The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

“Any man of Quarrel’s who should speak the first word out of turn will not utter a second before a blade cuts him down. This too they have been promised. Come, hasten now with me.”

  He led her through a hatchway that roughly corresponded to the door she’d taken to the captain’s cabin on the Herald. The French privateer was noticeably less damaged than the English ship, where most of the fighting had taken place, but she still carried scars and less had been done towards cleaning up the mess that had been made here. Cady vaguely recognized many of the faces, both on deck and below: Garvey’s men who had transferred to the captured vessel to bring her in as a prize. Some of them winked and grinned at her, others nodded grimly. She had the strong impression this was not the first time they’d had a run-in with the authorities.

  Quarrel’s men were also easy to pick out. They looked pissed off and broken. Few of them would meet her eye, or Bowditch’s. In fact, most stopped and bowed their heads low when the British officer walked past. They were lightly dressed, in spite of the cold climate, and their naked backs were covered by tattoos and the gnarled gristle of scar tissue. They smelled fantastically awful, down here out of the fresh air. By now Cady was getting used to navigating the crowded passageways of a cramped wooden ship on a hard swell. She bent and flexed her knees with every roll and plunge of the deck, and timed her feet upon the ladders to go with the motion of the vessel rather than work against it. At times, like everyone else, she would simply brace and wait out an especially difficult plummeting drop or sudden displacement as everything went sideways.

  She had no idea where she was when Bowditch pulled up.

  “The galley,” he announced.

  Cady was surprised to find Pip waiting for them, his bruised and bandaged face split by an enormously impish grin. He was standing by a barrel, from which he had removed the lid.

  Cady blanched at the smell coming from within.

  “I thought mistress could hide in here, sir,” Pip said. “They will not wish to inquire much beyond the top layer of rotten meat.”

  Bowditch leaned over the barrel and made a face at the stench.

  “Well done that, lad. If you would step into the parlor, Mistress?”

  He indicated the barrel full of meat, crawling with maggots.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Cady asked.

  No. They were not.

  25

  Smith cursed and Koffler shushed him urgently.

  “There are constables about,” he hissed. “Our cause would not be served by an encounter with them.”

  “Goddamn it, Koffler, I do not care a jot for that now. Cady is gone and all is lost.”

  Koffler shook his head.

  “No, no, no. You misunderstand me. This is good news, Smith. She has escaped! I am sure of it. A porter told me of two women arriving by carriage not four hours ago. He swore one of them was Mary Bradbury. The matriarch of a prominent trading family here, with powerful connections in Boston.”

  Koffler had hold of Smith’s arm to restrain him, but the lawman turned easily out of his grip.

  “I have no interest in the comin’ and goin’ of some monied old biddy,” he protested. “What of my friend and your patron, sir? What has become of Cady?”

  A rooster crowed the approaching dawn, and dogs set to barking nearby. Voices drifted up to them from the anchored ships, the shouts of sailors and their masters about their first orders of business.

  “You do not see, Smith. You must calm yourself and listen to me. This Bradbury woman was of late imprisoned for a witch. Her escape is a long established historical reality. Scholars have pondered her flight for centuries, thinking she must have had outside help. But don’t you see, Smith? Cady was that help. The house of Bradbury were the merchants and traders with whom she entered into business. They helped lay the foundations of the Society, without ever being aware of what they were building.”

  Smith’s runaway feelings of despair and torment ever so gently eased off their headlong gallop. Koffler had said there was two women in his informer’s tale.

  “You saying Cady is with this Bradbury?” he asked.

  “Not any more, no. They have taken separate paths to their freedom; Bradbury by land and Miss Cadence by sea. But she will seek her out again with offers of a lucrative compact. The ship which carries Miss Cadence south to Boston is one the Bradburys have often chartered, and the captain owes his livelihood not just to them but to their patron, Sir Ferdinando Gorges.”

  The two men lingered in the gloomy recesses of the alleyway, but Smith fancied he could detect the faintest trace of dawn turning inky blackness to a darkness less absolute.

  “I’m having trouble followin’ all this, Professor,” he said with real annoyance. “But if’n you’re tellin’ me Cady is alive and nearby, I say we skedaddle on out of here right now.”

