A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  “Do come back inside, Dinah. If there’s violence in the streets during the night”—the voice faltered here, as if frightened by the words it had just formed—“we’ll be safe inside. Or so the city leaders would have us believe.”

  The blue muslin skirt did not move at first. Tom could make out the outline of her face, a glint of her large almond eyes.

  Dinah’s voice drifted, expressionless, almost monotone, from the piazza. “Miss Emily, I believe I left your hairbrush in the garden.”

  “In the garden? What an odd place to leave a brush. I don’t—”

  “Washing it out good this afternoon. Let me get it for you right quick.”

  Tom ducked beneath the magnolia and waited. When Dinah reached the garden’s gate, he emerged. Daylight still clung in shreds to the tops of live oaks, and he knew even these few seconds standing like this with her could mean his being seen. But for the chance of bringing her with him, no risk was too great.

  Dinah pressed her hand to his through the wrought iron gate—one he had crafted himself.

  She rested her other hand on the swell at her belly.

  “Come with me,” he whispered, his voice coming hoarse. “You got to come.”

  Her hand pressed harder into his. “Can’t hardly walk as it is. Slow you down to a crawl.”

  “Workhouse,” he said, hardly more than a moan. “I’ll kill the man. Kill Jackson Pinckney with my own hands.”

  Dinah touched one finger to his lips. “You got to go now, right now, if you want to slip through the Neck. King Street passage likely already blocked.”

  “I’ll swim around the outside wall of the Lines if I got to. I’m not leaving you here.”

  “Listen.” She held the flat of his palm to her cheek and shook her head. “You got to listen to me. I wouldn’t make it past even the Lines, not after all this. Then what? We both dead.” Now she pressed his palm to her lips. “You got to go on without me.”

  “No.” He choked on a sob, his tears running over her hand as she reached to brush them away from his cheek.

  “We got”—with one finger, she turned his face back to her—“no choice.”

  He gripped her hand in his. Hesitated. Pressed his lips hard together. Then yanked a roll of bills from his pocket. “What I saved up toward buying us free someday. Once the baby come, you use this. Find a way. Folks say there’s people in Boston—other towns, too—that can help if you get yourself there. If you can’t get out, don’t care who I got to go through, I’m coming back for you and our baby.”

  Not the baby this time but our, and the word echoed between them. Wrenching. A question. And also a stake thrust in the ground—a proclamation.

  Revulsion churned in Tom’s middle. And fear. But right now he would only think about her.

  He held her free hand to his lips. “You count on that.”

  Eyes streaming, Dinah nodded. “Won’t take somebody long to mention your name with the leaders.” But she pulled his hand to her cheek. “Scared I won’t see you ever again.” She let out a soft cry. “And scared that I will.”

  He knew what she meant: the gallows that were waiting for him, for any of them that were caught.

  With one yank of the leather cord, Tom’s copper badge fell loose into his hand. He felt his bare neck—with no tag hanging there.

  Slipping the tag into her hand, he pressed his lips to hers. Felt the wet from her eyes and his, and tasted their salt.

  “For you, I would risk the wide world,” he said.

  Chapter 28

  2015

  They paused at the gazebo on the Battery, and Kate cupped her hands together.

  Carefully, Gabe passed the badge to her. She felt its edges: rounded but not entirely smooth, as if they’d been cut by hand, and thin. Its copper alloy warm from Daniel’s skin, its leather cord strung through a hole at the top of the circle.

  Kate gaped down at her palm and the copper disc in it.

  “We’re trusting you, Kate,” Daniel said, nodding toward Gabe. “With pretty much our family’s prize possession.”

  She tried to hand it back. “Dan, I don’t want you to feel—”

  “What I feel is glad for you to take a look. Just keep hold of it good. I’ve got a delivery of a nightstand to make here in town. Son, you come on home in a half hour, you hear?”

  Waiting until Daniel was out of earshot, Kate tried to hand the badge back to Gabe. “I’m afraid your dad felt pressured, you know? Sometimes I get curious and can’t let something alone. Listen, maybe you should take this right back . . .” Her voice trailed off, though, as her fingers hovered just above the worn etching, its letters not quite legible.

