A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  Kate pushed the words past a throat that had closed. “That is enough, Mr. Botts.”

  It seemed like betrayal somehow, Sarah Grace so recently gone and the image that Botts conjured up from Kate’s childhood so vivid: Sarah Grace with the light from the hallway behind her, leaning hard into the door’s frame—clutching at it. Sarah Grace groping for something solid as she made her way to Kate’s bed. Her kneeling. A garble of sounds. A prayer, perhaps, or a confession or both, sodden and murky with no proper end—just a finishing swamp of sorry so sorry, I’m sorry. Sarah Grace’s face buried in her little girl’s thick, wavy hair, the hair going wet through with tears, as Kate lay curled there, afraid to breathe.

  “You,” Kate told Botts, trying to steady the shake in her voice, “have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “We may as well be honest with each other about that, Katherine, if nothing else. Yours was not the only life her drinking impacted.”

  Kate shook her head—and knew she was shaking her head at the truth of her past. But she would not expose her mother like this, her kind, gentle, too-fragile mother, for whom life was often so dark. Kate would not let Botts see the raw place he’d hit.

  With a jerk of both arms, Botts’s grip on his briefcase tightened, his hands like white claws holding their prey.

  Kate could not bear to look at his face, his eyes boring into hers to see if he’d been right. So she focused instead on his hands. “All I want is to ask a few questions. Or maybe demand is the word I want. Sarah Grace raised me to be nice at all costs—to never demand. But that didn’t work out too well for her, did it?”

  Botts stepped toward her. “While we’re asking questions, Katherine, perhaps I might ask some of my own, as a kind of surrogate of my client, your father. It would appear that you’ve made some rather injudicious decisions just lately.”

  “Seriously? Even a year after my father’s death, you’re still, on his behalf, the all-seeing firm of Rutledge, Wragg, Roper & Botts, Attorneys at Law and Observers of Wayward Daughters?”

  “Having observed the . . . obstacles faced by both of your parents in their separate ways, I could imagine, Katherine, that you might very well—” He stopped himself there.

  “Go careening off course, just like my mother? Is that what you meant? Look, you want the truth? Here’s the truth. The clock’s ticking for me. Even if my doctoral program gives me one final shot, I’d better research and write and submit for publication something arresting and original and meticulously documented—incredibly fast. If not, I’ve wasted a whole lot of years of education—blood, sweat, and tears—with no fallback plan, no practical skills, and no real savings to speak of.”

  “Your father’s testamentary dispositions—”

  “Enough already with his money! If he couldn’t be troubled to help when my mother was barely keeping the two of us fed, and she never wanted to take him to court to make him trouble himself, then why would I want his money now? I was simply catching you up, Mr. Botts, on the loveliness of my situation.” Hearing herself describe her life out loud made it seem more real than ever, and Kate’s chest tightened as if giant clamps were crushing her lungs. “Let me save you some of the time you’ve always spent poking around my life to report back to my father: I’ve really screwed up this past stretch of road. But you know what? It’s not been my best year.”

  Botts’s eyes stayed narrowed on Kate. His jaw worked forward and back.

  “Maybe, Mr. Botts, you’ll tell me this. What did my father mean when he tried to warn me away from choosing the early nineteenth-century Low Country to study for my dissertation, picking up where my mother left off? He told me it was”—she made quotes with her fingers—“‘a history that can only hurt you.’”

  Botts straightened to rigid, his face guarded again and hard. On his breath she caught the bitter edge of the coffee he must have drunk before coming. “That, Katherine, is part of what I am bound not to discuss.”

  She had hit some sort of target. Her mother’s research—and now Kate’s own—was somehow connected with their family history, fragmented and shrouded in secrets. And her late father’s lawyer knew more than he was willing to say. “So, then . . .”

  Botts, though, was already checking his watch and scuttling across the porch. “I have a meeting scheduled, a prior commitment. And I never”—he briefly turned his head back toward her—“go back on prior commitments. I’ll thank you to keep that in mind. I will be in contact.”

  “Do not walk away from me!”

