33

Now I know myne owne ground and I will work when I please and play when I please.

Anthony Johnson, free Black, Virginia Colony

Will sat upstairs in the Bruton Parish Church gallery, crowded with William and Mary students, while Lord Drysdale sat in the pew below reserved for him and Lady Drysdale. The sermon was long but to the mark, and aside from refusing to pray communally for the English king, Will left church in a better frame of mind than when he’d arrived. He half expected pealing bells to rend the December air, but there was no bricked belfry here like in so many New England churches.

Despite the cold, the day was sunny and Palace Green had more than a few people walking about. He nearly took a step back as his gaze fastened on one in particular as easily as his surveying compass found magnetic north. But in a town of only two thousand souls, he was bound to keep coming across Sylvie Galant.

She was walking toward the Governor’s Palace, the children he’d seen with her at supper in hand. Beside them walked a Black woman he’d noticed about the bookbindery. Owned by Hunter, likely. Half of Williamsburg was enslaved. He decried it, and his stance had earned him enemies since coming to Virginia. But a few shared his views, some of them members of Bruton Parish Church, including Lord Drysdale, who’d invited him to the morning service.

To clear his head, Will turned down Duke of Gloucester Street to avoid Palace Green. The shops were closed, the Sabbath hush at odds with the agitation inside him. He was expected at the townhouse to join Kersey for dinner at two o’clock, but he was no idle Virginian, sitting and smoking and imbibing till then. A long walk would do him good.

Sylvie walked faster, trying to keep up with the children. They were cooped up like chicks in the bookbindery for long days, and now they frolicked like spring lambs in the wintry air and darted away from her. Eve had knitted them mittens and hats, and their rosy cheeks and noses turned them into winged cherubs. Sylvie was soon out of breath, not quite recovered from her recent malady.

Palace Green stretched languorously in the sunshine and seemed to lure everyone outside. Sylvie lost count of the fine carriages that lumbered past—chariots, these Virginians called them—some with liveried servants, their occupants adorned in silks and velvets. Churchgoers? Eve didn’t gawk like she did but kept her eyes down.

“You’re quiet today, Eve,” Sylvie said, hoping to draw her out.

“I don’t talk much, Miss Sylvie,” Eve replied. “I just . . . do.”

“We don’t know much about each other beyond our names. I count you a friend and would learn more.”

“Friends?” A lengthy pause. Eve never spoke in haste. “That’s a mighty strange word to call somebody like myself. Besides, my place isn’t to ask questions, just answer them. The quieter I am, the better.” Her slender face beneath her cap was stoic, the faint lines about her mouth the only indicator of her age. “Mam always told me so.”

“Is your mother here in Williamsburg?”

“She’s out a ways from town at Carter’s Grove.”

“I’ve not heard of it.”

“Fancy that.” Eve chuckled, a rare occurrence. “Then you’d be the first. Burwell Carter is known far and wide just like his grandfather, King Carter, used to be.”

“Why is your mother there and not here?”

“When I was small, we were separated. Sold. Mam went to the plantation, but Mr. Hunter bought me at auction on the steps of the Raleigh Tavern when I was no bigger than Rietta here.”

Sylvie schooled her revulsion. To shackle a child, to own a fellow human being . . . The enemy’s evil was boundless. Eve knew a different sort of bondage, a far greater one than Sylvie, who was free even if she felt chained to her circumstances. She could quit Mr. Hunter, but Eve never could.

“There aren’t any slaves where you’re from?” Eve asked quietly.

“Black sailors, mostly.” Sylvie’s thoughts stretched back. “I recall a few dark-skinned people when I went to convent school at a place called Ile Royale. But I didn’t know much about them or how they came to be there.”

“We hail from Africa mostly, on slave ships. Some Blacks come from the Caribbean. I know a few free Black jacks from Captain Lennox’s crew.”

“Have you any freedoms at all?”

Eve’s forehead knotted. “We ain’t free to go to church or marry. If we don’t mind our place, we get pilloried or whipped or worse. We ain’t allowed to learn or be schooled. Can’t carry a weapon or defend ourselves. Striking a white man or woman means death.” She frowned, eyes on the cobbled street. “So many laws keep us bound up, but I’ve never known any different.”

“Can you earn your freedom?”

“Rare as hen’s teeth, freedom. Slaves don’t get wages, understand. Masters provide for our living, or are supposed to. Now, Mr. Hunter’s better than most. I get victuals and a bed—and he leaves me be.”

