JT01 - In The Blood

by Steve Robinson

  Tayte held out a hand, still walking. “There’s no substitute for experience in this game, kid,” he reminded Schofield. But all he got back was that grinning magazine cover, dancing arrogantly in his face, telling him he’d better watch out. He never could forget Schofield’s parting jibe.

  “Least I know who my own folks are!”

  It was way below the belt and it hurt. After twenty plus years of searching, all Tayte knew about his parents was that his mother had an English accent and that she’d abandoned him to some South American mission when he was just a few months old. She’d been good enough to leave him a photograph at least; he liked to think that she couldn’t bear the idea of him growing up not knowing what she looked like. He’d kiss her image goodnight at the end of every day, and she’d watch over him from the bedside table as he slept. That’s what he liked to think she had in mind, but who knows? He didn’t even know his date of birth; not that birthdays ever meant much. They were just a sore reminder to him that, while he seemed perfectly adept at finding connections for other families, he just wasn’t good enough to find his own.

  He shook his head to dispel the memories and collected his things from the table: pad, pen, the incomplete chart. “It’s just a plane,” he told himself as he stuffed everything into a shabby leather briefcase that was as travel-worn as his suit. But he could already feel the sweat glands in his palms getting to work. He rose to leave, taking a last gulp of coffee and helping himself to a chocolate pastry to cheer himself up.

  Chapter Three

  The rushing sound coming from the circular vents above him told Jefferson Tayte that he was getting all the air American Airlines would allow. He twisted at them some more, just to be certain. Then he checked his seat belt again, knowing it was as tight as he could bear it. It was creasing his second linen suit that day, this one a shade paler than the last.

  A brief sleep in the passenger seat of his Torch Red, 1955 Ford Thunderbird had barely refreshed him, but he was used to it. 4.8 litres of V8 muscle with manual three-speed overdrive. He’d had the car since he started pulling paychecks, and even if it was on its third reconditioned engine, for all its faults he absolutely loved it. Running on whitewall tires with a white hardtop and enough chrome to shame a custom Harley, it looked a little ostentatious when he pulled up to see a client, but he didn’t care. That car was his only family.

  A suitcase nearly as shabby as his briefcase was testament to a lifestyle of stopovers at cheap motels, imposing a diet of fast food and a snacking habit that had contributed to his appearance over the years. Travelling prepared had at least saved him the trip back to DC to pick up a flight, and a few provisions from the shopping lounge at Boston’s Logan International Airport had serviced any needs his suitcase couldn’t provide for. He even carried a valid passport. He figured always having one with him meant he could go anywhere in the world if he wanted to, even if he had no intention of using it.

  Looking around the cabin he noticed it was half empty and wondered what the absent passengers knew that he didn’t. Then the thing happened that he’d been trying to avoid. He caught the eyes that had been drilling into the side of his head from the window seat since he’d first sat down.

  The woman’s voice suddenly burst the air, like she’d been holding her breath all this time, waiting to get an introduction out. “Hi, I’m Julia - Julia Kapowski.” Her voice was nasal with a grating edge, and she hung onto her words as though afraid to let them go again until she’d thought of something else to say. She was grinning childishly, like she was meeting someone famous and was their all-time greatest fan.

  Tayte twitched in his seat, recoiling intuitively. Her accent was easy to place. New York City, he thought. Queens - maybe Brooklyn. A hand shot across the empty seat. It was connected to the widest smile he’d ever seen and he was thankful for the space between them. He shook the hand and offered an uncomfortable nod. “JT,” he said.

  The woman wriggled in her seat. “J… T…” She repeated his initials slowly, as though buying herself time to work out what they stood for. “Well… The mysterious kind!”

  Mysterious? Tayte thought she’d never finish the word. I really don’t need this. His lips tightened, saying nothing to provoke further conversation, but she was off.

  “You know, you look a lot like my last husband.”

  Tayte imagined she must have gone through a few. He just nodded politely.

