D. Jackson: A Plunder of Souls

The red uniforms of the soldiers hadn’t darkened Ethan’s mood, but this red flag was a different matter. Smallpox. That was what it signified. The distemper had come to this residence, and those inside had chosen to remain in their home rather than be removed to the hospital in New Boston.

The flag was a warning, a symbol of infection, of quarantine. Within this house dwells pestilence, it said. Fever, scarring, perhaps even death. These reside here now. Enter at your own risk. And if the red cloth wasn’t warning enough, the guard out front was there to keep away the concerned and the curious. No one could enter or leave, save a physician.

The flag had been up for several days now, but it still made Ethan’s blood turn cold each time he saw it. He feared for Kannice Lester, who owned the Dowsing Rod, and who had been his lover for more than five years. He feared for those who frequented her tavern and who worked for her. And yes, he feared for himself. Smallpox was no trifle. The outbreak of 1764 had killed well over a hundred people, and those who were sickened but survived bore terrible scars on their faces and bodies. The practice of inoculating people against the distemper had proved somewhat effective, but it was an expensive process, one that few other than Boston’s wealthiest families could afford. And many remained leery of the science cited by physicians; using the disease to fight the disease seemed to make little sense. Despite advances in controlling the distemper, every person in the city lived in fear of another epidemic. Many fled to the countryside at the first report of an outbreak. He had known people to refuse newspapers, food, and other goods, out of fear that they carried infection. Andrew Ellis’s unwillingness to shake his hand, or even place coins in his palm, was more typical than he cared to admit. If more red flags appeared in the city, panic would set in.

Sobered, Ethan continued on to the tavern. Kannice, he knew, would be careful. But what if one or more of her patrons was less vigilant? If he had known a spell to ward Kannice and himself against the distemper, he would have cast it, but he wasn’t sure such conjurings even existed.

Reaching the Dowser, he slipped into a narrow alley between two buildings. There he cut himself again and removed the concealment spell. Once he could be seen, he returned to the main avenue and entered the tavern.

Upon stepping inside, he was greeted by the familiar din of laughter and conversations, and a melange of aromas: musty ale and savory stew, pipe smoke and freshly baked bread, and underlying it all, the faint, pungent smell of dozens of spermaceti candles. In spite of the apprehension that had gripped him upon seeing the red flag, he smiled, only to wince at the pain in his jaw from where Nigel had hit him. In his desperation to get away from Sephira, he had forgotten to heal himself. He considered retreating to the alley to cast another spell, but even as the thought came to him, the Dowsing Rod’s massive barkeep, Kelf Fingarin, caught his eye, grinned, and held up an empty tankard, a question in his eyes.

He would heal himself later. He nodded and crossed to the bar.

“Good evenin’, Ethan,” said Kelf, speaking so quickly that his words ran together into what would sound to most like an incomprehensible jumble.

“Well met, Kelf.” Ethan placed a half shilling on the bar as the barman set the tankard-now full-in front of him.

“That’s the Kent pale.”

“My thanks.”

“Diver’s in his usual spot,” Kelf said. He gestured toward the kitchen. “And Kannice is in back, workin’ on another batch of the chowder.”

Ethan sipped his ale. “I’ll be with Diver. She’ll find me eventually. She always does.”

Kelf winked, already grabbing a tankard for another patron.

Ethan wended his way to the back of the great room, slipping past knots of wharfmen and laborers, and tables crowded with men drinking Madeira wine and eating oysters. A few people looked up as he went by; fewer still met his glance or offered any sort of greeting.

More than twenty years ago, he had been convicted of taking part in the Ruby Blade mutiny and sent to the island of Barbados to toil on a sugar plantation. The conditions had been brutal: unbearable heat, food that was barely edible, sleeping quarters that were little more than jail cells crowded with vermin-infested pallets. A stray blow from another prisoner’s cane knife wounded his left foot; the resulting infection nearly killed him. The plantation surgeons removed three of his toes, and thus saved his life. But that was the least of what he lost during his fourteen years as a convict. His pride, his first and greatest love, the future he once had imagined for himself: all of this and more he left in the cane fields.

After enduring those conditions for fourteen years, he earned his freedom, returning to Boston in the spring of 1760. He soon established himself as a thieftaker of some minor renown here in the city. But those who remembered the Ruby Blade affair and Ethan’s role in it still regarded him with suspicion. Others who were too young to know anything of the Blade took their cues from those around them. And still others, who cared not a whit about Ethan’s past as a mutineer, might have heard rumors of his conjuring talents, and so shunned him because he was a “witch.”

Whatever the reason, Ethan had few friends here in the Dowser, and not many more beyond its walls. On the other hand, those he did consider his friends, he trusted with his life.

Among them, Diver-Devren Jervis-was the one who had known him longest. Diver was younger than Ethan by several years and though he was now in his early thirties, he still looked as youthful as he had nine years before, when Ethan returned to Boston from the Caribbean and almost immediately ran into Diver on Long Wharf.

At first, Ethan hadn’t recognized his young friend; Diver had been but a boy when Ethan was convicted. But Diver recognized him right off, and greeted him as he might a blood brother. For Ethan, it was one of the few bright moments in an otherwise difficult transition back to life as a free man.

With his unruly dark hair, his dark eyes, and a roguish smile, Diver was seldom without a girl on his arm. For years it had seemed to Ethan that it was a different girl every fortnight. But for many months now, since the previous autumn, Diver had been with the same woman: Deborah Crane, an attractive redhead who lived in Cornhill, near Diver’s room on Pudding Lane. The two of them sat together at a small table near the back wall of the Dowser. Seeing them engrossed in conversation, their eyes locked, their heads close together, her hand in his, Ethan faltered.

He found another empty table, also at the rear of the room, and sat with his back to the wall, looking out over the tavern and sipping his ale. A short while later, Kelf walked back into the kitchen and emerged again with Kannice, an enormous tureen of fish stew, or chowder, as Boston’s residents had taken to calling it, held between them. Ethan saw Kelf whisper something to Kannice. She looked up, searching the room. After a few seconds, she spotted him and they shared a smile. Just as quickly, her attention was back on her patrons and their empty bowls. She began to ladle out the chowder, saying something that made the men around her laugh.

Kannice was younger than Ethan by some ten years: a willowy beauty with auburn hair and periwinkle blue eyes. She once had been married, to a man who died of smallpox during the outbreak of 1761. She inherited the Dowsing Rod from him, and though barely more than a girl, managed to transform the tavern from a shabby, run-down haven for petty criminals and whores into a respectable publick house that turned a tidy profit. She had a simple set of rules: Anyone was welcome in the tavern, so long as they refrained from fighting, whoring, or discussing matters that were likely to lead to a brawl. With Kelf behind the bar, implacable, as immense as a mountain, she had little trouble enforcing her decrees, though in truth, Ethan had met few men who would dare defy her and thus earn one of her legendary tongue-lashings. Kannice was as savvy as any merchant in the city, and as clever as Samuel Adams and his fellow Whigs. She also had a sharp wit and could tell stories that would make the most hardened sailor blush to the tips of his ears.