Samona put Brown’s gun inside her shirt, and ran toward the shore, hands over her ears to stop the gurgling cries of the pirates. Thumps and crashes behind her made her spin around, but it was only King James and Amer, their faces as grim in the bright moonlight as she was sure her own face was. They didn’t stop running until they reached the marshy shore of the Schuylkill River.
Amer and King James stayed as quiet as they could rowing the jolly-boat up to the Osgood because of what King James had told them. Two more of Peggity Hank’s crew, it turned out, were left behind on the ship to ‘do some mischief.’ Sure enough, when King scrambled first up the ladder, a gruff voice called, “And ye’ve got it, then? Peggity Hank’s load? Caleb there behind ye?” Samona could hear thumps and cries coming from the stem of the ship.
“Right behind me,” said King James smoothly, as Samona had instructed him, then put his dagger to the man’s throat.
Another shadowy figure cried out and came running across the deck planks, cutlass in hand. Samona slung one leg over the bulwarks and cocked her pistol. “Hold up, you chuckle-headed fool,” she cried. “Lay down that blade before I put a musket ball in your brainpan.” The man stopped in mid-stride, and Amer relieved him of the sword.
Even in the dark, she could see the flash of Amer’s teeth as he smiled. “Why, you’re a right conscious rascal, Sammie. Your plan worked like a trump!”
Samona put the gun carefully in her belt. “Caleb and your partners won’t be coming back,” she told the two pirates. “They made a proper good dinner for the goriest bunch of goblins I ever saw. Now, where’s the captain?”
* * *
“Well?” said Amer, some days later, once they were inside their own cottage, leaving a grateful Captain Baldridge, King James, and crew in the harbor. Samona had seen to it she and Amer never had a moment alone on the ship. She needed the time to plan her speech.
She thought she saw humor in his eyes, and it made her feel optimistic. The words spilled out: the challenge with the button, the demon tree, the talk with the goblin mother. He hooted and laughed at that, declaring himself mightily intrigued by this new Talent. When she came to the part about the strange earth, and removed her scarf to hand it and its contents to him, Amer just stood with mouth agape. What she didn’t tell him, until the end, was the reason for the treasure hunt.
“Amer,” she said. “I had reason to worry that I might become a burden, so I wanted to add to our cache of funds in case of emergency during my confinement.”
“Your confinement?”
Samona put both hands on her belly. “By my guess, you’ll be a father in a little over seven months. I—I hope it’s happy news for you.”
Amer put a hand to his head and went to sit at his table.
“A baby. Our baby. Why, Samona, of course it’s happy news. I’m just surprised is all. You go clean up and dress yourself properly. I’ll tryout this lovely Chaos! Why, the Philosopher’s Stone is almost ours!”
Now I know, she thought. Now I see which of my surprises he deems most important. The knowledge was bitter as gall. But when she came back into the room, short damp hair in curls about her face, her favorite blue dress feeling oddly airy around her legs, Amer’s mood was much less jubilant. “Why, what’s wrong?” said Samona.
“It’s not going to work,” Amer said, prodding a glass athanor bubbling over a candle flame. He sighed and sank down in his chair, his eyes closed. “I’m no longer eligible for the Philosopher’s Stone. Ah, well.”
Despite her own pain, Samona wanted to comfort him.
She sat on the arm of his chair. “You were so proud before of your attitude toward material wealth. What made you change?”
Amer put one arm around her waist. The other hand he put on her belly. “This.”
Samona looked down into his face, barely daring to breathe. Did this mean ? “My . . . our baby?”
“Your news has made me realize I was fooling myself all along. Pretending such a cool demeanor. You’re the most important thing in my life, you and our new family. Which, after all, is as it should be. I want the best for you too much now to ever try for the Philosopher’s Stone.”
“Oh, Amer.” The wound in her heart healed over, leaving a few tears to leak from her eyes. She hugged his neck, kissing the top of his head. Bartering her only asset for that special earth, and now . . . Samona almost laughed at the trick events had played on her. Still, here in Amer’s arms, she felt secure enough. They would handle whatever happened.
