Now Face to Face (36 page)

T
HE SLOOP SEEMED AS IF IT, AND IT ALONE, EXISTED IN ALL THE
world as it cut its way through the waves, its sails billowing out with wind. There was nothing else as far as the eye could see, save water and sky. The line of the sloop’s prow, the shape of its hull, were sleek, moving through the waves with the grace of a filly as she runs. The vessel known to Virginians as a Bermuda sloop, after the Caribbean island of that name, was known for speed—necessary in these waters, where pirates lurked. Spaniards, Frenchmen, Englishmen, they had been commissioned to pillage by their respective governments when war was on, but many remained to menace shipping whether there was war or not. The Caribbean was a haven for such predators. No government of Europe sent the number of ships that would have been necessary to patrol it. It was nothing to them, a sea dotted with islands on a map, a piece of territory to concede or war over, a place to send flotsam: restless younger brothers, and military men with no war to fight or money to buy promotion.

“He says he hears a ghost. Some of the others believe him. I thought you ought to know. He wants to offer sacrifice tonight,” a mate was saying to Klaus, who stood at the big wheel that kept the course of the sloop.

The sight of the sails unfurled above them was magnificent, and the sound they made was music to men who sailed the seas, something Klaus missed on shore. On shore, sailors woke from dreams in which sails forever unfurled, white and grand, and the creak of rigging and rope was like a choir’s chorus.

“Sacrifice of what?” Klaus said.

“A chicken.”

“Give him his chicken. We’ll be putting in at Spanish Florida soon, and we’ll buy more fowl then. You’ll be there tonight when he does it? Tell him to ask the ghost for good winds while he’s at it.”

The deckhand grinned and clicked his bare heels together in imitation of Klaus, who was liked by his crew. Once his stint at the wheel was done, Klaus went belowdecks, made his way past the narrow passageway to his cabin and stopped there for water, which he carried carefully, walking easily with the sway of the sloop to where the cargo was. The rows of barrels held some actual flour and pork, as well as tobacco. Bolling was nothing if not careful.

“Boy,” he said. “Hyacinthe. Answer me.”

He waited, but there was only silence. Having satisfied himself, as he had to do over and over again, that there was no way the boy’s presence could be perceived other than through an African’s percipience—one of the crew was a slave—he lit the lantern he carried and made his way among the barrels. The boy was hidden behind them, and the gag was still around his mouth. He stared up at Klaus with a slack, vacant expression. Klaus untied the gag, rinsed the boy’s face, then carefully poured water into his mouth.

“Swallow,” he had to say, before the boy would do it; it was as if the child had forgotten how to survive. Klaus tore some bread to pieces, soaked them in water, put one in the boy’s mouth.

“Eat,” he commanded, and the boy chewed a little before turning his head away and refusing. It was possible he would starve before they reached a port. One side of the child’s face was still swollen, bruised to the texture of pulpy fruit so that it must hurt him to chew, but the bleeding from his ear had stopped.

“Do you know who I am?” Klaus kept his tone friendly, patient. “Tell me your name. What is your name, boy? You heard me call it, do you remember?”

The boy didn’t answer. He never had, not since that moment Odell knocked him to the ground.

“I have to put this around your mouth now.” Klaus redid the gag. He untied the boy’s hands and feet to move the arms and legs a little. It was like moving a large cloth doll.

“Can you stand? Do you want to walk awhile?”

There was no response, but he asked anyway. He bound the boy again, even though he was certain the boy could not escape, had no thought to. In fact, Klaus wondered if the child had any thought at all. But if he didn’t that was best—a blessing, really.

“I’ll be back again. There’s no need to be afraid of the dark—” Even as he spoke, the boy’s eyes were closing. Klaus stood and stared down a moment, anger and a kind of sorrow fighting with common sense and self-preservation. Damn Odell. It would have been better for the both of them if the child had died as Odell stood there looking down at what he’d done, aghast, one dog snarling at them, one moaning. Then it would have been upon Odell’s head; now, somehow, it was upon Klaus’s. There was nothing for it. If the child didn’t die, he would pay one of the slave merchants in Spanish Florida to come aboard and take the boy away in secret. Then Odell’s sin would be his sin; but wasn’t it, already?

“I have no choice,” Klaus said aloud, angrily, to the boy.

The boy shouldn’t have spied and sneaked. Odell shouldn’t have panicked. The boy should never have charged Odell, like some little maddened beast of a child. Klaus thought of Lady Devane, of Barbara, of her face and the way she had looked upon the rooftop. The kiss between them would remain forever unfinished, the passion between them never acted upon. The boy stood between.

Winter

For now we see through a glass,
darkly; but then face to face…

Chapter Eighteen

I
N THE EARLIEST HOURS OF MORNING, THEY HUNTED FOR
game. Barbara’s breath expelled itself unevenly; she tried to move more silently, easily, the way Colonel Perry’s slave did, but to her own ears she was loud and clumsy. How could she not be, with frost on the ground, but Cuffy, Colonel Perry’s slave, to her right, moved silently. Captain Randolph, Mrs. Cox’s grandsons, the others hunting—none of them were to be seen. They’d gone on ahead of her, and she’d lost sight of them. She rested a moment, then walked on, to the sound of her boots in the frost-edged grass. After a time, she saw a clearing—and then, suddenly, she saw the stag, grazing in grass that glittered with frost.

“Look,” she whispered to Cuffy, a white puff of air coming out of her mouth with the word.

