And never come back.”
What would I do without him to work the farm? There were just the two of us, and try as I might, I knew I’d never manage alone. Marshall hadn’t thought a thing about me when he traipsed off to join John Brown’s Free-Soil insurrection. It was my bad luck, feeling I had to do the thinking for him now.
“Hurry,” I said. He opened the outhouse door and slipped through the tiniest slit possible, while I braced myself for the shot that would mow him down in front of my eyes. The watcher on the hill didn’t see him, I guess, because the shot never came. My innards protested once more, and I wished I could spare the time to use the privy. Well, mind over matter.
“Where’s my gun?” Marshall asked. “I’ve got to have my rifle.
John will be awful mad at me if I show up without it.”
“Don’t you speak to me of John Brown. I don’t want to hear his name mentioned. To hell with John Brown, and to hell with Henry Beecher’s Bibles.” Bibles is what the shipping crate had said, the day it arrived on Brown’s doorstep, with the words stenciled in big letters on the lid. Inside were Sharps .52 Breechloaders, sent by abolitionists to fuel the insurrection.
How Marshall had laughed when he recounted the tale to me. How proud he’d been of that weapon of destruction, of death. God help him, he was still proud.
Marshall stared at me, shocked as he finally realized how much I despised his hero. Shocked him into silence for long enough to hear, from over the ridge, as Lolly, his riding mare, nickered when she caught the scent of a strange horse. I suppose the sentry heard her, too, and I knew if he found Lolly, Marshall’s chance of getting away clean would be just about zero.
We froze, staring at each. “Go,” I told him. “Go now. Run.”
“Sis…” he said, but there were no other words. He gave me a helpless shrug and took off running through the back pasture. He’d slip over the ridge and reach his horse before the soldier had time to ride around. Without a backward glance, he pushed through a half dozen cows slowly ambling toward the barn in expectation of the morning milking.
We didn’t have time to say goodbye.
The soldier’s horse crashed through the brush at the top of the hill, heading in Lolly’s direction. Close. Too close. I took a deep breath…and screamed. The crashing changed direction.
God save me. I didn’t feel like being a sacrifice. I needed to use the privy.
The icy-eyed soldier spurred his horse into the yard. I’d known it would be him. For the moment he didn’t see me standing in the shadows with only my racing heart to keep me company.
Then he did see me, and he kneed his horse, forcing the unwilling animal until it nearly walked over the top of me. I grabbed the bridle close by the bit and walked alongside the horse until he stopped.
“Bitch,” the soldier said, without heat, as though it didn’t matter.
And perhaps it didn’t matter, not from the heart. Did he care for a settler family and the men who had killed them? I didn’t think so. His reputation and the performance of his duty were what he cared about.
And he wanted to punish me because I had thwarted him, not once, but two times. He wore a sergeant’s stripes. He may have been afraid he’d lose them if Marshall made his escape…if I made mine.
“He won’t get away,” he told me, as though he’d received direct word from God that his prophesy would come true.
“Maybe he will,” I said, not trying for any denials. My belly gurgled.
“Huh-uh.” He shook his head under the blue soldier cap. “I’ll get him. I’ll catch up with him, and when I do, I’m gonna kill him. He’s not worth the bother taking prisoner—a little sissy boy, hiding behind his sister. And you! You thought you could trick me with your innocent act, didn’t you? Didn’t work though. Nobody tricks Slade McSylvie.
Not for long.”
“Don’t they?”
His eyes bored into mine. “Not even you,” he said. “Especially not you. I don’t like red-haired women. Bitches, all of you.”
Not knowing what to say, I kept quiet. He sounded crazy dangerous, and I didn’t believe it would take much to set him wild. A wintry chill curled around my heart and a frantic beat echoed in my ears.
“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you? Hiding him and getting him away. Where’d you have him? Under your skirt?”
Sergeant McSylvie seemed in the way of working himself into a real tizzy. The horse stamped nervously, shaking his head and slobbering around the bit in his mouth as if anticipating the feel of the spur. I prayed the sergeant would not dismount, that he’d ride on…now.
