Isle of the Seventh Sentry

by Fortune Kent

  “You didn’t think I was clever, did you?” he asked. “And your Dr. Smith. I had to laugh. Does he take me for some kind of fool? I saw him examining that tree limb like he would a patient. Thinking I’d tried to kill Mrs. Jamison by dropping a branch on her.” He snorted. “If I’d a wanted to kill someone there’s easier and lots more sure ways. A crazy accident, and he sees an attempted murder.”

  His hand stroked her hair, and she felt his nails light on her cheek. He slid the cloth from her right breast. “Beautiful,” he whispered. With one finger he drew narrowing circles on her skin. “Sometimes I have to laugh at what people think of me,” he said. “Maybe you’re right, what I know you think, maybe I’m nothing but a simpleton. And maybe I’m not talking about me now. I’m not admitting anything, understand. But I had this idea. Got it from Anne’s father having the tavern, and every once in a while a woman stayed there for one or two nights, traveling through Kingston or visiting.

  “What will happen, I ask myself, if one of those high and mighty young ladies has a room to herself and in the middle of the night she finds a man with her? Sometimes he’d have to tie her or gag her, but what could she do? And after, if she says anything—and how many would—but supposing she did, the man says she asked me to come, invited me. Who’d believe her? Who’d believe the woman?

  “Clever, don’t you think?” He laughed. “Didn’t happen often, not too many girls traveling or staying alone, but I made it my business to know when they did, not only in town but in the great houses too. I’m not saying I did any of this, mind you, but I could of, couldn’t I?”

  He removed his hand and leaned over her, and she felt his tongue following the trail left by his fingers, over and under her breast in narrowing circles until he held the nipple between his lips, kneading, tongue probing. His hand went around her waist and down. “Come to me,” he said.

  “Don’t be a goose,” he told her, and the word pricked her memory. She pictured him high on the roof of the estate house drawing the rope from the chimney and the goose bursting into the air, feet tied as her feet were tied, the goose black, honking mournfully, and she gagged as she had then and her eyes opened wide, her mind reeling. Then she calmed, her thoughts clear, and she cried out, “Yes, yes, yes,” and he looked at her and smiled.

  “My arms,” she whispered, and he reached into his pocket and a knife flashed and her arms were free. She ran her fingers over his bare chest and around his neck. His hands moved between her legs and found them clasped tightly together, and the knife cut down and the cloth bindings fell away.

  “Wait,” she said and stood before him, stretching languorously, breasts free, and he leaned back watching, wary when she walked away until he saw her go not to the table with its candle but toward the stove.

  “I’m cold,” she said, warming herself. She stepped to the back of the stove and grasped the stovepipe with both hands, found it warm, not hot, yanked, and the pipe lurched but held. She pulled again and a section tore loose. She leaped aside to escape the soot, cascading to the floor from the pipe above. John was on his feet coming for her. She swung the pipe like a club, and the soot sprayed into his face.

  “Aghh,” he choked, hands to his eyes, and she ran, grabbing the candle, ran through the doorway and to the right along the corridor, slipping her arms one by one into the sleeves of the dress. She rounded a corner, candle still lit, floor hard on her stockinged feet, and only then did she realize she had come to the right and not the left, was going deeper into the vaults instead of to the stairs to the outside.

  The corridor ended in a vault sunken below the level of the floor. She turned and held the candle above her head and found blank stone walls on either side. From far back along the way she had come, she heard the thud of John’s boots and saw the wavering light from his lantern on the wall.

  His footsteps approached slowly, inexorably, as though with the sure knowledge that she could not escape.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Beth turned and ran to the end of the corridor where the light from the candle revealed a stone wall extending from the ceiling to the level of her waist. At her feet two steps led into a sunken chamber.

  She went down the steps and bent low to enter the vault. Inside she found a square cubicle six feet on a side, empty, with water glistening from the stone walls. Beth’s nose wrinkled at the fetid odors accumulated from the years of disuse and decay.

