Riverrun (48 page)

Cass. His thoughts had been of little else since he’d burst out through the portal across the lane and into the road; whenever he tried to focus on his mission, her face, her smile, the faint bell-like sound of her laughter would intrude and he would find himself creating scenes between them. None of them were very momentous, no more than glimpses of what he hoped domestic life would be between them. And as he shook off each one in turn, he laughed, thinking how much like a young boy he was acting, and how much like a fool he had acted when Cass had, rightfully, put him in his place. But it had been difficult, returning to the place that had been his only home since leaving England, and finding the woman he loved doing very well without him. Even when she protested her need for him, he doubted. Amos and Judah had known quite obviously what they were about in terms of keeping the place as self-supporting as it was; if Cass had had just a few more hands, she would probably have had everything cleared off the ledger long before this. It had been difficult, and he had reacted predictably, slipping in and attempting a resumption of life as though nothing had changed, no years had passed, no blood had been shed.

Cassandra had, he’d seen immediately, changed too. She had always been a willful, headstrong, and intelligent woman; but the hardships she had endured had added something more to the portrait of the woman he admitted he was helplessly in love with—power. Power that comes from the knowledge of competence, the possession of confidence. She was strong, and he resented it. It had taken their loveless coupling and a retrospection of Hawkins’ visit to make him realize that no one—no one—would ever dominate his beautiful, dark Cassandra. And once that had sunk in, after a great deal of staring at walls and ceilings and a bout of prolonged self-pity, once he knew where he stood if he did not want to lose her, it was a simple matter to compromise. And not at all painful. So little pain was there, in fact, that after he had rushed into the Merchants’ Bank in Richmond, more than a little wild-eyed and breathless, he had foregone the temptation to remain there for the day just to recuperate. He had already been gone over twenty-four hours, and he had no idea what diabolical mischief Hawkins might have spawned by now.

He had arrived in the city at noon. He had paid no attention to the destruction, still unrepaired, from the march of the Union army. And he did not now see the ruins of great homes, merchant centers, auditoriums; it was nearly dark, would be completely in less than an hour, and he had traded in the new horse for a swift-looking, thin-legged Kentucky stallion whose milk-white body was sheathed in muscle, and untouched by any other color save for a fist-wide splotch of black on its nose.

He rode with his legs strapped to the saddle and the reins wrapped tightly around the pommel and his wrists. It was a precautionary measure because he knew that before he had gone very far he would be falling asleep. His eyes were filled with sand, his throat was dry, his belly empty, and unless he wanted to fall off and break his neck, he had to take every precaution. The letters were bundled into a money belt strapped around his stomach beneath his shirt.

By dawn he knew he would reach Riverrun by midafternoon. Three days to Richmond and back. He wished he had some way of discovering if anyone had ever made the trip that fast before. Probably not, he thought, for no one ever had the reasons he did. He laughed uncontrollably, dozed, drank as best he could from a nearly empty canteen, and two hours out of Meridine he began practicing the speech he would give to banker Jennings. His only regret was that Cass would not be there to see it; but he had decided even before he’d left that when he rode up to the house again, he would have the deed and the canceled papers waving in his hand. That, he thought, was far more important.

He did not notice the riders moving onto the road behind him. He was not moving fast now; the stallion had, with a few short rests, taken him all the way without complaining, and he didn’t want it dropping in the middle of Meridine’s main street. It was a beautiful animal, and he would give him to Cass during the celebration he anticipated upon his arrival that night.

When he heard the horses behind him, he thought nothing of them. He did not turn until he realized that they were moving damned fast. And when he did look back over his shoulder, it was too late. Vern Lambert already had his pistol out. One shot was all it took—Eric saw the smoke, heard the roar, and a split-second later the sky went black.

C
ass nearly screamed. As each second ticked by past mid-afternoon, though she knew she had imposed the deadline herself, the minutes extended themselves into intolerable lengths, and her temper grew too short for the others to stay with her long. David ordered her from his room. Amos grumbled something about checking the fields and left. Rachel and Melody simply stayed out of her way. And she hated herself for what she was doing, tried to turn herself around, and failed. Finally, when she judged sunset to be less than two hours away, she walked into the kitchen … and almost screamed.

