Rachel's Choice (29 page)

Rachel nodded. “I know, but if I don't try, I'll spend the rest of my life regretting it.”

“Go on, then. I can see there's no stopping you. I'll tend to your boy as long as I can. But if you go to prison, that father-in-law of yours will hear of it, and he'll come for little Davy.”

“I knew I could trust you, Cora.”

“You've been a friend to me and mine for a long time. You may be white on the outside, Rachel Irons, but inside, your blood is the same color as ours. I won't help you for your reb's sake, but I'll do it for you. Go with God, child.”

Rachel brushed her baby's cheek with one finger, then turned and ran toward the landing.

“Don't say I didn't warn you,” Cora called. This was bad business and no good could come of it. Rachel was a
loving woman and the best neighbor anyone could ask for, but even Rachel—smart as she was—would have trouble getting into a Union prison and freeing her man.

Still cradling Davy in her arms, Cora walked across the hard-packed earth to her son's forge. “Pharaoh,” she called.

The ping of a hammer striking iron told her that he was still shaping the shoes for Nathaniel's mare. A blast of hot air hit her as she rounded the corner. Pharaoh saw her coming and paused, stopping the swing of his heavy hammer in midair.

“Mother?”

She smiled at him. He was a good boy who'd grown into a good man. It had been her lucky day to find him, abandoned by the side of the road, still wet from his birthing. He'd been the first of the children she'd taken to raise, and none would ever take his place.

Pharaoh, she'd named him, after an old Egyptian king. He hadn't looked much like royalty when she'd pulled him squalling from that mud hole, but she reckoned he'd grown into the name. His high cheekbones, wide, strong nose, and full lips made him a handsome man, and his dark African eyes and broad shoulders gave him an aura of power.

But best of all, her son was wise, and not too full of his own ginger to listen to his mother. She never doubted that Pharaoh would do what she asked of him, no matter what he thought privately.

“Pharaoh,” she said as she approached him. “I've a chore that needs doing.”

He laid down the hammer and wiped the sweat from his brow. “What now, Mother?”

“I know you just came back, but I want you to take another trip up to Pea Patch Island.”

His eyes narrowed. “What scheme have you hatched up?”

“Come to the house, son. I'll explain it all.”

Pharaoh's lips thinned to a hard line.

“As a favor to Mother, dear.”

“I was afraid you'd say that,” he replied, and then he grinned at her.

The first person Rachel saw as she nosed the bow of her sloop against the dock at Fort Delaware was Pharaoh. She immediately thought that he'd come to prevent her from rescuing Chance.

“Mornin', Missy,” he called. “Sho glad I ketched up wit you. Yore grandaddy wants you back to de house, right now.”

“My grandfather?” She was totally confused. Why was Pharaoh talking like an uneducated fieldhand? And, since she'd heard him working in the forge at Cora's, how had he gotten here to Pea Patch Island ahead of her?

Pharaoh leaped onto her boat. “No, Missy. Don't tie up here,” he said with an exaggerated shake of his head.

“How did you get here?”

“Nearly run two horses to death to do it,” he answered softly. Then he raised his voice again. “You gots to get back to Delaware City. Now.” He smiled foolishly at her, but the expression in his eyes was fierce.

A Union officer walked down the dock toward Rachel's boat. “Anything wrong here, ma'am? Is this negra bothering you?”

Rachel's mouth went dry. “Not at all,” she replied.
“He works for my grandfather. An emergency at home.” She smiled at the captain. “A good day to thee.”

Pharaoh pushed off from the piling. “You take the tiller or I will, Miss Rachel.”

Heart pounding and hands numb, she turned the boat back toward the port town of Delaware City.

“You been hiding a reb on your farm all this summer,” Pharaoh said when they were far enough from the landing to keep from being heard. “All the time I was hunting snakes, you had a rattler in your house.”

“Your mother told.” She hadn't believed that Cora Wright would betray her, and the thought made her sick to her stomach. “He's not like you think.”

