A Dream of Daring (37 page)

“All the evidence points
to this creature as the only remaining suspect. A slave killing a master is
never
self-defense. No circumstance could ever excuse it. Do you think there’ll be
any planter on that tribunal who won’t feel the same way?” Rachel’s smile mocked
him. “Do you think the verdict on the wench is going to be anything but
guilty? . . . Not to mention the verdict on anyone who
tries to help her flee.”

“You have to do the right
thing. Not for
her
sake, but for yours.” He looked at her grimly.
“You’re crossing a line, Rachel—”

“Really?” She laughed
derisively.

“There’ll be nothing left
of you if you have your sister
killed
for nothing more than to satisfy
your own jealousy and malice.”

She waved her hand
contemptuously. “Why, Tom, sometimes your . . . purity . . . amazes
me.”

“You can’t get away with
your evil scheme. You can’t treat the law as if it were your personal
plaything, to twist and turn to suit
your
ends while it destroys other
people’s lives. You can’t hold yourself above the law.”

“Oh no? What do you think
politics is for?” Her eyes were sinister. “Why do you think Papa spent so much
time planting his seeds in that field? So we could be treated just like anybody
else?”

Her remark left Tom
speechless. Suddenly, he understood the nature of something that had disturbed
him since his return to Greenbriar, something that was never captured in the
untroubled painting of itself that Greenbriar presented to the world. Beneath
the calm waters on the canvas, he felt the town’s undertow, the pernicious current
that swallowed so many victims: the forced shutdown of a factory, the
uncontested assault of a helpless woman on the town’s main street, the laws
against contrary ideas and practices, the school he had to keep a secret, the
schemes to sabotage his invention, and above all, the many whom the town, like
a reckless mother, had abandoned to bondage. It was people like Wiley Barnwell
who sought to control the town’s current, to drive it this way or that to suit
their purposes, and to drown anything that got in their way. But how did they
get away with this? Now, he realized the answer. They had to snare the
law
,
to pull it away from the clear stream of justice and into the murky swamp of
power. Rachel understood and approved of this abduction and was now joining the
ranks of people like her father.

Tom glanced at the
slender figure in the ballroom gown with the untamable hair of a huntress. He
would
not
let the town’s current carry her away.

He turned to the
disoriented mother to make a final plea. “Mrs. Barnwell, this is your chance to
assert your own will. Rachel lives in your home and off your money, so you have
the upper hand. You can shut Rachel up. You can threaten to cut her off. You
can show her
you’re
calling the shots. Tell her you insist on stalling
the sheriff and giving your other daughter a chance to escape. To atone for
Daniel’s death and his daughter’s bondage, you have to act now. You have to
stand up to Rachel!”

Charlotte looked as if
something had snapped in her mind to disengage her from a reality she could not
handle. Her face took on a distant, detached look. “Wiley protected us,” she
said dreamily. “Wiley always made our choices. He knew what to do.”

“I’ll take care of you
now, Mama,” said Rachel soothingly. “I’ll take Papa’s place.”

“Yes, dear. You do what
your daddy would have done. You take care of us now, dear.”

The woman who had lost
her will conceded to the daughter who had lost her character.

“You just let me handle
this. Papa’s gone, but you’re not to worry. I’ll take care of everything now.”

“All right,” said
Charlotte pleasantly. She glanced at Ladybug as if she no longer recognized
her.

Ladybug quietly looked
on, witnessing the final collapse of the two women who formed her family.

Tom turned to her. “We’d
better go,” he said sadly to the daughter who was being abandoned for a second
time.

She nodded.

Just as Ladybug’s eyes
lingered for a moment in sadness, disappointment, and final farewell on the
woman who was her mother, Tom caught sight of something outside the French
doors. He tried not to react, but Rachel, who was watching him and who knew
every nuance of his face, sensed something was amiss. She followed his
glance . . . and smiled.

Through breaks in the oak
trees, Tom noticed a man coming up the winding path toward the mansion, a man
whose perseverance surprised him, a man who had not slept the previous night
but who instead had set out on a lengthy trip following his meeting at the
Crossroads. With ruthless persistence in carrying out his duty, this man had no
doubt already been to Baton Rouge and Indigo Springs and was now here to arrest
Ladybug. Riding up the hill and just minutes away from arriving, accompanied by
a deputy, was Sheriff Robert Duran.

Chapter
30

“Why, that looks like the
sheriff, Mama!” Gleefully, Rachel pointed outside. She hurried toward the door.
“I’ll tell him we’ve got the murderess!”

“Oh no, you won’t!” Tom
caught Rachel in mid-stride.

With one hand he lifted
her up by the waist; with the other, he covered her mouth. She kicked furiously
and tried to bite him, but he held her fast as Ladybug grabbed a few fabric
scraps lying in a basket, then gagged her sister and helped Tom tie her feet
and hands.

