by Koboah, A D
We loved each other so much, there had to be a chance for us and the happy ending I kept dreaming about.
There was hope for us.
Wasn’t there?
Chapter Seventeen
The following night Avery returned to the house two hours later than usual, two hours I spent in an orgy of wordless panic. When he finally materialised at the drawing room door, his expression was as fearful and frantic as I’m sure mine was, until he saw me sitting in the chair waiting for him. He relaxed then and looked so relieved that it made me wonder if he’d expected something to have happened to me in his absence.
He apologised for being late and explained that he’d had something important to do, which had taken far longer than expected. I didn’t ask where he had been even though I wanted to and he didn’t volunteer that information.
He was distant for most of the night and left early again. He told me that he might be late returning that evening. This time when I went to bed, I found it very hard to sleep and when sleep did finally pull me into its arms, the nightmare was there waiting.
When he returned the following evening he was in a bad mood. Amused by a previously unseen aspect of Avery’s personality, I allowed myself to forget my fears about the increasing number of hours he was spending away from me. Having insisted that we stay inside again, he sat slouched opposite me with his eyes lowered and his mouth pursed. And instead of listening to me read, he decided that I needed to memorise maps of the area and learn what seemed like a random assortment of words and their meanings, getting impatient if he thought I wasn’t taking the lesson seriously. When, after one reprimand too far, I shouted at him, he gave me a long wilting stare before he abruptly left his seat and moved to the window.
I stared at him as he stood with his back to me and, feeling my gaze on him, he turned and glowered at me.
Still amused by his little mood, I gave him a grin that never failed to draw one from him in turn, no matter how sorely I had tried his patience. And sure enough, his scowl melted away and a soft adoring smile crept onto his lips. Then it seemed as if he was reminded of something painful and the smile vanished. He drew back from whatever it was as if he had been burned and quickly faced the window again, his misery lingering like an Earthbound spirit.
A wrenching sadness came over me as I watched him. I thought the anguish that had previously been so much a part of him had been banished. But now it seemed it had returned and I felt crushed. I was no longer enough to keep his pain and misery away.
That night he stayed with me until the sun began to peer over the horizon and even then, he was reluctant to leave. That should have allayed some of my fears but I went to bed wreathed in misery, certain that my heavenly nights with Avery were almost at an end.
***
The next day I was sweeping the kitchen floor when I heard a sound from the front door. Startled, I dropped the broom and grabbed a large knife just as Avery materialised causing me to scream out in fright.
He sighed. “If I walk in here as a man would, you scream. If I appear out of thin air, you still scream. Please, Luna, make up your mind so I can at least be consistent in scaring you out of your wits.”
“Avery! What you doing out in the daylight? Get on out of here!”
“I need to talk to you.”
“You can talk all you wants when the sun goes down. Now get!”
He made no move to leave.
“Avery, I ain’t fooling! You look half dead. What am I gonna do if you drop dead on me in this here kitchen?”
He rolled his eyes. “Your...concern for me is touching,” he said, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “But you forget that I am already dead. Besides, it is most unpleasant spending the day buried underground, especially now that I have your mother’s presence with me daily whispering as tenderly as a lover, all the different ways in which she means to kill me.”
“Mama?” Even at the mention of her name, I was instantly struck by the now familiar feeling of longing mingled with heart-clenching anxiety. “And you’s only telling me this now?” I threw the broom I had just scooped up back onto the floor. “We gots to go and see her so—”
“It is too late for that,” he said quietly, deep in thought. “Far too late. She would think that I was controlling you and making you say those things. Anyway, I did not come to talk about your mother. I came to talk to you about Jupiter.”
“What about him?” I asked sharply.
He fixed me with a direct gaze, one I found hard to look away from. “Do you love him, Luna?” he asked with a pained expression. “I have promised I will never look into your mind again and I mean to keep that promise, so please be honest with me because I need to know if you love him.”
“Why you asking me that?”
“Because it seemed as if you were beginning to fall in love with him. That is why I almost killed him that night. I hated him because you felt things for him that I knew you would never feel for me. I will always be grateful to you for preventing me from doing so, for if I had slaughtered such a courageous man merely for loving you, it would have been a sin that would have haunted me all the days of my never-ending life. So tell me. Do you love him?”
I did and always would feel something for Jupiter. A powerful bond had been formed between us the day he gathered me in his arms and raced through the woods as my blood ran down his coal black skin. That bond had been cemented when I held him in my arms and prepared to meet death as his blood pooled in the dirt beneath us. But as powerful as my feelings for Jupiter were, it was merely a shadow of what I felt for Avery, and it would always be that way.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Luna, I need to—”
“Love? Huh. That ain’t nothing no slave can affords to own. We can’t afford ourselves so how we afford to love each other?”
He gazed at me for a long moment, his expression one of searing impatience and I was forced to answer as truthfully as I could manage under the circumstances.
