Melody did not need to ask what he meant. The smile was still there, but the humor had vanished. What was left was a parody of gentleness, a mockery of his earlier courtesy. His voice had dropped into a soft Virginia purr, a purr that was notched around the edges with a lacing of sharp teeth.
“You tell your mistress that an old friend dropped by to see her. Tell her that I’ve been away for a while, but that I’m back. Tell her, little girl, that I remember very clearly the last time we met, and that another old friend of hers and I have decided that it’s about time we renew our acquaintance. You might say I’m a little bit wiser than I was, trying to do things on my own when I should have had … partners. Well, I got those partners now, you tell her, and we’ll be back fairly soon so we can talk over old times. Just the way we used to. You be sure to tell her exactly that, little woman—just the way we used to. You got all that? You think you can remember all that when you see your mistress?”
Melody, trying vainly not to shudder, nodded.
The man grinned and reached out to touch her cheek, withdrawing his hand when she stepped back. He vaulted from the top porch step into his saddle. It was a show, a mime to impress her, and he laughed as he grazed his spurs against the black stallion’s flanks and raced down the lane, vanishing into the afternoon’s fast-growing shadows.
A moment later, Rachel came up behind her, staring at the cloud of dust that spiraled into the air and hid the rider as though he’d never existed.
“Who that?” she asked.
“I don’ know,” Melody said, “but I think someone done jus’ walked over my grave.”
C
ass barely managed to maintain her composure when, after she had returned to the house for supper, Melody cornered her in the stable and told her what had happened that afternoon She listened attentively, thanked Melody with an instantly suspicious, exaggerated nonchalance and waited for the girl to leave her before she allowed herself even to begin to think.
She felt both dread and excitement. Dread, because she knew who the man was and why he had come—Vern Lambert, returned to take up the challenge she had given him four years earlier when she and Eric had vanquished him and had fled into the storm that had blown her into a new and unsettled life. Excitement because this was the first substantial proof that her plan—the plan no one but herself knew about—was beginning to work. Word had spread. Riverrun was back on its feet and, though reeling, it was showing signs of becoming as strong as ever—strong because of the work of a single Northern woman who had seemingly come out of nowhere. Lambert had heard of it, and there must have been no doubt in his mind as to who that woman was.
Just the way we used to … He had returned to Meridine, sized up the situation, and had located Hawkins to offer him his services. She imagined he had convinced Hawkins on the basis of his knowledge of the plantation, and the fact that he, too, had a score to settle with the strong-willed woman who had once bested him. She could imagine Geoffrey’s slowly growing smile that released the breath of his madness; and she could imagine, too, Forrester thinking that at least he was not alone on her list of victories, no matter how temporary either of them thought they would be.
As she walked slowly back to the house, she found herself smiling for the first time in a month. Her blood raced through her limbs and gave them life; her thoughts broke through the cloud of self-defeat that had once made her believe with a dark and brooding fatalism that she was cursed, and had cursed everyone who came in contact with her. No more. That was over now. The skirmishes of the past were as nothing at this moment. Chet’s death, the destruction of the crops, the debts, and the snide remarks of her creditors had abruptly been relegated to the status of a prologue.
For months, when she had dreamed of this moment, thought of it while she worked and haggled and tore her flesh, she had feared she would panic. She had been afraid that when she was forced to stand up in the face of enemy fire, she would bolt and run and hide in the cellar until the storm had passed and she could creep away to try again somewhere else. It had all been nothing more than bravado, she’d thought when she was alone in her bed trying to rekindle the rage that had driven her for years, nothing more than a facade of bravery propped up by the notion that it would never happen, and thus there was no harm in giving vent to her anger at those who were essentially harmless against her.
But it was not bravado, or false strength, or courage born of distance and time. Her spider’s web had caught the dew, had sparkled in the early morning’s light, and had lured thereby the prey, and the battle.
You know, of course, that you’re entirely crazy, she said to herself as she marched into the kitchen and told Rachel to fetch all the hands into the front room immediately; you’re overreacting and you’re going to destroy yourself.
