Fitcher's Brides (40 page)

“I am by nature curious, I suppose.”

His demeanor stiffened. “I would advise against giving in to your nature here. All the mysteries will be solved tomorrow night. Trust in that. And in me, dear Kate.” He drank his glass and refilled it. “Some things in life should be accepted without question, because they are too great to be questioned. That is the definition of faith.”

Kate handed him her glass. “On the contrary, Mr. Fitcher, I believe the greater the promise, the more closely it must be scrutinized. The largest promises govern our lives. I'm unwilling to embrace blindly that which I've not considered to the fullest.”

He assayed her, and a small smile twitched at his lips. “You have never heard me preach, have you, Mrs. Fitcher?”

“Briefly, I have, sir, that time I visited my sister. And my father has described and even reenacted some of your more dynamic proclamations. I know he is persuaded, as is my stepmother. I have not had
that
privilege.”

He stood and carried the glasses to the writing desk, setting hers down. “Then tomorrow morning, you shall have it—the culmination of all my sermons on the final day. I predict I will persuade even you, madam.”

“I look forward to my lesson,” she replied.

He chuckled, and lifted his glass in a toast to her. “The cleverest by far, oh, yes. I was right to save you for last. You are the purest and most steadfast.”

“As you said, sir, when you asked for my hand.”

He waited a moment longer, as if in final hope that she would invite him to her bed, let go the sheet and shift the battle from words to sensations, where he would easily triumph. When she said nothing, he turned smartly and strode away with the bottle and the glass. “In the morning, then,” he called back over his shoulder.

She didn't see how he managed it, but the door to her room swung closed after him as if on command.

Then Kate sank back upon her pillows and allowed herself the luxury of terror.

“I
SAY UNTO YOU
, ‘G
IVE EAR
, O
YE
heavens, and I will speak: and hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass.' Thus begins Deuteronomy thirty-two.”

Fitcher stood upon the back porch of Harbinger. His audience had swollen beyond the confines of the Hall of Worship. They filled the yard as far as Kate could see. She sat off to one side, along with the small group of his inner circle. Thirteen chairs had been set up, three on a side and one in the center for the new bride. Kate was surprised to find herself enclosed by women as well as men—not just her father, but Lavinia sat there, both of them in the chairs ahead of her.

Kate looked at the faces of those to either side of her, faces that regarded her husband with pure adoration, even before he began to speak; and once his voice split the dark and threatening morning, so did virtually everyone within hearing turn their attention to him with expressions of adulation.

“The Lord says here, ‘To me belongeth vengeance, and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand!' We know who is spoken of here. They are the people outside our blessed utopia, those people who have ignored the signs, who care nothing for our message, who will not come in. Calamity
is
at hand! And their reluctance can but consign them to damnation.

“Some of them are dear ones, close to us, who would not be entreated to join us. Others are what they are—unyielding objects deaf to words they haven't themselves formed.

“They as we have always stood upon the brink of destruction. God placed all mankind on the blade of that sword which Solomon raised. We've been there since Eden. One foot stands in peril, the other in peace. The likelihood of tumbling into the pit has always been with us, and many before this day have slipped, their fates already sealed. We cannot change their fate. Others think they can wait and see how the sword will fall, and make their choices afterward. Not so, for does it not also say, ‘The Lord shall judge His people'? Who, other than God, decides when His children shall plunge into hell? No one else has this power. He may allow the wicked to persist in their ways, knowing that each act they perform only further secures their damnation; He may place temptation in their path, but He does not make them embrace it.

“God grants you all free will. You can choose. Today you are here before me because you have heard and you have chosen.”

Many in the crowd answered this, shouting in the affirmative, or just shouting.

“‘See now that I, even
I
, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal; neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand. For I lift up my hand to Heaven, and say,
I live forever!
'”

Fitcher's fist was raised to the sky. Thousands of other fists joined his in the air. Thousands of voices chanted: “I live forever!” Kate found her own arm hovering, but folded her hands together tightly in her lap. The group around her had their fists raised, every one of them. The power of the speech swept her up, but the sudden movement of the crowd in response had broken the spell. She glanced aside, saw the crowd as far back as the orchards extending their arms like clockwork creatures. His words still rang, the last quotation from Deuteronomy resounded. It must have been the three walls of the building that kept his voice spinning around them.