Charlotte, still dazed,
put up little fight as Tom and Ladybug dispatched of her in the same fashion.
Tom dropped each of the bundles inside an armoire and closed its doors while
Ladybug undid a few fasteners and peeled off her gown, hoop, and petticoat in
one motion. In a corset and pantalets, she jumped over the small mountain of
fabric at her feet and threw on the slave’s frock.

Tom whispered an
instruction in her ear.

She nodded and said
pointedly, facing the closed armoires with the women inside: “I know a way to
Natchez that’ll keep us off the main road.”

“Shh! Let’s go,” said
Tom.

Ladybug slid her knife
back in its strap on her leg and hastened out of the room, with Tom closing the
door behind them.

He grabbed the gun and
holster from the senator’s desk, and they headed down to the first floor just
as two house servants were arriving to begin the day’s work.

A morning breeze brushed
their faces as the two fugitives shot out the back door and onto the horses
that had been brought there for them.

* * * * *

Tom and Ladybug were
concealed by trees and shrubs along the back roads to Bayou
Redbird . . . until they came near the factory. The road on
the ridge midway up the hillside made the fugitives more visible. On one side
of them was the drop to Cutter’s Creek, its stream racing toward the port town
where the bayou met the great Mississippi. On the other side was the steep
climb to the top of the hill, with its intermittent thickets of foliage and
fields of clover. Tom eyed the openness of their new surroundings warily, eager
to get past this leg of their trip.

He had traveled this road
before, in the opposite direction, when he was leaving the murder scene at the
Crossroads Plantation and heading north to Ruby Manor. Then, he had wanted to
avenge the death of the man he thought had fought to save his invention from a
thief. Now, he was riding alongside the thief and killer, and his all-consuming
goal was to help her escape.

Along the way he had
constantly looked back, but he saw no sign of the sheriff. Surely the Barnwell
women had been discovered and set free, and surely they had told the sheriff
what they overheard when tied up in the armoires—Ladybug’s comment that she and
Tom were headed north to Natchez. Could the sheriff have fallen for the ruse
and gone in the wrong direction?

Up ahead the inventor saw
the turnoff to the switchback he had taken down to the factory. They were close
to town! Would they reach the docks without a snag? Could he dare hope that he
and his precious companion would soon be out of danger?

He turned to her, impatient
to complete the nerve-racking trip, his anxiety increasing with the openness of
the new stretch of road. “Let’s go faster!”

Just when they needed to
make haste, Ladybug got off her horse.

He looked at her in
disbelief. She was standing on the road, ten feet behind him. “What are you
doing? We can’t stop now!”

She had stopped at the
edge of a line of shrubbery and the beginning of a field of clover going up the
hill. “This is where I hauled your invention, over this clover to the top of
the hill. It’s sitting by those trees and shrubs up there.” She pointed. “I
want to take you to it.”

“We don’t have time! I’ll
tell Nick where it is, and he’ll ship it to us. We have to move fast now!”

“For the past three
months I wanted to get the inventor to the invention. Now that I’ve done that,
I have to leave you here with the tractor and go on
alone
.”

He stared at her
incredulously. Slowly, he dismounted and faced her. “What’s this all about?”

“I once read a newspaper
story about a free man who helped a slave escape. He got
ten years
in
prison! You’ll get worse, because I’m wanted
for . . . murder. I can’t do that to you, Tom.”

He studied the figure on
the road, her mouth unsmiling, her gaze direct, her feet firmly planted.
Everything about her said she was adamant.

“Listen to me, Ladybug.
Every bad thing that’s happened to you, from being whipped by Markham to being
sold to Fowler to battling with Barnwell—it all happened because of my
invention. You risked your life to save it. If there were no other reason, obligation
alone would demand that I help you.”

“I free you of that
obligation.”

“I don’t want to be freed
of it.”

“I don’t want to live
knowing I saved the invention but destroyed the inventor.”

“Look, I
choose
to
do this. I
want
to do it. We’ll talk about that later. But right now,
we’ve got to get out of here!”

He walked toward her,
wanting to grab her shoulders and shake some sense into her, then plunk her
back on the horse. Suddenly, she grabbed her knife and pointed it at him.

“Put that away.” He
grinned, walking into the knife.

In a flash, she flicked
her wrists so that the blade was pointing directly at her heart. “Stay back!”
she warned.

His face froze and his
legs stopped in sudden paralysis.

Her hands were steady on
the knife and her voice was even, the signs of a deliberate, rather than
impulsive, act. “Tom, I wanted to go this route not only to show you where I
hid the invention but also to leave you here with it . . .”—her
voice was sad but resolute—“. . . and to say . . . goodbye.”

“
Goodbye?
We’ve
barely said hello.”

