Behind these they crouched, as – by the sound of it – men went thoroughly through the house. Torches moved in the darkness around the barns and corrals as well.
‘What are they after?’ breathed Mrs Passmore.
‘At a guess,’ lied January, ‘exactly what we’re after. Either one of your friend Fleam’s men blabbed that Taggart was stockpiling gold for a pay-off, or Pollack’s got a friend at the bank. Pollack got wind of that gold somehow – and it may be more than a thousand dollars; we have no idea what Taggart was up to. Unless,’ he added, ‘we’re both idiots and Francis was right about having found which was the correct map to the lost San Diablo mine.’
She whispered, ‘Mother of … You don’t think so? That little weasel …’
‘I don’t know. I know there were a dozen maps in his study and a list of what he’d need for an expedition into Comanche country—’
‘Including bodyguards like Fleam?’
‘I certainly wouldn’t go in that direction by myself. I take it that “will” Francis was waving around gave the whole of the property to him?’
‘Lock, stock, and the living-room carpet.’ She brushed a loose strand of gray-dyed hair from her forehead. ‘Not a half-penny piece for Mama, not a bottle of rum for Auntie, not a spavined horse for his wife to ride back to Mexico on … nothing. Didn’t even pass along title of Mama’s maid to her. And some of the clumsiest forgery I’ve seen in my life, though I’m not the expert that Hannibal is. A good lawyer will tear it to pieces in ten minutes – or he would in the USA. God knows what would happen in a Texas court.’
They were silent for a time, as two men came back from the corrals, lanterns swinging in their hands.
‘Where’d you leave your horse?’ he asked softly.
‘Far end of the orchard. Well, it wasn’t mine, it was one I grabbed from Quigley’s posse … Where’s yours?’
‘In the corral, saddled. See how they’re searching the barns? They’ll probably miss him in the darkness. Did you ever hear anything about Pollack and Aunt Alicia?’
Again she was silent, and the damp wind breathed down off the hills, bringing the faint thread of smoke. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Something I heard from one of the men,’ said January. ‘And I found one of his love letters.’
Cornelia Passmore sighed. ‘He did that kind of thing,’ she said at length. ‘Got people to spy for him, I mean. I’m not surprised that when Madrecita and Aunt Alicia showed up, Pollack set about romancing one or the other of them. He’d obviously have a better shot with Alicia. She wasn’t as clever as her sister – even making allowances for rum and dope – and she was desperate to get out of her sister’s household. Who wouldn’t be?’
‘Did Pollack want a spy in Taggart’s household on general principles?’ January recalled the noblewomen and society ladies in Paris, who routinely bribed the maidservants of their social foes – or the foes of their husbands’ political rivals. ‘Or did he suspect that Taggart was up to something from the start?’
‘Well, Vincent was pretty outspoken in his support of President Lamar and the Nationalists before he went over to Pollack’s side. It might have been a genuine change of heart. He had one, you know,’ she added. ‘At least, when he wasn’t drinking. Then in October – must have been a couple months after Lamar sent his troops after the Cherokee, killed their chief who was a friend of Sam Houston’s, and tore off his skin for souvenirs – Vincent started making up to Pollack. That was just before Madrecita and her party showed up. I think Pollack didn’t quite believe the about-face.’
‘Did you?’
‘Oh, God, no. Vincent thought Pollack was a dungball and Houston an incompetent drunkard who’d tie Texas to the US to cover up the fact that he couldn’t govern a pig-farm and his precious republic was going bankrupt. I think that was how Vin put it. No,’ she went on with another sigh, ‘Vincent was up to something. Whether he thought he could prove title on the three labors of good cotton land that Pollack had – that Vincent said had belonged to his original purchase from the San Saba grant – or whether he was trying to split that idiot Rance from his brother so Vincent could get him to sign over some of his water-rights to one of the creeks in the hills, I don’t know. But he made a good hard pitch at Pollack.’
‘And Pollack didn’t trust him.’
‘Not entirely. I’d heard about Pollack making eyes at Alicia back in October, almost as soon as she arrived. Pollack has … I don’t know how to describe it. Probably a man wouldn’t understand.’ She shrugged again. ‘When he talks to you in that voice of his … But he’s married. And even Alicia has to know that married men don’t leave their wives for their mistresses.’
January said nothing to that. He knew that too many desperate people – particularly those with limited experience – have a terrible, tragic inclination to believe what they hope will come true.
Whatever they were looking for, Pollack’s men searched the house from top to bottom for nearly two hours. The men came back in from the barns – another group was sent out. January heard the rancher’s voice float up from the yard below, ‘… can’t have disappeared into thin air …’ Terror that he’d be caught – impounded as a runaway slave or, worse, claimed by Mrs Passmore as her own property – made January’s hands shake as he lay on the tile of the roofs, in the dense shadows of the chimney. Otherwise, exhausted as he was, with barely three hours of sleep last night and none the night before, he guessed he would have passed out where he lay.
Smoke drifted on the wind, and he wondered if that was Jalisco and his men, up in the hills.
Or Comanche.
Or Comancheros, waiting to loot the place as soon as everyone was gone.
