Chapter 28
With Ophelia, Berkeley, and Rue in tow, Carolina made sure they were alone on the darkened street and then knocked on the door of John’s house. There was shuffling from inside as John called that he was coming, and a few moments later, the door swung open.
John grinned at them, looking around at each gleefully before saying, “Carolina!”
“Hello, my friend,” Carolina laughed, taking his hand in hers and clapping her other hand to his shoulder in greeting. “You look well.”
“I am,” he agreed, waving them all in and closing the door behind them. “I’m settling in nicely here, and I’ve finally heard from Henry. He’s alive!”
Her eyebrows rose at that. “That’s great news. Where has he gone?”
“He’s gone off to aid the rebellion,” John said. “I’ve been in touch myself, wouldn’t you believe it?”
“It sounds like we have some catching up to do,” Carolina said.
“Indeed,” John nodded, and gestured at his table. “Have a seat. Everyone want an ale?”
They all nodded, but before he went to fetch drinks, he noticed Ophelia. “A new face,” he pointed out. “I’m John.”
“Ophelia,” Ophelia told him, taking the hand he extended to her. “It’s a pleasure.”
“Pleasure’s all mine,” he said with a grin, and asked, “an ale for you too?”
“Please,” Ophelia agreed.
While he turned to start pouring drinks from a cask on one of his kitchen shelves, Carolina asked, “So, did Henry tell you why he ran? ”
“He did,” John said. “Apparently, the night he ran, someone had come into his house and held him at knife point — a woman, he said.”
“She threatened him?” Carolina asked.
“Told him that Sovereign was onto him,” he answered, “and he’d best run.”
“And he didn’t know who it was?”
John shook his head as he gathered the handles of all five mugs in his hands to carry them over. Before answering, he set a mug in front of each of them, and then took his seat across the table from Carolina. “It was dark, and she was behind him. He never saw her face.”
“Curious,” Carolina said, and John hummed his agreement. “But you’ve been safe? No one’s come to investigate?”
“Strangely enough, no,” he answered. “Sovereign’s been silent since I took the lead archivist position.”
“That is strange,” Carolina mused, glancing around at her companions.
Berkeley asked, “What are you thinking?”
She considered it a moment longer, which was enough time for Ophelia to surmise, “You’re thinking it might’ve been your traitor.”
John’s eyebrows lifted behind his mug as he took a drink and quickly set it back down. “What’s that now?”
“Someone on my ship has been working against me,” Carolina told him. “But even if it was the traitor that ran Henry off, it doesn’t help. Almost half my crew is women.”
“Why are they working against you?” John asked.
Carolina shrugged. “We have no idea. I’ve got a growing list of problems in our wake and can’t deduce which of them are connected.”
“Well, why would your traitor want to scare Henry away?” John said. “Unless to keep you from finding out about Ascension.”
“I suppose,” Carolina said, “except that I hadn’t told them about it.” She nodded around the table. “We’re the only ones that knew. Or so I thought.”
There was a moment of pause, and then Rue said, “What if they’re after you ?”
“What do you mean?” Carolina asked.
“The bounty hunters,” Rue said, and nodded toward Ophelia, “what if they’re not just after her? If you’re being hunted too, I’d imagine it’s easier to find you when you’re bound to Omen.”
“That’d be one hell of a payday,” Berkeley said .
“Perhaps,” Carolina agreed, and shrugged again. “Although I don’t see why now , when I’ve been pirating the skies for over a decade.” She shook her head and sighed. “All I know is that we’re going to keep pushing forward.”
“But do keep one eye at your back if there’s a traitor in your midst,” John warned.
She nodded to that, and asked, “So, you’ve been in touch with the rebellion?”
“Yes,” John said, smiling. “Paid me a nice visit too.”
Ophelia asked, “Did you meet with Izaak himself?”
John’s face lit up. “You’re familiar?”
“We’ve done some work for the rebellion ourselves,” Ophelia told him.
“He’s lovely, isn’t he?” John asked.
Carolina mumbled, “He’s a politician, alright.”
“Well, I’ll tell him you said hello if you’d like, when I write to him about your visit.” John paused, and at Carolina’s curious look, said, “He’s asked me to alert him whenever someone wants to see the archives.”
“I see,” Carolina said thoughtfully. “Did you tell him we’d been here before?”
“I did,” John answered, grimacing apologetically at the look on her face. “Was I not supposed to?”
“I do prefer to keep my business to myself,” she told him. “But Izaak knows of my curse, and I understand if you need to be diplomatic about your allegiances.”
“I can delay writing him, if that puts you at ease?”
She smiled gratefully. “I would appreciate it.”
John nodded and smiled back, took another drink of his ale, and asked, “And what of you? I assume the Fortuna provided no answers.”
“Unfortunately not,” she answered. “Though I suppose it came as little surprise.” John hummed his agreement. “That is why we’re here, though, John. I was hoping you’ve had time to go through the archives.”
“I’ve certainly begun,” he told her, “but Henry left them a proper mess — organization never was his strength.”
“I see,” she said. “So you’ve not discovered anything that may help me?”
“Not that I can think of. But you’re more than welcome to come around any time while you’re on island to help me sort through it all.” He looked around at all of them. “It’d go much faster, that’s for sure. ”
“I do believe we’ll take you up on that,” Carolina answered. “If it’s no imposition.”
“Not at all,” he told her readily. “I’d be overjoyed for the company. It’s otherwise lonely work.”
“When can we start?”
John glanced over at the cold hearth, and then at the door before getting up to test the lock. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said finally. “I’ll leave the fire dead while you’re on island, and my door unlocked while I’m out at the library during the day. I know your time is limited, so stop by whenever you’d like.”
