Forever (26 page)

“Don’t kill me.”

He could hear Mary Burton, another soul far from home, pleading in the same way: to him, or to Kongo, or to others who had the power to let her live or make her die. For a fraction of a moment, Mary and Bridget merged, their faces, bodies, masks, wombs. As if they were sisters. His contempt for Bridget, for the earl’s whore, for the woman who had told him her sorrowful story in Ireland, smashed against his pity. Pity for her. For the child she carried. Then he thought: If she’s carrying the earl’s child, I must kill it, and her too. To make certain that I’ve gone to the end of the line. But suppose it was a girl child? Suppose…

Kongo could no longer wait. He untied one of the cords in the shroud, went to Bridget Riley, grabbed her blouse, pulled it up over her head, exposing a laced garment covering her swelling breasts. He tied the blouse like a hood, the rope tight around her eyes. Then he stepped to the side and punched her hard. She fell without a word.

“Quick,” he said.

59.

I
n the black river, the skiff was pulled by the current. The earl’s body
lay on the bottom of the boat, tied into its shroud, which was now heavy with rocks. Kongo stood guard at the stern, armed with the pistol and an ax, his eyes searching the river. They were passing the palisades that thrust up from the New Jersey shore. Cormac rowed desperately, trying to move them out of the grip of the current, closer to the Manhattan side, to a place of escape, but the skiff was being pulled by the black water toward the open harbor. Upriver, coming fast, they could see the bob and flicker of lights. A boat, with at least two lanterns. Coming after them. The earl’s men.

This was not in Kongo’s plan. There was no time to feel what he’d done, taking one life, sparing two. Sparing Bridget. Sparing a child. Almost surely the earl’s child. Did it matter? It might. The tribe ordered pursuit “to the end of the line.” Where was the end of the earl’s line? Not now, Cormac thought. No time to think. Time only to row, adding my own feeble power to the force of the river.

Until Kongo told him to stop rowing. Then he grabbed the upper part of the wrapped shroud and Cormac the bottom. The boat wobbled as they heaved. And the shroud sank into the black waters.

Upriver, the light was now larger. Yellow lantern light. The lamp of vengeance and punishment. Coming so fast that it must have five or six men rowing together.

Kongo glanced around, and then gripped the ax.

“We swim,” he said.

Cormac remembered swimming in rock pools in Ireland, in wide streams over hot summers, but he was afraid of the northern waters of the river. I can’t die. Not now, when I’m free.

But Kongo left no room for argument. He smashed at the keel with the ax. Sharp splitting sounds. Water erupted from one hole like a geyser. Followed by another, and a third. The boat slowed, the black water rose, and they were in the river.

The winter river shocked Cormac. He felt absolutely alone now, sinking and sinking, water filling nose and mouth, as he plunged into a black, shapeless, bone-freezing world. The sword was hooked into the back of his belt and seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He beat hard with his hands and arms and kicked with his legs, but he seemed not to move. And then he started rising. He saw the smeared roof of the sky. He felt his long coat swollen with water, the sword digging into his flesh. He tried to wriggle an arm free of the coat, but water filled his nose and mouth. He now felt nothing in his hands. Or his feet. Down he plunged, down and down, ripped by the current. Thinking: I am dead. Thinking: I now join the earl. Thinking: I have done what I came to do. But now I die. Far from home. Thinking: Revenge drowns.

Then he felt a bumping beneath him.

A roundness.

Cold and sleek and bumping him, pushing him up and up and up, forcing him away from the dark, drowned river bottom. It was as if he were being pushed by some enormous fish. Some round, cold-fleshed dolphin lost in the icy north. Up. And up.

Until he burst free and saw the sky.

He gasped as air and life flowed back into him. Went under again. Then was bumped. Almost gently now. Like a series of cold caresses.

He surrendered to the creature.

And then the world swirled and the watery sky was full of black clouds and the cold gauzy moon and the bumping caresses turned him, shoved him, moved him into endless blackness.

