Paper Woman: A Mystery of the American Revolution (9 page)

Private Barrows
entered the dining room with a sour look.
 
"A savage is outside.
 
Says
his name is something like As-say-see-cora."
 
One shoulder jerked with dismissal.
 
"Shall I get rid of him for you?"

She sat
forward.
 
"Assayceeta
Corackall?"
 
Runs With Horses, son
of Madeleine le Coeuvre's adoptive sister, Laughing Eyes — what brought him to
Alton?
 
He seldom ventured into town.

"That's
the fellow.
 
You want to see him?"

"Please."

Barrows looked
surprised.
 
"But everyone thinks
the savages killed those men."

Foreboding
twined with her grief.
 
She stood.
 
"Please."

In contrast to
the thud of Barrows' boots, Runs With Horses glided into the kitchen, his
moccasins a whisper on the wood floor, his earrings and nose ring silent.
 
Lines of dotted, charcoal-colored tattoos
ornamented his bronze, shaven head and encircled his topknot of blue-black
hair.
 
A bandoleer of tiny charcoal
tattoos extended from left shoulder to right hip, continuing over the portion
of his right buttock visible outside his breechcloth and coiling down his right
leg like a rattlesnake.
 
He halted about
two feet from her and bowed, the sigh of arrows brushing together in his quiver
and a rancid whiff of bear grease the non-visual harbingers of his
arrival.
 
"Nagchoguh
Hogdee."
 
Paper Woman.

The Creek slit
enemies' throats, and flayed them alive, and — heaven forbid — burned them at
the stake, but until she had a motive, she'd grant them the courtesy she'd
always given them.
 
"You honor my
house with your visit, Assayceeta Corackall."

"As you
have honored the house of my mother."
 
Behind him, Barrows leaned against the doorjamb yawning, bored with
condolences, perplexed by her choice of company.
 
"The people send well wishes.
 
The journey of Will St. James separates from yours for awhile,
but Creator will again unite your paths."

Hardly the
speech of a murderer or enemy.
 
Intrigue
gleamed in the onyx depths of Runs With Horses's eyes, sending a shiver through
her.
 
On a deep level, she sensed he
wasn't just spouting Indian-speak.
 
"And how do you know this, friend of my house?"

With peripheral
vision Runs With Horses ascertained Barrows' inattention and reined back
disdain.
 
"We saw his spirit pass
through the forest last night."

Yes, they would
have, after all the times her father had visited the village.
 
She bowed her head, by then certain the
Creek weren't involved in Will's death.
 
But unless the murderer was found, they'd be blamed.
 
Sorrow thickened her voice.
 
"You bring me great comfort.
 
Thank you for your kindness."

Barrows
escorted the warrior out.
 
Sophie's
attention wandered all afternoon.
 
Susana drenched her sleeve with tears during her visitation.
 
David kept a tight cover on his grief.
 
Between two visits from Alton's undertaker,
thirty townspeople paid their respects.
 
She kept wondering what secret mission was worth dying for in such a
horrendous manner.
 
The redcoats, the
rebels, the Spaniard: who killed Will?
 
Through her head wove that column of numbers in the cipher.

Back in her
bedroom Sunday evening, she studied the cipher while nudging ham and hominy
around a pewter plate with her fork.
 
With a sigh, she shoved the plate aside and cleaned her teeth.
 
Then she set the supper tray at the top of
the stairs.
 
Jollity from Mary and both
soldiers carried upstairs.
 
Will's death
created little stir in Mary's life, for it was Sophie who managed the
finances.
 
"Mary!
 
Fetch my plate.
 
I'm done with supper."

"Right away,
Mrs. Barton."

In Will's room,
Sophie eased into the rocking chair and thought about rocking Betsy, all full
of squalls, brawls, and life, her dark hair tousled and damp.
 
Five years later, she'd rocked a boy babe,
born too soon, until his hold on the earth slipped away.
 
Then she'd laid him to rest beside his tiny
twin who'd never mewed signs of life.

There'd been no
solace from Richard Barton, her second husband, away on business in North
Carolina when she'd borne the twins in Augusta.
 
He was always away on business, even when he was home.
 
As soon as she could travel, she'd returned
to Alton with little Betsy, where her family had given her the solace she
needed.
 
Not just her family, she
recalled, but friends as well.
 
The
Carey brothers and their wives stammered out platitudes.
 
Newlywed Joshua Hale and his wife were full
of trite little sayings about life and love.
 
Jonah Hale had mumbled out an "I'm sorry," then scurried off
because he was still mourning his wife, who had succumbed to yellow fever
earlier that summer — Jonah, whom she'd never see again.
 
Sorrow clutched the back of her throat and
receded without leaving her the relief of tears.

The visitor who
stood out most in her mind from that time was Mathias Hale.
 
Unmarried after his Creek wife, Stands Tall,
had died in childbirth, he'd sat quietly with her one morning.
 
When she'd asked him why he didn't speak,
he'd said, "I figure by now everyone has said all the words and still not
made it better, so I'll sit with you and not say anything."
 
His stoic presence bolstered her more than
anyone's shallow attempts at cheer.
 
Mathias, she reflected, had always been anything but shallow.

The current of
memories carried her farther back to a summer afternoon eighteen years before,
to one of her earliest memories of Mathias's depth.
 
A scant two weeks before she was to marry Jim Neely, she and the
girls stole clothes from the boys at the swimming hole.
 
On the opposite side of the pond she
discovered and swiped Mathias's clothing.
 
A good sport about it, he traded repartee while she returned articles of
clothing one by one, starting with his left moccasin.

