The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles Read online

“That all you can say? Sorry?”

  “What else should I say, Lottie? Conversation’s not one of your better skills, so let’s get down to the one in which you excel, shall we?”

  Once more he reached out to touch her nakedness. His hand was moonlit for a moment. It was a strong young man’s hand with fine golden hairs downing the tanned back.

  But he’d angered her:

  “No, sir, I want to know where your head’s at tonight, Mr. Judson Fletcher.”

  His laugh aped the crude guffaws heard at taverns, or around the gamecock ring. Like downing rum, that sort of laugh somehow came easy. He said:

  “I’ll show you where it ought to be, honeylove—”

  He bent his bare back, his mouth seeking. Again she struggled away. She was beginning to irritate him considerably.

  Pettish, she said, “Listen, you yelled out somebody’s name last time.”

  “Oh hell no I didn’t.”

  “Yes you did, I heard it, right there at the end.”

  “All right, I got plumb excited and yelled your name.”

  “No, sir, Judson Fletcher, it wasn’t Mrs. Lottie Shaw you was yellin’ about—” Another laugh; vicious. “You were givin’ somebody else a hard ridin’ and I don’t take kindly to it.”

  Furious, he wrenched away. He stood up, naked in the moonlight falling through the curtainless, glassless window of the crude little farm cabin. “For Christ’s sake, woman, you got what you want from me. What that old wreck your papa married you off to can’t deliver—”

  “I want a little respect too,” the young woman whined. “A little feelin’—I don’t want somebody pokin’ around in me and callin’ out ‘Peggy, Peggy!’”

  He seized her bare shoulder. “Shut your mouth, Lottie.”

  “Leggo!” She writhed. “I heard it clear. ‘Peggy!’ Think I don’t know which Peggy that is?” She was growing shrill, matching his anger. “Think the whole damn county don’t know whose head you wisht you could put horns on—?”

  He found the rum jug and hurled it at her half-seen form. She yelped, dodged away. Outside, her husband’s yellow hound began to bark.

  Judson grabbed up his clothes, practically yanked them on. By then, Lottie Shaw had realized her error. She leaped naked through the patch of moon, doubled over in exaggerated penitence, pressed her cheek against his ribs as she clasped his waist. While stuffing his fine lace-fronted shirt into his pants, Judson gave her an elbow in the nose, not entirely by accident.

  Lottie hung on. Judson’s blue eyes and fair, clubbed hair looked all afire in the light from the window. Lottie began to cry in earnest:

  “Don’t get mad, darlin’. I spoke too sharp. Come on back and love me again—”

  Judson leaned down toward her in the patch of moonlight, a tall, elegantly handsome young man with a long, sharp nose and just a slight softness at the edges of his mouth. His fingers closed on her muscled forearm. He looked like some avenging angel of scripture as he said quietly:

  “You ever speak her name again in my presence—or if I ever hear of you speaking it to anyone, Lottie, I’ll come here and kill you. Now think about that.”

  Pulling loose, he yanked on his boots of costly Russian leather, picked up his rich coat of dark green velvet and stalked out of the cabin.

  He shied a stone at the yellow hound to drive him away, then pulled himself up on the beautiful roan he’d tethered to a low branch of a scrawny apple tree the farmer was trying to grow in his dooryard. Still shaking with anger, he galloped out the lane and turned into the road leading toward the Rappahannock, and home.

  It was a fine, balmy evening in late June. He reached behind him, pried up the flap of his saddlebag, wiggled his fingers down inside, let out an oath. He was half drunk and wanted to be completely so. And he was out of rum.

  Lottie Shaw was another kind of medicine he took on the sly. Tonight, by catching him when he’d accidentally cried her name, Lottie had gone dry on him too.

  He cropped the roan without mercy, thundering down the dirt road in the sweet-smelling night because fleeing from the pain of having uttered Peggy’s name without thinking had plunged him into this star-hung dark and pain of a different sort, equally hurtful.

  ii

  Riding the roads of Caroline County, Virginia, always reminded him of his one best friend of boyhood. George Clark, the second of farmer John Clark’s six sons.

