Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V (43 page)

He stopped moaning. He rolled onto his back, his eyes staring straight up. “He’s done all he can do!” cried Margaret. “He’s exhausted.”

“He dead,” said Fishy.

Gullah Joe slammed the lid on the box, turned it upside down, and sat on it.

“You hatching that?” asked Fishy.

“Inside circle, inside my hair.” Gullah Joe grinned. “This time he no get out!”

“All right, Alvin,” Margaret murmured. “Come quickly.”

She leaned back against Denmark’s wife, who knelt behind her like a cushion. “I’m so tired,” she said.

“We all sleep now,” said Denmark.

“Not me,” said Gullah Joe.

Margaret closed her eyes and looked out into the city again. The water was calm again and the panic had died down, but the revolt was over for the night. Killing had been driven out of the hearts of the Blacks.

But now the thought of killing was showing up in other hearts. Whites were rushing to the palace, demanding that someone find out who started the plot. It had to be a plot, all the slaves starting up at once. Only the miraculous intervention of the waves had saved them. Do something, they demanded. Catch the ringleaders of the revolt.

And King Arthur listened. He called in his advisers and listened to them. Soon there were questioners in the streets, directing groups of soldiers as they gathered Blacks for questioning.

How long? thought Margaret. How long before Denmark Vesey’s name comes up?

Long before dawn.

Margaret rose to her feet. “No time for rest now,” she said. “Alvin will come here. Tell him what you’ve done. Don’t harm Calvin’s body in any way. Keep it as fresh as you can.”

Gullah Joe rolled his eyes. “Where you go?”

“It’s time for my audience with the King.”

Lady Ashworth spent the entire rebellion throwing up in her bedroom. The flood, too. For her husband had found out about her liaison with that boy—slaves who had once been docile now suddenly seemed to take relish in sowing dissension between her and Lord Ashworth. In vain did she plead that it was only once, in vain did she beg for forgiveness. For an hour she sat in the parlor, trembling and weeping, as her husband brandished a pistol in one hand, a sword in the other, one of which he would set down from time to time in order to take another swig of bourbon.

It was only the howling of the slaves that broke off
his drunken, murderous, suicidal ranting. This was one house where none of the Blacks wanted to brave a crazed White man with a gun, but he was all for shooting them anyway if they didn’t shut up and stop all that chanting and moaning. As soon as he left her alone, Lady Ashworth fled to her room and locked the door. She threw up so abruptly that she didn’t have time to move first—her vomit was a smear down the door and onto the floor beneath it. By the time the flood came she had nothing left to throw up, but she kept retching.

With the Blacks terrified and Lady Ashworth indisposed, the only person able to answer Margaret’s insistent ringing at the door was Lord Ashworth himself, who stood there drunken and disheveled, the pistol still in his hand, hanging by the trigger. Margaret immediately reached down and took the gun away from him.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. “That’s my gun. Who are you?”

Margaret took in the situation with a few probes into his heartfire. “You poor stupid man,” she said. “Your wife wasn’t seduced. She was raped.”

“Then why didn’t she say so?”

“Because she
thought
it was a seduction.”

“What do you know about any of this?”

“Take me to your wife at once, sir!”

“Get out of my house!”

“Very well,” said Margaret. “You leave me no choice. I will be forced to report to the press that a trusted officer of the King has had a liaison for the past two years with the wife of a certain plantation owner in Savannah. Not to mention the number of times he has accepted the hospitality of slaveowners who make sure he doesn’t have to sleep alone. I believe sexual congress between White and Black is still a crime in this city?”

He backed away from her, raising his hand to point the gun at her, until he remembered that she had his pistol. “Who sent you?” he said.

“I sent myself,” she said. “I have urgent business
with the King. Your wife is in no condition to take me. So you’ll have to do it.”

“Business with the King! You want him to throw me out of office?”

“I know the ringleader of the slave revolt!”

Lord Ashworth was confused. “Slave revolt? When?”

“Tonight, while you were threatening to kill your wife. She’s a shallow woman, Lord Ashworth, and she has a mean streak, but she’s more faithful to your marriage than
you
are. You might take that into account before you terrify her again. Now, will you take me to the King or not?”

“Tell me what you know, and I’ll tell him.”

“An audience with the King!” demanded Margaret. “Now!”

Lord Ashworth finally stumbled into the realization that he had no choice. “I have to change clothes,” he said. “I’m drunk.”

“Yes, by all means, change.” Lord Ashworth staggered from the room.

Margaret strode into the house, calling out as she went. “Doe! Lion! Where are you?”

She didn’t find them till she opened the door down to the ground floor. Half soaked in floodwater, the slaves were as frightened and miserable a group as she had ever seen. “Come upstairs now,” she said. “Lion, your master needs help dressing himself. He’s very drunk, but I have the gun.” She showed him the pistol. Then, certain that Lion had no murder in his heart, she handed the gun to him. “I suggest you lose this and then don’t find it for a few days.” He carried the gun upstairs with him, only dropping it into his pocket at the last minute.

“You sure he don’t kill the master?” asked Doe.

“Doe, I know you’re a free woman, but can you go to Lady Ashworth? As a friend. No harm will come to you from it. She needs comforting. She needs you to tell her that the man who had the use of her was more than
a trickster. He forced her against her will. If she doesn’t remember it that way, it just proves how powerful he is.”

Doe looked studious. “That a long message, ma’am,” she said.

“You remember the sense of it. Find your own words.”

