The others were gone.
Carefully, almost reverently, she placed the legal documents on the bed and knelt beside them. She did not want to touch them, but she drew faint circles on the quilt around them. It was not going to be easy. There was not much gold left from her flight—enough, perhaps, to take them all just barely through the winter, unless David was able to find himself work to help with the support. Then there would be spring, and the hiring of hands, clearing the grounds, buying seed and livestock. Her hands went suddenly to her cheeks as she realized the complexity of it all. Blindly she had driven herself into the realization of a dream, and now that the dream had become a reality she was no longer sure she could take hold and keep it.
You have no choice, she told herself. Already you have three people depending on you; what if Eric should return and see that you’ve failed? What would he say? She scowled. He would say nothing, only love her the more for trying.
“You know,” she said then to herself, “if you sit around here all day, nothing’s going to happen no matter what you do. Up, girl, damn it! You’ve got a hell of a long ride, and a hell of a long winter.”
The sound of her voice—scolding, chiding—made her grin. Speaking aloud to herself was, she knew, a habit she had long ago picked up from her father. Thinking, he had told her, too often refuses to stay on the track; talking, on the other hand, just as often can show you what a fool you’re about to make of yourself.
“No fool, Father,” she said, softly. “Not this time. I’ll die before I let this fall apart.”
D
espite the shadows that lurked beneath the trees and filled the brush alongside the road, there was still plenty of light to see by when Cass wheeled her roan mare about with a hiss and a cluck, and slowed the animal to a trot. The air was chilled now, Indian summer fading as rapidly as its promise. The ground seemed harder, the leaves more brittle, and she shivered involuntarily under the heavy drape of a woolen cloak she’d purchased at Owen’s Dry Goods before leaving Maridine. It had only taken an hour to round up the others and give instructions to David about the foodstuffs they would need. Then, over their protests, she had ridden off on her own. It was important, more than any of them knew, that she reach the plantation first, and alone. She had almost missed the turn-off; two man-tall pedestals of fieldstone marking the entry lane had been submerged in a tangle of ivy and weeds, and it was only a fleeting memory that warned her of her mistake.
Once onto the lane, hoof beats smothered by fallen leaves and forest debris, she began to doubt.
From the day she had taken over her brothers’ chores on the farm, she had prided herself on her strength. She was no ordinary woman, she’d told herself, no ordinary person. Where others had been satisfied to allow vague notions of destiny to color their lives, she had tried almost desperately to be her own shaper, her own guide. She thought she had proved her worth in her skirmishes with Forrester, had shown the depth of her strength after the episode with Hawkins during the Davidson ball. But how much of all that had been her error? If she had told Kevin of the assault, might he not have found some strength of his own to face the two men and sweep her troubled horizon clear? If she had told Cavendish everything soon after Kevin had died, wouldn’t he have shown her what legal recourse she could have taken to shore up her defenses against further embattlement? She hated the questions because she would never know the answers, would never know how much of her grief could have been spared if she had not insisted on doing things her way or not at all.
It came to her as she rode up the lane that she was alone. David, Melissa, Alice; they were companions of her waking hours, to be sure, but even when the sun shone there were still tendrils of night that wrapped themselves about her and hid her from sight. Melissa had once wondered aloud how a farm girl could have learned to be so aloof, and Cass had told her aloofness and caution were two different things. But she hadn’t believed her own words then, and she didn’t believe them now. And she had refused, until now, to admit that being her own woman was a grand and glorious matter that worked to her benefit only up to a point. It gave her leverage in her dealings with others—the element of surprise that a woman could be the equal of a man—and it allowed her in several ways to manipulate people like David and Melissa without their knowing their strings were being pulled, up to a point. But beyond that point she was and would always be the other Cassandra Roe, needing love, affection, strength where her own sometimes faltered. Geoffrey, in the beginning, had fulfilled that need, and Kevin, in the beginning, had done the same, though with less assurance. But it had been Eric—arrogant, self-confident, almost aristocratic in his manner—who had fitted her perfectly. Eric was gone, and she was growing weary of reminding herself of that, weary of those half-hopes and vagrant dreams that he would suddenly return on the heels of a storm cloud and complete the imperfect puzzle that was shaping into her life.