She still basked in the glow of that feeling the next day when the knock came upon the door. She opened it to find two grand figures festooned with braid and ribbon and silver buttons.
“Captain Buttons—eh, Captain Baldridge! And King James! How nice you look! Please come in.” She patted her hair, covered now with a stylish cap.
“Morning, good lady. I have business with your brother Samuel and your good husband. Are they at home?” The captain gave Samona a polite glance, but King James was staring at her, perplexed.
“Captain, it’s me. I’m Samuel Goldman.” Samona took off the cap. “My real name, sir, is Samona Crafter.” She pulled a silver object from her apron pocket. “And here is something I’d forgotten to return. My apologies.”
Captain Baldridge looked at the button, jaw agape. He looked at Amer standing behind Samona. Amer smiled and nodded. “Sammie!” cried the captain. “Capital! A woman as crew aboard my own ship. Well, well.”
King James took Samona’s hand in his, bowed, and kissed it. He came up from the bow, laughing. “Oh, Sammie. You a woman all along. And here I think I finally meet me a real gentleman!”
“Oh. Such a surprise, dear lady, I forgot my reason for coming,” said the captain. He drew forth a bag heavy with clinking coins and handed it to Samona. “You may not know, Goody Crafter, but there was a reward for the capture of Peggity Hank Barlo’s crew. Those two chaps we had clapped in irons were more than a little bitter about the turn of events, and, well, one thing leading to another, they gave over on the rest of Barlo’s boys.”
Samona looked inside and saw a flash of gold guineas.
Her heart lurched. “Oh, Amer. It’s a small fortune.” Amer looked inside and gasped.
“I made good your request for the freedom of King James here,” continued the captain. “Offered him passage to Jamaica on the Chelsea Queen. But the fellow had other ideas.”
“It’s James King,” said the big man. “I’m a freeman now, no slave names for me.” He squeezed Samona’s hand in his huge one. “How. can I leave when I have such good friends in Boston!”
Anno Domini 1685
SAMONA had been passing Edwin Lapthorn’s house on Bridlepath Lane and she’d heard soft, heartbreaking moans coming from within. She knocked but no one answered.
She’d paused on the doorstep, uncertain what to do.
She and Amer had been married three years ago. When their first child was due, they’d left Amer’s beloved mountainside home and moved to this town of Rock Harbor, just to the south of Boston. Here there were medical doctors for their baby girl, and Harvard College nearby provided manuscripts for Amer’s researches into the properties of magic. The Crafters kept to themselves. The last thing they wanted was any trouble with their neighbors over witchcraft or alchemy. They needed a chance to rest and take care of their new baby, untroubled by controversies. They especially didn’t want trouble with Edwin Lapthorn, a jeweller who carried an unsavory reputation with him as a skunk carries scent.
But there was a child crying in Lapthorn’s house. Samona rapped at the door again, louder. “Hello? Is there anyone home?”
She knew little about Lapthorn, though there was much gossip about him in Rock Harbor in that year of 1685. People said Lapthorn had gotten into trouble in England. Nobody seemed to know just what sort of trouble, but something unsavory and perhaps uncanny was hinted at. He had
managed to escape before the King’s constables could arrest him, taking passage on the bark Dora out of Plymouth and coming to Boston. He lived quietly enough in nearby Rock Harbor, but there was that about him people didn’t like. Perhaps it was his lean, lantern-jawed face, black eyebrows that met in the middle, bloodless lips set into a humorless grin.
Samona wanted nothing to do with the man. But there was a child crying in his house, and she thought it might be in serious trouble.
She had to go in! She straightened, a tall, beautiful young woman with long black hair, dark eyes, a haughty, arresting face, and a figure of such charm that even her modest costume could not entirely conceal. She tried the door and found it was unlocked. She entered the high old house.
