“Don’t let me sleep, Mason! Promise me you won’t!”
“I promise,” he said, with a quick glance at Bidwell.
“What’s all this nonsense?” Bidwell asked him. “The woman’s feared to sleep?”
“Yes, sir. She fears fallin’ asleep and seein’—”
“Don’t speak it!” Alice Barrow’s voice rose again, tremulous and pleading. “If you love me, don’t speak it!”
The little girl began to cry, the little boy still clinging to his father’s leg. Barrow looked directly into Bidwell’s face. “She’s in a bad way, sir. She ain’t slept for the past two nights. Cain’t abide the dark, not even the day shadows.”
“This is how it begins,” Winston said quietly.
“Rein yourself!” Bidwell snapped at him. He produced a lace-rimmed handkerchief from a pocket of his jacket and wiped beads of sweat from his cheeks and forehead. “Be that as it may, Barrow, I must speak to her. Madam? May I enter?”
“No!” she answered, the damp sheet drawn up to her terror-stricken eyes. “Go away!”
“Thank you.” Bidwell walked to her bedside and stood there, looking down at her with both hands gripping his hat. Winston followed behind him, but Mason Barrow remained in the other room to comfort the crying little girl. “Madam,” Bidwell said, “you must desist in your spreading of tales about these dreams. I know you’ve told Cass Swaine. I would ask—”
“I told Cass ’cause she’s my friend!” the woman said behind her sheet. “I told others of my friends too! And why shouldn’t I? They should know what I know, if they value their lives!”
“And what is it that makes your knowledge so valuable, madam?”
She pushed the sheet away and stared defiantly up at him, her eyes wet and scared but her chin thrust toward him like a weapon. “That whoever lives in this town is sure to die.”
“That, I fear, is only worth a shilling. All who live in any town are sure to die.”
“Not by his hand! Not by fire and the torments of Hell! Oh, he told me! He showed me! He walked me through the graveyard, and he showed me them names on the markers!” The veins in her neck strained, her brown hair lank and wet. She said in an agonized whisper, “He showed me Cass Swaine’s marker! And John’s too! And he showed me the names of my children!” Her voice cracked, the tears coursing down her cheeks. “My own children, laid dead in the ground! Oh, sweet Jesus!” She gave a terrible, wrenching moan and pulled the sheet up to her face again, her eyes squeezed shut.
With all the candle flames, the pine knot smoke, and the humidity seeping in, the room was a hotbox. Bidwell felt as if drawing a breath was too much effort. He heard the rumble of distant thunder, another storm approaching. A response to Alice Barrow’s phantasms was in order, but for the life of him Bidwell couldn’t find one. There was no doubt a great Evil had seized upon the town, and had grown in both murky day and blackest night like poisonous mushrooms. This Evil had invaded the dreams of the citizens of Fount Royal and driven them to frenzies. Bidwell knew that Winston was correct: this indeed was how it began.
“Courage,” he offered, but it sounded so very weak.
She opened her eyes; they had become swollen and near-scarlet. “Courage?” she repeated, incredulously. “Courage again’ him? He showed me a graveyard full of markers! You couldn’t take a step without fallin’ over a grave! It was a silent town. Everybody gone…or dead. He told me. Standin’ right at my side, and I could hear him breathin’ in my ear.” She nodded, her eyes staring straight through Bidwell. “Those who stay here will perish and burn in Hell’s fires. That’s what he said, right in my ear. Burn in Hell’s fires, forever and a day. It was a silent town. Silent. He said Shhhhhhhh, Alice. He said Shhhhhhhh, listen to my voice. Look upon this, he said, and know what I am.” She blinked, some of the focus returning to her eyes, but she still appeared dazed and disjointed. “I did look,” she said, “and I do know.”
“I understand,” Bidwell told her, trying to sound as calm and rational as a man at the bitter end of his rope possibly could, “but we must be responsible, and not so eager to spread fear among our fellows.”
“I’m not wantin’ to spread fear!” she answered sharply. “I’m wantin’ to tell the truth of what was shown me! This place is cursed! You know it, I know it, every soul with sense knows it!” She stared directly at one of the candles. The little girl in the other room was still sobbing, and Alice Barrow said with small strength in her voice, “Hush, Melissa. Hush, now.”
