Call of the Raven

by Smith, Wilbur

  The strain on Mungo’s chest made it almost impossible to breathe. His mind raced. He wasn’t strong enough to escape the captain’s hold. His back was to Sterling, so he couldn’t knee him in the groin. His hands hung uselessly at his sides. He tried to stamp on Sterling’s feet, but he couldn’t see to manoeuvre himself.

  There was only one other force he could harness. As the boat rocked on a wave, Mungo collapsed one of his legs and flexed the other like a spring. With their combined weight suddenly unbalanced, they were pitched over the side before Sterling could react.

  As soon as they hit the water, Sterling released Mungo and reached out for the boat, thrashing in the clutch of the waves. With a surge of joy, Mungo realised the captain could not swim.

  He grabbed Sterling from behind and wrapped his arm around the captain’s neck, dragging him under the surface. As they sank into the depths, Sterling bucked and struggled and clawed at Mungo’s face and arm, gouging the skin with his fingernails. But Mungo steeled himself against the pain and held on tight. He pumped all his rage and contempt and loathing into this one single action.

  The captain’s body went limp and his lips parted, as if to swallow the ocean whole. Mungo released him and watched as he tumbled down into the deep. The water was so clear that Mungo didn’t lose sight of him until his burning lungs forced him to move. He took a last look at Sterling’s shadow, turned his face upwards and swam towards the light.

  When he broke the surface, he saw the cutter floating fifty feet away. Tippoo was doing his best to hold the boat stationary, but the swells were strong. Mungo floated on his back, enjoying the cool embrace of the ocean and allowing the sunlight to warm his skin. He swam to the boat and Tippoo hauled him over the transom.

  Tippoo took up the oars and dug the blades into the water, pulling them towards the thin scrim of land visible over the south-west horizon. Mungo stretched out across the thwarts, realising how exhausted he was.

  ‘Your master is dead. You are free,’ he said to Tippoo.

  The giant nodded. His bald face split open in a grin.

  ‘Then why am I still the one rowing?’

  II

  THE RAVEN

  Nobody saw Mungo arrive at the large house on the hill above Capitol Square in Richmond. He came after dark, wrapped in a long coat and with a wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his face. It was a wise precaution. The last time he left the city he had been wanted for slave stealing and bail jumping.

  He laughed at the irony. Those were the least of the crimes he had committed. It would be a shame if they were the ones that snared him.

  The walk up the hill was the last stage of a long voyage. After the loss of the Blackhawk, Mungo and Tippoo had rowed to Cuba, then travelled overland to Havana. There they repaired their finances – Mungo with cards, Tippoo with his fists in bare-knuckle prize bouts – until they had enough to buy passage on a French packet ship to New Orleans. More fights, card games and another ship had finally brought them to Baltimore.

  The first thing Mungo did when they had landed was go to the courthouse and write out an affidavit that he, Thomas Sinclair and the lawful owner of the slave Tippoo, had manumitted his slave and given him freedom. The courthouse clerk produced a certificate, stamped with a crimson red seal that pleased Tippoo mightily. He ran his finger in circles over the wax, like some totem with magical powers.

  ‘Truly, this makes me free?’

  ‘As free as I am,’ Mungo assured him.

  Tippoo stared at the words on the certificate, though he could not read them. His rough face shone with an almost beatific joy. If you looked closely, you might have seen tears forming at the edge of his eyes – though it would be a brave man to point that out to the bald-headed giant.

  He wrapped Mungo in a hug that almost broke his spine.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mungo extricated himself from the embrace, smiling at his friend’s pleasure.

  ‘But keep the certificate close,’ he told Tippoo. ‘Free blacks are not safe in this state. There are any number of men who might want to enslave you again.’

  Tippoo bared his teeth. He had never lacked strength, but now there was a new confidence inside him that made him doubly formidable.

  ‘Let them try.’

  Mungo had left him to enjoy his new freedom in the taverns and brothels of Fells Point.

  ‘I will return in a few days,’ he promised, ‘but there is a family call I must pay.’

