Riverrun

by Andrews, Felicia

  “I can’t understand where Sara is,” she said. “This will burn if she doesn’t tend to it soon. It’s not like her, is it?”

  “Ach, let it burn and well feed it to the chickens—if we had any chickens to feed it to,” he laughed, crossing the room and scooping her into his arms. “You and I, lass, will dine on the stars if we have to.”

  She laughed when a grumble of thunder echoed through the empty house, and pushed at him until he released her. “I’m afraid there’ll be no stars tonight, Mr. Martingale,” she said. “But I still wish I knew what’s happened to Sara.”

  Eric scowled, and for a moment she saw something flash across his face that she had never seen before, something unnamed but decidedly unpleasant. It chilled her, but it passed, and she gave him her broadest grin.

  “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll take a quick run through the place to see where she’s hiding. I’ll not be surprised, though, if she’s sleeping like a log in one of the back rooms. She’s like that, you know. She does too much work for someone her age, and it all catches up with her, just like that,” and he snapped his fingers under her nose.

  “I believe you,” she said, taking his wrist and turning him around. “But just check, will you? For me? I don’t like to think of her being alone with this storm.”

  And when she was alone, she stepped up onto the brick hearth and stood as close to the fire as she dared, staring at the tall, wavering flames that defied the cold wind shoving at the rafters far above her. A spark drifted and died into ash at her feet. Her boot crushed it.

  Slowly she ran her hands down her thighs, remembering every detail of her recent lovemaking. Oddly, in spite of what she had been taught, she had felt no guilt during the act or afterward, only a sense of enormous tension gladly released. And despite her mother’s dark Biblical warnings, she had enjoyed it. Eric had too, she knew. He had been simultaneously rough and gentle, and in frantic haste, as though he could barely contain himself from adding his own cries of joy to her own.

  But … love? She doubted it, though she had no real gauge by which to measure what she felt; it was too soon, and she had too recently recovered from much pain. And if it was not love … then was it wrong? Her background insisted she give herself only to her husband, but there were no illusions here, no romantic dreams of Eric and marriage. Yet, by the same token, she could not equate herself with the whores she had seen, selling their bodies for something less than pleasure in order to have something more than starvation. They’d repulsed her, with their brassy hair and thick rouge, high-blown bosoms and tightly pinched waists. Not a wife, then, and definitely not a whore.

  A woman. Yes, a woman, she decided as a log split and died in a shower of sparks; and a woman who needed no apology forgiving freely of what she had to give.

  She plucked at her drying clothes with her fingers. She wished suddenly for a brush to comb her hair dry, but had to settle for fanning it over her chest while she pulled at it thoughtfully and waited for Eric to return. The heat from the fire made her drowsy.

  She found herself dozing, blinked herself awake just as the kitchen door was kicked open and Eric stood just inside the room. His hands were clenched in white-knuckled anger at his sides, his pale face wet with rain, his lips working soundlessly. There was the sharp crackling of a lightning bolt, and the crash of answering thunder. Shadows from the flames cast a demonic mask over his features

  “What, Eric?” she said. She came down from the hearth and gripped the edge of the table. “What’s wrong?”

  He pressed a palm to his face, hiding his eyes, his chest heaving as though he had just run a hundred miles.

  “Eric?” She stumbled around the table and took his hands. They were cold, and she chafed them. “Eric, my God!” Too many images raced through her mind for her to give voice to just one, but the anxiety in her tone opened his eyes and he looked down at her, and through her as though she were a ghost.

  “She was on the porch,” he said. “She must have been coming inside from the well out front. It’s the only one Lambert hasn’t poisoned.”

  “Was?”

  She pushed him aside violently and raced through the door and down the corridor into the front hall. The doors were open to the wind and the rain, and she slid on the slick floorboards as she passed over the threshold. She stopped, looked wildly from side to side, and in a lingering flash of lightning saw the old woman, sitting in the same throne-like chair Cass had used that morning. Her eyes were open, but she saw nothing; her lips were slack, but she would never say another word. From between her withered breasts protruded the silvered hilt of a dagger, and the dark stains of flowing blood had already dried down the front of her threadbare dress.

