by Rainbow
Quinn tried to calm his fiercely beating heart. Close your eyes, he told himself, for to keep them open was to see darkness he couldn’t control. By closing them, oddly enough, he felt he did have some control. He waited for the nightmares to close in on him—but they didn’t. Instead he saw Meredith: as a child happily soaring toward the sky on his swing, and then as a giggly woman with the hideous hair on the Lucky Lady. There was Meredith framed by the rainbow, and Meredith’s suspicious but passion-filled eyes when they first kissed. And then there was Meredith aboard the Ohio Star, her gold hair flowing over the pillow and her arms raised up to him.
He felt movement again—the boat was leaving the docks. They had made it!
Quinn smiled to himself. He had known Meredith would convince everyone that their elaborate charade was real. She could do anything, be anyone. Ninny, lady, groom, artist, widow. Lover.
Lover.
How good she had felt in his arms last night. How very, very good. And right. The images kept flitting through his mind, eclipsing the dark ones that had been with him so long. With something close to astonishment, he discovered that the bright happy memories had washed his mind of the bitter ones.
“They’ve had to slip by you,” Ted Carroll blustered angrily.
The sheriff looked at the Carroll brothers with distinct unfriendliness. He’d had just about enough of them, of their damned demands and threats.
“I’ve done my duty, damn it,” he said. “I’ve searched every last bundle that’s gone through Cairo, and it’s been a waste of time. I’m not going to hold up any more river traffic on your account.”
“It’s your job to catch runaways and thieves.”
“And I’ve done my best. They probably drowned in the river. You said you thought one of them was injured.”
“Then where’s the girl?”
The sheriff shrugged. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend any more time helping you get blood money.”
Ted Carroll, his right hand swathed in bandages, looked at one of the deputies. “You sure you searched everything?”
The sheriff turned toward his men. They nodded. One of them added for emphasis, “Every damned bag and box ‘cepting some coffins.”
“Coffins?” the sheriff repeated.
“Well, the widow said her husband and father died of fever. I sure as hell wasn’t going to open those damn things. There’s been cholera downriver.”
“Widow? What did she look like?” Ted Carroll asked.
“Nothing like your description. Blond, she was. And her sister was redheaded.”
“Where were they going?”
“They said a small landing ‘bout fifty miles from here, then up to Indianapolis for burial.”
“You fool,” John Carroll said. “You ever hear of taking a body all that way for burial?”
The deputy drew himself up tall. “If it were my daddy or wife, I sure would.”
The sheriff gave the deputy a disgusted look. “And I suppose the widow was pretty.”
The deputy’s sheepish expression answered the question. But still he protested. “She didn’t look nothin’ like you said. The description said black hair.”
“You ever heard of dye?” John Carroll asked.
“But they wuz sisters,” the man defended himself. “You didn’t say nothin’ ’bout sisters.”
“The women could be with the Underground Railroad,” Ted Carroll wondered aloud. “The girl and Devereux could have been in the coffins.”
“You’re just reaching for straws,” the sheriff said. “Now git the hell out of here.”
The Carrolls looked at each other. They were uncanny at ferreting out runaways. They both had a sixth sense about them, and now they knew how their quarry had fled. And where.
John nodded wordlessly to Ted, and they left the sheriff’s office, heading toward the stable. “I’ll bet my last dollar they’re headed for Canada,” Ted said.
“Lake Erie!”
“And Oberlin, I’d wager. It’s a hotbed of damned slave lovers.”
“If we can ambush them…”
Ted looked down at his hand. “The reward for Devereux is dead or alive.”
“And then there’s the woman.”
“Ten thousand dollars.” Ted grinned. “No split either.”
“And goddamned satisfaction,” John added.
They nearly ran to the livery stable for their horses.