  Tippoo had flexed his muscles. ‘I can help?’

  ‘I must do this alone.’

  Mungo had hired a hack and ridden south to Richmond. He had not sent advance word of his arrival. He wanted honest answers, not well-prepared lies and stonewalls.

  Now, he mounted the steps of the big house and knocked. Carter, the white-whiskered butler, opened the door. At the sight of Mungo, he almost spat out his false teeth.

  ‘Mr Mungo,’ he stammered. ‘I didn’t . . . Nobody said you was coming.’

  ‘No.’ Mungo pushed past him into the hallway. ‘Is my grandfather here?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I will wait for him in the drawing room.’

  Nothing had changed since he was last there. Above the marble fireplace, Abigail St John remained as beautiful and regal as ever in her gilded frame. Mungo poured himself a glass of whiskey from the decanter on the sideboard and tried not to think of all the things that had happened since he last stood in this room.

  The creak of a floorboard behind him announced Amos Rutherford’s entrance. Mungo put out his hand and his grandfather shook it, yet there was a coldness in the old man’s eyes, a calculation that belied his inviting smile.

  ‘I have been waiting these past two months for news from Captain Sterling,’ Rutherford said without preamble. ‘What happened to the Blackhawk?’

  ‘She sank in a storm off Cuba.’

  Rutherford took the news impassively. ‘And Sterling?’

  ‘Drowned. Along with the cargo and every other man.’

  ‘I guess you had an extraordinary escape.’

  There was a strange detachment in Rutherford’s tone: neither particularly overjoyed by Mungo’s miraculous survival, nor terribly distraught about the loss of his ship. He surveyed Mungo like a piece of merchandise he was examining for defects.

  ‘I had hoped for a warmer welcome from my grandfather,’ said Mungo.

  ‘Then you should not have brought news that you have lost my ship, and a cargo worth over a quarter of a million dollars.’

  ‘You mean the slaves?’

  ‘Yes, of course the slaves,’ said Rutherford impatiently. ‘What else?’

  ‘You were not so candid about the Blackhawk’s business before I sailed on her.’

  Rutherford rolled his eyes. ‘What difference would it have made? You were a fugitive and a felon. I did you a favour, putting you on that ship.’

  ‘So I could commit even more crimes?’

  ‘You said you wanted a fortune. Well, that was the trade that made the St Johns rich. I thought it would be in your blood – though you do not seem to have inherited your family’s flair for the business.’

  Mungo stared. Whatever he had been expecting from Rutherford, it was not this. Everything he had said was an utter surprise.

  ‘My family?’

  ‘Your grandfather, Benjamin St John.’

  ‘My grandfather was a plantation owner, not a slaver.’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’ Rutherford chuckled. ‘Benjamin St John was a practical man. He knew that if you want labour, it is cheaper by far to get it from the source.’

  ‘He went to Africa?’

  ‘At the height of his career, Benjamin St John was the most successful trader north of Charleston. Afterwards, when he was rich enough, he used his fortune to buy himself Windemere. Respectability, a conscience. But most of the hands at Windemere, or at least their ancestors, first saw America from the holds of his ships. That old negro you used to keep around, Methuselah?
He was the last of them.’

  Mungo had a sudden vision of Methuselah in the clearing, a dying man hastened to an ugly death by Chester Marion’s bullet. He remembered Camilla weeping over her grandfather, and again he thought of the old man’s last words: Beware the black heart, and the thirst that never quenches.

  ‘Men tell themselves many lies about the world in order to preserve their way of life,’ Rutherford continued. ‘Your father’s kindliness was his penance, I believe. It allowed him to maintain the illusion of distance from the indignities that made his own father so rich. I have no tolerance for such childish games. I accept that the forcible extraction of Africans from their homeland is not a pretty thing. It is violent. There are deaths. If it were not so unpleasant, there would be no profit in it.’

  Mungo knocked back his whiskey and stood, walking to the fireplace. He gazed up at the picture of his mother at Windemere, standing on the lawn in front of the house.

