Persuasion (23 page)

Stroking the bird’s head and back with two broad fingers, Obadiah began to speak in a rhythmic chant loaded with long vowels and harsh consonants, sounds like light and shadow. Feathers ruffling as if it were going to go to sleep, the raven settled itself and closed its eyes.

Obadiah kept stroking, and then his hand snapped closed, twisted, and broke the raven’s neck. Sweeping his arm upward, he threw the limp body into the air.

A scream seared up Barrie’s throat. The sound spilled across her tongue and then cut off with a gasp of surprise.

The bird had vanished.

She had seen it thrown. She had seen it hover at the point where it had stopped ascending, but it never fell. Instead, feathers drifted toward the ground like oversize black snowflakes, each different and unearthly.

Both hands pressed to her chest, she covered Mark’s watch and held it like a talisman while she pushed herself through the familiar steps of averting hyperventilation and warding off a panic attack. Trying to, anyway. It was easier to focus on the mechanics: exhale before inhaling; breathe out, then in,
out and in. How easy it was to forget how to do what every infant knew automatically.

Obadiah had killed a bird.

Killed it.

Or had he?

Because the body still had not appeared. Feathers drifted to the ground in abnormally slow motion, and they didn’t stop at the surface. They sank beneath the grass and continued sinking until they disappeared, absorbed as if the earth inside the circle had turned to liquid and the feathers had developed weight.

Barrie wanted to race back to the boat and across the river to Watson’s Landing, but her feet had welded to the grass. She doubted she could have moved if she tried. Needing something to hold on to, she stretched her fingers toward Cassie. But Cassie stepped forward and snatched the last handful of feathers out of the air.

Wrapping her fist around the feathers, Cassie crumpled them, and the largest snapped in two. “Was that real?” she asked, her words echoing Barrie’s thoughts. “Where’s the bird?”

Obadiah’s eyes snapped open. He spun toward her to stare in horror at the feathers in Cassie’s hand. “What have you done?”

Lightning flashed. The ground rumbled and shook with
a blast of energy that pushed Barrie off her feet and sent Obadiah flying backward, thrown up and away by an unseen force from below the ground. Cassie fell to her knees.

Whatever had happened, it hadn’t been any kind of traditional explosion. The ground wasn’t split open. There was no fire. But above them, the night sky turned to daylight blue, and the moon became a sun alternately hidden and revealed by clouds racing as quickly as a stop-motion video.

A flicker behind Barrie made her turn. On the foundations of the old mansion, a white-gabled house sprang to life. Three stories rose to form the central wing, and the eight columns in the portico matched exactly the ruined columns of Colesworth Place. Apart from an opalescent shimmer, the image was perfect in every detail, from brick to glass to mortar.

Barrie sprang to her feet and took a step toward Obadiah. Only it wasn’t him lying where she had seen him fall. Whoever lay there was ancient, a leathered husk of a man, his face shrunken, his cheeks gaunt, and his eyes hollow and sunken so deep his appearance was nearly skeletal. Before Barrie had taken a second step or processed what she was seeing, the mansion in front of her shimmered again, winked in and out of existence like a lightbulb deciding whether or not to die.

The front door opened.

Three abreast, soldiers clad in Union blue slouched down the steps, their half-derelict uniforms unbuttoned. Two more men dragged a dazed, stumbling woman and two girls behind them. One of the girls was white and blond, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. The other girl was black and younger,
probably a slave child, judging by her cheaper dress. The soldiers shoved all three out into the yard, where the woman stumbled to her knees with her wide hoopskirt belled around her. The soldiers pushed the girls down, too, and kicked the black child until the other girl crawled over and pulled her away.

Barrie had already started running forward, shouting, “Stop it!”

No one looked up.

She reached the two girls, but they crab-walked backward
through
her, leaving Barrie between them and the soldiers as if she weren’t even there. As if
she
were the ghost and they were real. Except they weren’t real; they couldn’t have been.

Clinging to each other, the two girls huddled beside the woman, who didn’t seem to even be trying to get up. Her eyes were fixed on the house, where more soldiers filed out the door, carrying chests and clanking bundles of looted candlesticks, plates, and silver wrapped in tablecloths and sheets. Two soldiers angled a life-size painting of a young debutante in a pale blue dress through the front door, and put it into a cart drawn up to the base of the steps.

Beside the cart, another man, an officer with gold epaulettes on his shoulders, opened the bundles and looked inside, his frown nearly hidden by a thick mustache and heavy sideburns. Banging his fist on the side of the cart so hard that the
horses twitched in their traces, he barked an order at two men trudging up the steps. The men broke into a jog and disappeared through the door.

Hand on the hilt of his sword, the officer marched to the woman and stopped in front of her. She shrank away and pulled her daughter closer.

Barrie couldn’t help remembering Twila Beaufort’s ghost, who had been stuck in Emmett’s bedroom, repeating the last moments of her life on an inescapable loop. Were these ghosts reliving the night they died? Or was this something else? Something that had to do with whatever ceremony Obadiah had performed?

The place where the husk of Obadiah had lain on the ground was now empty. Obadiah himself had disappeared.

The ghosts continued to move around Barrie—but were they ghosts? Could a house become a ghost? More likely she was seeing a scene from the past, an echo of some kind. An alternate reality? Maybe she was the one who had been transported somewhere else.

Barrie rubbed her aching head. None of it made sense.

Wherever she was, past or present, Cassie was there as well, standing a few steps back, still clutching a fistful of raven’s feathers. And beneath the trees along the road toward the church, the bulb of a lamp glowed yellow beside the front door of the small house where Cassie and her family lived.

