Isle of the Seventh Sentry

by Fortune Kent

  “I want to see you again,” Matthew said at last. “Soon,” he added.

  “Yes,” she said. She briefly pressed his hand and hurried to the house. Before going around to the unlatched window, she looked back. He hadn’t moved, stood in the moonlight looking after her.

  Had she been seen coming in? At the very last? The window opened easily, but when she was almost to her room, she saw a light quickly extinguished, a swirl of blue nightgown, a glimpse of blonde hair retreating into the hallway to the servants’ rooms. Alice? Beth shrugged and entered her room. She slept fitfully, asleep, awake, finding sound sleep only after she saw the light of morning on the window. Now wide awake, she threw aside the covers and went to face the day.

  After breakfast with Mrs. Jamison and before driving to Mass, she walked to the barn where Thunder made a habit of meeting her. Today he was nowhere to be seen. She walked past the pungent stalls. No Thunder. At the far door of the barn Mr. Bemis tipped his cap and Beth smiled. She crossed the stable area. No Thunder.

  “Looking for your dog?” John Price sat atop a rail fence notching a stick with a gleaming jackknife. His pale blue eyes stared down at her.

  “Yes,” Beth said. “He’s usually here. Of course, I’m very late today.”

  “Haven’t seen him since yesterday, about noon,” John Price said. He resumed whittling.

  She half-expected to see Matthew at Mass. He wasn’t there. After the service Andrew drove her to meet the Worthingtons at the Presbyterian church, a white wooden building with four Greek columns in front and a tan steeple topped by a weathercock. She sat on a bench between the church and the carriage house listening to a hymn quaver to the final amen.

  The benediction. A shuffling of feet filing out. Beth rose and watched the congregation cluster near the door, the women in capes, long coats, and wool dresses, the men top hatted and wearing black and gray suits. The contrast to her fellow Roman Catholic parishioners was evident. Where do I belong? she wondered.

  Jeffrey. He waited aside, aloof, while his grandmother chatted with the minister on the church steps. Why do I feel this excitement, this awareness? All day she had been telling herself she was anxious to ask him about the provisions of the will. To discover, if she could, what the landowners had decided in New York.

  She now knew these were mere excuses. She felt the color rise to her neck and face as she admitted to herself she wanted to see Jeffrey because he was Jeffrey and for no other reason. He needs someone, she thought. Someone to bring him more into life, to soften him.

  Jeffrey and his grandmother saw Beth and nodded and smiled their way through the dispersing crowd to her side. Jeffrey raised his hat and Mrs. Worthington held her hand. Beth smiled and lowered her head in what she hoped appeared a demure gesture. She looked at his boots. Highly polished leather. No imperfections, no scratches. She sighed, whether from relief or disappointment she could not be sure.

  Mrs. Worthington led them behind the church along a path bordering a small creek. The fronds of willows along the stream undulated in the breeze, some reaching down to brush the tops of the grave markers at the edge of the cemetery. Beth saw men and women strolling, voices hushed, between the precise rows of headstones. The river, below a steep bank on the far side of the cemetery, was gray and remote. Sentry Island was hazy in the distance.

  “Agnes Taylor,” Mrs. Worthington nodded at one of the headstones. “Consumption, four years ago. Her husband remarried someone half his age.” She shook her head in disapproval. “Harold isn’t keeping the Edwardses’ plot weeded the way he should. He hasn’t been the same since his mother passed on.” She nodded at a raw mound of earth. “Ida Horobin, passed away three weeks ago Wednesday. Takes a year for the dirt to really settle.”

  She spoke of the dead as she would of neighbors who had moved to another town and who might return at any moment. For Beth a cemetery had meant three reluctant journeys each year to the churchyard in a nearby village. For Mrs. Worthington it was an extension of her life.

  Death. How different were people’s attitudes toward death. Mrs. Worthington, not welcoming but accepting death as she accepted life. Matthew attempting to deny death, trying to breathe life back into the dead. And she, Beth, unaware, ignoring death all her life until the last few years had forced her to face its reality. She wished she could be like Mrs. Worthington, but knew she was too fearful of the unknown to readily accept the idea of death.

