He shut his eyes again. Virgin Mary, Mother of God, what can I do?
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, rest her poor, battered soul.
Tiny and far-off, like a single blink of glass in sunlight, he saw his own parlor on Rue Esplanade, and Rose in her dress of faded pink calico, standing behind Selina Bellinger’s chair. Saw old Roux Bellinger come in the door and run, weeping, to clasp his daughter in his arms.
Is this only something I’m desperate to believe?
When he woke again the rain had stopped. The stream below the cave-pool still sounded loud. Couldn’t I have had a dream vision of Bellinger writing Rose a bank-draft to pay me for all this?
He led his stolen horses down to drink, and fashioned halters out of what was left of the rope, tying the beasts where the grass grew thick. The smell, and the sound, of the water were like a song, quiet in his heart. He sat on the rocks by the pool to keep an eye on the horses, tossed them slices of dried peaches and dried apples from the Perdition kitchen. Ate stale tortillas and salty white cheese, and read Gideon Pollack’s love letters to Alicia Marryat.
Beloved …
In the first of them it was, Miss Marryat. He worked up to Beloved later.
How the Hell could she believe this? Knowing what she knew, of the man’s distrust of her nephew?
But it was obvious that she had.
Did anyone ever call her ‘Beloved’ in her life? Or say the word to her that he and Rose so casually passed back and forth, with smiling kisses and the touch of treasured hands?
The letters spoke of meetings. Of time snatched among the oak-woods of the bottomlands, in the deep shade beyond the prairies where ‘by your kind efforts’ Pollack’s sheep and cattle grazed on Alicia’s nephew’s land. Of the lovemaking that brought me within touching-distance of ecstasy …
I stand in awe of the gift you have given me. The memory of your limbs entwined with mine makes my heart pound even now …
January thought of Selina, locked in a back room of the Capital City Hotel. Of her tiny whisper, He hurt me … And the hair prickled on his scalp.
Pollack might have had charm, but he laid it on with a trowel. And obviously, Alicia devoured it.
Why not? The poor woman was starving.
You have no idea what relief it is, after all these years of beating my head against the stone wall of indifference and stupidity, to talk with someone who truly understands politics … Meaning, January gathered, the necessity of Texas joining the Union. Like threads of indigo in a tapestry, loyalty to the United States twined around the crimson dialog of passion: I could not love thee, dear, so much/ loved I not honor more …
I count the days until I dare sever the poisonous bonds that hold me, and take you to be my wife.
So the payment for spying on Taggart was the promise of marriage. The promise of freedom. The hope of love.
Then towards the end, rage and fear, that her nephew had betrayed her lover. He has lied about a great and patriotic undertaking. He has, I have come more and more to fear, betrayed a secret of which I cannot speak, even to you …
The pain of my wound yesterday was as nothing to the joy I felt at seeing you, as you ran to our meeting-place …
Clearly, he’d ridden to meet her at some point after the duel. He must be tough as prairie sod, as Marcus Mudsill had said. And what Taggart had done – what Taggart had paid Silver Joe Fleam a thousand dollars in gold to do – was important enough to him, to endanger his life.
Have you learned anything, come to know any way by which he, and that spitfire wife, and all within the house can be got rid of? You must help me clear away those imbecile guards he’s posted, all around his lands. This is imperative, my love. The house – and the grounds – must be emptied, for reasons I cannot – dare not – reveal. He has committed treason, and will commit a greater unless I can stop him. Like Eurydice I must beg of you, trust you – do not ask questions. Do not look back. Do not speak of this to a living soul. You are stronger of soul than the Thracian singer was. I know I can rely on you …
Every one of the letters ended, As you love me – as you hope for our love and our future together – I beg you, burn this letter.
Had he meant for Alicia to murder her nephew?
It was hard to tell. And hard to guess what he might have said to her, in the hot, clammy shadows of the bottomlands. As Cornelia Passmore had observed, it might not even have made sense to someone who wasn’t a woman desperate, and in love.
