Love and War: The Coltrane Saga, Book 1 (8 page)

“Oh, Nancy, why don’t you give up?” She shook her head from side to side, still laughing. “You really aren’t worth me worrying about, you know. I’ll admit that you used to really get under my skin. I’d run home from school and throw myself across my bed and cry for hours, because of something you’d said, making fun of me or my family. But now, all of a sudden, I find it doesn’t matter. Instead of being mad or hurt with you, I think I honestly feel sorry for you—because I’ve got the one thing you want—and can’t have.”

Kitty had walked slowly across the room to where the curving pine washstand stood beside a window. She lifted the blue porcelain pitcher and poured water into the matching bowl. Then she dipped one hand and began to pat her face, trying to cool her flushed skin.

“If you’re talking about having
Nathan
, Kitty Wright,” Nancy spluttered, eyes narrowed to angry slits as she stood just behind her. “You haven’t got him, and you’ll
never
get him. His parents would disown him before they let him marry the likes of trash like you…”

“Who are you calling trash, Nancy?” Kitty whipped around, still holding the pitcher.

Pressing, because she had obviously found a vulnerable spot in Kitty’s cool veneer, Nancy smirked. “Everybody in Wayne County knows your family is white trash. They say your daddy is a negro-lover, that he helps runaway slaves get to the underground, They say your mother is crazy. They say your daddy is too sorry and lazy to work the land he owns, and that’s why you’re dirt poor. And you dare to think you’re good enough for Nathan…”

She didn’t plan to do it, but when Kitty heard Nancy’s tirade against her father, it was too much. Slowly, deliberately—almost under its own will, her arm raised and the pitcher of water tipped, splashing down on Nancy’s head.

“What are you doing?” she screamed, covering her head with both hands and backing away. But it was too late. Her carefully curler-ironed tresses hung sopping wet around her face—the bodice and sleeves of her dress limp and splotched.

Calmly, Kitty returned the pitcher to the washstand. “Think again before you go calling someone white trash, Nancy,” she said, walking toward the door.

Nancy was sobbing and shrieking, and the sound brought several other young girls running into the room. “Look what she did! Look what that trash did!” Nancy was yelping.

Stomping down the steps one at a time, Kitty scolded herself for having come in the first place. She didn’t belong here. What was so important about social acceptance, anyway? She’d have much preferred to go riding or hunting, and if Nathan loved her, he would just have to understand.

A group of women stood inside the door, exchanging glances as they looked from Kitty to the direction of the sobbing and screaming. Casting a contemptuous glance in their direction, Kitty walked by them, head high. They looked like a clump of fat hens, clucking and chattering. What did they know about straddling a saddle, galloping in the song of the wind with hair blowing wildly about their faces instead of tiptoeing gracefully along in their stiff crinolines and ruffles? They would never thrill to the sound of Killer baying excitedly as he picked up the scent of a ‘coon, leading the way for the final triumphant moment. And let them scream and faint at the sight of blood. They didn’t know the goodness that spread within when a little black boy cut his finger and smiled at you with eternal devotion because you cleaned it and bandaged it and then kissed it to make it well.

She had more than any of those sour-faced women would ever have—and what they thought of her did not matter.

She burst onto the veranda breathlessly, gulping in the fresh air. They were still there—Weldon Edwards and David Stoner and Nathan, and the others, heatedly talking about the war.

“We can beat them in a month…”

“One Southerner can beat twenty Yankees…”

“…teach them a lesson they won’t forget!”

“Peacefully? Abe Lincoln don’t know the meanin’ of the word. He’ll never let any state secede from the union peacefully. We’ll go to war, sir.”

War, secession, fighting, Lincoln—words Kitty was sick of hearing. “Gentlemen, you are all fools!” she exploded as heads turned, mouths dropped open in shock. “You condemn my father for not joining in your enthusiasm for war, but have any of you ever stopped to listen to the wisdom of his words? He says there’s not a factory to build cannons that lies below the Mason-Dixon Line. And what about the cotton factories? With the exception of North Carolina, there aren’t many others, and we can’t supply the whole South if war comes.”

They continued to stare at her silently, a few of them coughing nervously as they darted sidelong glances at Nathan, who was shuffling uncomfortably. Then he started toward her, but she stepped back, holding up her hands to hold him away, not about to be led off once again like a naughty child.

