Call of the Raven

by Smith, Wilbur

  The man in the doorway stood a head shorter than Mungo, with thinning hair and hunched shoulders that even his well-cut coat could not improve. His face was unremarkable: if you passed him on the street, you would barely notice him. And yet, if you caught his eyes you would not forget him. They burned with a bright purpose, unsettling in its intensity, as if he was fixed on a future that others could not see.

  But now those eyes were staring in shock.

  ‘Mungo.’

  ‘Chester,’ said Mungo evenly.

  He had mastered his surprise quicker than Chester, perhaps because Chester’s name was the one scrawled on all the bills of sale he had been reading. Chester Marion was the family attorney, a man with a unique talent for turning the St Johns’ plans into contracts, mortgages and conveyances that advanced the interests of the estate.

  In truth, Mungo had never liked him. There was something cold and ferret-like in his bearing. He rarely looked you in the eye, and if he did it was always with an air of calculation.

  But now he was the man who might be able to give Mungo answers.

  ‘What happened? The estate – the crop, our people. Where are they all?’

  Where is Camilla? he wanted to ask, but he doubted Chester would know one slave from another.

  ‘Your father died.’

  ‘How?’

  Chester sucked his teeth. ‘It is a long story. Perhaps it is best I tell it from the beginning. That way, I can answer all your questions in the right order.’

  Mungo nodded.

  ‘Your father did not have a mind for business,’ said Chester. ‘I tried to advise him as best I could, but he would not listen. He was headstrong, like all the St Johns, but without the good sense your grandfather had.’

  Mungo’s grandfather, Benjamin St John, had been a towering figure. His uncompromising ambition had built Windemere from a smallholding into a great estate, while his ruthless methods had kept the slaves in such a state of terror that they made it the most productive plantation on the James River. Even Mungo had feared the old man.

  ‘My father wanted to be a better man,’ Mungo said quietly.

  Oliver had inherited none of Benjamin’s brutal enthusiasm for slavery. Where Benjamin refused to waste money on slave quarters and consigned the hands to wooden hovels, Oliver built solid brick cottages to house them. Where Benjamin had dictated whom the slaves would marry – ‘the better for breeding good stock,’ he had said – Oliver let them choose their partners and live with the families they created. Benjamin would sell a slave the moment he became unproductive; Oliver preferred to keep the old slaves doing light chores, so as not to split up their families.

  Did that make him a good man, when every minute of his life was provided for by slavery? Did it matter to the slaves that Oliver kept them in bondage only reluctantly? Perhaps Oliver believed it.

  ‘No doubt his methods flattered his conscience,’ said Chester tartly, ‘but they did nothing for his profits.’

  ‘It was enough for him to live comfortably.’

  ‘No!’ Chester banged his hand on the table. ‘Did you learn nothing from your grandfather? He built this estate by borrowing aggressively. But the only way he could pay his debts was by continuing to expand. As soon as your father decided to rest on his laurels, the debts became unsustainable.’

  He leaned forward. The look in his eyes reminded Mungo of a schoolmaster he’d had at Eton, a man whose passionate purpose was to make his pupils understand the Latin subjunctive, or flog them raw if they failed.

  ‘On any plantation, even in a good year, the profit from the crop is spent before the first seed is planted,’ Chester explained. ‘The income from the harvest goes to repay the debts. The structure that your grandfather and I had put in place meant that the estate had to expand constantly to survive, either by acquiring more land or by making the existing fields more productive. But your father would not take the measures necessary to force the slaves to work hard enough. Instead of rising, production fell. He had to borrow more, simply to pay the interest on what he already owed. Eventually, the bank lost faith in his ability to repay and foreclosed.’ He sighed. ‘Credit is as vital to a man as the air that he breathes. Cut it off, and he dies.’

  There seemed to be more regret in his voice for the financial loss than for the death of Oliver St John.

  Mungo had grown impatient. ‘This is all very well, but I doubt my father starved to death. How did he die?’

