A Breath of Snow and Ashes (140 page)

She twitched, sharp-eyed, like a bird spotting the stealthy progress of a worm through the grass—but I had firm control of my features by now, and she relaxed, detecting no sarcasm.

“You are welcome,” she said with chilly courtesy. “I am to see to your welfare, and acquaint you with our custom. You will receive one meal each day, unless you wish to send to the ordinary for more—at your own expense. I will bring you a basin for washing once each day. You’ll carry your own slops. And—”

“Oh, stuff your custom, Maisie,” said Mrs. Ferguson, butting into Mrs. Tolliver’s set speech with the comfortable assumption of long acquaintance. “She’s got some money. Fetch us a bottle of geneva, there’s a good girl, and then if you must, you can tell her what’s what.”

Mrs. Tolliver’s narrow face tightened in disapproval, but her eyes twitched toward me, bright in the dim light of the rush dip. I ventured a hesitant gesture toward my pocket, and her lower lip sucked in. She glanced over her shoulder, then took a quick step toward me.

“A shilling, then,” she whispered, hand held open between us. I dropped the coin into her palm, and it disappeared at once beneath her apron.

“You’ve missed supper,” she announced in her normal disapproving tones, stepping backward. “However, as you’ve just come, I shall make an allowance and bring you something.”

“How kind of you,” I said again.

The door closed firmly behind her, shutting out light and air, and the key turned in the lock.

The sound of it set off a tiny spark of panic, and I stamped on it hard. I felt like a dried skin, stuffed to the eyeballs with the tinder of fear, uncertainty, and loss. It would take no more than a spark to ignite that and burn me to ashes—and neither I nor Jamie could afford that.

“She drinks?” I asked, turning back to my new roommate with an assumption of coolness.

“Do you know anyone who doesn’t, given the chance?” Mrs. Ferguson asked reasonably. She scratched her ribs. “Fraser, she said. You aren’t the—”

“I am,” I said, rather rudely. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her eyebrows shot up, but she nodded equably.

“Just as you like,” she said. “Any good at cards?”

“Loo or whist?” I asked warily.

“Know a game called brag?”

“No.” Jamie and Brianna played it now and then, but I had never acquainted myself with the rules.

“That’s all right; I’ll teach you.” Reaching under the mattress, she pulled out a rather limp deck of pasteboards and fanned them expertly, waving them gently under her nose as she smiled at me.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’re in here for cheating at cards?”

“Cheat? Me? Not a bit of it,” she said, evidently unoffended. “Forgery.”

Rather to my own surprise, I laughed. I was still feeling shaky, but Mrs. Ferguson was definitely proving a welcome distraction.

“How long have you been in here?” I asked.

She scratched at her head, realized that she wasn’t wearing a cap, and turned to pull one out of the rumpled bedding.

“Oh—a month, just about.” Putting on the crumpled cap, she nodded at the doorpost beside me. Turning to look, I saw that it was crosshatched with dozens of small nicks, some old and dark with dirt, some freshly scratched, showing raw yellow wood. The sight of the marks made my stomach plunge again, but I took a deep breath and turned my back on them.

“Have you had a trial yet?”

She shook her head, light glinting off her spectacles.

“No, praise God. I hear from Maisie that the court’s shut down; all the justices gone into hiding. Hasn’t been anybody tried in the last two months.”

This was not good news. Evidently the thought showed on my face, for she leaned forward and patted my arm sympathetically.

“I wouldn’t be in a hurry, dearie. Not in your shoes, I wouldn’t. If they’ve not tried you, they can’t hang you. And while I have met those as say the waiting’s like to kill them, I’ve not seen anybody die of it. And I
have
seen them die at the end of a rope. Nasty business, that is.”

She spoke almost negligently, but her own hand rose, as though by itself, and touched the soft white flesh of her neck. She swallowed, the tiny bump of her Adam’s apple bobbing.

I swallowed, too, an unpleasantly constricted feeling in my own throat.

“But I’m innocent,” I said, wondering even as I said it how I could sound so uncertain.

“‘Course you are,” she said stoutly, giving my arm a squeeze. “You stick to it, dearie—don’t you let ’em bully-whack you into admitting the least little thing!”

“I won’t,” I assured her dryly.

“One of these days, a mob’s like to come
here,
” she said, nodding. “String up the sheriff, if he don’t look sharp. He’s not popular, Tolliver.”

“I can’t imagine why not—a charming fellow like that.” I wasn’t sure how I felt about the prospect of a mob storming the house. Stringing up Sheriff Tolliver was all very well, so far as that went—but with the memory of the hostile crowds in Salisbury and Hillsboro fresh in mind, I wasn’t sure at all that they’d stop with the sheriff. Dying at the hands of a lynch mob wasn’t at all preferable to the slower sort of judicial murder I likely faced. Though I supposed there was always a possibility of escaping in the riot.

And go where, if you did?
I wondered.

With no good answer to that question, I shoved it to the back of my mind and turned my attention back to Mrs. Ferguson, who was still holding out the cards invitingly.

“All right,” I said. “But not for money.”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Ferguson assured me. “Perish the thought. But we must have some sort of stake to make it interesting. We’ll play for beans, shall we?” She set down the cards, and digging under the pillow, withdrew a small pouch, from which she poured a handful of small white beans.

“Splendid,” I said. “And when we’re finished, we’ll plant them, shall we, and hope for a giant beanstalk to spring up and burst through the roof, so we can escape up it.”