She came out ten minutes later, shaken, and went directly home. After checking on her own child, Amy, aged fourteen months, sleeping quietly in her crib, Samona went to the drawing room and told Amer about her experience. Her husband listened, dark eyebrows drawing together in the scowl that appeared on his face when he was forced to listen to tales of man’s inhumanity.
“I’ll have a word with Master Lapthorn,” he said. Putting on his overcoat and hat he went out. He sought out Edwin Lapthorn.
Lapthorn was just leaving Josiah’s Publick House on State Street when Amer came up. The two men had a nodding acquaintance but had never talked together.
“Sir,” Amer said, “a little while ago my wife had occasion to pass your house. She heard a child wailing. She took the liberty of entering—”
“Entered my house, sir? Just walked in?”
“That is correct, sir.”
“Quite a sizable liberty, I’d call that,” Lapthorn said. He was an immensely tall man, with a wiry mass of black hair pressed down by a tricorne hat. His face was weathered, reddened under the cheekbones from drink, and badly shaven. He had a long upper lip, pulled awry by a puckered scar that ran down the side of his cheek, which gave him a permanent sneer.
“Your wife had no right to enter my premises, sir.”
“Perhaps not, sir. But she found the child who lives with you was in trouble.”
“Douglas in trouble? The child is perfectly able to look after himself.”
“She found him screaming his head off and hanging by one foot from the top rung of the ladder to the root cellar.”
“I had no idea he could even get the door open! Clever little fellow despite his idiocy! The experience did him no harm, obviously. Made of India rubber, that lad is.”
“He’s flesh and blood, sir,” said Amer stiffly. “Like the rest of us. Your youngster deserves better looking-after.”
“The idiot’s not mine, you know,” said Lapthorn. “Left to me by my former housekeeper when she died of a sudden fever. Out of the goodness of my heart I agreed to look out for him. He eats better than many in this town. But even if I starved him, sir, yes, and whipped him, too, what goes on under a man’s roof is his own business and nothing to do with you. Your wife had no right.”
“A child’s safety was at stake,” Amer said stubbornly
“Even if that’s true, it’s none of your concern. Unless you choose to make it so.”
The man’s callousness, and his suddenly aggressive behavior astonished Amer. Lapthorn had his fists doubled; the scar on his cheek glowed. The situation was threatening to get out of hand. It was plain that Lapthorn was an ugly piece of work, and he was looking for trouble. Was it worth starting what might be a nasty situation for the sake of an idiot child who understood nothing?
“That’s my last word on it,” Lapthorn said. “And tell your wife to keep out of my house. If she comes in again uninvited, it may not be Douglas hanging by his foot from the root cellar.”
Amer drew himself up abruptly. He was thin, dark haired, intense. The forward-leaning tension of his body conveyed menace. His eyes were blue and glittery. The hair of his head seemed to bristle. He said, his voice dropping half an octave, “Sir, do you threaten my wife?”
The two men stared at each other for several moments.
Amer’s neck began to swell with a rage he was having difficulty controlling. Then Lapthorn broke the tension, laughing and turning away.
“ ’Twas but a pleasantry, sir. I would never offer violence to a lady. But I hope she will not essay my premises again, because a nasty shock might await her, and it would be none of my doing. There are defenses to my house, sir, which I had not set into place before this, but which I will do now. You are warned. Good day to you, sir.”
And doffing his hat, Lapthorn strode away.
* * *
Amer returned home and told Samona of his conversation. Samona thought for a long time. Her eyes were pensive, and her gaze seemed far away. She poked at the fire negligently, barely noticing when the end of the branch she used as a poker caught fire. Then she flung it into the flames and said, “I wonder what he is trying to hide.”
“His indifferent cruelty to Douglas, as I believe the child is called. What else could it be?”
“It wouldn’t be that,” Samona said.
“Why not?”
“It’s too trivial. Nobody around here cares about cruelty to an idiot child. Except us.”
“Come now, my dear. Some of the church folk around here would make it an issue if they knew.”
“There’s more going. on here than that,” Samona said. “I think our Master Lapthorn has other things on his mind. Something is going on in that house.”
