The Randolph Legacy (29 page)

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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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Ethan lifted Eli’s head into his lap. Blood spilled out of his already-full red mouth, the start of the assault, and why his cry was so drowned. The blood soaked into Ethan’s waistcoat, but the change in position made no difference in the man’s breathing. That was almost done, only wafting the hairs of his nose slightly.
Ethan bent closer. He swallowed down his grief as he loosened the dying man’s cravat. Eli’s eyes recognized him, or perhaps his hands. Could he still hear?
“I will love her always,” Ethan whispered. “And protect her. Always, Eli.”
The last breath to leave Eli Mercer’s body was a sigh.
Ethan looked around the garden he was carving from this neglected corner of Prescott Lyman’s land. Decimated, in this golden twilight. The fear of hurting Judith’s father gone, he buried his head against the ripped chest, the way he’d wanted to retreat into Fayette. He rocked, partly to assure himself that he was alive amid the slaughter. Tears mixed with blood and grime on his face. He felt comfort there, on the back of his neck, exactly where Eli had massaged when he’d gone faint.
“Eli, your dread was no illusion,” Ethan whispered.
He heard Judith’s lilting call to her father. Close. Ethan lay Eli on his side in the grass. He eased off his coat and placed it over the bloody face. The turkey vultures would go for those moist places first. He remembered seeing them pecking away the eyes of dead animals at Windover. He pried the stake that Eli had used to defend himself from his freezing grip. It was important. He didn’t know how, but it was important. He shoved it into his waistcoat as he rose unsteadily to his feet.
Judith was at the end of the path to her father’s cabin when he reached her. Her eyes went wide with alarm.
“Ethan! Dear God. What has happened?”
“Happened …” he repeated tonelessly, stupidly.
“You’re hurt.”
Of course, the blood. “No.” He shook his head, dragging the words out as if English was not his first language. “Not me.”
“Where’s my father?” she demanded.
“Stay here,” he urged gently.
“Let go.”
“No. Stay!”
She screamed. “Ethan, let go of me!” So strong. She fought, jabbing with her elbows, kicking him off balance with calfskin slippers. She bit him hard on the shoulder—a bony part, so he worried more for her teeth than any harm she was doing him.
Hold. If you lose her, you will never get her back,
rang through his head. Others were coming in response to her screams. No matter. Hold on to her.
The blood and sweat between them finally helped her slip out of his grasp, turn. He reached for her waist. Missed. She stumbled farther away. But she had to lift her skirts to run. He leaped out and caught her then, bringing them both down on the dirt path.
“Judith,” he summoned her frantic eyes as he pinned her to the ground with his greater weight, “Eli—”
“No!”
“There was nothing else I could do.”
She screamed for her father like a lost child. Kicked. Ethan felt the weapon Eli had used against his attacker enter his own side. He ignored the pain and held her there below him.
Other hands pried his fingers back. Two of them cracked under the weight of hobnailed boots. The pain finally forced the blue skirts to slip from his grasp. He fought back the multitude of hands, fists, heavy farmers’ bodies. Their boots struck. He protected his side, fearing they would kick the stake in farther, and his own blood would obscure what Eli Mercer had worked so hard to scratch into the wood in his last moments alive.
“Stop!” Judith’s fiery command finally halted the assault.
Ethan rose to his elbow in the billowing silence. He coughed the dust and blood from his throat, then stared up at Judith. She seemed tall again, as when they were on board the
Standard.
Too tall to fit so well under his heart.
Her remaining strength left her face as their eyes met. She swayed, like that night she’d raised the bone cup to toast Fayette. But this time she did not fall. She widened her stance, then turned and ran toward the body of her father.
“Catch her, you damn fools,” Ethan barked at the Quaker farmers.
They did not. He blasphemed in both his languages as he struggled to his good knee. The last kick cut under his jaw so hard he felt his teeth sever a piece of his tongue before he fell senseless, even to Judith’s screams as she discovered her father’s body.
The scent of cold iron sapped Ethan’s strength. Where was he?
Why had they put him here? For how long? Where was Judith?
A soft crooning started. It reminded him of the rhythmic cadences of the people in the hold of the
Standard.
He opened his eyes. The ragged shadow was bigger than those faint images. And more dense. The crooning stopped.
“Evening,” he heard the greeting through the void.
“G—” Ethan choked, his sore tongue too big for his mouth.
“Touched fellow, I be Atlas. Only one they caught tonight. My woman, my two little girls, still follow the lights.”
“Lights?”
“Leadin’ north. On the end of the sky’s drinking gourd.”
“T-to Polaris.”
“What be that?”
“The North Star.” He swallowed painfully. “Runaways?”
