An Undisturbed Peace (6 page)

“That horse surely loves you,” a feminine voice said from a place in the aisle where a circle of light splintered the dark.

Abe started, mortified to be caught in such an unguarded moment. “Who's there?” he called out to the figure hidden by the glare of a lantern. It was disconcerting to be observed by an unknown entity. A vague unease replaced his embarrassment. “Who's there?” he repeated, this time in a more insistent tone.

“Only me. Hannah.”

The youngest Milner girl stepped out from behind her lantern and approached Hart's stall so he could see her. She wore a plain muslin nightgown and a blue robe over it that she'd failed to close. On her head was a ruffled nightcap, which her thick auburn hair escaped to tumble down past her shoulders. Seeing her apart from her elder sisters, Abe realized that she was not quite as young as he'd thought. Her fair skin had gone a lovely pink, a thin line of moisture glistened above her upper lip, and another graced the shallow scoop of the gown's neckline. Her intentions were perfectly clear. She'd sought him out alone in the night where neither her parents nor her siblings could monitor what might next transpire.

Abe was terrified.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. She shrugged and lifted her gaze to the rafters as if to say,
It's my family's stable not yours, isn't it?
Hanging the lantern on a post in the middle of the aisle, she boldly stepped into the stall with him, standing close. She pet Hart along his topline and asked, without looking at Abe but also without shame, “Do you like me, Abrahan?” What was a young man to say to such a question from the ripe daughter of a valued customer? “Of course I like you, Hannah,” he said, straightening his back and filling his chest with air in the hope that he might seem bigger, more powerful to her, and so inspire a shyness the girl plainly lacked. “You're quite charming.” He coughed and lowered his voice to lend it authority. “But now we must leave Hart to his rest. Come along, child.”

With the stamp of a slippered foot against straw and a raised hand, Hannah stopped him in his tracks. “I am not a child!” she said. Anger heightened her color further, her chest heaved with hot air. Petulance became her, Abe observed, and a place at the root of him ignited ignobly. “Yes, yes, you are not a child. I beg your indulgence, lady, but we must get from here,” he said as rapidly and forcefully as possible.

Once the pair stepped over the stable boy and into the open, Abe was hopeful of escape. Only forty paces more and he would be back in the kitchen, where surely this bold girl could not linger without fear of discovery. Besides, now that she'd had what she wanted from him—a simple admission that he liked her, which was not half as much as he feared—she'd calmed, took his hand in an innocent way, and looked up at the stars. Heaven's lights stretched across the skies like a wedding canopy with not a cloud to dim them. “It's a beautiful night,” she said. “Hard to believe there are creatures as awful as Dark Water creeping about, isn't it?”

Abe sighed heavily. It dismayed him that from the moment he'd arrived on America's shores he'd heard fanciful stories about the Cherokee. Though some had taken up European ways, it did not stop people from calling them primitive pagans, stubbornly resistant to both Bible and sword. He'd heard they were brutal, capable of the most grotesque tortures, and generally lived lives steeped in bestial habits. But having come to know Marian, who had only been helpful and generous to him, he was certain the worst of what he heard about this Dark Water was calumny, similar to the calumnies leveled against the Jews. According to most Europeans, he should have horns and drink the blood of Christian babies. Could the Cherokee dream up worse tortures than those his ancestors had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition? Why should he believe the worst of what Tobias Milner told him of Dark Water?

“Surely she cannot be as dreadful as your father claims, Hannah,” he told the young girl, considering his instruction a kindness.

“Oh, yes, she is. I saw her once.”

“Tell me.”

