Each step took us closer to the noise of the new waterwheel. At one point the wall opened and there was nothing to hold to but the rope. Patience dropped my hand as we passed the open hub. Though we could not see it, the vibration and the splatter of the waterwheel made a wall of sound where stone had been. Where the stone wall shielded us from the danger of the open gears, I felt the pattern of the steps, the breadth of them being more equal than not. We were lost in a clock ticking; each step, every drop of water adding up to hours. “Patience?” I called softly. I felt I must hold on to her just as a baby creature holds its mother’s hair. I called again, this time with a whine, “Patey?”
Her voice came muffled, as if her shadow spoke to me. “The bird you hear is August.”
August opened the window on a tin candleholder he carried. The light that came from the little light house seemed not to go beyond his sleeve but I knew his sleeve and the sight of it calmed my heart. “Come with me, lassies,” he whispered.
We came to the bottom landing and there was no door, just the open side of the house hidden by drooping vines and a fat, scratchy tree trunk. “Where shall we hide?” I asked. I also wanted to ask why I had not known this place. I loved a good hidey-hole, a place to haunt, for there was little to do and no one to play with in this great stone house since Allsy died. I used to spend hours in the attic amongst the old chests and dusty trunks, pretending I had found treasures from a kingdom far away. Now that we stood at the foot of the steps, they did not seem near so black and menacing. When the sun was up, I wagered it would be a sight to see.
“To the kitchen,” August said, and took one of my hands and Patience took the other, to run down the sandy path toward the kitchen, which was separate from the house. The path actually wound past the kitchen and went to the sugar mill. A puckish wind caught my clothes and hair. Only then did I realize how the mist in the passageway had soaked me to the skin. As we reached the coral outcropping where the path widened, he stopped short. He dropped my hand and closed the door on the candlelight. We had little need of it now, for the moon overhead had just risen over the hump of land on the far side of Meager Bay and glimmered across the quiet water.
A galleon under full sheets left a clear wake coming this way. From where I stood the still-golden moon glinted off something on the port bow as the ship swung its side toward us. “Black sails,” I said. “She looks a phantom acrossing under the moonlight.” No sooner had the words escaped my lips than the top-and mainsails collapsed, rolled by men we could not see. The shine that I had seen before now became clear. Someone watched our shore with a long glass. Six ports on the side opened and the unmistakable rounds of a cannon’s mouth filled each of them. We saw longboats. Three of them already lay aground on the sand and men moved upland toward the house with one left beside each boat.
“Saint Agnes, save us,” said Patience. “We have to warn Ma and Pa.”
“Five, nine, now sixteen, maybe twenty, or twenty-two men,” August said. “And six cannon on the port bow. I shall go back to the house. You girls stay in the kitchen.”
I pictured myself running up the loft steps to the cribs over the kitchen to hide, and August charging home, when Patience said, “I am coming with you, too. Ressie—you—you run to the well house. Tell Joseph to warn the slaves to hide in the fields. You stay there.”
“I cannot,” I said. I wanted to hide in the kitchen. “They always turn the pigs out when there is a situation.” I had seen pigs kill a man little more than a year before. My worst dreams held no suspense, no surprise, just the horror of being eaten alive by pigs.
August was but fifteen and taller than Patience, though his voice had not yet a man’s depth. It slipped fully back to boyhood as he stomped and waved his fists in the air. “No arguing! I am the man, here. Both of you go to the fields and I shall tell Pa,” he shouted. He pushed the tin light into my hands and took off at a run down the path straight toward the front door. For a moment I marveled at the moonlight, and how I could see his satin coat gleaming as it had not in the passageway.
Patience and I made our way to the well house, the white rock pathway lit by the moon. It was MacPherson’s lantern tonight, a full moon so bright and close and gleaming that the notorious highwayman Jamie MacPherson could have had his way with travelers as well as in broad day. The crashing of an ocean wave and soft voices that I knew made the whole scene seem tranquil and for just a moment I felt safe there.
Our man Joseph was supposed to sleep in the well house. Lucy, a kitchen helper, must have come for water after dark. They murmured to each other, low, laughing, not aware of our coming until we stepped through the open door.
“Pirates!” I said, bursting the cushion of night air with the word. Their two faces, one round, one narrow, looked toward me and smiled with puzzlement.
Joseph said, “Missy Talbot? What you doing tonight? What you say?”