Southern Republic (The Downriver Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramsay, Lex

  “Why’n hell do I have to do the dirty work?” He slurred, spittle flying from his mouth in his self-righteous fury.

  “And I guess I’ve gotta off the little pickanniny too, huh?” Bryce was having an imaginery conversation with Askew, the only kind he’d ever dared when his thoughts turned to insurrection.

  Bryce pulled himself off the divan, holding out his hand to stop from falling and nearly dropping the decanter. He figured he’d catch Olivia trying to escape and give her what she deserved. Since he knew she liked to trouble the stable hands and grooms, and she’d probably try to use a horse to escape, he knew where to find her.

  “Pro’ly trying to get one more roll in the hay before high-tailing up outta here.” Bryce snickered at his sparkling wit and deductive reasoning skills.

  Stumbling out of the Protectorate House, Bryce made his way to the stables, leaning against each outbuilding along the way. In a comical attempt at stealth, Bryce ducked into the stables and tried to hide, secure in the belief that he could sneak up on his prey.

  Just as Bryce slipped inside the open stable door, he saw Olivia walking past, holding her skirts up and whisking by with a swish of her evening gown. Bryce looked down at Olivia’s bare feet and that part of his mind still functioning despite the saturation of alcohol puzzled at why she would be wearing an evening gown but no shoes.

  Not bothering to puzzle out the answer to that question, Bryce grabbed Olivia from behind, pulled her into the stables and choked her with all the suppressed rage within. Her body slumped to the dirt floor like a broken doll in a fancy dress.

  • • •

  Joshua heard a noise from the back of the stables where he’s been sent to stand guard, and walked forward to investigate. He almost stumbled on the body lying near the front door, and looked up in time to see Mister Bryce staggering back to the Protectorate House.

  At first, he thought the body was Miss Olivia but as he took a look at her dirty feet, he realized it was Maggie on one of her midnight prowls.

  He’d asked Maggie once why she put on Miss Olivia’s old dress and walked around sometimes at night, and Maggie had told him that she was pretending to be someone else—anyone other than the no ’count child of a thrown away mother who was sold away at her tenth year.

  Kneeling down at Maggie’s body, Joshua looked up to see Miss Olivia sneaking into the stable, holding a small satchel in one hand and with the other placing a finger to her lips in a command of silence. She peered into Maggie’s upturned face, nearly purple from the strangulation, and said, “Who did this?”

  Joshua was caught between two warring impulses, and both of them could get him killed. Either he told Miss Olivia that Mister Bryce killed Maggie and break the 11th Rule of bearing witness against white folk, or if he refused to tell her he would break the 1st Rule of obedience. If he’d killed Maggie himself, there wasn’t no specific Rule for that and it wasn’t necessarily a killing offense, but it wouldn’t go easy for him either.

  Before he could say a word, though, Miss Olivia seemed to work it out on her own. “Bryce!” she hissed, with the squinted-eyed look of possibilities transforming her face.

  “Joshua, you need to do something for me. It won’t be pleasant and it won’t be easy, but if you can pull it off, I give you my word you will be rewarded with freedom.”

  CHAPTER 35

  ‌Eugenia sat at her vanity feeling the weight of a lifetime of unhappiness sink down upon her like a familiar garment. After a sleepless night, her face betrayed the tattered state of her soul, and she felt empty and defeated in the same measure as she thought she’d feel righteous and victorious at the vanquishing of her nemesis Sulla.

  Part of the ashen taste of the victory was that it was tainted by the knowledge that Olivia had been turned out of the house, her treachery laid bare for all to see. She had heard Bryce’s accusations, hollered through Olivia’s door last night, and suddenly it all made sense to her. Why Askew had called Winston that awful word. Why he had always seemed so cold to the boy. Clearly, he had known for some time about Winston’s lineage, yet for some reason had chosen to expose the revelation just yesterday—and then had the audacity to blame it on Sulla, for that was the crime for which she had been spirited away.

