The Carey family needed to be warned. Chelan and her brother, Nacto—or West—needed to know the people of St. Louis were turning against them. I was sure they were aware of the attitudes already—Nacto did not approach Mr. Massey or the other rail workers. In Nate and me, he must have sensed something different. I was sure he had been watching us for quite some time, taking our measure and waiting to see if we were like the others. But now, what I had assumed was a general tolerance was rapidly turning to abject hatred.
Returning to Philadelphia to speak with Mr. Cassatt would have to wait.
We moved quickly down the street. There was no place to hire a gasoline-powered runabout like Samuel Lane had, but we could hire horses.
We found a horse dealer and, with a bit of haggling, we managed to find two mounts that would get us back to the Carey house. We trotted down the street, trying to put as much distance between us and the mob as possible.
They were mobilizing and had great violence in mind. We had to get there first.
Chapter Fifteen
WHILE NATE HANDLED the horses, I rushed back to the hotel for our long coats, weapons, and my satchel of healing herbs. As an afterthought, I grabbed a set of clothing for us both and jammed them into our knapsacks. I had no intention of getting my clothing soiled with the blood of dead or dying men and being forced to wear it until we managed to return to the HeadHouse again.
The crowds were still busy drinking and crying out for blood when we headed out for a nice relaxing ride in the woods with a picnic lunch packed by the company that rented us the horses. It was all we could do to not gallop off to protect the Carey family. Instead we rode off, all smiles and happy jokes, before circling through the woods to follow the rails and head directly to the Carey home.
It was the beautiful, tall farmhouse I remembered from a few hours before. An empty wagon was parked out front. The small paddock of split-log fencing had two horses within, looking anxiously at our approach. On the far side of the barn, only barely visible, a second paddock held a cow and, from the sounds, a few goats. Chickens worried and quietly chuck-chucked to one other under the eaves of the barn.
We were not the first to reach the Carey home. Several horses were hobbled under trees, contentedly cropping grass. The saddles were decorated with feathers and beads, painted with faded, peeling paint in red, black, and yellow.
The door to the house stood open, blown open by a foul and evil wind. From where I stood, I could see a table littered with brown glass bottles.
We dismounted and Nate held up his hand, motioning for me to be quiet. He took our horses and wrapped the reins up around the nearest tree. I crept forward. I saw Nacto standing between his sister and who I thought was Joseph Carey, a tall, weather-beaten man, fair and blond-haired. I could not imagine a man who could have looked anything less like the Carey children.
“Do you think I am blind?” Mr. Carey slurred. “Do you think I am stupid? Three children off my squaw wife and not a-one of them look like me!”
I heard a chair scrape across the wooden floor. Nate crept silently up the front steps.
A drunken voice I did not know was speaking, “They all look like them damn Indians! It’d serve you right if I just let them take all them damn young’uns!”
I craned my neck, trying to see into the house. Where were the three children?
Haimovi was there as well. I saw the edge of his blue sleeve and his loose black hair falling around his shoulders.
Karl stood by the fire, glaring at Mr. Carey in the way only teenage boys could, his long hair hanging in his eyes.
“I ought to teach you to respect your elders, boy,” Carey snarled. “You, you ain’t even mine, none of ’em are.” Joseph took an unsteady lurch toward the table. “Just the bastard of some savage whore.” He turned to Nannie. Karl leapt forward to block his father’s way. Joseph slammed his fist hard into the boy’s stomach, knocking him to the ground. Karl crumpled with a grunt.
Nacto and Haimovi burst into a flurry of action. Nate charged into the house, sacrificing stealth for speed. Beyond him, I could see what was happening, but I could not stop it.
Nannie dove for her son. Joseph snatched at her hair and ripped her away, aiming a kick at the downed lad. Nannie screamed. Her shriek made his kick go wide, but he spun and caught his wife in the mouth, knocking her down like a shot pheasant. She gave a choking cry, drooling blood and broken teeth. Mr. Carey disappeared beneath a sea of men; Nacto and Haimovi, and my Nate, who was never one to allow anyone to be harmed if he could help it.