The big shadow came closer. “Now, I don’t knows much, but you seem possessed of a good enough mind to me, cousin.”
“Thank you.”
Ethan sat up slowly against the wall. His side ached, where he’d packed mud against the puncture the wooden stake had made. His right hand hurt. The sound of chains echoed. Chained. Like the slaves on the
Standard.
He was chained. Had he become one of the slaves, somehow? He wasn’t brave enough, not for that. He fought panic. The deep, companionable voice, so normal, so calm. He had to hear it again. “And now, Atlas?” he managed to croak out.
“Now? Why, they bring me back to Mary’s land, I expect. Whip me good. But not enough to harm me much. I’m a strong worker, and it be planting time.”
Ethan tried to move closer, but the pain made him groan.
“What be your trouble, cousin?”
“Fingers,” Ethan remembered.
He felt a wince of sympathy, through the dark. “Gone or broke?”
“Broken, I think.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“Two? Why, that ain’t nothin’. Keep them still and Atlas, he hunt you up some splinting, wrap you up something fine.”
Ethan listened as the man foraged freely. Atlas was not chained. Where was this place? Rats. Did he hear rats? No knife to keep them back. “Will they hunt your family?” Ethan asked into the darkness.
“Some, I expect. But Sully and the little gals gonna make it this time.” Ethan heard a ripping. Cloth; loose weave. “My brother’s got a farm, a mule in this Canada. The English up there won’t give us folk back, I hear.”
Ethan closed his eyes. “I’m sure you’re right.”
“Gives me your hand, real slow like,” the voice commanded. “Atlas fix you, if’n you stay real still, and don’t bite or holler.”
Ethan cupped his good hand under the aching, damaged one and sent them toward the voice. Atlas crooned his comforting melody as he set the bones, then splinted and tied the strips of cloth. “Better?”
“Much better. Thank you.”
“You got schoolin’, don’t you, brother?”
“Some.”
“They don’t like schoolin’. Hide it. Not much meat on you, either. And young to be in so much trouble they got you chained.”
“I’m three-and-twenty,” Ethan protested.
The man chuckled.
Ethan lowered his voice. “Will you try to run away again, Atlas?”
“Soon’s I heal. ‘Course, I could try now. Ain’t no hounds. The bounty men, they up and left, mostly. Be only one slave catcher, and he be fond of his corn liquor. But I gives all bribe barter to my Sully, ’fore we parted.”
Ethan glanced down at his vest. He yanked off the buttons with his good hand, then thrust his fist out, opened it. “Here.”
“What you got, brother?”
“Buttons. Silver. Take them. Godspeed.”
Ethan heard Atlas examine his gift. “Now what fine gentleman did you steal that waistcoat off, crazy boy?”
“I didn’t steal it!”
Atlas moved closer. “Sweet Jesus. You’s …” His voice trailed off in shock. Ethan didn’t know what had gone wrong between them. But he wasn’t a thief. Except of Judith. If he could get out, he’d steal her away from the pious Quakers who’d chained him in this place.
His companion snatched hold of his good hand. He yanked back Ethan’s sleeve, baring his wrist, then returned the hand, slowly. “Why,” Atlas whispered in awe, “be you a white man?”
“Yes.”
“You—don’t smell white.”
“Oh? How do whites smell?”
“Like they eats, full of pork fat. You smell like you eats nigger greens and corn and … and you’s chained, and sharing space with me without a howl of complaint.”
“Why should I complain? You’re the best company I’ve had in weeks,” Ethan said gruffly.
“Why, the Lord in His mercy protect you, sir! When the bossman says you’s touched, not to come close, not to speak to you on account you’d bite off my ear as soon as look at me, I knew then I was in for a treat, a good story to tell, but …” Ethan watched the glints of silver as
Atlas tossed the buttons up and caught them again. “Now I done got myself the key to salvation besides!” he concluded, jubilant.
Ethan enjoyed the sound of the man’s deep laughter in this harsh, suffering place. A massive hand patted his shoulder.
“Rest yourself now. But find your worth ’fore they eats you whole, young one,” he advised.
The eight-fingered slave was gone with the morning. Ethan wondered if he’d dreamed the man until he looked down at his own fingers, splinted between a spoon and broken pencil stub, and resting on his waistcoat. All the buttons of which were still missing.
 
 
“O
pen this door,” the familiar voice demanded.
“Now, sir, the prisoner beat a dozen Quakers senseless! He—”
“Open it. Now.”
“As you say, sir.”
Ethan tried to close his torn shirt, hide the iron cuffs that shackled him to the wall. Pointless.
