by Eric Flint
“And what did the up-timers themselves say about why they ceased going to the Moon? Its inhospitability?”
“No.”
“The expense?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then why, exactly, did they not go back?”
“Most contend that there simply wasn’t the desire to do so.”
“No desire? Be plain; they had the desire to go in the first place!”
“They did, but once they had done so . . . well, they lost interest.” When de Covilla confronted the resulting ring of baffled faces, he explicated: “Having done it, and then proven they could do it at will, they—well, they became bored. It no longer captured their imagination.”
“Surely, they are mad,” de Viamonte agreed.
“Sounds it,” Gallardo grumbled. “At any rate, I’ll want sappers. Dredgers, too, I suspect.”
Now he was the one ringed by baffled faces. De Viamonte was the first to find his voice. “Manrique, you mean to go to St. Maarten, to oversee the work yourself?”
“Well, the parts on the land, yes.” He returned their stares. “You think I’m going to stay here and miss all the fun?” He snorted. “What? Do you think I’m mad?”
Chapter 45
Oranjestad, St. Eustatia
The sun was beginning its slow fall toward the rim of the sea before Anne Cathrine was finally able to extricate herself from the day’s duties and callers and set forth with Cuthbert Pudsey. As they arrived at their sad destination, she looked over her shoulder and ordered, “Wait here.” She was through the door into the charred ruin of Edel Mund’s hovel even before the big Englishman had muttered, “Yes’m.”
She had come straight from the infirmary, having volunteered not only to help the stricken as to be a companion for the mostly silent Sophie Rantzau. Consequently, she was already wearing clothes that would want washing. So, she reasoned, what’s the harm in adding a little soot to the mix?
Unfortunately, “a little soot” proved to be a profoundly inadequate projection of the reality with which she was now confronted; the completely gutted interior yawned at her like a roofless, carbonized maw. Well, if I look like a chimney sweep when I’m done, so be it.
Except—how would she know when she was done? What should she look for? How could one get any clues as to how the fire was set, or who might have set it, just by wandering around the shell of a building in which every combustible object had been reduced to ash?
It took almost fifteen minutes of largely aimless puttering before she realized that her question had actually contained its own answer. Which was to say: if everything combustible was gone, then, assuming that any clues still existed, they would necessarily be found among the nonflammable remains.
But that, too, was frustrating. The hearth was blackened rock. Its andirons and tools were scorched, but otherwise uninteresting. There were intact shards of clay pots and a few better plates, but not enough to piece together, and besides, what would that reveal? Covered in much, much more than “a little” soot, she rose from where she had crouched to inspect a lump of lead and headed for the door. Perhaps this was as foolish an errand as Leonora had believed; if any clues existed, certainly Tromp’s men would have found them. They had been over the gutted hovel at least half a dozen times, and still, there was no word of how the fire had been set.
She slowed as she approached the door. In some indefinable way, she felt that once she recrossed the threshold, she would have said her true farewell to Edel Mund. That in accepting her inability to learn any more about the woman’s killer, Anne Cathrine was also accepting that this chapter was closed and that the dead widow’s memory had to be just that: a memory.
She touched the crumbling, fire-ribbed remains of the door-jamb—and stopped. The window just to the side of the jamb was different. Not like the other. But why? She stepped backward into the house, not examining either of the windows closely, but taking them in as generalized images.
These had been Edel’s prized stained-glass windows. They were both ruined by the blaze. The lead had obviously melted early and the panes held by those mullions had collapsed into a heap.
Or rather that’s what had happened to those in the window to the right-hand side of the door. The lead had pooled and rehardened in the lower sill of the window, some on the floor, and although many of the colorful panes were shattered or missing altogether, about half had fallen into the lead that had once held them in place, now stuck in the resolidified metal like multihued dragon’s teeth.
But on the left, only a fraction of that amount of lead was melted into the sill. Similarly, there were fewer panes left, and far more were shattered. So where had the lead and the panes gone?
Anne Cathrine turned, went back to the piece of lead she had found on the floor, kneeled, broadened her focus again . . . and discovered she was crouched at the far end of a fan-shaped litter of broken panes and beaded lead drops that widened as it got further from the window.
This window hadn’t melted like the other. Something had gone through it, sent pieces flying into the house in an arc, which were then punished by the heat at the center of the de facto crematorium and subsequently crushed and punted around under the feet of the investigators. But now that she knew to look for it, that progressive wedge of shattered glass plain to see. Which meant . . .
She turned, paced along the trajectory implied by the center of the debris fan . . . and found herself staring down at the modest remains of the dead woman’s Roman-style oil lamp. It had been on a table which was now ash, and the small clay shards were few and scattered. But on the stonework of the hearth that had been right behind it, there was a sharp-edged chip at just about hip level.
She stood next to it, leaned over, closed one eye . . . and discovered that it was indeed at the end of an invisible line that went from the window to the lamp to the fireplace.
