Freedom Bound (13 page)

FOR A FEW MINUTES
Nick wielded the file with vigor. But
his energy soon ran out. Charlotte took over, and for the rest
of the day they took turns, stopping only to share the last of
the bread and cheese from her satchel. By sundown they had
removed the shackle that encircled Nick's left ankle.

He took off his shoe and stocking and sat rubbing the
skin, where the shackle had left red marks. After giving the
leg a good stretch, he said, “I feel much better now. It's low
tide and the creek is running clear. I'm going outside to fill
the flask. Then I'll start on the other ankle.”

He crawled over to the wall to peer outside. “I wonder
where the alligator is?”

“We have nothing to fear from that particular alligator.”

“I'd still like to know.” Nick put his eye to the chink
between the logs. “I don't see it.” He hesitated. “But just a
minute! Somebody's coming!”

Charlotte felt a burst of panic. “Not Abner!”

“No. It's an Indian.”

“Let me see.”

When Charlotte looked out, she saw a slim young man
crossing the fallen tree that bridged the creek. He held a bow
in his hand. On his shoulder he wore a quiver of arrows, and
on his back a carrying basket. Nothing else about him
looked Indian—not his brown hair pulled back in a pigtail,
or his linsey-woolsey undershirt, or his army boots.

She let out a sigh of relief. “That's not an Indian. It's Elijah.”

“Carrying a bow and arrows?”

“That doesn't surprise me.”

For a few moments she lost sight of him. Then she heard
a bump as something knocked against the floor of the loft.
One of the loose boards rose, and the top of a ladder poked
up.

“Elijah, it's me, Charlotte!” she shouted.

“What!”

She lifted the second loose board out of the way. An instant later, Elijah's head popped up over the edge of the floor.
She couldn't help smiling at the astonishment on his face.

“Nick's here, too,” she said.

The rest of Elijah ascended. He pulled up the ladder and
laid it under the eaves out of the way.

“Nick reached over and stuck out his hand. “Glad to meet
you, Elijah. Charlotte's told me a lot about you.”

Elijah shook Nick's hand. “And I've heard plenty about
you.”

So much for introductions, Charlotte thought. But nothing more was needed. It seemed so extraordinary that Nick
and Elijah, two of the most important people in her life, had
never met before. It was all because of the war. Sometimes
war brought people together who otherwise never would
have known each other, and sometimes it sent friends and
loved ones far away.

“Elijah, where did you find the ladder?” Charlotte asked.

“When I discovered the cabin, it was inside, leaning
against the wall. I suspected what it was for, so I tested the
ceiling boards until I found the opening. When I'm away, I
keep the ladder hidden in the undergrowth. When I'm here,
I pull it up into the loft out of sight.”

Elijah shrugged off his quiver and his carrying basket.
“I'm used to shocks,” he said, “but this beats anything.” He
shifted his gaze from Charlotte to Nick and then back to
Charlotte. “How did you find me? The directions I gave
weren't
that
good.”

“I wasn't really looking for you. Finding the cabin was
almost an accident.” She shook her head. “It was Nick I was
trying to find.”

Elijah smiled. “Wherever I meet you . . . whenever I meet
you . . . you always seem to be searching for Nick.”

“Well, this time I found him.”

“I'd say he's lucky you did.” Elijah looked again at Nick,
his eyes registering the slave collar, the hand bolt, and the
remaining shackle with its dangling links of chain. “What
happened, Nick? You look like you've escaped from a dungeon.”

“That's close enough. A couple of Over Mountain men
had me chained in a cave. Charlotte rescued me.”

“A lot has happened,” Charlotte said, “since you left
Charleston.”

“I'd surely like to hear about it.”

Elijah sat down on the loft floor, facing them, while Charlotte told him everything. She ended with the alligator making a meal of Billy.

When she had finished, he said, “And here I thought you
were in Charleston, doing nothing more dangerous than
lugging bundles of laundry while I sat here slapping mosquitoes and wondering how long I'd be stuck in the swamp.”

“If you plan to stay in the swamp,” Nick said, “you need
to find a safer hiding place.”

“I'm not staying,” said Elijah. “I've had enough of hiding
in the swamp. Living here could drive a person mad. It's
everything all together: the mosquitoes, the snakes, the alligators, the rising mist, and the smell. There's plenty of game,
but I can't cook what I kill. If I lit a fire, somebody would see
the smoke. The first night I was here, I snared a muskrat.”
He grimaced. “Did you ever eat raw muskrat?”

“No,” Charlotte and Nick both replied.

