by H. G. Parry
“Oh, wonderful. That repair will be coming out of taxpayers’ pockets.”
“I’ll increase the rate of taxation on hats or something. Nobody will notice.”
“I was going to buy a new hat next week.”
Pitt cocked his pistol and pointed it at the entrance to Westminster Abbey. “Very well, I’ll increase the rate of taxation on mistresses. We’ll let Fox pay for it.”
Wilberforce laughed, even as he tightened his grip on his silver-tipped stake. Fortunately, there was a moon shining through the gaps in the clouds, and the courtyard was palely illuminated. Above him, the western facade of the abbey loomed tall and white.
“Was it following us out?”
“Oh yes,” Pitt said. His gaze was fixed on the abbey. “It was following.”
Despite himself, Wilberforce shivered.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of movement and whipped his head around to see the figure emerging not from the west entrance, but from the north. For just a second, the familiar and unbearable sense of evil settled over his heart and took his breath and his voice away.
In that second, the figure started across the courtyard, directly for the prime minister.
He barely had a chance to call “Pitt!” and see his friend turn sharply first to him and then almost instantly in the direction he was looking, before with a sudden rush the thing was headed his way instead. He heard the click of Pitt’s finger on the trigger but no corresponding explosion as the gun misfired, and then the thing he had feared all his life was upon him.
It was so dark he couldn’t move, and so cold he couldn’t think. Something impacted him hard in the left side, and he slipped and fell to the wet ground. Just for a moment, the undead loomed over him: a rough, bearded face, waxen and decayed. Under bristling red eyebrows, where human eyes would be, the dark of a shadow leered out and swallowed him up. With sheer desperation he lunged upward with the point of the stake just as a gunshot cut through the night.
Then, all at once, it was over. Wilberforce lay doubled over on the ground, wet and numb and shaken clear through, but the world around him was right once more.
“Wilberforce!” Pitt’s voice sounded as though it wasn’t the first time he’d called his name. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” he said, or tried to. He was, too, except that for some reason his legs wouldn’t work and neither would his voice, and the fog around him was thicker than usual and very cold.
Then, in a rush, pain engulfed him, as though a match had been placed to his left side and ignited, and his flesh and bones and organs were suddenly ablaze. He glanced down, gasping, and saw that they were not, but that a good deal of the rain soaking him through was not rain at all.
“Good God,” he heard Pitt’s voice say. “Wilberforce? Can you hear me?”
“Yes—yes,” he managed. He tried to focus on his friend’s face, which had to be there, but his eyes were too misted. “What’s happened?”
“It’s gone,” Pitt said. He didn’t quite sound like himself. “It didn’t touch you in the way a shadow would. But it had a knife. Of course it would. Why would you create an undead and not arm it? I should have—”
Wilberforce tried to move and barely held back a cry. His vision dimmed, and when it lit again, the world was even more ghostly, and he felt faint and sick.
“Steady,” Pitt was saying. “Just a moment…” Something rough and spongy was being applied to his side; despite himself, he writhed away from the pressure, but a hand held his shoulder firmly.
“Steady. Can you hold that cloth there?”
“Of course,” Wilberforce said faintly, without moving. “Did you kill it?”
“The undead? No,” Pitt said. “No, you did. Your stake went through it the same time as its knife went through you. I was completely useless. I’m going to get you out of here now, understood?”
Wilberforce nodded, and then he felt an arm slip around his shoulders and lift him. The quick movement was like being stabbed again; it cut through the haze in agony more exquisite than he’d thought possible. He cried out, a noise something between a scream and a sob, and the motion stopped at once.
He gasped with relief, even though the fire at his side wasn’t much better. “I’m sorry,” he heard himself say. “I’m so sorry. It hurts.”
“I know.” Pitt’s voice had regained its usual tone: it was as kind and as cheerful as if they were sitting in the Lauriston House library or under the oak at Holwood. If there was a trace of panic, it was buried very deep. “It’s perfectly all right.”
But it wasn’t. They were right outside Westminster Abbey; people would be passing. He couldn’t remember why that was important, but it was.
“Wilberforce.” The voice seemed to be coming from a very long way away. “Can you still hear me?”
“Um…”
“Listen to me. Your house is only around the corner. I only need to get you there, and you’ll be all right. But I need you to stay awake, and stay quiet. Can you do that?”
“I…” He tried to answer, but he couldn’t remember the question anymore. The rain was falling still, and he thought it was mingling with tears on his face. “Why is it so cold?”
“It’s England.” There was a pause; then the voice became suddenly brisk. “Wilberforce, what’s Psalm twenty-seven?”
“What?”
“Psalm twenty-seven.”
He blinked slowly and tried to stir himself. “Which one’s that?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. Tell me.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do. Of course you do. Just—”
“Yes, I do,” he said suddenly. Something of hope and strength flared briefly within him, reviving his wits long enough to grasp at the memory. “Um… ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?’”
“Good. Keep going.”
“‘When—when the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. Though an host should—’” He broke off, both crying out and stifling the cry at the same time; he had been lifted off the ground in one swift motion that wasn’t quite swift enough to spare him. Something inside him twisted, and the world dimmed again.
