Mending Horses (6 page)

“Good!” Jonathan shouted over the din. “A good man like yourself, Jacob Fairley. Or you, Tom Shelby. Or you, Ezra Stokes. . . .” He named all the men he recognized, watching their eyes go slack and fearful. A few tugged their hat brims down low over their brows and retreated into the shadows.

A breeze swirled a puff of white up from a sack in one man's hand. Feathers drifted about like flies buzzing around a cow's backside. Jonathan pointed his pistol at the feather-bearer. “If I was you, Abner Bacon, I'd rather face hanging than tell my wife what I done with all them feathers she was saving for her pillows and mattresses.”

Abner stared sheepishly into the bag, then thrust it behind his back.

Jacob cackled uneasily. “And why would any of us be hanged?” From the way his eyes wouldn't meet Jonathan's, the peddler knew that sense—or fear—had begun to sober him.

“Well, ain't that the penalty for murder these days?” Jonathan asked.

“It's not murder we're doing. It's justice.” The smith pointed a sooty finger at the pale figure quivering behind the gelding's shaggy legs.

“Not if you got the wrong fella.”

“We got the right one,” Jacob said.

“You do?” Jonathan scratched his chin dubiously. “You seen him do all this robbing and killing? You got some newspapers or handbills telling about it? You got a writ on him?” Phizzy's ears twitched, and for a moment Jonathan thought he heard thunder.

The men shuffled their feet and looked away. Jonathan saw a flash of light in the woods behind the men, and he heard the rumble again. Not thunder. Something better.

“Hell, you can't even agree what he's done or where he done it. About the only thing you can agree on is how to kill him.” Jonathan tossed the pistol at Fairley. Reflexively, the blacksmith grabbed the gun before it tumbled to the ground. He held it by the barrel and stared at it as if he didn't quite know what it was.

“If it's killing you want, go ahead, kill him. But you better kill me, too. 'Cause I'll stand witness against every damn one of you.” Jonathan stood in his stirrups to get a better view of the forest beyond. He pointed over the men's heads. “And you better kill Chester Ainesworth and Eldad Taylor and all the rest of them sober fellas coming up behind you.”

A half dozen horsemen burst from the woods. Some of the mob dropped their torches and ran, stumbling over each other in their drunken flight. Abner Bacon flung his sack at the nearest rider. The bag burst open in a spray of feathers. The horsemen had their hands full trying to calm their shying horses, avoid the fallen torches, and prevent the men on the ground from escaping, all the while trying not to drop their own lanterns or fall into the fire in the middle of the clearing. Eldad somehow managed to keep his own mount calm. He drove together several of the men like a flock of sheep.

Chester leaped down from his horse and pulled off his coat, using it to smother the fallen torches and stamping smaller flames out with his boots. The odors of scorched cloth and leather and
burning feathers mingled with the tar- and wood-smoke-laden air. By the time Chester had conquered the fires and reclaimed his gelding, the rest of the horses had settled down, and their riders had herded the remnants of the mob together. Only five remained, trapped in the circle of horses while feathers drifted about them like a freakish snowstorm.

Chester stomped over to stand toe-to-toe with the blacksmith. The constable's face was a blend of crimson rage and sooty black splotches. The smoldering coat in his hand wreathed him in a shroud of smoke, so he looked as if he'd just climbed up from the depths of hell.

“What the devil are you playing at, Jacob?” Chester roared. He jabbed his index finger into Fairley's chest hard enough to make him wince. Fairley looked ready to jab back, when the wind lifted a cluster of feathers and blew them into the blacksmith's face, where they stuck to his sweat-dampened cheeks like a ragged beard. Fairley swore and wiped the feathers away. They clung to his fingers and refused to be shaken off. Flicking his wrist in frustrated attempts to shed the feathers, Fairley looked too much of an idiot to lead anyone, and Chester looked too much of a devil to be defied.

