An Undisturbed Peace (8 page)

“How d'you do? How d'you do?” said the man pressed into service by William Blackclaw, presenting his hand for a good shake. “I'm told you come to our fair capital bearing tidings for a resident of ours, a man we much cherish and wish to protect. Forgive my zeal in wishing to shelter him, but as I say he is much valued here. Ah! I have not introduced myself! I am John Ross, humbly encumbered with the title Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.”

How odd, Abe thought. The man had the look of a European in more than dress. But he understood his title to be equivalent of that of president or prime minister or even king, and so he clasped the chief's hand with two of his own and bent low from the waist over them as a sign of respect.

“Chief John Ross, I am honored to make your acquaintance,” he said. “I am Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar, a simple peddler, who brings tidings from a loved one of this Jacob. I wish him no ill, only blessings. I beg indulgence but my oaths to Mari— Excuse me, the sender of that message has held me sworn to secrecy on her—excuse me, his identity.”

Abe's half-utterance of name and confusion of gender was entirely manufactured in the hope that Jacob's watchmen would be more forthcoming if they thought a woman sent him regards. It worked. The words “Mari” and “her” were but a heartbeat out of his mouth when he noted that the lips of both the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation and those of his clerk of the courts tightened. Aha! he thought. The connection between his Marian and this Jacob of theirs was now unquestionably confirmed by their anxiety. Soon he would know much more, including why the fiction that Jacob was dead had been spread far and wide. But had he gone too far? He hoped the price was not their closing ranks around the refugee. In the next moment, the men recovered themselves, releasing their tension with supercilious smiles.

“Let me send a scout to find him,” Chief John Ross said. “He could be anywhere. Please wait.”

The chief departed and William Blackclaw made efforts to assure his visitor's comfort. He ushered him to a straight-backed chair near a window and brought him a flavored water, although flavored with what Abe could not tell, along with a fancy biscuit on a plate suitable for high tea back home. After he ate and drank he waited, and while he waited Abe viewed the civilized Cherokee world, or at least the world Echota wished him to know. He was most impressed. A certain gentleman introduced as Elias Budinot came in wearing a visor and arm guards that protected his sleeves from the ink that stained his fingers. Apparently, he was the founder and editor of the Cherokee newspaper,
The Phoenix
, published in both English and the new alphabet the man Sequoyah designed. He asked William Blackclaw for a list of pending newsworthy cases due to come before the court and questioned him on those that were. A Major Ridge appeared next, a man dark as a slave, white-haired, with hands raw and red as joints of meat. Like his name, he had the air of a man of battle. He walked flat-footed and heavy, his arms slightly raised as if prepared to strike. He took no notice of Abe until William Blackclaw introduced him in both English and Cherokee ending with the phrase “who seeks our Jacob to deliver a message.” Once that intelligence was out, Major Ridge stared at Abe with eyes on fire, stepping up to close the space between them, stealing the air with his great pulsing nostrils. He spoke in Cherokee and Blackclaw translated. “Our Jacob you seek?” he asked.

Abe nodded. The man leaned in closer yet until Abe could smell the starch of his collar. He said nothing. It took Abe some doing to remain calm in the face of that scrutiny. But he managed.

After the silent inquisitor left, Blackclaw said, “The Ridge has the manner of a man born on campaign,” then he smiled as if this explained everything. Abe began to grow bored and restless. Perhaps an hour or two passed. He left the clerk's office and took Hart to a livery, where he removed his coin from the saddlebags and stuffed it into his money belt securely that it not clink and rattle when he moved. He strolled the streets, popped his head into the tavern, which was empty, and returned to the courthouse. Late in the afternoon, William Blackclaw packed up his desk, grabbed at his watch fob, glanced at the time, and frowned. Once he left, Abe stayed on waiting. Hard as his chair was, he fell asleep.

Some time later, the courthouse door crashed against the inside wall, waking him. Though there was yet an hour before dusk, the room had darkened and was full of shadows. Abe blinked. A young voice spoke out of the darkness. “I will take you to him,” it said in a thin, reedy tone that cut through the fog of Abe's awakening.

