Bella tapped a finger on the documents she had handed Davenkirk and the others. “You, your honor, and Mr. Rutledge both signed a legally binding agreement with a woman who, under your own asinine system of laws, is still considered the property of her dead husband.”
Rutledge started to open his mouth, then closed it. Judge Davenkirk stood, the florid color of his face draining away. “Whatever you plan on doing with that, madame…”
“I’m planning on filing a complaint against you and Mr. Rutledge with the State Bar Association about your conduct during this case, your honor,” Bella said. “In that complaint I will cite and attach this agreement as a demonstration of your incompetence in allowing a ‘vapid cow,’ not even qualified to practice law in your courtroom, to hornswoggle you both into a patently unenforceable and quite illegal agreement under the laws of your state.
“You, Mr. Rutledge, have your eye on several political positions, possibly beyond this state. This embarrassment will hurt you. And you, Judge, you have your appointment for life, but a man in your position lives or dies by his reputation. This will hurt and embarrass you, especially with your peers. How do you think this will influence your legacy, how you are thought of after you are gone?”
“I’m a well-respected member of this community,” Rutledge said, “powerful, and influential. Judge Davenkirk, even more so. We personally know most of the Bar ethics committee. Hell, I get drunk with them every other Wednesday. This won’t mean a damn thing. It will never see the light of day.”
“You two are very well-respected,” Bella said, nodding. “You could weather a quiet little scandal, the kind your type perpetuate—make the accuser look like a crazy, emotional lunatic, a hysterical female with delusions of equality. All the old boys circle the wagons—and that usually works … if it weren’t for Mr. Cline and his newspaper stories.”
Davenkirk and Rutledge looked at each other. Bella continued. “I assure you, gentlemen, I will have a doozy of a story to tell him on my way to the Bar Association committee. A story that I’m sure will receive as wide coverage as the last one he wrote, perhaps even further. The public loves to see influential, powerful people laid low. They have a positive bloodlust for it. Cloistered little clubs like you two are members of still have to explain themselves to the public when their actions are dragged into the light of day.”
Bella took out another document and laid it on the desk in front of Davenkirk.
“This is an agreement I drafted,” Arabella said, “to be signed by Mr. Anderton, relinquishing all control of Miss Stapleton’s inheritance, including the Grande Folly estate, back to her, and conceding custody of Constance to her as well. It includes a promise of no further litigation on this matter.”
“There’s a clause in there that if anything happens to me,” Maude added, “I do want my father to be her guardian until she is eighteen, then all my possessions, all my money, it all goes to her, free and clear, no strings.”
“What on earth makes you think I will ever sign such a thing?” Martin said.
“Martin,” Rutledge said, “please, be…”
“Reasonable?” Bella offered.
“Those ledger pages,” Maude said. “They show that the piracy your ships have been plagued with has cut into your profits over fifteen percent this year. Isn’t that correct, Father?”
“How did you know such things?” Martin asked.
“Because even if you thought I was too stupid to pay attention to your work growing up, I did pay attention and I did learn, because I had some vain hope that you’d want your only child to run your business one day, even if she was only a woman.”
“Maude…” Martin began, but Maude continued.
“I also know that, to date, not a single man on your crews has been killed, have they?”
Martin looked up from the papers. He looked at Maude in a way she had never seen him do before. She always thought she’d enjoy this moment, but she felt ashamed. She buried that feeling; too much was at stake to give into it.
“I happen to know someone back in that Nevada camp who is on very good terms with those particular pirates,” Maude said. “Apparently, one of the criminals or whores I was consorting with in Golgotha.” That much of it was true. Black Rowan was no friend of Maude’s, but the Barbary Coast pirate she had met in Golgotha last year had agreed to Maude’s proposal, sent via correspondence, to interfere with Martin’s shipping while assuring that no harm came to her father’s sailors. “You sign that paper and your troubles with them cease. In fact, your ships will have unseen protection until such time as you’ve made up for the losses you’ve incurred. You refuse and the attacks grow more frequent. Who knows, the pirates might even start taking hostages, demanding ransom. None of that will set well with your business partners and the banks.”