“A slaver.”

“No, not a slaveholder. Chance's family doesn't believe in owning slaves.”

“So he told you.” Pharaoh's grim features might have been cut of swamp oak.

“Please,” she said. “You don't know him like I do. He's a good man, Pharaoh.”

“Fighting to keep other humans under the whip.”

“No. That's not true. He told me that he joined the Confederate army because he couldn't go against his neighbors and friends, not because he believed in slavery.”

“And that's supposed to make a difference to me?”

A dark form glided under the boat, and Rachel stared down into the brown water. “I think that was a shark.” She shuddered. “I hate sharks.”

“They're good eating, if you know how to cook them. My Emma fries up—”

“Why are you here, Pharaoh? Why don't you just mind your own affairs?”

He knotted the line and scowled at her. “I am minding my business. I'm doing a favor for my mother.”

“What did she tell you to do?”

“Find you and keep you from doing something stupid.”

“Are you going to have me arrested?”

He shrugged. “Me? Have a white woman—a Quaker woman—arrested on my say-so?”

Rachel flushed and looked down at her plain gray dress. “His name is Chance. He means the world to me.”

“Family.”

“What?” Puzzled, she looked up into his face again.

“Family means everything to my mother. She wants me to help you get this reb free and see that he does the right thing by you.”

“I don't understand. You mean you haven't come to stop me? You want to help me get Chance free?”

“And see that he marries you.”

“Marriage? Who said anything about marriage? He never asked me to marry him.”

“Figured as much.”

“Don't judge him before you've met him.”

“I already have.”

“I can get inside the prison,” she said. “I've done it before.”

“You will wait for me at Delaware City. I'll go back and find out if your reb is still in there or if he's been hung for escaping.”

Rachel's fingers tightened on the tiller as she guided the small sloop around a larger vessel bound for the prison with a load of flour. “How can you find him? You don't know what he looks like. You don't even know his last name.”

“Mama said you told her it was Chancellor,” Pharaoh replied. “And you can give me his description.”

“I still don't understand what you can do.”

He scoffed. “Lots of black folks work inside those walls. We have our own telegraph system. White people don't take notice of us, or if they do, it's as a servant. Fetch-and-carry boy. That's me. Invisible. And a man who isn't seen can go anywhere. I'm a darn sight more valuable to your reb than a Quaker lady who can't take a step without fifty soldiers' eyes on her.”

Rachel nibbled unconsciously at her lower lip. “What will you do if you find him?”

“Try and get him loose.”

“Why? Why would you help us if you hate him so much?”

“Not doing it for you or him, Miss Rachel. Doing it for my mother. It's her notion. And whatever my mother wants, she gets, if it's in my power to give it to her.”

“And I'm just supposed to wait until you come back?”

“That's right.”

“And if you don't succeed?”

Pharaoh smiled, but the expression in his eyes remained cold. “Then I guess you'll have to try your plan after all. That, or go home empty-handed.”

“You won't betray us to the soldiers?”

“If I meant to, would I tell you?”

The sun's heat burned through the metal door of the punishment box and sucked the last vestiges of fluid from Chance's body. Consciousness came and went. He'd lost all track of time; he didn't know if he'd been in this broiling pit in the ground for hours or days.

Once it had rained. Water seeped in around the edges and dripped in through the lock. He'd savored every drop of moisture, eagerly lapping the muddy liquid from his hands and arms.

He couldn't remember if the Union officer had sentenced him to hang or be shot, but he remembered the feel of the lash ripping through his shirt when they'd whipped him. And he could see Coblentz's grinning face in the last seconds before they'd thrown him into this hole.

I should have killed him when I had the opportunity, Chance thought. Should have … should have … should have …

He laughed, and the sound of his voice echoed horribly in the small space. There was no room to stand or sit. He lay on his lacerated back in an oversize coffin and fought to keep his sanity.

It was easiest to let go, to stop thinking rationally and
let the blackness envelop him. There was no pain without reason, and no terror when he drifted on the brink of nothingness.