Quinn was bumped and bruised as his coffin was moved, heaved, and bounced. He didn’t know how long he had been entombed in the damned thing when a tool wedged in a crack and the lid was pried open. He sat up, his eyes slowly adjusting to the light, and saw Cam doing the same in the coffin next to him. The three women—Meredith and Lissa, both still dressed in black, and Daphne in servant’s clothes—were looking on anxiously.
A man in black stood over him, a smile on his weathered face. “I’ve been doing the Lord’s work nearly thirty years but this is the first time I’ve raised the dead,” he said with a chuckle.
Quinn tried to move, but his legs were cramped. Meredith leaned over and started rubbing them, and Daphne did the same for Cam. Within minutes, Quinn’s limbs were feeling alive again, more than alive, as splinters of heat ran up and down where Meredith’s fingers touched.
“I don’t like to rush you,” the man in black said, “but I think it would be wise for you to be on your way as quickly as possible. We’ve already heard about the search in Cairo, and inquiries have been made here. My son will take you to the next station.”
Quinn nodded. “Thank you.”
“It’s I who should be thanking you. A message arrived from Cairo yesterday from the Underground Railroad telling me to expect you. I’ve heard whispers about the man on the river, and what fine work you’ve done.”
Quinn flushed. “No more than others.” He felt distinctly awkward under praise he didn’t want or feel he deserved.
The preacher merely nodded. Quinn looked around. They were behind a small church, amid a clump of trees next to a small cemetery. The coffins, he expected, would be buried there. Once he stood, the preacher ushered them into a house adjoining the church, and led them to a table loaded with food. “While I summon my son, please eat.”
Quinn needed no urging. Although he’d had both food and water in the coffin, he’d taken neither, afraid of a subsequent bodily function.
Within an hour, the preacher reappeared with a young man of seventeen or eighteen. Each member of the fleeing party was given a pack containing two blankets, biscuits, cheese, dried beef, and a canteen. Quinn, who had borrowed money from Sophie after discovering his own cash had been destroyed in the river, asked about horses. The minister shook his head. There was only his own mount, which he needed for calls, and no one else in the vicinity had extra animals. The purchase of five horses would also be suspicious, he said. Perhaps as they traveled north they could purchase one at a time. Quinn winced. It had been a long time since he’d traveled far on foot. But then he looked at Meredith, and decided the longer journey would be worth it. He would be with her. Until Canada.
By the end of the third day, they all had blisters on their feet. They had passed from one conductor to another, from one hidden place to the next. The sheriff in Cairo had evidently telegraphed descriptions of Quinn, Lissa, and Cam throughout several states, and their guides said they were being sought by both law officers and bounty hunters. They traveled mostly by night, sleeping during the day. One day was spent resting in the woods but they were sheltered on the other two occasions at stations of the Underground Railroad. In one home, they were led up to an attic; in the other, to a strawstack that hid a shelter walled up with rails. On the fourth day, they were able to buy two horses, and the women rode, Meredith and Lissa on one mount, and Daphne on the other.
The trek to Oberlin was nearly four hundred miles, and when they rested, Meredith was often too tired to do more than collapse in Quinn’s arms. Quinn would hold her tight, pushing back wayward curls t
hat escaped from the long braid she had started to wear. It was, she said, the only way to keep her hair out of her face and out of the briers and twigs.
Each day, she looked more beautiful to Quinn, although her black dress and cloak were dingy and torn. Each day, as they started again, her back was straight and her chin up, her eyes bright with adventure and warm with love, and he wondered how he ever thought her plain. Or how he could let her go.
Meredith didn’t want the journey to end. As tired and sore as her body was, she relished each day’s respite when Quinn pulled her into his arms—even though she knew he did it reluctantly, even bitterly because he could not control himself into doing otherwise.
Although his eyes settled on her with pride and approval, she knew he had not changed his mind about their future.
Since Cam’s recent injury, Quinn had held part of himself back. The wall she had always sensed in him until that last night aboard the Ohio Star had been reconstructed and even fortified. Every once in a while, when he didn’t realize her eyes were on him, she saw a terrible sadness in his face and she knew he still intended to leave her. For her sake.
