The Pesthouse (22 page)

Over the months both Jackie and the half-completed tower grew higher and more ornate. The Finger Baptists hoped to move into the lower levels when the spring and a fresh intake of both pilgrims and travelers arrived. Everybody amongst the emigrants dreamed of walking out through the double gates to see a sail ship in the estuary. Another month would see them free again. A month was nothing to endure. Then America could be a nightmare left behind. Even Margaret began to believe that her best future — their best future — would be beyond the ocean, that taking to the ships would not be cowardly. That dream she'd had, up in the forest on the night when she had lost her way, that dream of being once again a safe and ancient girl in her soddy at the top of Butter Hill, had been a delusion. Yes, happiness was in the east. Wasn't that what everyone believed?

As the final days of winter passed and the moon, losing its hold, retreated back toward midnight, Margaret settled to the thought of finding passage in a ship along with her new friends. It was a comfort, in a way, to have a shared plan. She was distressed less and less by thoughts of Andrew and Melody, and Acton, their son, or by recollections of her life and family in Ferrytown. Even Franklin, her Pigeon, became more remote to her, despite the many occasions when her version of him as a father and a husband was offered to the women in the Ark or the many times she dreamed of their reunion. In fact, one morning when she was still exhausted from a restless night of Jackie's teething, she realized she could not remember many details of his face, and she could scarcely recall his family name. It wasn't Lombard, and it wasn't Lopate. She was relieved when, finally, the name was retrieved. Lopez, that was it! Franklin Lopez from the plains. How could she be so ready to forget that part of him, to let him slip away? That was troubling. It was as if the winter in the Ark had enriched her and robbed her at the same time.

The first truly warm day came when there was still snow on the ground, and the earth was hard. Spring's breath was in the air, crying green. Margaret had checked her pot of mint for signs of life, but there were none as yet. She was enjoying the sunshine at her duty spot beside the well and dozing, despite the usual hammering of carpenters and masons at the tower and the not-so-usual cries and hammering at the outer gates of the Ark.

Jackie, now into her second year, was playing push-and-pull with another toddler. It was she who first spotted the man, dismounting from a horse and running across the courtyard from the entry gate toward the tower works, followed twenty paces behind by a gang of thirty or so, all armed with swords and pikes.
Metal
swords and pikes, some already wet with Baptist blood. But it was not their shining blades or brass-encrusted shields or the clanking of their buckles and their armor that most alerted Jackie. It was the first man's clothes. A pinto coat like his, in such a striking pattern, was bound to catch a child's eye. She called out, not a word exactly, and pointed at the man, clearly amused by something. For an instant Margaret, with her poor eyesight, mistook him for Franklin. She half got up. She half cried out. But then she saw how short he was, his bandy legs, his many layers, the colored ribbons tying back his beard. She recognized his face.

FRANKLIN LOPEZ and his forty or so fellows in the labor gang had arrived outside the Ark soon after dawn and set to work at once. They were almost eager for the exertion. Work was their one protection against the cold, the hunger and the boredom of captivity. The masters had kept their vassals lightly clothed and underfed, but the laborers had been told that this day's work, if it was as richly productive as was hoped, might be rewarded with an evening meal and, possibly, brief access to a fire.

'Make it quick, and keep it quiet,' was the only instruction for the gang, though that was easier said than done. The winter months had shut the landscape down, hardened it and left it brittle. Even walking through the dead, frost-stiffened vegetation that morning had been far from silent. The ground had snapped and clacked loudly underfoot, protesting at the weight of so much flesh, though, so far, only telling anyone awake inside the Ark that there were men and horses passing by. That was not unusual for these spring mornings, when everyone was impatient to catch first sight of sails. The ships were coming. Any dreaming citizen with any hope was packed and ready for the sea.