  A sense of recognition tantalized her, a fleeting, fugitive knowledge, perhaps triggered by the mustiness, or by her feeling of foreboding, or a forgotten past echoing in this chamber. I’ve been here before, she thought. But when? And with whom? She tried to capture the wisp of remembrance, but it floated outside the boundaries of her memory and she could not.

  Go on, she told herself, I must go on. Her fingers recoiled from the slimy surface of the rear wall, and, although she crouched low, cobwebs caught and clung to her face and hair. The vault closed her in, and she knew a helpless panic as she relived her childhood terror of being buried alive, entombed. When John Price’s footsteps reverberated around her, the sound was like the thudding of the dirt she had once imagined being shoveled on top of her coffin.

  Trembling, Beth turned right along the wall. A few minutes ago she had also gone to the right. Why, she wondered, had she run from the rooms of her imprisonment and fled instinctively to the right into this cul-de-sac when she knew the stairs and possible freedom lay in the opposite direction? She did not know.

  At the corner of the wall she found a narrow space no wider than her body, so cleverly concealed her fingers discovered the opening before she could see it.

  Beth held the candle inside, and the light reflected from another wall of stone. No way out. Wait, she was mistaken. She looked closer and saw not an ending but a ninety-degree turn. Her shoulders scraped the rough stone on both sides as she slid through. The slit widened and became higher, and she stood upright. Several feet in front of her a stair led down into unfathomable gloom. She had found, she hoped, a passage to another section of the fort.

  The light from Beth’s candle glowed weakly in the thin air, forcing her to keep her fingertips on the wall as she descended step by cautious step into the darkness. Behind her, John had entered the vault. His curses told Beth he had found her gone. In a matter of moments, she knew, he would discover the recessed passage and follow her. Take care, take care, her mind cautioned. Hurry, hurry, hurry, cried the hammering of her heart.

  At last she reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped from stone onto a level dirt floor. In front of her a tunnel, supported at the entrance by posts and beams of heavy timbers, gaped open as though inviting her into the womb of the earth.

  A glint of metal on a timber at the tunnel entrance caught her eye, and she reached down and found a thin oval piece of metal. A pin. She blew away the dust, rubbed the pin on her dress and saw a cameo-like face. The brooch. The lost brooch. She slipped the pin into her pocket.

  An elusive childhood memory teased her, almost substantial for an instant and then blowing away like smoke before the wind. Do my past and my future wait for me, she wondered, there in the inner darkness of the tunnel?

  Beth looked up and saw John Price at the top of the stairway. For a moment they were frozen in a tableau—Beth below, candle flickering in her hand, face streaked, gray dress torn and falling open, while far above, John stood with legs apart, face and hair dark with soot, the lantern raised in one hand, a black object in the other. The pistol! She had forgotten the pistol. He held the gun head high and called to her. “Beth,” she heard him shout. The rest of his words were indistinguishable amidst the echoes of the chamber.

  John lurched forward, almost fell, recovered, and started down the stairs. With a gasp Beth whirled and ran into the tunnel, the candle in one hand, her other hand shielding the low flame.

  The tunnel was slightly higher than her head and so narrow she could have easily touched both walls. Her stockinged feet sank in a thin layer of dirt,
and she looked to the side and above, surprised to find the tunnel was dry. When she glanced back over her shoulder, she saw dust rising like a mist.

  She ran on, slowing time after time to edge around or climb over piles of rock and dirt where the roof and sides had given way. When would she reach the stairway back to the fort? Deeper into the earth she ran, panting, face flushed and hot, arms and legs sore, each step an effort. The only sounds were the padding of her feet and John’s infrequent shouts exaggerated by the close confines of the tunnel. On and on she ran, but there was no way out.

  Then she knew. She knew where the tunnel must lead, or must have led at one time, and why such tremendous effort had been spent in digging it. Built more than threescore years ago, the tunnel was a link between shore and island, a secret route to and from the fort.