  “You do, it’s almost spooky.” She turned to face him. “He was a cuddly man,” she mused. “Tall too.” Her knees edged closer, straining beneath a dark trouser suit that was as sharp and raven as her hair. The body language told Tayte that he would not be allowed to face his fears quietly.

  The woman continued to stare at him. “You have nice eyes…” She sounded very sincere.

  Tayte felt trapped.

  “Did you know you had nice eyes? I bet you didn’t.”

  Nothing about Tayte felt nice.

  “I bet you’re a kind man. Kind men usually have nice eyes. Well that’s my experience.”

  She went quiet. Tayte could feel her studying him again.

  “They’re a nice shade,” she said. “A girl could drown in there!” She giggled, then at last she turned away and pulled a magazine from the holder in the back of the seat. “My dog has brown eyes too,” she added. “Not so nice as yours though.”

  Tayte was thankful for that at least. He didn’t know if she was coming on to him or just couldn’t help herself. He figured the latter and weakly smiled. Then he closed his eyes, fixed a song from Les Misérables in his head and pretended to sleep.

  This would be Tayte’s second flight ever; the first was twenty-five years ago and he remembered it like it was just last week. He was fourteen, taking an internal flight to Vermont from Washington National Airport as it was known before it was dedicated to Ronald Reagan in 1998; a promising winter vacation ruined by the sickening worry of the return flight home.

  Everyone had said how lucky they were and that the storm hadn’t really been that bad. Planes are designed to deal with lightning strikes. He’d looked up the statistics and discovered that every commercial plane in the States is struck, on average, just over once a year. He also knew that the last time a plane had crashed because of a lightning strike was back in 1967, when it hit the plane’s fuel tank. But none of that put him any more at ease. He remembered reading that you are many times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be in a plane crash and thinking that he’d very nearly had both together.

  The passenger safety announcements came and went. The video screen in the headrest in front of him was blank again, reflecting unruly black hair that needed a cut and a comb, and a tired, sagging face in need of sleep. He knew he should have paid closer attention to the announcements, but it made him think of all the negative situations that could occur. He pictured himself fumbling beneath his seat for the lifejacket, and wearing the oxygen mask that would drop from the hatch beside his air nozzle as the plane plunged and they lost cabin pressure. Then sliding down the inflatable escape chute, arms crossed on his chest as he sank into a freezing sea. Yeah, he thought. A great help.

  He looked out the window beyond Julia Kapowski who was thankfully buried in the duty free pages of the inflight magazine. There were a few clouds, but it was otherwise clear. He almost began to relax in spite of his thoughts and memories, then he heard the jet engines pick up and he continued to squeeze the seat arms.

  A voice over the intercom said, “This is your captain speaking.” Tayte tried to switch off - shut himself down until it was all over. He only heard snippets: “Taxiing … runway … cleared for takeoff.” Already way too much information.

  The plane jolted as it began to move and Jefferson Tayte’s toes curled. He took some comfort from the odd bump or two as the plane’s wheels caught the ridges in the asphalt, letting him know he was still connected to terra-firma. Then the plane stopped and he knew they were at the end of the runway. A lump came to hi
s dry throat as he waited. He thought he would have forgotten the little details, but he could already feel the impending rush of speed and the effect it would have on his body as powerful unseen hands pushed him back into his seat and held him there. Then it came, and if he’d had any loose muscle left in his body to clench, he would have.

  “Whooosshh!” Julia Kapowski slapped her magazine onto her lap and jumped in her seat.

  Tayte jumped with her.

  “Don’t you just love the takeoff?”

  If only she knew.

  Ten seconds later and that part at least was over. When Tayte opened his eyes again, the plane was safely in the air and climbing - though safe was the exact antonym for how Tayte felt. If he had the stomach to look out the window again, he would have seen the Boston Harbour Islands diminishing below, but his butterflies began to fight one another now, turning his stomach into a boxing ring. Then the engine note changed. The raging violence of exploding gases out on the wings, courtesy of Pratt & Whitney, settled and a bong! sounded around the cabin as the seat-belt light went out. None of which gave him any further comfort.