Bidwell, again, was lost for words. He found himself gripping his tricorn with a force that made his fingers ache. The distant thunder echoed, nearer now, and sweat was crawling down the back of his neck. This hotbox room seemed to be closing in on him, stealing his breath. He had to get out. He abruptly turned, almost bowling Winston over, and took the two strides to the door.
“I saw his face,” the woman said. Bidwell stopped as if he’d run into a brick wall. “His face,” she repeated. “I saw it. He let me see it.”
Bidwell looked at her, waiting for the rest of what she had to say. She was sitting up, the sheet fallen aside, a terrible shiny anguish in her eyes. “He was wearin’ your face,” she said, with a savage and half-crazed grin. “Like a mask, it was. Wearin’ your face, and showin’ me my children laid dead in the ground.” Her hands came up and covered her mouth, as if she feared she might let loose a cry that would shatter her soul.
“Steady, madam,” Bidwell said, but his voice was shaky. “You must tend to reality, and put aside these visions of the netherworld.”
“We’ll all burn there, if he has his way!” she retorted. “He wants her free, is what he wants! Wants her free, and all of us gone!”
“I’ll hear no more of this.” Bidwell turned away from her again, and got out of the room.
“Wants her free!” the woman shouted. “He won’t let us rest ’til she’s with him!”
Bidwell kept going, out the front door, with Winston following. “Sir! Sir!” Barrow called, and he came out of the house after them. Bidwell paused, trying mightily to display a calm demeanor.
“Beg pardon, sir,” Barrow said. “She meant no disrespect.”
“None taken. Your wife is in a precarious condition.”
“Yes, sir. But…things bein’ as they are, you’ll understand when I tell you we have to leave.”
A fine drizzle was starting to fall from the dark-bellied clouds. Bidwell pushed the tricorn down on his head. “Do as you please, Barrow. I’m not your master.”
“Yes sir.” He licked his lower lip, plucking up the courage to say what was on his mind. “This was a good town, sir. Used to be, before…” He shrugged. “It’s all changed now I’m sorry, but we cain’t stay.”
“Go on, then!” Bidwell’s facade cracked and some of his anger and frustration spilled out like black bile. “No one’s chaining you here! Go on, run like a scared dog with the rest of them! I shall not! By God, I have planted myself in this place and no phantasm shall tear me—”
A bell sounded. A deep-tolling bell. Once, then a second and third time.
It was the voice of the bell at the watchman’s tower on Harmony Street. The bell continued to sound, announcing that the watchman had spied someone coming along the road.
“—shall tear me out!” Bidwell finished, with fierce resolve. He looked toward the main gate, which was kept closed and locked against Indians. New hope blossomed in his heart. “Edward, it must be the judge from Charles Town! Yes! It has to be! Come along!” Without another word to Mason Barrow, Bidwell started off toward the junction of the four streets. “Hurry!” he said to Winston, picking up his pace. The rain was beginning to fall now in earnest, but not even the worst deluge since Noah would’ve kept him from personally welcoming the judge this happy day. The bell’s voice had started a chorus of dogs to barking, and as Bidwell and Winston rushed northward along Harmony Street—one grinning with excitement and the other gasping for breath—a number of mutts chased round and round t
hem as if at the heels of carnival clowns.
By the time they reached the gate, both men were wet with rain and perspiration and were breathing like bellows. A group of a dozen or so residents had emerged from their homes to gather around, as a visitor from the outside was rare indeed. Up in the watchtower, Malcolm Jennings had ceased his pulling on the bell-cord, and two men—Esai Pauling and James Reed—were readying to lift the log that served as the gate’s lock from its latchpost.
“Wait, wait!” Bidwell called, pushing through the onlookers. “Give me room!” He approached the gate and realized he was trembling with anticipation. He looked up at Jennings, who was standing on the tower’s platform at the end of a fifteen-foot-tall ladder. “Are they white men?”
“Yes sir,” Jennings answered. He was a slim drink of water with a shockpate of unruly dark brown hair and perhaps five teeth in his head, but he had the eyes of a hawk.