It was such a terrible irony, she thought. He didn’t realize he would be killing her in quite a different way than would a gun or knife or any other instrument of death. A broken body was no worse than a shattered heart.
She would convince him of that. She must!
Tomorrow or the next day, or the next.
She must!
Chapter 29
JOHN AND TED CARROLL rode into Oberlin and took a room in a boardinghouse overlooking the main street. They told the proprietor they were heading west, and had stopped to get some rest before continuing.
Oberlin, they knew, was a hotbed of abolitionists. They had heard all the stories. How, when a fugitive slave was seized just outside the town, hundreds of its citizens had followed him and his captors, and freed him. The whole town was, in effect, a station of the Underground Railroad.
That meant, the Carrolls hoped, that Devereux and his party would feel safe enough to come into town openly, or that there would be some word or whisper of the fugitives. They could then follow Devereux and ambush him on his way to Lake Erie.
Ted’s hand still pained him, and each time he tried unsuccessfully to use it, he cursed Devereux and the damned black man. He wondered if he would ever be able to fully use his hand again. The doctor who bandaged it had given him no guarantees.
But he could still balance a rifle on that arm. And in an ambush, he and John would have the advantage even with his game hand. Devereux owed him. Devereux owed him a great deal.
Two days went by, and they heard nothing, saw nothing suspicious. The town seemed peaceful enough, but the people were noticeably reticent. All attempts to draw any of them out, including a jocular storekeeper, came to naught.
Ted had tried to ingratiate himself, saying he and his brother might join John Brown’s efforts to keep Kansas free of slavery. It was a tactic he devised after learning John Brown’s father was a trustee of Oberlin College. But his overture met with silence and seeming indifference, as if everyone knew who he really was. After three more days, he was convinced something was wrong. Very wrong. It shouldn’t have taken Devereux this long to get here.
Perhaps they had been mistaken about the route Devereux had taken. Perhaps the gambler had headed straight north to Wisconsin, or even further east. But the trail through Oberlin had seemed the straightest and most practical route. On the sixth day, they decided to ride up to Vermilion, a fishing village on Lake Erie. It was, they had been told, a frequent last stop on the Underground Railroad. Sympathetic fishermen could be hired to ferry fugitives to a steamer crossing to Canada.
With frustration and rage gnawing at their insides, the two brothers collected their horses. Five miles outside town, one of the horses started to go lame, and Ted had to dismount and walk him. He tried to trade the animal at a farmhouse, but the door was slammed in his face. A few miles farther, John’s saddle started to slip. When he inspected it, he saw that the cinch straps had been frayed in two places. Another mile, and the same thing happened to the second saddle. There was no way of repairing them without assistance.
They turned back to Oberlin, only to find both the blacksmith and saddler out of town. No one knew when they would reopen. Not a horse in town was for sale, nor a saddle. A visit to the sheriff produced no better results. The man looked at the saddles and mildly observed that they should take better care of their equipment and animals.
The sheriff was treated to a long string of threats and curses, but he merely regarded his visitors benignly and shrugged. Defeated, the Carroll brothers started the walk to Wellington, the next town. They realized every bitter, painful step of the way that the people of Oberlin had outfoxed them, and that Devereux was probably well on his way to Canada.
Meredith looked over the peaceful grounds of Oberlin College. She and Lissa and Daphne occupied one room, and Quinn and Cam another. They had been here one day. Upon arriving they were told of the two strangers who looked like anything but what they said they were. The two men were altogether too curious for the cautious Ohioans. Meredith and Quinn immediately recognized the Carroll brothers from the descriptions.
The man who had led them there grinned and told them not to worry. The townspeople would take care of the slave catchers in their own way. Quinn winced, and Meredith knew he worried about getting more innocents involved, but his reservations were quickly swept aside. No one would get hurt, he was promised. Except perhaps the pride and temper of the two unwanted strangers.