  “Sara!”

  A scream that descended into a mournful wail.

  Cass dropped as though she had been clubbed, crawled to clutch at the old woman’s knees, the tears burning her cheeks as the rain followed the wind and flooded the porch. She screamed once more, and this time the mourning had been replaced by hatred.

  She had no idea how long she stayed there, adding Sara’s name to the list of those she would somehow avenge; but soon, a pair of hands gripped at her shoulders and pulled her to her feet. She pressed her face close to Eric’s chest, then lifted her eyes and demanded to know what Sara had done, what crime she had committed.

  “She stayed with me,” Eric said simply, coldly. “All the others were run off by Lambert. I was paying them wages, they weren’t slaves, but Lambert— Sara stayed to the end. Damn, but I wish I knew why!”

  He raised a fist as though to defy the storm, suddenly yelped in surprise and pain when a sharp crack! split the air and he was yanked onto his back. Cass fell to her hands before she could catch herself, shouting Eric’s name, staring into the blue-white wash of another burst of lightning to see Lambert on his horse, pulling on the bullwhip that had snaked around Eric’s forearm, locked, and was drawing him squirming off the porch. The grin was there, and the scar, and the wide fearful eyes of his stallion as it wavered between its master’s commands and the unleashed fury of the thunder that crashed frequently overhead. Eric rolled from side to side as he tried to regain his feet, but Lambert kept his mount easing backward, dragging Eric down the steps and into the deepening mud. Cass shouted and used the railing to haul herself to her feet, pounding the smooth curved wood in her frustration. Then she looked around frantically for something she could use as a weapon. She saw Sara, her eyes still open and staring. And the knife—its hilt glittering silver in the cannonade of lightning.

  Without thinking, driven by a madness that tinged the world crimson, she grabbed the handle and yanked, grunting until it pulled free of its bloody sheath and she was nearly flung off balance again. Sara’s body slipped and rolled to the porch, but Cass paid it no mind as she heard Lambert’s shrill laugh and Eric’s curses. She scrambled down the steps, using the lightning for guidance, and slipped through the mud toward the grotesquely struggling figures still backing toward the trees. Lambert had a pistol in one hand now and was trying to make a clear shot over the neck of his mount; but the animal had given way to fear, was rearing, and the first shot vanished harmlessly into the air.

  Yet still he grinned, a maniacal grimace that seemed to split his face in two.

  Cass, nevertheless, was heartened. She knew he was having a difficult time keeping his place in his saddle; with one hand trying to use the gun, and the other working to keep the whip taut, only his powerful legs gripping the stallion’s sides enabled him to stay above and beyond Eric’s wild thrashings. Twice Martingale managed to gain his feet, his gloved hand scratching to free his arm from the whip’s grip, and twice Lambert screamed his laughter and yanked until Eric plunged back to the ground.

  Cass yelled, and he glanced at her slipping through the mud, and he laughed, fired once, and returned to the game he was playing.

  The lightning came in rapid volleys now as the storm passed directly above them, and somewhere to her left a
tall dead tree was struck and became a short-lived torch in the driving rain. This is hell, she thought, and she imagined she could smell the sulphurous fumes rising around Lambert’s satanic figure. The gun swung in her direction again as she neared the stallion on the side away from the weapon, and her rage multiplied when Lambert shrieked his laugh once more and made an awkward mocking bow behind his foul grin. She lunged, slashing out with the knife and falling away as his amazement turned to fury. Her wild thrust gouged across one arm and before he could check himself, the whip slid from his fingers and Eric was free. He spun the horse around as Cass struggled to her feet, lashing out with one boot and catching her soundly between her shoulders. She fell, crawled, rolled frantically away from the hooves that sliced through the air inches from her skull.