  “Right now?”

  Kate swallowed. “Just as soon as you and I do a quick rubbing so we can read it.” The disc clasped in one fist, she swung her backpack to one shoulder and grabbed his hand.

  Together they trotted the several blocks north and ducked in Penina Moise, where Kate ordered each of them a Fanta Orange from the blond waitress and set the disc gingerly on the table. “Hand me a napkin there, would you?”

  She spread the napkin over the front of the disc, drew a pen from her pocket, tilted the pen at an angle, and ran it back and forth across the disc’s surface. Pausing, she pushed the disc toward him. “Wanna give it a try? Here. Hold it like this.”

  Carefully, he ran the pen at nearly a horizontal angle across the covered disc.

  Words began to emerge.

  First Charleston.

  Then a number, 422.

  Then Blacksmith.

  And 1822.

  Kate sank back in her seat. “It could actually be Tom Russell’s. I can’t believe it.”

  Gabe sprawled back in his chair. “I could’ve told you. Had it memorized since I was seagrass size.”

  “Wait. You knew what it said all along?”

  “Handed down in the family, the words held close more even than the thing of it.”

  “Sounds to me like an argument your family has to be descended from Tom Russell the blacksmith.”

  Gabe held up one finger, just as Kate had seen Daniel do on the Gullah Buggy tours. “Got to allow for the possibility, though, that somebody just took the name Russell out of honor and proudness. There were plenty of the people of color, my daddy says, took whatever last name they wanted after the War. This could’ve got passed down like the name—out of the honoring.”

  “Your dad’s right. And real historians never jump to conclusions.” Kate laid a five on the table next to the bill. “Let’s just say I’m not known for my patience. Or my careful, methodical approach to anything. But it’s one more step toward finding out, right?”

  Gabe’s attention dropped to her backpack, where a couple of sheets of paper peeked out the top. He squinted at them.

  “You can pull those out, big guy. They’re pictures I’ve been taking with my phone of a very old diary I’m reading through with Miz Rose. I print them out so I can study them later and mark them up with my pens and highlighters. I think this diary may have some things to teach us, maybe even about Tom Russell and the Vesey revolt.” Maybe even, she thought, though this was probably too much for even a desperate woman to hope, shed light on what drove Sarah Grace’s research. “Miz Rose’s family has lived here forever.”

  “Like mine?”

  Kate hesitated. “Like yours. Only we don’t know if any of your ancestors had time to sit down and write in a journal at the end of the day.”

  Gabe thought about this. “Guessing mine didn’t.”

  Kate winced.

  But he’d already plucked several pages from her backpack. “Pretty handwriting.”

  “It is. But it would be a lot prettier if there were more of it.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Just that this diary looks like somebody tore it in half—at least the back cover and probably a good many pages have been ripped away. And nobody knows where the end part would be. If it’s even survived at all.”

&
nbsp; Gabe’s brow crumpled as he deciphered the handwriting letter by letter and word by word. “But how come she ends these days here with a treasure map X?”

  Kate shook her head. “No, see, she’s just marking with an X how she’s ending those entries, with a quote from a famous writer or thinker. Like, here. This one’s from John Milton, a seventeenth-century poet: ‘Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine / Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought / Mosaic; underfoot the violet, / Crocus, and hyacinth.’ Nice, right? Though who knows why Emily’s quoting it here. Maybe just favorite lines from what she’s reading. And here’s Edmund Spenser. He was the sixteenth-century poet who wrote The Faerie Queene for Elizabeth I of England. And here’s the Reformation theologian Martin Luther: ‘Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.’”

  “Who’s the hippo?”

  “What?”

  He pointed to the top of one entry that sat like the others to the right of an X.

  Kate laughed. “That’s Augustine of Hippo. It’s a place. He lived . . . a long time ago. Listen to this one: ‘We make a ladder of our vices, if we trample those same vices underfoot.’”