I leapt upon the porch. If Karl and Nannie were fighting Mr. Carey in the front room, where were Daisy and the baby? I raced across the uneven porch slats, my boots slipping on the sand and silt.
Please let them be safe!
I raced through the lounge and the kitchen, where the chairs stood around the small table. I nearly tripped over the edge of a rug. The stove was lit, the kitchen warm and the scent of bread and beans wafted through the air. Several jars had been brought up from the cellar and were neatly placed on the table along with a jar of flowers.
I ran through the kitchen and into the large dining room, where a table and six wooden chairs all sat neatly pushed in.
The sound of fighting grew more frantic. Strange how my mind could catch details when the only thing I desperately wanted to see was missing. Where was the baby? “Where are you?”
There was a sound. Not quite a cry, not a gurgle. Upstairs.
I took the stairs two at a time, nearly falling again as I ran. The door to the right was where Nate and I had spent the night. I threw it open. It banged loudly against the frame. Nothing.
The second door. A washroom. Nothing.
The third door. A larger bed. It must be the master bedchamber. I ran around the far side of the bed. Nothing.
One door left.
Please. Please let the baby be there!
The bedroom had a quilt of a dozen different fabrics upon a narrow bed and a hope chest that had been hastily shoved away from the wall.
Daisy crouched there in the corner, her pretty, dark face etched with fright but fiercely protective of a bundle wrapped in a knit blanket in her arms.
She recognized me and a great sigh of relief tumbled from her. “Mrs. Valentine, I am so glad you are here. He might kill Mama for sure this time.”
I crouched down, taking them both in my arms. “He will not. We won’t let him. Nacto and Haimovi are down there right now with my husband.”
The little baby in her arms let out a grunt and a grumble. Clearly, this was not how the baby believed he should be spending his time. I tried rocking and patting him.
Below us wood banged upon wood again.
“Mr. Carey!” Nate was trying to make him listen.
“Get outta my house!”
My brain was buzzing, trying to draw to mind a tarot card or cards I could use to protect Daisy and the baby.
Scraping, screaming wood, hammering, the sound of glass shattering. Beside me, Daisy set her thin, little jaw and held the baby tighter.
Nate’s voice came up the stairs. “Joseph, be reasonable!”
Chairs scraped across the wood floor, clattered to the ground.
Suddenly, it was all noise and violence. I was afraid it was Mr. Carey trying to come up the stairs after Daisy and the baby. More furniture was slammed around and glass shattered as the men fought. Then there was a sound, a rumble of rolling thunder. A gunshot.
My blood turned to ice. Who had been shot? I desperately wanted to run down the stairs and make sure my Nate was safe. But if Joseph had managed to harm Nate and Nacto and Haimovi, then we would be next.
I tried to swallow past the hot coal in my throat. No matter what, I could not leave Daisy and the baby alone. I jumped up, taking the baby in my arms. There was no reason I could not handle one drunken lummox of a man. The window gave us no easy way down, just a straight drop ten feet down to the patchy grass yard below. I would have to help Daisy down and pa
ss the baby to her.
We needed a shield. I immediately thought of my mother. She always protected me from all harm. Papa taught me, but Mama protected me. We needed my mama. A mother. The Priestess, mothering and wise, feminine and fiercely protective of all her children, in some depictions she even bore a shield. The deck I learned from had her painted as a gentler sort; reclined upon a chair with cushions of red velvet, surrounded by the images of Earth and Venus, but yet a mother. And there is nothing more powerful than a mother’s love. It is the same love that will make a woman lie about her origins to keep her children safe.
I pushed that thought away. There was no time to waste now.
I took on the power of The Priestess. I envisioned her mantle settling upon my shoulders. I felt her heavy crown upon my head. I felt stronger immediately. I was more the shield-wielding matron than the couch-reclining matron anyway. I had both my seax and my revolver. I could not allow Mr. Carey to take my seax away from me and use it upon Daisy and the baby but at this distance, my revolver would not miss.