It was certainly a stupid solution to the problem. But who could tell what Pollack had whispered to Alicia when they’d met on the Friday before Taggart’s death? (It could scarcely have been earlier, given the amount of blood the man lost …)
Not a difficult meeting to arrange, if Creed was in his pay. The bottomlands, in the trees not far from the cotton fields, would be easy to reach from Los Lobos, and an unlikely place to encounter Comanche.
The final note was short. My darling, I must see you. Tomorrow at nine, in the orchard. Creed will be keeping watch.
Was that so she wouldn’t flee when she saw Creed waiting there? Or had the cowhand kept guard on their meetings before?
Had she kept all these letters – the last note tucked loosely into the ribbon at the bottom of the pile – only because he called her Darling? Because she couldn’t bear to burn paper that bore his handwriting? Or had she had another reason?
He cached the letters in his shirt-pocket, pulled from the saddlebag the thick bundle of old deeds. They were difficult to read – the clerks who’d written them didn’t know Latin (or, in some cases, Spanish) very well, and they were full of abbreviations and clerical pot-hooks. But the same names cropped up in all of them. Sauceito Creek. Elbow Canyon (Cubitus Amnis). Mission San Diablo.
It looked like – sounded like – the boundaries of the same stretch of land, granted to the Valenzuela family ‘in conditional usufruct under the absolute title granted to the Order of St Francis at San Saba …’
It would take a lawyer – or several lawyers – or a series of court decisions beside which the English Courts of Chancery would appear as simple as nursery-rhymes – to figure out who actually owned the land between the Little Colorado, the Pedernales, San Diablo Hill, Elbow Canyon (or Creek) etc. etc. January recalled with a shudder the English case Hannibal had spoken of, which had been going since 1798 with no decision in sight.
And as he considered this, his fingers took in the textures of those old documents: hard, rough parchment. Smoother, paler vellum. Thick paper, stiff and brown with age.
The different hues of the faded ink. And most particularly, the pale red stains where seals had been winkled off the documents with a hot knife. To be affixed elsewhere …
By that time the sun was high. The creek had come down a little, though its voice still babbled strong. January led the horses back up into Witch Cave, tied the dapple at the back, and saddled the bay. He took the saddlebags with him: No sense taking chances. It took a bit of searching to find the remains of the old road up the narrowing canyon, but it wasn’t so overgrown, he judged, that ten or eleven determined men (with the prospect of being paid a thousand dollars in gold) couldn’t have taken a couple of wagons up it.
He wondered what they’d done with the horses and mules.
Not left them at Perdition, anyway. Even with Taggart’s men keeping intruders away, somebody was bound to notice and talk.
The overgrown road was flooded, right across, in three places. But it rose as the canyon shallowed and the stream-bed was left behind. The mouth of the old Bruja copper mine was overgrown, too, and barely larger than the caves further down the canyon. Someone had taken the trouble to scratch out the tracks of wagon-wheels in the tunnel, but he found the sticks of three Lucifer matches, flicked to the side where he flicked his own when he lit his lantern.
And fifty feet down the tunnel, there they were.
Three wagons, loaded with goods-crates – many of them still stamped with the names of Houston and Ga
lveston warehouses. That should make them easy to trace …
The stolen government archives of the Republic of Texas.
They were lined up doubletree-to-tailboard: Fleam and his men must have unhitched them and man-handled them up the tunnel. He guessed that Taggart had dictated the order in which they were stored, because the one nearest the mouth of the tunnel – and easiest to get to – was the one in which one of the goods crates had been later pried open, and documents extracted.
And replaced. Taggart had put slips of plain note-paper to mark the place in the crate – and no wonder, the box was filled with other deeds, other grants, other land-holding documents within that section of the archives. He’d wanted to make damned sure that he got every grant and deed and document that related to his own land, and to that transferred to his wife by her Uncle Gael, and replaced them with grants and deeds and documents which proved his own title to those lands unquestionable beyond shadow of doubt. None of this ‘usufruct’ or ‘absolute title granted to the Order of St Francis’ nonsense.
