The King's Mercy

by Lori Benton

  She had Azuba, Marigold. Others might help. And then what? If they laid hands on Phineas Reeves, a free white male, subdued and held him prisoner, her own freedom would be in jeopardy, the lives of any slaves involved forfeited. If they were caught.

  Charlotte and Papa needed her. And she wouldn’t risk condemning Azuba or anyone else.

  “No, Mister Reeves.”

  Something in her voice spun him round before he reached the door. “No?”

  “You said the slaves are all running away, yet you’d send more after the physician? That’s the last we’ll see of them. Are you giving up on Severn?”

  “Don’t speak as a hysterical fool,” he said without heat. “I’ll go myself and fetch the man. Does that satisfy you?”

  He went out before she replied, leaving her praying he’d hurry for Papa’s sake, if the physician even existed. Praying likewise for enough time to do the next hard thing now staring her down.

  * * *

  “No, Miss Joanna. I won’t leave you to face that man when he get back and find me gone—and who gonna help tend Master Carey?”

  Azuba hadn’t mentioned the plantation. They knew Severn was a ship sinking fast, its captain unable to abandon it. Therefore neither would Joanna, but she meant to give as many as she could a chance to survive.

  “He means to blame you for this. You, Mari, or Phoebe. Maybe all of you.” They were in the passage, hovering in the study doorway where they could watch for Mister Reeves’s return as well as Papa’s waking.

  Azuba shook her head. “Why take me down? I’m nothing to him.”

  “You’re important to me. That’s enough. I want you to take Phoebe with you. Mari and Jory too. Find Elijah. Tell him what’s happened. Ask him to come.” It was the one thing that might persuade.

  Sure enough, Azuba’s shoulders slumped in resignation. “I’ll do it, but only to bring Mari and Jory safe away—Phoebe too. And send Elijah back.”

  They went abovestairs, where Charlotte had cried herself to sleep, forbidden to see Papa. Both deemed it best Azuba slip away unremarked. Charlotte couldn’t later blurt the truth if she didn’t know it. But Azuba lingered in the doorway of their bedroom, gazing at Charlotte’s sleeping form. “You want me to take her?” she asked softly.

  “He’ll come after you for certain if you did. If the rest of you go alone…”

  “He let us be. Maybe.”

  While Azuba made ready to flee, Joanna went to the kitchen to speak to Phoebe and Mari. They were waiting when Azuba reached the kitchen.

  “Sybil?” Joanna asked.

  “Ain’t even seen her today,” Phoebe said. “Dorcas neither. You want I should find ’em?”

  “No,” Joanna said, hoping they, too, had run. “I want you gone. Mari, you know where to find Elijah?”

  Marigold hoisted Jory to her shoulder. “He told me where he meant to go. I reckon I’ll track him down.”

  They gazed at each other through memories thick as a wall, then Joanna pushed past it and embraced her, Elijah’s son nestled between them. Marigold stiffened. Joanna kept her arms around her until she relaxed, then drew back and brushed her fingertips over Jory’s silky hair.

  “I’m sorry, Mari. For so much.”

  Marigold nodded, brown eyes filling. “So am I,” she said. Then she and Phoebe went out.

  Azuba hesitated. “Miss Joanna…”

  Words Azuba had spoken long ago came back to her. “We all got to do things we don’t want to do…It’s the way things are, Miss Joanna. By and by you’ll understand.”

  By and by she had, and she’d wanted to change those things—for all of them. Perhaps this was the only way.

  She grasped Azuba’s big-knuckled hand. There were no words.

  Marigold stuck her head around the door, gaze urgent. “Azuba. We got to go if we gonna do this.”

  “She’s right,” Joanna said, and wrapped Azuba in a final embrace.

  “You sure about this?” Azuba asked.

  Joanna breathed in the smell of her, cleaning oils and hearth smoke and her own familiar scent. “Send Elijah. Pray for me.”

  Joanna lingered in the kitchen, not wanting to see which direction they took. Not wanting to see if others joined. She hoped they would, that they’d all go, save themselves however they could.