“I speak for you. I have called the people far and wide unto this mountain, and you have answered that call, you have come. You have made your sacrifices to me, given up the goods of the world, cast off that which burdened you, which tied you to the sensual life. Those who have
not
answered, let them be cast down. They are condemned already by their very disregard. He that believeth, he is not condemned.

“Tell me, then, that you believe!”

The multitude shouted out their belief.

“Tell me that you know there is nothing between you and hell itself but the air. Nothing protects you from everlasting flames. Hell is an open maw beneath you. The flames lick at the soles of your feet. The demons dance within, awaiting your arrival, the arrival of all mankind. The slope on which you stand will tumble you into their cruel care for all eternity. They will flay the skin from you. Terrible torture awaits those who lack the necessary faith, who question the truth even when it stands before them.” He glanced, as he paused, at Kate.

“Nothing can save you from the pit of hell except faith. You have journeyed far to be here, you have shunned the false prophets and the false churches, but you still stand upon that fearful blade and you can still fall even at the last moment, even as God makes the cut which severs us from them. Those outside our gates would kill you if they knew you would be granted a special place at God's side while they plunge into the fiery pit. They would slaughter you in their anger and their jealousy. But
I
protect you from them. I know who you should fear. Fear he who, having slain you, can throw your soul down into hell. I say, fear him above all others. Let
me
protect you from the wrath of God.
I
deal in fury.
I
deal in judgment. Place your souls in
my
keeping!”

They cried out with answers—swearing allegiance, committing their souls every one to his keeping. In the front rows of the multitude, some people collapsed. They twitched and kicked in spasms. Their eyes rolled up. A man foamed at the mouth. Some babbled incoherently and clawed at the sky. Those nearest caught them, laid them down, but got up quickly again, not wanting to miss anything. White feathers burst into the air as people in the throes of ecstasy crashed into the makeshift henhouses on either side.

The gathered lieutenants had risen around Kate to shout along with the others, and Kate found herself on her feet in their midst, though she had no sense of rising with them. She felt the words of allegiance in her throat but fought them down with urgent fear. He hadn't lied to her about the power of his preaching—if anything, he had understated it; but she had glimpsed his true self, and she made that memory burn like a jack-o'-lantern behind his enchantment. She listened and dissected his words more carefully than his loyal followers. The promise of the pit might be real enough, but the path by which one fell was not so obvious as he would make it. She had always maintained that those quickest to condemn were most in peril themselves, because they pointed the finger with a piousness formed of hubris, of haughty superiority by which they could eclipse their own shortcomings; and Fitcher's proposal for dividing the saved from the damned began with just such an imperious pose.

Her father, she guessed, would not believe her. She couldn't make him admit that the casuistry of this salvation had misled him. Even if she could find proof, she doubted she could persuade him. Fitcher was too skillful, too clever by half, to reveal himself in a casual way. She might trip him up with words, but only by verbal thrusts and parries as subtle as those he employed to twist his proclamation of redemption. His keys and the marble egg burned in her apron pocket, symbols of his control, of the limits he'd already established. It was all a matter of limits.
Torture awaits those who question the truth
, he'd said, but he didn't mean that. She could question truth all she liked. What she wasn't allowed to question was
him
. None of them was. As he spoke again, she closed herself off from the intoxication of his voice.

“We read the words of God in Isaiah: ‘I will tread them in mine anger, and will trample them in my fury. For the day of vengeance is in
mine
heart, and the year of my redeemed is come.' Tonight at midnight that day of vengeance shall commence. But I, holding your souls in my care, will act between you and your Lord, and together we will realize these promises that God has spoken. Together will we face
our God
!” His arms stretched up and out as if to embrace them all.

Their cheer must have been heard as far away as Jekyll's Glen. It filled the air, and each time the front gave out, from the back it rolled in again, wave upon wave of ululation like the roar of a huge cataract—like the waterfall in the great gorge that ringed them off from the rest of the world.

The shouting mob was where Kate placed her hope. They would need his close attention more and more as the time drew nigh. Sooner or later, he would have to leave her alone to attend to them.

She did not yet appreciate that leaving her alone had always been his intention, or that her two sisters had already stood upon the same arranged and fatal brink as she contemplated even now.

