“Oh, it was a fine day. General Washington offered milord over there an admiralship.”
Hawk’s jaw went hard. “He did no such thing.”
“He did exactly that. He said in not so many words that if we all survive the war, you would take over the Navy for him.”
“That’s wonderful news! Son, why are you so angry? You surely can’t begrudge your best friend such an honor.”
“In fact I can, when he himself declined it because I was not offered a co-admiral post. Am I so fragile that I must be protected and patronized as if I were a girl?”
Camisha put her spoon down. “Rashall, I will not have this at my supper table. Partly because it’s comically childish, partly because in your own perceived injustice you’re insulting those of us who happen to be female. But mainly because our time together is so short. So the general offered you no commission at all, is that it?”
Raven sipped from his wine. “No. Of course not. God forbid they put a Negro in charge of a ship.”
“But you … thought he might? And you’re somehow angry at your good friend because of this?”
“Mother, I know what you’ve said. Many years will pass before the black man receives the same recognition of an ordinary man for his work—and only when he is no longer seen as a black man. But please understand. At sea, all men are already equal. Every hour I spend on a ship, I am an ordinary man, no different than any other ordinary man on board. I do my work, they do their work, I command men of every color, and they obey. Then later we laugh, we play, we work, we fish. And then I come back home, and …” He shook his head. “Hawk and I captured a ship as big as Boston itself, and what did they offer me as a reward? That hard-won position of seaman.”
The table fell silent.
He rushed on. “The same post I hear Dunmore is offering Virginia’s slaves. Wait, no! He’s in fact more generous, offering them their freedom at the end of their service.”
His father refilled their glasses. “You must know this to be a sign of Dunmore’s desperation. It isn’t as if the governor is a champion of anyone’s rights. He owns slaves himself.”
“I know that. The obvious difference, sir, being that General Washington is supposed to be better than English aristocracy.”
The older man pressed his lips together and fell silent.
“Ray, the general is doing the jobs of three or four men right now. He cannot be expected to also attend to over 150 years of injustice wrought by many men the world over—including men in Africa.”
“Mother, that is the last reminder I need at this moment.”
“It’s a reminder you best never forget. Evil and greed and ignorance colluded at a point in history, and it will take many, many years, and the efforts of good white men, as well as women, to right those wrongs, to educate the even deeper ignorance. White, red, black, and blue men and women. And I will not have you or anyone else in this family hanging their head over that. I will not have you blaming others for what is not their fault, nor feeling sorry for yourself. You are not a victim. You are a strong, gifted man born in the most exciting period of this country’s history, and you will continue to do great things for her.”
This only sent him more deeply into himself; what she said, Marley was certain, wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before at the family dinner table.
Her gaze darted over each family member there. Helen, whose own husband was garrisoned at the edge of the town on the peninsula. Parks, who cast a sidelong glance at her brother. The matriarch of the family, who more often than not concealed her worry, purely to encourage them. And that lady’s husband, who knew better than any of them the ugly truth of what his son said.
The reality sickened her; most of all, that she was helpless to change a thing. She looked up at Hawk and found him gazing at her, as if the sight of her reassured him.
Then he turned to Raven. “Why would you think I would want a post with the Navy? Would you, for that matter?” He posed the question with frank honesty.
“This is not a useful line of reasoning. We’ve both loved the sea for over a decade, and we both want to aid the cause. Why wouldn’t I want a commission?”
“Because what we do now is the same thing, except without the stupidity of incompetent leaders, and with greater reward—and, as you said, a sane structure, where men are judged simply by the results of their labor.”
“We’re pirates! How is a man supposed to court a decent woman, doing what we do?”
He seemed to hear his own insult before Marley did. After an awkward moment, he thumped his forehead and turned to her. “Please forgive me, dear, that had nothing to do with you, and everything to do with me and how I’d like to live my life. I’d like to come home at night to my wife and children and go to the meeting-house on Sunday morning, and live an ordinary life. Just an ordinary man. That’s all I want to be.”