“If you leave town aiding
a murderer and a slave, you’ll
never
be able to return. If you come
back, you’ll be arrested. Good grief, Tom, you could be
hanged
. If you
leave here with me now, you’ll lose
everything
: your plantation, your bank,
your whole life. I can’t do that to you. I
won’t
do it.” The knife blade
caught the morning sun and glistened menacingly close to her heart,
highlighting her words.

“Don’t you think I knew
all of what you just said
before
I started this ride with you? I don’t
intend to come back, not ever. I want to start a new life in the
North . . . with
you
.”

“That’s impossible! You
can’t even think of that!” She shook her head decisively. “Who would accept
you?”

“Would
you
?”

She was stunned by the
question.

When she didn’t answer,
he persisted. “If we were in another place and time, free of everybody’s rules,
and we could do as we please, then would you . . . say
yes?”

All of her fervent wishes
for something important to happen in her life seemed to coalesce in her face
and voice as she replied. “If we lived in another place and time, in a world
where the people who stand in the way, thwarting my dreams like monolithic
stone figures, immovable and heartless . . . if we lived in
a world free of them, my answer would be yes
.
” Her face softened and her
smile caressed him. “
Yes
, Tom.”

“But we
can
be
free of them, as soon as we get out of here. We’re already acting free. In case
you haven’t noticed, I’m proposing and you’re accepting.” He looked tenderly at
her and nervously at the countryside around them. “Now, if that’s settled, we
can’t linger here! It’s too dangerous!”

It apparently wasn’t
settled. The knife still pointed at her heart. “What you’re saying can’t be
done.”

“The whole world isn’t
Greenbriar, you know.” The softness that the subject brought to his face
vanished when he saw her hands stiffen around the blade of the knife. The
earnest look in her eyes frightened him.

“Tom, my answer was yes
for another place and time. For this place and time, it’s no! If you help me
escape, it’ll destroy your life
here
. If you stick with me in the North,
it’ll destroy your life
there
. I can’t let any of that happen!”

“But I
won’t
be
destroyed! And you won’t be either.
Giving up
is what’ll destroy us!”

“Every person will shun
you. Every door will be closed to you. You’ll be ruined.”

“There will be places
that accept us. And even if there aren’t, why would we care? No one can stop us
from living as we please. Now’s the chance for
both
of us to break free
and be masters of ourselves.”

“You’ll have parties and
social gatherings to go to. You’ll have business to do, customers to meet,
people to deal with, events to attend, entertaining to do in your life. You
couldn’t have
any
of that with me. If you go any further with me, the
risk, the harm, the danger, and the loss will all be yours.”

“The
happiness
will be mine too.”

His words floated to her
in the morning breeze. She stood facing him on the road, her hair swaying in
the wind in tempo with the shrubs on the hillside behind her. “But Tom—”

“I’m not leaving you,
Ladybug. You’re the only one who saw the glory that I saw in my invention.
You’re the only one who wants to dream new dreams, the only one who isn’t
blinded by pictures that others paint of the world.”

Her dark eyes were filled
with desire and fear. She looked as if she wanted simultaneously to run into
his arms and to run away. Both urges seemed to be vying within her as she
swayed uneasily, her voice now faltering.
“But . . . Tom . . .”

“Your mother betrayed the
man she loved, and she betrayed herself too. She accepted the world others made
for her and spent her life with someone who wasn’t her real choice and who
didn’t make her happy. Is that what you want
me
to do? To betray the
person who’s
my
choice . . . because I’m afraid to stand
up to others and follow my own will?”

She stared at him,
speechless.

“I’m not going to betray
my choice. . . . Are
you
?” he asked.

Her arms lost some of
their tautness, and her fists eased their grip on the knife.

“Well, Ladybug? Do we get
to finish what we started this morning?”

He flashed a radiant,
lusty smile of supreme self-confidence, like a young David who could slay any
Goliath. His proud face and dogged hope slayed her fears. Slowly, the anguish
lost its grip on her face and she smiled.

In surrender to what they
both wanted, the knife dropped to her side. He rushed up to her and seized the
weapon. He crushed her body against him and kissed her hungrily.

She whispered in his
arms: “When I punched you the first time we met, I had to do it. Not because I
hated you, but because you looked at me then the same way you do now. And I
wanted you to look at me like that . . . I wanted you
to. . . . From the
start . . . I . . . wanted . . . you.”
He tasted a sweet, warm mouth that found his with a passion that matched his
own.

Suddenly, he pushed away.
He whirled around and stepped protectively in front of her. He thought he’d
heard something. In the same instant Ladybug also reacted; the shrubs rustled
behind him as she dove into them.

He reached for his gun.
But it was too late.

Up ahead, at the top of
the switchback, a man on horseback appeared, his gun already aimed and cocked.

“Drop it!” said Sheriff
Duran.