The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles (46 page)

He moved a step closer.

“A dollop of punishment, a dollop of pleasure—all at the same time, what d’you say—?”

He reached down, crooked his hand around his own reddened flesh. From beside the bunk, he crooned to her:

“Come on, now. Come on. Be good.
Give us a kiss
—”

This time Anne Kent screamed the wild wail of hysteria. But Rackham only laughed as he climbed on top of her.

She awoke in the fouled bunk sometime near dawn.

She had never hurt so terribly in all her life. Not even at the height of her labor when she bore Abraham. She felt almost destroyed by the repeated punishings Rackham had inflicted on her all night long, beating her and forcing her legs apart each time, tearing and plunging in her until the pain became so intense that it turned to a perverted blessing; a sort of drug to deaden some of the anguish.

Disconnected thoughts flickered through Anne’s mind as she tried to climb from the bunk, fell when
Gull
rolled sharply. She groped for the captain’s table. It took her almost two minutes to pull herself to her feet.

Through the oval stern windows she saw the steep-sided hills and valleys of the ocean.

And no land anywhere.

She brushed hair from one eye, leaned on the table, stared down at the blood that had dried along the inside of her left thigh. On her breasts three vivid blue-yellow bruises showed.

She grew aware of intermittent sounds. The rush of water against the hull; the stamp of sailors’ feet overhead; a muffled yell—

In a weak voice she repeated her husband’s name. Her child’s. Her husband’s again, as if the litany would somehow rescue her; waken her from this unbelievable nightmare of captivity and pain—

She hammered on the door. Tugged. Wrenched—

Bolted. On the outside.

She opened one of the oval windows, smelled the salt tang and watched the wake foaming white.
Gull
was running through a moderately heavy sea.

After staring at the water for a moment or so in a forlorn way, she latched the window, slipping and falling once more as she negotiated her way back to the table. She sank into the bolted-down chair, on the brink of another fit of uncontrollable weeping. She hurt; she hurt so terribly—

Then, out of her pain emerged a different sort of emotion.

Rage.

Rage at the vile way in which she’d been used.

Rage—and a determination not to surrender to despair while one breath was left.

All right, she said to herself. Think, now. Hard as it is, if you want to see Philip again—see Abraham again, ever—
think!
—

Rackham would return to the cabin eventually. But how could she get
out
of the cabin?

Only by eluding him. Disabling him, even.

If she managed to gain the deck, she might—
might
be able to convince a few of the crew to side with her; possibly put back to Boston. Rackham’s boasts about the loyalty of his men might not apply to every single one—

A slim, almost impossible chance.

But what else was there?

She began to turn her head slowly, searching for a weapon; any weapon to hold Rackham at bay—

All at once she realized that she’d failed to see the one serious flaw in the scheme. Rackham would never allow her on deck more than a moment if he could follow her.
If he—

Hair hanging down into her eyes, Anne Kent shivered. She wiped her mouth. She literally forced the completion of the thought:

If he were alive.

Remembering something, she raised her head. She stared at the lantern swaying from the beam hook. The lantern was paned with pebbled glass.

Rackham would notice a broken stern window instantly. But he might not notice a broken lantern pane—

Whimpering a little because the effort hurt so much, she knelt on the table. Groped upward—

The pitch of
Gull
nearly toppled her off. She managed to seize the lantern, twist it slightly. She bit down on her lower lip and struck her knuckles against the pebbled pane on the side away from the door.

She inhaled sharply. Someone was coming along the companionway!

She started to scramble off the table. The footsteps came closer—

Then passed by, and faded.

Panting, she waited a few moments. Then she hit the pane again.

And once more, harder—

Soon after, she lay in the bunk, her naked back to the door, her body curled not only to feign sleep but to hide her left hand that held the shard of glass. Her right hand bled steadily onto the stained bedclothing.

She lay as still as possible, thinking of Philip’s face, and Abraham’s. She tried not to dwell on how much she hurt. Or on how the pain might slow her; ruin her sole chance—

She lay with her eyes closed and her heart beating in a fast, irregular way and her ears straining for a sound of Rackham returning.