  ‘The old-fashioned way.’ Chester pointed out of the window, where a great oak tree spread its branches over the lawn. Mungo’s grandfather had reckoned it over three hundred years old. ‘The slaves found Oliver there at dawn one morning, with a pistol in his hand and a bullet in his skull. Facing financial ruin, it seemed he did the only honourable thing.’

  Mungo closed his eyes, imagining the scene. ‘He would not have done it merely because of the money,’ he said. ‘My father never cared about that.’

  ‘Not nearly enough,’ Chester agreed.

  ‘If he was bankrupt, he would have had to sell the slaves to pay his debts. That would have broken his heart.’

  ‘He was always too soft on them. He never understood that they were assets that should be made to turn a profit.’

  ‘He saw them as human.’ Mungo looked out of the window, to the empty fields that had once been so full of people. ‘Where are they now? Have they been set free, as he wanted in his will?’

  Chester leaned back against the door frame. A smirk curled on his lips, and Mungo realised how very rarely he had seen the lawyer smile. Chester took a cigar from his pocket and struck a match to light it. The end glowed red.

  ‘The will.’ The word hissed out with a cloud of smoke. ‘Such an extraordinary document. I hardly had the stomach to write it down when he told me what he wanted to do. The notion of freeing his slaves to salve his conscience – ridiculous.’

  ‘Your job was to execute his wishes, not judge them.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Chester leaned forward. The light in his eyes burned brighter than ever. ‘Why should I dare to have an opinion? Chester the pen-pusher. Chester the numbers man. Chester the loyal dog, waiting in the corner in case someone throws him a bone. Chester who works night and day to make the St Johns richer than he will ever be, only to see them piss it away. What right do I have to judge?’

  He met Mungo’s gaze, clear and full. For the first time in his life, Mungo saw through those shifting, deceitful eyes and into the bitter soul behind.

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I sold the slaves.’ He saw the protest rising on Mungo’s lips and waved a hand to hush him. ‘They fetched a good price. It will be a shock for them to finally learn the meaning of a hard day’s work.’

  Mungo stared. He had never been lost for words before, but now he could hardly speak.

  ‘You betrayed my father’s wishes.’

  ‘When he died, the will could not be found.’

  Mungo gripped the desk tight enough to crack the hardwood. ‘You were his attorney. Surely you knew where the will was kept.’

  Chester shrugged. His attitude only stoked Mungo’s anger.

  ‘I will find the will and prove you had no right to sell them. I will make you track down every last one of our people and buy their freedom.’

  ‘You do not have to look for the will.’ Chester reached inside his coat and pulled out a densely written piece of paper. Mungo could not read it at that distance, but he recognised his father’s bold signature scrawled across the bottom, stamped with the notary’s seal. ‘I have it here.’

  ‘Then why . . .?’

  Mungo did not understand what was happening – all he knew was that he had been betrayed. He flung himself at Chester. He wanted to sink his fists into that soft flesh and break every bone in his body. He wanted to wring his neck and rip his head off his shoulders. He wanted—

  He did not make it more than halfway. From a holster under his coat, Chester had produced a small p
earl-handled pistol. He held it straight out, aimed at Mungo’s heart, and even in his rage Mungo had the sense and the self-control to stop moving. Until ten minutes ago, he would never have believed Chester had the courage to pull the trigger. Now, he did not know what the man was capable of.

  Chester sucked on the cigar until the end burned bright red. Without taking his eyes off Mungo, he lifted the will and touched the corner to the glowing ember. A dark stain spread across the paper, then burst into flame. Mungo gave a stifled cry, but the pistol in Chester’s hand did not waver. Chester twisted the paper this way and that, until the fire took hold, then dropped it on the floor. Mungo could only watch as the paper shrivelled into wisps of ash. His father’s last wishes – gone.

  Chester ground out the embers with the heel of his boot.

  ‘That is not the end of it,’ Mungo warned him. ‘Even if the courts believe my father died intestate, I am still the only heir. Windemere is mine.’

  ‘You are too late. The property was foreclosed this morning. I signed the deed myself, on behalf of the Fidelity Trust Bank of Charles City.’ Chester spread his free arm with a proprietorial grin, dripping cigar ash on the hardwood floor. ‘Windemere has a new owner now.’

