A Dream of Daring

by Gen LaGreca

  Through breaks in the oak trees, Tom noticed a man coming up the winding path toward the mansion, a man whose perseverance surprised him, a man who had not slept the previous night but who instead had set out on a lengthy trip following his meeting at the Crossroads. With ruthless persistence in carrying out his duty, this man had no doubt already been to Baton Rouge and Indigo Springs and was now here to arrest Ladybug. Riding up the hill and just minutes away from arriving, accompanied by a deputy, was Sheriff Robert Duran.

  CHAPTER 30

  “Why, that looks like the sheriff, Mama!” Gleefully, Rachel pointed outside. She hurried toward the door. “I’ll tell him we’ve got the murderess!”

  “Oh no, you won’t!” Tom caught Rachel in mid-stride.

  With one hand he lifted her up by the waist; with the other, he covered her mouth. She kicked furiously and tried to bite him, but he held her fast as Ladybug grabbed a few fabric scraps lying in a basket, then gagged her sister and helped Tom tie her feet and hands.

  Charlotte, still dazed, put up little fight as Tom and Ladybug dispatched of her in the same fashion. Tom dropped each of the bundles inside an armoire and closed its doors while Ladybug undid a few fasteners and peeled off her gown, hoop, and petticoat in one motion. In a corset and pantalets, she jumped over the small mountain of fabric at her feet and threw on the slave’s frock.

  Tom whispered an instruction in her ear.

  She nodded and said pointedly, facing the closed armoires with the women inside: “I know a way to Natchez that’ll keep us off the main road.”

  “Shh! Let’s go,” said Tom.

  Ladybug slid her knife back in its strap on her leg and hastened out of the room, with Tom closing the door behind them.

  He grabbed the gun and holster from the senator’s desk, and they headed down to the first floor just as two house servants were arriving to begin the day’s work.

  A morning breeze brushed their faces as the two fugitives shot out the back door and onto the horses that had been brought there for them.

  * * * * *

  Tom and Ladybug were concealed by trees and shrubs along the back roads to Bayou Redbird . . . until they came near the factory. The road on the ridge midway up the hillside made the fugitives more visible. On one side of them was the drop to Cutter’s Creek, its stream racing toward the port town where the bayou met the great Mississippi. On the other side was the steep climb to the top of the hill, with its intermittent thickets of foliage and fields of clover. Tom eyed the openness of their new surroundings warily, eager to get past this leg of their trip.

  He had traveled this road before, in the opposite direction, when he was leaving the murder scene at the Crossroads Plantation and heading north to Ruby Manor. Then, he had wanted to avenge the death of the man he thought had fought to save his invention from a thief. Now, he was riding alongside the thief and killer, and his all-consuming goal was to help her escape.

  Along the way he had constantly looked back, but he saw no sign of the sheriff. Surely the Barnwell women had been discovered and set free, and surely they had told the sheriff what they overheard when tied up in the armoires—Ladybug’s comment that she and Tom were headed north to Natchez. Could the sheriff have fallen for the ruse and gone in the wrong direction?

  Up ahead the inventor saw the turnoff to the switchback he had taken down to the factory. They were close to town! Would they reach the docks without a snag? Could he dare hope that he and his precious companion would soon be out of danger?

  He turned to her, impatient to complete the nerve-racking trip, his anxiety increasing with the openness of the new stretch of road. “Let’s go faster!”

  Just when they needed to make haste, Ladybug got off her horse.

  He looked at her in disbelief. She was standing on the road, ten feet behind him. “What are you doing? We can’t stop now!”

  She had stopped at the edge of a line of shrubbery and the beginning of a field of clover going up the hill. “This is where I hauled your invention, over this clover to the top of the hill. It’s sitting by those trees and shrubs up there.” She pointed. “I want to take you to it.”

  “We don’t have time! I’ll tell Nick where it is, and he’ll ship it to us. We have to move fast now!”

