Dawn on a Distant Shore

by Sara Donati

  The innkeeper showed them to their rooms, a man as long and thin as a birch sapling with a fringe of hair around his ears and the habit of addressing his feet when he spoke. Elizabeth immediately shed her shoes and disappeared with the babies behind the bed curtains while Curiosity directed servants who came with trunks and baskets, trays of food and tea, and the first buckets of hot water. Squirrel went straight to the window to watch the crowd below them.

  Nathaniel joined her. Although the old clock in the hall had showed it to be more than eight in the evening, it was full light still.

  “We’re coming into the longest days,” he said.

  She looked up at him and it took Nathaniel by surprise, as it often did, to see her for what she was: a pretty girl, tall and straight. Only five years younger than her mother had been when he set his sights on her.

  “You’re going out, aren’t you. To that tavern the exciseman told you about. We passed it on the road here.”

  He nodded. “This far north it won’t be dark for a good hour yet, but then I’ll have to go. There’s a livery over there where I can rent a horse, or buy one.”

  She looked back out over the square. “I know you have to ask about the Jackdaw, but it worries me.” She said it in Kahnyen’kehàka, to make it more true, to make him listen.

  Nathaniel answered her in the same language. “Maybe your grandfather is nearby. Maybe he’s looking for us.”

  Below them five ladies had come into the square in the company of redcoat officers. The crowd parted for them, and Nathaniel got a better look. Young women richly dressed, each of them wore a broad band across the breast, blue in color with white script: God Save the King.

  He was in Scotland, and he was not: Nathaniel felt himself sixteen again, in those first years of the war, when the Tories still had a grip on New-York. He had seen this kind of display before. Loyalists parading silk banners for old George, determined to make the world England, even if they should have to die to do it. He had never thought to see the like again, and certainly not in Scotland. Not his mother’s Scotland, or the Scotland Robbie had fought for on the battlefield at Culloden. Or even the Scotland Angus Moncrieff had talked about hour after hour in the Montréal gaol. Yet here it was, proof that those stories had told only part of the tale.

  It’s none of our concern, he reminded himself. Don’t let yourself get caught up in their business.

  Hannah slipped her hand into his, and he squeezed it.

  Just next to the growing pile of refuse that would become the bonfire, workmen had begun building something that looked to Nathaniel like a makeshift gallows.

  “Look, Da,” Hannah said. “That man in the tall hat, there by the well. He’s got a great doll dressed like a man. What are they going to do with it?”

  It was a doll, one made of bound straw and rags. A shaggy old wig had been tied to the head, and it was dressed in breeches and a loose shirt. A board had been hung around the neck, and on this “Th. Paine” had been painted in large letters. The man held the doll over his head like a trophy, and then he jumped up on the platform to show it to the crowd. With a flourish, he turned it around so that they could read the board on the back: “The Rights of Man.” A shrill whistle of approval, laughter; the ladies put their gloved hands together.

  “Da?” Hannah was looking at him.

  “They can’t put their hands on Tom Paine, so they’ll hang him in effigy,” Nathaniel said. “And then they’ll burn him. To celebrate the English victory over the French.”

  “Boots,” Nathaniel called. “The servants are all gone. You can come out.”

  Elizabeth threw back the curtains and climbed down from the feather bed. She left the twins where they were, fed and content to babble at each other for the time being. They were in need of clean swaddling and a bath, and so was she. But first she must eat.

  She paused a moment to study the room. It was of a good size, well furnished with mahogany furniture and a fine carpet. Almost certainly these were the best lodgings to be had in Dumfries, but Nathaniel still must bow his head or knock it on the door frame as he came and went.

  “Where is Curiosity?”

  Hannah pointed with her chin toward the closed door to the adjoining room. “Hot water.”

  “Of course.” Elizabeth made diversions around trunks and baggage on her way to the table, where Nathaniel offered her a tankard. She wrapped her hands around the cool pewter and sniffed. Small beer, sharp and yeasty. The smell of it told her she was in Britain again, as nothing else could.

  “Sit.” Nathaniel pulled gently on her elbow.