He'd never known a man to come out of the pit alive. Among the prisoners it was said that those who went down into that grave lasted two days at most.

Strangely, the hate he'd felt toward the Dutchman had seeped away into the damp earth beneath him. He'd been discovered as he left Coblentz's room, after he'd already made the decision not to kill him. He simply didn't have the grit to murder a sleeping man, not even slime like Daniel Coblentz.

But I should have, he thought. Then, at least, I'd be dying for something. This was a waste and a hard way to leave this world.

If he survived the pit, it would only be to appear at his own execution. And a wiser man would let the heat and the despair take him.

His back felt as though it were on fire. Infection must have set in—perhaps even gangrene. Did a man know when he was dying, or could he lie already dead and be none the wiser? Maybe he was a ghost and didn't have the sense to realize it.

Could a ghost have such vivid memories of a flesh-and-blood woman? Would a specter hold the scent of a freshly bathed baby boy? He didn't believe that was possible.

It was Rachel who kept him alive; so long as he drew one breath after another, he might see her again … hold her in his arms.

I should have stayed with you on Rachel's Choice, he thought. I should have forgotten the war and been content
to plow your rich fields and hear the sound of your laughter in the twilight.

Rachel's lack of ostentation, her simple way of life, even her Indian blood, which would be so shocking to his Richmond friends and neighbors, were insignificant compared to the love he felt for her.

She'd given herself to him in the shallows of Indian Creek. He'd swum naked beside her, and they'd splashed each other with sparkling handfuls of water. He wished he could submerge himself in that glorious current now; he would trade a year of his life to drink his fill of that clean liquid.

Chance laughed again. Who was he to trade years of his life for anything? He had only hours or minutes left. Or nothing …

“Rachel … Rachel, I need you,” he murmured weakly. And then the space closed in around him, and he lapsed into a tortured dreamworld of parched earth and graveyards beneath a molten-red sun.

Rachel anchored her sloop on the outskirts of Delaware City and looked at Pharaoh. “Do you want to take the boat back to the island?” she asked.

“A good way to lose
Windfeather
is to loan her to me,” he'd said. “Whites are suspicious of a black man who owns something this valuable.”

“We're not all so cruel,” she argued. “Surely if you explained that—”

“Tell me that when you've lived with skin the color of coal.”

Rachel took a step backward under the force of his bitter gaze. “White men are giving their blood to free your people from bondage,” she said. “We're not all evil.”

“No.” His eyes lost their malevolent glow. “No, you're not. At least I tell myself that.” His expression softened. “Wait here for me,” he said.

“How long?”

“Until I come for you.”

He dived overboard and swam to the reedy shoreline, and a short while later he'd caught a ride to the island on a barge. Hoping against hope that Pharaoh could be trusted, Rachel watched him until she could no longer make out his rough-hewn features among a group of other laborers.

The hours passed slowly. The sun became a huge crimson globe seeping rays of orange and gold across the western horizon. Dusk fell, and Rachel was alone with the quiet noises of the river. She could see lights from the town and Fort Delaware, but the sounds of human activity were strangely muted.

By noon the following day, Pharaoh had not returned. In desperation she pulled anchor and raised her sail to catch the wind.

An hour later, carrying Chance's five hundred dollars and pulling her wagon of pies and bread, she entered the gate to the common prisoners' section of the island.

She knew she should have been prepared for the heartrending scene between the guards' station and the barracks, but the sight and smells of sick and dying prisoners were overwhelming. Despite her sympathy, she did not stop walking, and those ragged men who flocked around her to beg a bit of food or ask for favors made no attempt to stop her.

A corporal admitted her to the barracks. Knees weak from fear, she followed him through an empty dirt-floored building into the open space where she'd sold
her baked goods before. Only one prisoner was there, a small, thin-faced boy sweeping the hard-packed earth, but she could hear the coughs and groans of many others through the thin walls that separated the courtyard from the hospital.