We’ll do our best, just as we always have.”

IN THE FRESHENING breeze, they made the run back to the Patuxent in half the time it took to sail up the bay. They were just passing Hog Point, at the river’s mouth, when a sixteen-year-old indentured servant named Nervous Duncan Parrish spied a sail.

“Big schooner, makin’ fast.” Thomas Stafford peered through his glass. “A good three miles away yet.”

“Can you see a flag?” asked Nervous Duncan.

“No, but that means nothin’.”

“It damn do.” Nervous Duncan seldom held his tongue, and never when his nerves got the better of him. “It mean she got a reason for not showin’. I say she’s a pirate.”

“We’ll keep an eye on her and keep the four-pounders ready.”

“Four-pounders?” Nervous Duncan spun one of the little cannon mounted at the stern. “Fight a pirate ship with a pair of four-pound swivels? Pirates kill people who fight ’em. Except for slaves and little ones. Them they steal and sell.”

Jedediah’s father told Duncan to go below if he could not hold his tongue. He spoke calmly, but Jedediah saw the worry in his father’s face, especially when that two-master rounded Hog Point and headed upstream after them.

“Is they really pirates, Pa?”

“No. ’Sides, the Patuxent is the fastest sloop on the river.”

But over the next hour, the big schooner came on, riding a full spread of canvas like a black-hulled spirit.

Then the winds grew erratic. One moment, Patuxent had the air and widened the distance; then the wind faded upstream while it gusted below, and the schooner shot ahead, sometimes all the way into cannon range. But she didn’t fire, and Jedediah’s father said that was a good sign. The fluky airs, however, were not.

Soon the sky turned a strange yellowing black, and little Jedediah felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. Such a thing had never happened before, but he sensed that it meant something worse would happen soon. And the squall hit with a hammer blow that almost rolled the Patuxent on her beam end. Then the first thunderclap exploded in their face. Then ragged forks of lightning slashed down all around. Then the Patuxent was swallowed into a black belly of wind and rain.

But Thomas Stafford kept all sails set, letting the winds push the Patuxent far and fast upstream. And even little Jedediah realized the danger. His father had never run through a squall before, saying it was a good way to blow a sloop to pieces, not to be done unless there was greater danger in taking in sail and letting the storm pass.

But it worked. When the rain blew off, the schooner was gone and the afternoon sun came cutting through the clouds in brilliant blades of gold.

“Was they really pirates, Pa?”

“Royal Navy don’t let pirates in the Chesapeake. My bet is they were merchants, puttin’ in downstream. Just means more work for me, of course. Admiralty agent has to make certain everyone pays their duties.”

At Stafford Hall, Thomas told his wife that Nervous Duncan had gotten more nervous than usual and started everyone worrying with talk of pirates. Then he showed her his customs book to convince her that one of the downstream planters had been expecting a big schooner.

As his mother tucked Jedediah into bed that night, the boy searched her eyes for signs of fear and saw none. If his father could convince his mother that there was no reason to worry, Jedediah knew it was safe to surrender to the exhaustion rolling over him.

LOUD VOICES AWAKENED him some time later. Loud voices and the pounding of the plantation bell and the strange flickering light on the ceiling of his room.

So he crawled out of bed and went stumbling to the front dormer. At first he could see nothing but the scrawny shadows of the sycamores that his father had planted between the road and the house. Then his eyes found light in the darkness, and he saw Nervous Duncan pounding the bell by the hitching post, and he heard above the bell the cry “Pirates!”

He scuttled to the window that looked toward the river and saw torches casting their strange, flickering light, bobbing up the rolling road from the wharf, as though carried by evening guests. But no evening guest had ever before thrown a torch into one of the slave huts or herded screaming slaves toward his ship.

And then strong arms pulled Jedediah away from the window.

“Pa! What’s—”

“Be still, boy.”

Jedediah was swept up in his father’s arms and rushed through the darkness to the top of the stairs, where his father stopped and gasped the Lord’s name.

Through the stairwell window, Jedediah saw the torches crossing the back lawn, poking into the smokehouse, moving toward the servants’ quarters, surrounding the main house, as calmly as wolves flanking a deer.

Then a gunshot silenced the alarm bell.

Then came another gunshot, closer by, and the sound of breaking glass.