Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II (19 page)

It was through this grate that the two miscreants heard the blast and the immediate confused jumble of voices from below. The force of the explosion had been strong enough to rattle the rafters and send a shower of dust and dried flakes of paint down upon them. They exchanged a quick, confused look before dashing headlong for the door and in a stumbling rush down the staircase.

The group from the parlor was already gathered in the foyer, and Gabriel and Odell had run out into the street. The rest joined them there and stood with shock, looking east down Walnut Street and the night sky lit up like a gigantic bonfire.

“Is it the British?” Hugh frantically asked with a mixture of excitement and fear in his voice, “Is it the British?”

“It can’t be!” Benjamin Franklin exclaimed in a hard, angry tone, “I don’t believe it!”

“Hugh, come with me,” Gabriel barked as he headed off down the street with the young man hastening after him. “No, Evelyn, you stay here!” Gabriel stopped only to gesture his daughter back toward the house. “We have no idea what has happened.”

The street was now crowded with people coming out of their houses to investigate and exchange worried glances and words. Amidst the confusion, Evelyn stood with militant purpose facing her father.

“I won’t!” She exclaimed, her words more those of a determined woman than spoiled child. “I won’t be left again! What happens to you happens to me too.”

Gabriel caught the lash of accusation in her voice and winced. He and Evelyn had spoken little of her mother’s disappearance. Through his hurt and confusion, he had failed her, but he would not let guilt cloud his judgment. “You will stay here or find your liberties strictly curtailed. Now, go back!”

They stood—a tableau of familial conflict backlit by a vivid orange and black sky. Odell knew he was witnessing the moment when the child was no longer a child, when she would not be ruled by parental restraint and limitations. He held his breath, unaccountably riveted by this small drama infolded within the conflagration of revolution.

The peel of the fire bell split the night, and a horseman galloped up the street shouting to the left and right, “The Blue Anchor! The Blue Anchor is afire! All hands!” The fire brigade would have dispatched its engine to the scene, but the fear of fire was such that many ran toward the burning tavern to assess for themselves the extent of the danger and assist in putting it out.

Gabriel and Evelyn had stepped back as the horse sped past, the tension broken. Odell let out a pent-up breath and was relieved that the rupture was not yet; the breach had been postponed by the urgency of a man on horseback.

“We had munitions stored in that cellar,” Benjamin Franklin said stoically. “It could certainly have been the British… their spies are everywhere.”

Odell nodded and joined him as they turned toward the docks. He stopped only briefly to ask Evelyn to stay with Ava, “She can’t go out,” he reasoned. “Not dressed like that. It’s dangerous for her as is.”

He looked over at Ava standing unconscious of her appearance, watching the flames and smoke rise into the night. Evelyn looked at him, her lips firmly compressed.

“Please,” he entreated, “I won’t linger once it’s out. I’ll come right back to report.” He smiled at her conspiratorially. “Otherwise, Ava will come in search of me, trousers and safety be damned.”

Evelyn didn’t return his smile, but nodded curtly. She turned back to the house without a glance at her father. Gabriel, for his part, gripped Odell’s shoulder in gratitude before they turned to heed the call of the horseman.

When they arrived, the tavern was still ablaze. A contingent of volunteer firemen was frantically organizing its members. Some had formed a line using tough leather buckets to attack the base of the fire. Several men were working the levers and treadles of the fire engine to pump gallons of water onto the blaze. A large group had gathered to watch their progress with curious trepidation.

Benjamin Franklin detached himself from their group and joined another in intense conversation not far from the burning building. Odell approached, and Franklin turned to him his face pale and bloodless. “George Bryan has been killed, and Timothy Matlack is seriously injured.”

Odell’s knowledge of the American Revolution was not detailed, but he recognized Matlack’s name as one of the more radical members of the Pennsylvania Assembly. His faction had been important in moving the colony toward independence.

“George has been killed!” Gabriel exclaimed with horror and disbelief, “How?”

“We stopped off here… just for a quick chat…” a man stuttered, “we heard that British troop ships were in New York Harbor… we… we weren’t here but five minutes when the cellar blew.”

