The Seekers (62 page)

A door closed. Bare feet thumped, receding.

Jared stared at the bright red smears on his palm and fingertips. The old, overpowering nausea churned his belly.

He bit down on his lower lip, lurched forward, dizzy. He fell across the bed, fighting the sickness that turned his bones watery.

Stand up!
he screamed at himself.
Stand up
—
Blackthorn’s running—!

He pushed up from the bed, sourness in his throat as he saw the red handprint on the gray sheet. He wanted to bury his head, hide from that harrowing redness—

On hands and knees on the bloody bedding, he spoke Amanda’s name aloud. He started to shake; he screamed it.
“Amanda—!”

No physical pain, no mental anguish had ever been worse than the next few seconds. Jared Kent literally drove himself to a standing position again, blundered around the room until he found the pistol, palmed it in a trembling hand—his right. Not bloody, thank God. He couldn’t bear the sight of his left hand. He kept it by his side as he stumbled down the hall toward the staircase.

He shoved past a man and a girl, both naked. How much time had passed? Half a minute? More—?

From the head of the stairs, he saw Blackthorn making for the front entrance. Only Mrs. Cato and her slave boy stood between the man in the nightshirt and escape.

“Stop him!” Jared shouted.

The smash of another bottle testified to a situation still out of control in the parlor. Almost faster than Jared could comprehend, men and women appeared at the parlor entrance. One was the man Jared had seen brandishing the rifle.

The black boy was in Blackthorn’s path. The running man seized the boy’s shoulders, flung him aside—and lost his balance when the boy screeched and hung onto his arm.

Jared was halfway down the stairs. Blackthorn glanced wildly over his shoulder, regained his balance, shot out both hands and ripped the rifle away from the astonished onlooker.

Blackthorn whirled and pointed the rifle at Jared on the stairway.

Already twisting the multiple barrel to its next position, Jared locked it in place in the seconds Blackthorn’s finger squeezed the trigger. Jared’s pistol exploded first.

William Blackthorn shrieked and slapped a hand to his stomach. A black hole marked his nightshirt just above his waist.

He dropped the rifle, tottered forward and slammed on his face, his nightshirt tangled around his buttocks. Mrs. Cato took one look at him and fled for the front door. As Jared stumbled the rest of the way down the stairs, he heard her yelling on the stoop, “Get the soldiers! A man’s been shot—”

If I’ve killed him—
Jared thought.
Oh, God, if I’ve killed him
—

Both hands were bloodied now; how, he didn’t know. He knelt over Blackthorn, rolled him onto his spine. The man’s lips flecked with spittle. He had difficulty focusing his eyes on Jared’s face.

The noise in the parlor had stopped. Even the Tennessean’s voice was stilled as all the people from the parlor crowded the doorway.

“What did you do with Amanda?” Jared said to the dying man.

Blackthorn pressed his hands against his bleeding belly, grimaced.

“Sold her, you son of a bitch.”

“
Sold her!
To who?”

Blackthorn’s tongue licked at the corner of his mouth. “Trappers heading—up the Missouri. Told them she was—my indentured girl—”

Hearing that, Jared almost wept.

“Made—a sweet profit, too—” The green eyes were vicious with hate and pain. “Enough to keep me half a year, until you—”

Blackthorn arched his back, shutting his eyes. “Oh Jesus, you hurt me. I think you killed me—” The eyes opened again, deranged. “They’ll fuck her bloody till they trade her. The better she’s used, the better the savages will like her. Up in—Sioux country—plenty of young bucks and old chiefs take to—a white girl. She’ll bring plenty of pelts—”

Jared seized Blackthorn’s cheeks, marking them with blood. “Tell me the name of the men who bought her!”

Blackthorn’s eyes streamed tears as he arched his back again. When the spasm passed, he worked his lips—

And spat in Jared’s face.

The warm, sticky stuff trickled down the boy’s chin. Blackthorn said through clenched teeth, “You find out who—bought her—”

Like a madman, Jared struck Blackthorn’s jaw, smearing the blood already there.