Jonathan dismounted and knelt next to the prisoner. At Jonathan's touch, the boy squirmed away, kicking frantically. Jonathan grabbed the boy's shoulders. “It's all right, son. I ain't one of them.” The boy settled like a frightened colt, trembling as the peddler untied his hands, then pulled the sack from his head and the gag from his mouth.

The boy scrambled into the shadows to retch until dry heaves racked his body. When Jonathan laid a hand on his shoulder, the boy jerked away from him.

Jonathan took a flask from his coat pocket. “Here now, son. This'll set you straight.” He offered the flask, trying to coax the boy into the light in order to see how badly he'd been hurt.

The boy shied again. The breeze cast a drift of feathers over him. He shivered when they settled on his body. “I ain't going to harm you,” Jonathan assured him. He put his hand under the
boy's chin and pressed the bottle to his lips to get him to drink. Their eyes met for a second, then the boy turned away, coughing up the spirits.

Jonathan's heart rolled over. “Eldad! For Christ's sake, bring me a light!” He pulled the boy around to face him, cupping the boy's cheek in his hand when the lad tried to squirm free.

Eldad's lantern revealed a pale, freckled, sharp-featured face, his pupils so wide that his eyes looked nearly black.

“Dan'l?” Jonathan said. “Dan'l? Son? Do you know me?”

The boy might have been a wild beast or an idiot child for all the response he made.

“You know this fella, Jonny?” Eldad asked.

“I fear I do, Eldad. God help him, I fear I do.”

“His name's Daniel Linnehan,” Jonathan said. He took a hefty swallow of Ainesworth's rum, its warm bite serving as liquid comfort against what he'd seen that night. “He's bound out to some storekeeper up in Massachusetts. Near's I can remember, the boy's got no kin.”

“Do you know his master's name?” Chester winced as his wife salved the blisters on his singed hand. Now that the anger had settled out of him, he looked dirty and exhausted and a good decade older than his years. His bloodshot eyes were circled with fatigue and soot and, Jonathan guessed, more than a little guilt over his failure to keep his prisoner safe. Still reeking of smoke, he nursed a mug of rum in one hand while his wife nursed the other.

If Chester looked the worse for wear, his wife looked the worse for worry. Yet even in a shabby work dress, with her dark hair a-frazzle and her mouth tight with concern, she was a handsome woman. Her brown eyes had an intensity and alertness that were a wonder to Jonathan, given the time of night and how much work the men had brought home to her. She'd tended the boy's hurts and her husband's burns while simultaneously conjuring rum and cider and cake for Jonathan and Eldad. But she'd quickly made it clear to the men that the appearance of food and drink didn't grant them leave to lounge about in idleness. There'd been candles to light, water to be fetched, a fire to be tended, shirts and rags to be gathered, a multitude of orders to be obeyed. She was definitely a woman strong enough to keep a man in his place. Every time she looked his way, Jonathan involuntarily straightened in his chair and tidied his clothes.

“Mr. Stocking?” Mrs. Ainesworth said. “Who was the boy bound to?”

Jonathan rubbed his eyes, realizing that his mind had drifted off without answering Chester's question. “His master?” He scratched his head. Something to do with lying. Lyford? Lyons? “Lyman,” he said finally. “Yes, Lyman.”

“So that much is true, then,” Mrs. Ainesworth said, glancing toward the shadowy corner of the kitchen where Daniel lay stretched out on the settle.

Though Jonathan couldn't see the boy's face, he guessed that Daniel still stared at the ceiling with the same vacant gaze he'd worn since his rescue. Moving with no more will than a puppet, he'd let Jonathan and Eldad wrap a coat around him, put him on a horse, and bring him to Ainesworth's house, where he'd sat limp as a rag baby while Mrs. Ainesworth and the men had washed and tended to him and put a clean shirt on him.

The worst of the boy's hurts were old ones: scars from beatings across his back and buttocks and legs, scars from something else along his arms and shoulders. Jonathan suppressed a shudder at the thought of so many scars on such a young body, such a young soul. “That boy's been used hard,” he said.

“Hard enough to make him do murder?” Chester asked.