He stepped out of the saddle with a metallic rattle of his spurs.
Unable to help myself, I backed away from his flat-eyed stare. I retreated over the uneven ground until the clothesline pole stopped any me. McSylvie pulled me to him with thick, sausage-like fingers wrapped around my arm. There was no use in struggling. I struggled anyway. He grinned, his teeth gray as a steel gun barrel in the waning moonlight.
“Sure,” he whispered. His eyes bored into mine. “Fight for it. Think you can win?” With his spare hand, he took hold of the front of my shirt and jerked. The fabric, weak from uncountable washings and days in the sun, split open, exposing my breasts to the damp morning air and chill ice blue of his gaze.
I was afraid to blink. My belly tightened. The flesh around the nipples of my bared breasts puckered hard with cold fear.
“Yeah,” he breathed. “Fight me.”
God help me! I couldn’t seem to help myself. I knew my actions inflamed him, yet I flinched and hit and pounded and cried and screamed and scratched anyway.
He forced me to the ground in front of him, laughing at my hate, and stood over me while he unbuttoned his trousers. He lowered himself slowly, savoring the moment, and then captured my flailing arms, not a bit worried as I hit at him again and again.
He was so huge, so invincible. Writhing, I managed to scooch a few inches before he stopped me. My eyes watered when a clump of hair was yanked from my scalp, caught in the splintery brace of the clothesline pole. I reached up…and my hand touched smooth, cold metal.
He was too busy in the area below my waist, doing something that caused me pain, to notice particularly when I twisted yet again. I grasped the Sharps from alongside the brace and in an effort that nearly broke my back, smashed the butt of the rifle into his face with all of the force I could muster.
Slade McSylvie dropped on top of me, sandwiching the gun between us. Not from design. He was out cold. I pushed him off, triumphant and gloating.
“Yeah, you bastard,” I said to him. “I think I can win.”
The first sliver of sun poked over the hill behind the house, illuminating McSylvie’s ruined nose and cheekbones. I could barely believe what I saw. I hadn’t realized I had the strength to wield a weapon with so much force. He wouldn’t be looking at the sunrise today. No. Nor ever again.
Dear Lord, I thought in horror. I’ve killed him. They’ll come after me now. Marshall and I were two of a kind. We’d both hang.
I needed to get up off the ground. I needed to use the privy, and while my soul might flinch at touching the gun, I couldn’t summon the fortitude to raise myself off the ground without using it as a prop. The barrel bored into the earth and my hand smeared with Sergeant McSylvie’s blood as I slowly rose to my feet.
Dirt clogged the barrel of the gun one hundred and fifty years later.
I remembered that before I became conscious of Dad’s voice, thick with the strain of calling me back. I think he’d been calling for quite a while.
“Boothenay…Boothenay. Damn it, girl, come back now. Wake up.”
And as an aside to Scott, whose presence I sensed as well, “Do something, son! I think it’s killing her.”
“Ohmigod! Look. There’s blood. Where is she hurt?” Scott sounded nearly as terrified as my father.
Quick, Boothenay. Pull yourself together before you give your poor old dad a heart attack and
finish him off. “I’m all right,” I tried to say.
“It’s not my blood.”
“Not my blood,” I did say.
I’m afraid I made quite a scene, moaning and whining, weeping.
My teeth felt as though I’d ground half the enamel off of them. I fought, but I didn’t know if I fought to come back to now, or if I wanted to go back to then.
My fingers clutched at the powdery, old dirt from the rifle’s barrel; dirt as brittle and dry as a dead man’s bones.
“What happened to her?” I demanded, although I’m sure I don’t know whom I was asking. “How did she manage? Did her brother escape?”
“Who?” Dad asked.
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Scott sounded furious in the aftermath of emergency.
Question upon question, and where could I find the answers? I looked at my family, my brother, strangely enough as precious to me as Beth’s brother had been to her and began to laugh. Oh, not really in amusement. More at the weirdness of life.