  “For the past three months I wanted to get the inventor to the invention. Now that I’ve done that, I have to leave you here with the tractor and go on alone.”

  He stared at her incredulously. Slowly, he dismounted and faced her. “What’s this all about?”

  “I once read a newspaper story about a free man who helped a slave escape. He got ten years in prison! You’ll get worse, because I’m wanted for . . . murder. I can’t do that to you, Tom.”

  He studied the figure on the road, her mouth unsmiling, her gaze direct, her feet firmly planted. Everything about her said she was adamant.

  “Listen to me, Ladybug. Every bad thing that’s happened to you, from being whipped by Markham to being sold to Fowler to battling with Barnwell—it all happened because of my invention. You risked your life to save it. If there were no other reason, obligation alone would demand that I help you.”

  “I free you of that obligation.”

  “I don’t want to be freed of it.”

  “I don’t want to live knowing I saved the invention but destroyed the inventor.”

  “Look, I choose to do this. I want to do it. We’ll talk about that later. But right now, we’ve got to get out of here!”

  He walked toward her, wanting to grab her shoulders and shake some sense into her, then plunk her back on the horse. Suddenly, she grabbed her knife and pointed it at him.

  “Put that away.” He grinned, walking into the knife.

  In a flash, she flicked her wrists so that the blade was pointing directly at her heart. “Stay back!” she warned.

  His face froze and his legs stopped in sudden paralysis.

  Her hands were steady on the knife and her voice was even, the signs of a deliberate, rather than impulsive, act. “Tom, I wanted to go this route not only to show you where I hid the invention but also to leave you here with it . . .”—her voice was sad but resolute—“. . . and to say . . . goodbye.”

  “Goodbye? We’ve barely said hello.”

  “If you leave town aiding a murderer and a slave, you’ll never be able to return. If you come back, you’ll be arrested. Good grief, Tom, you could be hanged. If you leave here with me now, you’ll lose everything: your plantation, your bank, your whole life. I can’t do that to you. I won’t do it.” The knife blade caught the morning sun and glistened menacingly close to her heart, highlighting her words.

  “Don’t you think I knew all of what you just said before I started this ride with you? I don’t intend to come back, not ever. I want to start a new life in the North . . . with you.”

  “That’s impossible! You can’t even think of that!” She shook her head decisively. “Who would accept you?”

  “Would you?”

  She was stunned by the question.

  When she didn’t answer, he persisted. “If we were in another place and time, free of everybody’s rules, and we could do as we please, then would you . . . say yes?”

  All of her fervent wishes for something important to happen in her life seemed to coalesce in her face and voice as she replied. “If we lived in another place and time, in a world where the people who stand in the way, thwarting my dreams like monolithic stone figures, immovable and heartless . . . if we lived in a world free of them, my answer would be yes.” Her face softened and her smile caressed him. “Yes, Tom.”

  “But we can be free of them, as soon as we get out of here. We’re already acting free. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m proposing and you’re accepting.” He looked tenderly at her and nervously at the countryside around them. “Now, if that’s settled, we can’t linger here! It’s too dangerous!”

  It apparently wasn’t settled. The knife still pointed at her heart. “What you’re saying
can’t be done.”

  “The whole world isn’t Greenbriar, you know.” The softness that the subject brought to his face vanished when he saw her hands stiffen around the blade of the knife. The earnest look in her eyes frightened him.

  “Tom, my answer was yes for another place and time. For this place and time, it’s no! If you help me escape, it’ll destroy your life here. If you stick with me in the North, it’ll destroy your life there. I can’t let any of that happen!”

  “But I won’t be destroyed! And you won’t be either. Giving up is what’ll destroy us!”

  “Every person will shun you. Every door will be closed to you. You’ll be ruined.”

  “There will be places that accept us. And even if there aren’t, why would we care? No one can stop us from living as we please. Now’s the chance for both of us to break free and be masters of ourselves.”

