The Randolph Legacy (8 page)

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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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Yes, he had. Madeline had cried out like that, once.
The wind changed direction. Judith’s cry became the faint sounds of warning from below. But the arm that had held the boy so tenaciously would not obey his mind’s command.
Hold on. Grip. Grip the ropes.
They could not.
There was no pain as he fell. The pain came, of course, in the landing. It sent him through the gratings and onto the gundeck. He heard the brutal cracking of his bones.
He looked up into the face of Lieutenant Mitchell, the first officer he’d trusted with the knowledge of Washington’s existence. He heard the voices, even through the pain.
“Take him to the hold.”
“The hold, sir?”
“As carefully as you can. And hurry, while the captain is busy at the wheel.”
 
 
W
ashington heard footsteps. Many of them, not just Fayette’s. No, none of them were Fayette’s. When the door opened, the opposite of his imaginings happened: The water on his side drained out. He watched its flow. That was why he saw only the sailors’ bare feet, the officers’ booted ones, until they laid Fayette down.
Washington leaned over him. His fingers ached to give Fayette comfort, but knew they would only add to his friend’s torment.
“Where’s his coat?” Washington demanded. “He’s cold.”
The midshipman with swollen eyes handed it to him.
Washington placed it carefully over the broad chest.
Fayette opened his eyes in the swinging lantern’s light. His mouth twitched into a smile. “Fell out of your hammock, did you?”
Washington shrugged, smearing the fresh blood from his nose and lip across the back of his hand.
“Have Thrumming make you up a salve.”
Washington nodded, the tears flowing down his face.
“Now,” his friend admonished, “you knew this day would come.”
“Plus tard,”
Washington heard the abandoned child whisper.
“Listen to me. You are not without friends. They will do their best to keep you safe until Judith comes. I saw her,
petit général.
And I saw you, beside her. Standing. Imagine!”
“Fayette—”
“My name is Maupin. Henri Maupin, Washington. And I have finally had one of your confounded visions. Of green mountains and
mist. A beautiful land. You will love it. It will remind you of the sea.”
He coughed, splattering Washington’s shirtfront with blood. His eyes focused on their shells, books, and the miniature ships. “We did not do so badly with what we had, did we?”
“No. Not so badly,” Washington confirmed.
“So. I have given you my vision. Now bring me home.”
Washington pulled in a halting breath. “No area in the world around is blessed with light that can compare with that of the city of La Rochelle,” he began, in French, the description he had been told for years of Fayette’s birthplace. “The harbor with its two towers—Saint Nicholas and the Tour de la Chaine glistens now, do you see it? The arcaded streets bring back those times, medieval, sober, yet delicately noble. Do you hear centuries of lively argument among the Plantagenets and Bourbons and Catholics and Huguenots? Do you hear the cries of the people crushed under Richelieu’s siege? Best, best of all …” His voice squawked like an adolescent, but recovered quickly. “ … the Hôtel de la Bourse is a masterpiece, its facade decorated with the sterns of ships and maritime trophies and … Fayette?” he called softly. “Fayette, you are very rude, I haven’t even gotten to—”
He could not stop his tears. He felt one of the sailors kneel beside him. Washington leaned into the man’s side, for the moment it would take to regain his composure. Then he would reach out and close the lids over Fayette’s stilled green eyes. But the moment never came.
What came felt oddly familiar. A hand grabbed his shirt, fisted it, throttling him.
“Foolish, foolish, powder monkey!”
The grip tightened. Washington struggled to breathe as he felt himself lifted to his feet.
“He’s but a helpless cripple, sir,” he heard Lieutenant Mitchell say. “An orphan Fayette picked up. In Lima, I believe.”
The
massive hands released Washington to the damp floorboards.
“Is that so, Lieutenant?” The captain advanced on his second-in-command. “Is that what you believe?”
The captain’s way was blocked by Fayette’s body, still staring silently at the rafters. The captain kicked it with disgust. “Throw this rubbish overboard,” he instructed.
