Everfair (19 page)

In the cool darkness of her cavern chamber—shared now with but one child—Daisy pressed the letter paper to her and visualized the contents as if reading them by grace of the gift of psychometry:

I'll do as you say. But don't write me. I feel sure you are correct, and I can best serve Everfair's interests by continuing abroad. However, and let me be blunt, your promise of a sustained correspondence would cause more pain than pleasure—especially via your proposed go-between.

Of course, if you have some urgent reason, a matter of life and death, you may reach me through sending a message to Mr. Owen. As you suggest, I'll be in contact with him regularly, making him my reports.

For the other matter, I quite understand. Nor do I blame you, or Mr. Owen, or Laurie, or anyone else concerned, though I hope you are mistaken. But I will do nothing to upset your scheme of provoking a possibly dangerous response from Leopold by your continued presence within his reach.

Only I don't like it. Especially not as a motive for our continued separation.

Yours (as you well know),

Lisette Toutournier

Paper being precious, Daisy hadn't managed to keep a copy of the letter that prompted these brief lines. However, it had taken her so many drafts to get it right—well, it had not been right even in its final version. But trying to shape it into some semblance of what Jackie had said was needed, she'd come to know it well enough.

What she'd ended in sending—in addition to urging an appeal to the Congressional Committee on African Affairs—perhaps said too much of the idea of using Everfair's white settlers, and she herself in particular, as bait. That strategy, as she reiterated multiple times, was why Daisy must remain in the colony while her love lived indefinitely abroad as a spy.

There was very little danger involved in staying here, in Daisy's own opinion. Too little to matter. In truth, nothing did much matter, since Lily's death.

She'd thought that if she wrote as Jackie asked, that he, at least, would remain in Kamina. After their last encounter, especially. He'd said he loved and esteemed her. The latter word rather undercut the former, but never mind. The needs of the Society overrode her own, and no use pitying herself. She still had Rosalie, recovered now from her illness, but at thirteen, endearingly dependent on Daisy, and likely to continue so for years to come.

Tucking the grimy letter inside her skirt pocket—the last time she'd looked at it in the light, it had had a distinctly grey cast—Daisy emerged into her home's main chamber.

Here there was light. Sparse wood and metal furnishings threw shadows on the cave walls: some bare, some covered with woven grasses. Daisy picked up a brass lamp from the tin stand near the exit. She believed the wick protruding from its spout was also made at least partially of metal, though thin enough to burn. A globular, pierced screen shielded it, casting moving points of light on the stone walls of the passage as she walked.

Only a short distance up the uneven incline of the passage, she came to the high-ceilinged, cisternlike cave designated by them as the Mote Room. It was too inconveniently shaped to be of much use other than for these meetings: nets and baskets full of stored goods hung overhead, but the floor could hold no more than the mat Nenzima had created to cover it; the white cloth, on which rested the Lamp, a larger copy of the one she held; and the ten people seated around it on the oval mat's tight-sewn edges.

Daisy took the place they'd saved for her near the door. As usual, she was the last to arrive, though she lived the closest. All, however, stayed somewhere within the cavern complex, except during the dry season. Next to her knelt Nenzima, the Bah-Looba fighting woman, and just past her, Alonzo, Queen Josina's cousin. Beside him sat the little Scotch playwright, Mr. Matthew Jamison—or Matty, as he preferred to be called. He took Everfair's principles of equality seriously. Loyiki, back from another round of messages, hunched between him and Old Kanna, who memorized the Mote's monthly sessions for transcription into Everfair's many unofficial tongues—adopting English as their
official
language had been one of their first initiatives.

To Old Kanna's right sat Daisy's foe, Mrs. Hunter—now Mrs. Albin!—the smooth-faced Negro woman who had sent George away. She alone had contrived a chair for herself, a short stool. Her right flank was occupied by her allies: the reverend lieutenant and the youngest of her two inventor godsons, Winthrop. Naturally Mr. Ho Lin-Huang had chosen a seat near him, and Albert, one of the remaining white workers, who completed the circle.

The Mote's factions were made clear enough in its seating arrangements, though the separation between herself and Matty had long posed her a puzzle.