  “Agreed,” Koffler said. “But there is no ship out of this port until late evening on the morrow.”

  “Then we go overland, like old lady Bradbury.”

  “Again I agree, but that is not so easily done as wished. We have no transport, and to walk to Boston will take more time than we have. The authorities will be searching for her. Goody Bradbury could rely on sympathetic authorities looking the other way as she passed by. Boston grows wary of Salem’s hysteria. But Miss Cadence is not an old lady of fond remembrance and powerful connections to the local burghers. To these people she is a dangerous hellcat, in league with Satan, and she has already killed four or five good men.”

  This last, Koffler delivered with an admonishing almost accusatory bearing.

  Smith was having none of it.

  “They fired on us,” he said. “We exercised the right to defend ourselves, is all.”

  There was just enough light now for him to make out the frown that twisted Koffler’s face.

  “Be that as it may, we cannot assume the authorities or Miss Cadence herself will sit idle. If we wish to intercede, we must away as swiftly as birds on the wing.”

  Smith looked past Koffler to the smaller of the two ships tied up to the wharf. A few sailors with handheld lamps moved about her decks. “We will need horses,” he said. “There will be taverns and stables where we can—”

  “There is a stable nearby,” Koffler interrupted. “I have sufficient funds to purchase two steeds. I do hope you were not thinking of stealing them.”

  “I’m not thinkin’ of anything beyond gettin’ back to Miss Cady,” Smith countered.

  Stealing a couple of nags was in fact exactly what he had been thinking, Koffler having impressed upon him the necessity of his having as little as possible to do with the town’s aggrieved inhabitants.

  “You can ride?” he asked the German, steering the conversation away from the difficult to the practical.

  Koffler seemed to grow about two inches taller.

  “I rode with the Third Hussars before the Great War,” he said.

  “Good for you,” Smith said. “I was a boy scout for Jennison’s Rangers in my own great war. We shall see who has the best seat still.”

  Koffler, it seemed, did indeed know something of horse flesh and was not averse to spending up on it. He met Smith an hour later, ten minutes outside of the port town, riding one fine looking quarter horse and leading another. Neither of them were a patch on Smith’s beloved Chester, of course, and the melancholy that immediately overcame him upon recalling the loss of his old friend was powerfully dispiriting. As much as he longed for the reunion with his daughter, Smith was also quietly but strongly motivated by the prospect of stepping back through the years to reclaim poor Chester from the wasteland where they’d parted. It grieved him something fearsome to think of his companion alone and abandoned there.

  “Marshal Smith? Are you of your right mind, sir?” Koffler asked.

  Smith shook his head and threw off the burden of remembered sorrows. Weren’t nothing to be done for Cady, for little Elspeth nor for Chester but to lean hard into the job of saving them. He sheltered from a
light drizzling rain under the outstretched arms of a maple tree. Half of the golden brown leaves had shed themselves and they squished in the mud under his boot heels as he took the reins of the second mount.

  “I am fine. Our mounts look good, Professor. These must have emptied your coin purse.”

  Koffler shrugged off the half-question.

  “You forget I have been preparing for this for most of my life, Smith. We will not be here long, and I have no need to preserve my capital. Or rather, Miss Cadence’s.”

  “Fair enough,” Smith said, swinging up into the saddle. It was a smaller and cruder seat than he was used to, but it would do. “I figure you must know the Boston road or have a map tucked into your pockets somewhere?”

  Koffler smiled.

  “I know our business here is pressing, Marshal. But if you will allow me the indulgence of a strange nostalgia, I have studied this particular setting so long and so intensively that although this is my first time here in person, I feel as though I have come home.”

  “I would not deny you that, Professor. But we do have to ride.”

  “Then follow me.”

  Koffler caught his mount’s attention with the slightest tightening of the reins before kneeing the horse forward into a canter. He did indeed look a feller who had spent many hours in the saddle. Despite the relatively small size of his mount—Smith was a big man and Chester stood eighteen hands of rippling muscle—it was a righteous good to have a decent horse beneath him again. He pushed forward with his hips and was gratified when the dappled gray mare began to walk, then trot, impelled by the slightest pressure from his knees.