The men rode out with the moon still four hours from setting. January saw Creed walk the perimeter of the house and the courtyard wall, once, trailing the smoke of his cigaretto. Mentally timed how long a second circuit would be, but the cowhand didn’t appear again. He wondered if, during the search of the house, he’d appropriated some of the contents of Madrecita’s cellaret.
In time he tapped his companion’s shoulder, helped her over the tiles of the kitchen roof, to one of the sheds. He slid down, knowing she wouldn’t release her hold on the heavy strongbox, held up his hands for her. ‘I’ve got you.’
Cautiously and awkwardly, she turned her back and slithered after him.
Allowing him to remove the pistol from her waistband and twist one of her arms behind her back even as her feet touched the ground.
‘Inside,’ he whispered, pressing the gun-barrel to her side. ‘And don’t think I wouldn’t blow a hole in you, because I don’t have a single thing to lose.’
‘Ben—’
‘Not – one – word.’
He marched her into the house – Pollack and company had obligingly left the rear door open – up the stairs, and into Francis’s room, which, he knew, had locks on all its doors. Still holding his prisoner’s wrist, and watching for the obvious move of attacking him with the iron strongbox, he set the gun quickly down and extracted a candle from his pocket. ‘Put that box down and light this.’ He picked up the gun again, and released her wrist.
‘What are you going to do?’ She managed to sound innocent and hurt. Terrified, as if any man in January’s predicament would take the time for even the speediest of rapes.
‘Avoid killing you – if I can.’
‘Ben, I wouldn’t—’
‘You would – in a heartbeat. Although I will remind you that slave-stealing is a capital offense in Texas, so if you still have those forged ownership papers from last time they’d better be good. Now light the candle.’ And, when she still hesitated, ‘I’m only going to take a hundred dollars of your gold.’
She lit the candle. ‘Ben, I have always regretted—’
‘I’m glad you have.’ By the candle’s flickering light – gun still pressed to the woman’s side – he made sure all the doors into the study and the upstairs rear gallery were locked, t
hen dug one-handed into the geologist’s kit for a length of light rope. ‘I’ll sleep better at night, knowing of your repentance and regret. Because selling me into slavery in Vicksburg two years ago would have shattered the lives of my wife and children; it would very likely have ended my life within a year or two, and would have left my dearest friend stranded, ill, and quite possibly dying in a strange town with no one to make sure he wasn’t murdered by the ham-handed idiot they had as a doctor.’
He set the candle on the corner of the shaving-stand, and backed her up against the foot of the bed.
‘Now, I could choke you until you passed out,’ he said. ‘I can do that one-handed. My hands are big. But as you probably know, it takes an experienced strangler to judge how much is too much pressure and I’m not inclined to err on the side of caution. Or, you can accept my promise that I’m only going to take one hundred dollars of that gold – I saw you slam that strongbox so I assume you picked the lock and that the gold is in there – and you can let me tie you up without any trouble. It’s just to keep you from coming after me – I assume there are guns all over this house – until I can make a clean getaway. I’m going to blindfold you, leave this key –’ he brandished the key to the door that led into the hall – ‘in the lock of the door – there’s paper on the table here, and you can use one of Brother Francis’s stick-pins to poke it through and pull it back under the door. I’m going to hide the gold somewhere in the house. Then I’ll come up, untie your hands, and make my run for it.’
‘What, you’re not going to promise to marry me as well? That’s what the last man I believed promised.’
‘Mrs Passmore,’ sighed January, ‘do you believe that it would be much, much easier for me to kill you?’
‘Pig.’ She heaved the strongbox onto the bed, and extended her arm to one side of the bedpost.
‘A pig is an extremely intelligent animal, m’am. More so than most dogs.’ Moving swiftly, and keeping the side of his waistband where he’d thrust the pistol turned away from any chance of being grabbed, he knotted the rope around her wrists on either side of the bedpost, then for good measure passed the bond under and through the stringers that held the posts together. He pulled the knots tight, cut off the slack, and used a yard of it to tie her feet to the stringers of the footboard as well. He felt in his pocket for a bandana, remembered he’d used it to wrap up poor Hookwire’s severed hand (Was that only yesterday?), swiftly fished two handkerchiefs from Francis’s carved mahogany bureau (And how much did that cost, to transport here from Virginia?), and used one to blindfold her, the other to gag her.
‘The hundred dollars,’ he said, opening the strongbox – and yes, it contained an assortment of ten- and five-dollar American gold pieces, plus a great deal of American and Mexican silver, and a paper with a list of names on it. The first of them was Fleam – ‘is partly for my inconvenience, partly to buy me dinner when I get to Austin, and partly to get me the hell out of this godforsaken republic. You can keep the rest.’
She made a noise behind the gag, probably telling him what he could do with the hundred dollars.
He pocketed the list and ten ten-dollar gold pieces, then carried the strongbox and the candle from the room. Four more ten-dollar pieces he laid on the floor of the hall just outside the door of the room, then proceeded to move swiftly through the house, concealing some of the money, leaving other little piles where she would be sure to find them – to remind her to keep searching. His last stop was the kitchen, where he filled three canteens with water and crammed the remainder of the tortillas and cheese into the overstuffed saddlebags.
