The Rock Child (15 page)

“Is that so?” says Sir Richard.

“
Of course,
” said Harold. “They were
essential,
a necessary evil in the early days of the Church.
Rabble,
those were
rabble
that hounded us in Missouri and Illinois. Armed self-protection? Absolutely essential. Anything else, suicide.”

My mind was going goosey loops.
So why is the Prophet helping us? Or is he?

“Now, though, we Saints are safe.” I wasn’t so sure about that. “We’re established here. Our enemies lie a thousand miles away to the east or west.
The Danites are a throwback.
”

Sir Richard smiled, and I could see he didn’t want to seem patronizing, which always made him seem patronizing. “Can even the Prophet always control the Danites?”

Harold pulled a slow nod. “They are stubborn, especially Orrin Porter Rockwell. He is a legend among my people, feared and admired. He fought wisely in the Utah War. He’s hard to curb. Even for …”

Sun Moon spoke softly. “Do you know Porter Rockwell?”

Harold looked at her, flushed, and cast his eyes downward. “He’s a family friend. Way back.”

“What sort of man is he?”

Harold flashed his eyes up at her face. “I don’t know why Port would want… You’re so decent.” His face turned sheepish.

“Why does Porter Rockwell give himself to violence?”

She could push, Sun Moon, in her way.

“He don’t. I mean … You know what happened to him, to Port? You know about Joseph?”

Sun Moon shook her head. “Tell me, please.” I could feel her mind open to him to like palms, ready to receive.

Sun Moon concentrated on the young man. She became attentiveness.

“Port loved Joseph. From when Port was a kid and they were neighbors, I mean. He looked up to Joseph.” Harold twisted his legs together, then untwisted them. “Joseph had the countenance of a prophet, fire in his heart, and a holy light in his eyes. Port saw that, and knew he weren’t nothing like that inside his self, and he loved Joseph for it. In that way Joseph drew Port to the Church and unto himself.

“Port helped Joseph. Eventually that help became protection. Gentiles cast themselves into opposition to Joseph. Governments raised their hands against him. Mobbers craved the blood of Saints, Joseph’s most of all. So Port became one of the Sons of Dan, the men who protected us against the rabble of Missouri and Illinois. When Joseph required particular protection, Port acted as his guardian angel.”

Sun Moon drank the young man with her eyes.

“Until the day he went to the Carthage jail. Joseph knew what would happen to him. In the prime of life he was offered up into the hands of his enemies. He went in peace, and he stayed the hand of Porter Rockwell. He ordered Port to stay back, to let him go undefended, a lamb to the slaughter.”

She heard the pathos, but she also heard simplicity and truth.

“Port took Joseph’s death hard, and his failure to shield his leader harder. Anger became a holy rage. If any of the rumors about him striking out at the gentiles are true, it would have been at that time. He may have shed blood, but I doubt that it was innocent.

“I hear Port did some drinking in those years, and his anger festered in him, not abating even here, with the founding of Deseret. When the Sons of Dan acted again in their wrath, Port was one of the leaders. Blood was let, the blood of apostates.

“That’s when the change come. At some time in those years as a destroying angel, Port came to believe he had violated Joseph’s law: The sins which shall not be forgiven are the shedding of innocent blood and adultery.

“What blood is innocent? Only the Lord God knows. Did Porter Rockwell shed innocent blood? What counts is, he believes he did. And in believing so, he has condemned himself to a hell on Earth. He lives in the shadow of guilt. He believes he sinned and sinned, until he has put himself beyond even the mercy of the all-merciful God.”

Harold Jackson’s aspect changed. He brought truth to Sun Moon. “Has he threatened you? They say so. Therefore, I ask you, I entreat you,
do for Porter Rockwell what he cannot do for himself. Forgive him.” Sun Moon felt the iron band ease on her throat.

Captain Burton thrilled at this drama. He believed the young chap’s story, for it fit the man he knew. It fit the despair, the bitterness, the blackness of spirit.

Harold stopped, evidently wondering if he’d said too much, the youth in him desperate to say more, to explain, to justify. He stood. He shuffled his feet. He started to speak and held back. At last he said, “It’s the social hour inside. Maybe you two would like to meet some of my friends?”