  Sunrise was upon them, but it was no glorious morn. The late autumn dawn was bleakly gray and shrouded by a doleful, lowering sky of threatening storm clouds. Here and there large swathes of the district were lost behind the obscuring veil of isolated showers, while gusting, disobliging winds came freighted with the promise of a bitter winter. Smith huddled inside his coat as best he could, with the brim of his hat tugged down low, but there were few enough farmhands or laborers about yet to raise an alarm should one of them recognize him. He did concede that he offered a very different picture to the world, garbed in Koffler’s rudimentary yokel costume.

  It did not protect him from the cramping of his neck and shoulders, which was an unavoidable consequence of expecting to be shot in the back at any moment. It was all Smith could do not to spur his horse to a full gallop in headlong flight from this damnable hamlet. It was only partly that he wanted to be done with Salem and its macabre obsessions, more that he wanted to bring forward a reunion with Cady as soon as possible. So he bent to his ride, always keeping the professor in view, and trying as hard as he might not to present the image of a man fleeing the scene of a crime. If Koffler was correct and Cady had escaped with this other woman, there would surely be a posse raised within minutes of their absence being discovered. It would be a galling irony to find themselves roped into any such detachment simply because they happened to be on the hoof. He did not imagine that good riding beasts were as common here as in his own day.

  Some uncomfortable part of an hour later, a rain-shower enveloped them as they passed a field that Smith realized with a start was the site of his last connection to Cady. There was the fence they had vaulted, and beyond it the line of trees which had beckoned with the promise of deliverance. He almost reined in his mount, thinking to call out to Koffler that it would be worth searching the area, however briefly, for his weapons or any other equipage they might have dropped. More than that, though, he was drawn to a place where he knew she had been.

  Oh Cady.

  He had last held her just over yonder, until they was separated by the impact of that Indian savage.

  All of his carefully hoarded resolve not to fester upon his shame for so imperiling her was carried away on a sudden squalling gust of cold and rainy wind.

  Goddamn it all to hell, why had he been fated to encounter the celestial Wu and his damned infernal watch?

  Smith inched further into himself, dropping his head to avoid the sudden sheeting rain, but also that he should no longer have to look at the scene by the fence and be plagued by all of the what-ifs and what-might-have-beens. The cloudburst eventually expended itself, and when they emerged on the other side, the track had carried them to the very edge of the forest and away from the settled outskirts of Salem.

  Back in the forest, as the canopy closed over them, Smith might have imagined that night had fallen again. They passed through a haunted solitude of brute nature, and those few scattered beams of weak morning light which did penetrate the murk revealed an eerie landscape of giant trees and living shadow, an apt setting for gothic fairytales. Once out of view, Koffler put the spurs to his horse and sped away. Smith immediately followed suit.

  He drew level with the professor around a gently curving bend in the trail. Koffler was splattered with mud kicked up by his horse’s hooves, and his face had settled into a thin-lipped mask. He did not look to possess even one small part of the confidence he’d expressed back at the waterfront, and for a moment his unsmiling demeanor gave Smith to doubt they were racing toward Cady at all. Instead, Koffler wore the mien of a true fugitive with all the hounds of Hell snapping at his heels. Awaking to Smith’s presence on his flank, he at once relaxed into a merely worried grimace as he shouted over the thunder of their ironshod mounts, “Now that we are gone from the environs of Salem, needs must we make all haste, Smith.”

  The twin riders pounded through the forest, side by side on the narrow path, and Smith shouted back, “You don’t look too happy to be gone, Professor.”

  “It is good we are underway, but I wish to make Boston in double time.”

  “Why?”

  Koffler did not look at him when he answered, instead concentrating on the way ahead as he shouted his reply.

  “I heard from a stablehand that the magistrate they call Deodat Granville has ridden out for Boston two hours past, in pursuit of Miss Cadence and Goody Bradbury. I believe him to be an Apprentice.”

  The strenuous buffeting of their ride disguised any physical reaction Smith might have had, but there was no missing the ire in his voice.

  “How so?” he roared as thunder rumbled in the distance. A low ground mist lay ahead of them, creeping from the undergrowth to seep across the beaten track, obscuring it and forcing them to slow a little.

