but I needn’t do it particularly well all the time, must I?” He tolerated their gawking at him for several seconds, gloating really, then he said, “Why do you think I hired those two buffoons? I couldn’t officially help you—”
“So you unofficially didn’t hinder them,” Abbey finished. “Oh, Dominic . . . oh, Dominic.” She plunged forward and threw her arms around his neck. As she pressed her ear to his shoulder, she saw Lucy beside him, her funny face curled up in a grin.
Jake came up close to them. “What about Mrs. Goodes?”
Dominic reluctantly pulled back from Abbey as though forcing himself to do so. He swallowed hard, then gently urged her back into Jake’s arms. After a moment he said, “She’ll be held on the island, pending trial. I’ll remand her over to the custody of the U.S. Government. Federal authorities will find the necessary evidence to see that she never sees the light of freedom again, I’m sure.”
“But she’s not going to keep quiet. What’ll that do to you?” The sudden softness in Jake’s tone belied an unexpected concern for Dominic, as though somehow they had known all along that they were secretly on the same side.
Dominic’s lower lip came up in a kind of shrug. “She’s a corruptionist, and she attempted to do murder. She mishandled her authority . . . oh, a dozen things, I’m sure none for the first time. We knew someone was reselling slaves off the East Coast islands, we simply didn’t know who. What she has to say about me will pale, I’m sure. You forget, Mr. Ross, this is the North. We disapprove of slavery. And I am a northern official.” He looked down at Abbey now, and with his thumb he smeared a tear from her already wet cheek. “If you go down to the salt meadows between the wharves and Goose Pond, I suppose you’ll find a seaworthy though elderly schooner moored there, just big enough to transport several people off the island. I’m sure it won’t be missed.”
“My God . . . thank you,” Jake whispered.
“No, no,” Dominic said, dismissing the subject with a flutter of his fingers. “Take care of Abbey,” he said. “However, I think it only fair to warn you that neither you nor I can keep her from doing her will. Jacob,” he added, extending his hand, “you will be welcome back on Nantucket the day you become heroes instead of criminals. That day is coming, I’m sure.”
Still overwhelmed, Jake found himself grasping the hand of the island’s highest official and sinking into a completely unexpected brotherhood.
As Abbey watched, choked to tears, the two men shared a warm camaraderie for the first and last time.
“Now if you’ll pardon me,” Dominic said, wrapping his arm around Lucy’s shoulders, and gazing down at the cockney girl’s tear-streaked face, “we have a town to save.”
The slave families were rowed out to Dominic’s schooner by the hellish light of a fire that was out of control. Abbey sat with Jake and Matthew in the salt marshes near the shore, waiting for Elias to bring the rowboat back for them.
Matthew silently tended Jake’s shoulder as best he could and managed to get the bleeding to stop, which for now would have to do.
Jake sat still, hugging Abbey’s hand to his chest, and gazed longingly back at the blazing horizon of Nantucket Town, now a panorama of flames reaching toward the marble clouds. Abbey came up beside him, touched him, felt him, drew her hands over him. The rowboat was on its way back for the last load—them.
“You like Nantucket, don’t you, off-islander?” Abbey murmured.
“I feel like I’m running out on them,” he whispered, the fire patterning his face.
She placed her hands on the sides of his warm face and turned it toward her, to let her become his world. “Nantucket will survive. It always has,” she said.
“Yeah,” Matthew said, “as long as the pub don’t burn.”
Jake looked up at his cousin and smiled sadly, a small and limited smile of great warmth, soon broken by a wince that rammed his eyes shut and made Matthew pull his hand away from Jake’s shoulder.
“Sorry,” Matthew murmured. “You’re a mess, cousin.”
Abbey helped pull Jake’s sweater back over his head and get his sore arm into the sleeve, mentioning, “I don’t know how you ever survived without me.”
The sweater popped over Jake’s head, leaving his hair tousled, and his eyes squinted at her. “Before I knew you,” he said, “I didn’t get shot once a week.”
She bobbed her eyebrows. “Every relationship has its little adjustments.”
He hung his head and shook it wearily, his lips widened in a grin.
“Elias’ll go with you to help master the schooner,” Matthew said. “Take all the time you need with him, then shove him back this way on a southbound packet. By then, everything should have cooled down a mite.”
Jake nodded. “It’ll be good to have him along. You . . . I’ll miss.” He tugged on Matthew’s arm sentimentally.
Matthew gave Jake’s good arm a squeeze and dismissed the moment with, “Don’t get slimy on me, Ross. Nantucket ain’t seen the last of you, I reckon.”
“I presume not,” Jake agreed.
“Spoken like a true islander. I’ll get the rowboat.”
Matthew left the two of them alone on the salt marsh while he waded out to the returning rowboat.
Abbey sat quietly beside Jake, reading his eyes as he hesitated. He didn’t seem to want to stand up, to start the next leg of this unusual adventure she’d plowed her way into. He felt her gaze.
“Its a dangerous life we have before us if we keep this up,” he said softly.
Without even giving him time to finish his sentence, Abbey said, “Better than a deaf and dumb one. We could do worse. Canada’s waiting, lighthouse keeper. And there’s a whole South full of slaves who need the Underground Railroad.”
He squinted at her in the moonlight, saw her framed by the fire on shore, and whispered, “Nothing frightens you.”
Abbey poured herself into his embrace. Against his injured shoulder she murmured, “Life without you frightens me. Everything else is just shadows. I’ve never been afraid of shadows.” She pulled herself away, keeping her hands on him. “Lets go. Before we become afraid, let’s just go.”
She helped him to his feet, and they slipped their arms around each other, standing side by side as Matthew pulled the rowboat into the shallows and they heard its keel grate on the sandy bottom.
Puzzling at the expression in his eyes as he caught sight of the rowboat grating on the beach behind her, she asked, “What else? Is there something?”
He forced down a swallow. “I . . .”
“Jake,” she gently prodded, “tell me.”
“Well . . .”
Abruptly she shook her head and pinched both his cheeks, deriding, “Why, you! You don’t want to get in that rowboat, do you? Didn’t you think you’d ever have to leave the island?”
He shifted his feet. “I was hoping I’d be caught and put in a nice warm jail before that happened.”
She sank into his arms, he lost himself in her, and they fell together into the kiss that had been waiting all this time to happen.
The town burned, but the fire was their own.