It was one of the boys who'd accosted him that morning. His mouth was open, his nostrils flared, his chest heaved, and his clothes were stained with sweat. He shifted his weight from one foot to another impatiently. “Now,” he said.

Outside the courthouse were two more boys he recognized from that morning. One held Hart, who was freshly bridled and under saddle. The other held a blond pony not more than 12 hand high dressed only in a blanket and rope halter. “Your horse has been fed and watered,” the boy holding him said. Hart nuzzled his fist and the boy opened his palm. “He'll bite you if he thinks you've got something there,” Abe warned. The boy shrugged. “He already has.” The one who had awakened him mounted the blond pony while Abe mounted Hart. The other boys handed the first a double sack joined by rope, which he slung over his mount's withers. “It's not a long way,” he explained, “but it's some distance. We need provisions.” And he was off, his pony trotting determinedly down the street with Hart after him at a choppy clip.

They rode north with the mountains at their right hand for hours. It was a starry night with a three-quarter moon that bathed the way in an eerie light, making phantasms of trees and filling the brooks and streams with water sprites. Unseen owls chanted in anapestic hoots. The lad never once turned around to speak to Abe, seemingly dead focused on his role as escort, although at one point he removed his shirt and wrapped it around his head. This went on for two days. By checking his maps and figuring their speed, Abe thought they were somewhere in Cherokee territory by Tennessee. It would take him a week to get home. He began to doubt he was being led anywhere at all. Either the boy or the chief had surely hoodwinked him, he thought.

On the third night, at an hour Abe thought surely they would stop and sleep, they came to a settlement surrounded by wooden walls like those of a stockade. They entered its gates and rode down a street gone derelict, grown over here and there with weeds and bushes, studded with rocks. The street was lined with a row of blazing torches as if travelers requiring their light had been expected. By torchlight, Abe saw a smattering of buildings, not more than five in total, ghostly structures with sagging roofs and crumbled porches. Piles of sharp, shattered brick from toppled chimneys lay along their sides like the unraised quills of porcupines. Only one of the structures was lit from within, and it was there that the boy halted. “You go in now,” he said. As soon as Abe dismounted and tied Hart to an ancient rail, the boy abandoned them, cantering off on his pony away from the torchlight and into the night. Hart shuffled his feet and twisted his neck in their direction. He seemed to want to follow them. Abe patted his poll. “I'll be just inside, my friend. Be patient. I fear the boy has taken us on a dodgy journey. Why would Jacob be here, in this godforsaken place? No doubt we'll be off soon. Though God knows how long it will take for us to find our way again.”

So low were his expectations when he entered the house, it gave him a start to find not pranksters lying in wait to scare him off but rather a well-appointed room with hooked rugs and a tufted settee in front of a fireplace framed in tile. Perpendicular to the settee was a long table draped in linen and surrounded by wooden chairs with scrolled backs. Against one wall was a bookcase with beautifully bound books edged in gold. This was perhaps the strangest sight of all. If he were in a slave's home, who was this slave who could read? Surely not the slave of an Indian chief. His neck craned all about right and left, up and down taking it all in, and he could not help but ask himself aloud, “What is this place?” An answer issued from a doorway that led to an unlit room beyond, an answer unexpectedly voiced in an accent touched by London. “It is my home.”

Abe whipped his head toward the voice. At the doorway, a hulking figure stood, obscured by darkness. Leaning to one side against the doorframe, it looked to be a fairly large man. Abe made out the line of his frock coat, his great boots, and the irregular halo of his wooly head. “Are you Jacob?” Abe asked, trying to keep the excitement from his voice. He held his breath, waiting for a response.

“Yes,” the man said.

Until this point, all day long and all night too, Abe felt he had been held captive in one way or another by every Cherokee he'd met the last few days. His patience had been tried over and over throughout his long wait at the courthouse and longer journey to this moment. Perhaps it was simply a desire to seize control of events, but he decided to keep up the fiction with which he had inaugurated the events that led to his arrival at this island of luxury in the wilderness.

“I have a message for you,” he said. “From one Dark Water, known as Marian of the foothills.”