  He checked his watch - a cheap digital affair with glowing red digits that he’d had since the ‘80s and was still fond of in a retro kind of way. It read ‘11:40’ and he couldn’t believe they’d only been up ten minutes. A quick calculation told him that it would be 22:30, UK time, when they arrived. Tayte couldn’t stop himself from rephrasing the sentence with the word if instead of when. He needed something else to think about.

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out his travel documents, looking for the onward train journey details. He picked out the highlights. London, Paddington to Truro. The departure time read, ‘23:45’. That gave him over an hour to clear the airport and get to the train: an overnight sleeper that would take him to Cornwall in just over seven hours.

  As he put the tickets away and the plane began to level, he recalled how close he’d come to jacking it in, even as he stood there at the departure gate, ticket shaking in his hand. He always had when the f-word came up - found some excuse why he couldn’t fly here or fly there. But not this time. Irrespective of his client’s insistence, he wasn’t into this game just so some rich entrepreneur’s wife could have a nice birthday present. This assignment was all about finding a family that someone did not want to be found and that made the whole thing far more personal than Walter Sloane could know.

  If you can’t find this family, he told himself, how the hell do you expect to be good enough to find your own?

  Tayte settled back and began to think about James Fairborne and his family again, wondering what they were like, piecing their lives together from the records he’d found. He compared journeys: a couple of months being blown about in a wooden tub, guided by the stars at the mercy of the Atlantic Ocean, versus seven hours in a relatively comfortable seat surrounded by the best technology modern science could provide. The plane was steady now. He had no idea how high they were and he cared even less. It was just like riding a Greyhound bus, cruising on some smooth interstate. He felt pathetic as tiredness caught up with him and he began to drift.

  Chapter Four

  Named in honour of the woman credited with having made the first flag of the American Union, the Betsy Ross was a one hundred and ten ton brig, bluff-bowed with a flat transom stern and both masts square rigged for speed. Primarily, she carried cargo, trading in anything saleable along the busy coastal waters of the Eastern Seaboard between Boston and the Indies to the south. In the August of 1783, however, she had a very different itinerary.

  Sitting in the dock at Boston harbour, some seventy feet in length, she appeared to Katherine Fairborne as a ramshackle of heavy cordage and patched sail cloth, which did not instil confidence. Yet Katherine understood the importance of the day well enough. She had watched her father closely in the weeks that had built towards this cool yet fine morning, filling her journal with reflections of excitement and anxiety in equal measure. Now she wished nothing more than to get underway so that she might continue to record their adventure.

  Katherine was sixteen and the eldest of three children. She was draped in a dull and heavy woollen cloak that concealed all but her face and its frame of golden ringlets. So as not to miss anything of the scene she would later paint with her words, she had positioned herself strategically at the quayside. Her father was to one side of her with her brother, little George, who was just five, and her mother was to the other side with her sister, Laura, who was twelve. Her aunt and uncle were also with her mother, and all Katherine could hear from that direction was the wag of Aunt Clara’s tireless tongue.

  Little George, whose head barely reached the buckle of his father’s breeches, was so slight a child that it was difficult to believe he was there at all. The illusion was aided somewhat because he was the image of his father, dressed in a shorter cut of the same dark-brown greatcoat. He was watching the cargo being carried onto the Betsy Ross; arms crossed and standing perfectly still, mimicking. Katherine thought his expression was far too serious for his years.

  “What are they putting onto the boat Father?” George said. He looked up for the answer, blinking against the glare of the sunrise and the intense effect it had on the sea.

  James Fairborne continued to study the activity before them. A ramp stretched up from the quayside to the deck of the Betsy Ross, along which a seemingly endless line of men carried an assortment of crates and barrels.

  “Seed I believe - flax,” he offered. “They use the plant fibres to make linen.”

  “How long will it take to get there?”