“The Yankees will blockade our harbors quickly, and then where will we be? Could you get cotton out to sell overseas? The Yankees have the factories and the money. The South has nothing but a bunch of patriotic-minded fools who think there is glory in war!”

“Kitty, that’s enough!” Nathan’s voice was harsh, rasping, as he grabbed her outstretched arms and shoved them down to her sides, gripping and giving her a shake. He whispered, “Let me take you home. Obviously, you don’t feel well…”

Jerking away from him, she cried, “I feel very well. I refuse to let you people make me sick!”

“Nathan…” Lavinia Collins ran onto the veranda, her face white with shock, her personal maid beside her, fluttering nervously in fear that her mistress would faint. “Nathan, do you know what this…this creature has done? She’s poured water on little Nancy Warren!”

A round of laughter went up from the young men, and one of them called out, “Nancy should be glad Kitty didn’t have a gun, or she’d be nursing a wound like your overseer.”

Nathan’s hands fell away from his grip on her arms. It was too much. “Oh, Kitty…” he moaned, shaking his head.

She knew she had shamed him and, turning, she ran toward the end of the veranda and the side steps. “Wait, I’ll get the carriage…” Nathan called.

“No…I don’t need you…” Kitty cried, hoisting her skirts once again to run down the steps. “I don’t need anyone…”

Across the lawn she ran, her carefully coiffured hair failing down around her face. She headed straight for the woods. It was a good two miles or more to her house through the woods and swamps, but she had hunted these parts for years and knew her way. The walk would be good for her, she decided, slowing down as she made her way through the thicket. She needed the time to sort out everything that had happened, before she faced her mother.

The scream halted Kitty’s steps. Here, the woods were thick, with brambles and thickets of overgrowth. Her dress was being snagged and torn, but she’d been too angry to care.

“Master, don’t…please don’t, the baby…”

Turning toward the direction of the pleading cries, Kitty saw a clearing she hadn’t realized was about. Moving closer, she realized she was right next to the slave compound for the Collins plantation. There were perhaps a dozen or more wooden shacks lined up in a circle around a clearing. The porches of the houses were clustered with frightened, wide-eyed slaves. Small children clutched their mothers’ legs, peering out from behind at the scene taking place in the middle of the clearing.

A young black girl, swollen with child, lay writhing in the dirt at the feet of a white man who held a whip in his left hand—his right arm was wrapped in a sling.

Luke Tate!

“Don’t beat me, please. You’ll kill my baby…”

“I’ll kill you, you black wench. I’ll teach you to steal…” He reached down with his left hand, still holding the whip, and with a quick yank, ripped her thin cotton dress from her body. She groveled naked at his feet, trying to wrap her arms around her bulging, unprotected stomach—and her unborn child.

The Collins mansion stood on a hill above the, clearing, barely visible from the distance. A young black man came running from that direction, waving his arms frantically. “Don’t you hit her, Tate. You hit me instead…” He reached the clearing, face churning with fear and anger, chest heaving with exhaustion from the run. “I give her that meat. You cut off her food to punish her las’ week, and she an’ that baby were starvin’. I had to feed her, don’t you see? If you beat anybody, beat me.”

Luke Tate turned. “I’ll beat the both of you,” he screamed, bringing the whip down with a crackling whistle through the air. The lash cut across the black man’s face, laying open the flesh. Covering his face with both hands and shrieking in pain, he slumped forward in the dirt.

The black woman cried, struggled to her feet to reach the young man, but Luke’s whip slashed again—this time across her back. She was no match for the cutting leather, and she crumpled under the first blow—the blood already flowing from the slice that laid open her skin.

Luke raised his arm again, but Kitty had managed to make her way out of the brambles by then and was running toward him, crying, “Stop! Stop that, you dirty bastard, Luke Tate!”

He turned as she threw herself upon him, raking his face with her clawing hands, kicking at him, pummeling him with her fists in a rage of fury.

For a moment, she’d caught him unaware, but he quickly recovered to fling her away effortlessly, throwing back his head to laugh and sneer at her, “You shoulda killed me when you had the chance, you little spitfire, because you’re going to get the beating you deserve.”

