Southern Rapture

by Jennifer Blake

  A resolve, once taken, should be carried through as soon as possible. So Lettie had been taught, and so she did. When she and the others returned to Splendora, she went to her room, took off her hat and gloves and put them away, then sat down at the table where she wrote her letters. She drew paper toward her, unstoppered the ink, dipped her pen, and began at once to write.

  The pen nib made a scratching sound that was loud in the quiet of her room. The smell of the ink was bracing. She did not pause to think; what was the need? She had composed what she must say on the drive back from the funeral, in the long twilight hours on the veranda, during the empty hours of the night, over and over again, waking and sleeping, for weeks.

  The sense of finally doing something that was right sustained her until the last line was written and she had signed her name. A teardrop—where had it come from?—dropped on the page. She reached quickly for the blotter and held it on the drop until it was absorbed. The word where it had fallen was blurred. Let it go; she could not bear to write it out again.

  She folded the paper with care and set it aside. Taking another sheet and positioning it in front of her, she dipped her pen again. She sat with the nib poised and ready. No words came. She put her pen down and put the paper away. It would be just as well if she delivered this message in person. She would do it in the morning, early.

  The sun had gone down and shadows were gathering in the room. It was the blue hour of dusk when the summer heat began to loosen its iron grip. Through her open windows she could hear the murmur of voices from the veranda where Ranny and Aunt Em were sitting to catch the stir of the evening breeze. Somewhere in the fields behind the house a pair of doves were calling. The sound was plaintive, nearly despairing.

  Lettie picked up the folded letter. She pushed back her chair and moved toward the door. She passed the dressing table and for a moment her reflection slid across the mirror above it. She paused, startled. Pale and composed and tight-lipped, her hair drawn back and severe, her mirrored image might have been that of her own grandmother, as in her picture that hung in the stairwell of the house in Boston. Swinging away, Lettie went quickly out of the room.

  The smell of chicken roasting with garlic and onions and other herbs hung in the backyard near the kitchen. Mama Tass could be heard rattling silver and shaking pots on the stove. It would not be long before dinner was announced. She would have to hurry.

  The sky in the west was shaded with lavender and gold. The colors had dyed the glassy surface of Dink's Pond. The water, smelling faintly of fish and decaying vegetation, appeared placid. It was deceiving. Insects skated across it or hovered, nervously dancing, above it. There was a plopping sound and a small wave now and then as a feeding fish broke the surface. A slight roiling at the edge was the activity of young frogs and fingerlings. The arrow shape in the water was the track of a snake. The upright form in the shadows was a blue heron standing motionless on one leg, waiting for its supper.

  Wherever there was life, death waited. It could not be avoided. But no man had the right to beckon it forward for another. No man.

  There was the hollow tree. Lettie put the letter inside it and withdrew her hand.

  Pain assailed her, settling in her chest. The Thorn would come and stand here where she stood now. He would put his hand inside and take her letter, touching the paper she had held. He would read it, and perhaps he would smile.

  She put her hand out to the tree for support, leaning her forehead against the living wood. She had known it would be hard, but not this hard.

  Betrayal.

  He had betrayed her. He had taken her body and her spirit and changed them in some strange manner so that she hardly knew herself. He had awakened those primitive responses that lie dormant inside most civilized human beings. Helped by this damp and warm land where life was so abundant, helped even by Ranny, he had turned her into the kind of harlot who could love a murderer.

  Love.

  It did not seem possible. She hardly knew him. He came and went in a hundred disguises, a hundred moods, none of them ever quite the same. But he had touched her and held her and kept her from the storm, and there was in the taste and feel and sight of him something that her mind and body craved, something beyond desire, something that had no other word to encompass its meaning except love.

  If she did not love him, why did his betrayal cause such anguish? Why did she feel as if in betraying him she was destroying herself?

  She could not stand there forever. It was growing dark and she would be missed. She preferred that Aunt Em and Ranny not know what she had done, not while they could stop it. They would have to know when it was over, of course; there was no help for it. They would think that she had betrayed them, too. She was sorry about that, desperately sorry.

  It could not be helped. The decision, the only one possible, was made. Now all she had to do was live with it. If she could.

  She straightened, turned. Picking up her skirts, she walked back toward Splendora.

  Ransom stepped out of the willows on the far side of the pond. He stood staring after Lettie with narrowed eyes and his hands resting on his hips. When she was out of sight, he began to make his way toward the hollow tree.

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  16

  One twilight was very like another. The sun went down, the light faded, night came. It had been happening for thousands of years and would happen for thousands more. The only difference in this one from all those these many weeks past, or indeed from the evening before when Lettie had left her note in the tree, was that there was a wind blowing from the southwest. Hot, dry, and fitful, it rustled the leaves on the trees until they clashed like small paper cymbals and sent the dust from the road fogging through the house. She blamed her headache on it.

  Lettie and Aunt Em sat in the hallway after dinner. Lettie pretended to read while Aunt Em stitched a pillowcase, replacing a lace edge that had come loose in washing, and made desultory conversation. Ranny and Lionel were out back in the kitchen with Mama Tass, who had decided to bake bread and tea cakes sweetened with molasses while it was as cool as it could possibly be in late July. They were to have the tea cakes, when they were done, with milk that had been cooled in a bucket lowered in the well.