  The bond between George and Judson had been a powerful one in the years when they were growing up together, even though George’s father was relatively poor, while Judson Fletcher’s was rich. Maybe the reason was simply that any human being of any age liked to find another who would act as pupil—and George Clark, though two years younger than his friend, had discovered early that Judson was something besides a typical tobacco planter’s son. In fact, Judson loathed Sermon Hill. He much preferred studying what George, a boy who had roamed the Virginia woodlands since he could toddle, taught so eagerly.

  The geography of the heavens, for instance. Even swaying in the saddle, Judson could pick out the pole star, and the Cross.

  In their days and nights of wandering the fields and forests together, George Clark had taught him many things. How to discover a fly-up-the-creek, the little green heron that hid for protection on river banks. How to find hives full of wild honey, and to tell which plants and berries were edible. How to look to the horizon and identify objects and details of terrain at twenty miles—or spot a nighthawk at dusk just on the other side of a meadow. Far sight, was George’s name for it. He developed it with practice. He would need it where he was going, he always said.

  They’d traveled to fairs in Richmond, too. Spoken with rough, buckskin-clad men who carried long squirrel guns and claimed to have tramped the wild country west of the shimmering barrier of the Blue Ridge Mountains—the Blue Wall, Virginians called it. Out there, the long hunters remarked while spitting tobacco in a delightfully ill-mannered way, was a sea of forest and grass, sky and cloud. Enough animals to last a man a lifetime, whether he trapped and sold their pelts, or ate their flesh to survive, or both.

  Three years ago, in 1772, Judson’s friend and mentor had disappeared out that way; crossed the Blue Wall. He seemed to have a courage Judson lacked.

  Also, George Clark was not in love with a woman he couldn’t possibly win.

  Twice in the intervening time, George had reappeared for brief visits at his parents’ home. On those occasions, Judson had been invited to share an evening meal—and George’s wondrous tales.

  He described how he’d reached a raw frontier settlement that had grown up near Fort Pitt at the fork where two rivers flowed into one much larger one—the beautiful water, the red Indians called it. O-hi-o. La Belle Riviere, according to the French fur trappers.

  George Clark had gone down this immense river. Taken to the poplar, as the companions with whom he traveled termed it. He’d journeyed a long way down the Ohio, through a vast, hushed wilderness, paddling in that sixty-foot hollowed poplar log marked with bloodstains and the grease of pelts.

  On his second trip he’d traveled the river again. And wintered with a tribe of Indians called Mingos. He’d learned their tongue. He spoke glowingly of the gentle wisdom and forest skills of their old tribal leader, Logan.

  It was difficult for Judson to absorb all the amazing detail of these narratives. But it wasn’t hard at all to be entranced; to have his imagination lifted, until his mind’s eye built an immense wooded kingdom where dark-skinned savages slipped silently along the game trails. A kingdom where a man could claim land if he wished it. Or simply find room to do as he pleased. To be what he was, not what someone else expected him to be.

  The western forest was the only part of the continent for him, George Clark averred on those all-too-brief evenings before he vanished again, sterner-looking than he’d been in youth. Toughened now. Lean. He came and went across the Blue Wall like some red-haired ghost, and each short visit somehow freed Judson of the confinements of his ow
n life—if only for a few hours.

  The visits saddened him, too. Perhaps he belonged in the western forest. A great many bold, enterprising fellows were drifting that way, George said. Some families as well. More and more land companies were being formed to explore—and exploit—the vast wilderness. On occasion Judson thought that maybe he was a fool not to pack and follow his friend—

  There was just one problem. Judson had inadvertently brought it up tonight, when he should have been murmuring Lottie Shaw’s name instead.

  Judson saw George Clark’s face in his mind as he thundered the Virginia roads under soughing trees. The eyes of his friend never seemed at rest. They always seemed to be searching past a man’s shoulder—

  For what? he wondered. Freedom? The constantly retreating horizon—?

  “It’s that goddamned red hair,” Judson exclaimed thickly, just before a branch nearly took his head off. He straightened up again, reflecting that red hair was one painless way he rationalized George’s boldness. In the Clark family, it was said that red hair marked a man. Set him apart. Destined him for remarkable deeds. Of John Clark’s six sons, two had red hair. George Rogers, gone now three years, and the tad, William, still at the farm, only five.