Hawk spoke lightly. “Ah. Now I see. You want to be a Navy lieutenant who need never weigh anchor. Is that accurate?”
Raven smirked at him, a hint of humor, of his true self, entering his eyes. He broke his cornbread in half and crumbled it into his soup. Dipping his spoon into his bowl, he ate in earnest.
“I know what’s wrong,” Marley said. “You’re tired of the sea, you want a family of your own, and you were reminded today that only at sea is the color of your skin forgotten. And your bad manners are simply a combination of your anger over that and low blood sugar.”
The entire table went silent and turned to look at her. Raven jabbed his spoon at her, then at Camisha. “That. Low blood sugar. I’ve never heard anyone say that besides my mother.”
Camisha and Marley exchanged a mutually suspicious glance before Marley rushed on. “Nonetheless, the general was just a reminder of a corrupt system.”
“No, the general is a part of it. But yes, you’re correct.” Raven had abandoned his curiosity over the secret lingo Marley shared with his mother.
Hawk, too, returned his attention to his food. “Yet it isn’t so simple for him to say, ‘no, I will not be a part of this atrocity.’ He is but one man. Slavery, and the ignorant bigotry that came with it, is an insidious thorn that has embedded itself in the character of our land. If we do not remove it now, it will destroy us.”
To that, no one could add anything. Mr. Adams abruptly asked, “My dear wife, may we hope that you have a happier tale from the results of your day?”
Camisha raised her head, her dark eyes large with sadness.
“Oh, no. What happened?
“Mrs. Brownson lost her baby. A little girl.”
The men went silent, exchanging an awkward glance and then staring at their plates. Marley found herself surprised at their reaction. It was beyond the discomfort of men discussing something beyond their understanding.
Camisha noticed their reaction. “You know what this means, and it is nothing to be mourned. Just as her child is received into heaven, so there is this. Her child has died that another might know life.”
Raven sent his mother a somber glance. “It is not that simple, and you know it.”
“Who just got through preaching about the plight of the black man as an ordinary man as if you were George Whitefield himself?” She set her jaw in stubborn defiance.
Marley knew better than to ask stupid questions in the middle of this exchange. Even Hawk was lost in his own thoughts, oblivious to her confusion.
Camisha spoke at last. “Can we not break free from this terrible day and instead rejoice? This week we will see our friends at Rosalie. I’ve missed Ruth these many months, and it will be good to see my boys.”
“My Camisha,” her husband said, “You know they are not your boys.”
She bent her head for a long moment, then raised it again, her eyes bright with emotion. “They will always be my boys.”
“Very well. To each of us, there’s a time to be born and a time to die. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace. While we are together, this is a time to give t
hanks for each other. And the Adamses of Boston will celebrate with the Trelawneys of Williamsburg, and be glad indeed.”
With that, he reached to clap his son on the shoulder in solidarity even as he did the same with Hawk. And a shout of gladness arose from everyone at the table.
Marley sat, absorbing everything she heard, watching the joyful exchange in shock. Rosalie … Ruth …
The Trelawneys of Williamsburg.
And it all came back to her. The tankard she’d found in the ship’s cupboard. The beloved, priceless journals her family had hoarded—now, perhaps, lost to posterity for all time, locked in the trunk of her car. Their exact words escaped her, but the details remained and materialized before her eyes.
I was sad already that my friend Camisha was gone, sailed up to Boston to be with her husband’s family. … There was a fire up at the house, and by the time we saw it, we couldn’t do nothing but watch it burn. … Mr. Thomas, we none of us know him much. But the first we knew something was wrong, we saw him screaming and crying and running back and forth like a crazy man behind the house, and his little baby screaming and crying and Dan and the other men had to keep him from going in the house. I had to take the baby from him, I was so afraid of what he might do.
