by D. J. Butler
Sarah feigned astonishment. “Calvin Calhoun, are you tellin’ me that they’s folks on this mountain still worship the Crooked Man, and you don’t have principles as make you put a stop to it?”
Cal shrugged. “Sure, I got principles. And I also got friends. And while I reckon that fillin’ their bellies with corn liquor, strippin’ off their clothes and howlin’ at the moon in the name of some crazy old hill god makes ’em gone gumps, I don’t reckon it means they’re goin’ to Hell for it. Besides, I think it’s mostly a place they keep for takin’ girls to.”
“Shockin’.”
“That’s life, I reckon.”
“Tree sure sounds easier.” Sarah considered. “All right.”
She didn’t really think Cal would show up, and if he did, he could be helpful to her in making an escape without actually marrying her. And if he insisted, well…no, he wouldn’t persist with this foolish notion of marrying Sarah. It was pure Appalachee gallantry, and she loved him for it, but it would pass.
“It’s a plan, then,” he said. “In the cattle market we might spit and shake hands, but I know you’re as good as your word.”
“I won’t hold you to your offer, Calvin Calhoun,” Sarah said, “and I won’t think less of you iffen you change your mind. But iffen you still want to abduct me, I reckon I’ll be out here on this bench tonight with a bundle of necessaries, as soon as the Elector falls asleep.”
* * *
Cal was on his way to put together a pack.
He stepped around the corner of Azariah Calhoun’s cabin, nodding to old Granny Clay. Granny sat sucking her gums on the porch in a rocking chair the Elector had made for her twenty years earlier and which she had scarcely left since. She wore the same red shawl, year in and year out, and only ever looked any different if she had a plate of food on her lap, or if it was winter and one of her grandchildren had spread a blanket over her.
Granny Clay smiled at Cal, toothless and slow, and he smiled back.
Then someone threw a sack over his head.
He was caught by surprise, but Lord hates a man as leaves his pants down after he’s been walked in on, so Cal laid about him with his fists. He pounded his knuckles into flesh and bone more than once before he heard the voice of his grandfather whisper in his ear, “be still, Calvin.”
“Yessir,” he answered, and obeyed.
His moccasined feet felt solid earth under their soles and he heard breathing around him for several minutes, but the winding route he was led along defied his sense of direction, and when his captors finally stopped, Cal had no idea where he was. He could feel the heat on his skin and smell the burning wood of a fire, but the bag was too thick to let through any light stronger than glimmers.
A voice spoke. Cal recognized it as belonging to his Uncle David.
“Calvin Calhoun,” David intoned gravely, “do you declare, upon your honor afore these here gentlemen, as how you freely and voluntarily offer yourself a candidate for the mysteries of Masonry?”
Masonry?
Then Cal remembered what his grandpa had told him. He’d half expected a wedding, and was more than a little disappointed to find out his grandfather had something different in mind.
Still, he knew what to say. “I do.”
“Do you sincerely declare, upon your honor afore these here gentlemen, as how you solicit the privileges of Masonry because of a favorable opinion conceived of the institution, a desire of knowledge, and a sincere wish of bein’ serviceable to your fellow-creatures?” Still David.
“I do.” Cal gulped. What did this have to do with Sarah?
“Do you sincerely declare, upon your honor afore these here gentlemen, as how you will cheerfully conform to all the ancient established usages and customs of the fraternity?”
“I do.” He had no idea what those usages and customs might be.
The bag was yanked off Cal’s head. He stood in a clearing, and around him in a circle ranged roughly twenty of the senior men of his family, uncles, older cousins, and of course his grandfather. His uncle David held an open Bible. A third of the men held burning torches. Before Calvin on the ground lay a white sheet embroidered with many colors of thread. In his quick look at the patterns, Calvin spotted two stylized pillars, a cross and a square and compass. There was a boxy shape that might have been an altar, and above it, dominating the scene, a capital letter G.
Two of his older cousins started to pull off Calvin’s clothes. Following a nod from the Elector, he helped them, and stripped down to just his long hunting shirt. The night was chilly, even with the torches and the trees to break the wind.