“My sisters and I went berrying. I was only four at the time and they liked to ignore me, as I annoyed them. They found it a horrid chore whenever Mother said to look out for me or take me with them anywhere. Naturally, I wandered apart, going off our usual paths and into the woods. I was following a rabbit, I think, or it might have been a bird. Anyway, I don't know how long it was, but sooner or later, I came to a huge clearing and it was full of corn and squash and other cultivated plants. In the middle of these fields without farmhouse or shed was a savage Indian woman, tall it seemed to my child's eyes and dressed like a man. She was in a crying fit. Her hair stood up. It was full of twigs. Her face was streaked with dirt. She wailed and danced a terrible dance. Her body keened. Her feet stomped about in a circle. She ripped ears of unripe corn from their stalks and threw them down, wailing louder and louder as she did so. I'm telling you, the sight of her would make you, a grown man, frozen in fear. Just then my sisters called out for me. ‘Hannah! Hannah!' they called, and the madwoman's head snapped up and, I swear, turned all around like a pumpkin twirled upon a stick. Her eyes met mine for an instant, an instant only, but I shall never forget them 'til my dying day. They sent ice through my veins. I took off, running toward my sisters' voices. I ran and I ran, and by the grace of Jesus, I found them. They beat me for wandering off and asked no questions about where I'd been or what I'd seen. I told them nothing because they beat me. Ah! Here we are,” she announced, her tone taking a sudden lighthearted turn when they reached the house. “I'll say good night to you now, Abrahan, and cherish your fondness until we meet again. Godspeed on your journeys, especially the one that brings you back to us.”

The girl stood on her toes and kissed his cheek, then slipped swiftly and silently into the house through the kitchen. Abe followed and happily found himself at the hearth alone. He lay on his shelf, a row of birds on a wire drying above his head, and considered Hannah's story. Summoning his reason, he discounted it as the fevered imaginings of a small child lost in the woods, much colored over time. It made sense to him that this Dark Water was no nightmare creature as both the girl and her father had described but rather a flesh-and-blood woman who'd fallen on tragic times. He pictured a woman much like Marian in a demented misery. Imagining the whys of it agitated his sleep.

He headed west through midafternoon the next day until he was just below the highest mountain peaks, deep in a fertile valley where the ground plateaued and farms far richer than the Milners' dotted the landscape. As he neared Teddy Rupert's plantation, the full ramifications of the Milners' stories sunk through to the core of Abrahan Sassaporta's brain. He wondered with reluctance if the fair object of his most passionate affections might herself be the fearsome Dark Water. Twice now he'd covered the territory of the foothills where Dark Water was said to live and not come across even the slightest sign of any Indian woman on her own except Marian. If they were the same, his beloved one had a most violent history, an infamous one. Farfetched as it seemed, the possibility tormented him. It would explain much about her that he did not yet understand. If her native name was notorious, it would explain why she never told him what it was. If she were a pariah, it would explain the isolation in which she lived, which, he had to acknowledge, might be part and parcel of why she'd embraced the company of a stray peddler who'd happened by her sanctuary. Disturbingly, it would also explain why three rough customers had been searching for her that day. Perhaps, he considered, there was a bounty on her head? He decided he would have no peace until he investigated the matter.

Teddy Rupert and his wife did not receive him. They were elevated types too rarefied to bother with a peddler's errands. Mrs. Rupert's maid, a middle-aged black with an accent from the West Indies who seemed to have learned her airs and gestures from her mistress, stood on a high step at the back of the big house to look down at the wares Abe spread on a cloth over the grass below. She waved a dismissive hand above most of his display, selecting nothing for her mistress and only an ivory comb for herself, which she promptly stuck in her hair without pausing to look in the glass Abe held up for that purpose. She dropped two pennies in his hand while looking off at the row of field hands lining up at the edge of the vegetable garden. Abe studied his palm, incredulous at the meager amount she'd thrown him—and for ivory, ivory! He opened his mouth to protest. “Well, now, they're waiting for you, aren't they,” she said in her singsong voice. She turned to enter the big house, patting the comb in her hair as she did so. “You'll thank me for every copper you get from that crew,” she said with her back to him. “But not for me you'd never get near 'em. I could send them away like that.” She snapped her fingers and closed the door behind her but not before she tossed him a snippet of noblesse oblige. “You may have them come up, rather than move your wares.”

