The Randolph Legacy (30 page)

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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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Ethan turned his attention to the grim, whitewashed ceiling of
the small cell. Of course, that’s what it was, a cell. Murderer.
“They’ll hang me, then?” he asked Jordan Foster.
“No, of course not. If it even goes to trial, we’ll—”
“Trials don’t matter. The truth doesn’t matter. Like on board the
Standard.”
“This isn’t the
Standard
. You have friends, an influential family. They’re coming. We won’t let anything happen to you.”
Ethan tried to push the image of Eli Mercer’s corpse from his mind. Straight, bloody line—an evisceration, like the rat. That’s how the murderer wanted it to look, not fully realizing Eli Mercer’s own strength, his love of life. Everyone in Harmony Springs Meeting knew how Ethan had opened the rat, thanks to Hugh’s storytelling. Everyone.
“That’s what he wants. A trial. Attention on me.”
“Who? What who wants?”
“The one who killed Eli.”
“Did you see him?”
“No.” Ethan tried to swallow around the strangling grief lodged in his throat. “Did you bring any drinking water?” he managed to whisper.
“Yes.”
Once he’d emptied the crockery cup, Jordan Foster began to scrub at the grime on his face. Without complaint. Was the doctor even enjoying the task? Ethan looked at the muddy water in his basin.
“Small wonder he thought I was black.”
“Who did?”
“Atlas. We had a most enjoyable conversation, while he thought I was black.”
“If you’re having such a good time, perhaps you should stay the season.” The doctor frowned. “Ethan, listen to me. There were known to be renegade slaves roving this area for days. Perhaps—?”
“Atlas. Judith’s lights, her nervousness. Of course, it makes sense now.”
“What makes sense?”
“From the apple tree’s branches, Judith and I watched lights of neighboring farms, pointing north. Added our own. We were engaging in subterfuge, she said. So that’s what she meant. The slaves got north, then—all but Atlas?”
“Your friend slipped away, too, just after dawn, though no one can figure how. Damnation! You were supposed to be courting Judith, not assisting runaways to Canada!”
Ethan smiled, though it irritated the crack in his bottom lip. “Perhaps it was part of my courting duty. She hadn’t told me yet.”
“Good.” Jordan Foster helped him back into his waistcoat. “You still don’t know anything, remember. What the devil happened to your buttons?”
Ethan winced. “I don’t think you want to hear about that.”
The doctor threw up his hands.
“No runaway killed Eli Mercer, Jordan. Eli would have helped any, as Judith was doing.”
“Perhaps it was a panicked attack. An accident. It’s happened.”
Ethan remembered Eli’s wounds. “It was calculated,” he said. “We are all distractions. Jordan, Eli was a Fighting Quaker.”
“What has that got to do with—?”
“After the Revolution, a Loyalist band killed his wife, all his children but Judith. He must have known this was coming, and that I needed to know. Someone was listening. One of these Quakers is no Quaker. He’s a Loyalist.”
“But, Ethan, that war was—”
“Not forgotten. Not forgiven. Not by him. The one who killed Eli, opening him up, slashing his heart’s artery. Making him watch his own life’s blood draining …”
The grief again, physical, choking. He leaned over the doctor’s arm, heaving against his sleeve, then into his handkerchief. Jordan Foster made quiet, worried sounds, until it ended. Ethan rested his throbbing head against the doctor’s chest.
“Clear. You drank the water too fast, that’s all. No blood. Easy, son. Breathe easy now.”
Ethan’s good hand clenched the physician’s sleeve. “Jordan, I have to get out of here.”
“You will.”
“Stay close to Judith.”
“Her people won’t allow that.”
“Go around them. Go to Hugh. He’ll show you where she is.
Promise me. You are not a Quaker. I can ask that of you, a promise. Jordan, keep her safe, until I can get away.”
“You must not think of escape.”
Ethan grinned at the doctor’s worried face. “Do you not envision me outrunning them?”
He was expecting to be chided, but the physician sighed. “Thank God,” he murmured.
“‘Thank God’? Is that what you say as I draw you into yet another disturbance of your valued peace?”
Ethan thought he saw the sheen of unshed tears in the man’s dark eyes. “It’s only—” Dr. Foster whispered. “Ethan, after hearing of Judith, I thought, What would I do if you, too, were … not yourself?”
“Go to her, Jordan. They are webbing her in that cocoon of piety. She is Judith still. We will weather this, she and I, and come out on the other side of it stronger. Will you tell her this for me?”
 
 
S
he didn’t know how long she’d been sitting in the austere, whitewashed room. She had trouble keeping track of time. Except for day and night, it all ran together.
Nothing was required of her anymore, that was part of it. Not cooking, cleaning, gardening. Not even feeding the fowl. How were the chickens and ducks and geese doing without her? Someone would feed them, they were worth something. What was she worth?
Where had Ethan gone? He could have told wonderful stories, so that no one would be sad, or grieve for her father. Prescott thought it best she not attend the sitting. He said she wasn’t well enough. But she didn’t feel sick, just empty.
Prescott said Ethan would never return. He watched her face when he said it. And he said it every day. She hadn’t heard her own voice in so long. Why did Prescott bother her daily? Did he think she would speak? There was no longer any need. To speak, to pray, to seek the Light in herself or others. She was not a Quaker. She had no name, was no one’s daughter. She’d loved a dancing tree-dweller, once. That would fade. She would fade, if she sat here, very still. She would fade, and then disappear.
Thunder, rain. They made it hard to be still, to stay away from the window. Wet rose petals. Too early for roses. From where had that scent come? She walked to the single, small window of her room. Far below stood a woman. Did the woman not have the sense to get herself out of the rain?
She walked down the stairs. The doors opened before her, forming
a path through the maze of the widow’s added-on farmhouse. Who was doing that? The little one, the boy. She was fond of him. Hugh—he was leading the way, then hiding from her. It was a pleasant, silent game. The boy understood, better than his stepfather, her need for silence. But his path led to the rain, the flash of lightning, the sad, stung eyes of the rose-scented woman.
She walked outside, holding out her hands, the way she used to do with hurting people, before she’d begun to fade. The woman took them, giving her more substance.
“Judith, please.”
She was still here, then?
“He needs you.” She had small children, this woman. One was a baby she’d allowed Judith to hold, to dream over.
“Who?” Her voice. Was it her voice?
“Ethan. He needs you to speak at the hearing tomorrow.”
“I will, then.”
 