“Maybe. Maybe I coulda loved him if...if...things is different.”
He was sad again, seemingly deep in thought for what seemed like the longest time before he spoke again.
“Luna, can you prepare a meal for both of us tonight?”
I gaped at him. “But you don’t eat!”
He rolled his eyes and pursed his lips. “A simple yes or no would suffice.”
“All right,” I said. “If you wants me to spend my afternoon cooking for a man who don’t eat, then I guess I has to.”
He gave me another of his withering looks. “Fine. Do not waste the afternoon cooking on my account. But perhaps you could have some bread and water ready for me instead. Even the lowliest prisoners are given bread and water once a day, or is even that meagre a meal too much to ask for?”
“Bread and water sounds mighty fine to me,” I said with a smile. “Now get on out of here!”
He glared at me with the sulky petulance of a spoilt child, an expression I found quite endearing, and then vanished.
I could hardly contain my excitement. He wanted me to cook for him. I quickly ran through a list of things I could prepare, deciding that variety would be the theme for Avery’s second dinner in over fifty years. If only he had told me this yesterday. Counting down the hours to dusk, I decided I had enough time to go into town to get a few more things. Rushing out of the mansion, I started singing to myself as I saddled up Julia and rode into town.
But the farther away I rode from the mansion, the more fearful I became and the singing soon petered away to a glum silence punctuated only by the sound of my fluttering heartbeat. As a precaution, I had taken one of the guns with me and hidden it in a satchel strapped to the saddle. But even if I did encounter trouble, I knew I could never use that gun as the consequences of a Negro shooting a white person would be so severe that not even Avery would be able to protect me. So it was a very nervous, timid Luna who entered the busy main goods store that day. And when the proprietor, a red-faced gen
tleman with a receding hairline, regarded me in that intimate knowing way I was used to seeing at the plantation, I was flooded by the same helplessness that had been at the core of my existence for many years. For a moment I couldn’t speak.
“What do you want, girl?”
I lowered my gaze and cleared my throat. “Mr Jacobs. I’s Luna. Massa Avery Wentworth’s slave.”
He straightened up immediately and I noticed that the gaze of all the women in the store immediately fell on me at the mention of Avery’s name.
“Sir, I’s needing one or two things and Massa says—”
“Yes, yes. Of course. What do you need?”
I told him what I needed and waited patiently to one side whilst he leisurely gathered the things I had reeled off and tossed them into a paper bag. In the meantime a short stocky man who had been watching me since I’d entered the store sauntered up to the counter.
“We were wondering what our young Englishman does up in that old house by himself. I see now he has something to keep his bed warm at night.”
I felt the blood rush to my face but did not react or look up even though anger began stirring like a hungry snake.
“Now, now, George,” the store owner said with a smirk as he returned with the last of my order. “You heard young Mr Wentworth in that girly accent of his the other day. He said if his slave comes into the store he wants us to—what was it he said?—Yeah, that’s it. He said: ‘I want you to extend her the same courtesy you would to me’. These English have some mighty strange ideas. Imagine treating a nigger wench the same way I’d treat a white man. But if he’s as rich as he seems then I’ll be more than happy to humour him and his strange ways. So long as he plans on bringing some of that money into my store.”
“He hasn’t been here long anyway, but he’ll soon get used to the southern way of doing things,” the other man added.
The store owner handed me my package and although I meant to whisper a thank-you before scurrying out of the store, a stillness came over me and, remembering the reverence I saw in Avery’s eyes whenever I was in his presence, I spoke up without thinking.
“Yes, Massa Wentworth has some mighty big plans for that old house, and boy does he has money to spend. So long’s he ain’t got no reason to spend it elsewhere.”
I pretended not to notice the stunned silence that fell across the store at my veiled threat and left quickly, keeping my gaze from meeting anyone else’s.
It was only when I got to Julia that I realised I had been holding my breath since leaving the store and I wasn’t able to fully relax until the town was far behind me.
***
Avery arrived as I was bringing the food into the drawing room. At first I didn’t notice him standing by the fireplace, his gaze on the feast I had spent the afternoon preparing. I had made three different types of soups along with meat, fish, greens, cornbread, and two different fruit pies. And judging by his expression of amazed delight, he really had been expecting just bread and water.
“Luna, I...you didn’t have to do all this,” he said.
I shrugged casually and although I was hot and tired from rushing around all afternoon, I was elated by his appreciation.
But then it all changed and dejection settled over his countenance like a dark cloud.
“Avery, what the matter?”
He didn’t speak for a few moments, merely stood staring at the table, taking deep breaths as if struggling to stop something from tearing him apart.
“Avery?”
I stopped what I was doing and moved toward him. After a few moments he finally met my anxious gaze.
“I...I...have to take you back,” he blurted out.
I stared at him in horror, feeling as if I had been thrown to the bottom of a deep chasm.
“Wh-what?” I whispered.
