They were in the deep of the long bay now, and the wind and height gave him a sense of soaring above, as disconnected and free as the great osprey that flew close in the morning twilight. To the east lay the forested flatness of what was marked the Eastern Shore on their maps. To the west were the rolling hills of Virginia, cloaked in shadow. Between lay wind and sky, and a freedom he had not felt for months.
Freedom.
He glanced down at his companions, then with a more businesslike air studied the watery horizons. Several small fishing dories dotted the mouth of a river to the east. A sleek schooner, smaller than the Penelope, raced north ahead of them, probably headed for Annapolis or even Baltimore. His gut tightened as on the southern horizon he spied the square-rigged masts of what was in all likelihood a naval ship of the line, but then he realized that, bare-masted, she must be anchored.
He fixed his gaze on the now-distant point of land to the south that marked the mouth of the Rappahannock. If he had failed in his desperate attempt to disable the Ardent, if he saw her sails rising over the trees of the point, they would be doomed, for she would be close enough to spot the Penelope and her guns would soon reach them.
His gaze drifted back to the larger ship far down the bay. The murderous, lecherous Kincaid had taken Sarah. Her father had tried before to ship her back to England, to break her. She had even thrown herself into the Atlantic to escape Lord Ramsey, and she would do it again if given the chance. But this time Duncan would not be there to save her.
He watched the water until the mouth of the Rappahannock was long out of sight, no longer feeling the joy of the sailing but haunted by visions of Sarah as the prisoner of the man who had brutally murdered so many on the runners’ trail.
The call of a thrush, incongruous on the bay, stirred him from his waking nightmares. Duncan looked down to see Woolford holding onto the shrouds a few feet below him. He motioned the ranger captain to join him.
“We’re clear,” Duncan reported. “The Ardent will not find us now.”
Woolford nodded, and gazed out over the windswept bay. They did not speak for several minutes.
Duncan realized he had not had time to speak privately with his friend since Edentown, but he had seen the deep sadness behind Woolford’s eyes. “I regretted not being able to stay for Jessica’s funeral,” he offered.
Woolford took so long to reply that Duncan thought he had not heard. “She took hold of my heart like no woman ever before.” The ranger looked away, into the wind. “I carried my mother’s wedding ring all these years. I was going to give it to Jess that very day, to wear on a chain until the Virginia business was over. Then I was going to take her back to Pennsylvania and ask the blessing of her parents so I could put the ring on her proper. Instead I buried her with it. My heart has been like a cold stone ever since.”
There were no words Duncan could say. Woolford had lost Jess. He had lost Sarah.
“Lively!” came a sudden call from the deck. Trent was calling them down.
On a locker by the wheel, the mate had sketched a map of the Chester River on the back of a large chart. “Crabtown,” he explained, indicating an odd square drawn in the center of the river mouth. “Fish weirs and floating pens to hold crabs and oysters for market, connected with walkways in a square, with shanties floating alongside for the watermen.” He looked up at Duncan and his friends. “Take the Penelope any closer than Crabtown and the harbormaster will be out asking our business.”
Trent, now at the wheel, took over. “So we lay in at the Choptank in another hour to call on the fishing dories.”
“We have no time,” Duncan protested.
“We must make the time. We cannot be suspected when we reach this Crabtown.”
“He’s right,” Woolford agreed. “Any warning into the town and all we seek will be hidden away.”
“So we need to foul the Penelope’s beauty,” Trent said. “We are going to cover our deck with bushels of fish and crabs.”
“We need to make her stink,” the mate agreed, seeming to warm to Trent’s plan. “We need to make her ugly.”
“We’ll never pass for a fishing boat,” Duncan objected.
“Not a fisherman, a market lugger. One of them that runs in to the villages along the bay to buy fish cheap then over to Annapolis to sell them dear.”
There were always ways to rough up a well-run boat, but Duncan saw the chagrin on the crew’s faces as they began slouching ropes and canvas over the rails and hauling up buckets of mud, dragged from the bottom, to drip over the hull. He watched for several minutes then turned over the chart the mate had drawn on, to find a map of the northern bay.
“Do London ships call on Chestertown or Annapolis?” he asked the mate.
The man scratched at the whiskers of his throat. “Not often, to be sure.”
“Where then? If I were desperate to make passage, where would I go?”
“There’s them that anchors in the Hampton Roads or even upriver toward Jamestown, though mostly when the tobacco harvest comes in. If you needed to be certain it would have to be Philadelphia. Three or four a week sail from there, I daresay.”
Duncan pointed to the road on the map that ran northeast out of Chestertown. “And to get there from where we are going?”
“A fast horse east to the Delaware coast, I reckon, then catch one of the packets that run up the river.”
“If I rode straight through to Philadelphia, without stopping?”
“Gawd, lad, you’d kill the horse and maybe yourself.”
“How long?”
“Twenty-five, thirty hours.”
“I can send messages, Duncan,” Woolford said over his shoulder.
“To sit on some clerk’s desk for days while half a dozen ships embark?” Duncan shot back. “And what do you say in a message? Stop a naval officer of good family who, no doubt, has a perfectly plausible letter from Lord Ramsey authorizing him to deliver his impaired daughter to England? No! The second we finish our business I will find two horses and run north, switching mounts as I go. I will swim out to every ship in the river to find her if I have to.”
“I see. The runaway Scottish bondservant accosts the refined naval gentleman,” Woolford snapped back, “who happens to be under the protection of a member of the House of Lords. I’ll be sure to think of something witty from Shakespeare for your tombstone.” He wheeled about and left Duncan staring forlornly at the map. Sarah was gone. He had destroyed that which he most wanted to save.
The Penelope coasted into crabtown at noon the next day, reeking like a fish trader but with many of the company still grinning from the prior night’s banquet of crabs, oysters, and rockfish procured on the Choptank. At the end of a maze of weirs spread across the river mouth, the odd collection of floating sheds and holding pens was connected by floating logs, planked over to make crude, uneven walkways. The ragged, boisterous watermen who were working the pens eyed them uncertainly but soon warmed when Trent brought up a cask of ale from the sloop’s hold.
Duncan at first had such difficulty understanding some of the older men that he thought they must be speaking a foreign tongue, but then he caught the cadence and strange accents and realized they were using a very old English, the kind he might hear in a play of Marlow or Shakespeare. Their families, he realized, must have come over early in the prior century to this isolated region of the New World, and had never been diluted with immigrants from elsewhere.
The watermen seemed suspicious when he asked for a printer but soon, with the ale flowing, they explained there was but one print shop in Chestertown, though some of the watermen had the impression that the printer, Mr. Prindle, had been summoned elsewhere, for he had not been seen in town for weeks.