“Oh God, it hurts me!” Blackthorn cried, rolling from side to side, lifting one shoulder, then the other in an effort to lessen his pain. The tears coursed down his cheeks, mingling with the blood, a pink wetness. “It hurts me, it hurts me something awful—”

Yellow hair hanging over his forehead, Jared watched Blackthorn die. A squad of mounted men clattered up in front of the bordello in response to Mrs. Cato’s alarms. The tall Tennessean who had destroyed the parlor belched and draped an arm over one of the wide-eyed whores.

“Dunno who that boy is,” the man said in a thick voice. “But bless his heart for takin’ the heat off me. Mrs. Cato won’t worry so much about her furniture if there’s a man lyin’ murdered in her hallway—”

Jared was numb. Numb and beaten. On his knees beside. Blackthorn’s corpse, he pressed his bloody palms against his thighs and stared at the rifles of the soldiers rushing through the front door.

G
ENERAL WILLIAM CLARK PERSONALLY
took Jared’s deposition next morning. The boy repeated the story of Amanda’s abduction, and what Blackthorn had told him about selling her to white traders heading for the country of the Sioux tribes. In the afternoon, he was summoned to the governor’s presence again.

“I can find no witnesses to corroborate the alleged sale of your cousin,” Clark told him.

Jared simply looked at the general across the latter’s desk.

Clark seemed disturbed by the young man’s lackluster stare. “See here, Kent! I should think you’d show some interest in this inquiry—”

“I heard what you said, General,” Jared answered in a dull voice.

Still ruffled, Clark said, “I’m trying to establish the facts in the case. You did shoot a man dead.”

“He was going to shoot me. And he deserved it.”

“That doesn’t condone it. I remind you, the rifle Black or Blackthorn aimed was empty.”

“I had no way of knowing that. I’m just sorry he died before he told me the names of the men who bought Amanda.”

“If anyone really did. I’ve had investigators at the fur houses of Manuel Lisa and the Chouteaus all morning. Those gentlemen know virtually everything that happens in the local trade. They’ve heard nothing about a girl, or a transaction, such as you describe. However—”

“I doubt if Blackthorn would have advertised the transaction, General.”

“That’s true. You didn’t permit me to finish.”

“I’m sorry,” Jared said, without feeling.

“I was about to say I do have evidence that a girl resembling your cousin was in St. Louis.”

Jared’s head lifted abruptly. “What evidence?”

“The statement of Mrs. Cato. She said Black had a girl with him for a short time after his arrival. A quite well-developed and handsome young girl. She was poorly dressed, and showed signs of having been injured or abused—bruises, that sort of thing. She seemed to obey the dead man without question. Mrs. Cato got the impression she was mortally afraid of him.”

“Did you find out whether the girl was wearing a cordage bracelet?”

“She was. Mrs. Cato noticed it because tarred rope is hardly what any woman would consider fashionable.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Cato wonder about Blackthorn having a young girl with him?”

“In her—ah—profession, the lady is not greatly concerned about the history or the morals of her guests. She accepted the man’s story that the girl was a relative, and she thought no more about it when the girl disappeared in a few days. So Mrs. Cato’s deposition does give credence to yours—”

Again Jared said nothing. He stared at his hands. So much had been destroyed so quickly—

The firm in Boston belonged to the Stovalls—if they’d kept it. Perhaps Kent and Son already had another name, another owner. The objects from the mantel—the tea bottle, the French sword, the Kentucky rifle—had probably been sold for junk. He thanked God his uncle Gilbert was in his grave, and couldn’t see the straits into which the family had fallen—

Because of me.

The destruction he’d brought down on the Kents only confirmed the feelings about himself that he’d had for so many years. Aunt Harriet always said he was made of the same flawed clay as his mother and father. He believed it today more than he ever had before.

He’d come into the west just as his father had, and the land had defeated him—and that, too, held no surprise.

Now there was the news about Amanda. It should have cheered him. It didn’t. He suspected she was dead. Either at someone else’s hand, or by her own.

He could hardly bear to think of her alive in the circumstances Blackthorn had described. He wished she were with him, if only for a moment, so he could tell her how sorry he was for what he had done to her—

“Kent?”

He glanced up. “Forgive me, General. My mind wanders. You were saying—?”