Daisy removed the guard from her lamp's wick and joined its flame momentarily to that of the Lamp, a ceremonial lighting each of the others would have done as they arrived. Then she set her lamp before her on the mat, as with both hands she upended a big pierced-metal bowl—the same design, but for its size, as the guard of the lamp she'd carried—and lowered it onto the lip flaring out around the Lamp's tall spout. This signaled the meeting's start.

Loyiki reported that the war went well on all the fronts he'd visited. Alonzo concurred: the drums told the same story. Tink and Albert had recently returned from the crash site of Leopold's vain attempt to match Everfair's prowess in the air,
La Belgique
. The silk with which he had fashioned his
ballon dirigeable
's bags was superior to their best barkcloth, the two admitted, but both methods of propulsion he appeared to have tried had proved obviously inferior. His electrical batteries limited flights to round trips of roughly five miles each. They knew this for fact, having stolen and tested one, “and they can't be haulin around endless supplies of em for recharge,” Albert explained. The tyrant's new internal combustion engines gave him an improved reach, but their fuel still weighed more and took up more storage space than the Bah-Sangah's special earths, and were quite susceptible to fiery explosions, as well. Such as the one that had destroyed this latest experiment.

Mr. Ho had made quick sketches of the scene, black ink brushed on pale brown bark, and of pieces of equipment too large or fragile to be transported to Kamina's workshops. He seemed glad to turn these over to Old Kanna, and listened quite intently afterward to Winthrop's exposition on their most recent advances in the creation of artificial limbs. His dedication to improving medical prosthetics verged on the tragic.

Daisy had long since forgiven Mr. Ho—Tink, as she'd called him when he was a boy—for Lily's death. He had not killed her. Though he had not saved her, either.

Lisette, who'd been looking after Lily right before she was killed, had gone far away, exactly as Daisy had asked her to do.

Mrs. Albin, on the other hand, she simply couldn't stomach, though if Daisy were to look at the thing rationally, George's exile from Everfair was only what she herself might have ordered to prevent those two from consummating their marriage. What of their probable offspring?

“What of their souls?” the missionary asked, her question a warped echo of Daisy's thoughts. Dark face and hands speckled with the Lamp's golden glow, like the pelt of a reversed leopard, her eyes glinting in the shade of her straw hat, Mrs. Albin was no more satisfied with their potential victory than if it had been certain defeat. “Church membership has risen by a ridiculously small number: only sixty-two in the last year. The merest fraction—not even a tenth of the natives we've rescued and healed in that time!” She turned to address Wilson. “Can we not be fishers of men? Shepherds of lost sheep?”

Wilson blinked rapidly, his eyes directed across the mat but not meeting Daisy's—or anyone's, as far as she could tell. His lips began moving a moment before he spoke. “Are you sure? We were voted for, chosen to be representatives here … and so many attend Sunday services—”

“But do they understand what you're saying? Or is the attraction really your voice, your manner—”

“The sermons are translated.”

Daisy interrupted. “Is this truly a matter for the Mote? Can't you discuss such issues elsewhere, another time?”

Matty agreed. “What we must consider today,” he said, “is how far we've come in meeting the most common requirement asked of us by those we seek as allies: a national constitution. Do we all have our copies?”

They did. Daisy's comprised a sheaf of twenty crisply folded sheets, into which she'd inserted notes on any clear scraps she could find. She took it out of her skirt and unfolded it. Each of the Mote's other members consulted their own draft, even Loyiki and Nenzima, whom Daisy knew to be illiterate.

The document set up Everfair's political structure in the form of a highly decentralized representative democracy. It was very rough, only the bare bones of what they needed.

Mrs. Albin riffled through the pamphlet she'd sewn together of her copy and shook her head. “Nowhere in here is God mentioned. Obviously this document was drawn up by atheists.”

That was probably a good assumption; the framework of it must have been devised back in England by Jackie and Laurie.

“Many of us
are
atheists, ma'am. Skeptics, at the very least,” said Albert. “Seems in keepin' with that.”