  “Mm-hmm,” Gabe said. But his head stayed bowed over the pages. He fanned them on the table, his eyes jumping from one to the next.

  “It’s especially intriguing that this young woman, Emily, would include that particular quote about trampling vices—getting used to them, maybe. In fact, it’s part of my theory that young slaveholding women in the early nineteenth-century South weren’t at all blind to the atrocities of the ‘peculiar institution,’ as people called it. Its brutality was all around them. In fact, there were more antislavery societies in the South than in the North before 1830. But given that these women had everything to lose by trying to buck a system they had little say in and had lots to gain from, they seemed to become increasingly hardened as they grew older to the brutali—”

  “But why feet?” Gabe interrupted.

  “Feet?”

  With one finger, he pointed to the last several days of entries in June 1822.

  Kate shook her head. “I’m not seeing the pattern you’re seeing, Mr. Rubik’s Cuber. Unpuzzle me.” Digging into her bag, she offered him a yellow highlighter.

  Gabe skimmed neon yellow over the surface of several pages.

  Taking the pages one by one from him, Kate read aloud what he’d marked:

  We trample those same vices underfoot.

  Treading underfoot her honest name.

  Underfoot the violet.

  Faith must trample under foot.

  She lifted her eyes to meet his. “Underfoot. It shows up in the margins at the end of the last several days of entries.”

  He nodded, pulling his Rubik’s Cube from his pocket and spinning its faces.

  “Gabe, what if you were right and the Xs were actually a kind of treasure map?”

  He bounced once on the seat. “For pirate gold?”

  “Don’t go raising the Jolly Roger on me just yet. What if this Emily decided to tear off the diary’s final however many entries and bury that part for some reason—maybe because it contained thoughts she didn’t want anyone to read anytime soon? But she wanted to remind herself where it was. Or even tip off some future descendant who might figure it out.”

  “Underfoot,” Gabe said earnestly.

  “Underfoot. Exactly.”

  He lifted his Fanta to her. “Can I help, please, Kate, with the treasure hunt since I found the feet? Where do we start?”

  Kate scanned the printouts with Emily’s florid scrawl, the yellow lines leaping out at her now. “Underfoot,” she mused. “I think we start by asking your dad’s permission for you to turn pirate with me.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, assuming I’m right in thinking the mention of jessamine and violets and roses is a clue for where we need to start looking, we make sure we have our shovels handy.”

  “And then?”

  “Before then, we ask Miz Rose’s permission to tear up her garden—with very little evidence that we’ll find what we’re looking for there.”

  The next afternoon, dirt caked up her bare legs to her knees, Kate straightened her back, brushed dirt from Gabe’s face and her own—and tried to avoid the skepticism implied by the arched silver eyebrow a few feet away.

  “Rose, you said these roses here were antiques and had been in this spot for as long as you knew. We were careful not to hurt them. But is there any way of knowing how this garden was laid out two hundred years ago?” Kate shook her head. “Even hearing myself say that out loud, it sounds ridiculous.”

  From her knees, she flopped back to sit on the ground. “I was just so convinced that somehow that diary would be underfoot in the garden and that the diary would give us answers not only about Tom and Dinah and their world but also about what my mother was trying to find—and why. I’m so sorry if I’ve led us on a treasure hunt with no treasure.”

  Gabe pulled her head close. “Okay if it still was fun?”

  Kate laughed. “That’s always okay.” She pressed her cheek to his. “Rose? What is it? You have the oddest expression on your face.”

  Studying them, Rose did not answer for a moment. Then she turned away and sniffed. “My facial expression, sugar, was merely one of an investor in an expedition that has not, as yet, yielded results. I suppose I’ll be called upon to provide the two of you more Penina Moise biscuits in order to fund future outings?”

  Not waiting for an answer, she thrust her hands into the pockets of her linen skirt. Plucking a lollipop from the right side, she seemed to feign surprise at what she’d found there.