  “You’ll have parties and social gatherings to go to. You’ll have business to do, customers to meet, people to deal with, events to attend, entertaining to do in your life. You couldn’t have any of that with me. If you go any further with me, the risk, the harm, the danger, and the loss will all be yours.”

  “The happiness will be mine too.”

  His words floated to her in the morning breeze. She stood facing him on the road, her hair swaying in the wind in tempo with the shrubs on the hillside behind her. “But Tom—”

  “I’m not leaving you, Ladybug. You’re the only one who saw the glory that I saw in my invention. You’re the only one who wants to dream new dreams, the only one who isn’t blinded by pictures that others paint of the world.”

  Her dark eyes were filled with desire and fear. She looked as if she wanted simultaneously to run into his arms and to run away. Both urges seemed to be vying within her as she swayed uneasily, her voice now faltering. “But . . . Tom . . .”

  “Your mother betrayed the man she loved, and she betrayed herself too. She accepted the world others made for her and spent her life with someone who wasn’t her real choice and who didn’t make her happy. Is that what you want me to do? To betray the person who’s my choice . . . because I’m afraid to stand up to others and follow my own will?”

  She stared at him, speechless.

  “I’m not going to betray my choice. . . . Are you?” he asked.

  Her arms lost some of their tautness, and her fists eased their grip on the knife.

  “Well, Ladybug? Do we get to finish what we started this morning?”

  He flashed a radiant, lusty smile of supreme self-confidence, like a young David who could slay any Goliath. His proud face and dogged hope slayed her fears. Slowly, the anguish lost its grip on her face and she smiled.

  In surrender to what they both wanted, the knife dropped to her side. He rushed up to her and seized the weapon. He crushed her body against him and kissed her hungrily.

  She whispered in his arms: “When I punched you the first time we met, I had to do it. Not because I hated you, but because you looked at me then the same way you do now. And I wanted you to look at me like that . . . I wanted you to. . . . From the start . . . I . . . wanted . . . you.” He tasted a sweet, warm mouth that found his with a passion that matched his own.

  Suddenly, he pushed away. He whirled around and stepped protectively in front of her. He thought he’d heard something. In the same instant Ladybug also reacted; the shrubs rustled behind him as she dove into them.

  He reached for his gun. But it was too late.

  Up ahead, at the top of the switchback, a man on horseback appeared, his gun already aimed and cocked.

  “Drop it!” said Sheriff Duran.

  CHAPTER 31

  “You heard me. Drop it!” Duran ordered.

  Tom dropped his gun.

  “The knife too.”

  Tom complied.

  “Get up here, Jeff, fast!” The sheriff called to his deputy, who was just coming into view up the switchback. “Get the girl! She jumped into the bushes behind him.”

  “Don’t shoot her!” Tom yelled. “She’s unarmed!”

  In a flash, the deputy dismounted from his horse.

  “Sheriff, please!” Tom pressed.

  “Jeff, restraint . . . if possible,” said the sheriff as the deputy disappeared into the brush on the hillside.

  Duran rode up to Tom, dismounted, and picked up the weapons, all the while aiming his gun at the inventor. The two men faced each other on the road while the shrubs on the hillside swayed helter-skelter in the deputy’s search. The sheriff waited hopefully—and Tom waited grimly—for the result.

  “When the Barnwell women told me you were helping the girl escape, I reckoned you’d head south to your bank. So when they told me you let it slip that you’re going north, even if it came from the girl, I’m not buying it. I figured you wouldn’t be that careless. I didn’t underestimate you, as you apparently did me.”

  “It seems I’ve been outwitted,” Tom conceded. “But how’d you know I’d take this road?”

  “I didn’t. You see, I didn’t want to take the wrong road and miss you, and I didn’t want to take the right road and risk you seeing me and slipping away. So instead I took a flatboat.”

  “I see.” Tom nodded in acknowledgment of the man’s keen intelligence. Like other plantations with water access, Ruby Manor had flatboats on hand to float cotton downstream to the steamship docks. These boats were ample for carrying horses as well.

