Good Man Friday (36 page)

‘Let me see your stable,' said Oldmixton.

‘Look, Me Lord,' protested Elsie Fowler, ‘if you think Kyle and me ain't been livin' up to our side of our bargain, you just say so, and we'll—'

‘I said, let me see the stable. I don't care how many laws you break but I do demand that you don't go making side deals with my other employees without telling me of it.'

‘Ain't nuthin' in the stable.' The woman's face seemed to darken and sink in on itself. ‘See,' she added as she led the way through a gate to another narrow yard. ‘Nuthin' here.'

From the stable gate, January saw the Englishman bend down with his lamp, examining the dirt. There was, in fact, nothing in the stable – not even the two massive white-footed draft-horses. The wagon, too, was missing. The tracks leading to the outer gate looked fresh.

Wheel tracks, and the traces of many bare feet.

‘Fowler's spoken of contacts in Fredericksburg,' said Oldmixton, when they regained the muddy street.

‘From there they can get a steamboat down the Rappahannock to the bay,' said Preston. ‘Either that, or they'll head north to Baltimore.'

There was a pause, and Henri, sitting awkwardly on the largest and sturdiest of the British Ministry's horses, made a little whimper of despair. ‘What can we do? There aren't enough of us to split up—'

‘We'll have to,' said January. ‘Mr Oldmixton, would you be so good as to take charge of the Fredericksburg contingent? Preston – Reverend—' He rapidly gauged strong and weak, black and white.

‘I know the Baltimore road pretty well,' volunteered Trigg.

‘Leopold—' January switched to French and beckoned the valet. ‘You'd better come with us.' In English he continued, ‘Remember to check inside the wagon bed. And remember they may be drugged. If there's trouble,' he added to Henri as they, Trigg, and the still-incomprehending valet set out at a hand-gallop through the night-bound streets towards New York Avenue and the Baltimore pike, ‘stay back and don't get yourself shot, sir. You're the only proof we have that we're not rebelling slaves.'

‘Shot?' Henri glanced down in panic at the rifle sheathed on his saddle, then flung January a helpless look as they left the last dark, scattered dwellings of the town's outskirts behind them. The waning moon glinted on the bottomlands of Goose Creek; here and there birds flew up, startled by their passing.

Minou
, thought January,
wherever you are, Minou, hang on
…

The horses lengthened their stride.

They passed through Bladensburg over the East Branch of the Tiber; the moon was sinking. It was the season of planting-out tobacco seedlings and the night was thick with the smell of new-turned soil. More often, the formless dark that stretched on either side of the road smelled of damp weeds, of thick untended grass, for after nearly two hundred years under tobacco the soil yielded little. The planters whose brick houses could still be glimpsed in the dappled starlight now lived, more and more, by the sale of unwanted or unneeded slaves.

They pressed on. Rising, the river fog swallowed the fingernail moon, and they kindled torches, though the light made January uneasy.
They'll see us coming
…

Far ahead through the trees, where the road curved a little back on itself, he saw the answering glimmer of fire.

Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee
…

Help us out here
…

The wagon was stopped, waiting for them. Six women sat on its benches, holding small children close. Twice that number of men, chained neck to neck, ankle to ankle, grouped up around the team, so that Fowler and the two men with him stood more or less in the clear by the wagon's tail. Torches were wedged into cracks in the back of the wagon, and flecks of burning pitch dripped down to smoulder on the ground beneath.

As January, Henri and Leopold rode into the torchlight, Henri sobbed, ‘She isn't here!'

‘The wagon's got a hollow bed,' replied January, in the French in which the fat man had addressed him. ‘She'll be inside it, drugged.'

Henri straightened his back at that, urged his horse forward. ‘M'sieu Fowler—' His voice squeaked with terror. ‘I'm glad we've caught you. I believe you have two women and a child among your slaves to whom you have no right.'

Fowler spat. The male slaves clustered around the wagon, the women sitting behind and above them watched in silence, eyes a wet glint of silver in the torchlight. The slave stealer stepped forward, hand held out to shake, said in his soft voice, ‘And you'd be?'