  He flung one arm high as if batting away her protest, and his trench coat flapped beneath climbing jasmine as he hurried away up Meeting Street.

  Arms hugged tightly over her chest, Kate turned. The live oaks at the front of the inn stretched toward its porch, their arms impossibly long and graceful, Spanish moss like gauzy gray scarves draped from the bend of each joint—reaching as if there were something they wanted, desperately wanted.

  All through the oaks’ branches, wisteria vines looped and fell like twisted hemp.

  Like nooses, she thought, remembering the boy’s reaction to her drawing of them.

  From the pocket of her jeans, she dug out the sketch, crumpled now, that she’d scribbled there on the seawall: the mansions, the buggy, the cannons, the ship. And the nooses.

  Kate let the southern sea breeze—stronger now but too warm, too thick with the past—whip hard at her hair. Botts’s voice echoed in her head.

  Did she never divulge anything while, for example, she was drinking?

  Eyes down as she spun around, she smacked into a Nike T-shirt. She’d forgotten about the contractor guy. Lambeth.

  “I didn’t know which was worse,” he confessed. “To leave or to stay. I wasn’t planning on mentioning your hiding back there, you know. You didn’t have to come out.”

  Bristling at being caught in a weak moment, Kate kept her voice chilly. “It was time I confronted the weasel myself. Not that it did any good.”

  “Looks to me like maybe—”

  “I’m fine.”

  He nodded. But still didn’t leave. “You know, when I saw you sitting there, back at Penina Moise, I couldn’t help but wonder if—”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry . . . no?”

  Kate hugged her arms tighter over her chest as if she could hold in the hurt that she’d held so close for so long and that Botts’s words had kicked the lid off. “Look. I don’t mean to be rude. But no.”

  “To . . . ?”

  “To whatever it is you wanted to ask. The answer is no.”

  A grin started at one corner of his mouth but stopped only halfway. His face—a handsome one, if you liked the rugged, inscrutable type, which Kate did not—was sunburned and sweaty and in need of a shave. His T-shirt stretched across a muscular chest, and a scar cut across his left cheek. He was the kind of man that women made fools of themselves chasing after in action-adventure movies—directed by men. But in real life, a smart woman learned who to trust, which was no one. And a smart woman knew how to maintain her walls against precisely his type.

  He raked a hand through his hair. “Looks like I dove in this pond from the wrong end. I wasn’t actually hitting on you.”

  Kate straightened, arms still crossed over her chest. “Oh. Well. It . . . had all the markings.”

  “I apologize, then, for the markings.” He raked his hand through his hair again, making it stand nearly on end. He stepped toward her, his face only inches from hers, that almost grin hanging there.

  She stood her ground.

  But he brushed past her. Bent. Turned with a crumple of white in one hand. “This yours?”

  “Oh.” She took the scarf. Looped its length once around her neck. “Second time today I’ve dropped it. It was my mother’s—her favorite. It would kill me to lose it.”

  “Listen, I got no interest in sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong, but if that Botts fellow was your father’s lawyer—”

  Kate held u
p her hand. “Look, if I had any answers, I wouldn’t be here. Sorry, but I’ve got to go.” She turned—just a notch. “I didn’t say thanks. For your finding this. And sorry for interrupting the talk you were trying to have with Botts.”

  He studied her for a moment, and his hint of a smile disappeared. “There’ll be time for that yet.” With a nod, he strode diagonally across Meeting Street to the sprawl of a historic home. At the upward sweep of a twin pair of brick steps, he paused to tighten the screws at the base of its railing, then hoisted a ladder propped there to one shoulder.

  But just before he ducked into its garden, he swung back toward Kate, who was still leaning against a porch railing at the inn.

  “Is it important?” he called from across the street.

  “Is . . . what important?”

  “You finding Botts again today and trying to get him to talk?”

  Kate hurried down the inn’s steps toward the street. “It is, yes.”

  “The client he’s meeting today over lunch has an old friend who owns a café, and she’s there all the time—kind of holds court. In fact, you know the place.” One hand holding the ladder, he gestured north with the other. “Penina Moise.”