Abe waved those waiting forward and they came, approaching slowly, with some shyness but with eyes steady on the goods spread out before them. Both men and women wore the same yellow cotton shirts, loosely yoked at the neck. The women wore flour-sack skirts and the men pants of the same material. Everyone's feet were bare, everyone's clothes were patched. A year earlier, Abe questioned where they came by the coin to purchase goods from him, and was told that in the hours after their workday ended, Teddy Rupert permitted his slaves to hire themselves out to farmers around, taking a commission from them, of course, but allowing them to keep a percentage of their earnings. If they'd a craftsman's skill in woodcarving or shaping iron, they could make a tidy enough sum, all they'd need to pay for a few luxuries. If they did not, there was always some service they could trade among one another, and so, an economy took hold in the slaves' quarters that was a kind of miniature of that in the free world.

The first to make a selection was a fresh-faced boy nearing manhood whose ebony skin bore no marks or scars, a rare enough condition among the slave class. Like the rest, he squatted at the borders of Abe's display, running just his fingertips over the peddler's wares. Like the rest, he murmured admiration or surprise at this and that. Abe sat on the lowest step of the big house's kitchen steps, watching and listening, lulled by the murmurs and gestures into a kind of sleepiness. He noticed the boy's hands lingered over a porcelain teacup whose saucer had been cracked but not broken during Hart's various falls and charges through the countryside. Violets with tiny green leaves were painted on the side of the cup and in a twined circle around the edges of the saucer. Cracked or not, it was a pretty piece of work. The boy picked up the cup and turned it over several times, seemingly enchanted. He poked the fellow next to him and whispered, “Mama'd plain love this, don't you think, Thomas?” Stirring himself, Abe said, “I can give you that set at a discount, lad, considering the damage done en route.” Heads popped up all around. A dozen black faces stared at him. He lifted his hands, palms turned upward to the heavens. “What is it, people? Why do you regard me so?” One of them, a slight old woman who, thanks to a lifetime of hard labor, possessed huge arms and hands so muscled they looked to belong to some other body—a man's, perhaps, or a working beast's—spoke up. “No one's ever offered us a discount, sir, on goods broken or whole,” she said. “Not even you last year when you come by.”

Abe blushed, his head went down, studying the ground. “I was tightfisted then,” he said. “Now, I'm something different.” While they returned to fondling his goods, selecting only a few for most were too rich even with a discount, he realized that he'd spoken the truth. He was different this year. During his first foray into the foothills, his only concern was knocking off his debt to Uncle Isadore as quickly as possible, and yes, there were occasions he'd made outrageous deals in his own favor, even at the expense of those as poor and miserable as the slaves before him. He felt shamed over his greed now. He could only think it was love that had changed around his head and softened his heart. Yes, he thought, warming to the idea, it was brave, independent Marian who'd made a
mensch
out of him without even trying. Thoughts of Marian always ended lately with the mystery of Dark Water. He decided to find out what the slaves had to say about her. Slaves, he'd been told, always had their ears to the ground. They knew many things their masters did not.

First, he needed to find a slave he could persuade to speak to him openly on the matter. He decided the boy who bought his mother a teacup would do. After the others finished purchasing what they could afford, he asked the boy to help him pack things up and load them on his horse. Once that chore was done, he mentioned to him that he was curious about a person who was much feared in these parts, a certain Dark Water. He needed to know more about her should he find himself in peril as he made his rounds through the countryside. “Why I might give something as valuable as another of those teacups for the right information,” he said. Abe took a teacup out of the pack in which he kept china items wrapped in cloth and unwound its covering slowly at the boy's eye level. “Hmm?” he said, pointedly. “Hmm?”

The boy was thrilled, no doubt, by the chance to earn another teacup adorned with violets. He looked to be about to jump out of his skin over earning treasure for the sake of a little information. His hands shot forward. Abe held the cup just out of his reach.

“Tell me about this Dark Water first.”

“Dark Water is a murderess,” the boy said in a rush, his hands yet outstretched. “She murdered the master's son but covered it all up and made sure her daddy's black slave caught the blame. That man ran for his life to Echota. That would be the in the Cherokee Nation. It's their capital, like Washington is to you all. But also, it's a city of refuge. Do you know what that is, sir? It's a place where low-down murderers can spend their evil lives in each other's company without fear of arrest.”