  ‘You?’ The fury boiled up inside Mungo, but reason kept an iron grip on him. ‘How?’

  ‘Because I own the bank. I used it to acquire the debts your father owed – cheaply, I might add. The other banks were keen to be rid of them. Then I called in the loans. Your father could not pay, so he forfeited the entire estate to me.’

  Again, Mungo cursed himself for being so blind to the evil within Chester.

  ‘My father did not bring all this on himself. You led him down the path to bankruptcy.’

  Chester did not deny it. ‘It was not hard. He had no head for business, and he trusted me completely. He did everything I told him, even as it brought him to his own ruin.’

  ‘Whatever my father may have done, you killed him as surely as if you had pulled the trigger yourself.’

  If he had meant to wound Chester, he failed. The smile that spread across Chester’s face was terrible to see.

  ‘You are more right than you know. I did pull the trigger myself.’

  ‘You?’

  Chester nodded, as if accepting a compliment. ‘I had hoped that bankruptcy would drive him to despair. But even in his ruin, he did not have the wit to see what he should do. So I took it in hand myself.’ He sighed. ‘Even at the end, I had to do everything for him.’

  ‘I will kill you,’ Mungo hissed.

  ‘I think not.’ Chester reached out a fist and rapped twice on the wood panelling. ‘Only a fool would kill the wolf and let the cub grow up to avenge him.’

  Behind the desk there was another door that led to the billiards parlour. Now it snapped open. Mungo turned to see half a dozen men spilling out of it into the room.

  ‘I saw you coming the moment you crossed the county line,’ said Chester, drawing on his cigar. ‘We were ready for you.’

  Two of the men grabbed Mungo’s arms. A third pulled Mungo’s pistol from its holster and tossed it aside. These were not soft Cambridge undergraduates; they were rough men with strong hands. Stubble darkened their cheeks, they had knives and pistols strapped to their belts, and by the smell of them they’d spent time in Oliver St John’s whiskey cellar. Their leader wore a maroon hat pulled low over his face, and an open-necked shirt that revealed a livid scar circling his throat.

  ‘Granville,’ Chester said to him. ‘Take this boy outside and deal with him.’

  The men hustled Mungo outside. He had no false hopes. None of the neighbours had seen him arrive at Windemere; apart from a stable boy in Baltimore, no one even knew he had come back to America. His family were dead. Chester’s men would kill him, and no one would be any the wiser. Wherever Camilla was, she would never know he had received her letter and acted on it.

  Bristol, still tethered to the hitching post, whinnied at the sight of Mungo as the men dragged him past. They were taking him to the oak tree on the lawn, the same place where his father had died. Glancing back, Mungo saw Chester watching from the library window. Savouring his final victory.

  Mungo had not resisted his captors. He hung his head and slacked his muscles, like a man resigned to his fate. That put his captors off their guard. Then, suddenly, he stopped dead. The men who held him stumbled forward; their grip loosened. Not much, but enough for Mungo to move his arm.

  Couched in his hand, he still had the penknife that he had taken from the desk. He let the blade slip out between his fingers, and stabbed it to his right. The man let go with a cry. As he sagged to the ground, Mungo grabbed a long hunting knife from the man’s belt and deftly reversed it into the man on his left, who stumbled backwards clutching his belly.

  Before Mungo could move, two more of Granville’s men leaped for him. They grabbed his shoulders and tried to wrestle him to the ground. Mungo was too strong. He took three steps backwards and slammed them into the trunk of the oak tree, so hard they let go and reeled away.

  Mungo had been in his share of brawls. Yet he had never experienced this kind of violence before – half a dozen armed men trying to kill him. It did not terrify him; instead it unleashed the same focused fury he had felt with Manners in Cambridge. Everything seemed to move more slowly. The men who had attacked him had pistols in their belts. Before they could get up, Mungo snatched them both, spun, and discharged them both at point-blank range at the rest of Granville’s men.