  Why in hell wasn’t I born with red hair? he thought fuzzily as he rode. It was certainly a convenient excuse to relieve misery of the sort he’d encountered in Lottie Shaw’s cabin. And the different kind of misery he found along the dark, earth-smelling roads. Roads alive with memories of the friend who possessed some intangible quality of which he, Judson Fletcher of Caroline County, Virginia, had been unjustly deprived.

  iii

  Judson had ridden the roan so hard, the animal’s flanks were lathering. A measure of sobriety returned when he noticed it. He reined in, dismounted at the roadside. He wandered aimlessly while the roan blew and stamped.

  Judson belched, scratched his crotch under his fine gray trousers. Be just his luck to catch the pox from Lottie.

  Suddenly he stumbled across something propped against the rail fence. He crouched, uttered a surprised oath, fingered a crude dummy of white rags and straw stuffing. A fragment of slate lay in the dummy’s lap.

  He carried the slate out from under the tree branches. Turned it this way and that. He finally made out the word scrawled on the slate. His spine grew cold.

  “Buckra,” he said. And again: “Buckra.”

  The West African word for white man.

  He dragged the dummy into the road. By the light of the moon and a thousand summer stars, he saw what he’d missed before. A wooden stake driven into the dummy’s chest. The hole was smeared with something dark.

  Judson knelt, fingered the smeared cloth and whittled stake. Little sweaty places formed on his neck and behind his ears. He tried to still his alarm by talking aloud:

  “Has to be chicken’s blood. Or pig’s—where’n hell you suppose it came from?”

  Abruptly, he heard hoofbeats down the road. He whipped his hand to his right boot, where a discreet scabbard in the Russian leather accepted a slim dagger. A gentleman’s protection. He retreated to the shoulder, unpleasantly sober—and cautious.

  He saw lanterns bobbing around a bend. Half a dozen riders. He stepped into the road, hailed them: “It’s Judson Fletcher—”

  The horses reined in. It was the patrol that kept constant watch on the roads for runaway slaves, rotating its personnel nightly. Mounted on a fine sorrel at the head of the patrol was slender, gentle-looking Seth McLean. Behind him, shabbily dressed, a gray failure, Tom Shaw slumped on a sore-ridden nag.

  Tom Shaw spoke first, pathetically polite:

  “Evenin’, Mr. Fletcher.”

  Judson’s profile, lantern-limned, was sculptured arrogance. “Evening, Shaw.” The reply was so brusque, Shaw looked visibly hurt. Judson accented the social difference by greeting the others more cordially: “Mr. Wells—Mr. Squire—Seth.”

  “Taking the air again, Judson?” Seth asked, his smile innocent.

  “That’s right.” Ah, this was rich! The man he cuckolded regularly, and the one he wanted to cuckold above all, and never would. “I found something down here you gentlemen should see.”

  He led them to the stabbed dummy and the slate. Concern was instantaneous.

  “I knew them niggers was up to somethin’,” Tom Shaw exclaimed. “My Lottie, she sweared she heard a drum two, three nights ago. That way. From the river—”

  “Impossible,” Seth McLean said. “You know there’s not a planter in the district who allows his nigras ownership of a drum. Too easy to signal with them. My hands get nothing but dried beef bones—those, they can rattle all they please.” He addressed the others: “Gentlemen, would you continue the patrol without me? I’d like to speak privately with my friend Judson. He may be able to assist us.”

  In what way, Judson couldn’t imagine. But the others seemed to understand, and readily agreed. Judson fetched his roan, mounted up, and was soon jogging beside Seth back along the road by which the horsemen had arrived. The patrol’s lanterns vanished in the other direction.

  “I didn’t want to admit it to Tom Shaw,” Seth remarked finally, “but there may be nothing wrong with his wife’s hearing.”

  “I can’t say. I never listen for drums at night.”

  Seth laughed. “I know. Only for the rustle of the skirts of married women.”

  Judson went rigid in the saddle. Seth slapped him on the shoulder and Judson relaxed. Apparently there was nothing personal in the joke. His friends in the district had treated him to variations of it on more occasions than he could remember.