She burst into giggles at that, which somehow made me feel very slightly better.

“From your mouth to God’s ear, dearie!” she said. “I’ll deal first, shall I?”

BRAG APPEARED TO BE a form of poker. And while I had lived with a cardsharp long enough to know one when I saw one, Mrs. Ferguson appeared to be playing honestly—for the moment. I was forty-six beans to the good, by the time Mrs. Tolliver returned.

The door opened without ceremony, and she came in, holding a three-legged stool and a chunk of bread. This latter appeared to be both my supper and her ostensible excuse for visiting the cell, for she shoved it at me with a loud, “This will have to keep you ’til tomorrow, Mrs. Fraser!”

“Thank you,” I said mildly. It was fresh, and appeared to have been hastily dragged through bacon drippings, in lieu of butter. I bit into it without hesitation, having sufficiently recovered from shock now as to feel very hungry indeed.

Mrs. Tolliver, glancing over her shoulder to be sure the coast was clear, shut the door quietly, put down the stool, and drew a squat bottle from her pocket, blue glass and filled with some clear liquid.

She pulled the cork from it, tilted it, and drank deeply, her long, lean throat moving convulsively.

Mrs. Ferguson said nothing, but watched the process with a sort of analytic attention, light glinting from her spectacles, as though comparing Mrs. Tolliver’s behavior with that of previous occasions.

Mrs. Tolliver lowered the bottle and stood for a moment grasping it, then handed it abruptly to me and sat down suddenly on the stool, breathing heavily.

I wiped the neck of the bottle as inconspicuously as possible on my sleeve, then took a token sip. It was gin, all right—heavily flavored with juniper berries to hide the poor quality, but powerfully alcoholic.

Mrs. Ferguson took a healthy guzzle in her turn, and so we continued, passing the bottle from hand to hand, exchanging small cordialities with it. Her first thirst slaked, Mrs. Tolliver became almost affable, her frosty manner thawing substantially. Even so, I waited until the bottle was nearly empty before asking the question foremost in my mind.

“Mrs. Tolliver, the men who brought me—did you happen to hear them say anything about my husband?”

She put a fist to her mouth to stifle a belch.

“Say anything?”

“About where he is,” I amended.

She blinked a little, looking blank.

“I didn’t hear,” she said. “But I suppose they may have told Tolly.”

Mrs. Ferguson handed down the bottle to her—we were sitting side by side on the bed, that being the only place to sit in the small room—nearly falling off the bed in the process.

“S’pose you could ask him, could you, Maisie?” she said.

An uneasy look came into Mrs. Tolliver’s eyes, glazed as they were.

“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “He doesn’t talk to me about such things. Not my business.”

I exchanged a glance with Mrs. Ferguson, and she shook her head slightly; best not to press the matter now.

Worried as I was, I found it difficult to abandon the subject, but plainly there was nothing to be done. I gathered what shreds of patience I had, estimating how many bottles of gin I could afford before my money ran out—and what I might accomplish with them.

I LAY STILL THAT NIGHT, breathing the damp, thick air with its scents of mold and urine. I could smell Sadie Ferguson next to me, too: a faint miasma of stale sweat, overlaid with a strong perfume of gin. I tried to close my eyes, but every time I did, small waves of claustrophobia washed over me; I could feel the sweating plaster walls draw closer, and gripped my fists in the cloth of the mattress ticking, to keep from throwing myself at the locked door. I had a nasty vision of myself, pounding and shrieking, my nails torn and bloody from clawing at the unyielding wood, my cries unheard in the darkness—and no one ever coming.

I thought it a distinct possibility. I had heard more from Mrs. Ferguson regarding Sheriff Tolliver’s unpopularity. If he were to be attacked and dragged from his home by a mob—or to lose his nerve and run—the chances of him or his wife remembering the prisoners were remote.

A mob might find us—and kill us, in the madness of the moment. Or not find us, and fire the house. The storeroom was clay brick, but the adjoining kitchen was timber; damp or not, the place would burn like a torch, leaving nothing but that bloody brick wall standing.

I took an especially deep breath, smell notwithstanding, exhaled, and shut my eyes with decision.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
That had been one of Frank’s favorite expressions, and by and large, a good sentiment.

Depends a bit on the day, though, doesn’t it?
I thought in his direction.

Does it? You tell me.
The thought was there, vivid enough that I might have heard it—or only imagined it. If I had imagined it, though, I had imagined also a tone of dry amusement that was particularly Frank’s.

Fine,
I thought.
Reduced to having philosophical arguments with a ghost. It’s been a worse day than I thought.

Imagination or not, the thought had succeeded in wrenching my attention off the single-minded track of worry. I felt a sense of invitation—or temptation, perhaps. The urge to talk to him. The need to escape into conversation, even if one-sided . . . and imaginary.

No. I won’t use you that way,
I thought, a little sadly.
Not right that I should only think of you when I need distraction, and not for your own sake.

And do you never think of me, for my own sake?
The question floated in the darkness of my eyelids. I could see his face, quite clearly, the lines of it curved in humor, one dark eyebrow raised. I was dimly surprised; it had been so long since I thought of him in any focused way that I should have long since forgotten exactly what he looked like. But I hadn’t.

And I suppose that’s the answer to your question, then,
I thought silently to him.
Good night, Frank.

I turned onto my side, facing the door. I felt a little calmer now. I could just make out the outlines of the door, and being able to see it lessened that feeling of being buried alive.