Immediately on hearing her name, Jacob cried out in a deep, anguished groan and leapt forward into the light. He put his hands on Abe's shoulders and stuck his face close to him. Abe nearly shrieked in fear.

“Who did you say sent you? Who?”

Abe's lips moved but no sound emerged. The man who passionately bore into him was a monster and a puzzle both. He was black-skinned, but a deep magenta gash scored the length of his forehead and two more his left cheek. The right side of his face was smooth and well shaped, his features handsome, even dignified. The eye was brown with flecks of gold, his mouth lush and full, his profile heroic. However the left side of his face was as grotesque as the right was noble. Where his left eye should have been was a twisted purple knot of scar tissue. On the same side, his cheekbone was pushed up and in by unknown calamity. The left side of his head was sparse of hair four inches in from his temple and then the hair sprung forth in clusters of white whorls like those that covered the rest of his head. The left side of his mouth twisted downward, and on his neck above the collar of his frock coat were jagged scars without number. His entire body tilted to the damaged side, which Abe soon discerned was due to a crippling of his left hand and leg, both foreshortened by crooks of the bone. The monster shook Abe's shoulders twice to snap him out of dumb surprise.

“Have you never seen a veteran of battle?” he barked at the peddler. “Have you lost your tongue? Who sent you, I asked. Who!”

Abe swallowed and said, “Dark Water, known to me as Marian of the foothills.” The monster stared at him and then released him. He paced back and forth in an irregular, limping stride. Thump-tap, thump-tap, twirl about, thump-tap, thump-tap. His head bent downward in thought, his good hand grasped the deformed one behind his back.

“It is impossible,” Jacob said at last. “She thinks me dead.”

But he did not contradict him. At last Abe was certain beyond the slightest doubt. Dark Water and Marian were one and the same. Stuck now with his fiction, Abe kept it up.

“Someone must have told her otherwise,” he lied.

The monster Jacob was in his face again.

“Tell me. What is the message?”

Jacob's good eye seared into Abe's with unrelenting demand. He had to come up with something or perhaps be killed. He remembered the first lesson he'd learned with the boys on London's streets. If you want a man in the palm of your hand, look to what he wants most, then give him a version of it. What would an exiled murderer want? He took a chance.

“She has forgiven you,” he said, hoping the man would not ask next what she had forgiven him for.

Jacob rocked on unsteady feet. Clearly, forgiveness was the last thing he expected. He fell backward onto the settee, buried his face in his hands, and softly wept. Touched by the man's surge of emotion, Abe sat next to him, on his good side. “Thank you, young sir,” the man said. He dropped his hands, leaned back on the tufted cushions, looked up to the heavens, then sighed a long, ragged sigh. He wiped his good cheek and eye with his sleeve while Abe watched, dry-mouthed, unable to anticipate what might happen next. Then Jacob said, “We should have a drink.” He got up, left the room, and returned with a bottle of bourbon and two stemmed glasses of cut crystal on a tray. “Here's a habit I ne'er had in the old days,” he said as he poured them each a belt. “How sweet Dark Water would grumble at this! Let's toast her anyway! Here, young sir, let us thank God and cheers to the forgiving heart of my sweet lady!”

Abe did not know if he was more amazed at being given fine liquor in precious glassware by a white-haired, hideous slave who was a murderer and refugee to boot or the fact that the same man had utilized the word “sweet” to describe Marian. The Marian he knew was many admirable things, but sweet was hardly one of them. Still, he clinked glass against glass, and he waited for his chance to interrogate the man—but gently, so as not to rile him.

“And how do you know her?” Jacob asked. One half of his face was alight with wild pleasure and crazed curiosity, the other half quite darkly dead. His tone was cordial, even warm, but Abe feared him. He looked as if he could turn beastly in an instant. Unsure what might set him off, he stretched the truth to breaking yet again.

“I am a peddler and I met her on my route. My horse and I were injured traveling by her cabin this spring and she cared for us both until we were well. I vowed to repay her kindness and what she asked was that I come to Echota and deliver her message, and so I have done, although what this place is, I do not know.”