David spoke again. “Brethren, at the request of Mr. Andrew Calhoun, Mr. Calvin Calhoun has been proposed and accepted in the regular form. I therefore recommend him as a proper candidate for the Mysteries of Masonry, and worthy to partake of the privileges of the fraternity.”
“Amen,” rumbled Cal’s assembled male relatives.
One of his cousins handed Cal an unfamiliar pair of breeches, and he stepped into them. His cousins put one of his feet in a slipper, pulled one arm out of its sleeve, and the last thing they did before wrapping a blindfold over his eyes was hang a knotted noose and short rope around his neck.
Cal resisted the urge to laugh as a means to calm his nerves; the Calhoun men around him didn’t look to be in a jovial mood.
Blind and shivering, Calvin heard a noise like rapping at a door.
Knock, knock, knock.
“Who comes there?” The voice was his cousin Shadrach’s. “Who comes there? Who comes there?”
* * *
It was very important not to drink the compass. This was harder than it sounded, because Obadiah was thirsty.
He’d done as the Right Reverend Father had directed him, and it had been easy. Four men, heavy and scarred, had been happy to join up with Obadiah for the promised crown. None of them had asked to see the warrant, and two of them had laughed out loud when Obadiah mentioned the promised absolution of their sins. Fair enough; he would have done the same.
Father Angleton had ridden with Obadiah and the four hired men out of town—in the afternoon, before the sun had set and Nashville’s town watch had dropped the portcullis—but he’d waited behind, in a forest clearing in the valley, not far from the Charlotte Pike, while Obadiah had taken his posse comitatus, duly authorized if not particularly interested in its own authority, and crept up the hill in the dark.
The clear night sky gave enough glow that Obadiah could look into the bowl by its light and see the mercury blob. He couldn’t walk and read the compass, but he trod carefully through the autumnal leaf fall from one clearing to the next (extra carefully, as, even with the accelerating effects of the Right Reverend Father’s spell upon its healing process, his foot was still sore), stopping whenever he was under open sky to check his bearing.
The men didn’t complain, and Obadiah wondered what sort of men they must be, to follow around a foreigner with his face in a bowl in the hills at night. Desperate men, no doubt. Might they be desperate enough to cut Obadiah’s throat for whatever might be in his purse?
Obadiah loosened his pistols in his belt and checked that his sword was still on his hip.
They had come across a path, early, that seemed to lead up the hill where the compass was directing them, but Obadiah had eschewed it in favor of creeping through the trees. His mission was to make a lawful arrest, if convenient, but he had heard enough stories about the crazed bushwhacker clans of Appalachee that he preferred to make this lawful arrest as quietly and as secretly as he possibly could. Preferably the inbred mountain men would all be drunk and snuggling their sisters, and Obadiah could sneak in unnoticed, grab the witchy-eyed girl the Right Reverend Father was so interested in, and get out again.
Obadiah found the thought of the drunk cracker varmints cuddling up to their filthy sisters so distracting he almost walked headlong into a stone wall, and kept from spilling the beer compass only by a combination of fierce concentrati
on and good luck.
His posse laughed.
“Shut it, ye!” Obadiah hissed.
He looked up. The wall was a natural cliff of stone, a sudden rise creating a gray limestone crown on the top of the mountain. He looked closely at the rock—it was pocked and dimpled and cut through with crevices such that a smaller, more limber man might have been tempted to climb it.
Not Obadiah.
He considered his options. The trail he had foregone would hit this wall to his left, if it didn’t circle around it entirely, but, again, he didn’t want to try formally to serve notice of his Warrant on some gap-toothed, hatchet-wielding Appalachee brawler at the gate. He needed a hidden way up this stone, so he decided to turn right and follow the cliff around.
He was about to inform his crew when he chanced to look down and saw, in the silvery-amber puddle of moon-illuminated beer, a moving shadow. He put his eye closer to the compass and squinted. The quicksilver was moving visibly. It was moving fast.
