North and South: The North and South Trilogy (107 page)

The sun struck silver flashes from his hands as he sidestepped toward Billy. “Sorry your shot missed.” Forbes uttered a crazy kind of laugh. “Bet you’re a whole lot sorrier.”

“I didn’t miss. The ball never came close to you. It’s lying right over there in that bare place. There wasn’t a full charge of powder in my gun.”

“Smart fucking Yankee, aren’t you?”

Wind lifted Forbes’s hair, then pasted it against his sweaty forehead. Empty-handed, Billy backed away. One step, then another. Forbes came on, scuttling sideways like a crab.

“You shouldn’t have messed with Brett. Shouldn’t have set foot in South Carolina. Reckon they’ll send you home in a sack, but I guarantee your kin won’t want to open it and look at you.”

He moved the right-hand knife in a small circle, then started the same kind of motion with the left one. “Not after I fix up your face.”

Billy retreated again. He decided to make a dash to the nearest tree, try to tear off a limb before one of those knives—

“Billy.”

The voice wrenched his attention toward the carriage. Smith had disappeared. Charles had reached Brett; his collar was unfastened, his light blue trousers dirty. His face was wrathful as he pitched his saber into the field.

Billy stepped to the right so that the sword would land between him and Forbes. As the saber tumbled, Smith jumped into sight at the rear of the carriage. He had sneaked past Homer’s corpse and around behind the vehicle. He dashed for the saddlebag on his horse. The saber landed much nearer Billy than Forbes. Billy ran to get it.

Smith pulled a four-barrel derringer out of the saddlebag. Charles saw him, cursed, and lunged. Smith took four running steps into the field. He emptied all four barrels at Billy. After the last popping explosion, Billy felt a ball hit him. He groaned in pain and staggered forward.

Charles caught Smith from behind, spun him around, ripped the empty derringer out of his hand, and smashed him with a right fist, then a crossing left. Clumsy blows but powerful ones. Smith grunted; red mucus fountained from his nose.

Billy had fallen. Blood stained the left sleeve of his shirt above his elbow. On his stomach, he pushed up with both hands. Pain flashed through his left arm. His hand refused to support him.

Silver stars of light twinkled a couple of feet in front of him. He groped for the hilt of the saber, then nearly dropped the weapon as he lurched to his feet. A shadow lengthened in the grass. Billy flung himself to one side. Forbes’s right-hand knife missed him by no more than two inches.

Pain drained his energy and muddled his mind. All he could do was retreat, parry, try to collect himself. Forbes’s sweating, grinning face loomed huge, his eyes blazing with an obsession to kill.

Billy defended himself by instinct. All of the fine, planned moves he had learned at West Point slipped away in a haze of fright and throbbing pain. Forbes slashed with his left-hand knife. Billy blocked it with the saber, then tried to push Forbes away. He lacked the strength.

Forbes chuckled deep in his throat. “Got you now, Yankee.” He bored in, knives slashing, turning, confusing Billy with their glittering motion. Billy parried air. Forbes laughed and came on, confident again.

Once more Billy retreated, trying to organize an attack. He was too weak from the loss of blood he could feel streaming hot beneath his shirt. It had reached his wrist, dripped from his cuff.

Brett called something, but he didn’t dare turn. He stumbled over heavy, exposed roots and was suddenly backed tight against the huge trunk of a tree. Forbes’s eyes widened with delight. He stabbed for Billy’s face with the right-hand bowie knife.

Billy wrenched his left shoulder forward. The knife throbbed in the tree. Rather than trying to free it, Forbes struck with the second one. Billy wrenched the other way. The knife ripped his shirt, raked his ribs, and buried itself two inches in the trunk.

Forbes was standing very close now, realizing each stab had missed. With a desperate look he reached past Billy with both hands and started to pull the knives loose. Billy knew it was his last chance. He lifted his knee, drove it into Forbes’s stomach. Forbes gasped and staggered back two steps. With a little maneuvering room, Billy rammed the saber into Forbes and thrust until he felt the point scrape against the backbone.

Forbes collapsed face down. The impact drove the hilt against his chest. The point of the saber suddenly tore through the back of his shirt and jutted into the light.

Shaking, Billy turned away. The pain in his arm wasn’t half so bad as the spasm of sickness that emptied his stomach while he leaned against the tree.