  The Worthington plot was marked by knee-high cement pillars connected with metal pipes. Mrs. Worthington sat on a bench just inside this fence with hands folded on her lap while Jeffrey strolled apart, hands clasped behind his back, looking off to the purple mountains to the south. Beth entered and knelt before the large headstone engraved with the names of Jared and Mary Worthington. She lowered her head, made the sign of the cross, and prayed for the repose of their souls.

  She didn’t remember them. Could she be Beth Worthington and have no memory of her own mother and father? Yes, she told herself, yes, it is possible. She had no memory of any mother or father so Jared and Mary could be hers. Thoughts of the Shepherds mingled with those of the Worthingtons, and she prayed for all of them.

  When Beth rose to her feet, she saw Mrs. Worthington sitting on a stone bench some distance away talking animatedly to a white-haired couple. Jeffrey still stood apart but he must have been watching her, for he immediately turned and walked to her side.

  He swept his hat in a semicircle over the headstones.

  “Graveyards depress me,” he said in his staccato way. “May we declare a truce, if only for today?”

  “No armistice is needed where there is no war,” Beth told him.

  His mottled brown eyes blinked. “I’m tired,” he said. “I don’t want to bandy words back and forth with you today. I’m willing to try to get along. Can’t you answer me with a yes or no?”

  Beth flushed. “Yes,” she said.

  “Good. I know I’ve neglected you, what with the anti-renters agitation and our New York trip. Would you like to go with me this afternoon? Perhaps take the horses. You ride, don’t you?” She nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I thought so. We could ride the trail to West Point; you’ll like the mountains this time of year.”

  “I’d very much enjoy going with you,” she said. “And I’d particularly like to ride to the river and go to the island, Sentry Island.”

  “No, you wouldn’t want to go there,” he frowned, the two lines creasing his forehead. “A dreary spot. If not West Point, why don’t we ride to the Hasbrook House in Newburgh where Washington stayed? I know the people who own the place, and they’d gladly show us through.”

  “I’d love to,” she said, “some other day. Islands fascinate me. And Sentry Island more than any other. Could we? Please?”

  “You’re very difficult,” he said. He kicked a stone lying on the path, and she watched it bounce down the hill and plop into the creek. “All right,” he gave in, “we’ll go to the island. After dinner.” The Worthingtons, Beth had discovered, ate Sunday dinner at midday.

  Following the meal and while Jeffrey saddled the horses, she called Thunder’s name but the dog did not appear. Jeffrey led the two horses to where she waited, his a chestnut stallion, Red Devil, hers a black mare named Lady Barbara. He carried a wicker picnic basket in one hand. They rode down the mountain, past the doctor’s house, crossing and re-crossing the creek rushing to the river. Jeffrey paused at a dam across the stream, and they looked down at the sluice leading to a mill’s water wheel.

  The mill was quiet, for this was a holy day, and they heard no creaking from the wheel or grinding of the millstones within.

  At the shore Jeffrey tethered the horses, and they walked over sand still wet from the ebbing tide. The boathouse, a low, weathered building, extended out onto the river. The wood around the lock had rotted away, and the door hung open.

  “Will we go straight over to the island?” Beth asked.

  “Let me show you,” Jeffrey said. He picked a
long stick from the beach and drew a line on the sand. He made a rectangle on the line halfway down. “We’re here at the boathouse,” he said. “Here’s the island.” He sketched a misshapen moon. “The ruins are at this X. We’ll row around the island so you can see the far side.” Dashes indicated his proposed route.

  Beth looked down at the completed map.

  “I must have the lock fixed,” Jeffrey said as he opened the door to the boathouse. The interior was cool, and Beth smelled the heavy odor of the river. Jeffrey slid back the bar holding the door to the water and hooked the wooden panel above his head. Beth sat in the bow of the rowboat while Jeffrey untied the moorings and pushed away. The island, shrouded in mist, was some hundred yards away.