The closer the fleeing party had come to Oberlin and Lake Erie, the more tense Quinn had become. Although he still held Meredith in his arms when they rested, he had not made love to her. True, there had been little privacy, but they had improvised very well in the past.
Meredith found it torture, plain torture, to be so near him and yet have the invisible wall between them, one over which she could peek but not scale. If only Cam hadn’t been hurt. Even though he was nearly well now, she knew Quinn still felt guilt over the incident. Guilt and blame. And fear that it would happen again.
If they could get to Canada without more trouble, perhaps then she could convince him that they belonged together, that he was protection, not danger. Life, not death.
Their new guide came that evening with a smile on his face. The Carrolls had informed the rooming-house proprietor they would be leaving on the morrow. Certain arrangements had been made to ensure that their upcoming journey would not be a trouble-free one. Their own party could leave at midmorning without fearing detection or interception.
They had dinner together that night, the five of them in a private room at the college. If all went well, they would be on a boat to Canada tomorrow night. There was an undeniable tension during the meal because everyone was hesitant to speak of the future. They were all waiting on Quinn, who had very little to say.
Only Lissa was firmly decided on her course. She had heard about the communities of ex-slaves in Canada and how badly they needed teachers and schools.
Her eyes bright with purpose and a shy smile on her lips, she announced that she wanted to teach. Meredith wanted to protest, wanted some way for Lissa to stay with her. What she really wanted was for all of them to go to California, as Quinn had once proposed. But he had changed his mind, and now her own life was uncertain and confused. Could she go back to Mississippi and forget everything? she wondered.
Quinn, she knew, was not safe any place. He had already told her he could not stay in Canada because of his murder conviction in England. Now he was also wanted in the States, although California was still the safest place for him.
Meredith looked up and caught his eyes on her. Dear God, but they were blue. So blue and so intense that she had to take her own eyes away for fear of being consumed by them. Her gaze wandered down to the bare skin exposed by the partially open buckskin shirt. She saw the barely healed cut that curved up to his neck, an
d her heart hurt for him. She thought of the other knife cuts on his chest, the whip scars on his back. He had endured so much. His body had endured so much. How could he ever be entirely free of his past suffering?
She dreaded tonight because they would be apart. Although it might be their last evening together, they could not sleep in each other’s arms here. She wondered how she could get through the night alone, worrying whether tomorrow would be one of their last days together.
I love you, she said silently across the table.
He smiled, but it was a bittersweet smile that told her little. And then, abruptly, he left.
“What are we goin’ do, Capt’n?”
“Go to Canada.”
Cam gave him a disgusted look. “And then where?”
“You’re a damn fool for wanting to go any place with me. What about Daphne?”
“She wants to go where I do. We’re going to get married in Canada.”
“Then you’re even a bigger fool for going with me.”
“I don’t know about that. You freed me. You saved my life.”
“And damned near got you killed.”
Cam shook his head. “You think it wasn’t worth it to me? You gave me something more important than life. You made it worthwhile. You gave that to your lady too. You goin’ take it away now?”
Cam’s eyes bored into him, and Quinn turned away. He wanted to believe. Christ, but he wanted to believe. He wanted Meredith so badly. He wanted to see her eyes dance with laughter, and hear her soft teasing. He wanted to bury himself in her until their souls touched and their hearts whispered with the same intimate language.
“You talk too much,” he said, but Cam saw a light that hadn’t been in his eyes before, and with a grunt of satisfaction he turned over and went to sleep.
They caught a fishing boat in Vermilion. Not until they pulled away from shore did Quinn relax. It had been a fast journey by horse from Oberlin to this small lakeside village. As if by magic or by someone’s swift messenger, a fishing boat was waiting for them. There was no sign of the Carrolls, and Quinn, who had been told what had happened to the brothers, smiled wryly. The whole damned town. It seemed impossible. No violence, no one hurt. He still couldn’t quite believe their luck until they were well out in the lake and all possibility of capture was gone.
