An Unconditional Freedom

by Alyssa Cole

  Oddly, Daniel found himself intrigued instead of anxious. And besides, Roberts hadn’t offered to let them leave. Daniel would rather not push against that figurative door and find it locked until he was sure he’d be able to kick or blast his way out.

  “I wouldn’t mind supper if you’re offering it,” he said. “It’s difficult to kill on an empty stomach no matter how much you enjoy it.”

  Roberts brows raised and he chuckled. “Ah, you have a sense of humor. Splendid.”

  Daniel was confused, his head still hurt, and he wasn’t sure what lay ahead of them, but at the very least if they were to die, they would die well fed.

  The carriage turned and the jolting gait of the wheels over bumpy road was suddenly smooth.

  “Ah, we’ve nearly arrived,” Roberts said, peering through the window. “You both are being quite the sports about being held captive.”

  Captive.

  Daniel remembered the last time he’d been taken to the home of a white man against his will. His temporary calm evaporated in an instant and then there was only head-rattling, heart-pounding fear, so sudden and vicious he thought he would be sick. His heart hurt, and he was certain he would die if he didn’t get out of the carriage right then. He leapt up without thinking, hands bracing himself against the side of the swaying carriage.

  “What the devil?” That was Roberts, alarmed. Daniel was searching for the latch on the door. He had to get out. He had to get away. Or he’d—he’d—

  He punched at the door.

  “No, put your gun away,” Janeta cried. “He is not himself! Stop the carriage!”

  Daniel tried to follow the conversation, but he couldn’t breathe. He remembered the wood grain of the coffin digging into his fingertips, the fruitless kicking and punching at the wood and how he’d kept thinking, Just one more blow and I will break through, but he never had. Instead, he’d soiled himself and screamed impotently into the rag stuffed into his mouth.

  His hands went to this throat.

  “Daniel? Daniel!”

  Janeta. He would fight his way out. He had to, for her. Just one more blow and he would break through.

  He was already beginning to fall back into his seat, but he lashed out with the greatest swing he could muster.

  He couldn’t let her be captured, too. He couldn’t . . .

  * * *

  A sharp, acrid scent flooded Daniel’s nostrils, the smell burning through the haze in his head and jolting him awake. Awake?

  Oh no. He remembered leaping from his seat as memories had assailed him, of needing to escape the small space, of struggling for breath.

  How many times must I relive my former humiliation and create new ones?

  Shame and anger and the certainty that he would never escape the grip of his past engulfed him as he opened his eyes. He lay on a comfortable cushioned seat, and above him was a wood slatted ceiling painted an intense blue that he at first mistook for the sky. The air was still cool, and when he turned his head he could see the expanse of a well-kept lawn beyond the edge of a beautiful wooden porch.

  “Daniel!” Janeta again. That was what she had last said in the carriage, and now they were at Roberts’s estate. Daniel sat up woozily, his head pounding.

  Roberts sat across from him, his mouth turned up into the barest smirk. “You should have told me you were so famished you were likely to pass out. I would have asked Richard to get us home with some haste.”

  “I—” Daniel swallowed thickly.

  “No need to explain,” the consul said. His gaze darted to Janeta, and Daniel understood that Janeta had told the man something. He hoped she was as good a liar as he’d thought her to be because if this stranger knew of his past, his pain, and his weakness, he would have to leave. But when Roberts’s gaze returned to Daniel, it wasn’t filled with pity or disgust. In fact, his eyes held the same droll amusement that they had in the carriage. “I knew the smelling salts would be of use one day. Thank you for making carrying them worth my while.”

  “Thank you,” Daniel said. He felt out of sorts and woozy, but tried to regain some semblance of dignity.

  “Well, I suppose you two want to wash up. I certainly do. My servants will see you to your quarters and provide you with fresh clothing. After all, I’m sure the Queen of Spain wouldn’t want her envoys walking about tattered and smelling of donkey.” He clapped, then stood and executed a quick bow. “Maddie, can you see after them, please?”

