Immortal (The Trelawneys of Williamsburg Book 2)
Copyright © 2016 Bureeda A. Bruner
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-692-79103-5
Haunted Oak Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
All characters appearing in this work are a figment of the author’s imagination and no more than that. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
With gratitude for the freedoms I enjoy
to those who fought for liberty
in this great land, when they themselves
were not afforded her privileges
In their bravery and selfless sacrifice,
they were not Africans,
nor free men, nor slave.
They were mere Americans.
And, as always …
with love …
for Joshua
Notes from the Author
This novel is the second in The Trelawneys of Williamsburg series. Each of the books stand alone, but if you like series and especially if you find yourself reading books and wondering what came before, consider first reading Tender. Each book contains plot developments that inform plot developments of the next, as well as revealing events that occurred in previous books. (In other words, IMMORTAL is chock full of spoilers!)
This novel includes passages from historic journals and ship logs written by characters of varying literacy. For ease of reading, the language has been rendered correct aside from occasional regional dialect.
A list of major series characters is provided at the end of the book, in case you need a refresher on a character introduced in TENDER.
THROUGH airy roads he wings his instant flight
To purer regions of celestial light;
Enlarg’d he sees unnumber’d systems roll,
Beneath him sees the universal whole,
Planets on planets run their destin’d round,
And circling wonders fill the vast profound.
Th’ ethereal now, and now th’ empyreal skies
With growing splendors strike his wond’ring eyes:
The angels view him with delight unknown,
Press his soft hand, and seat him on his throne;
Then smilling thus. “To this divine abode,
The seat of saints, of seraphs, and of God,
Thrice welcome thou.” The raptur’d babe replies,
“Thanks to my God, who snatch’d me to the skies,
E’er vice triumphant had possess’d my heart,
E’er yet the tempter had beguil’d my heart,
E’er yet on sin’s base actions I was bent,
E’er yet I knew temptation’s dire intent;
E’er yet the lash for horrid crimes I felt,
E’er vanity had led my way to guilt,
But, soon arriv’d at my celestial goal,
Full glories rush on my expanding soul.”
Joyful he spoke: exulting cherubs round
Clapt their glad wings, the heav’nly vaults resound.
Say, parents, why this unavailing moan?
Why heave your pensive bosoms with the groan?
To Charles, the happy subject of my song,
A brighter world, and nobler strains belong.
Say would you tear him from the realms above
By thoughtless wishes, and prepost’rous love?
Doth his felicity increase your pain?
Or could you welcome to this world again
The heir of bliss? with a superior air
Methinks he answers with a smile severe,
“Thrones and dominions cannot tempt me there.” …
- Phillis Wheatley, A Funeral Poem on the Death of C.E. …
Prologue
Boston, Massachusetts, March 5, 1770—a snowy winter evening
The man they knew as Michael Johnson leaned on his walking stick, huddled around a fire with the other sailors in a public house on King Street. Only a few knew him by his given name: Crispus Attucks. Tomorrow he would become memorable; tonight, he was a simple seaman of no import, wanting nothing but to warm himself before they weighed anchor again.
The older he got, the more he loved a roaring fire. His joints felt the cold. He’d grown up in this land, and his mother’s people had lived here for millennia, but how he hated the cold. He yearned for his captain’s home in St. George’s.
Tonight had been the crew’s last night in town. Any shorter, and they’d get restless and behave badly. Any longer, and they ran the risk of abandoning the sea altogether.
As the men dreamed about island girls who could warm a man’s flesh, he recalled Antoinette. He’d helped her escape in Spanish Town long ago during a Caribbean voyage. How they’d loved! He’d delivered her to the Adamses, old friends in Boston who’d helped him escape his own bondage years ago.
These Adamses weren’t as well-known as John or Samuel, but they loved this land. With the gold he left them for her care, they’d helped her build a home where she raised their daughter. Camisha Adams had changed Antoinette, saved her soul, made her insist on marriage and faithfulness. Faithfulness, he could abide; life on dry land, he could not. He loved the land, but he could no longer live on it. Escaping slavery decades ago had given him a restlessness he could not conquer.
Yet how he loved Antoinette and their child, Marie—now a grown woman with children of her own. And the memories of Marie, of Antoinette, warmed him where the fire failed.
An urgency filled him. Go this second. Find her, take her with you, build your home in St. George’s. Or even her hometown in the West Indies. But marry her, man!
“Michael!”
The voice jarred him from his reverie. “Back in Spanish Town again?” He merely stared back at the young face teasing him. Of course it was Rashall, Camisha’s son.
As he looked at the others, he smiled. The remaining levity drained away as they waited, absorbing his intensity. Men took this humble mulatto man seriously because he cared. A person couldn’t help caring when they were around him.
“Raven, ’twas my mother who taught me to love this land. You boys can roam the seven seas all your days. You can touch distant pink shores seeking treasure. You may be seamen, but you cannot make me believe you do not love these shores.
