Had she ever said as much to the dog? Judy wondered.
Had she imagined Greyling’s reply in human speech, too?
“Yes. But today was so warm, perhaps this one was fooled into thinking that summer’s come back.”
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Was she that far gone?
“I will not take in another dog,” she said, and let the tears begin again. “I will move into Martha’s house. I will depend upon my friends, and if I’m fortunate I will die among them.
“I will not spend another winter here alone.” She said that in a voice so loud, it seemed like an oath. Or at least, that’s what it sounded like to Cornelius, who was keeping vigil by her window, mourning for Greyling, too, and for Judy’s departure, and for his own lost hopes.
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Cornelius
It was the middle of the night, but it might have been noon the way Cornelius was sweating. He’d woken out of a drowning dream into the sickening sense of being boiled alive. His shirt was drenched and the sour smell of his own bed made him queasy.
The window in his attic room faced away from the harbor, but Cornelius found no relief in the street either. The air was heavy and still: no halyard clanged, no wave lapped.
The darkness seemed complete, too, without a moon or even a single candle flickering behind any window.
He set out to walk and decided to head to Dogtown for a change. Since Judy had left it two years ago, his old haunts provided little pleasure. Still, he went from time to time, just for the change of air and to have a look at her old house.
He’d hammered over the broken windows, though he wasn’t entirely sure why he bothered.
&nbs
p; Walking past gloomy storefronts and dim houses, it seemed like the whole town had died in its sleep. Or that he was a ghost, haunting the town. Not that Cornelius held much with spirits. He had been ten years old when his mother died, and for years after that he had tried to believe that her soul lingered on to look after him. He’d poured pitchers of fresh water beside her bones every day and
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waited for a sign of her presence. But now he hadn’t been to the grave in so long, he doubted he could even find the spot; the stones he’d piled there must have been scattered.
Cornelius followed Washington Street out of town, away from the harbor and its old reproaches. For years, he’d watched the black-skinned sailors wearing bright scarves and golden earrings, bold and relaxed even among their white shipmates. When they’d asked why a strong man like him didn’t ship out, he had shrugged and said that the pitching of the waves made him sick as a dog.
It might have been true, too, but the fact was he’d never set foot on any vessel larger than a canoe. He could not beat back a suffocating fear of dying belowdecks, which he’d gotten from his mother on her deathbed. Her young body had survived the middle passage, and she had lived in the new world for twenty years: ten in Virginia and ten more on Cape Ann. But Cornelius knew that she died on the boat that had borne her over the sea.
When she grew ill, Mistress Finson brought fresh water and broth to her slave girl whenever she found a minute.
The mistress changed her shift and bedding, but with her household to run and family to feed, it was Cornelius who sat beside the bed, holding his mother’s hand and trying to understand her fevered gibberish. By the time he realized that “Senegambia” was a name, she was long past answering his questions.
In her mind, she was a child again, lying in chains in the dark hold of a slave ship. A storm rose up and turned the stifled, groaning misery of the journey into an even worse nightmare. As the belly of the ship pitched steeply from side to side, the suffering Africans believed themselves
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