The bolt rattled. Anne tensed.

Her right hand hurt horribly. She’d gashed it breaking the glass and carrying the shards to Rackham’s desk, closing its drop front to conceal all but the piece she gripped in her left hand.

She heard hard breathing as the door opened. Heard Rackham’s heavy tread.

“Having a spot of rest, my girl?”

Philip,
she thought,
pray for me. I’ve just one chance at him
—

“Come along, wake up, let’s see how you came through the evening—”

Rackham’s hand closed on her left shoulder, pulling her over. He groped past her forearm to pluck at a nipple—

And went white as Anne shot out her left hand with all her remaining strength, tearing the sharp edge of the glass across his face once, twice—

“Goddamn you for a deceiving whore!”
he screamed, knees buckling. He slapped hands over his face. The glass had pierced his left eyeball.

Pink fluid leaked between Rackham’s fingers. His slitted right eye began to quiver in involuntary spasm.

Anne started to crawl from the bunk. Rackham was teetering back and forth, cursing and pushing at his ruined eyesocket as if he could somehow stop the leak and bleeding. She ducked as he flailed at her with one arm. She dodged by him, ran—

She almost made it to the unbolted door. The deck tilted sharply. She lurched backwards against Rackham.

The lower half of his face was drenched red. His lips spewed unintelligible words. He grappled her around the waist, his spittle and blood running down her arm, her breasts, her belly—

Making wheezy sounds, Rackham hauled her around the table. Shreds of tissue hung from the hole in the left side of his face. His pulled-down right eye glared with beast’s pain as he lifted Anne bodily, started to hurl her away from him toward the stern—

She dug fingers into his face, felt one slip into the pulpy socket.
Gull’s
bow rose, coming out of the trough of a wave. Rackham’s thrust carried him along, stumbling, screaming as Anne kept her clawing hold on his face.

Too late, Rackham tried to release her. They fell together, against the glass of an oval window that burst outward at the impact.

She let go then, both of them plunging toward the boiling white of the wake. She heard Rackham’s dreadful shriek of fear but she had no time for fear; no time for anything save a last strident cry of the soul:

Philip, I love
—

The water smashed her and took her down.

A
CLOCK TICKED IN
his mind. Ticked ceaselessly, hurrying him another mile, then another.

The clock drove him on when his exhausted body almost refused. It woke him early every day, false dawn or sooner, the time when the spring air was piercingly cool and cardinals were just beginning to swoop through the waving meadowgrass. A mouthful of dried corn from the haversack—a twist or two of jerked beef bitten off and washed down with canteen water taken from a bubbling creek—then he was off again, mounted on the big bay he’d purchased at the Will’s Creek trading station.

He’d chosen the horse for stamina rather than speed. But as the days warmed, speed became his paramount concern. He began to push the horse harder than he should.

In small valleys between the ranges of mountains, he’d sometimes stop of an evening with settlers—one family, or several living in close-clustered cabins. He’d luxuriate in the comfort of a slab-wood chair beside a smoky hearth constructed of mud-plastered sticks.

And always, he’d ask the people a variation of the same question:

“Do you know the day of the month? I reckon it to be about the fourteenth, but I had a fever for three days after I crossed Savage Mountain and may have lost track somewhat—”

“It’s the sixteenth.”

And the clock ticked louder, a tormenting rhythm reminding him that it might already be too late. He’d be up and gone from the settlement before sunrise, ignoring the healed wound in his left side that still ached when the air was cold.

The first week or two, traveling across the Blue Ridge that turned all smoky indigo in the twilight hours, then up through the meadows along the meandering Shenandoah, he’d wondered if the prophecies put to him before his departure had not been wholly correct. Maybe he
was
a madman to set out alone.

True, he was well enough equipped. And he faced little risk of Indian attack this far south. Most of the fury of the British-incited Six Nations was focused miles to the north, across the tier of tribal towns from the valley of the Genesee to the valley of the Mohawk in York State.