Sylvie had seen light-skinned Black children in town. Could this be what she meant? Or did he simply not whip her?

“We Acadians simply have to be inside before dark,” Sylvie said, having broken this rule already. “If we venture to another parish, an armed escort is needed. We’re not supposed to be employed since we’re considered wards of the parish, though some powerful Virginians are testing those limits.”

They walked on, turning down Nicholson Street, a back road that housed the public gaol. The place, full of pirates and convicts and the insane, left Sylvie sorrowful and disturbed. She could hear their cries and shouts past the barred windows. They took another right, onto Waller Street behind the pompous, brick capitol building where these English governed. And there she came face-to-face with the Scot. Again.

She simply must escape Williamsburg.

She slowed, her awkwardness plain. Eve shot her a questioning glance before taking Henrietta and Nolan in hand.

“Mademoiselle Galant.” His words were deferential, his gaze direct. “Un moment, s’il vous plaît.”

She balked, but how could she ignore a man who had come to a complete halt in the middle of the street?

“Please go on without me, Eve,” she said softly. “The children are growing cold.”

Eve hastened her steps, Henrietta and Nolan in tow, though they looked back at Sylvie questioningly.

She nearly sighed as she met his eyes. “You needn’t address me in Française.”

“You needn’t be ashamed of who you are,” he replied in French.

Sylvie looked about, continuing in English, “Where is Bonami?”

He persisted in French. “In Kersey’s garden on Palace Street.”

Was that where he lived, then? She fell silent, the wind toying with her wool cape and sweeping dried leaves across the street more briskly than any broom. He took something out of his coat pocket and handed it to her, though the wind tried to snatch it away. She looked down at an advertisement of sorts, struck by its wording. So, instruction was needed in the art of the French tongue?

“What a riddle you English are.” She couldn’t keep contempt from her tone. “You revile us yet covet our language, our fashions and cuisine, even our dances.”

“I’m Scots, remember. A world away from the English. And I only covet your conversation.”

She faltered, chastising herself. Rarely was she unkind, and it seemed especially unbecoming on the Sabbath when he was so civil. “I am already employed.”

“You aren’t indentured but a day laborer,” he continued. “At liberty to do what you will with your free hours, including teaching your native tongue.”

“And why would I?” The question came softly as she met his eyes, finding them a gleaming silver like the wares of Williamsburg’s silversmith.

“You’d be surprised by how many colonials want to be fluent. It’s a mark of gentility, a way to keep up with learned Londoners and the rest of Europe.”

She allowed herself one curiosity. “How did you come to speak it so well?”

“I was locked in a French fort for months on end with little to do otherwise. But that’s a story best saved for another day.”

Surprised, she pocketed the paper lest it fly away. She wished he would. They were teetering dangerously close to what felt like a confidence. A forbidden familiarity. But he made no motion to leave, and since it was the Sabbath and the street was mostly deserted, he had no reason to move from where he stood.

“I’d rather hear about you,” he said, again in French. “What happened aboard the Dolphin?”

She hesitated as a couple strolled by arm in arm. Their high-spirited talk and laughter rankled. She waited till they’d passed to answer. “We were at sea more than three weeks before foundering in a storm. Prior to that, many aboard the vessel sickened and died.” To the end of her days she’d believe more perished of heartbreak than disease. “I lost my mother and sister. I don’t know what became of my father and brothers or the rest of my kin.”

Though she kept her voice free of emotion, she saw unchecked sorrow in his face. It chipped dangerously at her composure, so she changed course. “And you? Why are you here and not in New England?”

He ran a hand across his clean-shaven jaw, reminding her of how bewhiskered he’d been in Acadie. He was even more saisissant—striking—than she recalled, and she hated that she noticed. Hated that she still felt that same infuriating, inexplicable fascination for him as she did at first.

“Acadie changed everything for me,” he said. “I wanted to get away from the war. Virginia seemed a new beginning.”

“But you must have family in the northeast.”

“Nay.” The terse word led to a pause so prolonged he had her full attention. “My family was massacred by French and Huron when I was a boy. I hid in a hayrick and watched it happen . . . then I ran.”

Massacred?

She stood mute, mind whirling. Horror and bloodshed and mutilation leapt to mind. Tears blurred her vision, her heart so rent she couldn’t speak.

Stepping away, he touched the brim of his cocked hat. “Adieu, Mademoiselle Galant.”