  But another part of the sadness she felt was because she realized it was not Sulla who had caused her such pain all these years, nor Sancha before her or LuAnne before that or Tessie before that or Felicia before that or Alice before that—it had been Askew and his insatiable need to control, manipulate and destroy that had wrought such devastation in her life.

  And hearing Sulla’s piteous screams last night, and pondering what kind of life lay ahead for Olivia; Eugenia knew that he had wrought devastation in all their lives—indeed, in every life he touched. For Olivia’s fate was not only her own, but was to be shared by Winston. That Askew could so cavalierly discard Sulla was bad enough, but that he could so easily dispatch his own daughter, and a little child who, regardless of his origin, had become the sole reason for Eugenia getting up in the morning—that was truly monstrous.

  Eugenia’s ruminations were interrupted by a light tapping on her door, and when she answered, the door was opened timidly and Lily entered.

  “Miss Eugenia,” the girl said shyly, “Miss Olivia asked me last night to give you this note in the morning.” She handed Eugenia a small envelope and backed out the door, closing it behind her.

  Eugenia opened the envelope with a growing sense of trepidation, unfolding the page with palpable dread. But all the note said was “Save my son,” and was signed simply “Olivia.”

  Quickly Eugenia threw on her robe and walked out of her room, moving swiftly down the hall to Olivia’s door. She knocked once, then opened the door in her impatience, sensing by the stillness that something was terribly wrong.

  Calling out her name, she saw that Olivia’s bed had not been slept in, and the room was in shambles. Walking though the dressing room, Eugenia paused at the closed bathroom door, hesitating for a reason she could not articulate.

  Slowly opening the door, she stepped into the spacious bathroom, turned to the left, and saw red.

  Pooled at the side of the claw foot tub was a nearly congealed mass of blood. Following the trail up from the floor, Eugenia saw a hand limply hanging over the side of the bath tub, the water dyed a rose pink from the blood that had spilled from the other slashed wrist.

  Olivia was floating in the water, fully clothed, her auburn hair fanned out around her head, her face a discolored mask.

  Eugenia gathered her breath to scream, but nothing came out. She slid down to the floor, strangely fixated on the way the blood had seeped into the grout around the small white hex tiles on the floor, making little geometric shapes that put her to mind of long passed summer days of childhood spent lying on her back in the grass guessing animal shapes from the clouds.

  Lily found her that way, head pressed to the tiles tracing the blood patterns like clouds, and she roused the rest of the house, and the pandemonium began.

  • • •

  When Eugenia came to she was back in her bed propped up on what felt like a dozen pillows. She was being fussed over by her maid, as Askew paced the floors of the bedroom he hadn’t set foot in during the last ten years.

  She couldn’t focus on the words he was saying, but he seemed to be more belligerent than grieving, as if Olivia’s suicide had unfairly deprived him of the pleasure of torturing her further.

  As the people scurrying about the room realized she had awaken, all eyes turned to her, no doubt expecting heart wrenching, soul scouring cries to come tearing from her body.

  She said nothing.

  A lull in the frenetic activity surrounding her ensued, almost as if by her silence Eugenia had broken some time-honored tradition and in so doing had become the object of their pity, rather than her poor little girl languishing in a tub of spilled blood in the room down the hall.

  Their cloying insincerity infuriated her. Nobody in
this room had loved Olivia. Come to that, nobody in this house had loved her. Not her father, her husband or her child, and as much as it saddened her to admit it, not her mother as much as she should have either.

  Nobody would avenge the death of her child, just as nobody had championed her in life, and now that life was over far too soon. As immensely tragic as it was, Eugenia could not cry. She was far too angry for that.

  Without ever having spoken a word, she rose from the bed, pulled her robe around her shoulders, and left the room.

  By the time Askew tracked her down in the conservatory, Eugenia was making tea from a pot of hot water and a china service sent in from the kitchen, rolled in on an antique teacart.

  “Eugenia, please believe me when I tell you I had no idea how emotionally frail Olivia was. Had I’d known I would have sent her somewhere to get better.” He said the words in a rush.