Please, God, don’t let me die, flashed across his mind. I’m not ready to die.
“You’re doing very well,” Pitt’s voice said. “Just keep going.”
“‘Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear,’” he said, or thought he said. He was so cold. “‘Though war should rise against me, in this will I be… will I be…’”
The rain was falling harder. In minutes it would wash the cobbles clean and leave only a long-dead body, lying on the ground with a stake through the heart.
Jamaica
Autumn 1788
She was free of the spell almost all the time now.
That moment on the field had been the last time she had moved on her own for many months; as the seasons changed and crop season began and the days and nights of backbreaking work went on relentlessly, she had started to doubt her own memory of it. But then, one day, her sore knee had twinged as she set down a load on a cart—the knee she had twisted years ago and never been allowed to rest—and she had shifted to a more comfortable position without thinking. After that, it happened more and more. She closed her eyes when the sun was bright; she shifted the heavy machete in her hands to ease her blisters; she could straighten to ease her back when the overseers weren’t looking. The mesmeric commands in her head faded to a whisper; after a year or so, she actually had to force her body to follow the verbal commands given. That was hard, when she was so sore and exhausted that it was all she could do to stay on her feet at times. But she had to move with the others, as fluidly and mechanically as her aching limbs could manage, and not allow even a noise of protest to betray her.
The dark early-morning hours during
the planting season were the best times. They always had been, even when the spell had still held her. In the crop season, they worked through to the morning, with a few hours to rest grudgingly allowed in shifts. Slaves at the processing plant would collapse and tumble into the fires or lose their limbs in the grinding machinery when exhaustion slowed them. But during the planting season, night was when they were left alone together in the barracks built to house the slaves, and after a few hours without commands the evening’s dose began to wear off. All but the weakest could wriggle their shoulders or shift position, and that was a victory in itself. The ones who could speak whispered to each other and told stories. Augustus had told the best stories before he died, legends like those she could dimly remember from her childhood, but sometimes he’d work in the names of the people they knew and make everyone laugh. As the darkness lightened around them, they would talk more seriously: about the bands of escaped slaves, about the possibility of resistance at a crucial moment, about escape. It was worth sacrificing a few precious hours of sleep for that.
Best of all was when they sang. Jacob would start, his hand beating a rhythm on the floor, and those who could would take up the words and the beat. When she had been younger, she had lain there, her limbs thrilling with the vibrations of the floor beneath her; now she could sing, too, and sit up and laugh or cry with the words. Sometimes, when the music was angry, a reckless defiance would take her, and she would get to her feet and dance, to scattered cheers and a renewal of the music. To move completely freely, answering to no one, was so great a joy in those moments that she didn’t care if the overseer came in and saw her. That was worth more than sleep; at her most joyful, she felt it would be worth dying.
During the day was dangerous, though, as well as difficult. They beat her more now than they had before. Part of the reason might be that she could hardly hear the commands anymore, and trying to follow what everyone else was doing made her slow. But they beat her when she wasn’t slow too. The whip would catch her back unexpectedly, and it took all her strength not to cry out. She wondered if at some level they were trying to surprise a cry from her, or something even more damning. In some way, perhaps, they knew that she did not belong to them. There was nothing to outwardly betray her: her eyes still had the flecks of green that showed the presence of the spell in her blood; she kept her face expressionless; she made no trouble. But they still seemed to suspect her. If they knew for certain, they would kill her.
“You have to go,” Molly said to her as they lay in the sleeping quarters. Molly was one of the ones who could speak, in the long hours just before dawn. She couldn’t move, except sometimes to turn her head. “You need to get away from this plantation.”
“I can’t,” she said. The rest of the slaves were asleep, she thought, but not many could have listened even if they were awake. They were from different parts of Africa, and when they spoke to each other, it was in a creole version of English. She and Molly were speaking their own language—Molly had grown up only a few miles from where Fina had been taken. When she had met Molly, she hadn’t remembered the words. Molly had kept talking to her, and she’d remembered. “If they catch me, they’ll kill me.”
“They’ll kill you anyway. You can’t hide what you are forever. I’ve been to three different plantations in my life, little one, and I’ve talked to many of us there. I’ve never heard of anyone breaking entirely free of the spellbinding, as you have.”
“Perhaps they wouldn’t mind. Even here some of the slaves are unbound: the ones they use as overseers, and the house slaves. Some plantations don’t bind their slaves at all. If I told them I didn’t want to hurt them—”
“But you do. I know you do. You want to hurt them badly. You may be frightened, but you’re angry—I’m not sure even you understand how much. And your anger is so much more dangerous than Augustus’s was, because you know how to keep it inside you until the time is right. It’s more dangerous, too, because you’re a magician.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. Nobody could resist the spell entirely without powerful magic of some kind. Perhaps you haven’t found it yet, but it’s inside you, and it’s making itself known. The unbound slaves you talk about never have magic in their veins—the plantation owners would never be so foolish. If they want to leave a slave unbound, for any reason, they pay to have them tested for magic first so they can make sure they’ll be safe. You’re not safe.”