  Before Kate could thank him, he’d disappeared behind a wall covered in climbing jasmine.

  Chapter 11

  1822

  Tom Russell swung his hammer once more.

  On the walls leaned wrought iron gates with damascened crests—gold highlighting the design—and balcony railings with fleurs-de-lis and lyres and crossed swords and all manner of swirls. Works of art, fearsome and graceful and strong, some so massive they had to be walked, four men to a gate, out from the shop.

  His shop. His.

  Tom strode out the front of his shop, letting its door slam behind him. A few dozen paces and he was onto North Adger’s Wharf, his eyes darting right, then left.

  From St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s, the church bells tolled curfew. Behind him, from all sides of the street, slaves raced through the dusk, bare skin slapping the pavers.

  Tom felt for the copper badge at his neck, its imprinted block letters all too familiar to the touch of his forefinger and thumb.

  CHARLESTON

  422

  BLACKSMITH

  1822

  A badge of his being an urban slave, complete with a number tied to his owner.

  But tonight he’d use the badge as his ticket for ignoring curfew.

  Denmark Vesey was right about one thing, at least: Tom Russell was known. And was trusted. Tom Russell, yep, he’s real docile—it was what people said.

  A spatter of a ship’s lanterns lit a spotty path down Adger’s Wharf.

  Tom skirted the light, though, keeping well into the shadows of stacked cotton bales and towers of crates. Darkness was settling over the harbor, its surface holding fast to the last glimmers of day.

  A lantern swung into the shadows just ahead: a patrolman marching the length of the wharf.

  Tom ducked low behind a stash of empty crates reeking of fish.

  Back and forth swung the lantern. Back and forth.

  Leg muscles protesting from the position he’d crouched himself in, Tom shifted his weight to his knees. A board creaked.

  The light swung right toward the sound. Toward the crate blocking Tom. Footsteps echoed as the patroller approached.

  “You! Boy!”

  Tom waited for the lantern to blaze in his face. Caught.

  Instead it plunged forward. Onto another face.

  “Ain’t nobody but me, George Wilson, here, sir.”

  Tom knew the voice. A house slave. He’d been often to the blacksmith shop on East Bay, sometimes with a horse of Major Wilson’s who’d thrown a shoe. Sometimes with orders for kitchen tools or shutter guards. Just recently with the entire payment clutched in his hand for an elaborate sword gate.

  “Just going home with a sack full of fruit—see these here mangoes and pineapples—for the major. But now it’s gotten so near to dark. Major, he had a hankering, and he begged me to go.” George Wilson’s voice quaked.

  Tom didn’t blame the little man for his terror. You couldn’t live in Charleston more than a week without passing by the workhouse and hearing the shrieks and the moans of a slave caught out past curfew, and today’s drums would be sounding soon with the final warning.

  “Well, now. Is that so, George?”

  “Oh, yes, sir, yes, sir. You come on along with me, if you like, and see can you find Major Wilson at home to ask him your ownself.”

  For a moment, the light stayed where it was. Then, with a lurch, it floated left down East Bay with the trembling George Wilson.

  Tom let out his breath.

  That meant the wharf was probably clear of a patroller, at least for a few moments.

  Keeping low, he leapt from shadow to shadow along the wharves toward the Neck.

  At first, all he could hear was the shushing of marsh grass, the call of gulls over the water. The occasional jump of a fish.

  Just as the mansions gave way to tenements and the broad piazzas shrank to a few square feet of porch covered in drying linens, Tom slipped left, inland. At King Street, the only road that cut through the Lines, a jagged wall built during the War of 1812 to defend Charleston from any British troops approaching from land, a guard checked Tom’s neck badge.

  A good head shorter than Tom, the guard yanked on the badge, jerking Tom down and over. The guard’s mouth moved as he seemed to sound out the word blacksmith, and Tom realized the man could probably only just make out the word. With a grunt, the guard waved Tom aside, and he passed through into the Neck.