Dad looked on as though he feared for my sanity. I imagine I did seem a trifle peculiar. Scott, I think, if he’d had his druthers, would rather have slapped me silly.
“What’s so fricking funny? You sit for hours like the rags off a zombie, then all at once turn into this crazy woman with blood spurting all over you. And the great part is, this blood is coming out of nowhere!
Do you seriously expect us to figure out what’s going on? You’re the only wacko around here, Boothenay.”
Um. Scott was definitely an unhappy camper. There wasn’t all that much blood—not like I was drenched or anything.
“I’ve got to go back,” I said, sobering at the realization.
“And face your punishment? Who’d you shoot, Booth? Who’d you kill?”
“I didn’t shoot anyone,” I said. In point of fact, I hadn’t killed anyone either. Someone named Beth had done that. I may have been standing in her skin, feeling her emotions, but surely I’d been a witness, not a participant.
Even as I tried to sell myself on the witness story, I had a distinct memory of how it had felt when the rifle butt connected with McSylvie’s face. I gave a convulsive shudder and checked to make sure my shirt was closed over my chest.
No, there wasn’t as much blood as Scott had implied, but there was some. Just enough to show the parameters of this witching business were changing.
Before Scott had a chance to bark any more questions at me, the bell over the shop door tinkled. When I looked up, I saw the snowfall had become just a snowfall, no longer a wind-whipped blizzard. Traffic moved slowly along the slippery street.
The man who entered the shop carried a wrapped bundle under his arm. The telltale muzzle of a blunderbuss flared beneath the wraps.
Oh, great, I thought. What story does this one have to tell?
Somewhat warily the customer paused in the doorway, eying my blood-spattered clothing and hands.
“Well, folks,” he said in a soft southern drawl. Coolly, he observed the way the men hovered over me. “Do you need help? Has someone been shot?”
I had the crazy, intoxicating thought that here was the man fate meant just for me. You’re overwrought, I told myself, doing my best to shrug the feeling aside. A little dizzy, I stood up and announced, “No one has been shot. Excuse me, please. I need to go to the bathroom.”
Chapter 3
Caleb Deane walked through the door that day and, from the moment I laid eyes on him, I knew my life would never be the same.
Even at that first sight of him something inside of me just kind of soared, a sensation very much akin to the way power made me feel And like the power, this was something else I couldn’t logically explain.
The first thing he saw when he closed the door behind him was me, liberally sprinkled with blood, mud, and a substance that may have been brain tissue. A woman surrounded by a couple of shouting, gesticulating, obviously upset men. Did he retreat, like a prudent man?
He did not. Showing no fear, he came on in.
I can’t imagine where he got his nerve.
Gabe, my father’s old coonhound, rose with a creak of arthritic joints from his favorite spot beside the glowing wood stove. He ambled over to greet the new arrival and thrust his muzzle into the man’s fist.
Mostly the dog ignored the people who came and went. I took this for a sign—of what, I couldn’t yet tell.
And at this point, I didn’t much care. My feet felt as if they were touching the floor a couple of inches above its actual location. Groggy and tottering, I stood swaying after I slipped off the stool. I eyed the newcomer surreptitiously as I passed him on my way to the bathroom.
My God. I couldn’t believe I’d actually announced my need to a stranger.
I was aware of him watching me…all the way to the door and until I passed out of his sight, even though I had declined his offer of aid.
“Do you need help?” he’d asked. A rather foolhardy question when you think about it. But no. It was just me, Boothenay Irons, a little the worse for wear, mercifully delivered from my latest adventure where things had gone somewhat awry.
The way upstairs had never seemed so long. I barely got to the toilet before I was thoroughly sick to my stomach. When I had done with that, I crawled into the shower and washed McSylvie’s blood down the drain. The water ran and ran, until I thought I must be clean enough. I felt weak and drained.
