by John Jakes
“Stupid pious bitch, I’ll deal with him as I want,” Windom shouted. He cuffed her on the side of the head.
She staggered, slammed her shoulder hard against the mantel, cried out.
The pain somehow destroyed her allegiance to the Savior. Her eyes flew open wide. She spied the fallen poker, snatched it, and raised it to threaten her husband. It was a pathetic gesture, but Windom chose to see it as one of great menace. He turned on her.
Frightened and angry, Joseph grappled with his stepfather. Windom beat him off. Bess, terrified, fumbled with the poker, unable to get a firm grip on it. Windom easily ripped it from her hand and, while Joseph watched, used it to hit her twice on the temple. She sprawled on her face with a thread of blood running down her cheek.
Joseph stared at her for one moment, then in uncontrolled rage lunged for the poker. Windom threw it against the wall. Joseph ran to the hearth, seized the kettle chain, flung the hot stew over Windom, who screamed and pressed his hands to his scalded eyes.
Joseph’s hands were burned but he hardly felt it. He raised the empty kettle and smashed it against Windom’s head. When Windom fell, his cries subsiding, Joseph wrapped the chain around his stepfather’s neck and pulled until it was half embedded in the flesh. Windom finally stopped kicking and lay still.
Joseph ran out into the mist and vomited. His palms started to burn. He began to realize what he’d done. He wanted to break down and cry, to run away, but he didn’t. He forced himself toward the open door. Once inside the cottage again, he saw his mother’s back moving slowly. She was alive!
After many attempts, he got her on her feet. She muttered incoherently and laughed occasionally. He put a shawl around her and guided her down the misty lanes to Giles Hazard’s cottage, two miles distant. On the way she faltered several times, but his urgent pleas kept her going.
Giles came grumping to the cottage door, a candle illuminating his face. Moments later, he helped Bess to his still-warm truckle bed. He examined her, then stood back, fingering his chin.
“I’ll run for a doctor,” Joseph said. “Where do I find him?”
Old Giles couldn’t conceal his worry. “She’s too badly hurt for a doctor to do any good.”
The news stunned the boy, bringing tears at last. “That can’t be.”
“Look at her! She’s barely breathing. As for the barber who serves this district, he’s illiterate. He can do nothing for her, and he’ll only ask questions about the cause of her injuries.”
The statement itself was a kind of question; Joseph had only blurted that Windom had hit her. “All we can do is wait,” Giles concluded, rubbing an eye.
“And pray to Jesus.”
Joseph said it out of desperation. Giles put a kettle on the fire. Joseph sank to his knees by the bed, folded his hands, and prayed with every bit of his being.
There was no sign that the prayer was heard. Bess Windom’s breathing grew slower, feebler, although she survived until the river mist floating outside the cottage began to glow with light. Gently, Giles touched Joseph’s shoulder, jogged him awake.
“Sit by the fire,” Giles said, pulling a coverlet across Bess’s battered, peaceful face. “It’s all over with her. She’s gone to find her Jesus, and nothing else can be done. It’s different with you. What happens to you depends on whether you’re caught.” Giles drew a breath. “Your stepfather’s dead, isn’t he?”
The boy nodded.
“I thought so. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come here. He’d have tended her.”
All of Joseph’s hurt went into a single cry. “I’m glad I killed him!”
“I’m sure you are. But the fact is you’re a murderer. Archer won’t employ a murderer, and I can’t say I blame him. Still—”
His voice softened; his pretense of sternness had been a failure. “I don’t want to see you hanged or quartered, either. What can we do?” He started pacing. “They’ll search for Joseph Moffat, won’t they? All right, you’ll be someone else.”
The decision made, Giles inscribed a paper with a statement that the bearer, Joseph Hazard, a nephew, was on an errand of family business. After a moment’s hesitation, Giles signed his own name, adding the words Uncle & Guardian and several flourishes beneath; the flourishes somehow lent it authenticity.