Brett gave a ragged little cry and rushed toward her husband. Charles called, “Bring him back here so I can look at that wound.” Then he turned his attention to Smith. He dragged Forbes’s crony up by the collar and pushed him against the carriage. Smith held his crotch, tears on his cheeks. Charles shook him.

“Stop caterwauling and listen! Once upon a time I fixed your kinsman Whitney, and I can do the same for you. Fact is, I’d like to. But I reckon we’ve spilled enough blood. So you get out of here before I change my mind.”

Whimpering, Smith staggered toward his horse.

“On foot,” Charles said. “I’ll keep the animals.”

Without a backward look, Smith lurched into the road. An impulse seized Charles; he shied a pebble at the hobbling man. Smith yelped, grabbed his neck, and broke into a run.

Charles’s smile faded as he looked at Ashton’s dead slave, then toward the spot where Forbes’s body lay hidden by the long grass, its place marked by the saber sticking into the sunshine. Flies swarmed on the bloody point.

Billy staggered to the carriage with his right arm around Brett and his left hanging limp and bloody at his side. “They trumped up a duel,” he gasped, and then in a couple of sentences described the treachery with the pistol and how he had discovered it.

“Bastards,” Charles growled. He tore Billy’s sleeve and examined the wound. “Passed right through the fleshy part, looks like. Lot more blood than damage. Brett, give me some long pieces of petticoat. I’ll tie it off.”

She turned her back and raised her skirt. Charles tilted his head to study the angle of the sun. “We’ll have to skedaddle to make that train. Are you up to it?”

“You’re damn right we are,” Billy said. “I want to get out of this benighted place.”

“Can’t say I blame you,” Charles murmured.

“I never realized Forbes was so crazy and vicious,” Brett said over her shoulder as more cloth tore. “How did you find us in time?”

“Madeline LaMotte overheard Forbes and Preston talking at Resolute. Talking about you. After they left, she drove to Mont Royal to warn us. I saddled up and took the road I knew you’d taken.”

“But—how did Forbes know we were leaving just now? Or that we were going to the train?”

Charles accepted the lacy strips Brett handed him. He began to wrap them around the upper part of Billy’s arm. Billy clenched his teeth. His color was improving.

“Not certain about that,” Charles hedged, concentrating on what he was doing so as to avoid his cousin’s eyes. “I’ll ask some questions when I take Homer’s body back to the plantation. Meantime, you two climb in the carriage. And hang on tight to each other. I’m going to go like hell the rest of the way.”

Charles was as good as his word, driving to the flag stop at reckless speed. The train was heard whistling in the south as the carriage swayed to a stop. Charles dashed across the track to the cypress shed, flung back the lid of the box, and ran the flag up the pine pole. By the time he finished, the cowcatcher was in sight.

Over the hiss of steam and the clang of the bell, Billy tried to speak. “I don’t know how to say—”

“Don’t bother. All in the line of duty. One Academy man looking out for another.”

“But you let go of your commission.”

“That doesn’t mean West Point will let go of me.” Charles was surprised, even irked, to find himself so close to tears. All the shocks of the afternoon had probably conspired to cause that.

He hid his feelings as best he could, rushing to unload the luggage and place it on the platform. As the train slowed, the freight and mail cars passed. Then came faces behind dusty windows, faces whose bland passivity disappeared the instant they saw the bedraggled threesome—the soldier, the girl, and the young man with his coat draped over his shoulders and traces of blood showing on his bandaged arm.

Brett threw her arms around Charles’s neck. “Oh, Cousin—thank you. Explain to all of them.”

“I will. You climb aboard,” he added with a glance at the impatient conductor.

Billy followed her. Standing on the second step from the bottom, he gazed down at his friend. They clasped right hands.

“Don’t have any idea when we’ll see each other, Bison.”

The realization hit hard. “No, I don’t either.”

“You take care.”

“You do the same. A safe journey to you and your wife.”

“Thank you. We’ll meet again.”

“I know.”

Charles harbored doubts. With all the trouble in the country, their only future meeting place might be a battlefield. With each of them on a different side.

Damnation, don’t think that way and spoil everything. It’s been a rough enough day already.
He managed the old reckless smile, lifted his hand, and stood waving as the train chugged off.