 
“H
ow long have you been subject to fits, Mr. Randolph?”
“Fits?”
“Come, come, we possess all the sworn statements that came with your release from the British frigate
Standard.”
The magistrate slammed the portfolio of documents on the long chestnut table. “The chief medical officer claims you were not only lame and subject to powerful seizures, but that you attempted suicide when only moments away from freedom. We have the documents.”
“Consider the source of those documents!” Jordan Foster shouted.
The questioner spun around. “Will you deny Ethan Randolph’s return to that unbalanced state after a fall from his horse?”
“He was not unbalanced. Never unbalanced.”
“You were his physician through the second series of seizures.”
“They were caused by a fever.”
“Brain
fever.”
“Brought on by injuries sustained by the fall! I explained it to you, as did his mother, his sister, his brothers. It was the fall, and the elevated temperature of his body. His mind is sound.”
“Sound? One of those injuries was to the head. It affected his very memory. Do you deny that, Dr. Foster?”
“I don’t know what restored his memory. No one could say with certainty.”
“Just so. Little is known about the workings of the mind.”
Watching their exchange reminded Ethan of the battle off Trafalgar.
He didn’t want to go back there, so he detached himself from the bombardment and let his eyes sweep the town meeting-chamber. Still no Judith. Sally, her hair and clothes dripping wet, had visited his cell in the dead of the night to tell him Judith had spoken at last. A few words, a promise to attend today’s session.
He should not have hoped for it.
The hearing’s population was nearly evenly divided between the sober cloth of the Quakers and the Virginia finery of his family and their nervous, hired lawyers. The paneled room had grace but little ornament. It dated from when the Quakers ruled the entire colony of Pennsylvania, Ethan thought. Their best time, the time of their reasoned experiment, Fayette had called it. They had pulled themselves out of the running of Pennsylvania since, and held no offices. What would Fayette think of these Quaker observers, sitting uncomfortably in the high-backed benches? He was already guilty, in their sight. They were searching his eyes for the
why.
A few strangers sat in the room, too. Those had been sent from Washington, perhaps from Dolley Madison herself. They were men “of no little influence,” his brothers had said, as if they were part of a gambling game, like the ones they’d tried to draw him into on their plantations. This was all some kind of a game, like chess, or craps, whist. Or Trafalgar. He felt as powerless as he had strapped to the gratings on board the
Standard.
He’d worked so hard not to feel that powerless again. What had happened?
Ethan shifted his gaze past Winthrop and Clayton to his mother. Anne Randolph patted Jordan Foster’s hand. How beautiful she was. Both were striking in their courage.
Ethan looked among the Quakers for … what, the hundredth time? There: Judith entered their midst with Prescott Lyman, who held her arm in a tight vise. Her gown was dyed with indigo. It reminded Ethan of the sea at midnight. But she was so pale. And her eyes. There was something wrong with her. Something very wrong.
“ … Mr. Randolph, do we take your silence as refusal of our request?” the middle magistrate, Seymour Hess, asked quietly.
Stay engaged. Don’t let them hang you for stupidity.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “The question?”
“Would you show us your wrists, so we can determine if the
Standard
’s surgeon’s sworn remarks are fabrications?”
“They are not.”
He stood, yanked off his coat impatiently, and began pulling up his shirtsleeve. “It is here, see?” he informed all three gray men in a clear tone as he held out his wrist with its single scar. “It was a sharp knife with
an ivory handle. I know how to put knives to use, as you gentlemen have already ascertained. I could have had it over within minutes.”
His mother stifled a cry.
Damn you.
Ethan willed his curse to burn into the magistrate’s heart. “What interests you?” he asked impatiently. “Why I began or why I stopped?”
“Begin with why you would think of such a thing,” his inquisitor said.
He shoved his coat back on and sat. “The captain met with me before we came ashore at Norfolk. He put the knife in my hands. He said if I did not kill myself, he would slander the love Henri Maupin and I held for Judith Mercer. He would call it carnal knowledge.”
“And you believed he would have?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Was there any truth to—”
“This was not about truth. I had been powerless for ten years on board the
Standard.
I had only Maupin for protection, and now he was dead. I had watched my shipmates set the noose high after an absurd treason trial wherein Captain Willis had been both judge and jury. My place was less than esteemed.”
Silence. The air crackled with it. What did it mean?
“And what convinced you to cease opening your veins, Mr. Randolph?” Seymour Hess asked softly.
Ethan heard the distant echo of annoyed African clicking cadences. “Voices,” he whispered.
“Voices?”
He looked at Judith. “The clear voices of conscience. Not to allow them to win. Not to compound the wrongs done me.”

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