There, stretched across the wide-planked table, was Judah White. His chest was a maze of cuts and scratches, and his trousers were hanging in rags from his legs. His feet were bare, encrusted with mud, and one long arm in a sleeve of bruises dangled to the floor. At his head, with a large bowl of cool water and a rag, stood Alice Jordan; and from the looks of her, she had fared no better. Her hair was entwined with burrs and bits of grass, her dress torn across the bodice, and her eyes swollen nearly shut. Only her lips seemed to be untouched as she worked gently on Judah’s wounds, crooning to him while she whispered faint orders to Rachel about the liniments and herbs to prepare for a poultice.

Cass wasted little time in questioning. She immediately hurried to the table, and with Alice, did her best to clean the blood off Judah’s body and assess the extent of his injuries. By the time they were finished, she was; if not completely relieved, at least satisfied that the man would not die on her table. He remained unconscious most of the time, opening his eyes only once—to look at Alice and give her a puzzled, thankful smile. In that moment, Cass understood the depth of the man’s feelings for Alice. When she looked up to Alice and saw that the pain in her face was not entirely due to her own physical hurt, she recognized in the two blacks a mirror-image of her and Eric: two extraordinarily proud people who had finally learned the meaning of the word compromise.

She smiled to herself, shook her head slowly, then sat Alice on a chair and ministered to her wounds.

“What did he hit you with?” she asked, and held a finger to the woman’s lips when she tried to speak. “Don’t. You don’t have to say anything. I can see it right here. It was Vern, wasn’t it?”

Alice winced at the rag washing over her face, and nodded.

“I thought as much.” She heard shuffling behind her as Judah struggled off the table and into a chair, as Rachel quickly set before him a bowl of steaming broth. She did not turn. “Why, Alice? Why did he do this to you? Rachel, see what you can do to get some fresh clothes for these two. They’re freezing.”

When Rachel had left, Cass leaned back against the table so she could see the two of them, her arms folded lightly across her chest. “Now,” she said, “tell me.”

Alice, after a glance at Judah, sighed and said, “I heard things, Mrs. Roe. I told you they always coffin’ ’round the place at night talkin’ and stuff, and last night I heard some things. So I waited until they was all gone and then I tried to get away and come back here to tell you … and Mr. Lambert, he was waitin’ by the door. He knew I was here that day, in the rain. Mr. Forrester, he was outside all the time and he saw me ridin’ away. He didn’t know who I was before, but he did then and he was mad enough to skin me without puttin’ me out. Then he wanted to know where I was goin’, and I couldn’t tell him, but I couldn’t move my mind fast enough and he started hittin’ me. He yelled all kinds of things at me like I was some kind of foamin’ dog—”

“I kill him,” Judah muttered.

“—then he put me in my room and locked the door.” She grinned. “They was a window, but he prob’ly thought I couldn’t fly. I did. Soon as he left to go to the captain, I went down the pipe. I come the back way because I don’t know if he come out here first, and I saw this black ox rootin’ around in the mud like a hog.”

“I tripped,” Judah said.

Alice nodded. “An’ we came in here and there you are.”

“Where?” Cass said. “Where are we, Alice? What was it you heard that made Vern go after you like that?”

“Where’s Mr. Martingale?” Alice countered.

“I’ll tell you all that later. Right now I have to know what Vern said, what you heard.”

Alice seemed to draw into herself. She crossed her arms over her chest and tucked her chin down. “I don’t know what you said to the captain when he come out here that day,” she said in a low, quivering voice, “but he’s mad enough to spit. He told Mr. Lambert to get his people together.”

I knew it, Cass thought, half in anger, half in fear. Damn, I knew it. He has no intention of waiting the five days. How could he swing from madness to seeming sanity and back again at just the turn of a word? She pushed away from the table and walked to the great iron stove, staring into the kettle of broth Rachel kept simmering there. It would be so easy to give in to him. It would be so easy to let him have Riverrun and me, just so Alice and Judah and Eric would be spared. It wasn’t that none of them was important to her, and it wasn’t that she wouldn’t willingly make the sacrifice, but a sacrifice has to have some purpose behind it or it becomes no more than suicide. If she gave in now, despite Geoffrey’s claims, she would never be able to trust him to leave Eric alone. She would never be able to trust him at all. In fact, that apparent act of sanity and devotion might well have been just another side of his madness, nothing more. But how, she asked herself, can you be sure? I can’t, was the despairing response. Good God, I can’t be sure.