“I can’t believe my own flesh and blood is behaving this way,” Martin said. “How could you be capable of such duplicity, Maude?”
“How could I?” Maude said, the flint returning to her eyes. Her shame washed away in a flood of cold rage. “You raised me to believe in the law and the blindness, the fairness of it. This is all you have left me, Father. When you take away any hope of justice, of equity, you create criminals.
“You could have trusted me to take care of my girl, believed in me; you could have trusted that you raised me strong enough, and tough enough, to handle whatever life brings at me. You don’t have an inkling of what I have been through to keep her alive, keep her safe, and what I would gladly endure all over again to make sure she stays that way. You have no idea who I am, what I can do and less than any desire to know. To you, I’m nothing but a weak, ineffectual ‘featherbrain,’ and you refuse to think that I could be anything more than that. You were mistaken, and now you’ve paid for it.”
Martin’s eyes became moist. Maude almost stopped, but an anger so long buried, so abused and ignored, is a hard beast to tame. “I am so much more than you know, Daddy, so much more than you’ve ever seen. You’ve tried my whole life to keep me from that realization; you murdered a little girl’s dreams, and tried to steal a woman’s life. How could I? How could you?”
Martin stood. He leaned over Davenkirk’s desk, took a pen and signed the agreement. He handed the papers to Maude.
“You don’t know me either,” Martin said, almost croaking. “If that’s what you think I see when I see you, you couldn’t be more wrong. I’ll have Constance and her things out to Grande Folly as soon as possible. Andrew,” he said to Rutledge, “please see that the agreement is finalized and filed with the court as soon as possible.” Martin regarded Rutledge, and the judge. “Gentlemen, good day to you both.” He departed the office without looking back at Maude. The door clicked shut behind him.
Maude looked at the papers in her hands. They won, the war was won. Bella placed a hand on Maude’s shoulder. “Maude,” she said, softly. “I’ll deal with the rest of this. You go on home, now. I’ll meet you there later.”
As the door was closing, Maude heard Judge Davenkirk say around the stem of his pipe, “It’s a damn shame.”
Outside the courthouse, Maude barely felt the heat, barely felt anything. Her body was conditioned to regulate her temperature, keep her cool when everyone else was sweating automatically. Automatic, like a machine.
She was walking, balancing, swimming against the invisible oppression of gravity. Her heart pumped blood and her lungs took in air. The bright, brutal sunlight felt like it was hitting her skin from some distant solar system. Everything was muted, everything except the ache in her. The tearing inside was sharp and immediate and unrelenting, unforgiving. She tried to stay outside of herself, to ignore the pain.
She’d won, she’d lost. Her righteous anger had abandoned her now, when she needed it more than ever. There was no true victory in a war, only half measures of suffering and regret, something gained, something compromised, something lost. The cold combatant in her had known this moment would have to come from the start of her campaign
to reclaim what was hers; for her to see victory, her father would need to taste defeat. However, she had avoided the shape and the texture of that abstract, of what came after the endgame. It felt as if her father had died in that judge’s chambers, and Maude felt his loss, an immeasurable ache in her. He was not taken from her, she had done this, planned it, executed it.
The cabbie opened the door for her and took her hand, helping Maude up into the coach. Her mouth said the words that would tell him where to take her. It felt as if someone else were saying them. The coach shuddered, and began to move, taking her to Grande Folly, to her home, her land. She recalled in perfect detail the last words her father had said to her, and her senses had told her, even as he said them, that they were the absolute truth. “You don’t know me either.”
She retained a vague memory of a dream she’d had when she was seven, maybe eight. It was of her mother: a blurred, indistinct imagining of the woman who had given birth to her and then died. The woman in her dream had sweat-tousled hair and kind, but weary, brown eyes. She smiled at Maude and it was like the sun warming her heart.
