The Widow's War (39 page)

Teddy will inherit the money, and there will be ways to get at it. Forged documents. A will from Deacon, perhaps, that appoints his dear friend Henry Clark as the boy’s guardian. Then whores and whiskey, the green felt of New Orleans gaming tables. Perhaps he’ll buy a gold-headed walking stick, or perhaps he’ll just help himself to one of those canes the slavers sent Bennett after he thrashed Sumner.

A willow twig slaps him in the face. That’s the problem with galloping through brush. He’s been riding for at least a minute now, maybe two, and he can hear Carrie gaining on him. Pulling back on the reins, he halts and turns his horse around. He is in a natural alley with a row of willows on one side and the river on the other. Perfect. He’s only going to get one shot at her but in a place like this, a blind man couldn’t miss.

Grabbing Teddy by the hair, he jerks the boy upright so his face will be the first thing his mother sees. Then he draws his pistol and holds it by his side, concealing it under the edge of his jacket.

“Carrie Vinton!” he yells as she comes crashing out of the brush. “Stop! I have an offer for you!”

Carrie takes one look at her boy, jerks up short, and lowers her pistol. Clark realizes there’s no need to actually go through the charade of making her an offer. She’s holding still and couldn’t be a better target if she had a bull’s-eye painted on her forehead. He lifts his revolver and points it at her.

“Say good-bye to your mama,” he tells Teddy. And that’s when it happens: Just as he pulls the trigger the little brat, who up until now has done nothing but scream, suddenly turns on him like a snake and bites through his thumb.

With a yell of fury, Clark drops the pistol and flings Teddy into the river. Before he can mourn the loss of thousands of dollars’ worth of boy flesh, Carrie raises her gun and pulls the trigger. For an instant, Clark is sure he’s been shot; then he realizes she’s clicked on an empty chamber.

Throwing back his head, he howls like a coyote.

“You’re crazy!” Carrie screams.

Clark can see blood staining the left leg of her trousers. He may not have killed her, but he’s hit her. He starts to ride toward her figuring he can finish her off with his knife, but then he sees she’s drawn another gun. Two to his one. Hardly fair, but this hasn’t been his lucky day. Wheeling around again, he runs for it.

A
s soon as he’s out of sight, Carrie dismounts and plunges into the river. The wound on her leg stings as she staggers through the muck and reeds that line the bank. Just beyond the shallows, Teddy is thrashing around, going down and coming up. As she dives into the current and swims toward him, she can still hear Clark in the distance, yipping like a madman.

She grabs Teddy by the collar, and they both go under. When they come up, choking and coated with silt, Teddy clutches at her shirt and hangs on. He doesn’t fight her, so she’s able to keep his head above water as she swims toward shore.

When she can touch bottom again, she stands up, takes Teddy in her arms, and stumbles through the reeds. A few moments later, they are both sitting on the riverbank. She’s shaking, Teddy is crying, and both of them are plastered with mud from head to foot.

“Good boy,” she says as she rocks him and picks the waterweeds out of his hair. She’s so busy comforting him that she doesn’t bother to look at her leg. The wound Clark gave her hardly hurts, and she figures she can tend to it later.

W
hen Henry Clark comes riding out of the willows, he looks toward the main house and sees the planters and a dozen of his own men standing by the ruins of the dinner party with their hands raised over their heads. Jed is standing with them waving a white napkin, and the black soldiers are holding them all at gunpoint. Where are the rest of Clark’s Raiders, the fiercest band of bushwhackers in Missouri and Kansas combined? Nowhere, that’s where. Not a one in sight unless you count three dead men, one of whom he himself killed.

Clark feels a wave of disgust. His men never deserved him. They’re disloyal, cowardly, traitorous scum. If he ever meets up with the ones who ran, he may have to shoot them.