  An older Negro woman who had been hovering near the door approached.

  “Right this way.” She bowed her head, wrapped in brown fabric that matched her clean poplin dress.

  Daniel’s head was still spinning and he felt like he’d been kicked by the donkey he stank of, but he pulled himself to his feet. Janeta came to his side, slipping her arm through his.

  “I owe you an apology,” Daniel said darkly. “I treated you as if you would hold me back, but I am the one who has needed constant coddling on this journey.”

  “I think we have different definitions of coddling,” she said. “I meant what I said. You are my friend. Perhaps I don’t deserve a friend like you, but I will make sure that you know you deserve a friend better than me.”

  Daniel didn’t answer, but he squeezed his arm against his body, pressing hers close to him. He hadn’t thought himself in need of a friend; he hadn’t given thought to what he needed in some time. Wanting was dangerous enough; needing could be deadly. Both left you open to disappointment, which seemed a mild word for trauma that could raze your spirit and salt the earth afterward. But that’s what his enslavement had been to him—a bone-deep disappointment that the country he needed to believe in, one where he and his people might be truly free, had been an unobtainable fantasy.

  But he was already a broken man. Could indulging this one need sink him any lower?

  “You overestimate what I deserve,” he said. “And underestimate what your friendship has meant to me today. Thank you.”

  Janeta didn’t have a chance to answer. She was asked to follow the female servant, and Daniel was asked to follow a man named Michael who waited near the entrance of a washroom.

  “Do you need to be shown how to use the bath, sir?”

  Daniel thought the man was jesting, but then he glanced into the room. A large zinc tub encased in a wooden frame was against one wall. Another wooden frame stood perpendicular and a metal shower head fitted to a spigot.

  “This home has heated water. The toilet is on the other side of the bath, sir. You turn on the water here, the soap is here, and you can leave your clothes there and I’ll fetch them for washin’.”

  Daniel examined the craftsmanship of the wooden case and ran his hand over the zinc basin before shedding his filthy clothes. He used the necessary, marveling at the lavishly appointed water closet as he did. The room had fine wallpaper and a large window to let in the sunlight. And when he finally turned the spigot and stepped under the warm spray? Delight. Pure, unabashed delight filled him. The water was hot! And plentiful! It rained down on him, leaving his hands free to scrub and lather and wash away the layers of sweat and grime.

  It was odd, but as he scrubbed and soaped he felt like he was stripping away his anger and despair. Even as his hands passed over his raised scars, he didn’t get pulled into an awful memory, but thought instead of the future. What would their time here achieve? Why was Roberts so eager to allow them to stay? Why was Janeta so good at pretending she cared for him?

  Only time would tell.

  For these fleeting few moments, he didn’t worry about it. He let the water slap into his hair and neck and back, and stared at the tiled wall until his mind went blissfully blank.

  CHAPTER 18

  Janeta sat at the guest room’s dressing table, being attended to by an enslaved woman as she had been for most of her life, and hoped she hadn’t made a terrible mistake.

  They still didn’t know for whom Roberts worked or what his goal was. The Russians had painted him as a danger,
and perhaps he was, but their private conversation had shown that they didn’t know for certain. He seemed cordial enough, but he might be the enemy, and even if he wasn’t, that didn’t mean she could trust him. People in the Loyal League had trusted her, after all.

  She hadn’t told him Daniel’s secret, had instead pulled another lie from her seemingly endless sack of them. She had feared El Viejo del Saco, but she had become her own version, peddling lies instead of naughty children.

  Janeta had called upon something she’d heard Henry talk of. A friend of his who had answered the first call for Confederate troops, who had gone to battle barely trained and come through alive and relatively unscathed, but with a mind that occasionally slipped back to the battlefield.

  She’d told Roberts that Daniel had soldier’s heart, as Henry had called it, unable to tell the difference between the present day and battles of his past. That wasn’t false; more and more Janeta was realizing that what she’d been taught was the natural order of things was a type of warfare, with more casualties than anyone would ever be able to count.