“Well, then,” Carolina said. She lifted her mug to her lips to throw back the rest of her ale, and then set it back on the table with a heavy thud. “Let’s get to work.”
John nodded and gulped down the rest of his drink too, as did Berkeley and Rue, and then all of them stood to make their way to the fireplace. Carolina knelt down with Berkeley to pull the base of the hearth out and reveal the room beneath them, and when Ophelia saw it, she let out an awed, ‘ Oh .’
Carolina chuckled at that and gestured Ophelia toward the ladder. “After you.”
Ophelia happily lowered herself down into the makeshift cellar first. Carolina followed second, and while the rest of the group came down after her, she watched Ophelia’s reaction. Watched Ophelia’s face go from awe, to disappointment, to anger.
“This isn’t just some covered history,” Ophelia said, turning a circle to look at the countless pages before looking at Carolina. “This is an entire dynasty’s worth of history.”
Carolina nodded knowingly.
“The people need to see this,” Ophelia said.
It was Rue who said, “No,” and they all turned their confused gazes on her. “This is too important to reveal.” She shrugged. “And it wouldn’t tell the people anything they didn’t already know — that Sovereign doesn’t care about them, or that it’s time for a new ruler. The rebellion is already happening without risking these documents.”
Ophelia let out a quiet sigh through pursed lips as she nodded. “You’re right.”
Carolina asked John, “So, where do we start?”
He gestured to a mostly empty bookshelf with a couple of sparsely occupied baskets in front of it. “I’ve started organizing things here, chronologically.” He gestured to the rest of the scattered piles and stuffed shelves around the room. “And I’ve sort of just been picking documents from everywhere else. There’s no system to any of it, so start wherever you’d like.”
“Great,” Berkeley sighed.
They all dispersed toward different stacks and rolls of parchment, but Ophelia followed Carolina to a bookshelf and asked, “What is it we’re looking for, exactly?”
Carolina shrugged. “Last time we were here, there was a note that said all documents about Vivienne and Ascension had been returned to her descendants. Maybe we won’t find anything about Ascension itself, but if we could find some clue to point us toward her descendants, even if all we get is an island, then that’ll be more to go on than we’ve had yet.”
“This all happened in the span of how many years?”
Carolina couldn’t remember, so she asked, “John?”
“If I remember correctly,” he mused, pausing to glance upward in thought, “something like the year seven-fifty to eleven-forty.”
“So we’re looking for one piece of information in about four hundred years’ worth of history,” Ophelia said, turning a circle to cast her wide-eyed gaze around the room. “How simple…”
“I wonder who found Vivienne’s descendants in the first place,” Rue said as she flipped open the cover of a worn leather book. “To return all the documents to them.”
“The note didn’t say?” Ophelia asked. Carolina, John, and Rue all shook their heads. “So, what if we find something, and then find her descendants. What then?”
“I suppose I’d try to ingratiate myself to them,” Carolina answered.
“And if they still didn’t give you what we’re after?”
“We are pirates,” Carolina reminded.
“You can’t kill them,” Ophelia scolded.
She tutted with mock offense. “I meant rob them.”
Ophelia gave an embarrassed giggle and mumbled, “Oh.” She looked around the room and asked, “Do we at least know what year the documents were returned to Vivienne’s descendants?”
“Eleven forty-two,” Carolina answered.
“Right,” Ophelia said resolutely. “So, anything outside the range of seven-fifty to eleven forty-two is probably irrelevant. ”
John nodded his agreement. “That should help us sort through things quicker. Everything else can go straight to a shelf.”
“Sort first?” Rue asked. “Then pick through for information later?”
“I think that’s a good strategy,” Carolina agreed, and wandered to the emptiest table to take any remaining items off it and put them on a different one. “Put anything in our date range on that table,” she instructed, gesturing to the empty one.
Each of the others nodded, and they went to work. They all started with books, flipping through indexes and pages to check dates, and putting the books within the range onto the designated table. The books that were irrelevant were passed to John, so he could put them in their organized place on a shelf. After a while, Rue took on the task of stacking the relevant books based on content, so they could be more selective about the process when it was time to start going through it all.
It was slow, and dull, and not the kind of work to provide Carolina with a good distraction from the growing pain in her wrist. But while they sorted, John hummed familiar tunes to himself, and occasionally Berkeley would fill in with a lyric or make up some of his own. When they got bored of that, John began asking for stories about their lives as pirates and all the places they went. Ophelia chimed in with tales of her own about the years she’d spent on the run.
Shortly before Ophelia relieved Carolina of the pain in her wrist, Rue went out to get them something to eat, and came back with so much food they teased her about how she even carried it all back. And with the pain gone and a full belly, time passed more quickly, and they got another long stretch of sorting done.
Before any of them realized it, it was almost midnight, and Carolina’s wrist was beginning to hurt badly enough for the second time that she wouldn’t be able to stay much longer. But they’d filled half the table with stacks of books, and she was happy with that.
“That’s it for me,” she announced. “I need to get back.”
Ophelia yawned, nodding as she passed the irrelevant book she was holding to John. “I think my eyes are done for the night too.”
Berkeley nodded his eager agreement, but Rue said, “I might stay a while more, if that’s alright with John.”
“Of course,” he said.
“You sure?” Carolina asked.
Rue hummed. “I’m not tired yet. May as well keep sorting. ”
Carolina nodded, patting Rue gratefully on the face while shielding a yawn with the back of her other hand. “Be safe on your walk back. Watch out for soldiers.”
“I will,” Rue assured her.
She said goodnight to John, and then climbed the ladder with Ophelia and Berkeley to head back to the ship, hoping that all this work would pay off.