A Breath of Snow and Ashes (158 page)

The yard was fenced with eight-foot pointed pine stakes, laced with rope. She might get over them, with a foot up from Phaedre . . . but then she saw the shadow of a man pass by on the other side, a gun across his shoulder.

She would have guessed as much, had she been capable of organized thought. This was Bonnet’s hideaway—and judging from the piles of boxes, bundles, and casks stacked haphazardly in the yard, it was also where he kept valuable cargo before selling it. Naturally, it would be guarded.

A faint breeze wafted through the pickets of the fence, carrying the same vile stench she had smelled when they came ashore. She took another quick bite of bread, forcing it down as ballast for her queasy stomach.

Phaedre’s nostrils flared, then pinched at the reek.

“Be a slave ship, anchored past the breakers,” she said very quietly, and swallowed. “Captain come in yesterday, see if Mr. Bonnet have something for him, but he ain’t back yet. Captain Jackson say he come again tomorrow.”

Brianna could feel Phaedre’s fear, like a pale yellow miasma wavering over her skin, and took another bite of bread.

“He won’t—he wouldn’t sell you to this Jackson?” She wouldn’t put anything at all past Bonnet. But she did by now understand things about slavery. Phaedre was a prime item: light-skinned, young, and pretty—and trained as a body servant. Bonnet could get a very good price for her almost anywhere, and from what little she knew of slavers, they dealt in raw slaves from Africa.

Phaedre shook her head, her lips gone pale.

“I don’t think so. He say I’m what he call a ‘fancy.’ That’s why he’s kept me so long; he got some men he know, come up from the Indies this week. Planters.” She swallowed again, looking ill. “They buy pretty women.”

The bread Brianna had eaten melted suddenly into a soggy, slimy mass in her stomach, and with a certain feeling of fatality, she got up and took a few steps away before throwing up over a bale of raw cotton.

Stephen Bonnet’s voice echoed in her head, cheerfully jovial.

“Why bother takin’ ye all the way to London, where ye’d be of no particular use to anyone? Besides, it rains quite a bit in London; I’m sure ye wouldn’t like it.”

“They buy pretty women,” she whispered, leaning against the palisades, waiting for the sense of clamminess to fade. But
white
women?

Why not? said the coldly logical part of her brain. Women are property, black or white. If you can be owned, you can be sold. She herself had owned Lizzie, for a time.

She wiped her sleeve over her mouth, and went back to Phaedre, who was sitting on a roll of copper, her fine-boned face thin and drawn with worry.

“Josh—he took Josh, too. When we came ashore, he told them to take Josh to the barracoon.”

“Joshua?” Phaedre sat up straight, eyes huge. “Joshua, Miss Jo’s groom? He’s
here
?”

“Yes. Where’s the barracoon, do you know?”

Phaedre had hopped to her feet and was striding to and fro, agitated.

“I ain’t knowing for sure. I cook up food for the slaves there, but be one of the seamen takes it. Can’t be far from the house, though.”

“Is it a big one?”

Phaedre shook her head emphatically at that.

“No’m. Mr. Bonnet, he ain’t really in the slaving business. He pick up a few, here and there—and then he got his ‘fancies’”—she grimaced at that—“but can’t be more’n a dozen here, amount of food they eat. Three girls in the house—five, counting they Fulani he say he’s bringing.”

Feeling better, Brianna began to cast about the yard, searching for anything that might be of use. It was a hodgepodge of valuable things—everything from bolts of Chinese silk, wrapped in linen and oiled cloth, and crates of porcelain dishes, to rolls of copper, casks of brandy, bottles of wine packed in straw, and chests of tea. She opened one of these, breathing in the soft perfume of the leaves and finding it wonderfully soothing to her internal distress. She’d give almost anything for a hot cup of tea just now.

Even more interesting, though, were a number of small barrels, thick-walled and tightly sealed, containing gunpowder.

“If only I had a few matches,” she muttered to herself, looking at them longingly. “Or even a striker.” But fire was fire, and there was certainly one in the kitchen. She looked at the house carefully, thinking exactly where to place the barrels—but she couldn’t blow the place up, not with the other slaves inside, and not without knowing what she’d do next.

The sound of the door opening galvanized her; by the time Emmanuel looked out, she had jumped away from the gunpowder, and was examining an enormous box enclosing a grandfather clock, the gilded face—decorated with three animated sailing ships on a sea of silver—peeping out behind the protective laths nailed over it.

“You, girl,” he said to Brianna, and jerked his chin. “You come wash yourself.” He gave Phaedre a hard look—Brianna saw that she wouldn’t meet his eyes, but hastily began to pick up sticks of kindling from the ground.

The hand clamped hard on her neck again, and she was marched ignominiously back into the house.

THIS TIME, Emmanuel
did
lock the door. He brought her a basin and ewer, a towel, and a clean shift. Much, much later, he came back, bringing a tray of food. But he ignored all questions, and locked the door again upon leaving.

She pulled the bed over to the window and knelt on it, elbows wedged between the bars. There was nothing to do but think—and that was something she would as soon put off a little longer. She watched the forest and the distant beach, the shadows of the scrub pines creeping over the sand, the oldest of sundials, marking the snaillike progress of the hours.

