Cody said nothing, stooped to pick up the discarded packet, and ran a little to catch up with Brandon as he strode down the wharf. Clara was sobbing piteously now, and Cody’s heart went out to her. “Bran, why don’t you go about your business?” he suggested. “I’ll take the urchin and we’ll search the ships. I don’t think she can understand that Rory’s not here unless she sees it for herself.”
“I don’t want her hopes raised,” Brandon said repressively. “She has been hurt too many times by her mother. I will not add to her disappointment.”
Cody recognized the subject was supposed to be closed, but he ventured once again to make his point. “She is too young to be reasoned with, Bran. All she understands is that you will not allow her to find her mother. I don’t mind taking her round.” He added on an earnest note, “Really.”
“No. She stays with me. You’ll see. In a little while she’ll forget all about it. It’s the way of children.”
Cody thought it might be the way of many children, but not Clara Fleming. When she dug in her heels, a team of her father’s finest horses couldn’t pull her from her position. She had come by her stubbornness and grit naturally, having inherited it all from Brandon.
Brandon’s business was with the English customs officials, and the meeting did not go well. While Cody amused Clara with nonsensical stories in the outer office, Brandon argued with the merchants who would sell his next tobacco crop in England—at pricestheydeemed reasonable. It was the law, they reminded him. It was his crop, he reminded them. The system of fixing market prices was outdated and tyrannical, and he would cut back on production if they could not come to a reasonable agreement. After a series of threats and counterthreats, Brandon and the officials arrived at a price that made no one happy.
“I hate compromising with those bastards,” Brandon gritted when he stood outside with Cody and Clara. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Cody flinch at his insensitive remark. He rubbed his forehead, easing the lines of strain and the throbbing in his temples. “Hell, I’m sorry, Cody. That was a lousy thing to say.”
“Yes, it was,” he said gravely. They walked along the street in silence for some time, Clara between them. The simple stately line of redbrick shops and homes laid a shadow across their dry dirt path. Cody ran his hand idly along a white picket fence and occasionally greeted a familiar face. Brandon, he noticed, was scrupulously polite. Only the narrow line of his mouth betrayed his impatience. No one inquired about Mrs. Fleming, for which Cody was very grateful.
They stopped at the milliner’s, and some of their somber mood evaporated as Clara chose her bonnet. Brandon and Cody merely smiled as Clara picked a garish lavender ribbon to decorate the straw hat. It clashed frightfully with her hair, but her pleasure in the confection was so profound that even the milliner abandoned good taste to her young customer’s enthusiasm.
Confident his daughter’s attention to the bonnet would replace the interest she had shown in the ships, Brandon retraced their route to the skiff. He frowned deeply, ignoring Cody’s “I warned you” expression, when Clara pulled at his hand as soon as the ships were once again in sight.
“No, Clara,” he said with quiet firmness, wishing he had conducted his business in Williamsburg as he usually did. There would have been no problem with ships at the landlocked capital. Jamestown had undergone a steady decline since the seat of government had moved inland, and the only advantage it had was access by water. “No,” he repeated.
Clara knew the tone. She hesitated. “Please! I want to find Mama.”
Cody lent his attention to the relentless activity on the wharf while Brandon and Clara argued. Wagons jolted along the washboard road with a cadence that Cody found familiar and oddly soothing. Sturdy barrels rolled down the gangway of the nearest ship with a steady rhythm. There was an occasional shout, a startling burst of laughter, but mostly there was the sound of water slapping against the hulls of the great ships. He felt a tug within him but Cody’s face remained impassive as he looked at the gently swaying masts. Soon, he thought. Soon he would have to tell Brandon that he did not want to return to William and Mary in the fall. His future was not in the courtroom. It was on the sea.
Cody’s thoughts were distracted as Brandon stood up, sighing with a mixture of admiration and exasperation. “She wore you down,” Cody said. Laughter lurked at the corners of his mouth.
Brandon could not find humor in the situation. “It would appear so. Let’s take a walk along the wharf. You were right, though it pains me to admit it. Doubting Clara here must see some things for herself.”
“It can’t hurt to take a look, Bran.”
Brandon’s dark eyes were distressed, his features sober. “I hope not.” He took Clara’s hand.
Their progress along the wharf was slow. Clara would not be hurried as she studiously examined the faces of the few women she saw alighting from the ships. They toured several of the vessels. The weathered and seasoned sailing masters offered little objection to accommodating Clara Fleming. Brandon doubted they were moved to compliance by his own presence. His daughter had an influence upon the veteran captains that was uniquely her own. He soon abandoned the idea that Clara would recognize the futility of her exercise, and began to hope she would simply tire of the search.