She shook her head and strode into the corridor, leaving behind her the faintly puzzled stares of Rachel and Melody. No, she was no more crazy, no more insane than her father had been when those rebels had ridden into the front yard of their Gettysburg homestead.
“But we’re not done, Father!”
“Damn, but you’re right. Just like your mother. At least we won’t hand them the place on a platter, will we?”
And they hadn’t, and she wouldn’t—not as long as she could stand with a rifle, as she did when the hands, led by Amos, slipped into the front room. She was before the fireplace, its flames crackling high into the chimney despite the heat of September’s night. Posted at her side was a rifle, and in her left hand she held a long-bladed knife that caught the fire and shot it around the room in sun-bright bursts. The men looked at each other cautiously, not daring to meet her steady, solemn gaze, sensing that she was about to ask of them something she’d never done before, something that was far more important than patrolling the grounds.
She knew they were frightened, and puzzled, and when she cleared her throat to begin she nearly laughed when several of them jumped and looked quickly back over their shoulders.
They were an even dozen, not counting the women. A baker’s dozen, she told herself, when she saw herself with them.
“There’s going to be a fight tonight,” she said without preamble. “A hell of a fight. I’m sure by this time Amos has told you most of what he knows about what’s going on around here, and who’s doing it, and why. Well, Captain Hawkins has himself a new man, a man named Lambert. He used to be the overseer here, and I used to know him. It doesn’t matter how,” she said, lifting her voice when they began to stir. “It doesn’t make any difference. But I know him, and I know what he wants. He wants me dead, and he wants Riverrun. He thought, when I knew him, that he owned it then, and I’m sure that he still believes this place is his no matter whose name is on the papers. He’s going to make sure, dead sure, that we do not meet our October deadline.”
“No he won’t,” Simon muttered from his place at the rear of the group. “He ain’t gonna do nothin’.”
“Yes, he will,” Cass said. “Or at least he’s going to try damned hard. You don’t know him; I do. He’s going to do something, but we’re going to make sure he doesn’t finish it. There’s only one thing, and it’s very important—I’m asking you to take on something I’ve no right to ask—there’s going to be a lot of bloodshed, and some of us maybe are going to die. I can ask you to fight for me, but I can’t ask you to die. You’ve got to make up your own minds, and make them up now. Lambert will be back before midnight, I’m sure of it, and he knows I’m not about to turn this place over to him just like that.
“If you want, you can go to the fields. They won’t bother you there. It’s the house they want, and me. And I wouldn’t blame you a bit if—”
“Missus,” Amos said, wiping his hands nervously on his trousers, “this is all right and pretty, this here talk you’re givin’ us. But I told you that day I done rode over to Burford with that letter, if I ain’t here, I in a ditch somewhere and nothin’ changed from Father Abraham’s time. These boys here ain’t that young, Missus—they remembers. Believe me, Missus, they remembers.”
“Y
ou’re crazy,” David said. He was sitting up in his bed, a sheet to his waist, his naked chest bone-thin and gleaming with perspiration. His festering leg was bound tightly, twice the size of the other, and it lay on top of the sheet as he absently passed a feather fan over it to drive away the flies, the gnats, and the other night visitors. His eyes were sunken deeply into his skull, his cheeks mere shadows, and the hair that had once been delightfully soft with his youth and his vigor had become like straw and was shot through with gray.
Doc Garner had told her two days before that the leg was going to have to come off, that they’d waited much too long and only listened to his wailing instead of their reason. As it was, he’d said, the poison was already seeping through his system.
“Call me what you want,” she said, “you know this is what I’ve been waiting for, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone talk me out of it.”
“You’re damned already,” he said sourly. “You aren’t a natural woman, Cassandra, and you’re damned already. Melissa should have stopped you a long time ago but she’s too soft; she doesn’t understand these things. Like the other day. I was telling her about the new case Cavendish dumped on me, this man wanting to ship a passel of hogs overland—overland, mind you—to St. Louis, and I’m the one that has to take care of the … take care of—”
She stood for a minute longer, listening to him babble, wishing that the next day were already here with Doc Garner and his equipment so they could get it done and bring the old David back. But this was now, this was today. She only nodded several times and slipped out into the hall, knowing that he would never realize she was gone.