Burton deferred to Asie with his eyes. Asie considered. “Sure,” he said. He offered his arm to Sun Moon. After hesitating, she took it.

“I wish to write a little more, and will join you soon.”

In fact, Captain Richard Burton wanted to pray and then to transport himself to the land of Xanadu. He waited for the lads to close the door and performed his evening duty, the fourth prayer of the day. Then he lifted a stoppered flask to his lips, and drank deep. He sat back on the bench. It would not take long. Meanwhile he would watch the sun set beyond the Salt Lake to the west. It was a melodramatic sight, bloody as the Old Testament.
Tomorrow I must send out to the chemist for more laudanum
. A necessity for travelers, he would say.

And when will we be traveling?
Burton sighed deeply. They would leave soon. A place between his shoulder blades was itching often now, a feeling he knew well. It meant, watch your back. If Brother Young had an apostate wife in his household, he bloody well might have a spy.
All the way to San Francisco with some sort of deception
. It was a forbidding prospect, and he would have to face it. Tomorrow.

He looked toward the window and shifted his feet so he faced precisely toward Mecca. As he knelt, he could already taste the laudanum.

“Captain Burton!” The lass came toward him, arms extended. Burton took her hands politely. “I’m Clarissa Angesley Young, and I’m so glad you came.” Normally, it would have seemed an exaggerated welcome, an adolescent trying to be a womanly hostess. In Burton’s Kubla
Khanish state it became a mad parody. The lass was raven-haired, her skin fair and perfect as paper untouched by any pen. He imagined the poems of love waiting to be written on her face, on her bosom, on her thighs and between. The sensuous lines came to him in flowing Arabic, more beautiful than the music of water flowing in desert fountains.

Clarissa led him by one hand toward the rosewood piano. She was radiant, she shone with an exotic fire. Her shining innocence only made her in Burton’s eyes more erotic.

I’m squiffed,
Burton told himself loudly in his mind but to no avail,
squiffed by the laudanum. Every woman is a siren in my eyes. I must take care
.

The long parlor was speckled with pairs of adolescent lads and lasses, two on a sofa here, seated on a bench here, standing by a window there. Burton saw Asie seated at the piano, Sun Moon beside him. Burton recognized most of the lasses from the dining room.
The men must be Young sons and the suitors of Young daughters
—la crème de la crème
of Mormon society
. Some were going so far as to hold hands. The only light came from a bright lamp on the table in the middle of the room. He wanted to make a lilting song of it—la crème de la crème de la quim.
A bawdy song
.

Asie clattered a tune out from the keys.
Oh, the schottische. One, two, three, hop!
Burton noticed that the lad had the gift—this schottische had a lilt!
One, two, three, hop!

Asie was playing some sort of dance music, Sun Moon knew. She had seen and heard enough dancing at Tarim’s tavern. She had begun to hear some sense in the music. It was crude, though, beside the music of the zithers, flutes, and great lamaist brass horns. The dance was vigorous but lacking in subtlety. Yet she could see that Asie spirit entered into the song like a proud dancer, and kicked up its heels handsomely.

The girl with hair the color of a raven, Clarissa, led Sir Richard into the dance. He was graceful in the turns, but she recognized the mad agility of the drunk. Clarissa whirled, faced him, whirled a time and a half, and back into his arms with a gleaming smile.

Courting,
they called it in English. She remembered the courting in her own country, funny, joyful, sometimes bawdy. Tibetan women were not demure, nor chaste. That was why their sexiness was legendary among Chinese men.
Which is why Tarim wanted me
. The iron band choked off that line of thought.

She herself had never been courted. She entered the convent before puberty. She had watched, she had heard her sisters tell stories … Some monks and nuns returned to their families periodically and lived ordinary, uncelibate lives. Sun Moon had held herself to the highest standards, had never so indulged.

She turned back to Asie. His face was enraptured, transported. He was living in a reality other than the usual one, a reality resplendent with sounds, a reality flowing from his fingers, his own creation, his own collaboration with the fine energies of the universe. She had always loved the rapture of musicians. She loved it in Asie now.

