Easton's Gold Read Online Free Page B

he has been rushing home.
    Finally he reaches the north bank and pushes into the inlet of Fleet River. He comes to his pier swiftly, as there is no current here. Jumping out, he ties the punt-rope to the wharf. Every texture—oar, rope, wharf post—feels alien to him now. Turning, he nods to the watchman and strides up the wooden steps into the darkness of his street. He takes the long key from his tunic and, with a little effort, clatters the lock open. He pushes the door and thuds it closed behind him. In complete darkness now, he finds the drawer with the tinderbox and begins working for a flame. His hands tremble slightly with the flint, wood, cloth, and candle, but in a moment, the room comes alive under a wavering glow. He lights a second candle with the first and moves toward the shelf.
    Shaking now with anticipation rather than cold, his hands reach toward the shelf. He lets his fingers come down slowly on the dome of the skull and lets out a warm sigh of relief as his hands smooth over the pale ivory surface. Lifting the skull from the shelf with both hands, Fleet holds it to his heart. He remembers the name his mother and father gave him long ago, a name he has since abandoned, and he feels a warm pulse between skull and heart, heart and skull. Less happily, he thinks about the “wonders” and how he missed the chance to keep his promise. He looks down at the skull and remembers how his mother’s features—gaunt, yet kind and wise—once graced the surface of the bone. He grips it tighter so he can feel the hard cranium against his ribs. Then he sends out a simple, one-word prayer. “Sorry.”

C HAPTER T HREE
    I have emerged at the surface at last. Salt water is still upon my tongue, and I am overcome with the weariness of a half-drowned man. I am lying on a raft in calm waters, it seems, though how I reached this refuge in a storm so vicious is a mystery.
    Light skims over my face, and I have to raise my hand to shield my eyes. It makes no sense that the sunshine comes in a vertical strip when it should be a bloated sphere. On either side of the light, where there should be an endless blue sky, there is only a darkened interior.
    I realize I have been dreaming. My present life comes to me in flashes: the scrape and roll of carriage wheels on gravel and cobbles—I am in London again; Gabrielle’s smooth, cinnamon skin and the exotic curve of her smile; Jacques’s pink, smiling lips; two whispering maids; the Thames outside my window. In my dream I was aboard my old flagship,
The Happy Adventure
, being swayed and tossed upon a storm. I dreamed of knives and blood, of a young man’s gurgle as my sword slices through his neck. I dreamed of the rolling cannons and the whiff of gunpowder, of a slave galleon—a writhing mass of humanity, chained, with a thousand speechless eyes.
    I grope the dark space between nightmare and reality, measuring the passage of time—a decade or more must have passed since those days on
The Happy Adventure
. I am over fifty; no, it’s longer than that. Years multiply like hungry starlings landing on a field of seeds. Before long I can count dozens.
No, no, please don’t let me be eighty
!
    A sound echoes from my dream, nagging some long stretch of sinew between my heart and my brain. It is the faraway crying of a newborn child—my child. The mysterious cord pulses with each imaginary cry. Soon everything in me aches to the sound; my legs pulse rhythmically each time the baby wails.
    There is something about the crying that’s too painful to remember, yet my dream has unearthed what my thoughts would keep hidden. A knife was intended for the baby’s breast. I could see the dagger clearly in my dream, its handle bejewelled and ornate, its blade curved in the eastern fashion. He was an African boy and no use to me as an heir. The vitality of his blood, I had been promised, would lend years of health and fortune to any