She was alone.
She shook her head angrily, startling the roan, who skittered off to the side of the lane, shied at the stab of a thorned, skeletal bush, and bolted several paces before Cass brought her under control. When they had stopped, she looked up and saw the trees falling away. She gnawed at her lower lip anxiously. What if it was all gone? What if there was nothing but rubble and stone? What if fate’s cruel underside had finally turned up with a killing blow?
“Go,” she whispered to the horse, and stroked its neck gently. The roan balked, then broke into a canter, snorting its protest and angry surprise when she yanked hard on the reins and half-spun it around. It was beautiful … and it was hell. Her hands drifted across her eyes, and tears trickled through her fingers.
The house was, as far as she could tell, still in one piece. The broad front porch, the half-moon roof over it, the squared pillars, the tall, arched windows on either side of the huge double doors. The house caught lances of the twilight’s fire in panes and on clapboard, and diffused them until the house seemed to develop a faintly golden aura that lifted it out of the decay that surrounded it. It was unearthly, vaguely frightening, and she was positive that as soon as she blinked it would crumble, leaving behind it nothing more than a cloud of dust, a ghost-dance of memories that would be carried swiftly away as soon as the wind quickened again.
Riverrun.
“Oh, Eric,” she whispered, and slid down from the saddle, took the reins in her left hand and slowly led the roan up the lane to the wide carriage-turn now overgrown with wild grasses and seedlings of the trees that seemed to press closer now to the deserted mansion. Halfway to the steps she paused and glanced at the garden that had once been a colorful maze along the right side of the house. There were flowers still, but pale, sickly, autumnal remnants of some long-ago spring. She lifted her gaze up the side of the house to the window beyond which was the room where she’d recovered, the room from which she had seen Vern Lambert spying on Eric. She swallowed heavily, clucked to the roan, and moved forward again, the horse’s hooves the only sound as twilight hazed to dusk.
Vines had attacked the pillars, carpeted the porch, crept up and through the panes that were now broken like witches’ teeth. White paint peeled from the wood to leave slashes of gray, and here and there a board had warped away from its nails.
An animal skittered away, invisible in the shadows.
She tied the reins to a straggling shrub, hiked up her skirt with one hand, and climbed onto the porch—the steps had been shattered and were now nothing but gaps. She stood for a moment, listening for spirits, for voices, for signs. She looked to her left and saw an overturned chair, a crushed table beside it. Sara.
Sniffing once, laying a finger across her upper lip, she moved to the doors, stretched out a hand, pushed, grunted, pushed again, and the rusty voice of the hinges was an explosion that reverberated through the hallways inside and set a dozen starlings and jays scolding at the disturbance in the trees behind her.
The curve of the staircase, the rooms to either side, the corridor that led to the back and the kitchen, all lay under dust, gray and white, with hints of black-brown. The dust puffed into clouds as she walked, and settled slowly. Nesting sparrows chirruped somewhere upstairs. There were droppings that meant rodents and bats, an occasional hare. She shuffled through dried grass, twigs, and tumbles of reeds. The furniture was gone, and the portraits, and the draperies; the iron socket in the ceiling from which the foyer’s chandelier had hung gaped like a black mouth. At the top of the stairs the huge oval tapestry whipped to tatters, faded, and yellowed.
She stood for a moment at the foot of the staircase with her hands cupped around the great oaken ball of the newel post, her arms wanting to propel her up, her legs refusing to take the first step. Instead, she drifted with the dust down the hall toward the back. And stopped at the kitchen’s threshold, stifling a gasp.
The large room was clean, and recently done. The floor was scuffed but earnestly polished, the iron stoves, the fireplace, the table in the center—all of them were clean and obviously in use. There were bits of greens on the floor. Something once white had burned down the front of the stove. A freshly cut cord of wood was stacked near the fireplace.