Anne Cathrine lifted the hem of her dress, spat on it, and rubbed frantically at the flaw in the stonework. When the soot came away, the sharp, fresh edges of a recent impact not only stood out more, but the wound in the rock itself was creamy white. It was impossible to say if the flaw was only a few days old, but it certainly had not begun to dull with age.
She stood, realized she had to report what she had found to Tromp. But first, she needed to find the conclusive piece of evidence: the object that had been thrown into the house to shatter the lamp and so, start the fire. And which had very possibly dented the hearth at the end of its flight.
She bent at the waist, started examining the ground all over again . . . and stopped. She straightened slowly. She had spent her first fifteen minutes scouring the hovel’s small interior for a sign of . . . well, anything. If there had been an object that could have broken through the window and still retain enough force to shatter the lamp, let alone take a chip out of the fireplace, she would have found it. But since she hadn’t—
The realization snapped her spine straight as she looked around the hovel: Tromp knows. Because his men must have found what was thrown. Which means he has decided not to tell the town about what actually happened here.
She nodded. Of course he’d do that. Tromp might still be investigating. Or he might have decided—probably accurately—that if the town learned he’d discovered a “murder weapon” (although it had more likely been manslaughter, she realized), some people might very well take matters into their own hands. Given present sentiments, she could imagine them storming out to Haet’s tract or Musen’s or some other, armed and angry. And if they had actually drawn blood, they would probably have lost some of their own in the process. And God only knew how wildly that might spin out of control.
So, yes, as the guardians of the colony’s greater safety from external threats, Tromp and van Walbeeck would almost certainly have elected to keep this bit of information quiet. It was, she admitted angrily, their duty.
But, she thought, it is not mine.
* * *
The sun was setting over Fort Oranj
e, which meant that there was almost no light left in the narrow lane that ran past her shop and humble rooms. She opened the storm shutters on her only window, reached out, and turned the sign hanging from the weathered hook in the top sill; now, the word CLOSED faced the world.
What faced inward was SEAMSTRESS. She looked at that word for a moment, almost wistfully. If only life could be as simple as that, once again.
She closed her mind to that thought at the same moment that she closed the storm shutters and turned to make sure that her day’s last labor, a recently re-hemmed dress, was hanging evenly. Even though it would ultimately be conveyed to rough men who would tear it apart simply to get messages out of its seams, she still insisted that it be hung just like the garments she repaired or altered for her actual clients. She did so in part because it was wise not to call attention to the items of clothing used to send secret information to her anonymous “patrons.” But she was also proud of her business, of her work as a seamstress. And if anyone happened to call, even at this late hour, they would still see a tidy workplace in which all the garments were hung in an orderly, wrinkle-defeating fashion.
A knock on her door startled her; the sun still had not set. Why would tonight’s contact come so early? Was there something amiss? Had she been discovered? Whatever it was, she told herself not to panic. It was probably nothing. And if it was, then panic was not her friend but her enemy. A disordered mind made it less likely that she would be able to think, flee, or fight her way out of a bad situation.
As if she were putting on a hat, she put on a tentative and mildly confused smile, gave herself a moment to minutely arrange and settle into it, and then opened the door.
She stared. The tall dark man standing on her doorstep wasn’t either of her two contacts, one of whom worked for the Spanish, the other for the “adventurers” who roved among the islands. “Yes?” she said. “What do you want?”
“I want to speak to you.”
“It is late, and I do not recognize you.”
His lips crinkled; it wasn’t really what one could call a smile. “My name is Diego,” he murmured. “I am not surprised that you do not recognize me. But I recognize you. From another port. Well south of here.”
She had always thought that the saying “my blood froze” was odd; even when fearful, she’d never experienced that kind of sensation. But now, she understood that it was not merely a fanciful expression. Her limbs and extremities were suddenly chilled, although the growing dusk was still, even sultry. “What—what do you want?”
“It is as I said; I want to speak to you. And that is all I want.”
There was something about the way he said it which also seemed to be a grim guarantee that he was speaking truthfully, that if he wanted more, he would take it without dissembling to get it. She opened the door and stood aside.
He entered and turned toward her as soon as the door was closed; she was trapped with her back to it. “You do not know me,” he said.
She shook her head. “No, but I know what you are.”
“Good. Then this will be quite simple.” He waved behind at the dresses without looking at them. “I know how this is done. I know what to look for. And I know faces from Curaçao. From Willemstad. Before the recent”—he grimaced—“misfortunes there.”
“I do not know what you mean.” Her upper lip was sweating and she could not meet his eyes.
“I refer to events late last year. When the Brethren of the Coast were starting to gather information on Curaçao. You were there. You did their work. When you were finished, one of their Dutch captains, Mahieu Romboutsen, removed you. He took you to a boat that was waiting off Tobago. It was a pink of no particular nationality, if I recall. Just one of the dozens of small, independent hulls which trade in those waters. It carried you to the Dutch colony there, New Walcheren.
