Ethan came down squarely on both feet, bootless, after climbing
the notches he and Aubrey had carved in the rockface when children. The right leg buckled. Prescott Lyman circled the air with bloodied scissors as he spoke.
“This Mercer and I had an appointment which far preceded yours.”
“Ours was from Time’s beginning.”
“You can barely stand, Virginian. And I have nothing left to lose.” Prescott Lyman thrust his weapon, the scissors.
Fayette had taught Ethan how to dodge. He did. Again. And again. It felt strange, doing it standing up. The scissors only sliced the space between his coat and waistcoat. Startled, his attacker retreated, smiling that eerie, unnatural smile Ethan remembered.
“So, there are some things your black slaves don’t do for you.”
He threatened again, forcing Ethan backward, toward the ledge, trying his weak leg. He pulled his knife from his waistcoat. Where was his pursuer’s weakness? If only there was more room. Prescott Lyman’s heel caught under Ethan’s bad knee, sending him down, driving the knife from his hand and over the ledge. Judith screamed. Lyman’s boot landed squarely in his side. Ethan grabbed it and twisted until the bigger man came down with him.
Prescott Lyman’s fingers crushed around Judith’s hem, dragging her closer. She pulled some pins from her high waistband and he suddenly possessed nothing but a handful of silk. Wondrous woman, his wife, Ethan thought, barreling into her attacker. The big-boned farmer howled, then finally fell still.
Ethan rose, yanked Prescott Lyman’s head back, then let it fall. He felt Judith wedge herself under his right arm. Her palm was sliced open, bleeding. It was raining. He must finish this, he thought, and get Judith away. He removed his coat, placed it around her shoulders. She smiled in response, before her eyes widened in horror. Her silk became a noose, suddenly, around his neck. Prescott Lyman leapt over the sheer-drop side, dragging Ethan after him.
Ethan’s back slammed against the rockface. He saw a patch of dismal sky, the rushing water. Above, Judith’s bloodied hands holding his foot. Below, Prescott Lyman’s weight tightened the silk noose. He was upside down, he finally realized. Like the holy fool in Fayette’s deck of fortune-telling cards. No wondrous flight, no landing, this. Suspension, anchored only by Judith’s sobbing, fervent pleas. Captain Willis, laughing—finally getting his wish to hang Henry Washington as a spy? Purple spots before his eyes began to blot out the gray sky.
—
Arms,
petit général,
use your arms to relieve this torment,
Fayette advised.
Ethan reached out over his floating hair, found the silk line. Both hands closed around it. He pulled. A semblance of his breathing returned. Along with Prescott Lyman’s voice.
“You’re as tenacious as her father in the chimney, little husband,” he said, annoyed. Securing himself in the rock’s footholds, he reeled his tether around his broad hand, then held the scissors over Ethan’s heart. “Watch, Judith,” he called, “watch it done properly.”
Judith screamed, her powerful voice splintering, causing an avalanche. No—a pistol’s shot, Ethan realized. He endured her cry of despair as he kicked out of her grip, holding fast to the line of silk that attached him to her father’s murderer. Together they fell into the rushing water below.
C
layton smelled of gunpowder.
Large Randolph men, Judith thought vaguely, as Winthrop lifted her from the ledge without effort, even in her state. Sally rushed up behind them.
“I let go?” Judith whispered.
“No. Ethan broke your hold.”
Clayton touched her brow. “I don’t know how you held on as long as you did. He wouldn’t allow you to fall with him. Do you understand?”
She was in two worlds. One clear, too clear, despite the rain. The other world was blurred, rushing. Ethan’s world. Judith clutched his coat around her as the man who held her came into view again.
“You tried to help us—”
“Too late.”
“We’re sorry.” They sounded like brothers, at last, to her.
“The water won’t take him,” Sally argued, wrapping Judith’s hand in a remnant of her petticoat. “Not Ethan. He was born in the sack.”
E
than felt Prescott Lyman’s desperate strength even as the spring flow pulled them toward the James.
Hold. Hold on, until this man is dead.
But his fingers grew numb.
—
Let go.
“No. He’s so strong.”
—
You got healing hands. Not made for killing,
the voice coaxed gently. —
I got him now. Don’t you be worrying ’bout him no more.
He did as Aubrey asked. His burden lightened, then disappeared. Aubrey wore a wide straw hat. He was taller than when Ethan left on the
Ida Lee.
The grin—warm and welcoming—was the same.
“You weren’t finished growing, then?” Ethan asked his friend.
—
No. I be a big man, like my daddy. You needs to keep your promise to him, to my folk. You gots to go back.
“Back?” Ethan asked, confused.
Aubrey directed his long arm below them, where Ethan saw Aaron leaning on his spear, like a mighty sentry. Weeping, as the others gathered around a fish he’d plucked with that spear and landed on the creek bank. A still, coatless, bootless fish. Himself.
“Am I dead?” Ethan whispered.
—
You? Who I teached to swim? You gonna spoil the women’s birthin’ stories?
“Born in the sack?”
—There now, your memory ain’t so bad!
“Judith’s coming. With Sally—”
Aubrey touched his back.—
And my mama’s been cookin’ up your plum duff all morning’. Find your way home now.
Ethan nodded, then called out to the people below. No one heard, except the tiny, bruised child inside Judith, who leaped, startling her. There. That got her attention. “Help me, Judith,” he whispered, through the rain, wafting the curling wisp of hair beside her ear. “You know what to do.”
She knelt, fisted her bleeding fingers. Struck his back.
Aubrey laughed.
—You got yourself one mighty lady!
he proclaimed. —
I’d stay on her good side.
