And then, looming above them, a black place against the stars. Middle Street Church.
They paused in a dark corner at the edge of the courtyard. Billy put a finger to his lips again and Elizabeth was silent. They waited, listened, listened for anything, but there was no sound to be heard. Billy nodded and they stepped out of the shadows, around the far side of the church, to a side entrance under a small slate roof.
They stopped and waited again but they were alone. A minute passed, then another, and Elizabeth was about to announce that Sally was not coming when they heard a step behind that made Elizabeth jump. She turned and Sally was standing there. She looked tired, frightened. She held up a key for Billy, could not go so far as to actually open the door herself.
Billy took the key and fit it in the lock and turned it and the heavy door opened with a creak of exaggerated volume. He pulled the key out, handed it back to Sally. Sally slipped the key into her pocket. Their eyes met and Sally made a move as if to speak, but she did not. She just nodded her head and Billy nodded back and she turned and was gone.
Billy glanced around once more, then held the door open for Elizabeth. She stepped through, into the darkness of the church’s interior, the only negligible light being that which came in from the night sky through the open door. Then Billy came in behind her and closed the door and it was absolutely black.
“Just hold tight a moment, Lizzy,” Billy said in a whisper. The words seemed absurdly loud. She could not recall the last time either of them had spoken.
At her feet she could hear Billy clicking steel on flint and then a little trail of sparks spilled down on the dry tinder, which glowed orange and flared. Billy blew on it, gently, gently, and when it was finally burning with some legitimacy he used it to light a candle he pulled from his tinderbox.
The flickering light fell on the oak wainscot and crept up the white plaster, finally to be lost in the deep gloom that engulfed the upper reaches of the big church. The door they had come through had led them into the side of the church proper. To their left and ten feet away, the door they recognized as leading to the Right Reverend Dunmore’s office.
Billy gestured Elizabeth forward with a welcoming sweep of his arm, the way he had done when bringing her first aboard the Bloody Revenge and again when welcoming her to Boston.
It occurred to her that Billy genuinely believed that all of the world was his for the taking, that wherever he wished to go it was his absolute right to do so, and thus wherever he was, he was welcoming people onto his own property. That was why he felt justified in making that gesture.
It must be a fine thing, she thought, to be so damned sure of your place in the world. She smiled and made her way past Billy’s pews, headed for Billy’s office.
Down the narrow hall and back through the door through which Wait Dunmore had just that morning ordered them to leave. The office was unchanged, save for Dunmore’s absence, but that one omission made the space look much bigger, as if the force of Reverend Dunmore’s personality pulled the walls in to him when he sat at his desk, and when he was gone they eased back to their normal positions.
Billy found another candle and lit it, and a lantern as well, and the room was filled with a tolerable amount of light. Against the wall, the chests of papers that Elizabeth had that morning noticed. “Let us hope these are organized after some fashion, some fashion we can discern,” Elizabeth whispered.
“You look there, Lizzy, and I shall look to this Bible. If it is the Dun-more family Bible, it may have something of Wait Dunmore’s true parentage written there.”
Elizabeth nodded and took up one of the candles. She knelt before the first blanket chest as if it were a little altar and began to thumb through the papers. Records of births, records of deaths, records of marriage, just as Sally had said. They appeared to be a great jumble, in no particular order, and Elizabeth began to despair at the thought of going through all of the chests, paper by paper. She did not think there was time enough in one night to do it.
But as she made her way through the papers, a system, a kind of order, began to emerge, seemingly random clusters of papers resolved into rational groupings by name and date and she nodded as she began to understand.
She heard Billy close the heavy Bible with a dull whump. He stepped up behind her. “The Good Book says nothing of this, just a legitimate line of succession, right down to Roger Dunmore’s no doubt monstrous child William, born two years ago. Have you anything?”
Elizabeth nodded again. “I have not found the Dunmore family, but I see how they have put this all together. What was the name and birth date of the first Dunmore in the Bible?”
Billy paused. “I’ll have to look again,” he said, and a minute later, “Ezekiel Dunmore, born 1563 in Kent, died 1646, Boston. Father of…”
“That should do.” Elizabeth stood and opened the next trunk and the next, thumbed through the papers, not finding the Dunmore clan but seeing at least that they were organized the way she had thought. The next trunk, and her fingers moved confidently and there, at last, she found them. The Dunmore family, bound together with red tape. Ezekiel, died 1646, written out with the fine lettering and archaic language of a former age.
She pulled the papers out, put them down on Dunmore ’s desk, pulled off the red tape. Billy set his candle down beside them, leaned in close, his curiosity on a par with hers. She spread the papers out, arranging them like a family tree. Ezekiel, father of Elisha and Zacharias and Benjamin. The last, father of Sarah and Jonah and Rachel and Richard.
Elizabeth ’s hands were shaking, and she shuffled quickly through the papers. Wait Dunmore, father of Frederick. Wait Dunmore, son of Isaac Dunmore. Was Isaac the illegitimate son of Richard and the slave girl Nancy?
The record of his birth. It was there, in her hands. Isaac Dunmore. Father, Richard Dunmore. Mother… Anne Dunmore, born Anne Hutchinson of Boston.
And that was it. No mention of the slave Nancy, nothing but a record of a legitimate child of white parents. Elizabeth looked up at Billy, who was still looking at the paper. She felt the tears of frustration welling up. “Oh, Billy, damn it…”
“Well, I suppose it would not be likely they would make an official record of such a union…,” he began, but there was frustration in his voice as well. Disappointment.
And then a creak, the creak of the side door, left unlocked, the same creak it had made when they had opened it. Billy’s eyes met Elizabeth ’s and she felt no disappointment or frustration now, just fear, and a twist in her stomach, and on Billy’s face, alertness; like a deer, he was motionless, listening.
A footstep on wooden planking. Billy blew out the two candles and clapped the shutter half over the open lantern and the room was almost black and he motioned with his head for her to follow.
Elizabeth snatched up the papers, the Dunmore family record, and she shoved them down the front of her shift, though she did not know why, for they would do her no good. Still, she took them, felt the rough paper against her skin as she pushed them out of sight.
Billy stepped into the narrow hall, put the half-closed lantern down on the floor. It lit up the pine boards on which it sat, and threw a diffused illumination out toward the church.
They could hear them now, two men, footsteps, soft muttering. Billy stopped, held up his hand, but still Elizabeth nearly ran into him before she saw his dark shape. She could just make out his hands as he flipped his black cape back so that the cloth did not impede his arms, but he did not draw a weapon, as if he was still not certain these people were enemies.
Elizabeth did not see how they could be anything but.
An observation, muttered, but loud enough for them to hear. “I sees light. Down there.” A pause and then another voice saying, “Easy, now, easy. Cold steel…”