  Askew’s voice seemed to fade in and out of her consciousness, like tuning the old radio her uncle in Savannah had shown her as a child, knobs turning back and forth until the needle settled on something intelligible. Eugenia’s hands shook as she poured out the tea, and decided to favor him by breaking her silence.

  “Have some tea, dear,” Eugenia poured him a cup and handed it to him.

  “I’d never have actually forced her out of the house. I thought I would shake her up a bit, but I never meant for this to happen.” Askew continued when Eugenia said no more.

  She rocked slightly in her chair, sloshing little dribs of tea on either side of the cup and onto the delicate saucer, engulfed in the inanities of everyday life that for some reason kept chugging along even though her little girl was dead.

  The sound of the tree branch lightly brushing against the conservatory’s glass roof, propelled by a gentle breeze that would never again caress Olivia … the smell of the yeasty bread baking in the nearby kitchen … the particular slant of the afternoon sky splitting into an array of component colors and spilling like a rainbow through the prism of the glass … all these things were lost to her tormented child.

  What fear she must have known in her final hours. Eugenia knew about Olivia’s rivalry with Sulla over Askew. And while she should have warned her that he wasn’t worth her angst long ago, she had been so strangely touched by her daughter’s rare demonstration of loyalty that she’d said nothing all these years.

  Imagine what Olivia must have thought, seeing his beloved Sulla dragged off by the Apostles like a calf to slaughter—how defeated and hopeless Olivia must have felt at this show of callousness to one she had believed so cherished.

  The defeat would have left her reeling after so many blows in such quick succession: her son threatened, her life threatened, turned out of her home; Olivia probably believed she would only escape her torment in death.

  And here her tormentor sat, pleading his case like some Philadelphia lawyer, while his daughter lay dead at what may as well have been his own hands.

  “I mean, you know I loved her as much as you did, I didn’t want her dead.” Askew stammered on in the vacuum left by Eugenia’s continued silence.

  “Then why did you invite Bryce to kill her?” Eugenia said in a level voice, speaking as if they’d been having a conversation all along.

  Askew sipped his tea to buy some time and stared at her incredulously, as much at her impassive tone as at her words.

  “And why did you threaten Winston?” She continued, undeterred by his feigned innocence.

  “I …” Askew sputtered, trying to form the words to deny his guilt, but lacking the breath to do it. His face was turning storm cloud gray, and his eyes were bulging from their sockets.

  He grabbed his throat, foamy spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth. He heaved back in his chair, nearly toppling it, and his face had darkened from a muddled gray to a bruised flesh purple.

  A whistling noise squeezed out of his rapidly closing throat in rhythmic wheezes as Askew struggled to get his paralyzed lungs to expand. He gripped his throat with such force that Eugenia wondered, with admirable detachment, whether it was possible for a person to strangle themselves.

  Askew tumbled onto the floor, his legs thrashing spasmodically as his muscles fired involuntarily.

  Eugenia got up and walked around the teacart. She stood over Askew, convulsing on the floor in his death throes. While he still had the capacity to hear, Eugenia bent down and whispered to him.

  “Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it dear?”

  She waited patiently until it was over, half hoping but not really expecting a reply, and wrinkled her nose in distaste when she saw the dark stain spread across the front of his trousers.

  Eugenia turned and retrieved the petals seeping in the tea strainer that rested in the teapot. Using the back of her teaspoon, she squeezed out the extra water, and dumped the drenched petals into a bowl on her work table loaded with potting soil and gardening supplies.

  With a small hand trowel she added potting soil to the bowl of petals and blended them together, breaking the petals apart and grinding them into the soil.

  She arranged the mixture lovingly around the stalks of the flowers in each of the clay pots nearest her.

  It made such wonderful mulch for her beloved orchids.

  CHAPTER 36

  Washington, D.C.