Daisy did not speak but she didn’t shrink away, either. She raised her little chin defiantly. Even if we did not leave the room alive, we intended to leave it fighting.
The room below was now silent. The baby stared up at my face, his dark eyes searching mine for kindness or explanation, or maybe milk, his little fists bunched in the shawl, clinging for dear life.
The hall was quiet. Too quiet. The rooms I had searched before Daisy’s stood with their doors hanging half open, lazily creaking on well-made hinges. Orange light spilled from the windows on the west side of the house, flooding the wooden floors with the same red-orange color as the cloak covering the fallen man pierced with swords in the Ten of Swords—crisis.
The baby made a squeak and I loosened my grip slightly.
If Nate had been the one shot, I reasoned, Mr. Carey would already be upstairs. If Mr. Carey was alive and Nacto or his friend was shot, Nate would have transfigured to protect the women from further harm, consequences be damned.
I took a shuddering breath and crept down the stairs, my back to a wall to steady me, my weapon in hand, ready to defend the bundle in my arms.
Joseph Carey lay on the kitchen floor of the family home, his left arm twisted beneath him at an impossibly odd angle, his blood spreading across the wooden floor. The blond hair that lay across his forehead was matted with blood. The scent of gunpowder hung heavy in the air.
Nate stared at the body. The two Cheyenne men were arguing in hushed tones, gesturing at Mr. Carey in frantic motions. Nannie heard me approach and took her baby from my arms. I touched Nate’s back. He turned and reached out an arm to me. Karl crouched in the corner, one eye nearly swollen shut.
In an instant, the world Chelan had made for herself as Nannie and the white names she gave her children to protect them ceased to offer any protection. Like the Ten of Swords, a man lay dead and all that surrounded him was crisis and defeat. But, in times of crisis, a healer focuses on what she can do for the living. Nate and I had offered Nannie and the children our protection, and that was not about to change now, though I was at a loss as to how to move forward.
I turned to my husband. He looked at Mr. Carey’s body, the wheels in his head turning, nodding to himself as he worked up a plan.
I knew where to begin. I had living patients.
If there was sorrow at the loss of her husband, Mrs. Carey didn’t show it. Nannie held Daisy, softly crooning to her in the beautiful lilting Cheyenne language.
The children were theirs, hers and Haimovi’s. You would have to be blind to miss the looks she gave him.
Mr. Carey must have known.
“Mrs. Carey, why did you marry Joseph?” Nate asked.
I stared at him. How could he ask such a thing of a woman? Especially now that he was dead, with their children looking on.
I took Nate’s hand. “Surely the reservation is safer for you and the children. The rail workers told me most of the Indians live on the reservations, and if they don’t go—” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
Haimovi glared at Joseph Carey’s body. “They will take our children. Place them in church housing. Teach them to be good Christians.”
Nacto looked grim. “My sister has duties. I stayed to look after her.”
Nate turned to Haimovi. “And you stayed here for love. Men will do a lot for the women they love.”
Nannie looked out the window at the trees waved in the wind. “I give up much for my people.”
An odd peace lay over the homestead as though a cloud of darkness had suddenly lifted, even though the sky was still cloudless and deep blue. I should have been shocked by the sight of the dead man on the floor, but he had been killed in self-defense. He would have harmed Nannie and the children, as well as anyone else who stood in his way, of that I was certain,.
Despite all the awful destruction Mr. Carey had created, all the fear he had caused, leaving his daughter cowering in the upstairs bedroom, I could not help but feel sorrow for the man lying face down on the floor in a lake of blood.
I was only dimly aware of the flurry of activity behind me, out of place in such an awful moment. Joseph Carey was so like the fallen man in the Ten of Swords, slain and betrayed. I could not hate Chelan for it. I could not even hate Haimovi for it.
