“You an American? How?”
He settled comfortably in the grass. “Listen, Kitty, I’ll tell you more of myself than I ever told Sally Rose. I do not know why, unless it is because you are less distractingly fair. Alas, I am afraid I like overwell to talk, Kitty.”
“So does everyone, it seems,” murmured Kitty. “But what happened—a hundred and fifty years ago?”
“I like to talk, I suppose, because my mother was a strolling player, and famous for the way she spoke her lines as well as her good looks. She traveled the fairs and market towns, and everywhere she was made welcome and a stage set up for her. My father was a West Country farmer, and a dull husband I think he made her. I cannot recall her too well. But it was through his blood that I might have been born an American.”
The voice of the watch was fading now, down by the tannery and the distilleries, but Gerry Malory kept on talking.
“My father would shake his head, I remember, whenever anyone mentioned America. ’Twas a legend in our family that once an old grandsire of ours, about the time I mention, had journeyed to Plymouth and watched a shipful of people leaving that country to settle in this one. That he thought for a time to go with them, but decided against it. Sometimes I wonder if he had gone—”
The watch was coming back. They saw the light he carried. It wavered to and fro. Then it stopped just at the wall of the graveyard. Gerry Malory sprang hastily to his feet. “Kitty,” he whispered, “go back and tell Sally Rose—I don’t know when I’ll see her—but tell her to get out of Charlestown. We’re getting ready to move against the Americans. I don’t know when. At least by the end of the week. Some say we’re for Dorchester Heights, and some say Bunker Hill. Tell her to be gone. And you go with her—Kitty.”
He vaulted over the low wall and disappeared in the darkness between the fields and the flats along the river. Kitty peered after him, but she saw only a scatter of fireflies and a light mist rising from the earth. She was not afraid of the watch, but he did not challenge her as she crept back to the Bay and Beagle. He did not know she had been keeping a tryst with the enemy. Well, she had been, and felt herself none the worse for it.
She, too, was wondering what would have happened if old Grandsire Malory had taken that ship so many years ago.