The sight grounded Barrie, assured her the mansion wasn’t real, wasn’t
now
. But a few feet from where she stood, the officer abruptly pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the woman, shouting words that Barrie couldn’t hear. The woman shook her head and shouted back at him equally soundlessly. He asked again. Again the woman shook her head, and he aimed the gun and pulled back the hammer.

The woman was crying, her shoulders trembling, her head shaking no, no, no, and her mouth seeming to repeat words over and over, too. The blond girl stood and dusted herself off, then stepped between her mother and the gun.

“God, no. Please!” Hands to her mouth, Barrie backed away. “Please don’t.”

She couldn’t bear to see another person die, much less a child. It didn’t matter how long ago the death might have happened—didn’t the fact that she was seeing the echo at all mean someone had died? Were all these people trapped in someone’s final moments?

The officer turned the gun on the blond girl and repeated whatever question he’d been asking. The girl answered calmly. Her mother gave another silent scream, but continued to shake her head.

Gesturing with the gun, the officer waved a soldier over and pointed to the other girl. The soldier’s eyes widened, and he said something, but the officer snapped another order.
Seizing the black child by the arm, the soldier threw her back down on the ground, then yanked on the cord that held up his blue-gray trousers.

The slave girl couldn’t have been more than eight or ten. Her eyes were wide and rimmed in white, and now she was screaming, too, her mouth open and her throat working, but no sound spilled into the freakishly silent night.

Barrie’s blood stopped—everything stopped—the world stopped—it
should
have stopped.

She launched herself at the soldier who was pulling down his trousers, but she connected with nothing.

Nothing was there, nothing and everything that was wrong with the world. Everything that was warped and awful.

She fell through the ghostly body and landed on her knees. Beside her, the blond girl grabbed for the officer’s gun, and he hit her, knocking her away so that she fell sideways and landed only a few feet from the child. Both girls were close enough to Barrie that the desperation on their faces burned into her memory.

The officer turned the gun back on the woman. Grasping her face between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand, he forced her to look. The child lay on her back, panic-stricken and screaming at the soldier who stood with his boot on her stomach to hold her down. The woman tried to pull away, but the officer pointed at the blond girl in what was clearly a
threat. The mother sagged, shaking her head, pleading instead of screaming:

Please, no. I don’t know anything. I don’t know.

The words were clear, mouthed over and over. Barrie needed no sound to hear them.

The officer reached forward and yanked the woman to her feet. She kicked to break free, crying, cursing unheard curses, clawing at his arm. Finally, she spit on him, and he cuffed her across the cheek hard enough for her head to snap aside. She would have fallen, but he jerked her up.

The pain, the injustice, the fury ripped Barrie apart like shards of glass scraping at her stomach, at her chest. And there was nothing she could do.

These were the men who’d been meant to fight
against
slavery. That’s what she’d been taught. These were the saviors. If they weren’t, then who was? Because they were raping
children
. Hitting women. Stealing. Extorting.

Barrie wasn’t naïve enough to believe there was good in war on either side, but this . . . How did anyone justify this?

The blond girl looked at the officer and screamed something, her lips moving too fast for Barrie to read them. Pants halfway to his knees, the soldier stopped to see what was going on. The officer shifted his grasp from the woman’s face to her shoulder and asked the blonde a question. She answered, but her mother sagged, shouting, “No!”

Shoulders hunched and heaving, the woman sobbed, and her daughter looked confused.

The officer studied them both, then snapped something to the soldier who loomed over the slave girl. Pulling up his trousers, the soldier returned to the house, taking several other soldiers with him. They disappeared inside.

Barrie slumped in relief, but she had no breath. She dropped to the ground and hugged her knees. But only minutes later, the soldiers came back out of the house and shook their heads.

Without releasing the woman, the officer barked an order across his shoulder. The woman wrenched away. The officer slammed his fist into her cheek. She fell to her knees, crawled to where the black girl lay curled in a heaving ball, and gathered the child to her. Looking up at the man almost calmly, she rocked the girl in her lap, trying to offer comfort while her own tears streamed.

The officer studied her, then turned away. The blond girl had snuck over, too, and sat beside her mother, stroking the black child’s head. All three were crying. The officer turned his back as if they didn’t matter and moved toward the loaded cart.

The woman paid him no more attention. It wasn’t until smoke rose from the burning mansion—Barrie could smell it—actually
smell
it—that the woman’s head snapped up.

Three soldiers ran, crouching, out of the house with flaming torches, which they threw up onto the portico roof. Smoke billowed from inside the open door. Faster than Barrie could have imagined, fire licked the walls and paint peeled off the bricks. The glass in one of the downstairs windows shattered.

The woman bolted toward the house. A soldier snatched at her skirt, but she twisted free and raced up the mansion steps. She darted inside as the portico ceiling caught fire and flames bit through the wood in a shower of sparks.

“Go after her!” Barrie screamed, running herself even though part of her knew it wouldn’t do any good. None of this was real.

She couldn’t stop it.

The scene all played out in slow motion, as if time had slipped from its moorings and cast her out of the universe she knew. Barrie’s rational mind kept telling her none of this was happening. It had already happened, so it couldn’t be happening now—again. Yet it was.

Barrie passed the cart and reached the steps. The soldiers ignored her. Reacting to something behind Barrie, they whipped around in unison to face the woods by the slave cabins. The officer snatched a rifle from the cart.

A big man in a long black coat and burgundy waistcoat raced toward the house. The officer raised the gun and fired.

A bullet hit the man in the shoulder. He jerked. Stumbled.
Kept running. Racing past as the officer was reloading, the man swerved to avoid three soldiers who sprinted to intercept him. He passed the steps as other men snatched up their guns. With blood spreading across his shirt and coat, he made it ten more feet before another shot hit him in the back. He fell. Got up. Ran on.