Franklin — clumsy and stumbling at the best of times — had made more noise than most as they approached the palisades. He'd been strapped across the neck as punishment and then strapped again when he'd cried out in pain. His masters, he'd discovered, were quick to pick on him and were less eager to punish shorter men. Sometimes, when his anger and his despair became intolerable, he stood and stretched himself and laughed out loud, shaking all his limbs as if his humor knew no bounds. It was a way to shrive himself of all the furies. It was a laugh that did not seem — well, not at first — too impudent. Sometimes his masters laughed along with him, counted him an idiot, called him 'Donkey'. At other times they beat him for his laugh. But usually the beating was good-humored and less painful than not laughing.

Franklin had been relatively fortunate during his captivity. The morning following his separation from Margaret, after a cold, hard night sleeping with the horses and the stolen animals at the fringes of the Dreaming Highway, Franklin, Acton Bose and the two Joeys had been tugged awake on their leashes at first light and hurried along at the speed of the slowest horse toward Tidewater.

The horsemen did not stop to feed their charges. Their only opportunity to rest and urinate had not been pleasant. The seven rustlers had caught up with a cartload of furniture and farming tools, being pulled along the Highway by four heavy horses. The three emigrants who owned it, two men — brothers, with identical beards — and one wife, hoped to make themselves invisible by staying absolutely silent and making no eye contact with the newcomers, who had first ridden around them in a circle, whooping like children, and then dismounted to inspect their prey more closely.

The travelers studied their own feet without comment or expression as Franklin and his fellows were forced to sit in a line with their backs toward the cart. The family's horses were unharnessed and their boxes kicked open and their sacks emptied onto the Highway. Only their dog did not understand that nothing could be done to save them or their property. Its barking protests were short-lived. Finally, once any valuables had been discovered and stolen and anything fragile had been broken, just for the sake of it, the heavy horses were added to the string of mules, and the two men were attached to the train of captives with loops of rope around their necks and wrists. But the woman, despite the protests of her husband, who called out her name — 'Marie, Marie, Marie' — well beyond hearing distance, was left behind in the attentive care of two of the rustlers. They caught up with their comrades later in the afternoon in high spirits but unaccompanied. When the husband once again called out her name, they shook their fists to silence him and made vulgar gestures. 'Make another noise and you'll be beaten,' they said, and added, 'Like the dog. Like sweet Marie. That goes for all of you. We're in the mood.'

On their fourth day of captivity, exhausted by their pace of travel, by their anger and anxiety, and by the meanness of their rations, the six hostages arrived at an encampment in ancient waste land to the north of Tidewater. The land was far too widely strewn with rubble and debris for many trees to have survived. Only weeds and a few low scrub bushes made their living among the remains of great stone buildings and the tumbled masonry of a grand, dead city. So deep were the fallen remnants of the now shapeless structures that pools of water, little lakes, were nestling in the marble and concrete piles. The horsemen stopped in a steep-sided canyon of rubble and wreckage where the sunlight hardly penetrated. There the captives were tightly bound and shackled to an antique, purposeless engine of some kind, smelling of decay and rust, and — or so they feared — left for dead, without a jug of water or a scrap of food, any protection against the cold or any word of what their fates might be. Their only freedom, now that their captors were out of earshot, was that they could speak among themselves, exchanging names with the husband and brother-in-law of sweet Marie, who made their oddly formal introductions, observing rules of precedence that could no longer have any value.

'I have to get back to my wife,' Nike the husband kept repeating, as if offering an excuse not to join the others in their enforced adventure.

'We all have someone to get back to,' the older Joey said. 'I have a wife and other children, too. I don't know where they are.' He indicated Franklin: 'He has a sister, and Acton has his parents and his daughter. That's how it is for all of us. They're lost to us, we're lost to them.'

'You're older than the rest of us,' replied Nike, as if age devalued Joey's pessimism.

The younger Joey spent his time either crying or sighing deeply. He was in shock: the beating of the dog had been the cruelest act he'd ever witnessed, and inexplicable to a boy of his age. He'd no idea that anyone could be so heartless as to treat a dog as if it were, well, just an animal. But the older men, once they had heard the horsemen depart and tested the silence for a while, saw this unexpected abandonment as their only chance to get away with their lives. If there was anyone to get back to, if the wife, the child, the sister and the parents had survived, then this was the opportunity to seek them out.