“M
issus, why don’t you send Simon or someone in for the sheriff? Mister Garvey, he can stop ’em, can’t he?”
“Rachel, you saw how Garvey took care of Chet’s killer, didn’t you? Don’t ask foolish questions. Just be sure you and Melody stay here by the stairs and keep those rifles loaded. And for God’s sake, don’t stand up! I don’t think I could stand my own cooking.”
T
he night was less fearful than protective. The air was still, cool, and hinting of autumn’s shade around the corner; the moon was still large enough to cast ghost-light over the trees, the house, the faint dark shadows that crouched in the corners; and its dark curtain attention on the main building, brought one’s roving eye away from the surrounding black wall that for the moment kept the outside world from seeming too large.
Abraham, his work clothes streaked with burnt cork, knelt beneath the portal and watched the road to Meridine, and listened, his palm resting lightly on the ground to feel for the tremors that would warn him long before his eyes picked out riders.
Simon and four others had climbed into the trees that lined the turnabout in front of the porch. They were high up, deep, settled into the bark as though they had grown there; their weapons were pistols because they were easier to keep loaded, and hollowed and dried melon rinds filled with shot and broken glass to be thrown at the horses’ hooves in the hope that confusion might keep the raiders off-balance.
The rest of the hands were in the dining and sitting rooms. The sashes had been thrown up, but the shutters drawn all around the first floor. The lower slats had been knocked out; they would not be missed by those coming at them from the front, but they would permit the barrels of rifles to be thrust through while preventing any torches from being tossed inside.
Cass alone stood at the front door, a rifle in her hand, nervously thinking that perhaps she should have sent someone besides that young boy—she panicked and could not remember his name. Could not … remember … she closed her eyes tightly and forced his image into her mind: wide-eyed, laughing, Melody’s younger brother, his ears thrusting out comically from the sides of his head. Melody’s brother. Michael! She sighed with relief and opened her eyes again. Michael, his name was Michael. She should not have sent him out back alone. Lambert could very easily send a number of men that way, and Michael would be …
She shook her head vigorously. No. Lambert, from what Melody had said, had not changed in all these years. He was still arrogant, prideful, and most of all disdainful of her and what she could do. He would come boldly, with not a great number of men, because he did not believe she could muster a defense against what he believed to be his superior weapon—the fact that he was a man.
She smiled, and heard the owl calling, felt the tension that dropped from the ceiling like a shroud, heard Rachel and Melody shifting uneasily, thought she heard someone outside whimpering until she realized it was only a bird, or her imagination.
But it was not her imagination when she heard the horses pounding up the lane, slowing within yards of the turnabout. The snorting, the clinking of metal against metal, the squeaking leather protest of saddle and boot, a hoof striking stone, the distinct click-click-click of a revolver’s hammer being drawn slowly back.
It was as dark inside as it was out, and her eyes were already used to the dim light when the riders fanned slowly around the outside of the turnabout, and Vern Lambert rode boldly up to the first porch step. He was as she remembered, and she only prayed he would stay there long enough for her … to raise the rifle … to her shoulder … pull back the hammer …
Someone in the trees either panicked or thought he heard a signal of some sort. A rind fell to the ground with a dreadful racket in the unnatural night’s stillness. Others quickly followed, and there was a cacophony of swearing led by Lambert, who whirled his mount around and fired blindly into the trees. Instantly the blackness was laced with gouts of orange and red and yellow and white explosions that were soon followed by the screams of wounded men and the high, shrill cries of frightened and struck horses. Cass, stunned by the onslaught of light and sound, snapped herself back to her senses and fired, dropped the rifle, and reached out for another while Rachel scuttled back and forth between the rooms, snatching up the used weapons and replacing them with loaded and primed ones.