“You don't want to. After that experience, I lived on oysters and hardtack. The day I finished the hardtack was when
I decided to leave.” He opened his basket. “But look at this!
I have food for three days on the trail, as well as a good bow
and twenty arrows with metal tips.”

“Where did you get all that?” asked Charlotte.

“From Creeks who live on the Edisto River. I traded the
pewter buttons from my uniform for the food and the
weapons.”

“Clever,” said Nick. “I saw you'd cut off the buttons, but
never thought of that.”

“Try this.” Elijah handed Charlotte and Nick each a strip
of dried meat from the basket.

Charlotte sank her teeth into it. “Mm!”

“Very good,” said Nick.

“Smoked turkey.”

When Charlotte had finished chewing her mouthful, she
said, “Elijah, I don't blame you for wanting to leave the
swamp. But where can you go?”

“I'm going west to live with the Cherokees. In the mountains, the air is fresh and clean. There's a village called Chickamauga where I'll be welcome.”

“Wasn't the deserter you told me about captured on his
way to Cherokee territory?” Charlotte asked.

“Sergeant Malcolm. Yes. He was caught because he didn't
know the trails and mountain passes. But I do. I travelled
through that country on my way to Carleton Island.”

Nick said, “The British offer big rewards to the Indians for
turning in deserters.”

“I know that, but the Cherokees won't turn me in. Last
fall, I helped save the life of a Cherokee warrior. They won't
forget that.” Elijah began to drag the ladder from under the
eaves. “I might as well start out now.”

“No need to rush,” Nick protested. “There's room for
three to sleep here tonight.”

“I didn't plan to stay for the night. I just came back to pick
up my Bible. It was a gift from my mother, so I don't want
to leave it behind. If I hurry, there's a pine ridge I can reach
to make camp before dark.”

The Bible lay on the floor close by. Charlotte handed it to
him.

After putting the Bible into his basket, Elijah gathered up
his gear, put the ladder in place, and scrambled down. When
he reached the bottom, he waved his farewell. “If you're ever
in Chickamauga, come to see me.”

Charlotte and Nick watched him leave, not crossing the
creek but heading north, the opposite direction.

“I know that Elijah will be better off living in a Cherokee
village than hiding in the swamp,” said Charlotte. “But what
use will Cherokees have for a man who refuses to fight? He's
told me how he feels.”

“He can be useful in other ways. Hunting. Negotiating.”
Nick swung himself onto the ladder. “I'll fill the flask before
the tide turns. If I delay, the water will be too brackish to
drink.”

When Nick returned, he said, “There's a big alligator lying
on the creek bank. It looks like it ate recently.”

“Then it won't be hungry for weeks.” Her tone was so
matter-of-fact that she shocked herself. Crawling to a chink
in the wall, she looked down. There it was. Black. Armour-plated. Engorged.

“Do you suppose it digests everything? Shoes? Clothes?
The hat Mrs. Doughty loaned me was in Billy's pack.” She
took her eye from the hole and turned to Nick. “I was just
thinking about something. Before I left her house, Mrs.
Doughty said she didn't know why God created alligators.
Well, I don't know either. But I can tell you I'm mighty glad
he did.”

At dawn they were ready to leave. Nick had rid his ankles of
the shackles. But he still had the hand bolt fastened to his
left wrist and the slave collar around his neck.

“If we head south,” he said, “sooner or later we'll come to
the wagon track.”

“But, Nick, that's exactly where Abner expects us to go.”

“Then we must find another way. If we take our bearings
from the sun, sooner or later, we'll get back to Charleston.”

“Can we do it in one day?”

“That depends on how many bogs and ponds we have to
skirt around. Tonight we may have to sleep in the swamp.”

She shuddered. “I don't want to spend the night outdoors
in the swamp. Anything but that.”

“Then let's get started.”

Nick moved aside the loose boards and put the ladder in
place. Before following him down, Charlotte took one last
look around the loft. Elijah's buttonless red coat lay on the
palmetto leaves, and Nick's severed shackles on the floor.

When both of them had descended, Charlotte asked,
“What shall we do with the ladder?”

“Let's leave it in place, with the ceiling boards pushed out
of the way, in case someone else comes along who needs a
dry place to stay.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Let's do that. When the next person
comes here, I wonder what he'll make of what he sees. Will
he guess at the stories the red coat and the shackles have to
tell?”

They waded from the cabin into dappled sunlight. On the
creek bank the alligator lay basking.

“It's not hungry. It's not hungry,” Charlotte told herself.
Certainly it didn't look hungry. As they walked by, its leathery eyelids flicked over its bulbous eyes. No other part of the
gator moved. On its sculpted face it wore a yard-long
crooked smile.