Up ahead, he can see the boat that brought the planters to Beau Rivage rocking lazily beside the dock as if all the trouble going on is nothing to get excited about. Now that he doesn’t have to lead a bunch of cowards, he can ride onto the boat, cut it loose from its moorings, drift downriver, and disembark at his leisure. Money won’t be a problem. He still has one of the gold rings he took from Deacon. He can pawn it and treat himself to a hot bath, a shave, and a whore.

His only real regret, besides losing the boy, is that he’ll never be able to tell anyone what happened today. If he did, bushwhackers would be lining up for a chance to hunt down the men who attacked Beau Rivage. He would only have to say the magic words “black men with guns,” and he could just sit back and watch. They’d string up free blacks and fugitives both from here to Topeka without even asking if they’d been part of the raiding party and maybe lynch a dozen Jayhawkers for good measure. While he’s at it, he could probably get them to do away with Carrie Vinton and that doctor lover of hers in some satisfyingly unpleasant way, get the boy back if the little brat hasn’t drowned, and start spending Deacon’s money. But to do all that he’d have to admit he’s been outshot and outsmarted by a band of black soldiers, a woman, and a toddler with teeth like a serpent. He’d never live it down.

Clark kicks his horse into a fast walk. The only thing that stands between him and the boat now is the slave pen, but he never notices slaves unless he’s selling them, buying them, or entertaining himself with them, which is why, when a tall black woman walks out of the gate and stands in front of him blocking the road, he is so taken by surprise that he doesn’t notice she’s holding a rifle.

“Henry Clark!” she yells. “My name is Jane and you hurt my babies!” And lifting the rifle, she pulls the trigger and becomes the death Henry Clark never thought he would meet.

As he lies in the dust bleeding and in pain, she draws close and bends over him. Clark looks up at her with eyes filled with resentment. “You had no right to shoot me,” he gasps. “I should only be shot by a white man.”

“Sometimes you got to take what you can get,” Jane says.

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

Clark blinks and his blue eyes grow opaque. He licks his lips and groans. “It—” he says. He lifts up his hands as if to ward off something big. “It—” he repeats.

“‘It’ what?” Jane asks, but Henry Clark, who has made a habit of not finishing his sentences, does not reply. Waving his hands in an agitated way, he stares at a place just over her left shoulder with a look of such terror that Jane is glad she cannot see whatever he is seeing.

The history of the Kansas Territory is not a simple subject. Between 1854 and 1861, the territory had ten governors, seven capitals, and four constitutions. At times a pro-slavery legislature and a free-state legislature were meeting simultaneously, both claiming to be the only legal legislature. In the interests of not driving the reader mad with details, I have intentionally omitted descriptions of various events, some of them major, including several murders that would lend themselves nicely to a noir mystery novel should any future author care to undertake one.

Although some of the language has been modified for modern ears, for the most part I have chosen to record things as they actually happened. For example, on May 21, 1856, an army of pro-slavers attacked Lawrence, smashing printing presses, burning the Free State Hotel, and looting homes and stores. Three days later, John Brown and his sons rode to Pottawatomie Creek and—unlikely as it may seem—killed five pro-slavers with broadswords.

On various occasions, I have exercised the novelist’s prerogative to create fictional events. Although Brown and the Adairs once hid eleven fugitive slaves for over a month in a cabin four miles west of the present town of Lane, Kansas, there is no indication Brown trained an African-American cavalry unit like the one that defeats Clark’s Raiders. However, there is a reasonable possibility that such a unit could have existed. At one point, Brown told fellow abolitionists about a plan to arm former slaves and send them into the Allegheny Mountains to fight a guerilla war against slave owners. It is unlikely that he began to implement this plan while living in Kansas, but John Brown was a man who kept many secrets.

Although Henry Clark is loosely modeled on William Quantrill, the Confederate raider who attacked Lawrence in 1863, he is a fictional character. There was never a senator from Kentucky named Bennett Presgrove, nor did the fictional Senator Presgrove attack real Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Senator Sumner was brutally beaten by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks. I was the one who placed the cane in Bennett’s hand and let him share Brooks’s infamy.