The men were too tightly bound to attempt to untie any knots, but with a little wiggling each could sink his chin on to his chest and get his teeth around one of the thinner ropes. It tasted of sweat and smelled of horses and wood. But it was feasible, though not easy, to snap or chew the thin strands. Given time, it now seemed possible that they could bite through this rope, though whether that would set them free or merely damage their mouths and lips remained to be seen. They worked away, no longer wasting any energy on talk. They sounded like six feeding rats.

The best of them had broken through only a fraction of the rope when three of the rustlers, including their short and overdressed leader, still wearing Jackson's coat, returned. They were accompanied by an elderly man who rode his horse side-saddle and his two armed retainers. They helped him to dismount. He walked along the line of captives, nodding, shaking his head, behaving like a trader inspecting barrels of apples or bolts of cloth.

'Very well,' he said. 'My offer stands. I'll take those three.' He pointed at the brothers and at Acton Bose, but shook his head at the middle-aged potman. 'And I'll take the boy. We'll make good use of him until he grows. What name?'

'I'm Junior Joey, mister.'

'And this one, too.' He placed his finger on the end of Franklin's chin, buried in the hair and the threads of chewed rope. 'We'll have them digging coal.'

'No, the mountain's not for sale,' the small man said. 'We're keeping him.'

'Well, keep him, then. The more fool you. I would have paid extra for him.' He shook hands with the rustlers, handed over the price they'd negotiated, remounted his horse, with help, and led his retainers and his four newly roped purchases out of the encampment.

'There's much to do,' the little rustler said, inspecting the remaining Joey, now trembling with shock and fear. 'I own you now, you two. I have you for eternity. Free servitude. Work hard, and then we'll see what rations I might offer you. If you continue to devour your ropes, you'll not be fed, except with rope.' He laughed, quite normally and merrily, his beard and ribbons shaking — the very thought of feeding them on rope! Surely they could see the funny side of that. 'You call me "Master" or you call me "Captain" or you call me "Chief". Those are the names I answer to. Let's hear the sound of that. You first.'

'Master,' Joey said.

'And you, the giant.'

'Yes, Captain Chief.' The three rustlers found Franklin's answer hilarious. They laughed like teenagers, too easily amused. That name would stick.

'I could have made a shiny profit out of you,' said Captain Chief, indicating with a flapping hand that Franklin should squat. Franklin was used to being flapped down to the ground by senior but shorter men. 'I could have sold you with your four friends. Strong men like you are precious to the quarry barons and the gang masters, who pull the reins around here at Tidewater. But I've held onto you. Now why is that, do you suppose?' He took a step forward to whisper in his captive's ear, so close that Franklin could smell the familiar skin of Jackson's coat as well as the chewed tobacco on the man's breath. 'We're holding onto you, because, if you're wise as well as strong, if you're sensible, we might decide to let you be a brother in our band. Does that appeal to you, to ride with us when we go out on business? You look as if you could be educated how to snap a man in half if you saw any profit in it.' He raised his voice, so everyone could hear. 'But if you're
otherwise
as well as strong, then... Well, then, you'll be the one who's snapped in half. You won't be mounted on a horse. We'll have you mounted on a sharpened pole. We'll skin a shield with you. You have the word of Captain Chief on that.'

Franklin felt oddly hopeful after this whispered conversation. He would cooperate, be wise, be sensible. And then, as soon as he was trusted, he would try to creep away. He could imagine it, a night-time opportunity. He would retrieve his brother's coat. Its theft was a constant insult and a provocation and one that, in his head at least, he could revenge. Wearing it again might make him as valiant and purposeful as Jackson had always been. He'd be as light and silent as a moth when he cut loose the rustlers' biggest horse and stole away with Joey at his back. Then he'd be on board a ship with great white flapping sails and with Margaret at his side (for he could not bear to think that she had already gone ahead of him). And all the Boses would be there, on deck, with wind-pinked cheeks, both Joeys too, the brothers and Marie, the slaughtered dog, the coastline sinking as the waters passed around the hull.