  October 29, 1982

  ‌Patrick knew he was going to die. He knew it with the cold certainty of logic. He knew it even while another, more primitive side of his mind skittered from one fleeting scenario of salvation to another, grasping at some solution, some escape from what he was convinced was inevitable. He knew it, and he knew that there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself.

  He walked the avenues in a measured gait, speaking softly into the headset of the voice-activated transcriber unit of his electronic tablet, avoiding the large intersections that were armed with street cameras. Turning off his cell phone, activating the scrambler on his satellite monitored Personal Identifier Module; Patrick tried to blend into the waves of people surrounding him.

  He’d received the word from his contact in the SR, and didn’t fail to appreciate the biting irony in that. But Olivia couldn’t be sure exactly when the hit would come. Her strange communication was sent just this morning, and warned that the Assembly was cleaning up loose ends, removing all evidence of their monstrous Project Exodus. All evidence—including their willing dupe, Patrick. His heart lurched at the thought that Olivia would also be considered such a loose end, for if Patrick’s role in the Assembly’s grand scheme was as completely choreographed as he now believed, so was Olivia’s.

  She’d also sent him a video clip embedded in her message, saying that it had been attached to an earlier email from E.M., but that she’d only just discovered it this morning.

  Patrick had run the clip that morning, and was at last rewarded with a face to attach to the infamous Assembly. On the video, apparently taken from a concealed camera in an opulent, wood paneled office, was a portly, whiskered man perched on the edge of a desk, holding forth about the sins of the S.R. From his exhaustive studies of the S.R. Confederacy members, he knew he was looking into the face of Senator Alfonse Woolridge.

  “The facts are these … we are a nation of 40 million souls carrying a burden of nearly 25 million worthless slaves whose average output doesn’t amount to enough to feed and clothe them.

  “Of those 40 million, only 15 million are living in today’s world as far as tech is concerned—and out of those, only 12 million, the urban workers, are actually contributing anything of real value to our economy. The other 3 million are F.F.C., a necessary arrangement in its time, I’ll admit, but hardly a match for nations whose citizens actually DO something other than administer the institutions. …

  “Our slaves are forbidden to know tech—with good reason—but as a result, we cannot truly compete in the global economy against other tobacco, cotton and sugar producing countries that have automated machines to do the work of our slaves at one-tenth the cos
t. We have become a schizophrenic nation … with one part operating in the dark ages, and believe me … my pun was most certainly intended; and the other fast becoming the world’s leader in automation technology.

  “The urban workers have had to become geniuses at automation ’cause they’re so damn few of them in the cities. And as long as the tobacco industry was making money hand over fist, that was O.K. But, hell … every damn Yankee state in the U.S. has started class actions against the tobacco companies, with multi-million dollar verdicts being handed down every other day. So now, we’ve got 25 million slaves devoted to producing cotton and sugar that other countries make at a fraction of the cost on the one hand—and on the other, tobacco that’s bankrupting the largest sector of our economy at a fast clip. Great day in the morning … we’ve become a Frankenstein monster of a country, and there’s only one way out of this mess we’ve made and you know it.”

  “So what are we supposed to do? … Let the slaves go? Go where? Any country that’d take ’em would make us pay more than we can afford for the privilege of bein’ shed of ’em. We couldn’t dump ’em in the North, hell, they’ve been damn careful to only take the trickle that comes in through the R.A. over the last 130 years. How in the hell would they support an additional 25 million worthless beings? If anything, they’d send them back here, refusing them asylum … and we’d be stuck with them again. Plus, at that point, if anything untoward happened to befall the slaves, it’d be obvious who the culprit was, now wouldn’t it?

  “Put them all down? And risk being sanctioned by the very governments we’re trying so desperately to do business with? I don’t think so….

  “No … we’ve puzzled over this for the last 3 meetings of the Assembly, and the answer keeps comin’ up the same: we’ve got to kill ’em without making it look like we did it. And now we’ve got a plan that’ll work beautifully. No slaves, no blame, and no obstacle to the Great Southern Republic taking its rightful place of dominance in the global economy of the 21st Century.