  “There have been rumblings about possible trouble,” Seth said, serious now.

  “You mean with the nigras?”

  Seth nodded gravely.

  “At your place?”

  “Possibly.”

  Judson was surprised. Seth McLean was reasonably humane in his treatment of his three-hundred-odd field bucks and wenches.

  “I don’t see what it has to do with me,” Judson shrugged.

  “I’ll explain over a glass of port, if you don’t mind.” Seth spurred ahead toward the lights of his elegant house near the shore of the Rappahannock. Judson studied the illuminated windows on the second floor. One was Peggy’s room. He knew the location by heart.

  He followed Seth McLean down a lane between dark, rustling tobacco fields. The green leaves were ripening toward the end-of-summer harvest. Seth’s lean silhouette stood out momentarily against the lamps at his front door. Reining in a second later, Judson felt criminal. Seth was decent.

  At the same time, Judson was amused in a perverse way. It’s sort of like the fly inviting the spider home with him, he thought.

  iv

  A huge London-made clock ticked in the library; a quarter past midnight. The library doors were open to the candlelight in a cool, airy foyer two floors high.

  Seth poured wine for himself. Judson begged off, helped himself to Rhode Island rum instead. Then he settled his long frame in a chair, trying not to appear nervous or reveal his guilt—he was getting pretty good at that by now. He’d crawled into bed with his first married woman when he was fifteen.

  Judson heard footsteps. His heartbeat picked up until he realized the steps were too heavy for a woman’s. A grizzled black man in livery glanced in the doorway.

  Seth McLean looked at the black, his piece of property, said:

  “Nothing further tonight, Andrew. I’ll serve our guest.”

  With a polite murmur that might have been Judson’s name—a servile acknowledgement of his presence—the slave withdrew. Seth McLean rolled his wine glass between his palms.

  “Have you heard nothing about discontent among the nigras, Judson?”

  “You know me, my friend. The skirts swish too temptingly. The dice clack, the horses run, the cocks scream—and my father, the old bastard, swears a good bit, too. At me.” Judson’s mouth wrenched. “There’s altogether too much noise for me to hear anything significant. It’s
different with you, I gather.”

  “Well, as I said, there have been signs. Insolence out of the ordinary. My overseer has been forced to the whip three times this week.”

  “Ours is never forced,” Judson said, the sour smile remaining in place. “He looks for opportunities.”

  “Shaw,” McLean reflected. “Old Tom’s younger brother.”

  Judson nodded. “Cruel, illiterate bastard. Not like your Williams.”

  “But even Williams is being pushed hard. These things go in cycles, Judson. I’m uneasy—I just fear the wheel’s almost around again. I’ve questioned Andrew and his wife—they’re very loyal. They don’t know much about what’s happening. But they do admit there’s wide unrest. It has—spread.”

  Judson knocked back the rum, felt it scald his belly. Not with relief this time, but with an upsetting fire. The clock ticked loudly. The room’s shadows became ominous somehow. Clotting in the corners; blurring the gold stampings on the couple of hundred books on the high shelves.

  “Spread from here?”

  “From Sermon Hill. Andrew has heard that a nigra named Larned is at the center of it.”

  “Larned—” Judson’s mind saw a slab-muscled figure with blue-black skin. “Big buck nigger. Damn near gigantic. Just two years off the Richmond block. Came from the West Africas in a Boston ship. My father says he never made a better investment.”

  “Breeding stock?”

  “Yes. And Larned’s smart with the natural kind of smartness some of ’em have. That may be his trouble.”

  Seth McLean cocked a dark eyebrow that contrasted with his pale, almost ascetic face. “Or ours.”

  “You mean Larned may be fomenting rebellion?” Judson ambled to the sideboard for a refill of rum. “Possible. He took a mighty handsome wife. Young yellow girl named—let me see—Dicey. Up till three days ago, she was this big—” One hand sketched pregnancy in the air. “She produced twin boys for Larned. I heard Shaw brag last Christmas time that he was fucking her, too.”

  “Well, that’s certainly cause enough for trouble.”