Washington grabbed for his friend’s coat.
“Non! Plus tard! Plus tard!”
he called.
The captain turned. “A Peruvian who speaks French?”
He tore down the back of Washington’s shirt savagely. “A Peruvian who wears the whitened scars of the Royal Navy’s cat-o’-nine-tails?”
Washington felt the captain’s boot nail his shoulder to the floorboards with the force of his massive weight.
“Bring him on the main deck,” Willis instructed the seamen. “In a cage, and in irons. He’ll never get near my windows again.”
Washington struggled to stay upright between the two marines as they dragged him up the stairwell. His mind could only hold on to one thought, but it did so tenaciously. He’d failed Fayette. He hadn’t closed his eyes.
Behind him, he heard wild laughter, then his ships crashing together under the unholy sweep of the captain’s long arm. They fell to the floorboards, bones again.
It was not so different from his other Midwatch times on the
deck. He could see the stars beyond the cold iron of the cage. And the new surgeon tended to his lip almost as gently as Fayette would have done.
“Rest,” the surgeon advised, speaking very slowly. “When the sun comes out, it will hurt your eyes and burn your skin, because you’re not used to it. Drink all the water they allow you, keep yourself covered, and seek what shade you can find. Do you understand me?”
“’Course he understands you, he ain’t a fool!” Carney, the sheet anchor man, barked; then he seemed to think better of it. “Beg pardon, sir,” he apologized. “Mighty trying day.”
“It has been that.”
“The lad here’s had the worst of it.”
The surgeon looked into Washington’s eyes for the first time. “My—my condolences,” he muttered.
Washington nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he said quietly.
The surgeon shook his head, then glanced over at Carney. “Most of it is done?” he asked the grizzled seaman.
“It is, sir.”
“And you’ll lock him in, after?”
“We will.”
“I didn’t see you here. I don’t know about any of this.”
Washington watched the surgeon disappear into the darkness. He’d neglected to lock the rusted door of the cage. Carney entered, squatted his already square frame. He’d always reminded Washington of a squeeze box.
“How about helping us with the services, lad?”
“Services?”
“For Fayette.”
Washington looked away, stung again by open, staring eyes.
“We’ll finish the shroud ourselves, if it pains you.”
“I don’t understand. Did you not—”
“No, he ain’t in the waves yet. That was just rags and ballast, an old trick. Fayette used it to keep you amongst us. That were a fine thing he done, and we were all with him in it. Well, he deserved no less. We got him, waiting for you to make him proper.”
Carney signaled, and two other sailors hoisted their burden from the launch boat. They carried it into the cage.
Washington looked down at the clean canvas, the neat stitches that reached to Fayette’s neck. The face was no longer seared with pain. His friend’s mane of leonine hair was mostly silver. Only traces of gold remained. When had that happened? There was even a vestige of Fayette’s cynical smile frozen there for eternity. Someone had closed the eyes. Washington laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“Cold,” he whispered.
“Had him on ice, down in officers’ provisions. The least they could do for him, after he saved one of their hides, eh?” Carney tousled Washington’s hair, the way the sheet anchor men used to when he was a boy. He smiled, ignoring the sting at his lip. He was forgetting his manners. “Good work.” He complimented the stitches.
“Thank you, sir.” The two sheet-men pulled the caps from their heads almost in unison. How strange, Washington thought, anyone calling him “sir.”
Carney handed him two pennies. Washington placed them over Fayette’s eyelids. Then he kissed each weather-beaten cheek.
He took up the dangling needle and worked at the last of the stitches. Fayette’s face began to disappear under the canvas. Washington tried to think of something to say or sing. He tried to remember one of Judith’s Bible verses. But only snatches of François Villon’s “Ballad of Dead Ladies” came to mind. He whispered them softly as the chain between his hands kept time.
Qui commanda que Buridan
Fust gecté en ung sac en Saine?
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
The verses’ dancing cadence, the haunting Old French refrain of
“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”
helped the rhythm, helped him pull careful, locked-in stitches.
