An object clinked against one of the windows that overlooked the courtyard. She sat up. A second object hit the glass. There was no doubt. Someone was throwing pebbles from below. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and got out of the comfortable goose-down bed, with its rose-colored canopy. She pulled her dark blue sleeping-gown a little closer about herself, and taking the candle in its pewter holder she walked toward the door that opened onto her balcony.
It had been a day she would never forget. For that matter, what day lately—since being taken from the Great Dock pier by the East Indian giant with diamonds in his front teeth—had been forgettable? But at least the ordeal in the Nightflyer’s brig was far behind her, though not very far from her memory. She and Zed had been removed from the ship after nightfall, put into a closed carriage and driven to this inn, where again under cover of the night they were brought in through the dark green gate. Once inside they were separated, and Berry ushered to this room by a heavy-set Scotsman with a red tuft of hair atop his dome and a red tuft of hair on his chin while two husky men with muskets took Zed away. A meal of baked fish, corncakes, some kind of green melon and black tea had arrived at her room on a tray borne by a young woman with long ebony hair and coffee-colored skin. The door had been locked from the outside when the young woman departed. Later on, she had returned with the sleeping-gown, which she lay upon the bed for Berry. Again, upon leaving she locked the door. Berry had stepped outside onto the balcony and seen by torchlight the two tough-looking men with muskets talking in the courtyard below. Another movement had caught her attention and she’d seen Zed standing on a balcony one room over from hers. Zed had not paid her a penny of attention, but had been focused on watching the musket-men.
Though her mind was concerned with thoughts of what might be happening to Matthew—and her fears, she realized, were likely much more treacherous than the reality, since Matthew was a sort of guest here—she found sleep easily enough when she donned the nightgown and slipped into bed, simply because she was exhausted. But now, with the clinking of pebbles against the glass, Berry was fully awake as she followed the candle’s glow to the balcony door.
The night was still and warm, and down in the courtyard the torches were still burning. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. Two or three hours, possibly? But something was missing. She leaned carefully over the railing. Where were the armed guards, who looked as if they’d never skipped a meal of hog’s fat, horse meat and baby’s bones?
A shadow moved. It became a huge bearded black man, bald-headed, with massive shoulders jammed into a clean yellow shirt. He wore his baggy brown breeches and had on scuffed black boots. His tribal-scarred face peered up at Berry and he made a motion with his arms that Berry could read as if he were speaking to her.
He said, Jump.
“I can’t!” she whispered, before she realized he couldn’t understand. Yet it was clear he understood her facial expression, because he repeated the motion and then held his arms out.
I’ll catch you, he promised.
“Where are the guards?” she asked, again more to herself rather than to him. Zed stared up at her for a few seconds more in the orange torchlight, and then he shook his hands back and forth at chest-level seemingly to get the blood flowing.
She thought she understood what that meant. I took care of them.
It was about a twelve-foot drop. Could he catch her, if she jumped? Of course. “My shoes,” she said, and started to go back for them. Zed quickly popped his palms together.
No time, he said.
She understood that completely. But if they left the Templeton Inn, where would they go? And if they did get away, would that put Matthew in more danger, or less? She thought that Zed wasn’t as concerned with Matthew as he was with finding a boat to cast off from this island and continue on his own personal journey. She had to worry about Matthew’s safety, first and foremost, and maybe she should remain here in this velvet cage, but still…
She did not like cages, velvet or otherwise.
Zed was waiting, and the seconds were going past.
Berry thought he wished to escape this night, and in so doing escape from the confinement of the past into the freedom of the future. If he could find the local fisherman’s harbor, secure a small sailboat and possibly a net or some fishing equipment…but, how far might he get? It seemed to her that even if Zed perished at sea, without provisions or plan other than setting his face toward Africa, it was how he wanted to leave this earth. And he, too, could no longer abide the cage.
She decided she would help him find a boat and see him off, and then she would return here to wait for word from Matthew.
She climbed over the railing, careful not to snag her nightgown on the wrought iron, and she jumped.
Zed easily caught her. He set her down like a feather. Then he nodded—Yes, we’re in this together—and he held up a ring of four keys. He strode to the padlock on the gate and began to test it with first one key and then another. As Zed sought to unlock the gate, Berry looked left and right and found the bodies of the guards stacked up in some shrubbery just beyond the torchlight to the left. Their muskets appeared to be broken. One of the bodies was missing its boots. Suddenly one of the bodies shuddered and a hand lifted as if to seize the air before it fell back again, indicating that they were not dead but rather in a state of enforced sleep.
It was the last key. The gate swung open. Zed plucked a torch from its place in a wooden holder. Then they were walking into the road, Berry mindful of the small shells and pebbles that made up the surface. They had a choice to make concerning direction. They had come from the left, therefore they knew the harbor for large ships that lay over that way. Zed turned to the right and started off, seeking the local harbor, and Berry followed at his bootheels.
They seemed to be the only souls stirring at this hour. Dogs barked, but none were seen. The sky was ablaze with stars and a moon nearly full. The road left the last quiet houses of Templeton and was soon taking them through wilderness tinged blue by the moonlight. From the thicket the insects of the dark sang their songs of whirs and chitters, and Zed and Berry followed the flickering torchlight deeper into the night.
Berry wished she could ask Zed a question, but she wouldn’t know how to ask it. While she’d been eating her dinner, there’d been just the slightest movement of the room. A passing tremor, there one second and gone the next. She wished she could ask Zed if he’d also felt that. But in the aftermath of the tremor, she’d realized that the walls of her room were spiderwebbed with tiny cracks. She’d meant to ask the Scotsman about it in the morning, for evidently Pendulum Island was true to its name.
The road went on, and so did the journeyers. Zed walked fast, striding forward with a purpose, and though the shells and stones were not kind to her feet Berry kept up with him. More than once she wondered what her Grandda thought of her disappearance, along with Matthew’s. Were they still being searched for, after all this time? Or had her and Matthew’s whereabouts become a mystery that could not be answered? Surely Hudson Greathouse hadn’t given up the search! Yet…still…if there was nothing to be found of them, after so many days, then…a mystery, unanswerable.
Zed suddenly stopped so quickly Berry bumped into him. It was like hitting a stone wall. She staggered back. He didn’t even seem to feel it.
“What is it?” she asked him rather sharply, for her feet were cut and now she’d bitten her lower lip when she’d plowed into his immovable mountain.
He lifted the torch higher, and she saw what the light had already revealed to him. Hanging by leather straps from two poles on either side of the road were a pair of human skulls painted with brightly-colored stripes.