Not a gesture wasted, Cuffy knelt, poured powder into the musket he carried, tamped it down. The stag lifted his head and looked from one side to another, suddenly wary, scenting the air. His head and antlers were etched in clear lines against the winter-bare trees behind him. The sight was magnificent. Barbara raised the musket and took aim, but the gun was heavy and she could not hold it steady.

“Help me,” she said to Cuffy.

With a quick movement, Cuffy walked behind her, his hands going up under her arms.

“Yes,” she said. The moment was perfect. She had only to press back the trigger.

“Now, Lady,” Cuffy breathed into her ear.

The musket kicked hard against her shoulder, hurting her, and her ears rang at the loudness the gunpowder made as it propelled the musket ball out of the long barrel. Through the smoke rising from the barrel, she saw the stag rear, run wildly a few feet into the clearing, then drop.

I’ve killed him, she thought.

Within a few moments, Colonel Perry, his head protected from the cold by a battered hat tied down with one of Beth’s scarves, ran out from the woods and joined Barbara and Cuffy at the fallen animal. The sun had risen, unmarked by clouds. Its light streamed down strongly through the bare branches of trees. The scent of pine was strong in the air, and Barbara took it inside her lungs like some kind of perfume; it mingled with the strong sunlight and the stag upon the frosted, glittering ground, as if he had fallen among dropped diamonds. I will remember this forever, she thought.

“A most fortunate shot,” said Perry, and then, after Cuffy had said something to him in a mixture of his own language and English and Spanish, “Cuffy says he gave you his eyes with which to shoot, but the heart that pulled the trigger was yours. And it is a warrior’s heart.”

Barbara met the slave’s eyes. Respect was in his face, and she smiled.

Beth was walking out of the woods. Perry called his daughter. “Come and see the stag Lady Devane has killed.”

Cuffy had pulled out a knife from his belt, held it, his eyes on Barbara, up before his face, the blade flat. With an easy, violent elegance, he bent and cut the stag’s throat. Out of the woods had come some of the men who were hunting, and their slaves. Shouts, like war cries, rose up from other slaves as the fresh, dark blood streamed in the cold. Looking at Barbara, Cuffy dipped his fingers in the blood, then held his hand out to her.

This was a slave custom. Barbara had seen the overseer, John Blackstone, do it when he hunted with the slaves on First Curle. As the one who had killed the stag, she was to mark herself with his blood. It made the stag’s might and cunning hers.

“You don’t have to do it—” began Colonel Perry, but Barbara was already taking off her glove. Blood warm on her fingers, she marked her forehead, then—obeying some impulse—her cheeks.

One by one, the slaves followed suit, dipping their fingers in blood, marking themselves; Colonel Perry and Cuffy did the same. Barbara could see that Beth was shocked at the blood drying on her face, as were Captain Randolph and Mrs. Cox’s grandsons; but they were too polite to say anything. They were careful of her; the story of her taking Bowler Cox’s horse from him was known everywhere.

When the morning’s hunting was done, she knelt by the fire to watch slaves hang her stag from a tree and begin to gut and skin it.

She and her neighbors were hunting. The men were provisioning for winter, now that the weather was cold enough to keep the meat, but also, she saw as she joined them, taking time away from plantation and duties, from wives and family, to perform a ritual of hunting—and something more, which she could not quite articulate: a kind of gathering, around hunting, that somehow strengthened their friendships.

They were kind about her joining them. Margaret Cox used to hunt with us, said Colonel Perry. And I loved it, said Mrs. Cox. I loved the quiet of an early morning in the woods. I loved the hunt. The challenge of aiming true.

It was interesting to listen to the talk, when hunting was done, as everyone stood around the fire to warm himself and drink a potent, hot rum punch made in an iron pot right over the fire. They knew who beat his wife and slaves, who put trash tobacco into hogsheads, who was on the verge of losing his plantation.

She had learned that they thought Klaus Von Rothbach had made an excellent choice in his widow because of the land and family connections she would bring to him if they married. She had learned that the Governor was greatly disliked, that the quarrels between him and his Council and members of the House of Burgesses had been so strident that letters had come from England, from the Secretary of State, reprimanding everyone. They wanted a different governor. Even now there were men in England—Virginians—doing what they could to see that another man was appointed in Spotswood’s place.

Since the men talked of everyone else, they must also talk of her, she realized. She thought about that at night, when she was home from the hunting. They had plenty to say. She smiled a little at the thought of what they must say. Much. She had not been still since Hyacinthe’s disappearance.

There was no word of Hyacinthe, despite the reward, despite the descriptions posted at every ferry on the river, despite the word spread at all county courts, at all churches, by special order of the Governor, who sent her letter after letter. “Come to Williamsburg,” he wrote, “until your servant is found.” She declined. He had traveled to First Curle to see her, but she, with John Blackstone as escort, had been on her way past the falls, a dangerous journey of several days, to talk with people settled there, to spread the word that there was a reward for Hyacinthe if he could be found. For weeks, she had ridden from one end of the county to another, the weather finally stopping her. Nothing else could have. I will not wait patiently at home, she’d said to Colonel Perry. You would not.

Many times at night, she did not sleep, but paced the floor, thinking of Hyacinthe, wondering if he was held captive by some savage tribe somewhere, their slave. There was an agreement between the Iroquois and the colonists that runaway slaves would be hunted down and returned, dead or alive. Be strong, be brave, she whispered to Hyacinthe in her thoughts. There was an ache in her throat that was his absence; unshed tears, her grandmother would have said. She missed her grandmother. It would have been good to have the Duchess’s strength and presence in this time. But since she did not, she imagined what her grandmother would have done, and acted accordingly. No wonder they talked of her. What was it Bolling had called her in their last quarrel? Shopkeeper and fool.