Yet there were many other ways for a lone man to perish in the wilderness.

And he was inexperienced; possessed no forest skills as such, only his rifle and a compass and a couple of sparsely detailed maps.

But he had an almost demonic will to succeed. To follow and find the man who had warily put trust in him; the man who now surely felt that trust betrayed. He kept going when rainstorms drenched him; stopped only when the fever and flux made his head spin and his bowels run until he was so weak he felt he could never stand up again.

But somehow he did, listening to the great clock buried in his mind; the clock ticking and ticking the hours and days like whip-strokes being laid on.

He followed the trails that wound up the dark, forested grade of Little Allegheny Mountain, then Savage Mountain where the fever felled him a second time and he lost another three days, too feeble to do more than lift corn kernels to his mouth.

At last he reached Allegheny Mountain, in the highest range. The wooded peaks looked almost black against the April sky. Bobolinks wheeled over him and hares jumped in the brush as he climbed the slope on horseback, sitting quite tall on the bay, the Kentucky rifle held one-handed across his thighs. He was never more than a foot or two from the rifle, even in the pleasant green valleys of cabins and small tilled fields.

As the clock beat, something burned out of him. An older self became a stranger.

After weeks on the trail, his deerhide trousers and shirt felt not stiff but supple; a second skin. His flesh took on a darker tone, changing from the dead white of the winter sickbed through the burned red of the first days of exposure to the sun and wind and beating rains. When April came to an end, his cheeks had a mahogany shine. Not a single extra ounce of flesh remained on his body. Strangely, the new gauntness didn’t give him an unhealthy appearance, but the opposite.

On the downslope of Chestnut Ridge, beyond the Great Meadows where General Washington had once built a fort to withstand a siege by the French, the bay horse broke its leg stepping in a burrow. He shot the animal and left it in a grove of shimmering mountain laurel and went ahead on foot, along a trail that should bring him to the junction of the two rivers—the Monongahela flowing up from the south, the Allegheny rushing down from the north—

If
his compass and maps were correct.

But it had to be May already. The breathtaking beauty of the mountains and the intervening green valleys no longer exhilarated him. The clock in his mind beat louder—

George Clark had said he would depart from the forks in mid-April or early May.

He was proud of having come this far alone. Proud of surviving on sheer persistence, with not one drink of liquor since he’d left the tidewater. Those times when he’d sickened and lay shivering in the night woods astir with unfamiliar, unseen creatures, he’d wanted a taste of alcohol so badly his throat burned.

But he had gotten through without it. He’d summoned up resources in himself long unused. There was deep satisfaction in finding them still present, ready to lend him the stamina and stubbornness he needed for the trek.

Yet even that pride was fading as he plodded on foot, fearing—knowing—he’d be too late.

The weather changed from spring sunshine to cool, windy gray as he followed gullies where black coal-veins showed along the eroded walls. He slept less and less every night, tossing by the small fire he always built with his chip of flint and his little steel bar and the supply of tinder shavings kept carefully dry in his haversack along with his powder and ball. Dozing, knowing he must rest but wishing he didn’t need to, he’d hear a howling off in the trees, and occasionally see a glittering animal eye reflect the firelight. The wolves smelled him. They came to prowl close by. But the blaze kept them at a distance.

As he came out of the woods one gray morning, a farmer’s wife guiding a plow on a poor, cleared patch of land reached for her musket lying a few feet away. She watched him warily as he approached.

He touched the floppy brim of his old loaf-crowned hat—a gift from a family for whom he’d chopped some wood in return for dinner at the start of his trail in Maryland. He tried to smile in a cordial way:

“Morning, ma’am. My name is Fletcher. I’m headed for the fort at the forks. Can you tell me how far that is?”

The lean, weary-looking woman, thirty or so but already minus most of her teeth, leaned on the plow handles while the dray horse clopped a hoof impatiently. He saw one of the woman’s palms, ugly and moist with old and new blisters.