“Two of ’em. I mean to say…I think they be white.”
Bidwell couldn’t decipher what that was supposed to mean, but neither did he want to tarry at this important moment. “Very well!” he said to Pauling and Reed. “Open it!” The log was lifted and pulled from its latch. Then Reed grasped the two wooden handgrips and drew the gate open.
Bidwell stepped forward, his arms open to embrace his savior. In another second, however, his welcoming advance abruptly stopped.
Two men stood before him: one large with a bald head, one slender with short-cropped black hair. But neither one of them was the man he’d hoped to greet.
He presumed they were white. With all the mud they wore, it was difficult to tell. The larger—and older—had on a mud-covered coat that seemed to be black under its earth daubings. He was barefoot, his skinny legs grimed with muck. The younger man wore only something that might serve as a nightshirt, and he appeared to have recently rolled on the ground in it. He did wear shoes, however filthy they might be.
The mutts were so excited by all the commotion that they began to snarl and bark their lungs out at the two arrivals, who seemed dazed at the appearance of people wearing clean clothing.
“Beggars,” Bidwell said; his voice was quiet, dangerously so. He heard thunder over the wilderness, and thought it must be the sound of God laughing. His welcoming arms fell heavily to his sides. “I have been sent beggars,” he said, louder, and then he began to laugh along with God. Soft at first it was, and then the laughter spiraled out of him, raucous and uncontrollable; it hurt his throat and made his eyes water, and though he ardently wanted to stop—ardently tried to stop—he found he had as much power over this laughter as if he’d been a whirligig spun by the hand of a foolish child. “Beggars!” he shouted through the wheezing. “I…have…run…to admit beggars!”
“Sir,” spoke the larger man, and he took a barefooted step forward. An expression of anger swept across his mud-splattered features. “Sir!”
Bidwell shook his head and kept laughing—there seemed to be some weeping in it as well—and he waved his hand to dismiss the wayfaring jaybird.
Isaac Woodward pulled in a deep breath. If the night of wet hell had not been enough, this crackerjack dandy was here to test his mettle. Well, his mettle broke. He bellowed, “Sir!” in his judicial voice, which was loud and sharp enough to silence for a moment even the yapping dogs. “I am Magistrate Woodward, come from Charles Town!”
Bidwell heard; he gasped, choked on a last fragment of laughter, and then he stood staring with wide and shocked eyes at the half-naked mudpie who called himself a magistrate.
A single thought entered Bidwell’s mind like a hornet’s sting: If they send us anybody, it’ll be a lunatic they plucked from the asylum up there!
He heard a moan, quite close. His eyelids fluttered. The world—rainstorm, voice of God, green wilderness beyond, beggars and magistrates, parasites in the apples: ruin and destruction like the shadows of vulture wings—spun around him. He took a backward step, looking for something to lean against.
There was nothing. He fell onto Harmony Street, his head full of cold gray fog, and there was cradled to sleep.
five
A KNOCK SOUNDED on the door.
“Magistrate? Master Bidwell sent me to tell you the guests are arrivin’.”
“I’ll be there directly,” Woodward answered, recognizing the housekeeper’s Scottish brogue. He recalled that the last time he’d heard a knock on a door, his life had been near snuffed. Of course the mere thought of that wretch wearing the gold-striped waistcoat was enough to make him fumble in buttoning the clean pale blue shirt he had recently put on. “Damn!” he said to his reflection in the oval wall mirror.
“Sir?” Mrs. Nettles inquired beyond the door.
“I said I’d be there directly!” he told her again.
She said, “Yes sir,” and walked with a heavy gait along the corridor to the room Matthew occupied.
Woodward completed the task of buttoning his shirt, which was a bit short at the sleeves and more than a bit tight across the belly. It was among a number of clothes—shirts, trousers, waistcoats, stockings, and shoes—that had been collected for himself and Matthew by their host, once Bidwell’s fainting spell had been overcome and the man made aware of what had happened to their belongings. Then Bidwell, realizing his providence was at hand, had been most gracious in arranging two rooms in his mansion for their use, as well as gathering up the approximately sized clothing for them and making sure they had such necessities as freshly stropped razors and hot water for baths. Woodward had feared he’d never be able to scrub all the mud from his skin, but the last of it had come off by the administrations of a rough sponge and plenty of elbow oil.
