His father said the Lord’s name again, and suddenly Jedediah was plunging through the darkness, riding his father down the stairs, across the hall, into the study.

He was set down before the fireplace and told again to be quiet. Someone was fumbling to unlock the closet beside the fireplace, and for a moment, in the light of the torches flickering past the windows, he did not know that it was his mother.

Then she said, “Don’t worry, little Jed. You’ll be safe in a second.” Her voice was shaking, and she smelled of the same fear he had smelled on the slaves.

“Be quick, Elizabeth.” Jedediah’s father grabbed the brace of pistols he kept loaded on the mantelpiece.

And the voice of old Cicero, the house slave who slept off the kitchen, came screaming ahead of him. “Marse Tom! Marse Tom! They’s in the house!”

“Jesus God!” cried his mother. “In the house.”

In the house. Jedediah realized now what this was—a bad dream. In the house. But it was a long house, expanded over the years like an ever-lengthening row of boxes, one room deep, eight rooms long, with the study in the middle.

“Stay calm, Elizabeth.” Jedediah’s father put himself between his family and the dining room door. “Just press the third board down from the ceiling. And—”

Old Cicero’s white hair appeared. “They’s in the dinin’ room.” And a gun went off behind him, thundering like a cannon, splattering him into the room.

Jedediah was too shocked to scream, and shock became terror when a huge shadow appeared in the doorway, holding a blunderbuss. “Ah, la petite famille.”

And Jedediah’s father shot the Frenchman right in the forehead.

Jedediah screamed at the flash and the thunderous roar of the pistol.

“Quiet, boy.” His father calmly shot the next pirate through the door, then sprang to the bodies, pulled their pistols, and peered across the dining room. “The rest are in the kitchen, breaking things. Hide the boy, Elizabeth, and hide yourself.”

“You come, too.”

“I defend my family or I’m no man.”

“Then I’ll defend it with you.”

And there was no time to argue, because they were coming. Jedediah’s father raised a pistol and fired at another pirate.

Jedediah’s mother dragged him through the gunsmoke-choked darkness to the closet and shoved him into the tiny passageway that ran up along the chimney to the bedroom above. “Stay there, darlin’. Don’t come out for anything. No matter what you hear.”

“And be quiet,” said his father.

“We love you,” said his mother, and she closed the panel, sealing the boy into the wall, into complete blackness, where sound was the only sense.

He heard his father tell his mother to hide the tea service in the closet, where it would be easy to find. “That’ll satisfy ’em when they open the door.” And silver jangled in the space below him. Then the closet door was shut and sounds were muffled. And that was by the grace of God.

Because there were more gunshots, deep-throated growls and high-pitched cries, the sounds of scuffling feet and grappling bodies. Then a gunshot brought a scream that seemed to cut through the wall itself and right into Jedediah’s belly.

It was his mother’s voice, and the scream went on and on until Jedediah brought his hands to his ears in the blackness. They had killed his father. He knew.

Then the closet door opened below him. The pirate murderers were just feet away. He could see the torchlight through the cracks in the rough closet walls. Someone grabbed the silver, and he prayed they would not hear him whimpering.

Then his mother screamed, “Get off! No. Get off!”

Then she screamed as though pierced by a knife, and the pirates roared with laughter, until a gunshot caused screaming and laughter to stop suddenly, and the boy knew that his mother was dead too. He heard a body thump to the floor. He shivered, but he was too frightened to cry.

Then a man said something, though it was hard to understand because he spoke so strangely. “He no rape you with a bullet in him.”

“He’s raped enough,” growled a woman’s voice. “And killed.”

She was still alive! Jed clapped a hand to his mouth to keep from crying out.

“We kill who kill us. Your man a fool.”

“He had more honor than all of you.”

The man laughed.