“It’s none of our concern,” Amer said. “Each man is free under the King’s law.”
For the moment, Samona had to be content with that.
* * *
In Lapthorn’s house, the idiot Douglas sat on a little stool in the comer near the fire. He was big-headed and blank-expressioned with large, drooling mouth and small dull eyes. Douglas was a patient one, who could sit in a corner for hours, intently playing with a spider’s web, winding and rewinding it, never breaking the skein.
“It’s time,” Lapthorn said to him.
A look of consternation crossed the idiot’s face. You could have sworn he knew what Lapthorn meant. But he made no protest when Lapthorn led him to the special room, put him in his accustomed posture on the flagstones, drew the pentagram around him, and began to chant.
It seemed to take forever tonight. Then the candles flamed, though the air in the room was still.
It was the time Lapthorn had waited for, the great moment when the constellations had swung in their great circle to the correct astrological position. With Douglas in place on the flagstones, Lapthorn now made ready. The small altar in his back room, a room kept shuttered and locked to avoid any prying eyes, had long been prepared with the black candles and the specially treated mandrake root in its little pewter bowl. Lapthorn bowed down before the altar. He said, “I pronounce the words, O Shadrach, Asmodeus, and Belial, listen to me, give me this gift and I will repay you a thousandfold. And to bear witness to this, here is my blood.”
So saying, Lapthorn pricked his thumb with the end of a stylus. A bubble of blood swelled and then flowed down the instrument’s bronze side.
The candle guttered dangerously in its pewter holder. The window, with its parchment cover, creaked and strained at its latch as the wind pushed and tugged at it. The wind had long been his enemy.
“Come out,” said Lapthorn, speaking directly to Douglas.
A strangeness lit the idiot’s face. His features twisted. His mouth opened. From it issued a fine mist. It hung in the air, picking up rays of light from the dying candlelight, then swirled around his face. When it had cleared, the idiot’s face had changed.
“What is your name?” Lapthorn asked.
“I am Caspardutis,” said a voice from the idiot’s mouth.
“I was known in ancient Egypt. The laboratories of the alchemists knew me. I have conversed with Paracelsus and the Gr
eat Albertus.”
It was an elemental. These creatures had been known since earliest antiquity. They did not fit neatly into the theories of magic. They could not be said to serve either side.
“You have come in answer to my spell,” Lapthorn said.
“That I have. But I beg you to release me.”
“Not so fast, My fine ethereal friend! You know what I want.”
“The same thing you wanted last time,” the idiot said.
“And I will want it next time, too. What have you brought me?”
The idiot’s hands opened, displaying a handful of precious stones: several uncut rubies, a big sapphire, a small but perfect emerald, and a few lesser stones.
“Are they good?” asked Caspardutis.
“They’ll do,” Lapthorn said.
“Where did you get them?”
“I know a back entrance to the treasure of Ali Baba. But it is dangerous to go there.”
“You must go back at once and bring me more! And more after that!”
“For how long, Master?”
“For as long as I say.”
The idiot’s head nodded. Then his eyes blinked and closed.
His head drooped upon his chest. After a few moments, the head lifted again. The signs of intelligence were gone. It was Douglas again, until the next time he was inhabited by the spirit Lapthorn had captured.
* * *
Soon thereafter, Master Lapthorn opened his jewellery store in South Boston. It was an immediate success. People from as far away as Providence came to look at his fine rubies from Ceylon, his emeralds from Colombia, his pearls from the South Seas. To look and to buy. His sales were brisk, because, despite the growing difficulties between the Colonies and England, Boston was a prosperous small city and growing by leaps and bounds. There was money in the colony, and a great lack of goods to buy. Lapthorn’s jewellery was like a reminder of the beauty and decadence of old Europe, from which many had come recently. Despite the Puritan indictment of luxury and extravagance, people found reasons why they simply had to have this brooch or that necklace, or that unique ring.
The Crafters Book One Page 7