Henri blushed, hastily dismounted – January wanted to shout at him not to give up the advantage of horseback – and held out his hand in response. ‘I'm so sorry,' he apologized. ‘My name is Henri Viellard, of New Orleans, and I'm—'

Don't get away from your rifle—!

Fowler caught Henri's outstretched hand and dragged him forward, with his other hand – a pistol held by the barrel – dealt him a brutal crack on the side of the head that dropped him sprawling. January spurred his horse forward, pulled his own pistol from his waistband, knowing already he couldn't use it: not with the wagon full of women and children behind Fowler in the line of fire. He yelled, ‘Drop it!' hoping that would work, and it didn't. Fowler shot at him at a distance of less than six feet, and pain went through his side like a javelin of fire.

The next second another man sprang out of the darkness at him, dragged him from the saddle. The horse reared, squealed, toppled under the double weight. January tried to struggle free of the writhing tangle of hooves and legs and stirrup leather, unable to breathe, his vision fragmenting under the cold dizziness of shock and pain. He hit the ground hard, snatched at the legs of the new attacker to pull him off-balance. Fowler reached him in two steps and kicked him with brutal force in the belly.

Henri sobbed, ‘For the love of God! I'll pay you what you ask!'

Fowler paused, looked back at him.

Lying at Fowler's feet, January had a queer, faraway glimpse of Henri held between two of Fowler's ruffians – one with a pistol, the other holding a shotgun – close by the back of the wagon. He didn't know where Leopold was – the whole scene occupied the space of instants, bloody in torchlight – but he thought,
Trigg can't shoot for fear of hitting the women
…

From within the wagon, hollow in the wooden coffin, a child's voice screamed, ‘Papa!'

‘Can't risk it.' Fowler spat again. ‘Like I can't risk keepin' your buck here, much as it pains me to waste him.'

He pointed his pistol down at January's head.

The woman sitting closest to the back of the wagon – barely a girl herself, a child Charmian's age in her arms – reached over with her foot and kicked the nearest torch so that it fell on to the back of the man with the shotgun.

The man screamed, lurched around as his shirt caught fire, and Henri – with the slightly startled air of an actor just recalling his cue – simply took the shotgun away from him and, at a distance of five feet, emptied it into Fowler's belly.

The kick threw him backwards out of the path of the bullet that his other guard fired at him – one of the women in the wagon screamed. Henri waded forward, holding the shotgun by the barrel, and smote the man across the side of the head with it as if he were playing town ball after all. January knew there was another ruffian nearby and grabbed the pistol Fowler had dropped – the man was almost cut in half by the shotgun blast and was certainly dead as he fell – and rolled as the last ruffian fired at him. The bullet plowed the dirt next to his head, and January saw him framed neatly in the torchlight against the night, nowhere near the wagon. It was a perfect shot, and January pulled the trigger, the pain of the kick – he'd been shot in his right side – almost making him pass out.

The man fell dead.

I'm not going to confession about that one
.

The horses were whinnying and shying, but the man whose shirt was burning made no sound. As January pulled himself, half-swooning, to his hands and knees he saw him, dead a little ways from the wagon, as Trigg and Leopold rode into the torchlight, holding pistols on the ruffian Henri had felled.

Trigg sprang off his horse, ran to January's side. ‘How bad you hit?' He was already pulling a bandanna from his pocket, pressing it to the wound.

January shook his head, too shaken to speak. Henri fumbled, sobbing, at the back of the wagon, and from within Charmian's voice sobbed again, ‘Papa! Papa!'

‘M'sieu Viellard!' cried Thèrése's voice.

One of the women in the wagon said, ‘Catch over there on the side, sir.'

Henri scrabbled at the catches, clawed them free. Unobtrusively, Darius Trigg went through Fowler's pockets and produced his keys, which he passed to the nearest of the chained slaves by the wagon. The smell of the dead ruffian's burning flesh made a choking stink in the night.

‘Papa!'