  One of the men collapsed, clutching his shoulder where a bullet had shattered his collarbone. But the other ball had gone wide. Through the cloud of smoke that the pistols had disgorged, Mungo saw Granville and one of the others coming at him. Meanwhile, the men he had slammed against the tree were getting to their feet.

  Granville swung at Mungo with a knife. Metal rang on metal as Mungo blocked it with a pistol barrel, jarring so hard that Granville dropped the blade. For a moment he was defenceless: Mungo had an opening to attack.

  But if he went for Granville, there were three others ready to grab him. He could not beat them all. His only chance was to flee. He ran across the lawn to where Bristol was tethered. He slipped the bridle off the hitching post and swung himself into the saddle. Bristol had smelled the danger and began to move even before Mungo landed on her back. He kicked her flanks hard, leaning low over her neck as she shot away. Her mane blew back in his face; her hooves thundered over the hard ground.

  Over the din, he heard the crack of a gunshot. A bullet flew by and buried itself in one of the oaks to his left. He glanced back. Chester had run out of the house and was standing on the porch, holding his pistol. By the tree, Granville and two of his henchmen stumbled after him. But they only had pistols, and against a moving target at that range they stood no chance.

  Mungo passed the slave quarters, the drying sheds and the cooperage, and left the house behind. He rode across the soft earth of the empty fields, giving Bristol her head. Where now? After Chester’s betrayal, he did not know if he could trust any of Windemere’s neighbours. Richmond was a better bet, but it was miles away. Bristol had already done almost two hundred miles hard riding in the last two days. Already, Mungo could feel her beginning to slow. Behind him, he heard the barking of dogs and the neighing of horses. Chester’s men must have mounted up to follow him.

  Half a mile from the main house, he entered a knot of trees where a creek led in from the river. He guided Bristol down the bank and splashed into the creek. Halfway across, he slid out of the saddle and dropped into the water. The horse looked at him curiously.

  ‘Go on.’

  Mungo took his sea bag from the saddle where it was still tied on, then slapped the horse on her rump. She trotted away and up the far bank, leaving a deep trail of hoofprints in the mud. At the top of the embankment, she paused again and looked back.

  ‘Go,’ Mungo said again.

  With a whinny, she tossed her head and vanished into the trees. With luck, C
hester’s men would see her tracks and be led a merry dance before they realised their mistake.

  Mungo did not follow her. He turned downstream, holding his bag above his head and breasting through the water. Towards the mouth of the creek, where it met the river, an island had formed in the stream. There had been a bridge once, but it was gone now. A row of rotten pilings poking through the surface were all that remained.

  Mungo hauled himself out and climbed onto the island. The thickly wooded ground rose up the slopes of a long hill, a pocket of the pre-colonial wilderness that had survived the St Johns’ improvements to the land. There was only one path, almost invisible and seldom used. Mungo prayed that Chester did not know it.

  The air in the forest was quiet and dank. Briars and branches overhung the path, but it was not completely overgrown. The thicker branches still wept sap from their splintered ends where an axe had pruned them roughly back. In hollows where the earth stayed damp, Mungo saw footprints that must have been made since the last rain.

  He took out the pistol case from his sea bag and reloaded the gun he had taken from his captors. He continued cautiously up the path. The forest deadened sound, but in the distance he could still hear the barking of dogs. He hoped the creek had washed clean his scent.

  At the top of the hill, the trees thinned out into a clearing. A red brick building stood in its centre – an octagonal shape with a domed roof. Mungo’s grandfather had built it as an observatory and Mungo had spent many nights there with the old man, studying the stars through the heavy telescope that Benjamin had imported from Italy. After his death, Mungo’s father sold the telescope and left the observatory abandoned. The forest had drawn in, and a canopy of leaves now blocked any view of the heavens.

  But it had other uses. Someone seemed to be there now; the door stood open, and a pair of skinned rabbits were strung up from the bracket where a lamp had once hung. They were freshly killed; their blood pattered down on the carpet of leaves.

  Mungo advanced into the clearing, gun ready. He had been playing in these woods since he could walk, and knew how to move silently. Barely a leaf stirred as he approached the door.