  “Godspeed,” she whispered.

  Silence answered. The hearth was cold. No kettle hung from the crane. No skillet sizzled. No hands performed their labor over the table. Already the kitchen felt deserted, save for its ghosts.

  * * *

  Assuming his description widely broadcast, Alex had traveled by night south through the Carolina backcountry, then retraced his flight from Severn along the Cape Fear, cutting through forest when possible. The coat Hugh Cameron had given him was none the better for it. Perhaps it was no matter. He intended to reach Severn and observe the state of things before deciding how to reveal himself. First to Moon, or Marigold, someone he could trust not to shout an immediate alarm. He wanted it to be Joanna, but how was he to reach her without alerting Carey? Or Reeves.

  About an hour before daybreak, he’d bedded down on the sandy bank of a stream that meandered into the river’s course, put his head on his pack, and slept like one dead.

  When rough hands took hold of him and the midday sun smote him in the face, he’d been too disoriented to put up a fight in time. A belated struggle availed him little; there were too many of them, all males and strong. His hands were bound behind him, his face pressed into sand, then he was hauled upright.

  The features nearest his own resolved into familiar lines. Not a young man—white showed in his wiry beard and the hairs sprinkled across his brown chest—but hale and strong all the same. Edmund Carey’s head groom.

  “Moses?” Alex reared back his head as men’s voices murmured above him.

  “MacKinnon.” Moses stood, leaving him in the sand. “What you doing back here?”

  When he didn’t answer, Moses shared a look with another of the men ringing him—six of them in all, Carey’s slaves.

  “He’ll want to know,” the other man said.

  “He?” Alex asked. To a man they ignored him.

  “Make him tell why he back first,” another suggested.

  Moses’s gaze moved over Alex, taking in clothing, knapsack. “You going to answer?”

  Alex bent his face to his shoulder, wiping his mouth of sand, giving himself time to think. He hadn’t yet crossed Severn Creek. They weren’t on Carey’s land. And these men weren’t behaving as slaves.

  “I came back to see how ye fare.”

  Every set of eyebrows he could see shot high into gleaming foreheads.

  “The Careys?” Moses asked.

  “Aye.” He’d sand on his tongue still. He spat onto the ground, then said, “And Moon, Marigold. All of ye.”

  “Huh,” half the men muttered under their breath, a dark collective utterance.

  “What’s happening there?”

  Again he was ignored. “Take him,” Moses said.

  The rest closed in and hauled him to his feet. It was like his capture by Blackbird’s band, only these warriors carried no weapons save crudely sharpened sticks. Their clothing was tattered, their beards untrimmed. One took up his knapsack. They put him in their midst, striking off through the forest in file, three ahead, three behind.

  Pauling’s letter. Had he lost it in the scuffle? He couldn’t search his coat with bound hands. Lowering his head and raising his shoulder, pretending to scratch his chin, he felt the stiffness of the folded missive tucked in the breast pocket.

  Relieved, he set his mind to deal with whatever was to come next.

  For a while that proved little enough. Swampland surrounded, dark with cypress and cedar and the musty tang of rotting things, yet these men picked their way with confid
ence, a torturous route where the ground was often spongy, or inches thick in mud. He’d passed the point where he’d any hope of finding his way out of the morass when the way ahead began to resemble a path, even to his eyes.

  He smelled the smoke of cook fires before he made out the squat structures dotting an area of dry ground, about an acre in size. Some were open-faced shelters, others thatched huts covered in clay, tattered blankets hung across low doorways. Fire rings clustered in the center of the camp. Battered pots rested on ashy stones, with a scattering of crude trenchers and bowls. Dark-skinned women with their heads covered crouched at the fires. Here and there men loitered. Small children went naked or in the barest of clouts.

  When the spear-toting party arrived, Alex in their midst, men shot to their feet. Women froze like deer. Children cowered behind their elders.

  Alex recognized some faces. One of Carey’s coopers. Coming out of a nearby hut was the carpenter who’d crafted the bedstead for him when he’d arrived at Severn. But these people weren’t all from Severn—or they’d been part of the work gangs that lived out among the pines. Maybe thirty in all, that he could see.