THE GROUND WAS
spongy but firm as long as they were under the trees. Nick, in the lead, seemed confident that they
were walking in the right direction. Charlotte was not so
sure. One cypress tree looked much like another. But she
suppressed her suspicion that they were lost and followed
doggedly after.

She didn't know how long they had been walking—maybe an hour—when they came to a field of mud that looked
half a mile wide.

“Do we go through it or around it?” she asked.

“Let's try going through it. Going around it would take an
hour.”

They had walked only a few yards, their feet squelching,
when Nick stopped and turned toward her. “I think I've lost
my shoes.”

There he stood in mud up to his ankles.

“We'd better find them, ” she said, “if only to save the
buckles.”

They groped in the muck and pulled out the shoes. Under
an inch-thick coat of mud, they barely resembled shoes any
longer. Nick carried them until he and Charlotte reached
higher ground. Then he borrowed her knife to scrape them
before putting them back on his feet.

Charlotte felt thankful for her stout boots, with their
waterproof coating of beeswax, tallow and tar. Through
everything, her feet were dry.

On their left rose a wooded hill.

“If we climb to the top, ” Charlotte suggested, “we might
get a better idea of problems that lie ahead.”

“That might help, ” Nick agreed.

As they climbed, the wooded slope began to look familiar. This might, she thought, be the same hill that she had
mistaken for an island when she stood on the porch of
Hewitt's Inn.

Reaching the top, she saw Hewitt's Inn below them, half a
mile to the south. So all their slogging through the swamp
had taken them in a circle. At this rate, they'd never reach
Charleston in just one day.

From the top of the hill, Charlotte and Nick also had a
perfect view of the wagon track, which was mostly above
water once again.

Approaching from the northwest was a wagon drawn by
a pair of mules. Two men sat on the seat at the front. A black
tarpaulin, sagging in the middle, covered the wagon bed.

“That wagon's empty, ” said Nick. “It's probably on its way
back to Charleston after delivering its load—supplies for
General Greene, most likely.”

“Maybe it will stop at the inn.”

“It probably will, but just long enough for the men to
have a meal and rest the mules. They'll want to get the
wagon back to town tonight.”

A brilliant idea sprang into Charlotte's mind. “Let's hitch
a ride.”

Nick snorted. “You can't be serious! With a slave collar
around my neck and a hand bolt locked to one wrist, I need
to stay out of sight. But even if there were no danger in
being seen, who would offer either of us a ride, the way we
look? We're filthy.”

“I didn't mean we'd
ask
for a ride. If the men go into the
inn, we can crawl under the tarpaulin and relax all the way
back to Charleston. No more mosquitoes. No more bogs.
And we'll be back in Charleston tonight.”

“You clever girl!” His eyes brightened. “We can jump off
when we reach the outskirts of Charleston. It will be dark by
then. No one will see us.” He squeezed her hand. “Let's go!”

Descending the wooded hill, they briefly lost sight of the
wagon. But when they reached the bottom and watched
from the cover of the trees, there it was, coming to a stop in
front of the inn, only about fifty feet from where they stood.

The carters climbed down from their seat. They hitched
the wagon to a post and went inside, leaving the mules, still
in harness, munching the greenery that grew beside the
track.

Nick and Charlotte approached the wagon, careful to
keep it between themselves and the inn, in case somebody
happened to look out the window.

“I'll release the tailgate, ” said Nick, “then I'll climb under
the tarpaulin and lift up an edge for you to crawl under.”

She nodded. “Hurry!”

He crept to the back of the wagon, undid a couple of
catches—one on each side—and carefully let down the tailgate. Then he climbed onto the wagon bed and disappeared
under the tarpaulin. A moment later, one edge rose. She saw
his arm holding it up in an inverted V, like the entrance to a
little tent.

Charlotte dashed across the open ground that lay between the trees and the wagon. Nick grabbed her hand to
pull her up. Then she dived under the tarpaulin while Nick
lifted the tailgate and fastened it in place. When he dropped
the tarpaulin, it lay on them like a collapsed tent.

“What's that bad smell?” Charlotte asked. “Like rotten
eggs.”

“Gunpowder.”

“It doesn't smell like gunpowder.”

“Unfired gunpowder doesn't smell the same as burnt
powder. What you're smelling is saltpetre and sulphur.”
They lay side by side. “Now, ” said Nick, “you crawl over to
one side, and I'll go to the other. We don't want to make a
lump in the middle.”

It was black as night under the tarpaulin. As soon as
Charlotte reached her side of the wagon bed, she lifted the
edge of the tarpaulin just an inch to admit a little light and
air. As she squirmed about, trying to find a comfortable
position on the wagon bed, her hand brushed a smooth
sheet of paper.