January pulled out one of the documents, and compared it with its twin in the bundle in his saddlebag.
Gervase Hookwire had done his job well. Every word, every letter, every pot-hook – the very ink and parchment – were identical. Except that the title was granted, absolutely, in perpetuity (a lawyer himself, Taggart must have spent months looking up what to say), and at the sole discretion of, Alejandro de la Vega, who thirty years later in another document transferred them absolutely, in perpetuity, and at the sole discretion of Cosimo Valenzuela – the grandfather of Uncle Gael …
‘You fucking bastard,’ sighed January. He wasn’t even sure to whom he spoke. Vincent Taggart. Gideon Pollack. All white men. (Though he knew dozens of black ones who’d have perpetrated the same hoax if they’d had the power to do so and thought they could get away with it … starting with Seth Javel …)
The entire Republic of Texas, of which he now hated every square inch.
He could, he calculated, reach Austin by dark, riding east to the Colorado River and then south into town. Following the Pedernales would be quicker, but would take him through the bottomlands where men grew cotton. More people, and every one of them on the lookout for a runaway slave.
Either way he ran the risk of encountering Pollack’s men. By this time they’d be criss-crossing Perdition land looking for someplace where three wagonloads of the republic’s archives could have been cached. A bodyguard would help, but riding around looking for Jalisco and his men would put him in greater danger of being caught by the Pollacks, not something he wanted to risk. He was almost out of tortillas and cheese, though his sparing consumption of them at breakfast had left him profoundly unsatisfied.
Would Quigley ride out today to have a look at the house, and at the scene of Aunt Alicia’s murder?
Or had he combed through the long grass around those two stumps in the orchard yesterday evening, and found whatever there was to find?
If they’re hunting, he thought, they’ll be hunting by daylight. And with the stream high and the canyon half-flooded, there’s every chance they won’t come up here til tomorrow.
He led the horses back to the Witch Cave – being careful to scratch out his own tracks in the mine-tunnel, and pick up the match-sticks – and from there picked his way on foot to the small, high cave where he’d cached Hookwire’s spare pens, papers, pigment-pots. Remembering the precise artistry of the fakes that Taggart had inserted into the archives, he had to shake his head in admiration. The clerkish little bald-pate had truly been an artist (and he was almost certain Hannibal was going to try to make off with the implements of forgery when this was all over: in his way, Hannibal was an artist, too).
(That is, provided either of us lives through this …)
The larger, lower cave in which Hookwire had worked – and died – was more comfortable to lie up in for a day, but January remained where he was. He read through Pollack’s letters to Alicia again, piecing together fragments of their conversations – of the way the rancher had used the desperate, miserable woman as his spy – and wishing he could read what Alicia had written to Pollack. Twice Pollack referred to poems she had written.
At least Selina could be rescued. At least people would believe her, when she said, I was raped. Would understand why she wanted to escape.
You asked for it, Alicia’s sister – the sister who had raised her – had shouted.
Fifteen years. And then to be bullied into accompanying her sister to the house of another perpetrator.
No wonder she lived on laudanum and novels where everything ended happily.
He read through, also, the papers Hannibal had collected from Francis’s study. Words had been ticked with pencil in the seemingly random bundle of letters, account-books, bills. The young man had noted how his middle brother had formed the words ‘give’ and ‘will’, ‘absolutely’ and ‘brother’, ‘Rancho Perdition’ and, in one place, ‘bequeath’. He’d had a couple of Taggart’s signatures to copy, and those of men from Galveston and Corpus Christi – men who, if they existed at all, probably couldn’t be looked up at this late date, to testify whether they’d actually witnessed Vincent Taggart’s will or not. There were four practice drafts of the will.
Provided Valentina wasn’t convicted of her husband’s murder, this would amply pay her for the help she’d given him. Then he remembered the young woman’s kindness to Selina at the Ekholm farm, her matter-of-fact acceptance that had restored the shattered girl to confidence.
No. Nothing can ever repay her.