  After Daniel had struck the consul in his last attempt to save himself—or was it her he’d wanted to save?—before he passed out, Janeta had expected Roberts to have them hauled off to jail, or to serve his own justice for the insult. A Negro man striking a white one was enough to merit any harsh treatment Daniel received, in the eyes of the law. The price for such an action was supposed to be so high as to deter others from even thinking of it.

  Roberts hadn’t sought to hurt Daniel. He’d nodded understandingly and sent his driver for Maddie and the smelling salts, and to pass on word to chef that there would be two more for dinner. He’d taken another glance at Janeta and asked him to tell Michael to lay a fire in the parlor. He’d prodded at his sore cheek but hadn’t commented on the blow otherwise. She didn’t know what to make of him.

  She winced as Maddie tugged at her matted hair; Janeta had tried her best to clean it, but had given up in frustration and fatigue.

  “I can take care of that,” Janeta said, awkwardly reaching up to take over for the woman. “Gracias.”

  Maddie huffed a laugh but kept working. “Oh, I think you done about enough to this head of yours. Ain’t no trouble to me. What’s this? You got something in here.”

  Maddie passed Janeta the remains of the note that she’d braided into her hair what felt like forever ago. Janeta held the wad of paper tightly in her hand, a reminder of the deception she was capable of.

  The edge of the note had once been sharp, but was now a soggy and useless mass. Her words would be indecipherable now, and she took some comfort in that. A shiver went through her thinking of what she had initially set out to do when she arrived at that cabin in Illinois. Of whom she had wanted to do it for. She had agreed to spy for the Confederacy to save her father and please Henry, and she wasn’t sure if that had been the order of importance in her mind at the time she’d agreed to do it.

  She’d already been spying before she left Palatka. Why? To win smiles and caresses and sweet words from Henry. That was what had gotten Papi into trouble. And now Papi sat rotting in a prison, if he still lived, because Janeta had discovered new convictions, new people she wanted to win smiles from. She’d reinvented herself, she who lied as easily as the snake had to Eve—she was now shedding the skin given to her by slave owners and rebels and seeing what was beneath. It seemed she was always becoming a new person, though. How could she be sure that who she was now was who she would be tomorrow, or the next day?

  Panic fluttered in her chest and she closed her eyes.

  I am Janeta Sanchez. Descendant of slaves and conquistadores. I am a member of the Loyal League, partner to Daniel Cumberland, and I will complete the mission assigned to me.

  Yes. She couldn’t be sure of the future, but this version of Janeta was as real as any of the others had been, and she didn’t need to know the future for that to matter. She did need to know one very important thing, though.

  “Maddie? Why is Mr. Roberts being kind to Daniel and me?” she asked carefully.

  “Oh, he’s just a nice man, I suppose,” Maddie said, tugging at a snarl in Janeta’s hair. She reached for a small jar of hair oil.

  Janeta tried a different route. “Should we be worried about our safety?”

  “From Mr. Brendan? Oh no. He won’t hurt y’all. He’s not like the other white folk around here. But then again, y’all ain’t like the Negroes around here, so I guess I should ask the same: should we be worried about his safety?”

  Janeta paused. She wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen. The Russians had told them about a secret meeting with dangerous Rebels, but Roberts treated them kindly. He’d spoken candidly about the South and its racism. Could the same man also be planning to help Europe overthrow the North?

  Your father married your mother. Did that mean he thought all slaves should be freed?

  “We mean Mr. Roberts no harm,” Janeta said truthfully.

  Maddie nodded as she finished the second of two cornbraids. She’d left most of Janeta’s thick hair out, and gathered the ends of the braids and the remaining hair into a bun.

  “He’s a good man,” Maddie said, securing the bun and then standing. “Different, and not just cause of that accent. He been here . . . two years now? I been made to work in Enterprise all my life, and I ain’t ever been treated better. The day he go back to England is gonna be a sad day for me and Michael.”

  Janeta would pass that information on to Daniel. She didn’t know how he would feel about Maddie defending Roberts, but the woman had little reason to lie.