‘You probably have three hours,’ he said, when he returned to the bedroom and untied her hands, ‘before anyone comes to search the house again, so you should find the gold fairly easily. I’ve hidden Francis’s stick-pins, just to give myself a little more time, but I doubt that’ll slow you down much. But be quick,’ he added, retreating to the door. ‘Unless you trust Mr Creed.’
She said something else behind the gag.
Will I regret not killing her? How is a woman selling a man into slavery different from a man selling a girl?
No difference.
He would have watched Seth Javel burn without a qualm.
He still couldn’t do it.
He closed the door, locked it, left the key in the lock, and descended the stair as lightly as he could. The gold-pieces on the floor, the hall table, the dining-table winked in his candle-light as he hurried from the house. The big bay horse he’d stolen earlier in the day – had its owner appropriated one of the Taggart herd in compensation? – was still in the farthest corral, still saddled. What’s the penalty for horse-theft in Texas? He slipped the bit into its mouth, mounted, and rode to the far end of the orchard, where, in fact, a stringy dapple-gray gelding was tied.
It was hard not to break into a gallop, but he knew that the sound of two galloping horses would carry a long way on a still night. It was another three hours before he reached Witch Cave Canyon, and the moon had passed out of sight behind the rim. He lit one of the lanterns he’d taken from the house, and by its bobbing, uneven light, walked the horses until he came to the pond that Jalisco had described, where Arroyo Bruja bubbled and trickled down from the cave itself.
There’d better not be a bear in that cave …
Saint Francis, friend of animals, was in a good mood that night. The cave was empty.
He watered the horses, led them up the tangle of rocks, and through the damp arch of stone to a rocky hollow that bore signs of being an old camping-place for somebody, clearly many years ago. It was dawn before he’d unsaddled the animals and rubbed down their backs – they’d been worked all day and he felt considerable sympathy for them – then rolled himself, finally, up in the saddle-blankets and went to sleep.
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, let me know in the morning what I owe you for getting me through these past two days …
His last thought was of Rose, and his children.
I’ll get back somehow, I promise.
TWENTY-TWO
It was full daylight – gray and cloudy – when January woke.
He had dreamed of Bellefleur Plantation, where he’d been born. Of the grinding, sickened fear that he’d lived with all his childhood, tied to the household of a man who liked nothing better than to drink himself into raving fury, secure in the knowledge that neither his wife, nor his sons, nor his slaves had the power to either raise a hand against his behavior, or to leave.
Michie Fourchet had called this, ‘being free to live as I choose’. Most white men did.
As far as January could tell as an adult, looking back, drunken rage was the only joy the man had, not caring that it was at the expense of everyone around him.
In his dream January had been trapped in the house, where no black child was allowed. He ran in terror from room to room, knowing if he was found he’d be tied to a post in the barn and clubbed with a broom-handle. He’d later learned that there were laws in Louisiana against beating slaves to death but he knew also that these laws weren’t often enforced. In his dream – in his child-self – he knew only that he’d seen his nine-year-old friend Cal beaten to death with a wagon-chain.
And he couldn’t find his way out.
Instead of opening onto the galleries, front and back, the ten rooms seemed only to open into each other. Somewhere he could hear Michie Fourchet’s heavy footfall, hear his drunken voice bellowing, ‘You listen to me when I’m talkin’ to you!’ The smell of the man – the reek of liquor that seemed to come out of his sweat – hung in the air, clogged his nostrils when he breathed. He saw a girl running, too, darting through doorways glimpsed from the corner of his eye. A tall girl, vaguely pretty, with a wide, sensual mouth and sky-blue eyes. Sometimes she was a child, as young as he. Huge blue nearsighted eyes – she stumbled on the edges of rugs, or blundered into the sides of doors in her clumsiness. Soft brown curls bounced when she jerked her head around to listen, like a nervous hare.
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Sometimes she was older, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
I was sold, he thought. She couldn’t even be that.
Once he saw her in her bedroom, sprawled on her bed with her skirts turned up to her chin and a boy her own age standing at the bed’s foot, buttoning up his flies. ‘You tell an’ I’ll say you begged me to.’ He had rough sandy-brown hair that fell over his forehead, and her same pale-blue eyes. A strong chin, a half-familiar face.
‘I’ll say it to Pa an’ I’ll say it to every man an’ boy in this county. That you was a whore an’ you pestered me. Go ahead, Vin,’ he added, turning to the boy that January hadn’t seen until that moment, standing in the doorway, looking on. ‘What’s the matter? Can’t get it up?’ He laughed like a neighing horse and bent over the weeping girl again.
January woke, hearing rain on the trees outside the cave, and the wild purling of the stream below. He remembered how Michie Fourchet would take a fancy to this woman or that in the quarters – quite young girls, some of them. He remembered looking out the door of their cabin once, seeing his mother cleaning herself in a bucket in the half-light before she’d come in, not just bruises but blood.
One of his aunties had said, You just have to put up with it, til he gets tired.
He wondered if Jack Taggart had ever gotten tired.
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