  "I talked to Peter while I was over at Elm Grove this morning. It seems he is reconciled to having a Yankee for a father. Thomas has promised him a pony cart and a pony to pull it. It's wrong to try to buy the boy's affections, but I suppose all's fair in love and war. Who would have thought a soldier would have the means to do all he's done? Not that it signifies. There must have been a lot of men in uniform these last few years who would never have taken up the sword except to protect what they own."

  "On both sides, I'm sure," Lettie said.

  "Sally Anne is still cool toward him, but at least she talks to him. I'm not sure whether she's keeping him at a distance because she doesn't care for him or from sheer pigheaded pride. Things will be in a pretty mess when all's said and done if she refuses him, but he got himself into it. In the meantime, Elm Grove is protected from the tax collector or anyone else who might want to take over the place. That's a terrible way to look at it, but it's true."

  "A practical way, rather."

  "Yes, we have to be practical." Aunt Em knotted her thread and held up the pillowcase to look at it. "Sally Anne was upset. It seems Angelique, Marie Voisin's friend, has received what I can only describe as an indecent offer. Some man has had the nerve to ask her to go to New Orleans with him and become his mistress. If she wanted to be practical, she would accept."

  "Because she is of mixed blood?" Lettie's voice was sharper than she had intended.

  "What else is there for her? There's no suitable man for her among the gens de couleur libre, she has too much breeding and education to marry a freedman even if she would consider it, and there is no longer the huge dowry that might have persuaded a white man to accept her as a wife."

  "But a mistress!"

  "Suc
h women are given a certain respect in New Orleans. They have a house of their own, horses, a carriage. The arrangement can, and often does, last for years, sometimes until the man marries, sometimes for life. Any children are educated and provided for by the father. Somewhere below a wife but much above a woman of the streets, it isn't a bad life."

  "Possibly not, for the man."

  "I can't help wondering who made her the offer. O'Connor was taken with her. I hope she won't trust herself to him if that's who it was. He may have heard about such arrangements, but I'll be bound he doesn't understand how they work. He's likely to keep her for a month or two, then that'll be the end of it. But I haven't heard anything about him moving to New Orleans."

  Lettie made a sound that could be taken for interest. She wished the other woman would stop talking. All she wanted to do was to sit quietly and wait for the hour when she could pretend to go to bed, the hour when she must keep her appointment.

  A large, pale green lunar moth came fluttering in at the door. It circled, hesitating as if testing its welcome, then flew straight toward the lamp. Lettie reached to bat it away from the lamp chimney and the scorching flame inside. The moth caught and clung to her hand, its swallowtail quivering. She sat staring at it, intrigued and repelled and oddly touched by its confidence in her. It could not know she was not to be trusted.

  "Speaking of moving, they say Mrs. Reeden is going to live with relatives in Monroe. She can't bear to stay where her son was killed, or so the story goes. It's the scandal she can't bear. But there, I shouldn't say such things. We all have our burdens and carry them as best we can."

  "I suppose we do." The moth, alarmed by her voice, lifted in the air and flew away. Lettie watched it circle and land on the gilded frame of a picture.

  "Goodness, but you're pale, my dear. I hope you aren't sickening for something. You've been very healthy, but newcomers are often ill until they get used to the heat. Maybe I should have been giving you sassafras tea. The old folks swear by it as a blood thinner and purifier."

  "I just have a little headache."

  "Would you like some of Ranny's laudanum? I'll be glad to get it for you. I know how it is. I don't get a headache often, but when I do it's a dandy."

  "No, no, I'll be fine." Laudanum would put her to sleep. That was the last thing she wanted. "Here is Ranny with the tea cakes. Maybe that's what I need."

  The evening passed, the minutes and hours going faster and faster until finally the clock in the parlor struck eleven and it was time to go. Lettie slipped from the dark house by way of her jib window. Her stockinged feet made no sound on the veranda floor or the steps. When she reached the ground, she stopped to put on her riding boots, then went quickly through the gate and along the drive to where the colonel waited. She mounted the horse he had brought for her with the aid of a leg-up, then gathered the reins in her hands.

  Even then she could have stayed behind. There was no need for her to go. Her visit to the colonel that morning was enough. He and his men could have done the rest.

  She could not let them. She was compelled to see what would happen. It was her duty, she told herself. She had begun this thing and must see it through. For Henry and for all the other people who had died, she must see the Thorn captured once and for all.

  But there was more to it than that. She wanted to know, needed to know, who the man was who had tricked and deceived her, used her and taught her to love. She could not stand not knowing another hour, another day. Her curiosity was like an illness festering inside her. It gave her no surcease, would allow her no peace until she learned his identity and where he lived and how.

  And still that was not all. As at the death of some favored dream, she felt the need to hold a vigil. She had allowed herself to think for a time, against all odds, that there might be a man who risked his life so that others might live, who held his principles strong and untarnished, who fought against what was wrong not because he had anything to gain or lose but because he knew it wasn't right. The demise of a hero deserved a mourner or two.