  “I’ll bring you to supper,” Maddie said.

  Janeta followed her through the hallways decorated with expensive floral wallpaper and detailed wood molding. The hallways were immaculately clean, but some of the rooms held large crates that were either in the middle of being unpacked or loaded.

  The house was smaller than her father’s Santiago estate, but larger and more opulent than Villa Sanchez in Palatka. The large paintings, fine furniture, and modern light fixtures were somewhat extraordinary, as had been the hot water taps in the washroom; the house was in the middle of nowhere but had all the latest features of a modern home that her older sisters had sighed over with their friends.

  When she entered the dining room, she wasn’t prepared for the unexpected sight that met her. Roberts was dressed the same and still sported a red mark on his face from where he’d been grazed by a fist. Daniel was nowhere to be seen. That’s what Janeta thought at first before she realized the handsome man talking to Roberts was Daniel.

  He hadn’t worn rags during their journey, but he was now dressed in fine trousers and a clean tan shirt, with a matching brown vest and jacket. His hair had been trimmed and he’d shaven the wild beard that he’d sported since she’d met him. Janeta had already thought him an attractive man, but there was something about being able to see the strong jut of his jawline and the sharpness of his cheekbones that drove home the fact that Daniel was not only beautiful on the inside. Not to her. He looked younger and less troubled and, damn him, Janeta’s face was hot and she could not pull her gaze from him.

  A beard was just hair, to be shaved and regrown, but seeing Daniel without his seemed somehow intimate. She could suddenly imagine him as the idealistic young man, eager to study law, running a knuckle along his jaw as he pored over legal documents. She could see the man he had been before cruel fate—no, not fate, humanity—had crushed his soul. Perhaps he had wanted her to see this.

  No, don’t be foolish. He simply wanted to be appropriate for a meal in a place such as this. Or to be free of uncomfortable facial hair.

  Daniel’s gaze caught on hers as Roberts talked to him, and though he nodded and replied, he didn’t look away. His brows raised, ever so slightly, and she realized she was standing and staring. She made her way over to them, trying to gather the thoughts that had been scattered by Daniel’s change in appearance.

  “You look dif
ferent,” she said to Daniel after they’d both stood and greeted her.

  He ran his hand over his smooth cheeks and Janeta’s cheeks flushed warmer.

  “Is that the polite way of saying you prefer me with the beard?” He seemed to enjoy the fact that he’d been able to surprise her.

  “Not at all, though I suppose this will take some getting used to,” she said. Her gaze sought the floor between them, as she was suddenly unable to look at him. His eyes had always been lovely, but now they seemed larger and deeper, the warm brown more apparent.

  “I’m sure I’ll be unkempt again within a few days’ time,” he said. “Enjoy this while you can.”

  He grinned, a full-on charming grin that made her breath hitch in response. She was grateful that he had been distant and rude when she’d first met him. Even then, she’d felt the inklings of attraction. Now, she saw how things could be between them. Joking and subtle looks and not-so-subtle attraction. She knew things with Daniel couldn’t last. Perhaps they had a day or two, or even just those few minutes before Roberts did with them what he wished.

  She absorbed the warmth of his smile like the rays of the equatorial sun.

  “I believe I will,” she said.

  They took their seats at the large table and the servants brought out the first course, a hearty autumn stew. Janeta wondered what Augustus and Jim and Shelley would have for dinner that night. She also thought about the fact that the only dark faces she had ever seen at her father’s table were her mother’s and her own, yet Roberts had welcomed them to share his own supper.

  “Now that you’ve had a chance to eat a bit, I’m going to be unbearably rude and ask what exactly it is you want of me. This week is a busy one, with an important delegation arriving at the house in just a few days. I don’t have time for espionage games and banter. I don’t have much time at all. None of us do.”

  His brow creased.

  Janeta looked at Daniel, who dabbed at his mouth with his cloth napkin.

  “Are you aiding the Confederacy?” he asked bluntly.