Frank observed this with a lifted eyebrow, then in private tones advised me, “Hell hath frozen over. Watch your step.”
But it felt nice to have the group’s acceptance and approval for that moment.
Nice, too, to know that Frank, Rosina, Don, and Lara were out front and waiting by the parking lot to see that I got safely to my car. I could hear their voices as, alone inside the house, I started with my ritual of locking up.
This time, I walked the same route backwards, starting with the upstairs rooms to get them over with. “I’m coming in,” I told the empty air as I walked through my office door. “Don’t scare me.”
Nothing moved.
“Thanks.” Quickly moving through into the old part of the house, I checked the upstairs chambers, being careful of the patched floor in the little northeast corner room, where Sam had also now repaired the wood frame of the sloping ceiling.
Violet and Phyllis’s room, as I’d taken to calling it. Nothing moved here, either.
As I descended the narrow back stairs to the buttery I could hear everyone’s voices outside with a comforting clarity. Lara was laughing.
I crossed through the parlour and checked that the front door was bolted securely. Passed on, through the keeping room into the corner room under my office that would, from the floor plans, have once been a small chamber just off the kitchen.
The window here looked to the side of the house, to the woods where I’d once seen the ghost light myself, and tonight as I turned I thought I caught a glimmer of something again through that window, out there in the dark.
I shouldn’t have stopped, I knew. I should have carried on doing my rounds and ignored what I’d thought I saw. Left it alone.
But I didn’t.
I took a step nearer the window, and looked.
It was there, gleaming brightly beyond the dark glass. I leaned closer. Cupped my hands against the glass so my reflection wouldn’t interfere. The light went out abruptly like a candle flame extinguished.
As I pulled back from the glass, it came to life again.
And that was when I realized it was a reflection, too. It wasn’t shining in the woods at all. It was behind me.
In the doorway.
As I spun around my heart shot up and started pounding at my collarbone.
The light was there. The light, and nothing else.
I couldn’t move. I thought the light moved upward as though somebody had lifted it to see me better, then it lowered. Travelled on away from me, with nobody to carry it.
It seemed to disappear into the plain wall of the corridor beyond the door. A wall that had been built with the Victorian addition.
But when Lydia’s French officer had lived here, there had been no wall. He would have walked straight from this room into the kitchen, and I knew that if I had been braver—if I’d forced my feet to move and gone around myself to look—I’d find the light there moving now, across the old and empty Wilde house kitchen with its long-cold hearth.
Lydia
He was carrying the lantern.
It did make the walking easier, the sun not being up yet and the woods alive with small and furtive rustlings. Every dropping of an acorn seemed the footfall of a predator, and though she knew this path so well she could have walked it blindfold, she was grateful for the warmly swinging light of that one candle in its glass and metal box.
Her father, having gone ahead, called back to them that Mr. Fisher’s sloop was there and waiting as he had arranged.
She’d have much preferred to go by land, but Father had explained he could not spare the beasts nor waggon, nor could he afford just now to hire ones from Henry, but since Mr. Fisher owed him for the shelves he’d built last summer, this would cancel out that debt and serve their purpose.
“This is very precious cargo,” said her father to his friend. “See you take care of it.”
“You need not fear,” was Mr. Fisher’s answer. “As for the other, though, I’ve half a mind to dump it in the Hellgate.” But he nodded a terse greeting to the man who held the lantern next to Lydia. “Good morning.”
Mr. de Sabran echoed those words in reply in his deep voice, but said no more than that, and handing off the lantern to her father he helped Lydia to board.
The tide was at its highest point, and soon it would be turning, with a wind set fair to carry them straight in to New York’s harbour. Mr. Fisher’s single-masted sloop looked very small against the darkly looming shadow of the Bellewether beyond it, but she knew that it had speed, and they would be at William’s dock that afternoon.
She had not realized just how long the hours between would be.
The other times she’d sailed with Mr. Fisher she had been with Joseph and with Moses, and the men had talked among themselves and left her little to do other than to watch the passing shoreline and enjoy the sense of freedom. Except Moses was not here now, and each glance from Mr. Fisher made it plain exactly where he laid the blame.
It did not help that on this day Mr. de Sabran wore his full and proper uniform, with shoes and stockings and the long white coat with its blue lining. With his hat set low above his eyes, hair fastened back, sword at his side, he somehow became less an individual and more a symbol on which Mr. Fisher focused all the hatred that he felt for those who’d killed his son.
She understood. She’d felt the same at first, and Mr. Fisher had not had the chance, as she had, to observe the better qualities of Mr. de Sabran.
So she could only do her best to keep the tension at a manageable level by diverting Mr. Fisher when she could with conversation.
With the cold and wind and salt spray she was growing hoarse and welcomed their arrival at the Hellgate, with its swift and shifting currents that required Mr. Fisher’s full attention. And then they passed into New York’s harbour, and there was no need to talk.
It was a sight that always filled her with excitement and with awe, although she would not wish to live in such a place. There were too many buildings—houses closely pressed together in a row along the shoreline, stretching farther to the north each time she saw it, spires of churches rising here and there amid the rooftops, and the solid walls and towers of the star-shaped fortress sitting for protection at the bottom of it all.
The harbour was itself a city built of ships—high masts and sails of every shape, tall ships and small, some riding at their anchors, others riding on the wind, all crossing paths and navigating boldly around one another so she was convinced that there would surely be a great collision. But there was none. Mr. Fisher brought them through the shadow of a giant British man-of-war, its colours flying crisply in the wind, and steered between a swiftly moving privateer brig and a rowboat full of raucous sailors, and delivered them in safety to the wharf.
She knew the way from there.
“Some men may build their mansions in the meadows,” William had once told her, “but a city’s beating heart lies in its markets and Exchange, and in the wharves and docks that keep them well supplied with their life’s blood of trade.”