“I was saying that Black is no loss to the community. But if the law takes that posture, there’s no reason to have law. Nor can I permit you to go scot-free, regardless of how much provocation you had in attacking the man you killed.”

In a tired voice, Jared began, “It was self-defense—”

“The magistrate who hears your case will certainly take that into account. After you’ve served your sentence for disturbing the peace, I’ll grant you an extra ten days’ grace. In that time, you’re to remove yourself from St. Louis. Don’t come back.”

“How long will I be in prison?”

“A minimum of ninety days—you find something amusing, Mr. Kent?”

Jared’s mouth lost its bitter curl. “No, sir. I was just thinking it might as well be ninety years.”

Clark was thrown off guard; he moderated his tone. “Come, you act as if your life’s over—”

“Yes, sir. That’s exactly how it feels.”

The stifling summer dragged on. Jared grew to hate the small, gloomy cell in which he was confined. The jailer allowed him the Bible Mrs. Jackson had given him, but he never opened it. His only reading matter was an occasional copy of the
Missouri Gazette,
which usually contained dismal news from the east.

A United States naval victory on Lake Champlain and the resulting British retreat into Canada were more than offset by the devastating success of another enemy probe into the Potomac district. In late August, the British marched on Washington virtually unopposed. The president and his cabinet had already fled when the enemy arrived, but the capitol was torched. So were the new White House and all of the departmental buildings save the patent office. Several private homes went up in flames along with the Navy Yard, which was deliberately destroyed to prevent it from falling into British hands.

A violent storm and the mustering of fresh American troops combined to push the enemy out of the city by the first of September. But the secretary of war was forced to resign because of the debacle. He was replaced by Monroe, who also held the post of secretary of state.

In mid-September, a British thrust at Baltimore was repulsed. Fort McHenry withstood an all-night pounding by the cannons of an enemy flotilla. Witnessing the bombardment from one of the British vessels on which he was being held prisoner, a young lawyer and sometime poet, a Mr. Key, had been moved by the sight of fire in the heavens: the British employed the spectacular but relatively harmless Congreve rockets during the bombardment. Key wrote a patriotic poem about the successful resistance by the Americans in the fort. Jared read the poem’s opening lines—
“O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light
—” with the same interest he’d have had if he’d been perusing a description of events on another planet.

The conflict was dragging on too long for both sides. Britain was occupied with a renewed Napoleonic threat in Europe. The Americans were realizing that the war had perhaps been ill-advised in the first place. Even western papers such as the
Missouri Gazette
were expressing hope that the commissioners at Ghent might reach a peace accord by year’s end.

It didn’t matter; nothing mattered. Jared was consumed by his sense of failure—

Failure to deal with Stovall.

Failure to protect Amanda.

Failure to make Blackthorn reveal the names of the men to whom he’d sold the girl.

Worst of all—the cause, the wellspring of all the other failures—was his own seeming failure to be something other than what his father had been, to find the strength to overcome the taint he carried.

For one brief moment at Mrs. Cato’s, he thought he might have mastered some of his own weakness. When he’d slashed his cheek on the broken window, and seen blood, and felt the familiar sickness, he’d still been able to function. He had
willed
himself to function.

Hardly conscious of that small victory at the time, he had thought of it occasionally since. But he found it laughably, pathetically insignificant in the light of everything else that had happened.

Night after night, he lay awake on the pallet in his cell, condemning himself and praying to a God with whom he wasn’t on very familiar terms. A conviction that his cousin was dead never left him—because he saw no way that she could survive. But if by some perverse chance he was wrong, and she had indeed been bartered to an Indian, he prayed she’d find a means for suicide. She had already suffered more than many women did in a lifetime.

He thought about suicide for himself, too. Somehow he lacked the courage. Count that one more failure.

Other than the Bible, the only personal belonging he kept with him in his cell was the worn green ribbon and medal, the fob given him by Uncle Gilbert. He often stared at the Latin inscription and the tea-bottle design, alternately cursing himself for the way he’d besmirched the statement of his grandfather’s purpose, and pondering whether the medal might unlock some answer about what he must do next. It didn’t.