Obadiah was no surveyor, but he knew enough about direction and distance to realize that if the girl was moving rapidly enough to make the compass needle move with her, visibly to his unaided eye, then either she was moving very quickly indeed, or she was very close.
The quicksilver rolled around the rim of the bowl and stopped, pointing right.
“This direction,” Obadiah whispered. “Guns ready, she ben’t far now.”
He pulled his pistol and led the way, beer compass now a little more precarious in his left hand alone, but it shouldn’t matter if he spilled it, once he had the little witch. He fought his way through a wiry octopus of briar and followed the limestone cliff around a sharp corner, and then stopped abruptly when he saw the boy.
The wheezing, tiptoeing ruffian immediately behind Obadiah did not stop, and when he bumped Obadiah it wasn’t hard, but it was enough to knock the bowl compass from his grasp, spilling the beer, hair, and mercury into the dirt. Obadiah muttered a curse and pushed the man back with his elbow, but the boy hadn’t reacted, and Obadiah could see the girl now, too.
Obadiah looked over his shoulder. For just a moment, in the shadow of the cliff, he thought he saw not four, but six men following him, six hulking silhouettes with their faces hidden in the darkness. Bloody grifting freeloaders, some Nashville scum heard there was easy money to be had and decided to tag along. But then he blinked, and the number of men in the posse returned to the expected four. Trick of the light, and Obadiah looked forward again to focus on his quarry.
A skeletal maple tree climbed up the limestone, all its branches growing out away in the other direction, right where the cliff dipped in a little notch. At the foot of the tree stood the tall, gangly lad from the Fair, long red hair tied behind his neck and hanging over a much-patched wool coat. Two packs lay on the ground by his feet, as well as a musket—an ancient matchlock, fitting for these impoverished dirt-scratchers—and a tomahawk hung from his belt. He stood with his back to Obadiah, looking up into the maple and coaxing along the girl.
She wore a similar heavy coat, no doubt over the revealing clothing Obadiah remembered from the Fair (he smiled, remembering the purple shawl with the golden suns on it, and in his memory he plumped the witch up to a more reasonable and ripe womanhood), and she picked her way from branch to branch, slowly clambering down the natural ladder of the tree’s limbs. How could this route be unguarded by the bushwhackers? But they probably had a guard at the top, death to any attacker fool enough to climb a tree in the face of defending gunfire.
Fine. They were coming down the mountain on their own, so he didn’t need to go creeping into the Appalachee stronghold. It was good to have luck on his side.
He turned back and whispered to the nearest hired man. “If you see anyffink movink at the top of that tree, shoot it.”
The thug nodded.
The boy’s back was turned and the girl was concentrating on her hands and feet, so Obadiah crept up easily. When the girl had almost reached the ground, he smashed the boy across the back of the head with a pistol butt. The young man fell like a slaughtered pig, hit the leaves, and lay still.
“No!” the girl shrieked. She looked up and saw that there was a twenty-foot climb between her and the notch in the cliff, but only inches between her and Obadiah Dogsbody.
“Mind the clifftop, lads.” Obadiah thumbed back the hammer of his pistol and pointed it at the boy. “My name be Obadiah Dogsbody, poppet. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“What do you want from me?” the scrawny thing asked, pulling herself back up a branch.
“Me? ’Erne’s ’oofs, I don’t want nuffink,” Obadiah said truthfully. “My master, the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton, would mickle like to ’ave a conversation wiff you. I regret that I didn’t wot that this mornink, or I’d ’ave nicked you then, an’ saved us all this bother.”
She hitched herself up another branch. “Your master tried to shoot me!” Her bad eye was goblin purple in the moonlight.
“Now see ’ere, I trow that was a misunderstandink,” Obadiah lied. “But do not misunderstand me now, you filffy wee beggar. I’m goink to start countink, an’ when I ’it five, I’m goink to blow your friend’s brains out into the autumn leaves. I ought to warn you that I ’ad but little schoolink as a child, an’ I ’ave been known to skip numbers. One!”
“Stop, that’s murder!” she begged, and he ground his teeth.
“Four!”