Prince, n’enquerez de sepmaine
Où elles sont, ne de cest an,
Que ce reffrain ne vous remaine:
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!
He doubled the stitches back until they found Fayette’s nose through the canvas. That nose had snorted in frustration as he taught Washington to speak French, had breathed in scents of times and places of his landed past. The stories had made his student, who had no past before this ship, breathe La Rochelle too. Washington plunged the needle through the cartilage.
When Washington had first seen Fayette performing the mutilation on a dead sailor, he’d been shocked … .
“Why do you do that, Fayette?”
“It’s said that this will keep the dead man from floating back up to the surface to haunt his comrades.”
“Is this true?”
He’d shrugged. “It is a good story,
n’est-ce pas
? That is more important than literal truth.”
“But isn’t it unreasonable, superstitious?”
His friend had frowned. “Perhaps. But be more tolerant of comforts for the living,
petit général
,” he’d advised.
Washington locked in the last stitch, thereby ensuring Fayette’s peace on the ocean floor, his new home.
“May flights of angels sing you to your rest, Henri Maupin,” Washington whispered, in English. Where did those words come from? Shakespeare, the only Englishman who could approach Moliere, Fayette said. A death, in one of the tragedies. Which? They were all so full of deaths.
Around him, men replaced their caps. A young midshipman wept. He helped the others carry Fayette away. Washington listened closely as they slipped the shrouded corpse, almost without a splash, into the waves.
 
 
T
he stars came out later, along with a blowing cold wind that made Washington shiver against iron bars that afforded no warmth. He tried to cover his back, but the tear the captain had made in his shirt resisted his efforts. Washington felt someone staring at his ugly knots of scars. He turned. Fayette’s worn coat touched his shoulder.
“Monsieur Fayette got Jamie down,” the midshipman said. He thrust the coat between the bars, and was gone.
Washington pulled it over his shoulders, buried his face in the weave and its scents of rum and salt and licorice. Finally, as dawn was breaking in the eastern sky, he fell asleep.
 
 
J
udith heard the horse’s piercing scream. She pulled her cloak from its peg on the tavern wall and took up a lantern before running out into the night.
When she reached the wooden bridge, one of the landau’s four horses was whinnying wildly, its foot driven through the rotting wood. But two men with powerful shoulders, one the driver and the other a clear-eyed black servant, succeeded in calming the animal.
When he saw Judith, the servant gave a quick nod and glanced toward the rolled-up hood of the vehicle. She placed her hand on the carriage door, latched in a graceful French design.
“Inside!” she called.
“My grandson has injured his lip,” a deep voice, calm despite its worried tone, called out. “Are the horses secure?”
“Yes. I will be happy to guide thy party around them.”
“What does the odometer read?”
“Odometer?”
“On the wheel, just before you.”
Judith found a wooden box. What looked like a clockface with only one hand was attached to the wheel. She placed the lantern closer, intrigued. “Six and eight-tenths,” she said. She heard the sound of a scribbled calculation.
“Ah. Only one-tenth of a mile to Pierson’s Tavern, then. Ellen, Cornelia—might you assist your cousin?”
“Yes, Grandpapa,” Judith heard bright voices affirm.
“Good.” The door opened. Judith could see dark shapes inside. “I will avail myself of the arm of this lady,” the speaker said, “and we shall get out of Burwell’s way.”
He glanced at the man still working to calm the lead team. A signal
passed between master and servant without words, and as fast as quicksilver. Judith admired it, as she admired the well-dressed gentleman who took her arm. He was very tall, over six feet. Though she judged him to be past seventy, his grip was strong, and his lively, deep-set eyes held vast measures of intelligence, tempered by kindness. He turned to the two young women who emerged from the coach with a boy of about twelve between them. One held a handkerchief to the boy’s face, though he struggled against it. “It’s almost stopped bleeding, Grandpapa,” he called out in frustration. “Tell them to let me be!”