Some passengers had come out to the platform of the last coach. As the coach went by, Charles heard an obscenity. Something flew past his face. He looked down to find a gob of spittle on the front of his uniform. “Shit,” he said.

He didn’t stay angry for long. His smile came back, and from the shadows at trackside he called out mockingly to whoever had spat on his Federal uniform.

“Done like a true Southerner.”

Rubbing his eyes, he trudged across the track toward the carriage. The train disappeared down a natural tunnel in the pines. He felt its last vibrations as he stepped off the rail.

He wished he could drink himself insensible. But he was summoned back to the red field, and to Mont Royal, by unfinished business.

          
“I know moon-rise,

          
I know star-rise,

          
Lay this body down—”

T
HE WORDS OF THE
old Gullah hymn came clearly through the windows of the dark library. The slaves were singing for Homer, whom Charles had brought back in the carriage. He had left Forbes for the cormorants to pick. Compassion had its limits.

“That’s how it happened, nearly as I can piece it together,” Charles was saying. “They meant to murder Billy.”

He put his cigar back in his mouth and stretched his long legs in front of his chair. Orry lingered in the corner, his shadow falling on the old uniform. “Couple your account with what Madeline told us, and it becomes conclusive. God above, Charles, I had no idea they hated him that much.”

“Brett said almost the same thing before she left. Jealousy played a big part, I reckon. How is Madeline?”

“She was fine when I spoke to her an hour ago. I trust she went back to sleep.”

“LaMotte is probably searching for her.”

Orry nodded. “That’s something else I must attend to this evening. But first things first.” He sounded stern. “Have you seen Ashton since you returned?”

“Saw her right as I drove up. She wanted to take charge of Homer’s remains. I said no and she disappeared.”

Orry strode to the candle-lit foyer. Cuffey jumped up from the stool where he had been dozing. “Find Mrs. Huntoon and her husband,” Orry said. “Tell them I want them in the library. At once.”

Cuffey hurried away. Charles turned so that he could observe his cousin. By the glow of the foyer candles, he saw the set look of Orry’s expression.

“Help me light some lamps, Charles. When I tell them, I want to see their miserable faces.”

Ashton’s color was high as she entered the room. She was instantly on the attack.

“I resent being ordered about like a common servant. If you think I’ll dignify the accusations of niggers and troublemaking wastrels”—Charles laughed—“by responding to them, you’re badly mistaken.”

Orry’s hostility was conveyed in an icy-calm tone. “No one plans to accuse you of anything. There’s no need. The facts speak eloquently.”

Huntoon had been hovering behind his wife. Now he moved to the left. The flames of the lamps reflected on the circles of his spectacles. “See here—”

“Save your oratory for Montgomery,” Orry interrupted. “I have one or two things to say, and I prefer to get them said as quickly as possible. The first matter concerns your slave, Homer. Did he—does he have a family?”

Ashton answered. “James bought Homer from a gentleman in Savannah. I believe he had a wife and children there.”

“From which you separated him without a thought. Christ Almighty. It’s no wonder the Yankees despise us.”

Again she went on the offensive with a mixture of bluster and arrogance. “Orry, whatever is wrong with you? I refuse to be subjected to this kind of treatment.”

Huntoon’s outrage matched hers. “She speaks for both of us. We’re leaving.”

Orry nodded. “Indeed you are.”

“We’ll take Homer’s body back to Charleston.”

“No. He’ll stay here with our people. I’ll try to locate his family.”

Huntoon pulled off his glasses, puffed out his chest, and stepped in front of his wife. “I insist. The nigger may be dead, but he’s still my property.”

Orry looked at him steadily. “He stays here. You aren’t fit to touch him.”

Huntoon lowered his head and rushed his brother-in-law. He tried to hit Orry’s jaw with his right fist. Orry stepped back, reached across and batted Huntoon’s forearm aside, as if he were driving off an insect.

Huntoon stumbled, gasped, and fell sideways, managing to catch himself on both hands and one knee. His spectacles were still in his left hand as it struck the floor. There was a crunch. When Huntoon staggered up, pieces of glass fell from the bent wire ovals. He was livid.

Orry ignored him, turning to Ashton. “Today you divorced yourself from this family. From Brett, Charles—all of us. Once you and James leave this plantation, never come back.”