W
ith Judith’s second clout, Ethan leaned over, coughed up brown sludge from the creekbottom. He was breathing, though every breath pained his throat, and he had no voice. Away. Why were they pulling Judith away? He looked at his hands. Empty.
“River’s done got him, sir,” Aaron soothed.
No. Aubrey. Aubrey’s got him,
Ethan wanted to tell Aubrey’s father. Aaron smiled, as if he had. Ethan took an unsteady grip of the bondsman’s massive shoulders. He only managed to pull himself into a sitting position. Aaron laughed. “Easy, now, brother. You ain’t long back ’mongst us. Let’s get this wicked noose from your neck, make you more presentable to your ladies, shall we?”
Ethan made a guttural sound.
“You don’t needs to talk, young one. I hear you,” Aaron reprimanded.
Other hands pulled at his neckerchiefs. Jordan, chest heaving from his run. Not looking into his eyes. Smelling of death. Winthrop Randolph was dead, then. Ethan had broken his promise to see the old man out of his life. But he’d sent one father to look after the other.
He began shaking. From the cold, only the cold. Mouth, trying. No sound to answer Judith’s calls. Battling the hands, all pulling at him.
Leave me alone.
Jordan yanked open his eyelids, issued curt commands—Look up, down, right, left, at my shoulder, toward the sun—when all Ethan wanted to do was comfort his powerful, weeping wife.
Aaron began to interpret between them—with his new father, just as he used to with the old one. “Excepting that mean neck-burn, the boy seems sound to me, sir. And he has a mighty need for Miss Judith just now, Dr. Jordan.”
Jordan shook his head. “Blood. From his mouth. May signal internal injuries.”
Ethan growled.
“His lip, sir,” Aaron interpreted. “Chomped down on it in the waters, is all. That right, young Ethan?”
Ethan nodded vigorously, though it started his teeth chattering.
Jordan’s eyes finally locked on to his own. Ethan saw fear there, which gave him a touch more patience.
“You bit your lip?” Jordan whispered.
He nodded, more slowly.
“And, aside from your throat, you feel no serious injury?”
Ethan shook his head.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Sally’s voice demanded. Ethan saw her over the doctor’s shoulder. His sister, another go-between, the full measure of her love shining from her swollen eyes. “Now, Doctor, kindly give Judith leave to her husband, before she breaks poor Clayton’s arm!”
Ethan stood, then staggered on legs that felt as weak as a new fawn’s. He blinked, trying to clear his vision of beaming faces, black and white.
“Landsickness,” Jordan Foster diagnosed. “He’s better on water.”
“Or flying, sir,” Aaron agreed. “He soars like a hawk.”
The doctor snorted. “One direction. Down.”
“Stop teasing my brother,” Sally defended him stoutly.
Ethan didn’t care. He was holding Judith, and she was warming away all fear of fits. She led his hand to her middle. Larger then when he’d left her. Round. Perfect. And, what was this, alive? Of course alive. Leaping. This new go-between. Judith pressed his hand to the undulation, laughing. “Your child welcomes you home,” she proclaimed.
W
hen he opened his eyes, he was in his bed at Windover, his beautiful wife curled against his side. She stretched as drowsily as a cat. “You are a wondrous good patient, husband,” she whispered at his ear, “in need of barely anything but sleep and my warmth.” Ethan felt his face flush with shame at his intense physical reaction to her, but she only smiled wider. “Well, perhaps something more? To help us both fall into a deeper sleep?”
He glanced at the room’s doors. She’d latched them all securely.
H
e woke again to fingers parting and reparting his hair. His mother’s, his wife’s, his sister’s tender, nervous habit had given his mane its wildness, not his years below the decks of the
Standard,
he realized, looking up at Anne Randolph.
Her long, rose-scented fingers beat gently against his mouth. “No talking, Jordan says, or I must leave. Judith will return directly. Jordan’s rebandaging her hands. Oh my darling, don’t look so worried—they will heal in time for her to hold the baby.”
He curled his hand around his mother’s fingers, set them on his chest.
“Good, then,” she approved. “Now. Shall I tell you a story, Mr. Washington? One those beautiful eyes have been asking for all your life?”
He nodded slowly.
“Very well, then. It is about a woman of three-and-thirty years, who should have known better than to fall in love with the young man who taught her growing children, who would not leave her side when a terrible sickness came. But he was so brave and handsome, and possessed such a lively, all-encompassing intelligence, that she came alive again, after so many years of duty and care of others and neglect of herself. She had never been allowed to be a girl, can you understand this?
A girl giddy in her ripe body’s power, giddy in her love of this man.
“But the sickness left, and her husband returned and she was bearing the young man’s child. She was seldom more than a breeding mare to her husband, but she had seen the power of his anger when any was caught stealing from his estate. She feared her lover and child would not survive that anger, so she chose deception and, she thought, safety for them both. She had not seen the wide world as you have, my darling, she did not yet know there is no place, no decision safe.
“She learned. When her child’s father accepted her gift of a profession, but did not patiently wait for her to give their beautiful boy up to his care. When he chose a wife, a family, a wilderness, a war. When her son turned toward the sea. There he was lost to all of us, while yet a child, writing beautiful, oil-packeted letters to a mother who had never deserved them or him.”
“Mmmm—” Ethan tried, as tears threatened his already swollen throat, but her fingers against his mouth pressed him silent again.
“Then, one day,” she continued, “another woman, one who had never been allowed to be a girl, either, she found the boy, a young man now, and brought him home. And this wondrous woman and my son’s father, who’d never stopped loving a child he’d never seen, they joined forces and gave him back to us all, and … Well, you know the rest, don’t you?”