“You are not an Englishman, Elias, nor you an Irishman, Johnny, nor you a free Mozambican, Obadiah. You are all Americans. Look within your hearts and, beneath the love for sea air and salt water, you’ll find you hunger for the sight of the prairie, for the craggy mountain, that fire in your veins that is your love for this land and for freedom. Freedom that beats not in the heart of any other land except this.”
This made them titter. He’d known every man here since their days as callow youth, and they knew him to be the occasional sentimental fool. He’d practically raised their very own captain, and Adams, here, himself, if knot-tying were schooling and sea shanties, lullabies. The captain, at 17, had approached him with the offer of a quartermaster position on board their Adventurer seven years ago. His bravado hadn’t fooled Michael, but his combined pluck, bravery, and earnestness had charmed him into accepting the offer and helping him outfit a ship. Within a few years, as the captain had promised, all the sailors Michael had scared up to follow the young captain were rich as Croesus.
The captain came to be known as Hawk, roving the seas and plucking treasure from Spanish and English ships. The days of the pirate were long since passed, but there were riches enough for those unafraid of hard work and long hours.
> Hawk’s boyhood friend, Camisha’s son, called himself Raven, and he and Michael ultimately shared the quartermaster position, with all three men in a similar place of authority among the crew.
And even as he thought of him, that young captain filled the doorway five feet away, stamping his feet free of snow. He wore a heavy wool coat, but his blond head was bare save for a knot of leather tying his hair in a queue.
How he loved that lad. He was his captain, his good friend, and more like a son to him than most men’s own sons.
Hawk gestured at Michael. Michael nodded in response and the seamen headed out the door, eager to get underway. They hurried down the street toward the harbor, and Michael stopped. He had forgotten to settle up with the tavern wench.
“Be along straightaway.”
As he returned to King Street, a rabble of boys and men and redcoats crushed in upon him. He stepped into the tavern and paid for their drinks, then returned to the street. The crowd had stopped, and a boy of perhaps fourteen years stood, confronting a British soldier at least twice his age and size.
“He owes my lord, the wigmaker!” the boy cried.
“I told you, begone! All of you! Disperse!” This from the soldier as he inched backward away from the crowd.
But they encircled him. “Lobster-back! Lobster-back!”
The soldiers raised their bayonets to force back the crowd. They were outnumbered—but they did, after all, have weapons. The boy had only an invoice for payment.
Another, deeper, British voice rang with authority in the night: “Do not fire! Don’t fire, I tell you!”
Michael shoved through the crowd. The boy persistently thrust an upturned palm toward the soldier. The soldier pushed back with the bayonet, making the boy jump away. Michael lost all patience; what madness, for the cost of—what, a wig-dressing? He would pay the boy himself.
He raised his walking stick and with it nudged the barrel of the musket away. The nervous soldier almost dropped the gun. Michael pushed the boy out of the way, taking his place.
“Wasn’t the death of the German boy last month enough to satisfy your bloodlust? Let’s see what happens when your cowardice is met by a full-grown man.”
Michael faced the soldier, unafraid, mocking the soldier’s badgering of the boy. “Then fire, damn you!”
And he fired.
Michael felt little but a fire deep inside. He touched his stomach and found a mass of viscous wetness he recognized to be his innards. And then his legs betrayed him, and he fell.
Presently, he saw the captain’s anguished face before him, heard him shouting Michael!
“Go, boy.”
“Get a surgeon,” the captain urged the British soldiers. They stood mute.
In a moment, Michael knew he was dying.
“I will not let this pass, Michael. I will fight—”
“Fight for the land, boy. For the land of your mother.”
And as he said the words, he was in his heart a child again running through that land, the spring sun on his dark shoulders and the wind in his face, the coolness of the Charles River on a hot summer day, laughter singing in the air. He was a young man loving Antoinette and their daughter. And in a blink he was old—on the deck of the Adventurer with this young captain, the heady salt breeze filling his lungs and stinging his eyes.
Life—how endless we think it!
The captain drew him back into his life as the glow and the sting of the wood fires burning in the cressets began to leave his eyes and his nostrils, as the terror in Hawk’s voice went silent on the cry of Michael.
He wished too late that he had told him the truth of his name. At least Antoinette knew. And he hoped in time she would find in her heart the kindness to tell their daughter how much he had loved her. He was not a perfect man, but he had tried hard for them, as he never had for anyone else.
And even as he wished, as his earthly eyes and ears saw and heard no more, the sound of his mother’s voice came to him—the ancient sound of a Natick Praying Indian. Her visage, her beloved face with the same high cheekbones as his, the same strong, blunt blade of a nose—the face he’d loved as a child and missed as a grown man, when she passed on—now warmed him at last as she held out a hand to welcome him. “Come home, Crispus. ’Tis time to come home.”