Henri dragged his daughter from the hollow bed of the wagon, fell to his knees and clutched her close, then turned back. ‘Minou—'

‘They took her.' Thèrése dragged herself half-out of the narrow black rectangle of the entry hole, her wrists and ankles bound, her sugar-brown hair a snarled tumble in the torchlight. ‘Half their men – half their slaves – they sent south into Virginia—'

Henri sobbed, ‘No—'

‘We'll find her.' January dragged himself to his feet and almost threw up with pain. By the feel of it the bullet had broken one of his floating ribs and was lodged between it and the twelfth rib. ‘With Fowler dead his men will let her go for money. Oldmixton will know where to look.'

Henri also stood, holding his daughter by the hand. ‘Fowler—' He looked in the direction of the slave stealer.

His eyeballs rolled up, and he slid to the ground in a faint.

‘L
eave him be for a minute.' Trigg put a staying hand on Leopold's wrist as the valet hastened forward with smelling salts. To January, he said, ‘I know a woman in Montgomery County who'll make sure these folks get on their way in the right direction, a few at a time. Keep the chains,' he added, to a small man of about January's age, who came up with key and shackles to hand them to him. He seemed to be the leader of the slave gang. ‘Let the constables think they're looking for slave stealers rather than runaways. Ben, you think you can get back to town through the woods and the fields rather than the road?'

‘I can guide 'em, sir.' A half-grown boy slipped out from among the gang. ‘My old marse's place was in Bladensburg. I know the ground 'tween here and Washington.'

‘Good boy,' said Trigg. ‘What's your name?'

‘Billy, sir.'

‘Billy – you know Mrs James? Has a house called Witchhazel on the Paint River?'

A grin spread over the boy's face. ‘You mean Mrs James, all this time, has been—'

‘You hush,' said Trigg. ‘You just get yourself there after you see these folks back close to Washington.'

Billy saluted. ‘Yes, sir.'

‘You be all right, Ben? Can you travel?'

‘I'll be all right.' The smallest movement brought on waves of nauseated agony, and the thought of riding eight miles back to town turned him sick. Leopold came to his side and offered him Henri's crystal vial of smelling salts. They helped. More practically, Trigg dug in the pockets of Fowler's coat again and came up with a flask, which helped a good deal more. He wiped the blood off it on Fowler's coat.

‘I'm sorry you can't take it with you,' said the landlord as he collected handkerchiefs and rags to make a rude dressing over the wound. ‘But all you'd need is for somebody to find it on you—'

‘I'll be all right.' January had, in fact, serious doubts about this assertion, but it was the only thing he could think of to say. He understood that he had no choice. He had to be all right – or at least sufficiently all right to make it back to Washington – because the alternative was to be charged with that most heinous of crimes, slave rebellion.

Black men had killed white men. Not a jury in the state of Maryland would even listen to a plea of extenuating circumstance. It was illegal for a black man to kill a white even in self-defense – always supposing that any jury would entertain the idea that the black defendant wasn't lying, and the white arresting sheriff might be mistaken in his reconstruction of the so-called facts.

No
. As he climbed on to a rather shaken and indignant horse, his attention grimly focused on keeping in the saddle, he knew that he simply had to make it back to Washington at whatever the cost.

Hurt? Not me, sir
.

Riding around in the middle of the night with a pistol? Why, sir, there's a dozen people – including two white gentlemen, Mr Poe and M'sieu Viellard – who'll swear I was in Mrs Trigg's parlor playing Snap with the children all the evening
…

With a little fancy footwork
, he reflected, his hand pressed to the swelling universe of pain in his side,
we can even convince Luke Bray that we didn't come knocking at his door at ten thirty accusing his wife of being a spy
…

‘Michie Henri,' he heard Leopold saying, far off in another world on the other side of darkness, ‘Michie, are you well? Up you come … Yes, sir, your horse is over here, sir …'

For a moment, January saw Charmian, clinging tight to Trigg's arms as the little man held her. Her gaze went from her father, to her Uncle Ben, to the massacred corpse of the man who had thrust her into the wagon bed, her dark eyes wide in the torchlight but tearless and unafraid.

She's Livia's granddaughter, all right
, thought January.

Thèrése, for her part, sat on the ground by the wagon bed, moaning, her face in her hands. When Henri was mounted, Leopold went over to her, helped her to her feet.