  But more than these things, she had to be there because she had to face him. It was necessary for her to see him as a man, only a man. She wanted him to be angry, to curse her as he was put into bonds. She wanted to see him made small so that he would resume his normal size in her mind, so that she could see him as the calculating killer she knew him to be. She wanted proof, justification, a consciousness of being right so that the nagging doubts in her mind would be resolved, so that she could sue for peace with her soul.

  Finally, she wanted to be there for Henry in order to be true, at last, to his memory. She wanted to know that the man she had helped to entrap was her brother's murderer, that she had brought about what she had come so far to do. She wanted reassurance that she had kept faith with Henry so that she could leave this place and never return.

  Reasons and more reasons, but in the end it was a small thing really that she required. She just wanted to see him. And she felt she owed it to him to see him alone, for the sake of past consideration.

  Lettie and the colonel made good time. Thirty minutes before the hour set for the meeting, they were within a mile of it. The colonel's men had been deployed well before dark in case the Thorn should take the time to watch the place before he came in. There was no reason to suspect that he might fear a trap, still, it was best to be prepared. The colonel drew rein, and Lettie pulled up beside him.

  "Are you sure you want to meet him alone?" he asked.

  "I'm sure."

  "I'll warn you again, it may be dangerous if he decides to shoot it out."

  "I appreciate your concern."

  "I want your word that at the first sign of trouble you will drop to the floor and stay there."

  "I'll do that."

  "My men and I will never be far away. It will be over before you know it."

  "Please don't worry about me."

  He swore. "How can I not? I shouldn't let you do this. I'd order you to stand back and let us take care of it if I thought it would do any good. You know that if anything happens to you, Sally Anne will never forgive me."

  "That is, of course, something for me to worry about," she said with wry humor.

  "Oh, the devil, you know what I mean!"

  "I do know, and I promise you I'll be all right."

  "See that you keep that promise."

  She rode on without him, leaving him to reach the rendezvous by a more circuitous route.

  The night was moonless and dusty. The wind with the breath of the Texas plains in it dried out her face so that the skin felt tight and stretched. It also made her horse skittish. Or it might have been her own edginess affecting her mount. She was not without a certain apprehension. In fact, her nerves were tied in knots. It wasn't her safety that troubled her, however, but rather this terrible need to be assured that she had done the right thing.

  She thought the colonel, from the way he had looked at her, suspected her of setting this trap for revenge. He could not know all the reasons she might have for doing that. Weren't the deaths of two men, her brother and Johnny, enough?

  Still, he was wrong. Or was he? She felt no need to gloat over the Thorn, and yet remnants of her anger lingered. It was her own weakness that enraged her most. To see the man laid by the heels might assuage it, it very well might, but it was not her main object. Her motive was much more complicated than that.

  Was it really?

  She had told herself a great many things, marshaled reasons by the score, but in the end she thought that what she wanted most of all was to hear what the Thorn would have to say in his defense. If there was anything he could say.

  The turning that led to the corncrib lay before her. The woods around it were quiet, so quiet. The colonel's men were well hidden; she saw not a sign of them. The track was narrow and overreached by the rampant new growth of the summer. The briers of vines tugged at her poplin skirts, and the tassels of some blooming grass sent out floating bits of fluff that tickled h
er nose as she passed.

  The low corn crib was a dark shape more sagging and forlorn than when she had seen it last, and the lean-to seemed lower and more ramshackle. She unhooked her knee from the side horn and slid to the ground, then stood holding to the stirrup while she stamped the prickles of cramp from her legs.

  She stared about her in the darkness. This was where the Thorn had spent the night when she had forced him at gunpoint out of the corncrib into the inclement weather. He must have huddled against the wall over there, away from the dripping rain. It was a wonder he had not crept back inside and disarmed her while she slept. She had never thought of that.

  And there was no point in thinking of it now. Holding one hand before her, she felt in the darkness for a post and tied up the horse. The animal pushed at her with his head, as if wondering where his oats were, and she stood for a moment holding the bridle, rubbing her hand over his nose. She gave him a last pat and turned toward the corncrib.

  The door creaked as she pulled it open. The familiar smell of cornhusks and mice and dust assailed her, bringing memories she would just as soon forget. She had a sudden impulse to slam the door and run, run and never stop running until she reached the outskirts of Boston.

  It wouldn't do. She must finish what she had begun. She owed it to Johnny. It was here that she had stood talking and joking with him while they waited for the Thorn to come to take him to Texas. Here that they had first seen that caricature of an old woman, that deadly old woman.

  If she concentrated on those things, she might hold those other memories at bay, the ones she had tried so hard to wipe from her mind.

  It could not be done.

  She should have set this meeting for somewhere, anywhere, else. Inside the crib, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, fighting to keep her mind blank. Still, they crowded in on her, the memories. The unbelievable cataclysm of desire she had shared with a murderous stranger. The wonders of touch. The magic of joined bodies. That odd sense of recognition, not of his identity, but of something inside him that made him seem a familiar soul. These things were imprinted on her mind and heart beyond forgetting. There was only one thing that could remove them, and that was death.