Her body tingled. A sensual feeling of her girlhood flowed back to her, the first time she touched herself and felt arousal…

It slipped into her mind unwelcome—the warmth in her body when … She felt her body entwined with Asie’s on the sand. Her skin prickled.

Albert watched the John Bull captain, trying to be discreet. He wondered what Brother Rockwell actually wanted. “Intelligence,” Rockwell had said, “everything.”

He supposed that included the information that Captain Burton danced with Brother Young’s daughters with too intimate an expression on his face, and too much insinuation of body. It did not matter that Clarissa was a Young daughter he fancied himself.

Albert had been flattered to be trusted with this task. His father had fought with “Port” in the Utah War, and admired no man more than Brother Rockwell. “Brother Young is the brains of Deseret,” he said, “our women are the heart, and Porter Rockwell is the hard muscle.”

But what exactly did Brother Rockwell want to know?
To be sure the fugitives were here—that was solved. Probably to know what rooms they were in. And especially to get some idea of their plans. “Renegades,” Brother Rockwell had called them. Raised through the tribulation of inner conflict and apostasy, Albert knew what that meant, the trials it brought the Church. “They cannot hide in Brother Young’s house forever,” Brother Rockwell said with a look. Something in the look made Albert feel he would follow Porter Rockwell into hell itself. As his father had felt.

How to discover their plans?

He got to his feet and strode straight toward the dancing pair. His heart tripped as lightly as their feet. Clarissa’s face turned toward him,
and the look gave him pause. He forced his feet onward, smiled, and lifted a hand to her.

With a cold and brittle smile Clarissa Young joined hands with the young Saint. He saw her eyes stay on Captain Burton as they danced away, pining.

Anger pulsed in Albert, and he used it to push out questions. “Who is that odd-looking man?” Silence. “I hear he’s staying in Lion House—can that be true?” Silence. “I hope he and his friends go soon. Outsiders contaminate Deseret.” But Clarissa did not answer, did not even look at Albert. When the song ended, she whirled and walked back toward Captain Burton.

And Albert came to knowledge of jealousy.

Gradually the light dropped by half. Burton saw that one of the older lasses had stacked books high around the lamp as a shield. He kept chatting with Clarissa as though he noticed nothing.

Asie changed music. It was something … Burton couldn’t say, but it inspired reverie rather than dancing. The dancers, as by consensus, disappeared into shadowed corners.

“Let me show you something,” said Clarissa. She led him by the hand to a high, slender window. She seemed to walk on air, and he to fly lightly behind her, a balloon trailing from her hand. “Look,” she said. Far to the northwest a last ribbon of light touched the barren ridges of the Hogup Mountains. Above it, in the plush half darkness, an arc of moon was already setting. Clarissa looked up into Burton’s eyes. It was as though she gently pulled the balloon to her face. “Captain, when the moon …”

Richard Burton inclined his head slightly and moved to brush her lips with his. She turned her head, so that he touched her hair instead. “My, Captain!” she murmured low.

She took both his hands and held him at arm’s length. She pivoted into one arm, stepped back, and looked up. He found her lips a hairbreadth from his. He took full advantage.

And then Burton slipped his left hand past the hem of a bodice and found a delicate breast. The lady gasped. He caressed the small, hard nipple.

Oh, enchanting madness
.

The parlor door rasped. By a deft movement of shoulders Clarissa slipped away from Burton’s palm. She turned to face Burton again, flashing a brittle smile.

A set of candelabra loomed in the doorway. Beneath it materialized the stout form of the Prophet.

On the piano bench Sun Moon trembled.
A powerful man is angry
.

The Lion of the Lord peered about himself fiercely. Unmistakably, he could see well enough. “The girls will go upstairs to their rooms,” Brigham Young declared, “and I will say good night to the young men.”

Clarissa walked away without looking back. Sun Moon had watched her closely with Sir Richard, had seen her in his arms at the window, had witnessed the furtive caress. The sight had made her feel her own arousal. She avoided looking at Asie on the bench next to her.

The young men stood foolish and hangdog. Burton rocked on the balls of his feet queasily.

This is odd. What is the harm in courting?

Burton’s feet carried him along the back wall, and his body followed with a wobble, Sun Moon thought. He turned the knob on a side door.