Nannie had given up the right to marry the man she loved, the one who had fathered her children, the one who now stood beside her, a strong arm wrapped around her as he glared at the dead man with contempt.
Haimovi spoke. “Chameli, Meturato, help your mother.”
The moment Haimovi said it I knew he spoke truth, a truth I knew without being able to name it. Her name was not Nannie. Her name was Chelan. Her children—their children—were Chameli and Meturato. I looked at the baby in Chelan’s arms. I suddenly wanted to know his name because it surely was not Evan.
I was once engaged to a man who I did not love. He had not loved me. He needed a woman who would marry him and I needed a way to provide for my parents in their old age. It seemed a good idea at the time. Except he was a gambler, a lout, a drinker, and a whoremonger. In short, Byron Goodwin was a horrid man. Yet, I might have married him for the protection his name and estate would have provided. It was only through good fortune that I had realized, before it was too late, that he would never respect me, and that he would never grow to love me.
Then I met Nate: wonderful, loving, adventurous Nate. And, together, we managed to solve the problem of providing for my family.
Chelan had stayed with Joseph Carey to remain here rather than go with her people and the safety they offered her and her children.
I looked around. The flurry of activity was the organized chaos of a family preparing to leave.
Chameli stood at the kitchen shelves, packing glass jars of preserves in a wooden crate, carefully wrapping them in towels and stacking them. Meturato—I was still getting used to the unique feel of their true names—was tying bags of corn, flour, and beans with bits of twine and setting them by the door, then he marched up the stairs. Haimovi returned from taking a load outside to take the sacks of grain and flour.
Everyone carefully stepped over Joseph Carey’s body.
“Wait!” Everyone looked at me like I was mad. “We cannot run, that will make Chelan and her brother look guilty.”
The children resumed their packing.
“We are guilty,” Nate said reasonably. “A man is dead.”
I started to protest. But no, the law would not even protect a woman from abuse in London. Not really. In the home, the man was the law. The law protected the wife and children from outright murder, of course but, short of that, the law rarely got involved.
Nate took my hand and pulled me outside. “The law will not protect these people, Vivian. You know that, as well as I do.” He lowered his voice to frantic, hushed tones. “They are not even seen here as people. I don’t think it’s right they are being forced away from their homes, but they will not find justi
ce here, and Nacto and Haimovi did kill Joseph Carey.”
I shivered at the thought.
“Not that he didn’t deserve it,” Nate continued offhandedly.
I stared at him. The casual way in which he said it was startling. My husband was a lot of things, but I never considered him a bloodthirsty man. “How can you say that?”
“How can I not?” he said, aghast. “Viv, if anyone put their hands on you, I would murder them outright! Any other man would do the same.”
“Yes, but the law—” I protested.
Nate interrupted. “The law will do nothing for them. If it did, Chelan wouldn’t have had to marry Joseph to stay here. Haimovi wouldn’t have to pretend his children were another man’s, or risk them being taken away.”
He was right. It wasn’t fair. How could such a country pretending to be so advanced and so forward in their thinking be so backward? How could they hate a group of people just because their skin was another color or because they believed differently?
Behind us, Haimovi and Nacto grabbed Mr. Carey’s body and dragged him out of the house. A new age, indeed. They may have new monsters, but they preyed upon the weaknesses of men just the same as the old world demons did. We could pretend technology and education were the virtues of the new man, but what defined us was what united us. Mankind was defined by the same old prejudices and ignorance.
This family would be punished for Carey’s death if they were caught.
Chelan stood at the door. Her face was badly bruised, her lip swollen, several teeth broken. “You hate us.”
I realized belatedly I had been crying. “No. It is not you.” The truth of it set a fresh tear snaking down my cheek.
Chelan cradled her baby like a talisman. She couldn’t have known how it tore my heart. “I know you wish for us to adhere to the law. We cannot. Now we must go to my people. There is no safety here.”
The Rail Specter Page 13