Fina didn’t answer that. She didn’t know how to say that she wanted to be safe.
“I don’t remember being free,” she said instead. “Not really. Even if I did manage to escape, I wouldn’t know how.”
“Yes, you do,” Molly said. Her voice was uncompromising. “Everyone knows that.”
“I’m not brave like you. I’m not like the ones who fight to take themselves back. I couldn’t turn and hit the overseer, like Augustus did last year. I’d be too scared.”
They had killed Augustus. They had force-fed him enough of the spell to lock him rigid, and they had ordered him to stand still while they set him on fire. The white overseer had ordered the other slaves to watch him burn, and Fina had stood and watched.
“You are brave,” Molly said. “You’ve lived like this since you were six years old, and you haven’t let them break you. I watched you come back from despair when you had nothing but our voices and your own thoughts to hold on to. I watch you suffer every day and not show a glimpse of it on your face. That’s bravery. You’d be braver still once you left. Having more to lose makes you brave.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” she burst out. That was what she really meant. “You and Jacob and the others. I don’t want to—I can’t just leave you here to get beaten and worked to death without me. You’re my family. I love you.”
“And we love you,” Molly said. She spoke softly now. “Of course we do. But that’s why we don’t want you to stay here.” She paused. “Maybe you could join one of the bands in the hills. Then you could come break us out, like that band a few years back.”
It might be like that, she knew. But she couldn’t believe it, or see herself doing it. She also knew, and maybe so did Molly, that if she escaped, they might kill Molly to deter the other slaves from escaping as well. It had happened once before, when Sam had run away. They claimed that they thought the slaves could forge no relationships. But they always seemed to know which one of them to hurt to punish another.
“Would you go?” she asked. “If you could? Would you leave me?”
Molly was silent for a time. “No,” she said. “No, little one, I wouldn’t. But you need to, all the same. If they find out how powerful you are, they’ll kill you.”
Fina knew that. It was why she hadn’t told Molly about the flashes that had cut across her vision, twice over the last few months and more intense each time. Once she had seen the inside of the processing plant as she had lain down to take her rest, in a flash of heat and flame. Another time, in the burning sun, she had seen the cool white parlor of the owner’s house, somehow familiar although she had never worked there. She didn’t know what it meant, or what the magic awakening in her could achieve. But she knew that once she admitted it was real, and hers, she really would have to leave. And she had nowhere to go.
London
November 1788
It would, Pitt decided, be easier to break into the Bank of England via a secret tunnel from Kew that did not exist than it was to gain access to William Wilberforce when a host of friends and doctors had anything to say about it. It was a comfort, in a way, that his friend had so many people concerned about his well-being. He knew Wilberforce was genuinely, seriously hurt, and still drifting in and out of real danger. But it was frustrating.
“I’m the prime minister,” he told the healer. “Directly after this, I have permission to see the king.”
“And I will not prevent you from seeing Mr. Wilberforce, sir,” the doctor said. He was a moderate empath, but a Commoner—another who would ha
ve been able to do his job far better without the restrictions of a bracelet. “But you must understand that he’s still very weak, and the laudanum he’s been given to dull the pain is going to make him very drowsy. Please try not to tax his strength. His injuries are very serious.”
The doctor had no idea that Pitt knew very well how serious his injuries were, since nobody knew that he had been there when Wilberforce had sustained them. Only a few, in fact, knew that Wilberforce had been injured at all. Most knew only that he was dangerously unwell and unable to leave his bed, a decline seen as very sudden and surprising for an undersized but previously healthy twenty-eight-year-old. Fortunately, Wilberforce was so generally well liked that the papers and the other MPs had responded with concern rather than suspicion; even Fox had stopped Pitt yesterday to inquire if Wilberforce was improving. Most politicians would have been judged deserving of such an illness, if they weren’t suspected of conveniently inventing it. The Nightingale of the House of Commoners was not one of them.
“I promise to be extremely careful,” Pitt assured the healer. “Could you please let him know I’m here?”
It had been a long time since Pitt had remembered to think of Wilberforce as diminutive, but the man lying in bed seemed impossibly tiny. His face was white and drawn, his tangle of brown not-quite-curls lay unbrushed and unpowdered over the pillows, and his eyes were dulled. He managed a shadow of his usual smile at the sound of his friend’s steps, however.
“They tell me I’m no longer ill enough to refuse the trouble of your visit, Mr. Pitt,” he said. “Although God knows I’m not a man to enjoy the company of those he esteems and values.”
“Hurtful as that is, I’m relieved to hear you say it,” Pitt returned, trying to keep his own voice light as the door quietly closed behind them. “When I was told last week that you were actually turning visitors away, I believed you were either dying or dead.”
Wilberforce laughed a little, and winced. “I really do apologize for having to turn you away. I believed I was either dying or dead also, which made it even harder. I’m much better now. How is the king? I thought I heard you say you were on your way to see him after this—which, I may say, was beautifully haughty of you.”