Giles promised to bury Bess in a Christian manner and insisted the boy could not afford to stay and help. Then, giving him two shillings and some bread tied in a kerchief, instructions about avoiding main roads, and finally a long, fatherly hug, Giles sent a bewildered Joseph Moffat out of the door and into the mist-grayed hills.
On a lonely road in Gloucestershire, something made Joseph pause and look up. The night was flawlessly clear, with thousands of stars alight. Eastward, above the roofline of a dairy barn, he saw a streak of white. Something afire, dropping very fast toward the earth.
Iron. God was sending iron to man, just as Giles had said. The boy could understand why ironmasters were so proud of their calling. It was a trade born and blessed in heaven.
Awed, Joseph watched until the white streak vanished near the horizon. He imagined a huge chunk of star iron smoldering in a fresh crater somewhere. There could be no more potent material in creation. No wonder wars were won, and distances conquered, by machines and equipment of iron.
From that moment, the direction of his life was never in doubt.
Joseph pressed on toward the port of Bristol on the Avon. He was not stopped once, nor required to produce the paper Giles had prepared so carefully. Showed you how much the world valued Thad Windom, didn’t it?
Joseph mourned the loss of his mother but felt little regret over having slain his stepfather. He had done what had to be done; vengeance had come as a companion to necessity.
On the journey he found himself thinking strange new thoughts, many of them about religion. He could never subscribe to his dead mother’s faith in a gentle, forgiving, and apparently powerless Christ. But he discovered a new sympathy with the Old Testament. Bess had read him many stories about strong, brave men who didn’t flinch from bold action. He felt a strengthening kinship with them, and with their God, as he trudged through fields and forests to the great port of western England.
After several false starts, he located a ship’s master who soon would be sailing for the New World—a part of the globe in which many Englishmen were finding second chances these days. The man was peg-legged Captain Smollet, his vessel the Gull of Portsmouth. The captain’s proposition was straightforward.
“You sign a document indenturing yourself to me. In return, I’ll provide you with passage and keep while you’re aboard. We’ll be calling at Bridgetown, Barbados, then going on to the colonies in America. They need skilled workers there. If you know ironworking as well as you claim, I should have no trouble placing you.”
The captain peered at Joseph over the rim of the ale pot he was just lifting to his mouth. The boy felt no resentment of the captain’s hard bargain; indeed, he rather admired it. A man determined to succeed always had to make difficult choices, he was discovering. So it had been with the heroes of the Old Testament. Abraham. Moses. If he was to be like any man, it would be one of them.
“Well, Hazard, what’s your answer?”
“You haven’t told me how long I’ll be a servant.”
Captain Smollet grinned admiringly. “Some are so lathered with excitement—or so guilty over past crimes”—Joseph kept his face absolutely calm, ignoring the probe—”they clean forget to ask till we’re on our way down the estuary.” He eyed the contents of his drinking pot. “The indenture is seven years.”
At first Joseph wanted to shout no. But he didn’t. Smollet took his silence for refusal, shrugged, and rose, throwing coins on the soiled table.
Being bound to another man as a slave for seven years wouldn’t be easy, Joseph thought. Yet he could use that time wisely and profitably. Educate himself, both generally, as Giles had urged, and in every aspect of his chosen trade. After seven years he would
be a free man, in a new land where there was a need for ironmasters, and where no one had ever heard of Thad Windom.
At the inn door, Captain Smollet stopped when he heard, “I’ll sign.”
Rain was falling that evening when Joseph hurried along a wharf toward the Gull of Portsmouth. Light glowed in the windows of the captain’s quarters at the stern. How bright and inviting it looked. In that cabin Joseph would shortly make his mark on the articles of indenture.
He smiled, thinking of Smollet. What a rogue. He had asked only a couple of perfunctory questions about Joseph’s background. Fearing the offer of indenture might be withdrawn, Joseph had rashly shown the document Giles had provided. Smollet had scanned it and chuckled as he handed it back.