“Hmmph. So I've been complaining. Atheist savages and heathens.” Mrs. Albin turned to look at Wilson. He stayed silent. “Winthrop?”

Even seated, the inventor bulked above the other Mote members like a bear. “Well, Godmama, I don't see why we should ask for such a change. Americans are a Christian enough nation without the country's constitution defining them that way.”

Was the slaughter of declared Christians—disregarding the Negroes—more likely to gain their side the necessary supporters? Probably. Yet, Lily, their only white martyr so far—

“No! We will lose our strength in lies!” Wilson had risen to his feet, shouting. His hands were balled into trembling fists. “All blessings! All blessings! We call all blessings! They come! They come!”

Shock kept Daisy seated. The lieutenant raved on—was he mad? Nenzima crawled from her spot beside her to the far side of the Lamp and wrapped her arms around the poor man's legs. Oddly, this quieted him.

Mrs. Albin had also wrapped Wilson in her arms—though she stood to do so. Her body shook twice, visibly, containing the throes of his fit, then subsided, slumping with his dead weight.

“Help me. He must lie on his back.” Mrs. Albin instructed her godson and Nenzima how to stretch her patient out in the crowded space. She slapped his cheeks in a businesslike way and called for water and more room. Feeling useless, Daisy retreated into the Mote chamber's entrance. If only Lisette had been here … or if Lily had been able to continue her studies …

“Shall we postpone the rest of this session till later in the day?” she heard Matty ask. “Or—when will he be recovered?”

George's erstwhile wife shook her head, fluttering the Lamp's shielded flame. “I can't say. I haven't the slightest clue.”

 

Baltimore, United States of America, March 1902

A man gestured to Lisette to take his seat, fooled by her appearance. She declined, and gripped the thin pole next to her more securely as the streetcar started up again. She was done expecting to be treated as white consistently. Her clandestine mission seeking financial support from the congressional committee had come to a standstill; this showed the long-term futility of concealment.

In any event, she preferred to stand. The brisk spring breezes of these northern climes no longer chilled her so much, and from her position on the outer edge of the novel open-sided car she could see the tracks, the wires, and, leaning a little, the rounded prominence from which the car's driver controlled their speed—perhaps also their direction? If she could only watch carefully enough, she might learn.

This was her second trip of the day. The first had taken her outbound to Riverview Park, home of an enchanting miniature railway and a beautiful Ferris wheel—not as large as the Grande Roue of Paris, but nonetheless distinctive. It would feature as the setting for an amorous rendezvous in her current tale.

Now she was inbound. She had over an hour of daylight remaining in which to find her way back to the Marble Hill home of the family with whom she stayed. Like the majority of this city's inhabitants, they were Negroes, and they proudly called themselves such, though nearly as light of complexion as Lisette herself.

The car's comfortably regular rocking slowed, and it turned onto a wider thoroughfare. Traffic thickened, and with it the noises of horses, poorly maintained engines, and independent vendors crying the virtues of newspapers and early farm produce: strawberries, peas, daffodils. Also present: the competing fragrances of many meals being prepared in the hotels and restaurants lining the street. The ripe tideland scents of the wharves, which she was fast learning to ignore, sank beneath these more appetizing aromas, but didn't entirely vanish.

She thought the stop at which she must change lines would come soon. Here was South Street, here Charles. Park Avenue's stop, confusingly labeled “Liberty,” would be next. She reached for the cord past the shoulder of a short man in a bowler, but before she could touch it, the bell rang. Apparently another passenger wished the same stop. It was a busy one.

The car drew up to the platform and she was able to dismount quite quickly, thanks to its open sides. Hurrying forward, she caught a mere glimpse of shining levers and switches in the operator's compartment. Its occupant winked at her over a bushy white moustache as he pulled away.

She descended to the crosswalk. She had already rid herself of Mr. Owen's latest missive, taking advantage of a waste receptacle at Riverview. She saw now that, as she'd remembered, a letterbox waited patiently on the street's far side. It was painted a glowing green very different from the crimson used in Britain and on the Continent. She slipped her report on Washington into its slot. None of the committee's members had promised to push for allocating any official monies to their cause, even when approached separately and assured of secrecy.