He awoke to a cold pink dawn, lying in sand and scrubby weeds. A pale moon lingered in the sky. He ached in every joint and felt a throbbing pain in his back. He sat up. Felt a pressure. The sword. I still have the sword. The pain ceased as he stood on aching legs. Then the river and his fear erupted from him in bile and vomit. Finally, after another five minutes, he felt empty of everything. He stood with his head bowed, vacant, boneless, exhausted, freezing, and whispered hoarsely, “I’m alive.”

Seabirds cried and screeched above him, as if angered by his intrusion, circling, diving, swooping, but not attacking. Across the harbor, he could see the island of Manhattan and knew he was on the wild empty shore of New Jersey. Pushed here. Bumped here. Saved. When he looked again at the seabirds he saw among them one that was black and knew that it was a raven.

60.

W
hen Cormac arrived that afternoon, after the ferry ride to the
Manhattan dock, still barefoot in his soggy coat, Mr. Partridge looked relieved. Cormac didn’t show him the blurred, water-swollen letter signed by the earl.

“Have you been swimming?”

“Yes.”

“They say it’s good for the health.”

“It’s better in August.”

“Well, have a sleep, and we’ll work tonight.”

He surely must have suspected something terrible (Cormac thought), but he didn’t ask another question. Cormac removed his coat and trousers, brushed away the mud and nettles, hung them on a peg, then hid the earl’s letter and the sword. He fell into an aching, dreamless sleep.

When he awoke, Mr. Partridge was setting type by lantern light. He mentioned casually that an African had delivered the money for the posters.

“And by the way,” he said, “happy Saint Patrick’s Day.”

The night of the rising.

The date that had fueled Kongo’s urgency.

Cormac listened for street sounds but heard no clamor or alarm. He opened the door, and the night was very still, without wind. Of course. That was it: the wind. Or the lack of it. They had spoken about the need for wind before firing the fort. On this night, there was no wind. He closed the door, feeling reprieved.

“Expecting someone?” Mr. Partridge said.

“No, just a breath of air is what I needed.”

Mr. Partridge was silent for a while, type clicking in his swift hands. Cormac could hear his shallow breathing. Finally the older man spoke, in a grave voice.

“You’ve killed him, haven’t you?”

“Aye.”

He sighed. “And now what will you do?”

“I’ll finish learning my trade.”

Mr. Partridge looked at Cormac carefully, then handed him a sheet of foolscap.

“You can set this. I’ve work to do up above.”

“Good night, Mr. Partridge.”

And up he went on the ladder. No judgments. No expressions of a regret he did not feel. Cormac set type that night until he could no longer see.

When Cormac lay down to sleep at last, he was filled again with the events that had brought him there. He still felt almost nothing. It was as if the black river waters had purged remorse, and guilt, and even conscience. He hoped he would not be traced and arrested for murder most foul. He hoped Mr. Partridge was not drawn into any of it. And he feared Bridget Riley. As she must fear him. She was the only witness. She could call the constables, tell them about Cormac, and about Kongo, and that could be the end of them.

But he did not think she would give names or descriptions. If she had married the earl, then she was the widow. That possibility must have drawn her to America. To assail the earl with guilt, or threats of exposure, to force him to marry her in some chapel, anywhere from Boston to Charlotte. That would be her triumph. She’d been sold for oats and corn, and now she’d be a lady. She could make him juggle before admitting him to her bed. There must have been some risk: The earl could have had her killed. But perhaps there was something else. Perhaps he loved her. Perhaps he sent for her. Perhaps he felt an aching loneliness on the shore of this empty continent, this outpost on the moon.

Either way, she might choose silence. If she was truly married, or could persuade others that she was, she would now own everything that the earl had owned when mysterious robbers broke in and committed murder. She would own the property in New York and the property in Carrickfergus. She would own his shares in the trading company. Better to vanish. Go home to Ireland or England instead of standing as witness in a trial that would make her name known from here to London and certainly provoke scrutiny.