After a long time, her knees grew numb and her elbows hurt, and she spread the cloak over the nasty mattress, trying not to consider the various stains on it, nor the smell. Lying on her side, she watched the sky through the window, the infinitesimal changes of the light from one moment to the next, and considered in detail the specific pigments and the exact brushstrokes she would use to paint it. Then she got up and began pacing to and fro, counting her steps, estimating distance.

The room was about eight feet by ten; 5,280 feet in a mile. Five hundred and twenty-eight laps. She really hoped Bonnet’s office was underneath her.

Nothing, though, was enough, and as the room darkened and she reached two miles, she found Roger in her mind—where he had been all along, unacknowledged.

She sank down on the bed, hot from the exercise, and watched the last of the flaming color fade from the sky.

Had he been ordained, as he wanted so much? He had been worried about the question of predestination, not sure that he could take the Holy Orders he desired, if he were not able to subscribe wholeheartedly to that notion—well,
she
called it a notion; to Presbyterians, it was dogma. She smiled wryly, thinking of Hiram Crombie.

Ian had told her about Crombie earnestly attempting to explain the doctrine of predestination to the Cherokee. Most of them had listened politely, then ignored him. Bird’s wife, Penstemon, though, had been interested by the argument, and followed Crombie about during the day, playfully pushing him, then crying out, ‘Did your God know I would do
that
? How could he know that—
I
didn’t know I would do that!’, or in more thoughtful mood, trying to get him to explain how the idea of predestination might work in terms of gambling—like most of the Indians, Penstemon would bet on almost anything.

She thought Penstemon had probably had a lot to do with the shortness of Crombie’s initial visit to the Indians. She had to give him credit, though: he’d gone back. And back again. He believed in what he was doing.

As did Roger. Damn, she thought wearily, there he was again, those soft moss-green eyes of his dark with thought, running a finger slowly down the bridge of his nose.

“Does it really matter?” she’d said at last, tiring of the discussion of predestination, and privately pleased that Catholics weren’t required to believe any such thing and were content to let God work in mysterious ways. “Doesn’t it matter more that you can help people, that you can offer comfort?”

They’d been in bed, the candle extinguished, talking by the glow of the hearth. She could feel the shift of his body as he moved, his hand playing with a strand of her hair as he considered.

“I don’t know,” he’d said at last. He’d smiled a little then, looking up at her.

“Do ye not think any time-traveler must be a bit of a theologian, though?”

She’d taken a deep, martyred breath, and he’d laughed then, and let it go, kissing her instead and descending to far earthier matters.

He’d been right, though. No one who had traveled through the stones could help asking it: why me? And who would answer that question, if not God?

Why me?
And the ones who didn’t make it—why them? She felt a small chill, thinking of those. The anonymous bodies, listed in Geillis Duncan’s notebook; Donner’s companions, dead on arrival. And speaking of Geillis Duncan . . . the thought came to her suddenly; the witch had died
here,
out of her own time.

Putting metaphysics aside and looking at the matter purely in terms of science—and it
must
have a scientific basis, she argued stubbornly, it wasn’t magic, no matter what Geilie Duncan had thought—the laws of thermodynamics held that neither mass nor energy could be created nor destroyed. Only changed.

Changed how, though? Did movement through time constitute change? A mosquito whined past her ear, and she flapped her hand to drive it away.

You could go both ways; they knew that for a fact. The obvious implication—which neither Roger nor her mother had mentioned, so perhaps they hadn’t seen it—was that one could go into the future from a starting point, rather than only into the past and back.

So perhaps if someone traveled to the past and died there, as Geillis Duncan and Otter-Tooth had both demonstrably done . . . perhaps that must be balanced by someone traveling to the future and dying
there
?

She closed her eyes, unable—or unwilling—to follow that train of thought any further. Far in the distance, she heard the sound of the surf, pounding on the sand, and thought of the slave ship. Then she realized that the smell of it was
here,
and rising suddenly, went to the window. She could just see the far end of the path that led to the house; as she watched, a big man in a dark-blue coat and hat stumped rapidly out of the trees, followed by two others, shabbily dressed.
Sailors,
she thought, seeing the roll of their gait.

This must be Captain Jackson, then, come to conduct his business with Bonnet.

“Oh, Josh,” she said out loud, and had to sit down on the bed, a wave of faintness washing over her.

Who had it been? One of the Saint Theresas—Theresa of Avila? Who’d said in exasperation to God,
“Well, if this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few of them!”

SHE HAD FALLEN asleep hinking of Roger. She waked in the morning thinking of the baby.

For once, the nausea and the odd sense of dislocation were absent. All she felt was a deep peace, and a sense of . . . curiosity?

Are you there?
she thought, hands across her womb. Nothing so definite as an answer; but knowledge was there, as sure as the beating of her own heart.

Good,
she thought, and fell asleep again.

Noises from below awakened her sometime later. She sat up suddenly, hearing loud voices raised, then swayed, feeling faint, and lay down again. The nausea had returned, but if she closed her eyes and kept very still, it lay dormant, like a sleeping snake.

The voices continued, rising and falling, with the occasional loud thud for punctuation, as though a fist had struck a wall or table. After a few minutes, though, the voices ceased, and she heard nothing further until light footsteps came to her door. The lock rattled, and Phaedre came in, with a tray of food.

She sat up, trying not to breathe; the smell of anything fried . . .

“What’s going on down there?” she asked.