Sam said, “It’s going to take a few loads, but I’ll get some guys down here with chainsaws and we’ll get this cleared for you.”
Thank you, I wanted to say, and I’m glad that you’re back, and I missed you. But I had a lump firmly wedged in my throat and the sun felt too bright in my eyes. It was making me blink. I just nodded.
He moved past me, taking the armful of siding to throw with the rest in the back of his truck. By the time he returned I was crouched in the snow, petting Bandit a little too fiercely. I’d found my voice.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Anytime. Hey, come and tell me what these are, though.” Guiding me cautiously through the debris, he stopped me at what would have been the shed door, pointing up to the one shelf that hadn’t been smashed. “Those look like they’re something.”
I looked at the three olive-drab canvas bags. They were dusted with snow, but unharmed. “Yes,” I told him. “They are.”
When we brought them inside the house, Rachel came down from her room. “What’s all that?”
“All that,” I said, “is your grandfather’s kayak.” I opened the top of one canvas bag so she could see the wood pieces inside. “It’s a folding kayak. German-made. When I was little, Grandpa used to take me out in it a lot, but then it started leaking, and an oar broke, so it all got put away.”
She frowned. She seemed to find it natural that Sam was in our living room, with Bandit. Bending down to scratch the beagle’s ears, she asked, “So how did we get it?”
“Your dad was going to fix it.”
Rachel stared down at the bags so long I wondered whether I’d made a mistake in bringing them inside—if maybe they were too much a reminder of the things my brother’s death had left unfinished. But at last she asked Sam, “If I wanted to do that, to fix it myself, could you help me? Show me how to use the tools?”
I warned them, “There are no instructions. My dad lost them.”
Sam looked from my face to Rachel’s and studied the bags on the floor. “That’s no problem,” he said. “We can figure it out.”
Lydia
The days grew shorter. Darkness fell late in the afternoon and when she went around to light the candles it was common to find Joseph with his pencil and his plans spread on the table in the keeping room, adjusting the dimensions of their work upon the Bellewether in answer to some new request from William.
“For a man who owns four ships, he doesn’t know a thing about how they’re constructed,” Joseph told her. “What he asks for is impossible, unless I alter this as well.” He pointed to a section of the latest drawing. “And I can’t do that, unless . . .” He paused, and took the pencil up again and drew a fresh line as he sought a new solution to the problem.
He was good at that. He always had been. “Joseph doesn’t see a wall,” their mother used to say, “only the ways to get around it.”
He drew the candle closer to inspect the change he’d made. “It will take time. We’ll need more timber.”
“William doesn’t seem to worry how much time you’ll take.”
“Just how much money it will cost him.” When he grinned, he did it with such ease she caught her breath.
She had forgotten what he looked like when he did that. She might have forgiven William many of his failings, for the part he’d played in helping Joseph heal. But she had not yet forgiven William altogether.
Word had reached them from New York that several of the merchants there had been indicted for their part in stirring up the riot in the streets against George Spencer. She’d been half afraid that William would be one of them, and then she had been angry with herself for hoping he was not, and then she’d been resigned to the reality that William, with his powerful connections and his gift of personality, knew how to dance around the rules of justice.
For her family’s sake, she hoped his luck held out. He and his friends might have shamed and frightened Mr. Spencer, and reportedly they’d even had him thrown in jail for debt, but as long as a reward purse stood to tempt would-be informers there were bound to be some who would take the risk.
She knew that Silas would.
“Be careful, William,” was the last thing she had told her brother when she’d left New York, because whatever else he was, he was her brother, and the thought of Silas living near him left her mind uneasy.
She was growing equally concerned about Mr. de Brassart. His burst of temper was behind him, but it seemed to her that, just as Joseph’s health and sociability improved each day, Mr. de Brassart’s worsened. He offered his apologies. “It is the cold, you understand. My home in France is in Bordeaux, a city in the south, where it is not so inhospitable. Your winters here for me are an affliction.”
It did not help that the first days of December were the coldest ones in recent memory.
Violet, coming from her milking, held her hands up to show Lydia how red they were from even that small time outdoors. “His Majesty,” she said, “should be rejoicing he’s not with that group of prisoners they’re taking back to Canada. They’re going to lose their hands and feet to frostbite.”
But Mr. de Brassart did not seem to find that any consolation. He was eating well enough—perhaps too well, as he began to thicken at his waist—but in between meals he no longer sat and read or joined their conversations, only kept within his chamber, often sleeping.
“I suspect,” Mr. Ramírez said one afternoon, “he is downhearted after being left behind. A man deprived of freedom may survive as long as he has hope, but when that hope is taken from him . . .” There he stopped, and glanced at Violet, who along with Lydia was salting up the pork.
It was a tedious but necessary task, since meat when fresh would spoil too soon were it not dried or salted, and they had a house of men to feed throughout the winter. First the pork was cut in pieces, cleaned, and washed in brine, then laid in rows and rubbed with salt and layered in a covered tub and left three days, then turned into a second tub and rubbed again with salt and left a week to sit. When that was done, they’d pack it into salt-lined casks and strain the brine through coarse cloth over it and store it in the cellar with the stone jars full of applesauce and pumpkin and the other fruits and vegetables they’d worked hard to preserve, but every step must be done carefully and with a mind to cleanliness to keep the meat from rotting at its core.
Violet didn’t lose the rhythm of her movements but she raised her head and told Mr. Ramírez, “When this war is ended he’ll be free. So there’s his hope. And there are plenty who’d trade places with him just to taste it. Even you, I think, if you tried stepping off this property.”
His smile was slight. “No, you are right. I cannot even take you to Cross Harbor, to your church, for fear I’d find myself in jail.”
Lydia said, “We would never let that happen.”
The weight of knowledge in his eyes seemed to indulge her innocence. “You’re very kind. But there have been men of my country, men of Spain, whose ships were carried here as prizes in the last war, and if there were any on those ships whose skin was dark, like mine, the English had them sold as slaves. It did not matter then if they were free, and had the papers that could prove it, or had friends—kind friends—to stand up at their sides and say that this was wrong. The laws could not protect them and the English sold them anyway. So thank you, no, I will stay here.” And then, as if he felt the mood had grown too sombre, he put in, “Although that is no hardship, I assure you. I am better fed here than I can remember. And I have a ship to build, to keep me busy.”
? ? ?
Mr. de Sabran, too, appeared to have no trouble finding tasks to occupy his time.