The gentleman approached, calmly drew the handkerchief down, and inspected. “Quite accurate, Francis. I will allow you to keep pressure on the wound yourself, if you will show respect for all our valiant ladies by walking between Cornelia and Ellen. Agreed?”
Francis raised his dark eyes to Judith’s and smiled shyly. “Yes, Grandfather,” he said. The young women looked at each other over their cousin’s head, and nodded, satisfied. Judith felt the tenderness among the four catch her in its overflow. She cast out a quick prayer to find such a family for Washington, soon. A family like this one would be worth the frustrations and sadness that had beset her search.
After consulting briefly with his coachman and servant, the old gentleman reached for Judith’s arm again. They led their small expedition back to the tavern. Under the man’s low-crowned hat, Judith saw glints of red in his white hair, worn undressed, like her father’s.
“Now, tell me what brought you out and to our assistance ahead of the tavern keeper. You’re not—” A thought struck him, Judith could see it fire his eyes. “Pierson hasn’t finally taken a wife?”
She laughed. “No. Judith Mercer is my name. My father and I are thy fellow guests. I heard the horse. Is it badly injured?”
“Burwell will do his best. That concern, your dress and speech lead me to a more well-founded speculation, Miss Mercer: That you and your father are Quakers.”
“We are Traveling Friends, yes.”
“Ah, my life long I have admired the Friends’ fair, equitable, and reasonable settlement of Pennsylvania.”
A fond remembrance of Fayette gently pierced Judith’s heart with sorrow. “Thee has read thy Voltaire, thy Rousseau on that subject?”
“Of course! But also William Penn and George Fox.”
“That’s good, as thee does not wish to spend the evening arguing with me when thy fine family—”
“Squire!” The tavern keeper ran, breathless, toward their small party. “Squire, had I known! Had I but known it was you! Let me take your arm, sir—are you injured?”
Her companion held firmly to Judith. “I am under the care of this lady, and with her assistance will find our way to your establishment, Mr. Pierson. Your time would be better served by fetching your carpentry tools to mend the bridge over Beaver Creek.”
“Of course, Squire. By morning’s light my sons and I—”
“Tonight, Mr. Pierson, before it catches any more hapless travelers.”
“Aye, Squire, just as you say!”
Judith watched the tavern keeper disappear. She wondered how the heretofore lumbering fellow could attain such speed. “Thou art a man of considerable influence.” She spoke her astonishment, even slipping into more formal use of her language.
Her companion smiled. “At one time, perhaps, Miss Mercer. Now I gladly exert what influence is left me to cheer your kind heart.” His granddaughters were smiling, too, behind their gloved hands.
Young Francis’s cut lip was indeed not deep or severe. Once inside the tavern, Cornelia cleaned the wound, then Judith pressed it with a measure of her father’s supply of shepherd’s purse. The boy’s grandfather watched, the line of worry creasing his fine, high forehead eased by Eli Mercer’s assurances about the healing properties of the herb. But soon their voices faded as Judith felt the odd sensation that she was comforting not Francis, but Washington. Why? Because his eyes were dark and guileless? Or was it that her longing always grew more intense after the fall of night, Washington’s time? And when her doubts about her mission settled in.
Benjamin Morris’s father had told her that his son had lost three fingers to frostbite at sea before he’d signed on the
Ida Lee.
The next name on Mrs. Madison’s list—the Jarvis boy—had had a large birthmark on his right cheek, and so was not Washington. Judith felt herself opening old wounds of grief instead of bestowing the light of hope to one family who had grieved without cause. And she had many more families to visit, from a settlement at the base of the Alleghenies to a lighthouse on the Maryland shore. She heard Washington’s voice. “Hurry, Judith.” Her hands trembled against the poultice.
“Must I wear the leaf, Miss Mercer?” the boy asked, becoming young Francis again, annoyed at being the only injured member of his family.
“Indeed not. What wondrous healing power is thine, Francis! The wound is hardly swelling.”
“Do you hear, Grandpapa?” he called.
“I do. Let us hope Samson is faring as well.”

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