  ‘How much did she know about all this?’ he asked.

  ‘It was how she met your father. Benjamin and I were in business together; I financed his early ventures. Of course I never shared the details of the trade with her, but there were incidents over the years – ships lost at sea and insurance claims my partners and I had to file. I’m sure she figured it out.’

  Mungo stared at the portrait. He had never noticed before, but now he saw it: the tobacco crop in the background was ready to harvest, but there were no slaves in the fields. It was a vision of Windemere as Abigail had wanted it to be, perhaps as she really did see it.

  Everything he had ever believed about his family had been a lie. Abigail had known. Oliver had known. Mungo had thought he saw the world as it truly was, with none of his father’s hypocrisies and evasions. Now he realised how contemptibly blind he had been. He felt as though Rutherford had ripped something out of his soul.

  It must have showed on his face. But if he had expected any sympathy from Rutherford, he got none. Rutherford stood by the door, and though the old man was fifty years Mungo’s senior and half a head shorter, his face was as unyielding as granite.

  ‘I sent you on the Blackhawk to make you a man. I did not think you would come back a snivelling child, weeping over niggers like some kind of abolitionist.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a creased piece of paper. ‘Do you know what this is?’

  Mungo shook his head.

  ‘It is an item from a Havana newspaper. It reports that a Baltimore clipper was salvaged in some distress two months ago, and on further inspection turned out to be manned entirely by negroes. It seemed they had overpowered the crew, seized the ship and got it in their heads that they would sail her back to Africa.’ He gave a contemptuous sniff. ‘Of course, they only ran her aground.’ His eyes flicked up and caught Mungo’s. ‘So now that we have dispensed with the fairy tales and the family history, perhaps you can tell me what really happened to the Blackhawk.’

  Mungo stared at him dully. ‘The slaves escaped and captured the ship. I got away in the cutter.’

  ‘So why the story about the storm?’

  ‘I thought if I reported the ship sunk, it would be easier for you to claim the insurance.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Rutherford ran his eyes over Mungo. The coolness in his face had turned to something much darker. ‘Archibald Sterling was the finest captain in this trade I ever knew. He never lost more than the absolute minimum of his cargo, and in all his voyages I never heard he let any slave lay a finger on one of his men. So you’ll understand how I struggle to believe that he somehow grew so careless that he allowed the slaves to escape their chains, gain the deck and slaughter the crew. Every man of them but you.’

  A taut silence stretched between them.

  ‘Is that an accusation?’ said Mungo.

  ‘Sterling kept a tight ship. There was only one man aboard the Blackhawk who had not sailed with him before. And now that man comes telling me preposterous stories about what happened to his vessel.’ Rutherford gave a grim laugh. ‘I always thought your father’s weakness was an aberration. I thought you were better than him, that you had inherited your mother’s will and your grandfather’s strength. Perhaps I was wrong.’

  ‘If you had seen the things I have done—’

  Rutherford raised his head suddenly. ‘Why did you come here? To spin me lies? To beg my forgiveness?’

  It was clear from his tone he did not expect an answer to his question. But there was a reason Mungo had come. The shock of Rutherford’s revelation had almost driven it from Mungo’s mind, but now it flooded back. The one thing that still mattered.

  ‘I came to find out where Chester Marion has gone.’

  The change of direction caught Rutherford off guard. ‘Marion?’

  ‘When I asked in Charles City, they said he’d sold Windemere and gone south. Some said it was to Louisiana, New Orleans way, but they did not know where.’

  Rutherford gazed in disbelief. ‘You cannot manage a cargo of chained slaves, but you still think you can go against Chester Marion? I would admire your determination, if it was not so laughable.’

  ‘Do not tell me what I can or cannot do.’ A hard edge came into Mungo’s voice. ‘Where is he?’

  Rutherford thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Even if I knew, I would not tell you. Instead, I will give you a piece of advice. Forget Chester Marion. He is more powerful than you will ever be. That chapter of your life is finished and nothing will bring it back.’