  James turned his head to the sea. “There’s a big ocean between here and England,” he mused, gazing out past the northern edge of Spectacle Island, which appeared in relief against the early sun. He gazed far out, beyond the shelter of the harbour entrance between Deer Island and Long Island Point where it opened into Massachusetts Bay. Beyond that, like a promise, the Atlantic waited.

  James answered slowly, perhaps in awe of the journey ahead. His expression was flat and distant. “Over three thousand miles to England.” He squatted, giving George a smile and his full attention. His tone lifted. “The Master supposes we’ll make a hundred miles a day. Can you work it out?”

  Katherine smiled as she watched George act out his notion of a man in great thought. His eyes narrowed to a squint as they fixed on a far away space, high in the rapidly lightening sky. But it seemed that George could not work it out, so he continued to pull faces until his serious expression at last betrayed him. He grinned at his father who laughed heartily and ruffled the lad’s hair.

  “It will take seven or eight weeks,” James said. “If the weather is with us and God permits it.”

  Katherine had been too distracted to notice her uncle until he entered the scene. He was a barrel of a man, adorned with enough lace to drown himself in. He needed no greatcoat to combat the morning chill.

  “James, I must speak with you,” he said. His voice was low and gruff, as befitted his portly appearance, and his jowls quivered as he spoke. “I have concerns, James.”

  Katherine watched her father’s expression sour.

  “It’s this boat,” her uncle continued. “Is it big enough for such a voyage? Is it strong enough? That is to say, is she capable?” He motioned in the direction from which he’d come and his eyes settled on his wife’s cradled belly. “To own the truth, I’m concerned for the child.”

  “Jacob, do not distress yourself,” James said. “I am assured she is a craft worthy of the passage and it will not be her first Atlantic crossing. She has a good crew.”

  “Yes, but only fifteen in all. Is it enough for such an undertaking?”

  “She carries a carpenter and a sailmaker.”

  Jacob nodded his approval.

  “We should count ourselves fortunate,” James said. “We have the means to charter such a fine vessel where others do not. And to have found her already converted to take us.” He put a hand on Jacob’s sh
oulder. “Return to my sister and comfort her. Clara will be in need of your support.”

  Katherine’s eyes followed her uncle’s return, catching her mother’s who waved discreetly back so as not to disturb the flow of the one-sided conversation Clara was having with her.

  “I’m just not comfortable with it,” Clara continued. “I like to know where my things are. Like them where I can see them, and that’s not on the other side of the world.”

  Eleanor continued to nod, smiling politely. A moment later she said, “Do excuse me.” She raised her petticoats and followed her gaze towards her husband, passing Jacob midway who tipped his head and touched the emerald brim of his beaver-felt tricorne.

  With Eleanor gone, Clara turned to Laura to continue her monologue, but Laura too had left her.

  “Well, I don’t know. I’m sure I don’t,” Clara said.

  Little George had seen the gathering break. He rushed past Katherine, heading straight for Laura, and Katherine knew that his toothy smile and bright eyes spelled trouble.

  Eleanor drew close to James as she arrived beside him, sinking her cheek into the soft ruffles of his cravat. “Tell me again that this is all for the best,” she said. “Tell me that our lives will be just as they were.”

  “They will be better!” James held her shoulders, easing her away, yet keeping her close. “You pay too much attention to the worries of my sister and her husband.” He searched her eyes briefly, moving in again when he seemed to find that place he was looking for. His tone softened. “We must remain loyal to our sovereign, God bless him and keep him safe. There is nothing here for us now save our own persecution.”

  “But so far away?” Eleanor said.

  James brushed her cheek and kissed her forehead. “Do not trouble yourself,” he added. “All is set. Everything we have of value is safely arrived in England where it awaits us. We go to a magnificent estate there too, and a familiar business to continue. We can thrive in England, Eleanor! These are exciting times.” He let her go and began to pace the quayside, frothing with enthusiasm. “Instead of copper, we’ll mine tin. There are no richer deposits to be found anywhere in the civilised world than in Cornwall.”