Chapter One
Present day Richmond, Virginia
The day’s work had been long and hard at the dig in Norfolk, and Marley had arrived home aching and sore and filthy. An eighteenth-century ship, unearthed at a construction site, was the most exciting discovery she’d been involved in during her short career. Early tomorrow morning her team would finish scanning the site. The construction contractor’s timetable added pressure to what would otherwise be a more comprehensive physical effort—but the computer-generated 3D images of the site would help their research efforts.
Now, she stood in the kitchen, freshly bathed, in her nightshirt and slippers, enjoying the quiet of the house. The milk boiled, and she poured it over her own hand-ground, gourmet cocoa mix in an oversized mug and placed the pot in the sink to soak. She watched the mixture continue to boil and steam inside the cup as she stirred. A moment later the mix was dissolved.
Dropping in marshmallows, she set the mug aside. She washed her hands scrupulously, rinsed until they squeaked, and rubbed them on a tea towel until they were dry as parchment.
Then she retreated with the cocoa to the window seat in the old stone home outside Richmond where she lived with Nan.
She placed the cocoa on the deep ledge alongside the window to cool. She turned on the reading lamp, closed the heavy drape around the window seat, and curled up inside. It was a luxuriously cushioned place almost as big as a daybed. With any luck, she’d fall asleep here. Her grandmother’s house was nearly 300 years old, and with all its charm, she loved most the window seats where she could usually be left alone.
She fluffed the pillow and stuffed it between her shoulder and the window frame so that it cradled her head just so, and she inhaled the sweet smell of the spring rain. She started to sip her cocoa from the dissolved puddle of marshmallow, but it was still scalding hot—she’d let the milk boil. She set it aside and, just for a moment, she stopped to love life.
And then, she retrieved the leather book from the display case on the shelf above. How many times as a child she had been scolded away from it. She was ten years old before she was allowed to touch it and then, only wearing white gloves. As a historian, she had seen and loved many old volumes, but none were as treasured, as doted on, as the one she held.
As she grasped the heavy book, she looked at the binding.
The Trelawneys of Williamsburg
Truth to tell, it was a collection of leather- and cloth-bound ledgers, expanded to add pages as time passed. The book ran for hundreds of pages, from 1746 well into the twentieth century.
Just one volume was missing, from perhaps the most meaningful, exciting period of time in American history—late 1775 through July, 1776. She didn’t let that noteworthy flaw keep her from enjoying the priceless treasure.
The outer binding was a leather-encased cedar box, hand-tooled by freed slaves, as beautiful as any jewelry of royalty. They had fashioned the binding with the future in mind, allowing room for the volumes that would annotate over two centuries of their history.
The cover contained small portraits of family members. In its center was the lady who’d begun it, a woman named Ruth. Underneath the portraits was an engraved banner.
For our children’s children.
That gave her a bit of guilt for the wealth she held in her lap. She was not a Trelawney. One day, she hoped, she would either donate the book or see to it that it was returned to the last surviving Trelawney—wherever they might be. But it didn’t belong to her, it belonged to Nan.
She opened the cover and withdrew the oldest volume, the most fragile of them all. On the frontispiece was written:
This is the diary of Ruth Freeman Trelawney
She turned the page and began to read, loving each lark of spelling, each hard-won new word selected by each home-schooled author. Back in those days, even college graduates spelled creatively.
July 7, 1746
Mr. Godfrey Hastings has been teaching me to read & write. He gave me this diary as a school lesson. He says it will get better over time, but I have to write every day in it. I have a powerful strong story to tell, soon as my spelling gets better. If houses have hearts, our house’s heart is broken.
That’s all for today.
July 8, 1746
Mr. Hastings tells me spelling don’t matter, and that what matters is that I catch all the thoughts and the happenings around me.
I was sad already that my friend Camisha was gone, sailed up to Boston to be with her husband’s family. Then two nights ago the awfulest thing a person could imagine happened. There was a fire up at the house, and by the time we saw it, we couldn’t do nothing but watch it burn.
I got there just after my Dan. We all brung our pails to try and help, we all lined up in two lines from the river, and it was just a mess. The noise, the heat, people going every which way.
None of us know Mr. Thomas much. But, first we knew something was wrong, we saw him screaming and crying and running like a crazy man behind the house, and his little baby screaming and crying and Dan and the other men had to keep him from going in the house. I had to take the baby from him, I was so afraid of what he might do.
Then we found out. Mr. Grey, and Miss Rachel, and poor, sweet little Emily—they was in that fire. Those good people, they died in that fire. It just makes me hurt all over. I don’t know how to tell little Dan and Sukey, they loved that child like she was they sister.
Come to find out, Old Nate saw the whole thing! He was coming back from visiting family at Westover, and he saw that James Manning, that devil of an overseer Mr. Grey ran off. Well, Old Nate saw him sneak into the house with a torch and a kettle of whale oil. And not long after, out came the family, looking for something. Then, by the time Old Nate got close enough to tell anybody what he saw, little Miss Emily went and ran inside, like she forgot something. Mr. Grey ran in after her. Miss Rachel, she ran in after him. I expect if he hadn’t had the baby, poor Mr. Thomas would have gone in after all of them.