“A family errand. Taking you all the way to the colonies. Fancy that.”
Their eyes met. Smollet knew the boy was on the run and didn’t care. Joseph admired the captain’s ruthless enterprise. He liked him more than ever.
Seven years wasn’t so long. Not so long at all.
That thought in mind, he paused at a stair leading down to the water. He descended half way, clung to the slimy wood with one hand, and dipped his other in the salty water once, twice, three times. He did the same with his other hand. If there was any symbolic blood on him, it was gone now. He was making a new beginning.
He examined his dripping fingers by the light of the nearby ship’s lanterns. He laughed aloud. Earlier there had been some charcoal dust still embedded beneath his nails. It too was gone.
He whistled as he stepped on to the gangplank. He went aboard Smollet’s vessel with rising spirits. About to put himself in bondage for seven years, he faced the prospect with a sharp new sense of personal freedom.
In the New World things were going to be different for Joseph Mof—no, Joseph Hazard. God would make it happen. His God, growing more familiar and companionable by the hour, was a Deity who favored the brave man who didn’t shrink from the hard action.
Joseph and his God had become well acquainted during the past few days. They were close now; friends.
1687: The Aristocrat
In the late spring of the following year, across the ocean in the royal colony of Carolina, someone else dreamed of making a fortune.
For him the ambition amounted to a lust. He had known what it was like to be rich, powerful, secure. But the security had proved an illusion, and the wealth and power had been swept away like the shining beach sand down by Charles Town when a storm tide attacked it.
Charles de Main was thirty. He and his beautiful wife, Jeanne, had been in the colony two years. Carolina itself had been settled by Europeans for only seventeen years; all of its two or three thousand white citizens were, relatively speaking, newcomers.
Among the colonists was a group of adventurers originally from Barbados. These men had settled in the village of Charles Town and had quickly assumed power under the Lords Proprietors, the English nobles who had started the colony as a financial venture. These same Barbadians had already mantled themselves in superiority.
Charles considered the Barbadians impractical fools. They dreamed of an agricultural paradise where they could grow rich raising silk, sugar, tobacco, cotton. Charles was more realistic. Carolina’s coastal lowlands were too wet for conventional farming. Its summers were pestilential; only the very hardy survived in them. Currently the colony’s prosperity—such as it was—had three sources: Pelts like those that passed through Charles’s trading station. Grazing cattle. And the kind of wealth he was just now engaged in bringing down from the back country at the point of a gun.
Indians destined for slavery.
It could not be said that Charles de Main had come to this land of coastal swamps and back country sand hills because of its physical or commercial attractions. He and Jeanne had fled here from the valley of the Loire, where Charles had been born the fourteenth duke of his line.
In his twentieth year he had married and begun to assume the management of his family’s vineyards. For a few years the life of the young couple had been idyllic, except perhaps for the troubling fact that Jeanne produced no children. But then the religious faith traditional in their families for several generations had brought their ruin.
When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the uneasy truce between French Catholics and Protestants ended. Like all the other fiercely proud Huguenots—for proud, some Frenchmen substituted the word treasonous—Charles de Main and his wife were threatened by the purges that soon ravaged their homeland. Once the terror began, it became a serious offense to attempt to leave the country. Just like hundreds of other Huguenots, however, the de Mains made plans to do exactly that.
In the village near the great round-towered Château de Main there was a certain lawyer named Emilion who practiced bigotry and thievery behind a pious expression. He knew the profits to be made in England from the sale of the château’s rich reds and tart whites. He coveted the de Main vineyards, and to get them he paid a groom to inform upon his master and mistress.
Emilion felt the de Mains might try to flee, and before long the groom saw signs of preparations. One word from him to the proper official was all it took. The night the de Mains left, their coach was no more than half a kilometer from the château when the authorities came galloping up behind it.
Charles put his arm around his frightened wife and whispered words of affection to distract her from thinking of what they would face following their arrest—the inquisition by means of which heretical Protestants were forced to recant. Another Huguenot in the neighborhood, caught while dashing to the coast, had died when the inquisitor’s blade slipped and cut off his testicles.
