Joseph had come down to join their father on the threshold of the open door. Mr. de Brassart had been yet asleep in bed. Mr. de Sabran, though, had stepped through from his chamber to the kitchen and despite the fact he did not speak their language and could not have known the cause of this new tension in the household, he apparently had sensed that it meant trouble, for he’d dressed in his full uniform and taken up position between Lydia and Violet and the door, as though preparing to defend them from whatever might attempt to enter.
Lydia, to her surprise, felt safer for his silent presence. But she did not like to be kept back where she could not see what was happening, where she could only hear the brief words Joseph and her father were exchanging, low, with one another.
“British?” asked her father.
“No,” said Joseph. “Those are not the colours of a British ship.”
“What colours are they?”
“I don’t know.” Then, “They’re putting four men in that boat. They’ll outnumber us.”
“We have four men.”
“Only two we can trust.” Joseph’s tone was agitated, and their father noticed.
“Go inside,” he said. When Joseph did not move at once, their father laid a firm but gentle hand upon her brother’s shoulder. “Go. It will be fine. They’ve brought the Bellewether back home, I doubt they’re anything but friendly.”
He did not relax his guarded stance, though, even after Joseph had obediently left his side and sullenly retreated past them all into the front part of the house. Nor did her father go to meet the strangers as they came ashore but stood and waited, holding to the high ground so that when their leader reached them he was winded from the climb.
Lydia, by taking one step closer to the kitchen window, could just see the figures crossing from the woods towards them. If there had been four men in the landing party, two must have been left down with the boat, because she only saw two men approaching now—the one in front with black hair and a short clipped beard, wearing a black coat faced in scarlet; and the man behind him taller, dressed in grey, and with skin darker brown than Violet’s.
Both men appeared to have empty hands. Neither was holding a weapon.
“Good day!” called the bearded man, cheerfully. “I look for se?or Wilde.”
Her father, standing so he blocked the doorway, spoke with caution. “You have found him.”
“I’m glad. This is not a small hill that you have, and my legs are not used to the land.” He spoke English with ease, and in spite of his words and his breathing seemed physically fit, in the prime years between youth and middle age. Neither as tall nor as broad as her father, he nonetheless stood as his equal and, facing him over the threshold, thrust out his right hand. “An honour, se?or Wilde. I am Domingo del Rio Caballero, capitán of El Montero, this beautiful ship you see down in the bay with the not-very-beautiful one of your son’s, at the moment. And this is my—how do you say it in English? First mate, is it not? Juan Ramírez.”
Her father shook the black man’s hand as well. “Mr. Ramírez. And Captain—?”
“Del Rio,” the captain supplied. “I regret we could not take your son’s ship the whole way to New York, but it’s not so safe for us, you understand. The English may not be at war with Spain but they still like to seize our ships and ask forgiveness after, and we’ve had a very tiring voyage these past days and are not looking for a fight.”
The emphasis he put upon those last few words made Lydia suspect he’d seen beyond her father and had glimpsed the armed French officer who stood within the shadows of the kitchen, though she could not know for sure.
Mr. de Sabran had not moved.
Her father said, “Captain del Rio, I am grateful you have brought my son’s ship back to us. But I confess I’m curious how you came to possess it in the first place?”
“Ah. That,” the Spaniard said, “is a good story. And good stories, so my father always told me, become better ones when told with food and drink.” His grin, what she could see of it, was self-assured. “May we come in?”
? ? ?
It was, if not the oddest group to share a meal, at least the most unlikely one. At one end of the table sat her father in his customary chair with Joseph at his right hand, and then next the two French officers, and rounding out the table’s other end the Spanish captain and his first mate, who was evidently—from his introduction and the fact he used a surname—a free black, and so around again to Lydia, who couldn’t help but think that if the English Captain Wheelock were to turn up at that moment in his scarlet coat, their keeping room would hold the old and new worlds fully balanced.
She found it increasingly obvious, looking at Mr. de Sabran, which side of the scales he belonged upon. His manners were the plainer kind, and what his movements lacked in grace and elegance they gained in pure economy, so that he looked more like her father and her brother than the Europeans. The only thing he did that they did not was use his own knife from his pocket when he cut and ate his food—the same small, curved, bone-handled knife he made use of for various purposes—but this one habit that had seemed so strange to her at the beginning now seemed entirely normal. Mr. de Brassart and Captain del Rio and Mr. Ramírez all handled their cutlery in the same fashion and brandished their cups with a similar flair, as though bred to a dining room finer than this one, with plates made of porcelain, not pewter and wood.
To be fair, no one yet had complained of the meal. Since the uncommon hour made it too late for breakfast and still a few hours too early for dinner, it had been a scramble for Violet to make them a meal on short notice. She’d curdled some cream with sweet wine and a grating of cinnamon, serving it warm to the table, and thickened the porridge of Indian meal they had eaten at breakfast and fried it in cakes drizzled thick with molasses, brought pickle and cheese from the cellar and rounded it off with two pies of the first apples picked from their orchard, still fresh from her baking of yesterday. Even with Lydia helping it had been a great deal of work to assemble, and Violet—who rarely withheld her opinions—would normally have raised a protest against the disruption of her day’s routine. But she hadn’t said a word, seeming distracted by her fascinated study of their guest Mr. Ramírez.
He was returning the favour, his gaze seeking Violet on several occasions, but it wasn’t obvious whether he watched her because he considered her pretty or because he viewed her with sympathy.
Surely there must be a range of emotions a free black man felt when he looked at a slave.
Lydia didn’t know much about free black men. They were an oddity, even in larger New York. In her memory there’d only been two who had come to this part of Long Island: one last year, who’d stopped at Cross Harbor to preach at the New Lights Church, and one a few years before that—a bootmaker who’d briefly set up his business in Millbank only to leave so discreetly and in such great haste there were many who still felt convinced he’d been stolen away.
Neither man, though, had looked like this Spaniard, who could not be older than forty, his close-clipped hair dark with no sign yet of whitening, shoulders as broad as her father’s beneath the fine grey fabric of his coat that at its turned-back cuffs was trimmed with silver cord and buttons, with a narrow fall of lace across his dark brown hands.
Lydia had thought Mr. de Brassart might in his turn raise a protest against being made to share the meal and table with a black man, but in keeping with the day and its surprises he had not. Instead, the whole of his attention had been captured by the Spanish captain, whose name he had recognized.
“You wouldn’t by chance be,” de Brassart had said when they’d been introduced, “the great pirate Captain del Rio made famous in all of those stories by Madame MacPherson?”
Del Rio had smiled and corrected him. “Great pirate-hunter. And no, he’s my father.”
“Is he? My mother devoured those tales. And you must resemble him strongly, for you look exactly how I would have pictured him from the descriptions.”
The smile had become a grin, brilliantly white against the trimmed black beard. “But my father will tell you he’s much more handsome.”
“He is still alive?”