He got out of bed and found a newspaper to see what ships might be sailing on the morrow. The war had cut the number to two, when there would normally be ten. But neither ship was bound to cross the Atlantic. One was going to Charleston. The other to Nova Scotia. Cormac thought: It must be the war with Spain. But if Bridget Riley couldn’t leave, performing her grief for a small audience, then why would she not talk? The constables might suspect that she had a hand in the killing. Particularly if she had married the earl, if there was a certificate, a will. After all, the constables were faced with a mystery. There was much blood in the earl’s study, but why was there no body? What mere thief would steal a body? If they suspected Bridget Riley, she would surely save her own skin. She would describe the African and the Irishman. Cormac’s breath quickened in fear. And then another face appeared in his jangled reverie, another woman who might be carrying a child. Where was Mary Burton? What was she doing with her rage? What could be brewing through this long night that would come for him in the day?

And then at last he slept.

In the morning, the wind was making flags curl and pushing dust and paper down Cortlandt Street. A gathering wind. A wind certain to stiffen. And when he moved through the streets to deliver posters to Jameson the vintner, he felt a strangeness in the air. He searched for Kongo on the waterfront but didn’t see him, didn’t see Quaco either, or any of the other Africans he knew, and didn’t even know if Kongo still lived. He wanted to go to Hughson’s, to try one final time to get them to call off the rising. And to speak with Mary Burton. But he was afraid that if he spoke too strongly they would turn on him, accuse him of weakness, leave him out of the struggle that he wanted now to join. Mary Burton might hear his words the wrong way and turn on all of them in her bitter anger. And another form of strangeness gripped him. There were no alarms over the death of the earl, no posters, nothing in the day’s edition of Peter Zenger’s newspaper. It was as if nothing at all had happened. He thought about writing a crude letter to Bridget Riley, addressed to Lady Warren, demanding a cash payment for delivery of her late husband’s body. Write it with his left hand. To explain somehow to the constables the mystery of the vanished body. But that might only lead to a harder hunt, with rewards and informers….

And besides, the tension in the streets told Cormac another story. Something was coming that was much larger than the Earl of Warren.

Around three o’clock he hurried down to the waterfront to look for Kongo. He lolled behind the empty Slave Market, trying to look casual, and watched the two ships that would depart at four. The
Carolina
and the
Arcadia
. All cargo had been loaded, and the stevedores on the piers were smoking and laughing, waiting for the ships to sail. A few passengers appeared on the deck of each ship, but the flags showed the stiffening of the wind, blowing north from the harbor. Most passengers were in cabins or the cheap bunks belowdecks. Captains and company men chatted, examined documents, smoked seegars. Cormac stretched, as if tired after a hard day of work, gazed into the windows of a ship chandler, hoping for the sight of Kongo. One lonely redcoat leaned against the side of the deserted Slave Market, huddling out of the wind.

Then a black unmarked coach, with trunks lashed to its roof, galloped up in front of the
Carolina.
An African in livery, his face familiar from the earl’s stable, leaped down, called to some stevedores for help in unloading the trunks. He opened the door and offered a hand to Bridget Riley.

She gazed around, near and far, her face still marked by fear, and then saw Cormac.

She stopped. The African followed her gaze. It was too late for Cormac to back away. Bridget’s head turned toward the lone redcoat. Cormac thought: I must want to be caught, to be hanged for the death of the earl. Then the African whispered to Bridget Riley, and she threw Cormac a chilling glance and turned to board the ship.

The gangplank was raised an instant after she stepped on deck. She turned one final time, looking directly at Cormac, and then vanished into a cabin on the poop. The
Carolina
eased into the river, bound for Charleston. Officers barked orders. Seamen scrambled in rigging. The African watched for a while, then turned and walked toward Cormac, taking his hat from his graying head. Cormac glanced at the redcoat, saw him stretching his arms over his bored head, and moved to meet the African.

“She ask me to tell you some words,” the man said.

“Yes?”

“She ask me to tell you: Thank you very much.”

He glanced out at the departing ship, and then at some flags on the rooftops of warehouses. “She tell the constables someone hit her,” he said, “and she saw nothing that happen to her husband.”

“Much obliged,” Cormac said.

The African looked at Cormac now. “Tell Kongo,” he said. “We are with him.”

He moved to the carriage, climbed to his seat, and flicked his whip as if punctuating his brief conversation, and the horses started off, heading north.