  “I’ve been sitting more than half the day,” she said. “Let me stretch a bit. And tell me, what is all this?” There were six trunks she did not recognize, in addition to their own few things.

  “Giselle Somerville’s baggage,” said Hannah. “Moncrieff said that Captain Pickering did not want them, so he gave them to us.”

  “How very strange. Without first asking if we cared to have them?”

  Hannah shrugged, her eyes sliding over Elizabeth’s gray travel dress. It was one of the three she had left Paradise with, and like all of them it showed the strain of the journey.

  Elizabeth reached for the platter of cold beef. “I will not wear her finery. If we come to the earl in tatters, it is his own doing. I daresay he will receive us anyway.”

  “Otherwise we’ll just turn around and head home,” Nathaniel said dryly, peering suspiciously into a bowl of pickled onions.

  A knock at the door, and the innkeeper appeared. He bowed hastily, his pate flashing as round and white as a clockface. “May I inquire, is everythin’ in order? Do ye require aught else, sir?”

  “Mr. Thornburn.” Elizabeth addressed him directly, in a tone she knew he could not mistake. “Please see to it that these trunks are removed. Take them to Mr. Moncrieff, for they do not belong to us.”

  The innkeeper’s head bobbed. “Mr. Moncrieff is across the way at the Globe, ma’am, takin’ a drink wi’ the Poet. But I’ll see tae it directly.”

  Hannah’s brow creased. “The Poet? Does Dumfries have its own poet, then?”

  “We do indeed, miss. We count Rab Burns as our own. Did ye no’ make his acquaintance when he came aboard the Isis?”

  “Robert Burns?” Nathaniel sat up straighter. “The exciseman?”

  “Aye, the verra one,” said Mr. Thornburn, stroking his chin whiskers thoughtfully. “An exciseman, and Scotland’s greatest poet, forbye. Is his verse kennt sae far awa’ as America, then?”

  Hannah put her hands flat on the table and she sang without hesitation, her voice steady but a little rough with disuse:

  Ye flowery banks o’ bonnie Doon,

  How can ye blume sae fair;

  How can ye chant, ye little birds,

  And I sae fu’ o’ care!

  Mr. Thornburn’s jaw sagged, and then snapped sharply closed. “A Red Indian wha’ kens Rab Burns’s verse. It’s aye true, then, they can be civilized.”

  Before Hannah could respond, Nathaniel had stepped between her and the innkeeper. He said, “We’ll thank you for moving the trunks. There’s nothing else we need.”

  “Aye, sir, as ye wish.” Mr. Thornburn bowed again. At the door he hesitated, casting one last inquisitive look at Hannah, who raised her chin at him and stared, all indignation.

  For a moment they were quiet, listening to the crowd in the town square. Then Elizabeth reached over and put her hand on Hannah’s.

  “I’m afraid you will hear many such terribly ignorant and rude things while we are here,” she said. “Those who think themselves to be civilized are not always particularly intelligent, or rational.”

  Hannah nodded, the muscles in her jaw working silently. “I should have listened to you,” she said finally. “I should have stayed at Lake in the Clouds.”

  Elizabeth saw Nathaniel tense, as she herself tensed. “I cannot deny that you would be safer at home,” she said. “But you belong with us, and I am glad that you are
here, just the same.”

  What Elizabeth wanted most in the world was to bathe in privacy and then to climb into the feather bed to sleep tucked up against her husband. It had been so many months since they had shared such a large and comfortable bed, and this half-day journey from the firth had been more difficult than the last few weeks on the Isis.

  But it was an idle wish. The twins needed bathing, and more desperately than she did; the servants came again to remove the trunks, clear the tables, lay fires, empty cold bathwater and bring in new. Curiosity insisted on sorting through all their clothing, separating out those things that needed immediate laundering, and Hannah determined that one of the maids had an inflamed eye that must be treated with a particular herb the Hakim had given her, which required a long search through all her parcels.