King Arthur and his council had been meeting for an hour before Lord Ashworth finally bothered to show up, and it was obvious he had been drinking. It was rather shocking and would have been a scandal on any other night, but all the King could think about was that finally he was here, perhaps he could break the impasse over what to do. Hotheaded John Calhoun was all for hanging one out of every three slaves as an example. “Make them think twice before they plot again!” On the other hand, as several of the older men reminded him, one didn’t seize one-third of the city’s most valuable property and destroy it, just to make a point.

Lord Ashworth, however, did not seem interested in the argument. “I have someone to see you,” he said.

“An audience! At a time like this!”

“She claims to know about the conspiracy.”

“We know about it already,” said the King. “We have soldiers searching for the hideout right now. If they’re wise, they’ll drown themselves in the river before they let us take them.”

“Your Majesty, I beg you to hear her.”

The intensity of his tone, despite his drunkenness, was sobering. “All right, then,” said the King. “For my dear friend.”

Margaret was ushered in, and she introduced herself. Impatiently, the King got to the point at once. “We know all about the conspiracy. What can you possibly add to what we know?”

“What I know is that it wasn’t a conspiracy, it was an accident.”

She poured out the story, keeping it as close to the truth as possible without announcing just how powerful Calvin was before, and how helpless he had become. A young White man of her acquaintance noticed a man taking something from each slave that disembarked. It turned out that they were charms that held the slaves’ true names, along with their anger and their fear. Tonight there had been an accident that destroyed the name-strings, and the slaves suddenly found themselves filled with the long-hidden rage. “But the flood frightened it out of them, and you’ll have no rebellion now.”

“Claptrap,” said Calhoun.

Margaret looked at him coldly. “The tragedy of
your
life, sir, is that despite all your ambition, you’ll never be king.”

Calhoun turned red and started to answer, but the King raised a hand to silence him. He was quite a young man, perhaps younger than Margaret and there was an air of quiet assurance about him that she rather liked, especially since he seemed interested in what she had said. “All I want to know,” he said, “is the name of the one they call the taker of names.”

“But you already know it,” she said to him. “Several witnesses have told you about Denmark Vesey.”

“Ah, but
we
know about him because of excellent investigative work. How do
you
know?”

“I know that he’s innocent of any ill intent,” she said.

A man handed the King a paper. “Ah, here it is,” the King said. “Your name is Margaret Smith, yes? Married to an accused slave thief. And you’re here in Camelot to meddle in our ancient practice of servitude. Well, tonight we’ve seen where leniency takes us. Do you know how many slaves told us about plans to kill entire White families in their sleep? And now I find that there’s a White woman intimately involved with the conspirators.”

With sick dread, Margaret saw herself playing the leading role in some nasty futures in the King’s heartfire.
She hadn’t bargained on this. She should have probed into her own future before coming to the King with wild-sounding stories about Blacks giving up their names voluntarily, for safekeeping, and then getting them back suddenly. “You must admit it sounds like a fable,” the King explained kindly.

“Your Majesty,” said Margaret, “I know that there are those who urge you to punish this revolt with brutality. You may think this is necessary to make your subjects feel secure in their homes, but Your Majesty, extravagant measures like the one Mr. Calhoun proposes will only bring greater danger down upon you.”

“It’s hard to imagine a more heinous danger than our servants turning their knives on us,” said Calhoun.

“What about war? What about bloody, terrible war, that kills or injures or spiritually maims a generation of young men?”

“War?” asked the King. “Punishing revolt will lead to
war
?”

“The rhetoric surrounding the issue of whether the western territories of Appalachee will be slave or free is already out of hand. A wholesale slaughter of innocent Black men and women will outrage and unify the people of the United States and Appalachee, and stiffen their resolve that slavery will have no place among them.”

“Enough of this,” said the King. “All you have succeeded in proving to me is that you are part of a conspiracy that must include at least one of the servants in the palace. How else could you know what John Calhoun’s proposal is? As for the rest, when I need advice from an abolitionist woman on affairs of state, you’re the very person I’ll call upon.”

“Your Majesty,” said Calhoun, “it’s obvious this woman knows far more about the conspiracy than she’s letting on. It would be a mistake to let her leave so easily.”

“What I know is that there
is
no conspiracy,” said
Margaret. “By all means, arrest me, if you’re prepared to bear the outcry that would follow.”

“If we hang one slave in three, no one will be asking around about
you
.” said Calhoun. “Now arrest her!”

This last order was flung at the soldiers standing at the door. At once they strode in and took Margaret by the arms.

“She’ll confess soon enough,” said Calhoun. “In treason cases, they always do.”

“I don’t like knowing about things like that,” said the King.

“Neither do I,” said another man’s voice. It took a moment for them to realize that it wasn’t one of the King’s advisers who spoke.

Instead, it was a tall man dressed like a workingman on holiday—clothes that were meant to be somewhat dressy, but succeeded only in looking vaguely pathetic and ill-fitting. And beside him, a half-Black boy two-thirds grown.

“How did you get in here!” cried several men at once. But the stranger answered not a word. He walked up to Margaret and kissed her gently on the lips. Then he looked steadily into the gaze of one of the soldiers holding her by the arm. Shuddering, he let go of her and backed away. So did the other soldier.

“Well, Margaret,” said the man, “it looks like I can’t leave you alone for a few minutes.”

“Who are you?” asked the King. “Her foreign-policy adviser?”

“I’m her husband, Alvin Smith.”

“It was thoughtful of you to show up just as we’ve arrested your wife. No doubt you’re part of the conspiracy as well. As for this Black boy—it’s not proper to bring your slave into the presence of the King, especially one too young to have been reliably trained.”

“I came here to try to keep you from making the mistake that will eventually take you off your throne,”
said Margaret. “If you don’t heed the warning, then I at least am blameless.”