The man was obviously in shock, and someone had thrown a blanket about his shoulders. Odell could barely see him in the sooty darkness until the flickering fire caught new fuel and flamed brightly, the light falling across their faces. His breath caught as he recognized the large, fleshy nose and sad eyes of Thomas Paine.

“I can’t believe it.” He was shaking his head. “The munitions were well preserved and properly packed. I don’t believe this was an accident.”

Franklin had thrown a cautionary arm around Paine’s shoulders and looked penetratingly around the scene of chaos. Several bodies were laid beside the creek bed that bordered one side of the tavern. The injured had either been removed to the hospital or treated on site by the good Samaritans who had brought salves and bandages from their homes. “It is good fortune that the majority was moved just last night or this tragedy would be far greater.”

They stood huddled against the dying fire. Feelings of grief and foreboding pressed in, isolating them from the frenetic activity of the firemen.

“Old Barnaby’s been killed,” Hershel strode up from the creek bank and broke the shell of silence. “Deborah is all right. Slightly injured, but walking and talking. She swears that none but regulars were in tonight, but her father chased off a vagrant earlier this morning… seems he was milling around the cellar door.”

Gabriel smiled sadly. Leave it to Hershel to move forward, to shut out the calamity and focus on the essentials, the facts. He wondered if Hershel ever cracked. If Cara saw a different side of him, if upon arriving home he unleashed his emotions, incapacitated by feelings? Whatever his wont, his matter-of-fact delivery and calm assessment was like a tonic. Hershel’s runner’s instincts would be invaluable here.

“Hershel,” Gabe asked, “do you think you can get a description, something we can go on?”

Hershel shrugged his shoulders. “I can try. Deborah didn’t see him. She heard her father get up before dawn. The dog was barking, and Barnaby saw the man… looked to him like he was trying to gain entry into the cellar.”

“Or already coming out of it,” Benjamin Franklin concluded grimly.

“Maybe,” Hershel mused. “But…” He pursed his lips. “…it was securely padlocked. I’ll ask around. There’s a possibility some drunken sailor was stumbling about at that time, although they aren’t usually the most reliable of witnesses.”

The men nodded in unison. There was nothing more to be done. The tavern still stood, a blackened ghost of a structure. Embers glowed along the charred timbers and smoke rose, blacker than the night sky. Men still worked with buckets to douse the coals and prevent even the smallest spark from spreading. The fire engine had been pulled back to await its return to the firehouse. Families, neighbors, and friends comforted the afflicted.

Odell couldn’t help but feel that this was just a small taste of what they were in for. He rarely believed in coincidences. It was a signal to him, a shot across the bow. They were here. The enemy was among them. The Revolutionary War had begun almost a year ago at Lexington and Concord. The war for the future had begun here and now.

*

Benjamin Franklin left to accompany Thomas Paine back to his lodgings. Hershel slipped off to pursue any leads along the docks. Odell, Gabriel, and Hugh walked up Walnut Street.

They could have been the only three on the street. The subdued and muted crowd trudging back to their homes was barely noticeable. Each man held thoughts that differed in character only by their age and temperament.

Violence and death was a combination that impacted the human psyche like nothing else. Odell had seen it in many guises, in several different dimensions. He tried to step back and view it with dispassion. His scientist brain struggled to comprehend the motivations, the conditions that converged to create an environment favorable for its occurrence. There were times he had anticipated it, had maneuvered to avoid it, and other times it had exploded into his life with little warning. There was no special formula… no way to calculate its impending appearance. Each instance was unique. Each act signified something different to the perpetrator. What mattered to his adversary? Odell asked himself. What was he seeking?

Gabriel walked, hands thrust into his pockets and eyes trained contemplatively on the path before him. He was tired. Weariness seeped into his bones. He felt the coming war with an ambivalence bordering on tears. He had heard all the grand words, the high-flown rhetoric: freedom, liberty, equality. He wasn’t young or idealistic. He knew that new worlds were like children; they grew and developed. He didn’t expect this new nation to burst into being fully realized, but it did matter how it was born. The war had already begun, but they still had a chance to define it. They still had a chance to choose their direction. With the violence of this night, he felt that chance slipping away. The populace would rally. Their leaders would shout powerful words, words that would move people to war, words that applied only to the privileged few, leaving multitudes in chains.