  A glance around as he was brought into their midst showed him racks of drying fish, the carcass of a wild boar hanging from a tree, a brace of ducks outside a hut, feathers half-plucked. They were living wild, and like wild things with survival in mind, they recovered fast from surprise.

  Questions came at Moses, who raised a hand for silence. “He gone out with Billy’s gang?”

  “He here,” a woman said, eyeing Alex warily. “In his place, yonder.”

  Alex followed shifting gazes to a nearby hut as the blanket across its doorway moved and the first white man he’d seen for days emerged. He was dressed in shirt and breeches, brown hair drawn back and tailed, beard stubble shadowing his blunt chin.

  Elijah Moon saw him and stopped in his tracks, recognition running like ripples across his scarred face.

  * * *

  Outside his hut, Moon motioned Alex to sit. Squatting next to a stone ring where a fire burned, he added wood, poking up the embers with a stick. The action showered sparks, stirring memories of Severn’s forge, of hours spent in its molten heat. Though it had been long since Moon swung a hammer, his upper body was little diminished. Unchanged as well that piercing stare, which he aimed at Alex from beneath leveled brows as Moses and two more of Carey’s former slaves joined them. They hunkered down, skin showing through the threadbare knees of their breeches.

  In the presence of the three ex-slaves, Severn’s former smith regarded him. “Moses tells me ye’ve come back to…how did he put it? See how we fare.”

  “Aye. I heard things went ill with the Careys.” He paused, giving Moon a chance to offer specifics on the subject. He didn’t. “And I mean to make amends for my leaving. Far as I’m able.”

  “Ye’ve left it late. Probably too late.”

  Dread tightened Alex’s gut. “What d’ye mean?”

  “It was bad enough by the time I was forced to leave Mari and our son behind.”

  “Ye’ve a son, then?”

  “He’s called Jory.” Moon’s expression softened briefly. “Never ye mind him now. Where have ye been these months? And Jemma? Is she with ye?”

  “Not anymore.” Alex gave account of his flight, Jemma’s following, and their capture by Blackbird and her warriors as Jemma was giving birth. That detail halted the narrative.

  Moon was aghast. “She’s a child herself!”

  “Who done it?” Moses asked.

  “Reeves. Though it took her until our parting to say so.”

  By the time Alex finished telling of Jemma’s adoption by her grandmother’s sister and her intent to marry Runs-Far, heads were shaking.

  “Good for her,” Moses said. “She’s a free Indian like she say she gonna be.”

  “I havena told ye all,” Alex said. “We found Reverend Pauling among the Cherokees, a captive.”

  “Ye left him there too?” Moon asked, startled.

  “I brought him away with me, verra ill. I got him to a place we kent near the Yadkin River where he’s tended. I’ve a letter from him,” he added, touching his coat where it rode. “Addressed to Carey.”

  Around them rose the voices of women and children, the clank of a pot, the sizzle of frying meat. In the distance thunder rolled.

  Alex thought of Blackbird’s son with his new name.

  The day was clouding over.

  “So that’s why he never responded to Joanna’s letters,” Moon said at last. “Is that where ye heard of Severn? Reverend Pauling?”

  Impatient to hear of Joanna, he said, “I had it from our mutual acquaintance, Hugh Cameron, overseer at the place where I left Pauling.” Mention of overseer hardened the faces at the fire. “Tell me what Reeves has been about.”

  By the time Moon was done telling, Alex was seeing the red of rage, much of it directed at himself. Moon was right. He’d left his return far too late—if he’d meant to do the Careys any good.

  “So Reeves has the reins of Severn in hand and is running it straight off a cliff.” Was Joanna no better than a prisoner in that house? “Have ye been back? Or have these others kept ye informed?”

  Moon and Moses shared a look weighted with significance.

  “Ye didn’t tell him?” Moon asked.

  “No, man,” Moses said. “Thought you do that.”

  “Tell me what?” Alex demanded.