  “Damn you!” he shouted into the storm, holstering his gun. He threw his weight into directing the horse at her as she raced toward the trees. Thunder and hooves followed her closely as she led him away from Eric, wanting but not daring to look over her shoulder as she leapt into the shrubs and trees, grabbing wildly at branches to yank herself onto a new course before he could run her down. Then, knowing he could not follow her except on foot, she swerved and made her way swiftly back toward the house. She paused, then, just before emerging from the woods. Eric was nowhere to be seen, and Lambert had been seized by some kind of madness that had him raging back and forth in front of the porch, one hand clutching his bleeding arm. She gulped at the storm-cold air, pushed off a bole and did not stop running until she was leaning against the house, using it to keep her upright as she made her way as rapidly as she could toward the back. She sobbed once when she thought of Sara’s body lying on the porch, and again when she realized she was stumbling through the garden she had never had a chance to see.

  The wind shoved her and she nearly fell, but was caught suddenly around the waist, and before she could react, lifted and placed onto the roan. Eric thrust the reins into her hands and mounted his own dark horse, signaled with a brusque wave of his hand, and immediately they were riding. There was no looking back. She could only bend over the roan’s plunging neck and follow Eric away from Riverrun, through the fields, into the storm, with only the shriek of the wind to show her the way.

  BOOK TWO

  Philadelphia

  1863 - 1866

  Chapter Eight

  Not half a dozen streets from the simple grandeur of Independence Hall was a small, tree-studded square bordered with fencing of polished black iron. Off the south side of the square was a street that held, on one side, a long row of elegant townhouses. They were uniformly gleaming in new red brick and sparkling, freshly painted white trim, each shining door sporting its own distinctive brass knocker. Several had window boxes protruding from the first floor windows from which a variety of summer flowers rose colorfully and tall; others had tiny gardens in the small front yards that were little bigger than a winter blanket. Each, however, was separated from its neighbor by a low stone wall or a white picket fence with a latch gate and hedging that protected the grass from the casual stroller or an unchecked child. Facing them across the rippled sea of cobblestones were larger, unattached homes of heavy, dark fieldstone, the wealth behind their dark, draped windows implied in the richness of the cloth that caught the afternoon sun, the carved ebony of their doors, the Greco-Roman designs of the mock pillars that flanked each entrance. There were no lawns or gardens here for general appreciation, only close-fitting railings that marked the below-ground entrances to the kitchens and the servants’ quarters. The street was crowded with carriages and pedestrians, vendors of wares pushing their tumbrils in front of them and crying out the quality of their fresh fruits and fish. Shrieking children raced between and around the legs of men standing on the corners discussing the latest news from Virginia, the latest attempts by Confederate blockade runners to slip past the Union ships with much-needed food and supplies for the beleaguered Southern armies. When a young cavalry officer left one of the fieldstone mansions, he was instantly surrounded by gray-suited men whose pocket watches were of gold and whose ties were of silk. They questioned him closely, but politely, and as he walked away they followed him like supplicants. The young man obviously enjoyed all the sudden attention from complete strangers, and just as obviously wished to escape as soon as he could; their hands on his arms, their eager faces thrust into his. And when he had gone, the corner meetings resumed, sedate but earnest.

  Cassandra stood by a window in her aunt’s red brick home, one hand pulling aside the lace curtain as she followed the officer’s progress toward the square. A smile on her lips belied the melancholy that pinched her face and darkened the skin beneath her eyes. She allowed herself a single glance at the larger homes opposite, then let the curtain fall with an audible hiss and turned back to the man seated on the couch on the far side of the small, heavily furnished sitting room.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Cavendish,” she said, her hands drifting to clasp together contritely in front of her waist. She was wearing a snug black dress with tiny black bows cinched at the waist, a small black hat with a half-veil she had lifted from her face to drape back over her hair. She stepped to a thickly upholstered wing chair and lowered herself carefully, her palms resting on the wooden armrests lightly, her face taking on the alertness she knew the old lawyer demanded of her. Not, she thought sourly, that the expression had done her any good.