He hated redheads, McSylvie had said, but when I rubbed steam off the bathroom mirror, I didn’t look any different than I ever had. Not a redhead. Still dark of hair and eye, still with the Irons’ family eagle beak. Beth had been small, I remembered. I’m not more than average height myself and a little on the slim side to boot, but compared with her, I felt huge. Is that what made it possible for her to save herself, I wondered? Had my twentieth century health and strength given her an edge? With all my heart, I hoped so. If that were the case, then maybe I’d finally learned why I had been given this power.
I dried my hair into its usual wiry curls, redid my eyelashes and climbed into a clean pair of jeans and a fuzzy sweater. By then, the savage emotion and exultation in the matter of McSylvie’s demise had begun to feel surreal and far away, like the fading edge of a nightmare.
A new face took shape in the shadow of my mind—the face of the man downstairs.
He’ll be gone when you go back, I told myself. It doesn’t matter.
Forget him. I couldn’t—or didn’t want to imagine why the thought of him bothered to stay with me.
Even so, when I came back down to the shop from our upstairs apartment, he was the first person I looked for. And found him, too.
There was Dad, settled in his rocking chair by the woodstove, calm now and self-possessed enough to carry on a normal conversation. Our new customer had pulled my stool over and was sitting between Dad and Scott, the three of them apparently on the best of terms. A stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff lay on my workbench amidst the jumble of grinder, punches, reamers and other tools of my trade. Beth’s rifle lay there also, but I couldn’t bring myself to so much as glance at it.
In fact, a good many days passed before I felt able to finish working on the Sharps, and when I finally did, every trace of power was drained and gone.
“Doc,” Dad announced, motioning toward the medical paraphernalia, “has checked me out and pronounced me fit.”
I looked at the newcomer who shook his head. “Not quite fit, Mr.
Irons,” he said. “I said you didn’t look like you’d be throwing in the towel today.”
“That is about as fit as I get, Doc,” Dad said.
“You’re a doctor?” I asked.
“No, not a doctor,” he denied. “Doc is just a nickname.”
Scott introduced us. “Boothenay, this is Caleb Deane,” he said.
“Caleb is a Physician’s Assistant-Certified, working over at Riverside Clinic.”
“Ah.” I nodded. At least there was something to back up the stateme
nt about Dad’s health. Caleb told us he’d acquired his nickname on the battlefields of Bosnia, Kosovo, and at various others of the ongoing, dirty little wars that never get called wars.
“Yeah,” he said, with a crooked smile. “The government is fond of words like peacekeeping missions, and joint NATO something or others, but somehow, the need for a medic never goes away. I’d guess I worked on as many civilian casualties as military ones.” He sighed, his lean face pensive. “I suppose in the long run it was good on-the-job training.”
Caleb may have earned his name in a tough venue, but I learned later he found Riverside almost as dangerous. It was the middle-of-the-night haunt of drug dealers and addicts, pimps and whores, and people like AIDS patients suffering from both symptoms and loneliness.
I could tell he didn’t want to say any more about Bosnia, or about his present job, and I must say I completely understood. What I’d been doing today wasn’t a topic I wanted brought up for discussion either, especially since I felt like I’d just been run through the spin cycle on the washing machine.
I sighed, feeling uninterested in and unprepared for any new conundrum. “Well, Mr. Deane, what sort of problem have you brought me?” I had to ask because, after all, it is what I get paid to do.
“I hope there is no problem,” Caleb said. He led the way to the counter where he had set his blunderbuss upon walking in on what he’d imagined to be an emergency as he entered the shop. He hadn’t carried the gun inside a case, but had wrapped a fleecy blanket around it to keep the snow off.
“See what you make of this,” he said. “Tell me if you think a little restoration is in order, or if you think I should leave well enough alone.” I saw pride in the off-hand way he spoke of the gun, so I knew it was special to him, even if I were to find nothing out of the ordinary.
I reached for the wrapping. I knew the piece was a thunder gun, or blunderbuss, as most people would say, because I’d already noticed the general shape: flared muzzle and rather shorter in length than muskets or rifles in general. What most people don’t realize is that blunderbusses are not all that rare. In fact, in collectors’ terms, they’re about as common as rocks.
In The Service Of The Queen (The Gunsmith Book 1) Page 4