  He went to his bureau and pulled out a slip of paper. He wrote on it quickly and signed his name at the bottom.

  ‘I will give you one other thing. Here is a cheque for one hundred dollars.’ He waved it at Mungo. ‘It is the last gift you will ever have from me. Use it to get yourself far away from here, because, by God, if I ever see you again I will have you thrown in jail.’

  The cheque was an insult. Mungo had no intention of accepting it. He could make the money easily enough with cards. But as Rutherford waved the paper at him, something caught Mungo’s eye. He reached out and took the cheque, ignoring Rutherford’s contemptuous sneer.

  ‘You are just like your father. All you want is easy money.’

  Mungo did not hear him. He was staring at the cheque, his hands trembling.

  ‘What is this?’ he whispered.

  ‘It is goodbye.’ Belatedly, Rutherford noticed the change that had come over Mungo. ‘What? Did you think you deserved more?’

  Mungo ran his finger over the letterhead at the top of the paper.

  ‘This is drawn on the Fidelity Trust Bank of Charles City.’

  ‘The cheque is fine, if that’s what you’re worried about. The bank is good for it.’ Rutherford chuckled. ‘I should know – I’m one of the partners.’

  Mungo gripped the cheque and slowly ripped it in two. The torn halves fluttered to the floor. Rutherford clicked his tongue impatiently.

  ‘I suppose you think that was a very fine gesture. You will find in time you should have taken the money.’

  Mungo spoke slowly, controlling the rage that throbbed in his throat.

  ‘That was the bank that repossessed Windemere. It was the bank that Chester Marion used, first to tie my father in a rope of debt, and then to hang him with it. The bank that Chester owned. And now you tell me you are a partner in it?’

  For the first time that evening, a crack appeared in Rutherford’s studied calm. He took a step back, thinking quickly.

  ‘Perhaps you are not as dull-witted as I thought,’ he said. ‘Yes, I am a partner in the bank.’

  ‘You knew what Chester Marion was doing to Windemere? You let him do it?’

  ‘I encouraged him.’

  For the second time that evening, Mungo’s world had been turned upside down. He could hardly credit what he heard.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because after Abigail died, I had nothing to tie me to your father. All Oliver’s foolish talk of emancipation, his notion of blacks as equals – it was an embarrassment to me. I beca
me a laughing stock among my associates.’

  ‘You sold out your own family.’

  Rutherford made a deprecating gesture with his hands.

  ‘I made a tidy profit from the transaction. Chester drove a hard bargain when he sold Windemere to your neighbours. They were all in on it too, of course.’

  Mungo’s head reeled with the shock of revelation. Every word that Rutherford spoke demanded a thousand more questions.

  ‘Then why did you help me? Why send me on the Blackhawk?’

  ‘To save you from yourself. I thought you might make a new life and put all this behind you. I confess, I did not think you would give me quite so much cause to regret my generosity. I never imagined how naïve you truly are.’ He turned away dismissively. ‘Just like your father – unwilling to face the dirty reality of life. You—’

  He broke off with a strangled cry. Mungo had closed on him and was gripping his neck with both hands, pressing his thumbs against Rutherford’s windpipe. Rutherford struggled and tried to pull Mungo’s hands away. But though he was strong and fit for his age, he was no match for his grandson.

  ‘You have taken everything from me,’ Mungo snarled. His yellow eyes burned with fury.

  Rutherford managed to lift his leg and stamp on Mungo’s foot; for a second Mungo’s grip faltered. Rutherford twisted away. He lunged for the bell-pull to summon his servants, but Mungo grabbed the collar of his coat and dragged him back, hurling him down onto the sofa. Pinning him down with his knee, Mungo snatched a cushion and pressed it down on his grandfather’s face.

  Rutherford struggled and fought; he jerked about, but he could not free himself. His movements grew weaker, the moans under the cushion fainter. Mungo did not relax his grip. His mind was absent, disassociated from his body. He did not notice when Rutherford stopped moving, or the damp patch that spread on the sofa. All he felt was rage.