  “When I was younger,” Jeffrey said, “I thought the island might be a good fishing spot. The water is deep and the current slow. The old men who fished the river for a living laughed. ‘You’re wasting your time,’ they told me, ‘you won’t catch fish near the island.’”

  “Sounds like superstitious nonsense,” Beth said.

  “I thought the same. So I fished there from a boat and from the rocks on the shore. I caught nothing. They were right.”

  He became silent, paying attention to his task. He rowed, Beth thought, as he seemed to live—with short, violent strokes. Yet he appeared not to tire, and in a few minutes they were well into the river. Should I offer to row part of the way? Beth asked herself. To overcome her fear of water she had often rowed on the lake in Ashtabula. But no, Jeffrey was probably like most men, and most men wanted women to be ornaments, not oarsmen. She decided to let Jeffrey do the rowing.

  Beth was surprised because she had thought that as they came closer the features of the island would become clearer. They did not. As they approached she saw the shore was either mud and small stones or serrated, shelf-like rock. The trees came within a few feet of the water and grew so close together their foliage seemed impenetrable. The undergrowth was tangled and lush, almost tropical. Above the trees hung a mist, a heavy dampness which steamed up from the island’s interior.

  Something was different about this island, Beth knew, and she became uneasy, restless, and yet she couldn’t put her finger on whatever disturbed her. “Jeffrey,” she said, “there’s a wrongness here, but what?”

  He raised the oars and let the boat drift ahead with its own momentum. “I wondered when you’d notice,” he said. “The birds. Look for the birds.”

  Then she knew. There were no birds swooping along the shore, none chattering among the trees, no seagulls or sparrows or blackbirds or blue jays, none at all.

  Jeffrey resumed rowing, and they passed beyond the jungle growth to the tip of the island where they went between the shore and a small outcropping of rock a few boat-lengths away. This narrow section of the island was as devoid of trees as the rest was overgrown. White skull-size rocks piled one atop another near the water while inland boulders as large as houses looked down on them.

  They rounded the point. “Look ahead at the end of the cove,” Jeffrey said. “The ruins.”

  They appeared, these ruins built to be ruins, more orderly than they had from the steamship, arranged in what looked like a semicircle of vine-covered pillars with broken archways between. In the center of the half-circle made by the pillars was a pyramidal structure with steps ascending on each side to a platform at the top.

  “We’ll dock here.” Jeffrey indicated a low jetty extending into the cove, the wet stones steaming in the sun. He maneuvered the boat until they lay alongside. When Beth wiped the moisture from her forehead, she glanced at Jeffrey and saw that his face was covered with beads of perspiration. She felt foolish and dismayed for insisting on being escorted to this godforsaken place.

  Jeffrey shipped the oars and stepped onto the slimy black surface of the jetty. “Hand me the line,” he told her, and he tied the boat to a metal ring embedded in the stones.

  She took his sweating hand, and he pulled her onto the slippery rock beside him.

  “Welcome, Miss Worthington,” he said, “to the Isle of the Seventh Sentry.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “The Seventh Sentry?” Beth asked. “I thought the name was Sentry Island.”

  “No, the people in the Hudson Valley call it the Isle of the Seventh Sentry. You’re right, though, many say Sentry Island. Seventh Sentry is hard to say without lisping.”

  “There must be a story behind the name.”

  “You haven’t heard of the seventh sentry?”

  “No,” she said, “at least I have no recollection.”

  Jeffrey shook his head. She noticed his questioning look on hearing her admission, but she did not elaborate. She had decided not to mislead him. If she didn’t remember the past, she would say so.

  “The story will make more sense after we visit the fort,” he said. His tone was conciliatory. “Here, let me go first.” They left the jetty, and Jeffrey led her along a barely discernible path toward the ruins. The trees had been cleared away long ago, but the sparse second growth only hinted at the eventual return of the forest. To her left Beth heard the river lapping on the shore, and all around her she smelled the stench of rotting vegetation. The mist lightly touched her face, and the high grass tugged on her skirt. At least, she thought, she had worn her older brown riding habit for this excursion.