“Hello, my darling,” Claire Anderton had said. “So strong to survive this, so brave and so beautiful.”
The nightmare part began when Maude was taken away from her. She heard her mother screaming, calling Maude’s name as the darkness swallowed them both. Maude awoke, weeping, screaming for her mother.
Her father had been there, had held her while she cried at the shadow play her brain had put on for her. Martin held her so tight, like she would fly away into a million pieces if he let her go, and in that moment, Maude had felt like she might, but his love held her together. She remembered her daddy’s face, the warm tears rolling down from his eyes, the same eyes she had seen today.
“I got you, I know,” Martin had said, his usually strong voice trembling, just as it had trembled today in the judge’s chambers. “I know, I miss her too, all the time. It will be okay, Maude.”
In the carriage, headed toward her newly won home, Maude knew the tears would come, and she would allow them this time, but she didn’t think she deserved them.
22
The Heirophant
Charleston, South Carolina
May 22, 1871
It hadn’t taken Maude long to find Hell’s Belles. What Gran had mentioned in Maude’s meditative vision was Datura stramonium, a plant known commonly as Jimsonweed, and sometimes called Hell’s Belles. It was part of the nightshade family and Maude remembered Gran teaching her about it long ago during her training in poisons.
When Maude had cracked open the old, massive pharmacopoeia that Gran had insisted she memorize, she found a strip of yellowed paper marking the page relating to Datura stramonium. Gran had seldom used bookmarks, ever, saying a good well-trained memory was all the bookmark you needed. Maude ran her fingers along the old paper and discovered there was something irregularly, and invisibly, coating the surface of the page.
Sniffing the paper, Maude discovered that Gran had left her another clue in a very subtle code. Steganography was placing a secret message hidden or embedded in another commonplace item or location, so that to the unaware it would most likely be overlooked. The greatest danger in such messages is if they were discovered in their obvious hiding places, information might be compromised, so a steganograph was usually combined with another code or cipher. Gran had taught Maude a unique and cryptic code, based on discriminating between scents and smells, with each scent representing a letter or number. The scent code required a degree of sensitivity and discrimination of smell that only someone of the Blood of Lilith, or a certain deputy back in Golgotha, could possess, and only Maude had been taught how to crack Gran’s code. She carefully wrote each symbol associated with the scent and then double checked it several times. The decoded message read:
Back of the old clay tablet on the table in library, Hell’s Belles in proper dilute dosage for non-lethal result. Swallow the blood stone as you drink solution. I told you meditation was useful. Glad you kept up on your poisons and ciphers. Gran.
Maude examined the large clay tablet on the library reading table, the one with the ankh—the looping cross—and the lines of cuneiform text. She ran her fingers over it, searching. Gran had made her learn to read print in a pitch-black room, blindfolded, with only her fingertips to guide her. It took the better part of an hour, but finally, she detected the spot where delicate, powerful fingers had gouged an opening in the back of the tablet and then repaired it, nearly flawlessly. Maude recalled Gran erasing her prints in the sand without even seeming to touch them; once again, only someone with Maude’s degree of training, her sensitivity of touch, could possibly detect this obfuscation.
She directed her strength to her fingertips and carefully tore open the seal. A tiny bead, the size of a pea, was revealed in the powdery gray debris. Maude gingerly plucked it up. It was a ruby, a deep wine color, flawless and beautiful.
She retired with the ruby and some of the Jimsonweed she had harvested from the estate grounds to the all-but-abandoned infirmary and laboratory that Gran had constructed on the third floor of the manor. Maude remembered the room from her years toiling here to understand the secrets of chemicals and compounds, to understand how to use those agents to heal or harm, and Gran’s numerous lessons on combat and field medicine. Maude had often thought she might have enjoyed using the powers granted her to save lives as a doctor.
The room had seemed so much larger back then than it did now. Maude removed the dust-covered cloths that covered the various tools and instruments of the chemist’s craft. By that evening, Maude had cooked the dark seeds of the deadly poisonous plant and extracted the correct dosage of the chemical within it to create a substance that would induce hallucination, not death. Gran had taught that cultures across the globe used Jimsonweed extract for healing purposes as well as for mystical and religious rites.