  No wonder the English ships patrolled in vain while the Tory raiding party searched the fortifications for the missing sentry. This was the answer to the riddle. She was in the escape route of the seventh sentry. The warning to the Continental army had been given, not by means of a lucky escape across waters guarded by the English, but by careful prearrangement through this tunnel beneath the Hudson. For surely she must be below the waters of the river now, probably more than halfway from the island to the shore.

  What awaited her there? Could she find a way to escape or had the exit been sealed many years ago? Her mind filled with images of the river over her head, the water surging back and forth with the tide, pressing down with untold force, always down, seeping into the mud and sand, into every crack and crevice, probing for a fissure, trying to force its way into the tunnel to fill and destroy this unnatural shaft far beneath the surface.

  Beth stopped. In front of her the tunnel split in two like the arms of the letter Y, both branches equal in size, supported by a framework of timbers crossing and re-crossing above the junction. Which way? She started to the right, hesitated, turned to the left. Her instinct told her nothing. To the right, she decided, always to the right. She considered laying a false trail into the mouth of the other tunnel, but a quick look told her John was too close behind.

  After a few yards the tunnel narrowed and the walls became rough and jagged as though completed in haste. Had she been mistaken, come the wrong way? Was this a final dead end, the result of an abortive burrowing that had encountered impenetrable rock? John was almost upon her, some ten yards away. He called to her, and she looked back and saw him raise the gun, heard him shout again, the gun pointed over her head, threatening. And then, incredibly, he pulled the trigger, the bullet embedding harmlessly in the tunnel roof.

  Why had he fired? To frighten her, to freeze her into immobility? Did he really know what he had done, or did he act on impulse to show that he, John Price, must not be ignored? Beth never knew.

  The shot deafened her for a moment, the sound like the roar of a battery of cannons fired at close range. Her eardrums ached, her head pulsed. The very air seemed to expand and surge around her in wave after wave.

  Through the gun smoke she saw John standing, stock-still, stunned by what he had done. A rumbling rolled over her head, the sound within the very earth itself, and the tunnel shaft quivered. The ground shook under her feet, and a beam, halfway between John and her, shook loose with a splintering crack, one end crashing to the ground to lie diagonally across the tunnel.

  The rumble died away and there was no sound, like the stillness before a holocaust. She saw John lean across the barricade and place the lantern on the tunnel floor. He began to clamber over. She heard a murmur, a whisper of sound on her side of the fallen timber. Alarmed, she searched above her head and located the stream of water, inconspicuous, innocuous, no larger than her little finger, arching feebly from high on the wall to splatter into the dirt in the middle of the passage.

  As she watched, the stream widened slowly, inexorably gathered strength, She saw John, poised astride the beam, watching too, fascinated, as the jet grew until it was as thick as her wrist, spewing forth, larger and larger, a torrent now, pouring forth with all the power of the great river behind it, cascading earth and rocks to the floor of the tunnel, splashing and spreading, rising. She no longer saw John, only the water rushing in.

  Her feet. The water seeped about her toes, soaked her stockings, rose to her ankles. She realized her danger and ran deeper into the tunnel. A doorway blocked her, and she gripped the door with one hand and pulled. The door swung open and she was inside a high chamber, walls disappearing into murky darkness above, timbers piled on one side, a door to the right, a door to the left.

  She entered and the candle flame inclined toward her and went out. Desperately, she reached in her pocket for the matches. Gone. She searched, her fingers reaching here, there. She felt the brooch but no matches. She was without light, alone, the water a steady roar outside, already forcing its way into the room, wet and cold on her feet.

  Beth dropped the useless candle and heard it splash, ran and opened the door on the right, and found a hollow indentation ending in a dirt wall. She felt her way across to the door on the left, found the same, went back to the door she had entered, struggling through the water surging into the room, pushed but could not move the door against the pressure of the water. She retreated to the far end of the chamber, the water rising higher and higher, to her knees and above, roiling about her. No way out, and she had the certain knowledge that in a few minutes she would no longer be able to breathe.