The day I had been dreading for weeks was finally here. Avery was leaving me to pursue a life of his own and all I could see ahead of me now were days, months and years of nothing but the road to a long, torturous death.
“Do not look so, Luna. I am not taking you back to the plantation to be a slave again. I would never do that.”
He moved forward as if to place his hands on my shoulders but I backed away, angry at what I saw as his rejection and betrayal. His reaction to my response was that of a man nearing the finish line of a particularly gruelling race who has been told that he has to go back and start the race all over again. But he composed himself and made no move to touch me.
“Please, sit down, Luna. Let me explain what has happened.”
I was thankful for the hard chair beneath me when I sat down because I felt like a weak and fragile flower that had been uprooted from the nourishment and strength of the earth. Watching my reactions carefully, Avery slowly sat opposite me, the food completely forgotten.
“These past few nights, and sometimes during the day, I have worked at securing your freedom by placing suggestions, so to speak, in the mind of your old Master and those around him. I have led them to believe that the only way to secure the safety of everyone on the plantation is to sever your ties to it by freeing you. He has done that now and you are no longer a slave. Unfortunately, it is still not enough for your mother.”
“Mama?”
Why oh why didn’t I try to do something about her fears before?
“I have been so selfish, Luna. When I took you away I knew your mother would move Heaven and Earth to get you returned to her and yet I kept you here anyway. And that selfishness has put her life, her very soul at risk.”
“What you mean?”
“She knows where we are now and she is coming for you.”
“How that make her be in danger? You...you ain’t gonna do nothing to my mama is you?”
“No, Luna. I would never do that.” He reached for my hand but I drew it away and after a few moments in which he seemed to flounder like a wounded bird, he placed his hands in his lap and sat back.
“Do you remember me telling you that your mother knows powerful magic and that there is always a price for using that magic?”
I nodded.
“Well the women in her family have always known how to counteract this, and protect themselves from some of the more malevolent spirits that are drawn to powerful witches. But she was stolen from her people before she could learn how to do this, and every time she draws on the power of these spirits they drain her of her life force in return for what they do for her.”
Of course, I had seen the signs in the physical pain that had plagued her and the fact that she had seemed to be aging so fast.
“In her desperation to find you she has been tapping into much darker, powerful energy, and last week she did the unthinkable. She sought out the spirit that has haunted the chapel for centuries and it has a hold on her now. This thing, from what I have learned of it, is an ancient evil, pure evil, and it is feeding on her fears. It has shown her where we are now and they will set out to find us tomorrow morning. It will take them four days to reach us and by that time, there will be nothing left of your mother but evil. So I have to take you back.”
I sat in silent turmoil as I mulled over what he had told me. Mama was the strongest person I knew and she was in danger, a thought that clawed at me with cold, spiteful fingers. I was also ashamed of my selfishness.
“This is the hardest thing that I have ever had to do,” he continued. “When I found you, I can say that I had forgotten who I was during those years of despair. I was barely a man. But I remember who I am now and the more you come to accept me as a man, the harder it is to keep you here. The danger your mother is in is my fault. I should have never taken you away. I love you, Luna. I have from that moment, all those years ago, when I first saw that vision of you in the chapel. But I should have let you go with Jupiter and Father Geoffrey that night and found a way to let you stay with them as I have now done. But I let myself believe you wanted to stay here with me and that you could grow to love me too, even if it was only the love of a
friend. But I realise that I am no better than those slave holders if I continue to do as I have done. You are free now, Luna. Free to go back to Jupiter and pursue the life you want.”
I didn’t believe that he was being completely honest about his motivations for sending me away. If he wanted to, he could find a way to save Mama and us. But he was choosing to send me away instead, which meant he could see no possible future for us. And perhaps he now saw me for all that I was. A mere slave.
I was convinced of all those things but my soul still yearned to confess my feelings for him. I would be his if he wanted me, mind, body and soul. And I might have told him if Mama’s life did not hang in the balance.
I could not let her die, especially to keep chasing after someone who was already lost to me by virtue of the colour of my skin.
“Luna, say something.” He was looking at me earnestly, some of the desperation and anguish that had characterised him upon our first meeting already back in his eyes.
“What happen to Mama ain’t your fault, it be mines,” I said. “When...when you gonna take me back?”
He gazed down at the hand I had pulled away from him with so much yearning that I couldn’t look at him.
“We will leave an hour before dawn, the same time they intend to set out. That means we will intersect them in the woods.
“Tomorrow morning?” I gasped, almost unable to choke back the tears that were fighting to surface. “You shoulda said this gonna to be my last night here!”
“I meant to. God knows I meant to take you back a few nights ago but I have been struggling with the thought of letting you go. This afternoon when you confessed that you do, or could love Jupiter, it made it much harder to continue to keep you caged here. I love you. I love you more than I thought possible to love another and you have given me so much. But all I have done is take from you. I can no longer keep you here and let the years eat away at your chances of happiness whilst I continue to hope and dream.”