Curious, she picked it up, and then she lifted the edge of
the tarpaulin another inch so that she could read the writing. The paper appeared to be an invoice or bill of some
kind—not the sort of thing she would expect to find lying
on the floorboards of a wagon. The writing was in a neat
clerical hand:

Bill of Lading

Rifles, 6 crates. 10 rifles per crate

Gunpowder, four barrels

For Delivery to General Nathanael Greene

Benbow's Ferry

She turned over the paper. On the other side was a scribbled
note in pencil:

Load shipment 19 February. End of 2nd Watch.

Warehouse foot of Broad Street.

Speak to Lewis Morley and no one else.

This took a moment to sink in.

It was hard to believe. But the words admitted no other interpretation. Lewis Morley, a staunch Loyalist, was involved
in shipping arms to the rebels.

She slipped the paper between the pages of the Bible that
Mrs. Doughty had given her. As she put it into her pouch,
she heard men's voices approaching. Charlotte dropped the
edge of the tarpaulin and lay still.

She heard the men untie the mules. The wagon gave a
slight lurch as the carters climbed onto their seat.

“Giddy-up!” one called out.

The wagon jolted forward. At first she felt as if her bones
would shake loose with the bouncing and jouncing. But she
got used to it. Lying there with nothing else to do, she had
plenty of time to think.

There were two possibilities. First, Mr. Morley might always have been a secret rebel, a man who truly believed in
the goals of the revolution. Second, he might be doing this
just for the money. Importing goods from abroad had made
him rich. Selling rifles and gunpowder to the rebels would
make him richer still.

Charlotte really didn't care about his motives. His actions
were what counted. And as she mulled over the consequences of his actions, she thought of Jammy.

Morley's treason, when it came to light, would turn
Jammy's situation upside down. If he applied to Southern
Command as an escaped slave owned by a rebel, he would
not be sent back to his owner. Instead, he would be offered
a chance to work on fortifications or to join a regiment like
the Black Pioneers or the Black Dragoons. And at the end of
one year he would be awarded a General Birch certificate
guaranteeing his future as a free man.

She must get this news to Jammy before he left Charleston. She could hardly wait to tell him that now there was no
reason for him to flee. He and Phoebe need not part.

Hurry! Hurry! She silently urged the plodding mules. But
her urging had no effect.

She couldn't relax, not holding such a secret. She burned
to tell Nick.

Many long hours went slowly by. It was dark under the
tarpaulin. Even when she raised its edge to admit a slit of
light, the wagon's solid wooden side kept her from seeing
where she was. She had no idea how far they had travelled
until the light outside began to fade and the approach of
night told her that Charleston must be near.

It was completely dark when she felt a tap on the shoulder. Nick had crawled over to her side of the wagon.

“Now!”

The tarpaulin shifted. A click, followed by another click,
told her that Nick had released the tailgate. The wagon gave
a bounce when he jumped.

Then she jumped too, half rolling from the open end.
Nick pulled her to her feet and off the track.

The wagon did not stop. To the men seated at the front,
their passengers' departure must have felt like a couple of
bumps on the rutted track. When the men arrived at the stable, they might wonder how they could have forgotten to
fasten the tailgate. Apart from that, Nick and Charlotte's
presence would leave no mark.

Charlotte looked up. The sky was full of stars.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“At the Charleston boundary. We're inside the hornwork
wall that crosses from the Ashley River to the Cooper.”

A breeze was blowing from the harbour, fresh against her
skin. Over the sound of small creatures scuttling in the grass,
she heard the rippling chime of distant bells—the bells of St.
Michael's Church, each singing with a different voice.

“Eleven o'clock.” Nick put his arms around her and held
her for a minute without speaking. Then he kissed her.
“We've done it!” he said, and kissed her again. “Now let's get
back to Mrs. Doughty's house.”

“Just a minute. I have something to show you. A paper I
found on the wagon floor.” She pulled the bill of lading from
her satchel and held it under his nose.

“I can't read it. It's too dark.”

“It's a bill of lading that lists six crates of rifles, ten rifles
to a crate, and four barrels of gunpowder to be delivered to
General Nathanael Greene at Benbow's Ferry.” She stopped
for breath. “And on the back there's a note in pencil that
says, ‘Load shipment 19 February. End of 2nd Watch. Warehouse foot of Broad Street. Speak to Lewis Morley and no
one else.'”

“Good God!” said Nick. “Put that paper right back in
your satchel. I have to show this to Southern Command.
You know what it means, don't you?”

“It means freedom for Jammy.”

“Yes, it does. We certainly owe it to Jammy to make sure
of that. But much more than one boy's freedom is involved.”