Witchy Eye jumped to the ground, suddenly docile. Grunting in satisfaction, Obadiah gripped her by the arm and aimed his pistol at her belly.
“As of right now, your life ain’t worth a chewed plug.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Sarah was having a hard time counting. The moonlight was dim, and that didn’t help; nor did the fact that she was slung over the scratchy, bony shoulder of an ill-smelling Nashville tough, bouncing with every rough spot on the slope; nor still did the fact that, to begin with, she only had the one good eye.
Still, she knew Obadiah was in front, leading his gang down the hill in a rolling limp. Back to Nashville? But the Imperial Town shut its gates at dusk and didn’t open them again until dawn, out of fear of things that might go bump in the night, including the rowdier members of the Calhoun family. The brute manhandling her down the slope was second in line, which she was sure of because Obadiah periodically pinched her bum or slapped her thighs and made a tut-tut-tut of disapproval.
She yanked her imagination away from thoughts of cutting Obadiah’s throat. She needed to be working on her escape.
Following Sarah—and, because she faced backward over the man’s shoulder, in her line of sight—marched three more ruffians. They were dirty, tough, and armed, the kind of men who were too dangerous and too lazy to make an honest living. Nashville was full of such desperadoes; the Imperial Highways were sufficiently well patrolled to make banditry risky, but there was still plenty of traffic on the Natchez Trace and other old ways, or on the rivers, and travelers in town were often easy prey. A few of Nashville’s criminals even got desperate or bold enough to take to road-agenting on the Imperial Pikes, or interfering with Thomas Penn’s tax collectors. Their depredations were why the Imperial Foresters existed, and if the armed men in Imperial Blue sneaking through the forest discouraged attempts to evade the Toll Gates, so much the better for the Penn family coffers.
Sarah forced herself to laugh out loud, though it hurt her belly. “The Elector’s gonna kill you boys, sure enough,” she muttered, just loud enough for the toughs nearest her to hear.
“Shut up,” the thug immediately in her line of sight said. He huffed and puffed under the combined weight of the packs she and Calvin had brought. Hers wasn’t all that heavy, but knowing Calvin, he’d probably packed half the contents of his tidy little half-dogtrot in that bag.
“That fool Englishman tell you that I’m Old Andy Calhoun’s daughter?” she asked.
The ruffian looked surprised for a moment, but then hardened his face. “You’re ly
in’,” he said. “I know you’re a foreigner. Pennslander, the Englishman told us all about you. Besides, the Elector ain’t gonna find out.”
“Do I sound like a Pennslander to you, gump?” she snapped.
He shrugged.
She would have spit on him, had she been able. Beyond him, the last two thugs carried Calvin, one lugging him by the feet and the other with arms looped under his shoulders. His hands and feet were tied with rope, as were Sarah’s. Sarah assumed the only reason they hadn’t killed poor Calvin was to be able to motivate her with the threat of violence. They’d stripped him of his weapons and he still languished unconscious. Calvin was tough, but Sarah had seen men die from lesser blows to the head.
Nobody carried Cal’s old musket—the Englishman had smashed it on the limestone cliffs. Obadiah himself only carried the alcohol. He had rifled through their packs and found two full skins of wine, which he had promptly appropriated. He had been suckling at one of them all along, and as they trudged down the side of the mountain, he broke into a song, surprisingly loud in the night, of climbing and plunging melody.
To Anacreon in ’eav’n, where ’e sat in full glee
A few sons of ’armony, sent a petition!
“Really?” Sarah tried again to get under the thug’s skin. “That’s the feller you believe when he tells you I’m a Philadelphia belle? You think that fool’s gonna be able to keep his mouth shut?”
“Shut up!” he hissed back.
There they were again, as she looked up to try to make eye contact with the pack carrier. Over his shoulder, out of the corner of her eye, she would have sworn she saw two more men, not carrying anything and trailing along behind the others in silence. When she focused on them, they disappeared. When she had first noticed them, as she was being carried away from the maple tree where she’d been caught, she thought she had seen one of them bend down and pick something off the ground; otherwise, they did nothing but follow mutely.