D. Jackson - A Plunder of Souls

His visitor, whoever it was, knocked again. Ethan pulled on his trousers and drew his knife.

“Who’s there?” he called.

“A friend.”

He didn’t recognize the voice. “I’ll be the judge of that. Give me a name.”

“I bear a message from certain gentlemen who keep company with a dragon.”

Alone in his room, Ethan grinned. Gentlemen who keep company with a dragon. Samuel Adams and his fellow Sons of Liberty had for several years used a tavern called the Green Dragon as a meeting place. Still gripping his knife, Ethan unlocked and opened his door. The man on the landing wore the clothes of a craftsman: a linen shirt, worn breeches and waistcoat, a tricorn hat. He looked respectable if not well-off. He was closer to Diver’s age than to Ethan’s, with dark brown eyes, red hair, and a freckled face.

He handed Ethan a folded piece of parchment and turned to leave.

“Did Adams himself send you?” Ethan asked.

The man started down the stairs without looking back. “All you need to know is in the message.”

Ethan watched the messenger leave before unfolding the parchment.

Mr. Kaille,

We would very much like to speak with you regarding a matter of mutual interest and benefit. Please meet us at the sign of the Green Dragon at your earliest convenience.

S. Adams

He had last spoken with Mr. Adams the previous fall, as the occupation of Boston began. And they’d had dealings several years before, at the time of the Stamp Act riots, during Ethan’s inquiry into the Berson murder. He couldn’t imagine what he had done this time to earn the man’s attention. His curiosity piqued, he washed himself with the tepid water that had been sitting in his washbasin and dressed.

As he did, he considered the dream from which he had awakened. Most nights, he didn’t put much stock in such visions; even conjurers could dismiss as nonsense most of the images that disturbed their sleep. But something about this one troubled him, something more than just the mutilated cadavers. Why had the color of that fire looked so familiar? What had Sephira been doing there, and why had she seemed to be working with him?

Upon leaving his room, he heard Henry hammering at a barrel in the cooperage below. As he had business with the cooper that couldn’t wait, he went first to the workshop.

Dall’s cooperage had been built in 1712 by Henry’s grandfather, and had withstood more than fifty years of storms and fires. A sign over the door read “Dall’s Barrels and Crates,” and another beside the door said “Open Entr.” Before Ethan could heed this second sign, a gray and white dog bounded up to him, tail wagging, tongue lolling. She ran a tight circle around him and yipped happily before allowing Ethan to scratch her head.

“Well met, Shelly,” he said.

She licked his hand.

Shelly had been a constant companion to Henry for several years now. She once had a mate: Pitch, a black dog who was as sweet as she and as protective of both Ethan and Henry. But several years before Ethan had been attacked by a conjurer who threatened his life as well as that of Holin, the son of the woman who once had been Ethan’s betrothed. The conjurer was far more powerful than Ethan, and had been on the verge of killing him when Pitch appeared. With no other hope of surviving the night and saving Holin, Ethan cast a spell, sourced in the life of the poor dog. The conjuring incapacitated his enemy and allowed Ethan and the boy to escape. It also killed Pitch. To this day, despite knowing with certainty that he’d had no choice, he considered it the darkest deed he had ever committed, the one he regretted above all others, including those that had earned him his conviction. Every time he saw Shelly, he felt he ought to apologize to her.

He patted her head one last time and let himself into Henry’s shop.

The cooper sat on a low bench, his face damp with sweat, his shirt soaked through. But he smiled at Ethan, exposing a gap where his front teeth should have been.

“All right, Ethan?” he said, before taking a sip of water from a metal cup.

“I’m well, Henry. And you?”

The cooper shrugged. “All right, I gueth,” he said, lisping the word as he always did. “Saw Sephira’s men out in the street last night. They wasn’t givin’ you trouble, was they?”

“Not really,” Ethan said. He crossed to the bench, fishing in his pocket for the coins he had gotten from Andrew Ellis. He counted out a pound and handed the coins to Henry. “That should pay for my room through the end of September.”

Henry closed his hand over the coins, a look of concentration on his face. At last he nodded. “That’s how I figure it as well.” He put the money in his pocket. “My thanks, Ethan.”

“Well, you have my thanks for letting me pay you late for June.”

Henry waved away the words. “You pay me in advance more often than you pay me late. It was no matter.” He stood and picked up the cloth-covered mallet he used to hammer hoops in place on his barrels. “You working on something these days?”

“I’m staying busy,” Ethan said, not wishing to say more. Henry didn’t know that Ethan was a conjurer, and when he didn’t see Ethan around the shop for too long, he worried as a father would for his own son. Hearing of the grave desecrations and the ghosts haunting Boston’s families might have scared the man.

“Well, good. Be careful.”

“I will. Thank you, Henry.”

He left the shop, and turned north on Cooper’s Alley toward Water Street, the ring of Henry’s hammer fading as he walked away.

The Green Dragon stood near the corner of Union and Hanover streets in what Ethan imagined must have been for Samuel Adams and his allies uncomfortable proximity to the barracks of the Twenty-ninth Regiment. It was a nondescript building, notable only for the cast-iron dragon perched over its main entrance. The tavern itself was located in the basement, down a steep, dimly lit flight of stairs.

So early in the day, most publick houses in Boston would have been nigh to empty. Not the Dragon. The great room was filled with artisans and men of means, many of them gathered at the bar, others crowded around tables. Overlapping conversations blended into an incomprehensible din; Ethan wasn’t sure that he could have made himself heard even to ask one of the men where he might find Samuel Adams.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to. As he stood in the doorway, surveying the crowd, a man near the bar detached himself from a cluster of patrons and approached him. Adams had changed little since their encounter the previous year. His face might have been a bit more careworn; the palsy that had afflicted him all his life might have been somewhat more noticeable. His hair had long since turned gray, though he was but a few years older than Ethan, but his brow remained smooth, his dark blue eyes as clear and keen as Ethan remembered.

“Mister Kaille,” he said, proffering a hand and smiling broadly.

Ethan gripped his hand. “Mister Adams, sir. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

“And you. Can I buy you an ale?”

“Thank you, no.”

“Very well. If you’ll follow me, we can join the others and speak without fear of interruption.”

Ethan didn’t know what others he referred to, but he followed Adams through the throng to a small chamber off the rear of the great room. There they found four other men, including Dr. Warren, whom Ethan had encountered just the night before. Adams shut the door against the clamor, before taking his place at the table where the others were already seated.

The four men had fallen silent upon Ethan and Adams’s arrival, and were watching Ethan, who lingered near the door, though there was an empty chair at the table. Eyeing the men, he realized that he recognized all of them; Adams had invited him to an august gathering.