 

By late afternoon, the number of those come to salvation had redoubled. Inside the fence, people moved into the woods. They cleared spaces for themselves and their families in the underbrush, content just to be inside, knowing they were both safe and saved. According to her father and the other lieutenants, their numbers had reached twenty thousand, and at least as many more were on the road.

Jekyll's Glen was a town trapped in the path of a flood. Converts covered the streets, the yards, the sidewalks. They jammed the taverns. They clustered beneath canvas awnings to hear other preachers, who extolled the virtues of Elias Fitcher and painted their own descriptions of the fate awaiting the unsaved.

Ministers of the two traditional churches had gathered their flocks together inside the buildings out of fear that the faithful might fall prey to this millennial fever, but also out of a keener fear that they, preaching against the end of the world, might be accused as false prophets by the chaos of converts and strung up if not protected by their congregation.

The steamboat
Fidelio
chugged wearily down the lake with hundreds more packed upon its decks—people who had converted only at the last, or who had bothered to set their secular accounts in order before coming. All across New England, banks were suffering as a result of the massive cash withdrawals by converts who were bringing their wealth with them, either to bribe their way across impasses or in the misapprehension that they would be able to keep their money in the Next Life. So many people with ready cash did not go unnoticed, either. Some had been waylaid as they left their banks, others upon the roads, beaten and robbed of their entire fortunes by individuals interested more in immediate than in eternal reward. The steamboat provided a safer mode of travel than coach or horse, but only because it offered no escape for the thief. The town of Jekyll's Glen, on the other hand, now entertained a network of pickpockets and cutpurses with easy pickings and little likelihood of consequences, although one such had been caught and clubbed to death, and his body, hung with a sign marking him as a thief, now dangled from a tree on the road into town as a warning.

On the Gorge Road, the turnpike and sentry box in front of the Charter house had been demolished, broken up during the night and used for firewood. Squatters exhausted from the crush of people on the road currently occupied the house. They ate off the family's plates, slept on the sofas, slouched in the chairs. They were filthy and tired and not much given to concern themselves with treating someone else's property respectfully. If the spirit of Sam Verity was still about (or ever had been), it kept its own counsel now. No one among the squatters was treated to a session of spirit rapping.

Then, in the hour before sunset, the bridge across Jekyll's Gorge collapsed.

The bridge had not been built to support the weight of the two hundred people who were on it at the time. The braces gave out.

With an explosive crack the center split and both halves tipped the screaming, wailing crowd into the widening gap in the middle. Finally the whole structure gave way. The push from the back continued, and another three score were forced over the side before the mob realized what had happened and could stop their momentum. The bridge hit the bottom of the gorge with an explosion as loud as a volley of cannons. A few souls instinctively sprang after their tumbling loved ones, committing themselves to the same sure fate. The rest began racing like frantic ants along the edge of the gorge in search of a path to the bottom—some to give aid, but most in a desperate hope of finding another way to the opposite side. They couldn't have come this far just to be damned by a collapsing bridge. It wasn't fair!

People clinging to the debris of the bridge were hauled up. From below came cries for help. It was impossible to tell if these were from people who'd been camped below or from survivors of the fall—the smoke from the fires at the bottom obscured the view. Galls went up for rope. Some people wanted to climb down for a rescue, others to make a new bridge across while there was still time. But no one had any rope—most everyone had divested themselves of practical items on this, the last day of the world—and so a handful of reluctant converts began to fight their way through the teeming crush of crowd back toward Jekyll's Glen, where they might buy enough hemp to get across the divide.

 

The thunder of the bridge landing in the basin of the gorge made the ground shake at Harbinger House and, because of the nature of sound in the gorge, seemed to come from all sides at once. Random panic followed, fueled by the belief that the explosion was a first sign of the end. People who'd only just settled themselves in the woods came flying out, wild-eyed, terrified. Others wailed and fell to their knees, hands clasped to the sky as they begged for their salvation.

It was another half an hour before the first of the injured was carried to the front gate and the story of the disaster made its way through the community. The call went out for aid. Someone hitched horses to a wagon and drove around to the gate only to find the road so congested that they couldn't go any farther. At Harbinger there was plenty of rope, and coils of it were rushed out to the gates, tossed into the wagons. As the gates parted, many who hung on the outside tried again to push through, and a battle raged until some had been hammered unconscious or dead and the rest pushed back to let the rope bearers and wagons out.