And she remembered, unmistakably, a voice whispering forgotten secrets in her ear as she slept. The voice of a man born in Williamsburg nearly three decades before, whose father had held him as he watched the fire that had consumed Rosalie and had taken his eldest son and grandchild. The sound of a voice that had become dearer to her than her own.
“My name is Bronson, my darling.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Adventurer had sailed but two hours south of the Massachusetts Bay’s icy waters when the skies cleared and the weather thawed.
Helen had stayed behind in Dorchester with the youngest children, allowing her mother to take Shonny along for the family’s traditional holiday.
On the second day of their journey, Camisha put Marley and Parks to work below deck chopping the vegetables and salted pork. These were the oils and acrylics she worked on her culinary palette. She sheer poundage of celery and onions seemed excessive to Marley, but she had no way of knowing the numbers of people awaiting feeding at Rosalie.
At this moment, she had escaped for a break and huddled, stooped in a corner on the quarterdeck, watching Hawk direct the men in the rigging.
Bronson, she reminded herself, already growing fond of his name. It suited him.
They had been sailing nearly two full days and nights, and she had had no time alone with him at all. Occasionally, in stolen moments, she caught him watching her, but she pined for those unending days at sea when she’d had him all to herself, when he tutored her in the simple pleasures of life as a seaman.
Now, he thought her below with the Adams women, and in the sunshine he worked without his shirt, his broad back brown in the noonday sun as he talked to Jem, pointing out some item of interest. She inhaled the salty sea spray as she folded her arms around her knees and rested her chin there, rolled almost into a ball there in the corner. She’d wrapped a woolen shawl around her head and neck to warm herself in the cool autumn breeze, but the sight of him lit a fire within her and she burned for him.
Even as she slipped the shawl from the crown of her head to cool down, he turned, displaying a rippling chest and abdomen, his breeches low on his lean hips. Her lips parted at the utterly sexual sight. She unconsciously touched her tongue to her lips as if in hunger, and then she noticed his gaze on her.
In two strides along the deck and another three across the quarterdeck, he was at her side, crouching before her. One knee rested, then, on the deck, brushing her hip.
“How did you escape your chaperones?”
“I have no need for chaperones. You taught me to take care of myself.”
One corner of his mouth turned up. Noticing the loose fall of her shawl, he reached out to bundle her more carefully. “Are you cold?”
Not any more, she thought with a smile. But she only shook her head.
“Well, then.” At the warmth in her slow, innocently sensual smile, he lifted his hand and drew away the shawl until it fell into the bend of her elbows, revealing her creamy breasts to his private gaze.
“’Tis only fair,” he murmured, his gaze lingering.
“You, sir, are beyond redemption.” Even as she said the words, her gaze drifted frankly to his chest, to his rippling arms.
“You smell … delicious. What is that aroma?”
She laughed at that. “Delicious indeed. Onions, perhaps?”
A robust chuckle burst from him as he considered her. He sobered, the tenderness in his eyes filling with desire even as his lips parted, as he took her face in his hands and dipped his head toward hers.
“Ohhhh, captain!”
She tasted his breath—sweet with anise seed—and felt the heat of his warm, moist mouth, hovering above hers. His eyes closed a brief moment, even as the amused call came again, more prolonged. The soft curve of his lips went tight as he pressed them together.
“Ohhhh, caaap-taaaaain. Oh, captain, oh—”
His eyes were bright with pleasure as he hastily replaced the shawl over her and released her, turning away toward Ray’s call.
“For a man who refuses any favor I ask, you certainly require my opinion when I’ve no interest at all in what you do.”
“Hampton is less than 30 minutes off. We’ll enter the James there, rather than Norfolk, given Dunmore’s antics.”
“Aye,” he said, rising to his full height, his hands on his hips. “We discussed this ten minutes ago. Why, then, your antics?”
Rashall Adams—Ray, as she’d come to think of him, as his family did—arrived on the quarterdeck, his face alight with devilment as he gave Marley a gentlemanly bow. Then he moved closer to the captain.