Hugh walked with head bowed, his hands clenched into fists. George Bryan had been a good man. An abolitionist, he had worked with them on several cases. He had a family, as did old Barnaby. Poor Deborah, she would be alone now, with only a burnt wreck to remind her of better times. His blood boiled. It was senseless. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Spies should be circumspect. They should seek out truth, facts, good intelligence. They should seek to avoid the death of innocents. In his naiveté, he had believed there were rules to war, civilized behavior. He was English born and bred after all. He could as easily be fighting for the other side. His time here was still short, but he had never felt more American than right now.

Within the stunned crowd, another walked. He followed not far behind the three men. It was easy to go unnoticed. People had withdrawn. They were not looking about them. The initial burst of outward activity had given way to a quiet and dazed reflection. He had assumed a similar bearing.

It wasn’t a long walk. He sunk into the shadows of an adjacent building when he saw them slow and turn up the stoop of a modest house. A pretty girl came down the steps and threw her arms around the middle-aged lawyer. The man took his daughter’s face in his hands and just stared at her and then hugged her tight again. Another woman came out. She had a hooded cloak thrown over her dress. He couldn’t see her face. She placed her hand on the arm of the tall mulatto and must have said something amusing for he smiled and nodded. A general consultation ensued between the five of them. The young man then placed the woman’s hand more securely in the crook of his arm, and they left the others to walk sedately up the street.

Similar scenes were playing out up and down the avenue. Those who had stayed at home came out craving information, looking for reassurances. He didn’t know why he had been assigned this particular group to follow. He wished he’d been given the task of following someone important, like Benjamin Franklin, or checking the hospital for survivors. He shook his head with bored dejection and was about to turn away when he saw a blurred movement at the door, and then it was gone. The figure had looked like a slave boy and oddly dressed. But there was something quick and lithe about the movement that made him think of a girl. There had been rumors for months about this house and this family, that they often sheltered runaway slaves and found them refuge at the many Quaker farms scattered about the countryside.

He shrugged his shoulders. It probably wasn’t important, but he would report it anyway.

Fifteen

ODETTE’S BONES ALTERNATED between brittle tension and melting fatigue. At times she felt like a small child again, waking up in the mornings damp and limp, unable to make fists with her hands. Except she couldn’t remember the last time she had slept. In this inter-dimensional existence sleep was optional.

She had met the others; if “meet” was the right word. Their eyes slid past her, as if unable to settle on the features of her face. They didn’t actually speak
to
her. They released words into the air, murmured sentences that floated out in no particular direction, interwoven phrases not punctuated by pauses.

“They are doing this for you,” Ambrosius had said, “speaking… conversation.”

Odette almost laughed. “
This
is conversation?”

Ambrosius smiled. It was a slow smile. His lips moved incrementally, testing out the muscles with each fraction they curved upward. The first time she had seen him do this his other features were so inanimate it looked as if the smile had been pasted on his face. But with practice, he had learned to relax so now his eyes crinkled at the corners and his even, white teeth showed.

“You will have to open your mind,” he told her. “Human speech is not the only type of communication that exists in our world, nor is it the most complex or expressive.”

She had opened her mind and the words flowed in, making patterns, congealing into a coherent whole. She imagined this was how the large sea creatures communicated, with their clicks and haunting notes that traveled through water, strong enough to penetrate skin and consciousness. And so she learned.

She often looked about her and thought, so few, so few of us left. Ambrosius had warned her; the
Liberi
were almost extinct. They no longer reproduced. What humanity they once possessed was buried deep in the past. Nevertheless, their society was still rich despite its lack of touch and emotion. Each
Liberi
was a component of the whole. Some were builders; others were strategists; others were spies or operatives; one or two were inventors; several were soldiers; but only one was their leader, Ambrosius.