“No,” Jonathan said, though what, indeed, did he know of the boy? He'd seen him all of twice. Still, he'd seen enough to convince him that the boy had a sense of honor—honor enough to spare an old horse's legs and an old man's pride by deliberately losing the race Jonathan had challenged him to at their first meeting. But even an honorable man would do murder in his own defense. Or someone else's.

“Would he steal a horse?” Chester asked. His wife finished bandaging his left hand. She tugged his sleeve to make him hold out his right.

Jonathan had forgotten about the stolen horse. “Was it a red mare?”

Chester nodded and took in a quick breath as his wife dabbed ointment on his knuckles. “A good-looking one, so I've heard,
though I haven't seen her myself. She's still at the blacksmith's. I was going to fetch her in the morning.”

“He ran off, then,” Jonathan said softly. “Ran off and took the horse with him.”

“Maybe not.” Mrs. Ainesworth shot a cryptic glance at her husband.

Stiffly, Chester started to rise, but his wife patted his forearm to make him sit back down. “I'll get it, dear,” she said. She ruffled her husband's dark, wavy hair and kissed him gently on the forehead before taking a candle and leaving the room. She returned with a bundle of papers.

As he leafed through the papers, Jonathan let out a low whistle. Whatever had freed Daniel from his indenture must have been one step shy of a miracle. “So he's free, then. And the mare belongs to him.”

“If those papers are real.” Eldad's tone warned Jonathan not to get too hopeful.

Mrs. Ainesworth clicked her tongue impatiently. “That boy's only what? Fifteen? Sixteen? Would he know enough to write them, never mind forge half a dozen different hands?”

“The fella is who he claims, then,” Eldad said.

“And no thief, either,” Mrs. Ainesworth added, a smug half-smile playing across her lips. She cut another strip of linen and went back to work on Chester's right hand.

“So it seems. But it doesn't mean he can't be a murderer,” Chester said.

“That boy's no more a murderer than I am,” Jonathan said. “I have a sense about him.”

Chester raised an eyebrow. “So did Jacob Fairley.” He drew in a breath as his wife tightened the bandage around his finger a little too fiercely.

“Do you really believe Mr. Fairley's tales?” Mrs. Ainesworth's voice was sharp-edged.

Chester sighed. “It doesn't matter what I believe. What matters is the truth and the law. In a couple of days, we'll know whether there's any truth to all this talk of murder.” Chester started to run
his left hand through his unruly hair, then grimaced and thought better of it. “Then I'll know what the law requires me to do. In the meantime, he might as well stay here.”

“If you lock that boy up in some dark hole, you'll have yourself a corpse or a lunatic come morning,” Jonathan said.

Chester shook his head. “I should have been less worried about keeping him locked in and more worried about keeping everyone else locked out,” he said. “I'll sit watch on the boy, just in case anyone tries to follow Jacob's example.” He tried to lift his mug, but his bandaged fingers were too fat and slippery to hold it. “I only hope,” he said, staring glumly into his rum, “that tomorrow morning Jacob Fairley feels as bad as I know I will.”

Jonathan yawned so wide his jaw popped. He looked enviously at the bed Mrs. Ainesworth had made up for Daniel, then at his own mattress, a well-worn tick flattened with long use, which Chester had dragged down from the attic and laid on the floor. His aching joints regretted the impulse that had prompted him to sit watch over Daniel.

“You wouldn't happen to mind changing places, would you, Dan'l?” Jonathan asked.

The boy lay rigid on the bed, his eyes staring blindly at the ceiling. He'd barely reacted when Jonathan and Chester had carried him upstairs into the Ainesworths' spare bedroom.

“Dan'l?” Jonathan waved a hand in front of the boy's face. “You wouldn't happen to mind at least not looking quite so cadaveracious, would you?” No response. The peddler sighed and pulled the blanket up to the boy's chin.

A light footstep shuffled in the hallway, and the door creaked open. A pair of curious blue eyes stared up at him. “Billy! What the devil are you doing here?”