  Nathaniel stayed clear of all of this by keeping watch at the window. Dumfries celebrated its delight with the Royal Navy by having every man of consequence climb up onto a platform and give a speech, and Nathaniel reported now and then on particularly absurd or witless turns of phrase, of which there were not a few. At one point a very drunk old man leaped up into the group of men on the stage and began to sing so loudly that for a moment the crowd stilled to listen for a few wobbling notes.

  “Mick Schiell! Ye can sing nane!” The shout was accompanied by a well-aimed apple, and the old man gave in to the crowd and climbed down again so that the speech-making could continue.

  Hannah was listening closely. At one point she looked up from her basket of herbs with a confused expression. “How can a frog be papist?”

  “‘Frog’ is a disrespectful term for the French,” Elizabeth explained. “Most of France is Catholic.”

  Curiosity made her own disrespectful sound. “I don’ know why it is folks are always stirrin’ things up. Always lookin’ for a way to get bloody.”

  Hannah pursed her mouth thoughtfully. “It’s not much different from home.”

  “True enough. We got enough trouble of our own, don’t need to go lookin’ for any fresh foolery.”

  But she met Elizabeth’s eye when she said this, and there was a ghost of a smile there, a kind of weary acceptance. She got up, and spread her skirt smooth with her hands. “I’m tired,” she announced. “And I cain’t deny, that bed looks mighty sweet. I’ll wish you all a good rest.”

  But even with the twins settled and Curiosity and Hannah in the next room, Elizabeth did not have Nathaniel’s full attention. And how could she, when he finally lowered himself into hot water laced with soap? And so she took a turn at the window, her own attention divided between Nathaniel and the scene below in the square. Thomas Paine, or what was left of him, twirled at the end of a rope while boys pelted him with rocks and dung.

  “Dumfries doesn’t suit you, Boots.”

  She laughed. “Did you think it might?”

  Nathaniel slid down deeper into the tub in a futile attempt to submerge his shoulders and knees at the same time. “I can’t figure out if it’s Scotland or that crowd in the square that has you out of sorts.”

  “Both,” she said, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. “And I am worried about this outing of yours.”

  He met her gaze directly. “If you don’t want me to go, you’d best just say so.”

  Elizabeth considered. She could ask him to stay, and in such terms that he would give up this scheme of a nighttime ride to an unfamiliar tavern frequented by rough trade. But then she would have accomplished very little: her own poor mood exchanged for his sleeplessness, and this she could not justify to herself.

  Nathaniel bent his head to pour a dipper of water over his soapy hair. The twilight was deepening now, and it gilded the wet skin at the back of his neck. A neck like any other. He was blood and bone; he was strong, and clever, and quick. He would go out into this curious Scottish dusk, a sky streaked the color of gilded roses and ash and ocher, and when he had done what he must do, he would find his way back to her again. She must trust him, as he had once trusted her to undertake a perilous journey.

  She said, “They will light the bonfire soon, and that will be a great distraction. I suppose that will be the best time for you to go.”

  He blinked the water out of his eyes. “That’s not what I asked you, Boots.”

  “I know what you asked me.” She came to kneel beside the copper tub and take the dipper from him. While she rinsed his hair she said, “Last night you said something to me, I cannot quite get it out of my mind. You said you might as well be in chains for all the good you are to me.”

  He started to speak, and she hushed him.

  “I will not have you in chains, not even of my own making. But promise me you’ll be careful, and that you’ll be back by dawn.”

  Nathaniel caught her wrist and pressed his mouth to her palm, his beard stubble rough against her skin. “I promise. Maybe I’ll scratch at your window like the Green Man, come dawn.”

  “More likely you will come to wake me with cold feet,” she said, surprised and disquieted by the shudder that ran up her spine. Come dawn, come dusk. Superstition, she reminded herself. Nothing more. Nothing less.

  The bonfire came to life against the darkening sky with a roar that drowned out the crowd. Nathaniel watched from the lane beside the King’s Arms while he planned his route to the livery through the mass of people, young and old, faces shining with excitement and their voices hoarse with liquor. Mr. Thornburn capered around the fire with the rest of them, and Nathaniel wondered if he had any idea how much Dumfries looked like any Kahnyen’kehàka village after a battle well fought.

