Page 145 of Dawnlands

He rubbed his face and his arms against the biting mosquitoes, and then went back in and closed the door. He shucked off his shoes, breeches, and linen shirt, pinched out the flame of the candle, and lay back in his hammock in the darkness. He felt happy, as he had felt withRowan on the voyage from Texel to Lyme Regis, as he had felt on the march with Monmouth, because he knew that she was near.

He heard something—some creature—stir in the rafters above him, and he pulled a scarf over his face for protection against some venomous insect dropping down on him. Then he heard another little noise, like a scratching rat at the shutter, and he pulled up the rough cotton cover over his chest. The noise came again, more insistently.

Ned sat up, one foot to the floor to steady the swinging hammock. The scratching sound came again, in a rhythm that no creature would make. Ned shook out his boots to ensure they were empty of any insects, pushed his feet into them and strode, naked but for his cotton bedsheet wound around his belly, to the shuttered window. Gently, he unbolted it and opened it a crack.

“Are you there?” he whispered into the darkness of the warehouse yard.

“Nippe Sannup?”

He was flooded with such emotion at the sound of her whisper that he clung to the windowsill as if a great wave from the ocean beyond the bar was breaking on his head.

“Rowan? Is that you? Rowan?”

“Can I come in?”

“Yes. Yes!” He flung the shutters wide and stepped back as she leapt up and heaved herself half in, and then swiveled her legs over the windowsill. Still he could see nothing, and he reached for his tinderbox to make a spark to light the candle.

“Wait till I close the shutter,” she whispered.

He heard the creak and then the dropping of the metal bolt.

“Can I light now?”

“Yes, but be quiet.”

The shower of sparks from the flint was not enough to show her to him, nor the glowing char cloth, but the tiny flame on the splint guided him to the candle, and it caught light and finally, he could see her.

His first thought was that she was just the same as the girl he hadknown, but when he held up the candle, oblivious to the hot wax on his fingers, and examined her carefully, he could see that she looked older, hardened in the two years they had been apart. She had a groove between her thick black eyebrows, and her skin was darkened from living out of doors. Her hair was down to her shoulders, caught back by a twist of plaited vine. Her face was thinner, but her eyes, dark and smiling, fixed on his, were the same as ever.

She was wearing nothing but a skirt made from rags, and a string of shells at her throat. He thought she looked like a faerie child—a creature from beyond, that his sister Alinor would recognize her as one of her own. Her feet were bare, and she had a large knife honed from a billhook in a leather sheath at her waist. She looked nothing like the manacled boy who had stumbled into the hold of the Barbados ship in Bristol, nothing like the frightened girl in the cabin of his ship at Boston. This was Rowan as she was born to be, as she was raised to be: half-naked, lean-muscled, armed.

“Have you been ill?” she asked, and he realized that she was examining him from head to foot as he stood before her, wrapped in his bedsheet, just as he had been observing her. She saw he had lost condition in the months of his unconsciousness, his muscles ropey under thin skin, his gray hair turned almost all white. She saw the twist of his lined face from the seizure and his lopsided shoulders. Her dark eyes were filled with pity. She knew that the loss of her had harmed him, while she, so much younger, had grown strong when she was alone.

“Nothing lasting,” he said. “You look…”

She laughed quietly as she realized he could not describe her.

“I came for you,” he said.

“I know. I knew you would come sooner or later. Did you get a passage with the new governor? I came as soon as I heard the guns.”

“Yes. It’s Drunk Monck from Wellington. D’you remember?”

He watched her face light up with the memory. “Yes! Of course. Is he sober now he’s not frightened?”

“Not frightened: still drunk. You know this is Johnnie’s warehouse? He came to free you. They told him you were dead. He…” He couldnot bring himself to say: “He loves you.” Johnnie would have to do his own courting.

She looked quite blank, as if she had forgotten all about Johnnie. “Oh yes,” she said. “I saw him ride away from the Peabodys’. But I don’t need his help. I’m free.”

It was incredible to him that she stood before him, as light on her feet as she had always been, unharmed, in her own dress, as if the war in her own country and the rebellion in his had never happened. As if she were as free here as she had been in her own forest, as if the white men had never come to the Americas at all.

“We’re both here to free you,” he said, trying to be fair. “Johnnie came at once. I followed as soon as I was fit to travel.”

The loud bell of St. Michael’s Church tolled the half hour. “What time is that?” she asked, as if she was no longer ruled by the bells of the church and the clocks of the town.

“Half past midnight,” he told her.

“I’ll go,” she said. “I just wanted to see you, and know you are safe. I wanted you to know that I’m safe. Will you go to Jamaica with Drunk Monck? Will you go back to England?”