She turned away from the stove as Rachel returned with the clothes and instructed Judah to go to the scullery to change, then, with mutterings and raised brows, helped Alice get out of her tatters and into a shirt and trousers much like those Cass wore. When it was done, Cass asked Alice to stay in the kitchen for a while, took Judah by the hand, and led him to the stairs.

“Judah,” she said as they walked, their footsteps echoing in the huge house, “I want you to do me a favor.” She looked up to the second floor. “There’s still bad blood in this house, and I want all of it gone. Or as much of it as I can get rid of. Do you understand me, Judah? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Judah looked down at her, and nodded.

A moment later they were in David’s room.

David stiffened when he saw the huge black man duck under the door to enter, and glared at Cass when she followed directly behind him. But he kept his silence, contenting himself instead to stare at Judah as though he were a physician examining a reluctant patient.

“David,” she said, sitting on the mattress beside him, taking his hands and burying them in hers, “Judah and Alice came back tonight.”

“I’m not blind,” he said.

“Good. Then you’ll be able to see what Vern Lambert did to Alice. You can see what running has done to Judah. And he can see what’s happened to you.”

“What do you want?” he demanded. “Do you want us to fall all over each other like women, hugging and begging each others’ forgiveness?”

“No,” she said.

Judah looked more and more as though he wished he were somewhere else, but when he made a move toward the door Cass stopped him with an imperious glare.

“Then do you want apologies?” David asked.

“David, you know as well as I, and as well as Judah, that what passed between you was because of Alice. Well, Alice is back and she loves Judah. I can see that, everyone can who has a brain to use. What you had was a fancy, and Alice fit the bill perfectly. You didn’t love her, David, you tried to possess her.”

There was a long, awkward pause as David examined the folds in the coverlet, the ceiling, the backs of his hands, looking everywhere but at Judah, who seemed preoccupied with the throw rugs on the floor.

“I hadn’t really grown, this city boy hadn’t,” he whispered. “And I killed someone because of it.” He yanked his hands away from Cass when she tried to protest. He looked at Judah. “I did what I did, and it’s done. You can see what the result was. I—” and he coughed, long, hard, grabbing at the coverlet and pulling it to his mouth, his face growing alarmingly pale, then flushed, until the spasm passed. He reached for a glass of Rachel’s herb potion and took two long swallows, coughed again, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “There’s protecting to be done here now, Judah. See that you do it.”

Cass rose immediately. She did not really know even now why she had forced this confrontation, and she did not know whether it had done any good. Judah’s face was, as always, impassive as he glided silently from the room, and David—there was something in his eyes that she had never seen before, something for which she had no name, yet for some unaccountable reason filled her with dread.

She hurried down the stairs, not seeing Judah anywhere, and into the dining room, where she stood at the front window and looked out at the night. She saw nothing, heard nothing, knowing only that Simon was waiting down at the road, ostensibly to keep an eye out for Hawkins and his men, actually to raise the celebratory alarm when Eric returned. But why wasn’t he here, now? Why was he never around when she needed him?

She wandered out of the room, out and around the side of the house. The air was warm, the night-sounds comforting and familiar, but she felt as though she were on another world. For the first time in weeks, in months, she began to wonder what was happening in peoples’ lives beyond the boundary of Riverrun. She didn’t recall how long ago it was that Meridine’s newspaper had stopped coming to the plantation, and she wondered if there were still rumors that Johnson was going to be thrown out of office, that General Grant was being groomed by the vindictive Republicans to be the next president. Had Virginia been readmitted to the Union, or was Congress still fighting a war that should have been buried years ago? Her lack of knowledge frightened her. She felt suddenly alone, drifting on an embattled raft while the rest of the ocean swelled and passed her without so much as a light spray for a greeting. There seemed to be nothing to remind her, that there were other people and other lives and that these nightmares were only transitory.