Later he slept again – a childhood spent in slavery had given him the ability to fall asleep even though gnawed with hunger – and he dreamed of Rose, and his children, back in New Orleans.
When the shadow of the opposite canyon rim fell chillingly across the cave-mouth and he woke, he hid Pollack’s letters, Taggart’s bloodstained clothing, and the true land documents relating to Perdition, in separate nooks at the far back of the cave, well away from Hookwire’s forgery kit, and ate the last of his rations. In the advancing twilight he returned to Witch Cave, watered the horses again and staked them for awhile outside to graze, then saddled the bay and rode northeast up the canyon, until he found one of the steep-sided gorges that led up and out onto the hills.
The moon was rising. The day’s clouds had broken, showing him enough of the hills to orient himself – more or less – toward the Colorado River, ten miles – more or less – north-east.
I can do this, he told himself.
And then I can turn the whole thing over to Sheriff Quigley, and get myself and Hannibal the hell out of Texas.
Always supposing Hannibal hasn’t been hanged already for murdering Aunt Alicia.
But he guessed that Quigley was smart enough to realize that a woman couldn’t just tear off a man’s old-style cravat – which wound several times around the wearer’s throat – while he was in the process of strangling her. And if he isn’t, Hannibal’s smart enough to point out that this is a rather longer procedure than simply tearing off a bandana.
Even if Quigley doesn’t want to listen – if for whatever reason he wants to push Hannibal onto the gallows – I doubt he could do it that quickly …
But the thought of being stranded in Texas, three days’ travel from any seaport, turned January cold.
The Texas hills were full of more than long-horn cattle and Comanche. January had seen Comancheros in Austin, men who traded with the tribes for stolen horses, stolen mules, and slaves to sell, either deeper into Texas or, if they were women or children, north to the Navajo. He had also seen bandits, who would trade anything with anyone and would certainly be delighted to encounter an unclaimed black man – free papers or no free papers.
I will never – not ever – help anybody in trouble again. Nor will I ever leave the French Town again except possibly to move to Massachusetts … or to Canada, for that matter …
Movement on the hillside to his right. Cattle grazed the
re, moonlight sliding along those grotesque horns, but they rose and moved off, startled, wild as deer with the sudden appearance of two riders from a stand of oak.
One of the men shouted, ‘You, there!’
Damn it …
A white man could probably have talked his way out of ‘What the hell you doin’ on this land?’
In Texas, a black man by himself at night was assumed to be a runaway.
January jabbed his heels into the bay’s sides, and took off for the nearest gully where trees offered the shelter of darkness. Hooves thundered behind him. ‘Pull up, goddammit!’ and a shot. January flattened on the bay’s neck, tried to form a plan – how far does that gully go? Which direction?
Another rider emerged from the gully, and moonlight glinted on a rifle-barrel. January veered, sent the bay slithering down the steep side of the gully, heard the men curse as they plunged down after him. It was black down there, like riding into a cave. January dropped from the saddle, pulled the saddlebags off and slung them on his shoulder, slapped the horses to send them running and doubled back in the direction he thought he’d come, down the gully, praying he’d be able to find his way once daylight came. He heard a rider pass him in the dark, the man cursing fit to peel paint off a gate. A thread of moonlight winked ahead of him and to his right; his foot slithered on a stone, crunched softly in last year’s dry vegetation.
How long will they keep looking?
That probably depends on who they think they’re looking for.
He followed the moonlight, feeling his way from tree to tree. It was too dark even to find a place to go to ground. The ground was rising, and he moved closer toward the moonlight, nearly breaking his leg where the rocks dropped off suddenly in an old water-course. There’s got to be a tree I can climb. Or a deadfall I can hide in …
That isn’t inhabited by rattlesnakes?
Movement again beyond the trees. The next minute, another blink of moonlight on cattle-horns. The glint of reflective eyes.
Something that felt like an oak in front of him, a gnarled trunk and – as he felt upwards – branches he could reach, that seemed thick and strong enough to bear his weight. Leaves like black clouds—
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