Read Chapter 8: A Slip of the Line

The skiff rose on the shoulder of a swell, and Elinor gripped the gunwale, salt spray stinging her cheeks. Behind her, Black Rock had dwindled to a dark tooth against the gray horizon. Nathaniel pulled at the oars with steady, unhurried strokes, his breath even, his eyes fixed somewhere past her shoulder.

“You’re quiet,” she said.

“Thinking.”

“About what Silas told us.”

Nathaniel’s jaw tightened. “About how your husband knew that channel better than any man who wasn’t a smuggler.”

The words hung between them, sharp as a fishhook. Elinor looked down at the leather satchel at her feet—the coded note, the chart, the forged death certificate. A paper trail leading nowhere good.

“He wasn’t always—” she started.

“I know.”

“You don’t. Everyone speaks of Josiah Marsh as though he were a saint carved from New England granite. And now I find he was meeting strange schooners in hidden inlets, trading in secrets, leaving debts against my house—” Her voice cracked, and she pressed her lips together.

Nathaniel shipped the oars for a moment, letting the boat drift. The water lapped against the hull, a gentle sound that felt like a lie after the morning they’d had.

“Silas was right about one thing,” he said quietly. “The man who knew that channel wasn’t the same man who courted you. And I don’t know when he changed.”

Elinor looked at him. The wind had pulled strands of hair loose from her bonnet, and she pushed them back with an impatient hand. “Then we find out who made him that way. Someone on that schooner. Someone with a scarred hand who never signed the manifest.”

“Or someone in New Bedford,” Nathaniel said, lifting the oars again.

She thought of Mr. Hale, of his ledger with its neat rows of debts and credits, of the unmarked schooner loading at his private wharf. Of his face when she told him she’d paid her husband’s outfitting bill—the flicker of something that was not surprise.

The skiff crested another swell, and Elinor felt the change before she understood it. A pressure in the air, a tightening at the back of her neck. She turned.

A cutter had come out of the mist off their starboard quarter. Fast, low in the water, sails full and dark as a crow’s wing. No flag. No name on her bow.

“Nathaniel,” she said, her voice low.

He glanced back. His arms went still.

“How long has she been there?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear her coming.” He dug the oars in hard, and the skiff surged forward. “Sit low. Keep your head down.”

Elinor huddled against the thwart, the satchel pressed to her chest. The cutter was gaining. She could hear the creak of her rigging now, the hiss of her bow through the water. Nathaniel was rowing square and strong, but it wasn’t enough—the skiff wallowed while the cutter sliced.

“They’re not trying to catch us,” Elinor said, watching the larger vessel angle toward them. “They’re trying to run us down.”

Nathaniel grunted. He pulled once, twice, three strokes, then shipped the oars and reached under the stern seat. His hand came back holding a boat hook—a length of ash with a bronze blade at the end. He laid it on the floorboards beside him. “If it comes to it, you take the tiller and head for that point of rocks yonder. There’s a rip tide there that’ll shake anything.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Elinor.”

“No.” She said it flat. Final. “If you think I’m going to watch you drown the way I watched my husband sail off, you’ve misjudged me badly, Nathaniel Coffin.”

The cutter surged. Its wake walloped the skiff broadside, throwing Elinor hard against the rail. Water sloshed over the gunwale, cold and sudden. She gasped, clinging to the satchel. Nathaniel heaved her upright with one hand.

“They’re coming around,” he said through gritted teeth. “Hold on.”

The cutter’s hull loomed—wood close enough that she could see the grain of it, the tar in her seams. A man stood at her bow, silhouetted against the gray sky. One hand raised. His other hand—

“Gloves,” Elinor breathed. “He’s wearing gloves.”

The cutter struck.

The shock threw Elinor against the stern. The satchel flew from her grasp. Time went strange and slow: the satchel spinning in the air, the ledger sliding free of its flap, pages fluttering white like gulls. Nathaniel lunged for it, one hand outstretched, and then the skiff rolled.

Elinor heard herself scream his name. The sky went one way, the sea another. Cold swallowed her whole, salt burning her nose and throat. She kicked for the surface, broke the foam, and saw Nathaniel’s head go under beside the overturned skiff.

He didn’t come up.

The cutter had already passed, leaning into a turn, and Elinor saw her chance. She struck out across the chop, arms thick with cold, and dove. Under the water the light was green and dim. She saw Nathaniel’s legs moving weakly, one arm tangled in the skiff’s sheet line. His eyes were open, but they weren’t seeing anything.

She grabbed him by the collar of his coat and kicked.

They broke the surface together. Elinor gasped, hauled air, and felt the line still snared around his wrist. “You’ve got to—stop struggling—let me—” She worked at the wet rope with shaking fingers. Nathaniel’s head lolled against her shoulder.

“Don’t you dare,” she panted, sawing at the line with her teeth. “Don’t you dare die on me now, you stubborn, oar-headed fool.”

The rope gave. Elinor kicked hard, dragging Nathaniel toward the skiff’s hull, which rolled belly-up in the swell. She hooked an arm over the keel, pulled him close, and held them both there, gasping, lungs burning.

The cutter had completed her turn. She was coming back.

Elinor’s eyes raked the water. No satchel. No ledger. A wave lifted the skiff, and through the trough she saw the ledger floating a dozen yards away, its pages swollen and dark, already beginning to sink.

Nathaniel coughed—water streaming from his mouth—and stirred against her. “She’s coming around again,” he rasped.

“I know.”

“She’ll finish us this time.”

“I know.”

The cutter bore down. Elinor could see the man at the bow more clearly now—broad-shouldered, cap low, a face with no expression she could read at this distance. His gloved hand pointed at her.

Called her out. Marked her.

Then the cutter’s helm came over, and she sheared off, turning north. Her sails filled, and she ran before the wind, disappearing into the mist as though she had never been.

Elinor floated in the water a long moment, holding Nathaniel, watching the place where she had gone.

“The ledger,” she said at last. “It’s gone.”

Nathaniel was quiet. Then, very softly: “I’m sorry, Elinor.”

She turned her face to the gray sky. Thought of the rosewood rose hidden in her dresser, of the second seam she had not yet opened. Of Josiah’s handwriting in the margin of the chart she had tucked into her bosom at dawn—the one thing she had not kept in the satchel.

“It’s all right,” she said, and the words tasted like bile. “Everything I need to know, I know by heart.”

She pulled him onto the skiff, the hull bobbing low and sluggish, and looked north where the cutter had vanished. Someone had sent that boat. Someone had known exactly where they would be.

And they knew her name now, too.