Shannon blinked rapidlyas she stepped out of theCentury’shold and quickly turned her face from the sun’s beckoning warmth. Her skin tingled, and the sensation was accompanied by a faint wave of nausea. Shannon tried to ignore it, but the tingling continued as a breeze lifted a few strands of hair away from her face. The peculiar fragrance of fresh air, the harsh energy of raised voices, the snapping of canvas above her head were working against her, compelling her to confront life. Shannon Kilmartin wanted none of it. Someone nudged her in the small of her back and she moved forward docilely to let the next person on deck.
Shannon shivered in spite of the heat, or perhaps because of it. She wasn’t certain anymore. Of anything. Unbidden, the questions she had asked so often during the voyage came to her mind. Would the earl have insisted she accept transport if he had known what she would encounter? Had he given any thought to the dark and airless hold, the wormy, meager rations that were fouler than anything she had eaten at Newgate? Had he really been so arrogant that he believed his influence would extend beyond the reaches of London? Had he thought the Glen Eden title could guarantee her a passage safe from the violation of the other prisoners or theCentury’s sailors?
Following a roughly issued command, Shannon shuffled along the deck, stumbling slightly as she attempted to work muscles that had atrophied from disuse. Her mouth puckered in a frown as she recalled the viciousness of the hands that had assaulted her, tearing her dress, shredding her dignity. What would she have done if the prostitute who shared her leg iron hadn’t announced Shannon had the pox? She couldn’t have borne it; that much she knew. She could never lie casually beneath a man as the prostitute had, lifting her skirts without protest and opening her legs. They would have had to kill her, and Shannon was certain the lightskirt had sensed it, offering herself instead. Shannon had turned her head away, burying her face in the crook of her arm as three men took turns with her companion. But she could not escape the heavy breathing, the awful grunts of their wretched labor. When they left the hold it was Shannon, not the whore, who was sick. She was so filled with revulsion that she never found the words to thank her savior. This she regretted deeply. A few days after the incident, disease and fever swept the hold and numbered the prostitute among its victims. Shannon never learned her name.
Shannon experienced a measure of freedom after the whore died. She was not bound to another human being after that and could have moved easily about the hold. She could not bring herself to take advantage of the liberty; it seemed sinful. Instead she withdrew more deeply into herself and could not be roused to conversation by any of the hold’s other inhabitants. She was not as oblivious to them as she would have them believe. Shannon knew they talked about her and were convinced the pox—she was still unsure of what that was—was exacting its toll on her mind. She did not care what anyone thought as long as she was left alone.
Until she stepped out of the hold and felt an alien sun prickle her skin, she thought she was dead to all feeling. She was profoundly unhappy to find she had been wrong.
Shannon held the torn bodice of her dress modestly in place as she moved down the gangway. There was a sense of urgency that emanated from her luckless companions, and she tried not to be swayed by it. They were hopeful of a new beginning in the colonies, and Shannon could not bear hope. She had never allowed herself to dwell on the earl’s plans for her future. It would have been extreme folly.
A sudden stirring in the crowd waiting on the wharf caused Shannon to lift her head sharply. She steeled herself, not wanting to view the men who waited below as they prepared to purchase the bondage papers of felons such as she. Her vacant gaze grasped the throng as a whole but was blind to individual faces. She sensed curiosity and impatience, attitudes of men anxious to get on with the business that lay before them. She wondered about this raw, demanding land that had an insatiable appetite for laborers. Hands were hands, she thought absently. The land had no conscience. It cared not one whit if the hands that worked it had committed atrocities. The men who stood on the wharf were responding to the call of their land, burying their natural distaste and employing England’s refuse to appease it.
Shannon dropped her gaze and stared at her own hands. How would they look without the iron bracelets? She had become so accustomed to their weight, to the restricted movement, that the idea of being without them seemed remotely foreign.
“Mama!”
Shannon heard the cry, but it hardly impinged upon her consciousness. She took another step on the gangway only to find her progress impeded by the man in front of her, who had stopped in his tracks. No one on the gangway was moving. The childish voice screamed again, and this time Shannon joined her companions in searching out its source.
There was a titter of laughter as a child squeezed beneath the stockinged legs of an impeccably turned out planter. His florid face reddened further as the little girl pushed past him and he stumbled ignominiously. There was a strident shout to stop the girl, but she was like a bead of mercury, eluding the hands that reached out to capture her. The planter was knocked to the ground again as two men leaped from the crowd to catch the child.
“Mama!”
