Page 185 of Dawnlands

No one said anything in the kitchen, the baby snuffled at the nursemaid’s cape. They heard the front door open and Alys came in again. “You can go aboard,” she said shortly. “They’ve got a barge putting lines on.”

“Praise God,” said the count. He took Alys’s hands and kissed both of them. “I can never thank you enough,” he said.

The queen put out her hand. “God bless you,” she said gently.

Alys did not curtsey as she should have done. She shook hands as if to an equal, and then she led the way to the quay, head down against the wind and the rain, and guided them up the gangplank. Livia turned to her when she was on the deck. “Alys…”

“I did love you,” Alys admitted. “But I don’t want to ever see you again.”

Livia kissed Alys gently on the mouth. “I never deserved your love,” she said. “I hope you will forgive me.” She went below as Alys turned to her husband, who was shouting over the noise of the wind and the rain, to stand by the lines on the barge, and prepare to cast off.

“Godspeed. Calm seas and steady winds bring you safe home, Abel Shore,” she said, as she always did, as if nothing had changed and nothing could change between them.

“God bless you, Alys.” He stepped close to her and gave her a firm kiss on her mouth.

Alys went down the gangplank and stepped back as they ran it on board. The rain was easing off and the wind picking up; as theSweet Hopegot into midstream the sails unfurled and Livia and her mistress, the Queen of England, and the royal baby set sail for France. Alys watched them go, expressionless.

BARBADOS, WINTER 1688

Rowan, Caskwadadas, and young Wómpatuck sat with their feet in the creek, sweating and exhausted, beside a massive fallen branch of a cedar tree. It had been sheared off the trunk by lightning. Rowan hadfound it farther inland, and the three of them had rolled and dragged it to the brink of a cliff where the creek poured in a waterfall to the sea below. Hidden by the thick forest, the three of them had worked on the branch, trimming off the side branches and scraping off the thick bark. Next, they would shape it, giving it a bow and a stern, and then burn it out and carve out a rough scoop from the center, deep and long enough for the three of them to sit, one behind each other, to paddle, one on each side.

Caskwadadas, from the north of the Dawnlands, had traveled far out to sea in the oceangoing dugout canoes all her life, and knew that it would take weeks, even months of work for the three of them to get the branch into seaworthy shape for a two-day journey. But she knew it could be done. They would wait for high tide, a high tide with a full moon and an onshore wind, when the sea at the foot of the cliff was at its deepest, to launch the canoe down the waterfall and into the sea.

“Men’s work,” Rowan said, nudging the boy, who laughed at her.

“I shall do it all on my own,” he told her. He showed her his callused palms, where the sharp stones they used for shaping the tree had blistered his hands.

“I shall sit in the canoe and you shall paddle me,” Rowan told him.

“Straight into the setting sun,” he promised gravely. “Until we reach land.”

She nodded.

“Do you really think we will find our people?” he asked. “My sisters that were sold as servants?”

“We may find them,” she said cautiously. “I hope we do. We’re not allowed to live together as a People, and we have no land of our own anymore. But some of us have been enslaved on our old lands. We might be able to find your sisters and free them.” She looked at his troubled face. “And I know of three Pokanoket who have survived, and will live on their lands again, and one of them will grow to be a man.”

“Me?” he said with his shy smile.

“You,” she confirmed. “So the People of the Dawnlands will be home once more.”

They worked for a moment in silence.

“And we know that we will reach land?” he asked. “We are sure?”

Rowan heard the anxiety in his voice and took up a twig and drew in the sandy earth beneath their feet, as Ned had drawn it for her. She showed Barbados as a teardrop shape, and the other islands as little dots in a semicircle to the west, beyond that a sickle shape of land like a great bay. It was the map that Christopher Monck had shown Ned in faraway London. “It looks like this,” she told him. “If you were a frigate bird, up very high, looking down, you would see it like this.”

“Was it a frigate bird that told you?” he asked, completely seriously.

“One like a frigate bird,” she replied. “One that sees a long way, and flies very true, and keeps faith. He has never told me a lie. I trust him. He told me that if we paddle west, we will make landfall. We will find our way home.”

REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, WINTER 1688

Ned, released from William’s army, since it was clear that there would be no fighting, tapped on the back door of the warehouse. Tabs swung open the top half and saw him, with his pack on his shoulder in the yard. “God be praised!” she said. “I was afraid it was papists.”

“No, just me.”

“God bless you, safe and sound again,” Tabs exclaimed. “I’ll tell Mrs. Shore.”