“I believe you recall the bargain my mother made to ensure your lady’s chastity?” He spoke in subdued tones behind a feigned smile, but Marley was able to make it out.
“Ah, yes. That disturbing snatch-me-baldheaded promise she’s fond of. And what, pray tell, does the matron believe I can do in three minutes of full daylight with two dozen crew watching that I could not do in three weeks of sheltering my beloved in my own bed?”
Marley’s heart sang with pleasure. His beloved.
“What?” Rashall demanded with sharp disbelief.
“You’re a clever man, Raven. I said nothing that young Shonny wouldn’t have discerned over the past month.”
With that, the captain reached for his shirt, where he’d tied it in the shrouds, and donned it.
Despite herself, Marley gave a soft cry of disappointment.
Both men glanced at her—Bronson, in subdued pleasure, and Ray, simply stunned.
“I’m gonna tell my mama,” he said as he headed below, shaking his head.
Bronson met her gaze as he buttoned his shirt and slipped the tails inside his breeches, then bowed to her. “Would you like to watch the approach of the shore at my side?”
She placed her hand in his, rising.
With one arm, he drew her close against him, bending to brush his lips against her temple. “How I ache for you, my love. How I yearn for the time you are my own.”
She turned her face toward him, and her open mouth brushed his throat.
“Today you shall meet my father,” he said. “And tonight you shall be mine.”
With the help of a British Navy concentrated on the opposite shore near Norfolk, and a British flag to run up, should they encounter trouble, the Adventurer passed through the Chesapeake Bay and into the James River. Although Marley had lived her entire life in this land, over two centuries of change would stamp itself on the land before she was born, and she recognized none of what she saw.
Until they arrived at Rosalie.
And even then, it was not so much the sights, but the smells. The rich, fecund aroma of the river, the unique smell of rotting indigo brush and st
out blackberry bushes on the riverbank beneath the thawing snow, and the faint, comforting sting of woodsmoke coming from farther inland. The branches of the elms and ash were bare, their leaves composting in the shadows of the riverbank to shelter their young.
When the captain set Marley on dry ground, she was overcome with a riot of harsh emotions she could not explain. Perhaps it was like returning home after a long journey abroad, to an utterly strange land that she’d only thought she knew.
She had discovered so much while here in this time, and been given so much—and yet she missed so much.
But … what, exactly, she wasn’t sure. And it wasn’t precisely missing, for that matter; merely an anxious fear, an emptiness she could not explain.
She hadn’t grown up on Rosalie, and had never lived here—yet the depth of her melancholy was like a homesickness she’d known her entire life, as if she’d discovered an unfathomable answer to a researcher’s puzzle of the ages, that a crucial missing fact suddenly righted and aligned itself.
A deep ache opened within her, frightening her in its intensity. In a moment, she grew terrified that it was her own time, calling her home, when this had become her home; the man beside her, her love—a love she never could’ve known in her own time.
She scanned her heart’s snapshots, letting the ache open within her as she thought back to the hasty departure she and her grandmother had made, that last afternoon, when she’d wanted to visit Rosalie once more.
But that wasn’t it.
It wasn’t until the group had disembarked and begun their joyous trek toward the community of the Trelawneys that she recalled the last time she had been on this land.
She stopped, looking back at the Adventurer, standing stalwart near the deep bank of the James.
“There she is! Ruth!” Camisha cried, wildly waving her arms. Marley ignored her, desperate to understand what troubled her so.
Her throat ached as she stared at the beautiful ship in its full glory against the autumn sky. Back on that last morning at work, she had knelt in the dig, painstakingly brushing at dirt. But it wasn’t until she was back in the office that she’d seen the remains of a man near the captain’s cabin of an eighteenth century ship near Norfolk. The dig hadn’t occurred here, it was sixty miles from here—and yet fear overwhelmed her.
Immortal (The Trelawneys of Williamsburg Book 2) Page 21