  How exactly, Tom wondered, will Vesey and his lieutenants deal with this problem, this one road, King Street, that could so easily be shut off—which would block access for recruits from outlying farms and plantations coming to fight in the city?

  Some recruits were scheduled to arrive by canoe from the coastal islands, but that wouldn’t account for the droves who would be arriving by land.

  Several blocks up ahead was the church where Vesey had asked to meet him but Tom had not waited. Would not be sucked into this dance with death.

  But now, standing outside its glassless window, Tom could make out a handful of words, whispered—if whispers could shout: “Like the Hebrews in bondage in Egypt, where God saw fit to make the waters run red with blood, our day of liberty and brotherhood and equality—I tell you, of safety and happiness—is coming. Do not grow weary of striving. No, not yet. Our day of redemption and release is in the hand of the one Judge, the only one, who hears our cries. Yes, even now . . .”

  Typical of Vesey, it was a sermon that was part Declaration of Independence, part Old and New Testament, and part current events—especially from the French Revolution and the newly established Haiti, which had thrown off white rule less than two decades ago. And typical of Vesey, his preaching, like the songs from the rice fields, carried just enough of the promise of some future world that he could argue he was speaking of heaven—Vesey could assure some angry white passerby who might overhear, despite the remoteness of the location here in the Neck, Goodness knows, why no, sir, ’course I wasn’t speaking of this life—no, not me.

  But then afterward, Vesey’s lieutenants would speak one by one with potential recruits, who would then tell others one at a time: July 14. Our own Bastille Day. Our own independence. Vesey might preach to whole groups, but he was adamant that the rest of the rebels spread the word quietly and directly so that each new recruit had no idea who else was involved in the revolt—and therefore could not inform on anyone except the one person who’d approached that recruit with the plan.

  But Tom hadn’t come to listen to Vesey’s sermon or anyone else’s whispered persuasion.

  Crossing his arms, he reminded himself why he’d come: the image of Dinah’s head lurching back up in the cupola of the Pinckney mansion, her soundless scream. And Tom, more than six feet of muscle and utterly helpless, had doubled up the
re on the street and vomited until dry heaves were all he had left.

  Now, the drums from the city limits warning the last chance for slaves to be off the streets before curfew, figures flitted past Tom, their footsteps echoing, frantic and stumbling, into the dusk. But he kept to the shadows, crouching. Even in front of the faithful disciples of Vesey, Tom would not link himself to the cause.

  Only when the last of the small crowd had dispersed did Tom step into a pale pool of light from the moon, finding Denmark Vesey alone outside the front door of the church, his eyes on the stars.

  Vesey did not jump when Tom appeared. Hardly, in fact, seemed startled at all.

  “I thought you would come,” he began.

  “Haven’t come like you think. Not like them.” Tom’s head jerked in the direction the crowd had dispersed.

  Vesey lowered his face from the stars. “What then?”

  “With conditions. Only with these conditions. That you commission me to make what you want me to make.”

  “Weapons.”

  “A word I don’t want used again. That you pay me well for my work. That all payment get sent to Widow Russell. I’ll be telling her it’s rice-harvest equipment—new planter in town, him needing trunks to block up the water, scythes for the rice, hoes and shovels. All paid direct to her.”

  Vesey’s eyebrow arched high. But Tom ignored this.

  “That my part of the payment get settled between me and her. That it’s a dealing of business. That’s all.”

  Vesey nodded slowly. “A business transaction you’re hoping that, even after Widow Russell takes her lion’s share, might be enough to earn you your freedom. Or, more to the point in your case, earn someone else’s.”

  Tom merely looked back at the old man.

  “You realize, don’t you,” Vesey demanded, “how rare it is now for a white owner to be able, even if they wish it, to grant a slave freedom?”

  “Willing to take that gamble.”

  Vesey examined the stars. “Any more conditions?”

  “That my name never get included on any of the lists you, Peter Poyas, Mingo Harth, Gullah Jack, Ned Bennett, and Rolla Bennett keep. No matter how careful you guard those lists.”