He had previously put on a pair of black trousers—again, a shade snug but wearable—and white stockings and a pair of square-toed black shoes. Over his shirt he donned a pearl-gray silk waistcoat, loaned to him from Bidwell’s own wardrobe. He checked his face again in the mirror, lamenting that he would have to meet these new people in a bareheaded and age-spotted condition, as a wig was such a personal item that asking the loan of one was out of the question. But so be it. At least he still had a head upon his neck. If truth be told, he would rather have slept the night away than be the centerpiece at Bidwell’s dinner, as he was still exhausted; but he’d slumbered for three hours after his bath, and that would have to do until he could again stretch himself out on that excellent feather-mattressed four-poster behind him.
As a last precaution he opened his mouth and checked the condition of his teeth. His throat felt somewhat parched but nothing that a draught of rum couldn’t satisfy. Then, smelling of sandalwood soap and lemon-oil shaving lotion, he opened the door of his spacious room and ventured out into the candle-illumed hallway.
Downstairs, he followed the sound of voices into a large wood-panelled room that stood just off the main entrance vestibule. It was arranged for a gathering, the chairs and other furniture shunted aside to afford space for movement, a polite fire burning in a white stone hearth as the rainy night had turned cool. A chandelier made of antlers hung overhead, a dozen candles flickering amid the points. Bidwell was there, wearing another opulent wig and a velvet suit the color of dark port. He was standing with two other gentlemen, and as Woodward entered the room Bidwell interrupted his conversation to say, “Ah, there’s the magistrate now! Sir, how was your rest?”
“Not long enough, I fear,” Woodward admitted. “The rigors of last night haven’t yet been eased.”
“The magistrate tells a remarkable tale!” Bidwell said to the other gentlemen. “It seems he and his scribe were almost murdered at a tavern on their way here! The rogue was evidently well versed in murder, isn’t that right sir?” He lifted his eyebrows, prompting Woodward to take over the story.
“He was. My clerk saved our skins, though that’s all we came away with. By necessity, we abandoned our belongings. Oh, I look forward to the morrow, Mr. Bidwell.”
“The magistrate has asked me to send a party of militia there in order to
regain his worldly goods,” Bidwell explained to the two others. “Also to arrest that man and bring him to justice.”
“I’ll be going, too,” Woodward said. “I wouldn’t miss seeing the expression on Shawcombe’s face when the iron’s slapped on him.”
“Will Shawcombe?” One of the gentlemen—a younger man, perhaps in his early thirties—frowned. “I’ve stopped at his tavern before, on my trips back and forth to Charles Town! I had my suspicions about that man’s character.”
“They were well founded. Furthermore, he murdered the magistrate who was on his way here two weeks ago. Thymon Kingsbury was his name.”
“Let me make introductions,” Bidwell said. “Magistrate Isaac Woodward, this is Nicholas Paine”—he nodded toward the younger man, and Woodward shook Paine’s outstretched hand—“and Elias Garrick.” Woodward grasped Garrick’s hand as well. “Mr. Paine is the captain of our militia. He’ll be leading the expedition to secure Mr. Shawcombe in the morning. Won’t you, Nicholas?”
“My duty,” Paine said, though it was obvious from the glint in his iron-gray eyes that he might resent these plans of arrest being made without his representation. “And my pleasure to serve you, Magistrate.”
“Mr. Garrick is our largest farmholder,” Bidwell went on. “He was also one of the first to cast his lot with me.”
“Yes sir,” Garrick said. “I built my house the very first month.”
“Ah!” Bidwell had glanced toward the room’s entrance. “Here’s your scribe!”
Matthew had just walked in, wearing shoes that pinched his feet. “Good evening, sirs,” he said, and managed a wan smile though he was still dog-tired and in no mood for convivialities. “Pardon my being late.”
“No pardon necessary!” Bidwell motioned him in. “We were hearing about your adventure of last night.”
“I’d have to call it a misadventure,” Matthew said. “Surely not one I’d care to repeat.”
Speaks the Nightbird Page 7