“And now you are here. But you are no longer working just for pirate coin. I have seen who comes here. The other man may be paying you in Dutch guilders, but behind them are Spanish reales.” When she blinked in surprised terror at his unfailingly accurate narrative, he nodded. “I did not lie to you. I know how this is done and what to look for.”
She shivered. “Have you told them? The Dutch?”
“If I had, where do you think you’d be now?”
“At the bottom of the sea with a millstone around my ankles.”
The man frowned. “Some of them might do that. Tromp would not. But no, I have not told anyone. Obviously.”
“So I . . . I may still escape?”
Diego shrugged. “If that is your wish. But you must also decide if you will redeem yourself, first.”
“How? To whom?”
“To yourself. You know what is going on here. Edel Mund’s death may have been an accident. But the door to violence has been opened. It will not close now. Your actions made that possible by making the slaveholders bold. And you are making it possible for them to hope to bring slavery here in full force. As only the Spanish can.”
She felt her eyes grow wide. So he knew that she had also been the channel through which the Frenchman from St. Christopher had communicated with the slaveholders, prior to the Kalinago attack.
He was nodding at her, as if reading in her eyes the realizations that were darting through her mind. “Yes, I know that, too.” He paused, pointed to his face, then hers. “Look at us. Look at our stations in life. Who might we have been, had we been born in places where the color of our skin was of no consequence? That is the world the up-timers and Tromp and the Danish princess are trying to bring about.”
“She’s a king’s daughter, not a princess.”
He swatted away the distinction with the same gesture he would have used to shoo an annoying fly. “Only one thing matters, right now. Will you flee for your life without stopping to help, without helping to set things right for people like us? Or will you redeem yourself by helping to change what is happening on this island? It may change nothing. Or it could change everything, could set these lands on better course so that we, or at least those who come after us, will not have to live in terror and suffering—or die trying to rise out of it.”
He started toward her; she dodged to the side.
But he continued past her to open the door. He looked back at her, his large brown-black eyes steady and unblinking upon hers. Then he closed the door behind him.
When she remembered to breathe again, she ran to the door, opened it to see where he went.
The street was empty.
Pointe Blanche, St. Maarten
Captain Cibrian de Lizarazu cursed his slow progress up out of the surf toward the narrow strand between the sheer rocks on the bayside flank of Pointe Blanche and the surly waves crowding around that promontory into St. Maarten’s Great Bay. Would the weakness inflicted upon him by that damned fever never relent? Was he to become a cripple like that busybody de Viamonte?
He shrugged off a helping hand offered by one of the newly arrived soldiers: eighty in total, half of whom were sappers. Well, at least the governor of Santo Domingo was a helpful busybody, although the sappers weren’t subject to his orders. And they had brought word that a far more senior captain than himself, some old warhorse by the name of Gallardo, would soon arrive with more troops of various types and would take overall command of St. Maarten’s land forces.
But in the meantime, the new troops were just what Lizarazu had needed to get the God-damned Dutch claim jumpers off of his island while it was still his island.
Panting as he finally dragged his feet up beyond where the waves stretched themselves out and disappeared, he saw the Dutch—well, the ones who were still alive—staked out in the sand. One, a heavy man, was screaming in agony. Sounds like a little girl, or a rabbit, he thought with a grin.
Off to one side, the trespassers’ Moorish slaves were huddled, shivering as if the setting sun was a dire omen for what would soon befall them, too. It wasn’t, not in any immediate sense: the Empire always needed more slaves. He�
��d have them interrogated, find out what they knew how to do. But for now . . . “Morca!”
His corporal came running over. “Yes, Captain?”
“Those boats we saw, did our skiff catch them?”
“No, sir. They both turned out to be sloops. Bermudan, from the look of their lines. But they went in different directions. One south, the other north. And that last one wasn’t set to run like the ships of the Somers Isles. She was rigged more like—well, like a pirate.”
Lizarazu frowned at the unexpected development. Why can’t anything ever be simple? “You mean ‘privateer,’ Morca. Remember that. One of ours, do you think?”
“No way to know, sir. Not running any colors.”
The captain looked after the boats. “Did both boats come from the same direction?”
“No, sir. Different directions. When they got enough breeze to run, they chased back along the headings that brought them here. They seemed to be as surprised to see each other as we were surprised to see them.”
Wonderful. A mystery. Well, maybe there were some clues. “What have you learned from the, er, prisoners?”
“They are from St. Eustatius, as you conjectured. They were salting fish, but I think they were here for another reason, too.”
“Yes, and what would that be?”
“I—I’m not sure. The leader, whom we are currently questioning”—more cries, then a meaty krakk-kk! and a long shriek—“keeps asking . . . well, sir, it seems like nonsense or delirium, to me.”
Lizarazu rolled his eyes, drew his pistol, and stalked to where the Dutchman was staked out. He waved at the surrounding soldiers to undo his bonds. “Sit him up,” the captain sighed. If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.
He looked into the Dutchman’s pain-clouded and ashen face. “You! What is your name? No, stop: I don’t care. Why are you here? And I don’t mean the fish.” He cocked the pistol’s hammer meaningfully.