The young nobleman and his wife were kept in prison seventeen days. They were questioned with the aid of knives and hot irons. Neither broke; not outwardly, at least, although toward the end Jeanne alternately screamed and wept without stopping.
They would have died in the dungeon at Chalonnes had it not been for Charles’s uncle in Paris. He was a clever politician who could change his style of worship as effortlessly as he changed satin robes. He knew a few important men whose Catholic principles did not extend to their purses. Bribes were paid; a certain postern was left unlocked. Charles and Jeanne de Main escaped from Nantes in the bilge of a rickety fishing boat that almost capsized in the furious waters of the Channel.
In London other Huguenot refugees pointed them toward Carolina. The colony’s professed religious tolerance made it a likely haven for those of their faith. Months later, depressed by the heat and the arrogance he found after he crossed the ocean, the young nobleman wondered whether the journey—or life itself—was worth the effort. Charles Town was not necessarily lucky for those named Charles. Or so he thought then.
He had simplified his last name to Main to demonstrate that he was making a new start in a new land. Soon his pessimism vanished. In Carolina he was free of many of the rules that had constrained him when he bore a title. He took advantage of that.
He had survived torture—his scarred legs and chest testified to it—and he would survive poverty, too. The greedy little lawyer had stolen his lands and his château, but he would own other land and build another great house. Or his descendants would. Provided Jeanne’s body ever yielded him an heir.
Poor Jeanne. Today her gray eyes were as clear and lovely as ever. But a narrow white streak running all the way through her yellow hair betrayed her suffering in prison. So did her sweet-little-girl’s smile, and the way she hummed and laughed in response to any serious question. She recognized her husband sometimes, but she thought they were still living in France. Her mind hadn’t survived as successfully as her body.
The ruin of Jeanne’s mind hadn’t dampened her passion. But their couplings produced no children. That and his own advancing age, kept Charles sleepless many a night. At thirty a man was growing old; at forty he could say he had lived a long life.
The effort of establishing his little trading station at a ford on the Coop
er River above Charles Town had changed him physically, too. He no longer resembled an aristocrat. He was still tall, and slightly stooped because of his height. But poverty, work, and strain had blurred his good looks.
His smile, once quick and gay, looked false, even cruel, when it appeared, which was seldom. Gone was any trace of a prideful bearing. He slouched on the back of the little marsh pony that labored under his weight. He had become almost a brutish parody of his former self.
Today, in fact, he hardly resembled a white man. His hair, brown as his eyes, hung to the middle of his back, tied with a scrap of red rag. His skin was as brown as that of any of the eight shackled and half-clothed human beings staggering along in a file behind him. Although the spring morning was intensely hot, Charles wore full-length trousers of deerskin and a jerkin of old, cracked leather. In his beaded belt were two loaded pistols and two knives. A musket rested across his knees. A slaver learned to be cautious and a good shot.
This was the fourth expedition Charles had made to the Cherokee towns in the foothills of the mountains. Without the occasional sale of some Indians he would have failed as a trader. The little post by the river simply didn’t bring in enough income, even though the Charles Town factors took all the furs he could collect from members of the very same tribes he raided on other occasions.
The seven men and one woman trudging in chains were all in their twenties. Handsome, brown people with wiry limbs and the most beautiful black hair he had ever seen. The girl was especially attractive, he thought. She had a fine bosom. He had earlier noticed that she stared at him frequently. No doubt her large, placid eyes concealed a desire to cut his throat.
Charles rode with his back to the captives because he had an assistant, as heavily armed as he, at the rear of the file. His helper was a hulking half-breed apparently sired by some Spaniard who had wandered up from the Floridas. He was a Yamasee Indian from the northern camps of that tribe. He had come to the trading station a year ago, already knowing a bit of French. He claimed to have no ambition other than to make war on the tribes that were his enemies.