  Jeffrey pointed over the water. “You see how the river suddenly narrows to pass through the highlands,” he said. “In 1777 General Howe and his British troops were in New York City, and Washington fortified this island to guard the route to Albany. The Continental army worked many months shipping huge stones here from the quarry on shore.”

  “Fort?” she asked. “Grandmother told me the ruins had been built as ruins.”

  “So they were. The fort came first, then was abandoned after the Revolution. Years later when George Krom wanted to build his arches and the altar, he chose the same site. His ruins needed the support from the stone foundation.” He pointed to a low wall of earth along the river broken by an occasional opening. “The cannons,” he said, “were placed in those apertures in the breastworks.”

  Beth smiled to herself. Jeffrey had never been so eager, so animated before. He had a young boy’s delight in being her guide—if only he could be this way more often.

  The ruins loomed over them. Beth and Jeffrey left the path, and beneath her feet the pitted stones of the old fort were covered with moss. Weeds flourished in the cracks. Above her head the symmetry of the pillars was broken by the circling vines reaching into the mist. The sun shone a faint yellow through the fog.

  She made her way past Jeffrey and across the rubble-strewn ground to the foot of the pyramid he called the altar. Ahead of her the sun’s rays pierced the upper branches of the trees like arrows plunging into the earth.

  Beyond the altar at the edge of the trees a narrow stone stair descended into darkness. Above the steps large stone blocks extended in both directions with vines and roots dangling over them from their covering of black dirt. Beth had the impression she was seeing a stone building which had been sucked into a morass until now only the roof remained in sight.

  In a flutter of excitement she ran forward to peer down the steps. Water dripped from the stone walls on both sides, and the stairs themselves disappeared into the gloom. She could not see the bottom.

  Jeffrey came to stand behind her. “The storage vaults,” he said. “For gunpowder and cannon balls.”

  “Can we explore them?” She took a few steps down before stopping to look back expectantly at him.

  “No,” he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t bring a light. You don’t want to go down, anyway. I’ve been inside, and there’s nothing except a passage leading to a series of storerooms.”

  Beth pursed her lips in disappointment. How did he know what she did or did not want to do? She must descend these steps and find out if an answer waited below in the darkness. She shook her head. Without a light she was helpless.

  “Come, let�
��s get away from this benighted place,” Jeffrey said. “We’ll find some sun and sit and eat—I’ve brought bread and cheese.” She paused before turning away from the vault to follow him. I’ll be back, she promised herself. I don’t know when or how, but I’ll be back.

  They returned to the boat, and Jeffrey took the wicker basket. They climbed among the rocks until he found a large flat surface where he spread a scarf before them, opened the basket, unwrapped the linen cloth, and laid out bread and cheese and wine. They still had no sun, for although the fog did not extend to this corner of the island, clouds had piled high in the west.

  He cut the bread with a hunting knife and spread the cheese and handed her a piece.

  “Ummmm, good,” she said.

  He brought two small cups and set them on the rock.

  “New York wine from upstate,” he said, pouring the deep-red liquid.

  She hesitated, being unused to drinking wine, then breathed deeply, drank, and coughed.

  “Sip the wine,” he told her, and she did and felt her lips pucker. The taste was sweet, and soon a glow spread within her.

  “The seventh sentry,” she reminded him.

  Jeffrey leaned back on one arm.

  “In the summer of 1777,” he said, “the British made their great attack to end the Revolution once and for all, a three-pronged drive designed to split the colonies in two. St. Leger marched east from Lake Ontario, General Burgoyne south from Canada, and Howe was supposed to come north from New York City They planned to join forces near Albany, separate New England from the rest of the colonies, and cut off and destroy Washington’s army.”

  Jeffrey stood and paced back and forth in front of her. He was tall, and Beth smiled inwardly at her feeling of diminutiveness. She wanted to be small and feminine and protected.

  “In July of 1777,” Jeffrey said, “St. Leger was advancing in the upper Mohawk Valley, and Burgoyne had the Americans in full retreat below Lake Champlain. Howe, in New York, loaded his troops aboard transport ships, ready to attack. The question was where. Washington was in New Jersey. Would the British strike at his army or drive directly up the river?”