  “There is no Deodat Granville in the record of the witch trials,” Koffler explained without taking his eyes from the road. Either horse could easily snap a foreleg in a gopher hole or washout, pitching its rider through the air and crashing down on top of him. Smith never once let his eyes stray from the path, but he attended to Koffler with as much attention as he could safely spare.

  “I fear the Watchmakers placed him here,” Koffler went on. “To ensure Miss Cadence was excised from the line of years. If he is en route to catch her at Boston, we must overtake him, or at the very least reach the city coincident with his arrival.”

  “Why did you not tell me earlier?” Smith shouted.

  “I did not want you drawing unwelcome notice by galloping through Salem like a Horseman of the Apocalypse… which you would have done.”

  Koffler was right of course. Even now, Smith spurred his mount to greater effort despite the peril of racing through an unfamiliar course in darkness and heavy fog. The woods grew thicker and pushed in on both sides of the narrow trail. Moss hung from trees like the rotting rags of murmuring swamp ghosts, and bare branches seemed to reach for them with ragged claws and malign intent. Lightning flickered and thunder followed, but Smith did not slow his pace even as he drew ahead of Koffler. The thick, swirling mist did not merely obscure the ground, but gradually climbed to the height of a man, and after swallowing everything below that, to the height of a rider on a wildly racing horse.

  Finally he had to slow. He was in danger of crashing off the trail and into the woods. He knew from last night’s trek to Salem that the terrain here
abouts was treacherous. A few strides off the path and you might plunge into a steep ravine or a fresh washout, falling twenty or thirty feet onto sharp rocks hidden by rushing floodwater.

  He must have outpaced Koffler by a considerable margin, because it was some time before the professor reappeared from behind. He had slowed his horse to a canter.

  “I believe it would be appropriate for me to say I told you thus,” the German said.

  Smith was panting and sweating. He ignored the German’s barb.

  “An Apprentice?” he said. “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I am not sure,” Koffler snapped back. “You can never be sure with them. Miss Cadence left two volumes of instruction on their methodology and her prescriptions for countering it. She warns that we can never truly be sure when an Apprentice might arrive. But this magistrate reeks of their stink to me. The village was aflame with gossip about him and the cache of Devil’s instruments he carried away with him.”

  “Cady’s travelin’ pack,” Smith said. “It must be.”

  “Almost certainly,” Koffler agreed.

  They slowed the horses to a walk now. The fog was of such grumous density that to go with any haste was to invite catastrophe. Smith experienced the forest more as a world of things heard than seen. The creaking of great tree trunks as they gently swayed in the breeze that stirred their highest reaches. The hissing of that wind through those bare branches like a thousand winged serpents in the air. Water everywhere. Running, gurgling, dripping. The cries and calls of unfamiliar birds. The rustle of ground ferns and the crash of big game…

  Phfft.

  Phfft.

  Phfft.

  “Ayayayayaya!”

  “MOVE!” Smith roared as arrows cleaved the swirling mist in front of his nose. “Injuns!”

  Koffler’s horse reared up and the old cavalryman struggled to regain control as ululating battle cries spiraled all around them.

  Phfft.

  Phfft.

  Smith tensed at the wet, solid thunk of an arrow striking Koffler’s horse, the merest fraction of a second before the animal’s pitiable shrieks began and it threw Koffler to the ground with a thump. Every inch of his skin prickled in anticipation of the missile storm that would soon fall on them, but instead the native warriors, screaming and bellowing their promise of death, closed in to count the coup upon their foe. They did not so much emerge from the funereal shroud of mist as they solidified all around the two white men. Smith charged his horse at three of the savages grouped closely together, urging it on when he felt it balk at the collision. It was not an animal trained to the chaos and bloody madness of combat, but it did respond to his rough handling and the painful bite of his spurs, crashing into the men as they tried to raise muskets to shoot him from the saddle. The horse whinnied pitiably and reared on its hind legs, almost unseating Smith. One heavy, ironshod hoof punched down into the face of a snarling Indian with enough force to sheer off the nose and make a crimson ruin of his mouth. The man screamed out a gurgling howl and fell away into the fog.