She knew what Gran wanted her to do, but an uncertainty bordering on fear held Maude. She had been required, under Gran’s care and supervision, to ingest every imaginable kind of poison, drug and hallucinogen, so that she could understand their effects, recognize them, even function under them to a certain degree.
Maude had hated that aspect of her training. She hated the feeling of loss of control, of helplessness that it gave her, and she despised having her innermost thoughts, insecurities and desires laid bare and held up to her waking mind to address. Alter was right, she didn’t like to dwell inside herself, didn’t like to look inward. Maude saw no use for it, believed no good could come from it. There were things in her that she was very glad she had the discipline to ignore and keep quiet. It was a mystery to her how anyone could enjoy those feelings, do that to themselves willingly. She had been drunk maybe three times in her entire life and had never had a desire to use any drug.
A contradiction hit her that evening as she sat at the kitchen table with Isaiah; she had enjoyed feeling out of control, those few times she had had to push herself hard to do some impossible thing, usually when she was three-fourths dead, or when she let herself feel fully, let the joy, the abandon, of life take her. She felt that same dizzy feeling of being out of control with Mutt, the only man who could match her, who could understand her, whose love felt so pure and so primal. The freedom she felt in those moments was exhilarating. Perhaps there was power in being out of control, and perhaps some part of her understood that better than she had assumed she did.
“Whatever you’re thinking about, it’s making you blush and smile stupid,” Isaiah said as he rinsed the dishes in the sink. Maude shook the thoughts away, like brushing cobwebs from her face.
“Sorry,” she said, “just a stray thought hit me. Isaiah, have I always been so … reserved?”
Isaiah chuckled. “Reserved? Oh, dear child, is that what you think?” he said. “You don’t remember wrestling with the other farm kids, and they gave you as good as they got! You’d come in for supper covered in mud, dung and blood, a big grin on your face, you
r two front teeth missing! A few times I went to stop you from fighting, but Lady Cormac, she’d hold me back, said it was good for you, you needed to learn how to get scuffed up, ‘take some of the paint off the china doll.’”
“I’d forgotten about all that,” she said. “I loved it! I whooped Eli Wynn’s boy damn good, and he was a horse compared to me!”
“You always been a scrapper,” Isaish said. “I think that was what she saw in you that drew her to you at first. She saw how pushed down you’d been by your father, and you still fought to climb out and just be you. No, you learned how to be reserved, Maude; by nature, you’re a tiger by the tail.”
Maude smiled and sipped her iced tea. “I guess I am, aren’t I?”
“And don’t get me started on that time you were up in the barn loft with Eli’s son, little girl,” he added as he dried the glasses with a cloth.
“My first kiss,” Maude said wistfully.
“He still asks after you, by the way,” Isaiah said with a chuckle.
“He was a better kisser than a scrapper, that was for sure,” Maude said.
* * *
It was close to midnight when she decided it was time. Isaiah insisted on sitting with her for the ordeal, but Maude was hesitant. “When I’m under the influence of the drug, I have no idea what I’ll do.”
“More reason you need someone around to look after you, keep you safe.”
“What if I accidentally hurt you?” Maude said.
“You’d never do that,” Isaiah said. “I trust you like I trust myself. Let’s get this show on the road.”
They cleared the section of the rugged floor in the study before the crackling fire in the fireplace. Maude dressed in the loose, comfortable dark men’s clothing and boots that they had both come to call her “working clothes.” Isaiah settled her down and put a barrier of thick pillows around her as she positioned herself cross-legged in the meditation stance.
“I never cared much for Lady Cormac’s love affair with intoxicants,” Isaiah said, “the wine, the whiskey, opium, hashish and then all those hallucinogens she’d come back with from some far-off place.” He handed Maude the glass vial with the drug. “You sure about this?”
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