“No,” she whispered to herself. “There can’t be anyone here. It isn’t fair. Damn it, it isn’t—”
The back door opened with a bang, dust lifting like thunderclouds into the air. A man stood in the doorway with a lantern.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Her eyes narrowed. “I should ask you the same thing.”
He stepped in and held the lantern away from himself so she could see his face without shading her eyes. He was tall enough to have to duck under the lintel. His legs were barely covered by gray and ragged trousers, his feet and chest were bare and covered with grime. His face was expressionless, handsome, and not a single hair sprouted anywhere on his head. He was almost as black as the night gathering outside.
Chapter Twenty
T
he lantern sat in the middle of the table, its glow filling the room more with shadow than with light. Because of the quality of the light, the house seemed inordinately huge, oppressively empty, and bearing down like a menacing weight. Boards creaked, though there was no wind; the darkness had a whispering life of its own. David and Melissa stood by the mantel, his arm about her waist, his face taut and suspicious while her gaze appeared hypnotized by the low murmur of voices that accented the dance of the flames. Alice leaned back against the stove, her arms folded tightly over her chest; her face was impassive, her eyes slitted as if the narrowed vision would enable her to see through something she was not sure had substance. Cass sat at the table and listened.
His name was Judah White. He was, as far as he knew, the only survivor of a second-generation slave family who had belonged to a tobacco planter in South Carolina. When, in January of ’63, word of the Emancipation Proclamation had filtered down to them, he and several of his friends had walked off the land to find the promise of riches implied in the message from Father Abraham. Many others stayed behind—they had no place else to go, no other home, no means or skills to carve themselves out a living in a hostile world. But Judah had been determined, and had been romantic enough to overlook the hardships, to welcome the risks. Unfortunately, reality was too much with them. The rebels refused to accept the Proclamation’s legal standing, and more often than not Judah and his friends were hunted instead of employed. One by one they were either killed mercilessly or forced back into slave labor on the rapidly failing plantations already stripped of everything valuable either by the passing Union hordes or by conscription from their own Confederate government. Judah, however, managed to escape capture and death each time, but not before he had seen enough lynchings and floggings to fill a hundred mens’ nightmares. Eventually, by springtime, he found himself part of the Wilderness army, a member of one of the growing numbers of Negro companies formed partly as a gesture, partly to exploit the blacks’ hatred of what they’d fled in hopes that the war would be shortened thereby.
It was a bitter lesson in the killing of a dream. Though the whites they fought alongside were Northerners, Judah learned quickly that their attitudes toward his people were sometimes as unreasonable and uninformed as those he had just fled. A few treated him as though he were a child, a simple-minded child who needed to be taught everything from sleeping to eating; a few others took him as a man and forgot his color, and for those Judah was grateful; but there were also those who told him to his face he was a member of an inferior race, a creature almost subhuman, a creature to be tolerated as one does a valuable but not very lovable pet. Though the latter were not quite as numerous as the former, Judah understood that fleeing to the North once the war had ended was not going to mean the instant realization of wealth and respectability that he’d once believed it would. But the pay was adequate, he had decent food and clothing, and his size commanded grudging respect despite his background, so he remained with Grant’s troops until the end. It was at Appomattox Court House where he saw the dignity that marked every step of Lee’s surrender, from the moment he spoke to General Grant to the moment he turned over his sword to Colonel Custer. It had been a moving moment, and scarcely anyone—except perhaps Custer—had been unaffected. But as soon as it was over, Judah took what pay he had coming to him and drifted into the Tennessee hills. He’d been a fair hunter as a boy, and planned now to trap and hunt his way west where many of his people were heading to do some homesteading. That was disappointing, too. He survived, but little more than that. He was a farmer, not a trapper, but he soon discovered that though the papers had been signed, the states one by one slowly returning to the Union, the war was not over. The whites had fallen back into a guerrilla-style battle, and their anger was taken out on the most helpless of their proclaimed enemies—the blacks.