  He pulled his preacher’s hat down over his brow and skirted the edge of the open area, staying out of the fire’s light. And here he found there was another Dumfries, one that watched silently from the shadows.

  Just beyond the tiled roofs of the inn and the red-sandstone assembly hall was a sea of small cottages. On every one of those thatched roofs, a man or boy sat perched with a bucket between his knees and a broom soaking, at the ready, wary eyes following sparks up into the deepening night sky. In doorways mothers stood with babies on their hips and silent husbands at their backs. An old man with cropped gray hair, hard faced and remote, sat straight spined on a mule and the fire reflected red in his eyes. In the near dark he put Nathaniel in mind of Sky-Wound-Round, his first wife’s grandfather, the man who had first led him into battle. Homesickness rose in him, but he put it away.

  I dreamt my lady came and found me dead …

  And breathed such life with kisses in my lips

  that I revived, and was an emperor.

  Nathaniel looked back over the square and saw a single candle flame at the window. Elizabeth was watching still, the pale heart shape of her face floating in the dusk. She was waiting for him already, though he was hardly gone.

  There was a light in the livery, and the ringing of hammer on metal. He went in, a sack of thick five-guinea pieces in his fist. The Tory gold had been nothing but trouble since Chingachgook brought it out of the bush almost forty years ago, but now he would put it to good use.

  He did not offer his name, but he did not need to: the sight of the coins in the light of the fire did their work. The blacksmith put down his hammer and went to get the best horse he had.

  It was a smithy like any other; it smelled of hot metal and manure and sweat. A tankard sat on a rough table next to the remains of an oat cake and a bit of dry cheese. On a nail next to the door hung a woolen cloak with well-worn boots standing beneath it, from the size of them the blacksmith’s own.

  He brought the roan fully saddled. A fine animal, no longer young but with strong legs and an intelligent look about her. Nathaniel offered him twice what she would have fetched in New-York, and the blacksmith sold her without hesitation.

  “The boots and cape. What do ye want for them?”

  The blacksmith watched him from the corner of his eye. “I’ve had yon boots a guid ten year. Broke in just richt, they are.”

  Nathaniel
put another gold piece down and the man grunted in surprise. The coin disappeared into his fist.

  “Anythin’ else, Dominie?”

  Dominie. In an hour the whole town would hear about a preacher with a pocket full of gold coin, foolish enough to spend five guineas on old boots and a worn cloak. A stranger whose Scots had an odd feel to it, like a Hielander who had learned it secondhand. It would not take Moncrieff long to put it all together, and Nathaniel did not want Moncrieff with him on this errand.

  “Aye,” he said. He put five more coins on the barrel. “Guns. And your silence.”

  The dark head swung around and the blacksmith looked straight at him for the first time. Sweaty hair plastered his temples; the left side of his face smooth and slack, the mouth dragged down at the corner. The right eye squinted. Nathaniel was glad of the shadows and his hat’s broad brim.

  From the tavern next door came the sound of a man singing, a strong voice, clear and true.

  Does haughty Gaul invasion threat?

  Then let the loons beware, sir,

  There’s wooden walls upon our seas,

  And volunteers on shore, sir:

  The Nith shall rin to Corsincon,

  And Criffel sink in Solway,

  Ere we permit a foreign foe

  On British ground to rally.

  O! let us not, like snarling curs,

  In wrangling be divided,

  Till slap come in an unco loon

  And wi’ a rung decide it.

  Be Britain still to Britain true,

  Amang ourselves united;

  But never but by British hands

  Maun British wrangs be righted.

  The blacksmith’s mouth twisted as he looked at the gold. As much money as he would make in two years of pounding out horseshoes. Without a word he went to a cabinet in the corner and selected a ring from the clutch at his waist to turn the lock.

  What Nathaniel wanted was a rifle; the best he expected was an old musket. But when the blacksmith put the bundle on the barreltop and unwrapped it, he got more than he had hoped for: a pair of holster pistols, well balanced and easy in the hand. Long brass barrels and walnut stocks, etched silver lockplates. Weapons made for a rich man and rarely fired.