He raised the whip high above his head once again, and Kitty threw up her arms to protect herself as best she could. Closing her eyes in anticipation of the cutting slice that would be crashing down upon her—she blinked them open again at the sound of his laughter—and saw that he was flinging the whip aside.

“Naw, it’d be a shame to mess up anything that looks like you do.” He leaned over, and she could smell the redeye on his breath. Scooping her up as she hit at him uselessly, he roared, “A good fuckin’ is what you need to calm you down, and I’m the man whut can give it to you…”

He started off with her slung over his shoulders, in the direction of one of the slave cabins. “Get the hell outta there!” he roared, and slaves scattered, emptying the shack.

Stepping inside, he set her down and hooked the fingers of his left hand into her bodice and ripped it down, her breasts spilling out. “God…” he breathed, as she staggered backward, trying to cover herself.

“Don’t you touch me!” she cried hoarsely, darting her eyes about for any kind of a weapon. “Nathan will kill you for this…”

“I’m willin’ to take that chance…” He licked his puffy lips as he fumbled with his pants. “You just lay down on that cot yonder and it’ll be good for both of us. You need this, Kitty…you need tamin’…”

“Not by you, Tate!”

They looked to the doorway where Nathan Collins stood, fists clenched, legs apart, eyes boiling with the fury of his anger. In one of his clenched fists, he held the bullwhip Tate had discarded, and without warning, he brought it slashing down across the overseer’s shocked face.

Tate fell to his knees as Nathan hit him again, and the sound of the leather slicing into flesh and muscle made bile rise in Kitty’s throat. She stumbled away from the shack and out into the cool November air, retching against the hands she pressed to her lips.

The sounds of the whip stopped. She could hear Tate moaning. “You get off this land by sundown,” Nathan yelled. “If I ever lay eyes on you again, I’ll kill you. I swear it!”

She shook herself back to reality, moving quickly from the porch across the clearing to where a crowd was gathering around the pregnant woman. They parted respectfully as she shoved her way through.

“Move this woman into a cabin so I can examine her,” Kitty ordered, then she turned to the boy, whose face was streaming with blood. Reaching down, she ripped one of her petticoats to make a wad of bandage to press against the cut. “Someone see to him.
You’ve tended whip cuts before.”

“Please take care of Jenny,” the boy whimpered as she moved away. “Don’t let nothin’ happen to our baby…”

Nathan ran up just as Kitty was about to enter the slave cabin where Jenny had been taken. “I’ve sent for the carriage. I’m taking you home. I’m sorry all this has happened, Kitty, but it’s best you leave now.”

An agonized snarl made both of them jerk around to see Luke Tate staggering into the clearing. His face was covered in blood, and his shirt hung in bloodied shreds of cotton. Pointing a finger at them, he cried, “I’ll get you both for this…you’re a dead man, Nathan Collins, and I’ll make you beg for mercy, Kitty Wright…”

He stumbled toward the woods, and Nathan ignored his outburst, more concerned at the moment with taking Kitty home and getting her out of the terrible situation. “Come on now.” He grasped her waist. “I’m so sorry, Kitty. I want to get you out of this…”

“No!” Jerking away she moved on toward the cabin door. “I’ve got to see to Jenny.”

The woman was lying on a filthy mattress stuffed with corn shucks, writhing and moaning, hands clutching her stomach. An old black woman was bent over between her legs. Straightening, she said to Kitty, “It ain’t her time yet, missy, but she’s a’birthin’…”

“Kitty, listen to me.” Nathan stepped inside the slave shack, then, realizing several women were milling about as Kitty bent to examine the girl in labor, he raised his voice to snap, “Get out of here! All of you!”

The women scurried, bumping into each other as they each rushed to follow their master’s orders. Then Nathan was across the dirt floor in two great steps to clamp his hands down o Kitty’s shoulders, yanking her up and whirling her about to face him.

“You listen to me, Kitty,” he hissed, eyes blazing with fury. “You’ve got to get out of here. This is an embarrassing situation for you to be in. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m in love with you. My parents are going to be very upset about all this, and your staying isn’t going to help matters…”

“Nathan, you’re in my way,” she said softly.

He stood back as Kitty shouted for the other women to get busy with boiling water and clean rags. “Well,” she jerked her head up to see him still standing there, gawking, “this is no place for a man. Get out of here, will you?”