thought he would have forgotten the little details, but he could already feel the impending rush of speed and the effect it would have on his body as powerful unseen hands pushed him back into his seat and held him there. Then it came, and if he’d had any loose muscle left in his body to clench, he would have.
“Whooosshh!” Julia Kapowski slapped her magazine onto her lap and jumped in her seat.
Tayte jumped with her.
“Don’t you just love the take-off?”
If only she knew.
Ten seconds later and that part at least was over. When Tayte opened his eyes again, the plane was safely in the air and climbing - though safe was the exact antonym for how Tayte felt. If he had the stomach to look out the window again, he would have seen the Boston Harbour Islands diminishing below, but his butterflies began to fight one another now, turning his stomach into a boxing ring. Then the engine note changed. The raging violence of exploding gases out on the wings, courtesy of Pratt & Whitney, settled and a bong! sounded around the cabin as the seat-belt light went out. None of which gave him any further comfort.
He checked his watch - a cheap digital affair with glowing red digits that he’d had since the ‘80s and was still fond of in a retro kind of way. It read ‘11:40’ and he couldn’t believe they’d only been up ten minutes. A quick calculation told him that it would be 22:30, UK time, when they arrived. Tayte couldn’t stop himself from rephrasing the sentence with the word if instead of when. He needed something else to think about.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out his travel documents, looking for the onward train journey details. He picked out the highlights. London, Paddington to Truro. The departure time read, ‘23:45’. That gave him over an hour to clear the airport and get to the train: an overnight sleeper that would take him to Cornwall in just over seven hours.
As he put the tickets away and the plane began to level, he recalled how close he’d come to jacking it in, even as he stood there at the departure gate, ticket shaking in his hand. He always had when the f-word came up - found some excuse why he couldn’t fly here or fly there. But not this time. Irrespective of his client’s insistence, he wasn’t into this game just so some rich entrepreneur’s wife could have a nice birthday present. This assignment was all about finding a family that someone did not want to be found and that made the whole thing far more personal than Walter Sloane could know.
If you can’t find this family, he told himself, how the hell do you expect to be good enough to find your own?
Tayte settled back and began to think about James Fairborne and his family again, wondering what they were like, piecing their lives together from the records he’d found. He compared journeys: a couple of months being blown about in a wooden tub, guided by the stars at the mercy of the Atlantic Ocean, versus seven hours in a relatively comfortable seat surrounded by the best technology modern science could provide. The plane was steady now. He had no idea how high they were and he cared even less. It was just like riding a Greyhound bus, cruising on some smooth interstate. He felt pathetic as tiredness caught up with him and he began to drift.
Chapter Four
N amed in honour of the woman credited with having made the first flag of the American Union, the Betsy Ross was a one hundred and ten ton brig, bluff-bowed with a flat transom stern and both masts square rigged for speed. Primarily, she carried cargo, trading in anything saleable along the busy coastal waters of the Eastern Seaboard between Boston and the Indies to the south. In the August of 1783, however, she had a very different itinerary.
Sitting in the dock at Boston harbour, some seventy feet in length, she appeared to Katherine Fairborne as a ramshackle of heavy
“Whooosshh!” Julia Kapowski slapped her magazine onto her lap and jumped in her seat.
Tayte jumped with her.
“Don’t you just love the take-off?”
If only she knew.
Ten seconds later and that part at least was over. When Tayte opened his eyes again, the plane was safely in the air and climbing - though safe was the exact antonym for how Tayte felt. If he had the stomach to look out the window again, he would have seen the Boston Harbour Islands diminishing below, but his butterflies began to fight one another now, turning his stomach into a boxing ring. Then the engine note changed. The raging violence of exploding gases out on the wings, courtesy of Pratt & Whitney, settled and a bong! sounded around the cabin as the seat-belt light went out. None of which gave him any further comfort.
He checked his watch - a cheap digital affair with glowing red digits that he’d had since the ‘80s and was still fond of in a retro kind of way. It read ‘11:40’ and he couldn’t believe they’d only been up ten minutes. A quick calculation told him that it would be 22:30, UK time, when they arrived. Tayte couldn’t stop himself from rephrasing the sentence with the word if instead of when. He needed something else to think about.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out his travel documents, looking for the onward train journey details. He picked out the highlights. London, Paddington to Truro. The departure time read, ‘23:45’. That gave him over an hour to clear the airport and get to the train: an overnight sleeper that would take him to Cornwall in just over seven hours.
As he put the tickets away and the plane began to level, he recalled how close he’d come to jacking it in, even as he stood there at the departure gate, ticket shaking in his hand. He always had when the f-word came up - found some excuse why he couldn’t fly here or fly there. But not this time. Irrespective of his client’s insistence, he wasn’t into this game just so some rich entrepreneur’s wife could have a nice birthday present. This assignment was all about finding a family that someone did not want to be found and that made the whole thing far more personal than Walter Sloane could know.
If you can’t find this family, he told himself, how the hell do you expect to be good enough to find your own?
Tayte settled back and began to think about James Fairborne and his family again, wondering what they were like, piecing their lives together from the records he’d found. He compared journeys: a couple of months being blown about in a wooden tub, guided by the stars at the mercy of the Atlantic Ocean, versus seven hours in a relatively comfortable seat surrounded by the best technology modern science could provide. The plane was steady now. He had no idea how high they were and he cared even less. It was just like riding a Greyhound bus, cruising on some smooth interstate. He felt pathetic as tiredness caught up with him and he began to drift.
Chapter Four
N amed in honour of the woman credited with having made the first flag of the American Union, the Betsy Ross was a one hundred and ten ton brig, bluff-bowed with a flat transom stern and both masts square rigged for speed. Primarily, she carried cargo, trading in anything saleable along the busy coastal waters of the Eastern Seaboard between Boston and the Indies to the south. In the August of 1783, however, she had a very different itinerary.
Sitting in the dock at Boston harbour, some seventy feet in length, she appeared to Katherine Fairborne as a ramshackle of heavy
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