Jordan Foster crouched beside him. He steadied his cool, clean hand on Ethan’s forehead. His thumb traced around his bruised jaw, his split lip.
“Open,” he instructed.
Ethan obliged.
“Christ in Heaven,” Jordan muttered, seeing his raw-edged tongue. “Any teeth broken? Loosened?”
“No, sir.”
They seemed like a miracle, the physician’s hands. Ethan had wanted his own to become like them, hadn’t he?
“I can’t tend him properly,” Jordan Foster insisted to the man beside him. “Remove the shackles.”
“Not me, sir, he’d strangle me soon as—”
“Give me the key, then, damn you!”
“It’s your neck, sir.”
“Leave!” Jordan shouted.
The man was only too glad to scurry out, though Ethan didn’t remember doing him any harm. Silence then.
“Do you think I’m mad, too, Jordan?”
“No, son.”
“They took my boots. Tell them to give me back my boots, will you?”
“I have done that.”
“Thank you.”
The doctor released the shackle from his damaged right hand. “What in the name of Heaven did you splint yourself with?”
“Not me. Atlas. He used what he could find.”
“Atlas?”
“He’s gone now.”
“I see.” Jordan exhaled, opening the cloth ties.
“Leave it be. Please.”
“Suppose you let me judge, this once?”
Ethan clenched his jaw. “Yes, sir.”
The doctor continued taking apart Atlas’s work. “Don’t know when to let go, do you?”
“Of Judith? No, sir.”
“Two simple fractures of phalanges. Both set well. Should cramp your writing for a little while, brat.”
Ethan grinned through the clench in his already aching jaw. “I’m ambidextrous,” he ground out.
Jordan Foster shook his head. “I should have guessed. Maupin would see to that.”
“You don’t know half my talents.”
“I’m sure I don’t.” He resplinted, then wrapped the damaged fingers in the fresh gauze from his bag. “Adequate, for now,” he conceded.
Ethan took his hand back, resting it under his trousers’ left brace. “I could have told you that. Before the torture,” he groused.
To his surprise, Jordan Foster smiled. “Let me see your side now, there’s a good fellow,” he said gently.
“She didn’t mean it. She didn’t know I had the stake there.”
“Stake?”
“A wooden stake. It was next to the little tree. Eli was holding it when I found him. Where is it now? It’s important.”
“Lie still.”
“I made a mud paste with the dirt of the floor and rainwater that puddled from a leak. I haven’t been fevered.”
“Hush now, magpie.” The corners of the physician’s mouth turned up. There. He was in a better mood.
“Jordan. Don’t tell my mother.”
“Too late. She’ll be coming. So will your brothers.”
“Merde.”
“Watch what’s left of your profane tongue. The magistrates are just outside.”
“What do they want?”
“Let me finish cleaning you up before they’re treated to the sight of you.”
“Judith wouldn’t mind. She’s seen me worse. Does Judith have the stake? Does she understand the marks her father made? Where’s Judith?”
The doctor looked uneasy. “Let’s dispense with that shirt.”
The blood had soaked through the weave, and dried brown. Only traces of his own; it was mostly Eli’s blood. It had comforted him, alone in the darkness, with the cold iron. When Dr. Foster helped him remove the shirt, he suddenly felt as he did without Fayette’s coat—lost.
“Jordan?”
“What is it, son?”
“They don’t believe in grief, the Quakers.”
“I know.”
“I did not wish Judith to see Eli that way. That’s why I held her back, though she fought like an avenging angel. Was it disrespectful, presumptuous of me, to hold her back?”
“Protective,” he said kindly. “It was protective.” He pulled a new shirt over Ethan’s head. One that smelled of lavender and fires, ink, gaslamps, brick. Of a city. Philadelphia. Where he’d gone to visit his wife’s brother, wasn’t that it? There was so little he knew of this man.
“When will they let me out of here?”
“Let you out?”
“Yes. They misunderstood, the Quakers who beat me. They thought I was hurting Judith, yes? Isn’t that why they put me here? And hasn’t she explained?”
“Ethan, Judith hasn’t spoken. Not a word.”
“She hasn’t? Who sent for you?”
“A child, I think, from the handwriting on the note.”
“Hugh,” Ethan realized. “He found your name, your brother-in-law’s dwelling in Philadelphia listed among my things. Clever boy.”
“Ethan, do you know where you are?”
“Some sort of holding place. When first I came to myself, they were taking my boots off. You know I can’t walk without my boots, and I couldn’t make them understand—”
“Ethan, listen to me. This is a jail cell. You’re being held on suspicion of murder.”
“What?”
“Eli Mercer was killed with your knife. The Quakers think you were trying to kill Judith, too.”

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