  She screamed, a cry of desperation, the water to her waist, dress pulling soggily down from her shoulders. She screamed again, and in that instant the past returned. One moment her mind was closed, the next the events of her childhood spread before her, not recalled one by one, laboriously paraded from their resting places in the past, but there, absolutely hers to know and keep.

  Jeffrey is my brother, she told herself. For she was Beth Worthington. She knew this now with irrevocable certainty. Jeffrey is my brother, she repeated.

  The twin memories of being entrapped lay one over the other, confused, and she sorted them in her mind. The first when she, Beth, discovered the tunnel when she wandered from her father while they explored the island, returned another day with a light to find this chamber, alone, unable at first to reopen the door, thinking herself entombed, crying, screaming, at last the door pushing outward and she was free.

  The second memory, months later on the ship, the three doors all closed, Beth knowing her mother and father and Jeffrey were locked within, the water rising about her, finally sweeping her away. Then occurred the only gap in her new-found memory, for she recalled nothing after the shipwreck until the warmth of the fire in the kitchen and Mrs. Shepherd bending over the stove.

  At last she had the answer to her past, knew the truth, but too late, for the water rose inexorably. Jeffrey, Jeffrey, she thought, seeing herself pulling on the stateroom door. A timber struck her leg, and her mind snapped to the present. She held the plank with one hand, the water reaching to her breasts, and floated up on the timber with the water swirling about her. She reached one hand over her head and touched the ceiling.

  The room was completely dark, the candle long since washed away, and she remembered the flame bending and dying and, memory lain pattern-like on top of memory, the flame of long ago flickering and blowing out when she entered this room, and she knew a surge of hope. Perhaps from somewhere a draft blew into this crypt-like chamber.

  Beth maneuvered the log so she was next to the wall, body wet, shivering, the fear crowding all else from her mind. She felt numbly along the wall foot by foot, the water so high that when she reached the corner of the first wall and found nothing, she had only headspace between the water and the roof. She started along the next wall, fingers digging into dirt, clutching stones, finding nothing. Beth went on to the third, lying on her back with her face upward, body completely immersed. Would she have time to complete the circuit of the room?

  Her hand reached for the wall and found nothing. Then she found a space, search
ed again, and knew there was an opening. She pushed her way inside what seemed to be a narrow shaft, shoved herself farther within until the log bumped to a stop. Beth crawled from the water and up along a slanting corridor, the dirt loose and dry, crawled on her hands and knees. She saw a dim light above, keyhole-size, and pushed her hand through and found sticks and brush beyond. She shoved the loose earth aside with both hands and thrust her head through the hole, and then her shoulders, raised herself up, and she was in the undergrowth and could see across the beach to the boathouse stark in the light of early morning.

  She tried to stand, stumbled, and fell face down on the sand. Her eyes closed and her head whirled around and around and around. And then nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When she awakened the room was dark. Coals glowed in the fireplace, and Ellen nodded beside the bed. My bed, Beth told herself, in my room in my home. She tried to sit up, but the dizziness returned and the room spun about until she lay back and closed her eyes. “Beth Worthington,” she murmured. “I’m Beth Worthington.” She slept.

  She woke to daylight and saw, through a veil, Grandmother Worthington and Matthew whispering by the doorway. She reached to her face to remove the veil, found none, and shook her head, puzzled. Matthew walked to the bed and placed his cool hand on her forehead.

  “A bad dream,” he told her. “Remember, the whole time on the island was only a bad dream.” She tried to smile at him, and her eyes misted and again she slept.

  “I’m hungry,” she said to Alice. She was awake once more, wide awake this time with the pillows piled behind her back. Alice nodded.

  “It’s so good to see you yourself again,” Alice said. “And I really meant what I said before. About being grateful for what you’ve done. I hope you believe me.”