  “The current was brisk, so I reckoned I’d get down the creek to Redbird before you did, then wait for you to arrive.” The distance by boat was shorter than by land. “But then you surprised me when I spotted you and the girl on this ridge.”

  Tom filled in the rest. “So you kept your boat close to the shore, out of our view, then you docked at the factory and came up the switchback.”

  “Too bad you didn’t work that out sooner.”

  “You’re good at your job, Sheriff. I assume that job is to serve the cause of justice. That’s why I have things to tell you that I’m sure the Barnwell women left out, since they serve a different cause.”

  “After you attacked them and imprisoned them in their closets, I’m sure they weren’t feeling up to par.”

  “Did the women tell you that Rachel and Ladybug are sisters?”

  “Haven’t we all figured out that the girl traces back to the senator?”

  “But she doesn’t. Rachel and Ladybug have the same mother, Charlotte Barnwell.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Did the women leave that out of their report to you? Charlotte, Rachel, and Ladybug all have the same birthmark over their hearts.”

  Tom knew that the revelation about Greenbriar’s grande dame, the one woman beyond reproach, stunned the sheriff—as it would everyone else in town.

  “After I fired Bret Markham, he set a torch to my house.”

  “The Barnwell women told me.”

  “I sent a note to you reporting it, but you had already left for Baton Rouge and were on your way back by then, weren’t you?”

  “Like you said, I’m good at my job.”

  “The possibility that Markham could retaliate against the Barnwells, along with our injuries from the fire, brought me to Ruby Manor with a slave I bought three months ago. After I got there, I found out her real identity. The birthmarks on her and the Barnwell women—and the truth about their relationship—came out this morning at Ruby Manor, and I was a witness.”

  Tom proceeded to tell him about Charlotte’s lover who built Ruby Manor, Leanna’s birth, the empty casket, the enraged Wiley Barnwell drowning Leanna’s father despite Charlotte’s admission that it was she who started the affair. The inventor described how Charlotte’s child was reared in slavery by Polly and renamed Ladybug, and how he came to buy her from Fowler without knowing the seller’s or slave’s identity until a few hours ago. He related how Ladybug was whipped by Markham, chased by Nash, sold by Barnwell, and raped by Fowler.

  Tom paused for a response from the man whose
eyes drilled through him like two intense beacons. The sheriff simply waited to hear the rest, so Tom continued.

  “If you see the birthmarks of the three women, as I have, their relationship will be obvious. If you dig up the casket of Leanna Barnwell, you’ll find it empty. And if you read Polly’s note in her plantation journal nineteen years ago about the funeral for Ruby Manor’s carpenter-slave, Daniel, I think you’ll find that it occurred immediately after the birth date marked on Leanna’s fake tombstone. If you can speak to Charlotte before Rachel manages to dominate her completely, you might get her to admit all of this, as she did to me and Ladybug. She’s terrified of a public scandal, but if you talk to her in private, you might be able to capture these facts from what’s left of her sanity.”

  The sheriff remained stone-faced.

  “So you see, Sheriff, Ladybug was born free as the child of a white woman. But she was abandoned to slavery by her mother. She was sold to a brute by Wiley Barnwell, the finest, most upstanding citizen of your town, who also murdered her father. What happened to her has everything to do with servitude, abuse, and cruelty and nothing at all to do with murder. You know, self-defense isn’t a crime.”

  The sheriff continued to stare at Tom without blinking.

  “Now, if you’re good at your work, Sheriff, which you are, and if your job is to serve justice, which I think you pride yourself on, then tell me this: Will Charlotte ever be tried for abandoning her daughter to slavery? Will Fowler ever be tried for raping her? Was Wiley Barnwell ever tried for drowning Ladybug’s father, Daniel? Where has justice been for Ladybug’s whole life?”

  “What happened the night of the murder?” The sheriff proceeded on his own track. “Fowler says she took his horse and went missing. That gives her the opportunity. Barnwell’s mistreatment of her provides the motive.”