When he'd bent
to help her disentangle her petticoat from brambles, across the ropy muscles
and Creek tattoos on his left shoulder she'd seen an outrage: faded scars,
legacy of his stepfather's wrath.
 
Why
did Jacob Hale beat him?
 
Had Mathias
let the fire in the forge go out or been slow with the bellows?
 
Not likely.
 
Jacob had never taken to his stepson, no flesh of his own.
 
But still, that was no reason for Jacob to
beat him.

Didn't his
brothers know their father beat him?

Mathias had
regarded her then, expression composed, precursor to his solace over her
twins.
 
Of course his brothers
knew.
 
How could they not know?
 
Sophie, do me a favor and don't say
anything about it
, he'd said.
 
In
fact, just forget about it
.

Sophie returned
to Sunday, June 4, 1780 in the dusk.
 
How peculiar that sitting in her father's bedroom should call to mind
Mathias's depth.
 
Yet something told her
it wasn't coincidence.

She pulled the
wedding band from her pocket and scrubbed scorch marks off with her
fingernail.
 
Tears pressured her throat,
but when she waited for relief, the flood didn't come.
 
Instead, a blaze in her insides burned the
tears away.
 
She didn't want to
weep.
 
With her bare hands, she wanted
to strangle every redcoat, rebel, and Spaniard she could find.
 
Will couldn't be forever gone.
 
She expected him to stomp in through the
back door at any moment calling for his supper.
 
Exhaling despair and bewilderment, she closed her eyes, and
another memory trickled into her head: Will with six-year-old Betsy on his
knee.

***

"Grandpapa,
what's your favorite animal?"

"A
horse.
 
He's smarter than most men I
know, and he'll tell you who's the master."

"What's
your favorite color?"

"Green.
 
It's the color of the deep, untamed
wilderness."

"And
your favorite number?"

"Three,
for my three children and three grandchildren."

***

Anxious, Sophie
rose, pocketed the wedding band, and brushed her fingertip over one of three painted
wooden soldiers ornamenting a bookshelf.
 
Three clay pots of different sizes each contained tobacco for Will's
pipe.
 
On his desk she found quills for
his inkpot and three seals.
 
A shudder
wove up her back and stirred her imagination.
 
Three
.

Back in her
room, the door closed, a lantern lit, she opened
Confessions
to page
seventeen and wrote the third letter of the fourth word.
 
Next to it she wrote the third letter of the
sixteenth word on page twenty-five, and from page forty-nine, pulled the third
letter of the eleventh word.
 
By the
time she'd ferreted out twelve third letters from the book, she'd cracked the
cipher.
 
Those letters spelled "Don
Alejandro."

Night settled
over Alton while she dipped her quill in ink and extracted the message one letter
at a time.
 
Then she sat back and
whispered, "Gods."
 
don
alejandro de galvez awaits you midnight june seventeenth near old fort beware
the serpent

She knew who
"the serpent" was.
 
Had Will
been supposed to meet a Spanish lord at midnight on June seventeenth but been
killed by the serpent?
 
"Don
Alejandro" might know something — if she could talk with him.

Many forts in
North America could be reached by a man on horseback within two weeks of
leaving Alton.
 
Where was the "old
fort?"
 
She correlated the
page-word pairs with the letters to make sure she hadn't missed any, but she'd
used them all.
 
Edward wouldn't have
kept any of the message from her.
 
Perhaps Will had known his destination in advance.
 
Or perhaps the clue to his destination was
conveyed in another manner.

She rolled her
head around to work kinks from her neck, picked up the book, and examined
scratches on the front and back covers.
 
None of it looked like secret code.
 
The soldiers had slit the covers, hoping for clues.
 
She examined the spine, still amazed that
her father would tolerate material from a "damned Papist" in the
house.
 
And St. Augustine, of all
people.

The chill slid
up her backbone again.
 
St.
Augustine.
 
San Agustín
.
 
Wasn't there an old Spanish fort at St.
Augustine in East Florida?

Having acquired
East Florida from Spain after the Old French War, Britain had booted most
Spaniards out to Havana, then concentrated military attention on the thirteen
colonies.
 
The garrison and residents of
St. Augustine formed a stronghold of the king's friends.
 
The city hardly sounded like a haven for a
meeting between a rebel courier and a Spanish lord, unless the meeting was
facilitated by an agent in St. Augustine.
 
How likely was it that a spy for Spain resided there?

The Congress
was desperate for support from another European power like France.
 
Spain had declared war on Britain in June of
the previous year, then intrigued with France.
 
But Spain hadn't made an official alliance with the American
rebels.
 
Even though rebels in the southern
colonies won smaller battles, such as that fought not far from Alton at Kettle
Creek the year before, the entire southern Continental army had surrendered to
the redcoats just three weeks earlier in Charles Town.
 
The Crown also held Augusta and Savannah.
 
The rebels needed more direct intervention
from Spain.
 
Earning approval of a
Spanish lord who had the ear of King Carlos couldn't hurt the rebel cause.

Time to make
Edward aware that she'd cracked the code so he could exonerate her, and she
could find out what else Mathias had needed to tell her.
 
The folded paper in hand, she headed
downstairs, entered the front shop, and stopped short, stalling a conversation
between Barrows and Fairfax.
 
Both men
looked at her.
 
What the deuce was
Fairfax doing there instead of Edward?
 
She slid the paper toward the pocket of her petticoat, but Fairfax
missed nothing.
 
"Barrows, it
appears Mrs. Barton has completed her assignment."