  “Best I show ye,” Moon said and stood. Moses and the others trailing, he led Alex past a gauntlet of gazes and hushed conversations to an open-faced shelter across of the camp. Beneath its slanted thatched roof, curled on a pallet of pine boughs, was Demas, oblivious to the camp bustling around him. Another of Carey’s former slaves stepped from a nearby thicket, holding a pistol. Alex looked back at Demas, noting the gleam of sweat on his brow despite the cool of the day.

  The guard melted back into the brush.

  “This I didna expect,” Alex said.

  “He was found fevered, wandering the swamp,” Moon said. “Maybe seeking us, I don’t know. In any case, he was beyond resisting, had to be carried in.”

  “Time we had of it, man like a bear,” Moses muttered. He and the others moved off, called away by a group of women to eat the food they’d fixed.

  “How long since ye found him?”

  “Day before yesterday.” Moon told then of a confrontation in the smithy, Reeves’s accusation, Demas’s assault and escape. “Where he’s been since he ran, I cannot say, but ye’re looking at Reeves’s scapegoat.”

  “Reeves blamed him for poisoning Carey?” Alex asked.

  “I saw it happen.”

  Moon beckoned Alex back toward his hut, but both men hesitated when beneath the shelter that well-bottom voice rasped, “He not lying.”

  The shelter’s roof was so low Alex had to bend almost double to see beneath it, but he wasn’t willing to crouch or come within reach of those massive hands. “Can ye talk, man?”

  Demas’s eyes blinked. “There things I can say.”

  “So it’s true. To cover his crime Reeves threw his one faithful slave to the wolves.”

  Teeth gritted, Demas pushed himself upright. He cast a bleary look across the portion of the camp visible from his shelter, and drew a stuttering breath.

  “No wolves here,” he said, then raised assessing eyes to Alex. “Maybe one now. But I never was that man’s slave. Give me water, I tell you what I was.”

  41

  “Aye,” Alex said. “And while ye’re at it, I’d ken what Reeves has against Edmund Carey, why he’s wreaked such havoc upon the man.”

  Demas swayed but caught himself. He laughed low in his throat, a rumble like the thunder rolling in the distance. “Oh, he make a mistake in choosing you, man. But let that bide for now.”

  M
oses rejoined them, bringing a canteen from which Demas drank, then began a tale that started years ago, when Edmund Carey retired from the Royal Navy, taking Moon with him.

  “The new captain, Potts, he let things happen on that ship another would have punished with a whip. Man named Smith was the worst—Obadiah Smith. Phineas blame Potts, Smith of course, but also Carey, for leaving him. He blame that one called Kelly for not seeing what going on under his nose.” Threatened with worse if he told a soul, Reeves had endured two and a half years of terror and abuse until, in port at Kingston, he’d escaped the Severn, his home turned hell.

  “Not captured?” Moon asked. “What was all that about the pirate ship, the Isis?”

  “Never was no pirates,” Demas said. “He hide on the docks in Kingston until he run from there too. That when I find him.”

  Demas had been a lad himself, already big for his age, when he came across the half-starved Reeves hiding in the sugar cane on his master’s plantation in the hills above Kingston. Demas brought him food. When the plantation master discovered Reeves and, the three alone out in the canes, commenced to beat Demas for hiding him, something in the strange white boy had snapped.

  “It like seeing a good dog go mad. He attack my master, got away that whip, turn it against him. I never see such joy in a face as I see that day Phineas beat my old master.”

  “To death?” Alex asked, chilled even as a fresh wave of sweat beaded Demas’s brow.

  The man’s bloodshot gaze met his. “Later we hear so.”

  Demas and Reeves had escaped deeper into the hills, to the maroons—runaways living much as Severn’s ex-slaves were now.

  Eventually the two returned to Kingston, where Reeves proved an efficient pickpocket and Demas kept hidden. They waited for the chance to escape that island. It came in the form of a ship’s captain, bound for the Colony of Georgia, desperate enough for crew to hire the pair despite their youth. Reeves was a skilled enough seaman. What Demas lacked in knowledge he made up in strength. Best of all, no one laid a hand on Reeves with Demas a protective shadow.