  Nonchalantly—a little too much so, Kate thought—Rose offered the candy to Gabe. “My banker provides these, and I’d quite forgotten I’d kept it.” She shot a glance at Kate. “Lord knows he ought to provide something besides resistance to simple requests.”

  Kate cleared her throat. “Speaking of requests.”

  Gabe, crunching into the lollipop, stopped chewing a moment to listen.

  “Yes?”

  “I have a big one. You know I’ve been trying to talk with my late father’s attorney—and yours. And that Mr. Botts has managed so far to return none of my calls or e-mails and has stonewalled me at every turn. I’ve been wondering what would happen if I cornered him in a public setting—where he couldn’t run away. And here’s where the rude part comes in.” Her words came faster. “He’s supposed to be at some fund-raising event out at Magnolia Plantation this Tuesday—for the opera or symphony, something. I’ve thought about just showing up, sneaking my way in somehow.”

  Rose finished the thought for her. “But you thought it might be even better to come as my guest, if I could secure you an invitation.”

  “Rose, could you?”

  Rose considered. “I’m invited, of course, to the Magnolia event.”

  “Of course.” Kate hid a smile.

  “But I’d actually not planned on going. One’s social obligations can overwhelm.”

  “Not a problem, Rose, honest. I’ll find a way in.”

  “Let us not dispose of the last remnants of good manners and breeding just yet.” She adjusted the linen pleats of her skirt. “I am willing to go and take you as my guest, Katherine. You may recall that Percival stood me up as well that day in Penina Moise. I’d like to know just what’s behind such behavior.”

  She turned to Gabe with her palm up. “Do let me throw that away for you, Gabriel Ray. I have always loathed the aspect of lollipop sticks lying about that some careless child tossed.”

  “Rose?” Kate touched the older woman’s arm. “Thank you. Botts knows something about what happened to my parents. There has to be a way to get him to talk.” Rose squeezed her hand as Kate bent toward Gabe. “C’mon, big guy. It’s getting dark, and your dad’ll be wanting you back at the shop.”

  Together, they looped past Battery Park and headed toward East Bay, reaching Cypress & Fire just as the harb
or was going dark. High heels clattered past, and gas lanterns flickered.

  Standing there as night fell, Kate wondered, if—if—Tom Russell had tried to escape the manhunt that swept Charleston once Vesey’s plot had been exposed, just where might he have run to escape?

  Maybe she’d been out working too long in the Low Country sun this afternoon and read too much history this morning, her mind paranoid and jumpy now, running to secret plots and violence—prone to seeing things that weren’t there.

  But in the dance of streetlights and shadows, she could imagine a lone figure running away up the alley, his life depending now on the speed and the silence of every step.

  Chapter 29

  1822

  Dodging from alley to alley and shadow to shadow, Tom slipped through the night.

  Approaching horses allowed him to move without his footsteps echoing in the streets. Still, he could not be seen.

  Behind crates, he huddled. At the corners of carriage houses. Along garden walls.

  Block upon block of the city he ran—north toward the Neck. But he would have to get through it quickly somehow.

  Dodging and darting, he neared the north end of King Street. And could see that the break in the Lines was already blocked. He was trapped in the city.

  STEAL AWAY had been etched on the Quaker woman’s comb.

  Two lanterns, she’d said. Just after dark. If thee are in need of help.

  It might be a trap. But he had no options left.

  Near North Adger’s Wharf, Tom slipped behind a warehouse to wait.

  It finally took shape in the dark: an old buggy, lanterns swaying from a singletree that creaked behind the plod of a broken-down horse.

  Two lanterns. Two lanterns and two people, the white woman in the plain dress who’d dropped her handbag yesterday on the street, along with a bearded white man with a plain, poorly fitting gray coat—the man who’d been at the tavern and come by the shop.

  Here they sat on the driver’s seat of the old buggy. And in its flatbed, a coffin.

  Leaping to the ground, the man raised a forefinger to his lips, stood listening, then waved at Tom to hurry. Sliding the flimsy lid of a pine coffin to one side, the man hobbled around the wagon, checking its axles, adjusting its harness.