  “I understand, ma’am,” he said, just barely able to disguise his distaste. He knew nothing of how she had come to Philadelphia; he knew only that she had suddenly come into his office nearly a week before and had announced herself as the niece of Mrs. Agatha Simpson. He had been startled, to say the least, but once her memories had given him the proof that she was who she claimed to be—that, and a delicate lithograph found among the old woman’s possessions—he became as solicitous and as kind as the extent of the estate allowed him.

  “You were saying, Mr. Cavendish,” she prompted gently, a honey-sweet smile on her lips as she inclined her head to encourage his talking.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he stammered, reaching for the stack of papers he had placed on the cushion beside him. He sorted them fussily until Cass thought she would scream, but she held the smile until her cheeks felt as if they were cracking, glanced toward the window and back to the lawyer again, who, in finally readying himself, had cleared his throat rudely to regain her attention.

  “There isn’t much here, I’m afraid,” he said, the tone of his voice devoid of any sympathy. “Your aunt had a parcel of land in the territory of Wyoming, which she naturally left to her son Bret and his wife—Barbara is her name, I think; I don’t know. He met and married her while he was … staying in New Orleans. At any rate, they already live there, as you may know.” He looked up and she nodded. She had not known, however, that her cousin had moved west, and at the moment she did not much care. “The house here,” Cavendish said, and looked about him as though he were inspecting a barn for demolition, “is to be sold for Mrs. Simpson’s debts, of which, I’m afraid to say, she had a great deal. Your aunt, Miss Bowsmith, was a generous woman with her late husband’s fortune. Too generous by far, if you don’t mind me saying so. She was, to be candid, what one of my young pup clerks would call a ‘good touch.’ A sad story would send her to the bank as quickly as a demanding creditor. She was, as you might guess, taken advantage of quite often, and she had donated large amounts of gold to the Union cause and for the election of Mr. Lincoln—a matter that is apparently of debatable value still, considering the state of hostilities that continues to exist.”

  “Mr. Cavendish,” Cass said with a note of warning.

  “A shame,” the lawyer muttered, almost to himself. “She was a good woman, one of the best. I doubt, of course, that they’ll ever find the man who broke in here that night. Philadelphia is not as wild as some of her northern sisters, and we do not have the best of cooperation from the authorities, after the fact. A pity. I would like to have a hand at the man
who did it myself. Scoundrel, no doubt—some layabout from the docks who wandered into the wrong place.”

  “Mr. Cavendish,” she repeated sharply, her impatience finally at the point where she could no longer tolerate the bulbous-nosed creature. “Sir, please get to the point. I am expecting a visitor shortly.”

  “Oh? Oh. You mean that person who came to the office with you.”

  “Mr. Martingale, yes.”

  “Martingale,” the lawyer muttered, shuffling the papers again and looking up innocently. “Well, I’m sorry to report that once the house has been sold, I’m afraid there’s not much left to divide among the rest of the family. She has a sister in New Jersey, I believe—though the old woman may be dead by this time—and her son, and you. You will receive half of whatever proceeds are netted from the sale. It will not, as I said, be such a fortune as you may have expected, Miss Bowsmith, but it should be sufficient to carry you through until you find other … accommodations. I gather you do not intend to return to Gettysburg.”

  She nodded, not trusting herself to say a word.

  “Well, as I told you, I’ll be more than happy to handle that aspect of your affairs, too. I’ve the name of the merchant you’ve given me there, and once that matter is cleared up I’ll do as you suggested and invest it where I can.”

  “Thank you,” she said demurely, thinking that the old bastard was probably hoping she would move in with him once the house had changed hands. She was not unaware of the effect she had had on him since the moment he first laid eyes on her; and she had no doubt at all that, had Aunt Aggie’s estate been somewhat more lucrative, he would not have wasted any time at all in pressing his suit. But the estate was minimal to say the least, and he was if nothing else a practical man. A nearly poverty-stricken woman would do him no good at all in Philadelphia society, where the premium was less on one’s physical beauty than it was on lineage and the size of one’s fortune.