“I don’t know,” I said, keeping a firm grip on my nerves—and the rock. My lip was still tender, puffed from the blow he had dealt me, and I had to form the words carefully. “I don’t know where we are.”
This was true, though I could have made a reasonable guess. We had traveled for a few hours, mostly upward, and the trees nearby were fir and balsam; I could smell their resin, sharp and clean. We were on the upper slopes, and probably near a small pass that crossed the shoulder of the mountain.
“Kill her,” urged one of the others. “She’s no good to us, and if Fraser finds her with us—”
“Shut your face!” Hodge rounded on the speaker with such violence that the man, much larger, stepped back involuntarily. That threat disposed of, Hodge ignored him and seized me by the arm.
“Don’t play coy with me, woman. You’ll tell me what I want to know.” He didn’t bother with the “or else”—something cold passed across the top of my breast, and the hot sting of the cut followed a second later, as blood began to bloom from it.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I said, more from surprise than pain. I jerked my arm out of his grasp. “I told you, I don’t even know where we are, you idiot! How do you expect me to tell you where anything else is?”
He blinked, startled, and brought the knife up by reflex, wary, as though he thought I might attack him. Realizing that I wasn’t about to, he scowled at me.
“I’ll tell you what I do know,” I said, and was distantly pleased to hear that my voice was sharp and steady. “The whisky cache is about half a mile from the malting shed, roughly northwest. It’s in a cave, well-hidden. I could take you there—if we began from the spring where you took me—but that’s all I can tell you in the way of direction.”
This was true, too. I could find it easily enough—but to give directions? “Go through a gap in the brush a little way, until you see the cluster of oak where Brianna shot a possum, bear left to a squarish rock with a bunch of adder’s-tongue growing over it. . . .” The fact that the need for my services as a guide was probably all that kept them from killing me on the spot was, of course, a secondary consideration.
It was a very shallow cut; I wasn’t bleeding badly at all. My face and hands were ice-cold, though, and small flashing lights came and went at the edges of my vision. Nothing was keeping me upright save a vague conviction that if it came to that, I preferred to die on my feet.
“I tell you, Hodge, you don’t want nothing to do with that one—nothing.” A larger man had joined the small group round me. He leaned over Hodge’s shoulder, looking at me, and nodded. They were all black in the shadow, but this man had a voice tinged with the lilt of Africa—an ex-slave, or perhaps a slave-trader. “That woman—I hear about her. She is a conjure woman. I know them. They are like serpents, conjure wives. You don’t touch that one, hear me? She will curse you!”
I managed to give a rather nasty-sounding laugh in answer to this, and the man closest to me took a half-step back. I was vaguely surprised; where had that come from?
But I was breathing better now, and the flashing lights were gone.
The tall man stretched his neck, seeing the dark line of blood on my shift.
“You draw her blood? Damn you, Hodge, you done it now.” There was a distinct note of alarm in his voice, and he drew back a little, making some sort of sign toward me with one hand.
Without the slightest notion as to what moved me to do it, I dropped the rock, ran the fingers of my right hand across the cut, and in one swift motion, reached out and drew them down the thin man’s cheek. I repeated the nasty laugh.
“Curse, is it?” I said. “How’s this? Touch me again, and you’ll die within twenty-four hours.”
The streaks of blood showed dark on the white of his face. He was close enough that I could smell the sourness of his breath, and see the fury gather on his face.
What on earth do you think you are doing, Beauchamp? I thought, utterly surprised at myself. Hodge drew back his fist to strike me, but the large man caught him by the wrist with a cry of fear.
“Don’t you do that! You will kill us all!”
“I’ll friggin’ kill you right now, arsebite!”
Hodge was still holding the knife in his other hand; he stabbed awkwardly at the larger man, grunting with rage. The big man gasped at the impact, but wasn’t badly stricken—he wrenched at the wrist he held and Hodge gave a high, squealing cry, like a rabbit seized by a fox.
Then the others were all in it, pushing and shouting, grappling for weapons. I turned and ran, but got no more than a few steps before one of them grabbed me, flinging his arms round me and jerking me hard against himself.
“You’re not going anywhere, lady,” he said, panting in my ear.
I wasn’t. He was no taller than I, but a good deal stronger. I lunged against his grip, but he had both arms wrapped tight around me, and squeezed tighter. I stood stiff then, heart pounding with anger and fear, not wanting to give him an excuse to maul me. He was excited; I could feel his heart pounding, too, and smell the reek of fresh sweat over the fetor of stale clothes and body.
I couldn’t see what was going on, but I didn’t think they were fighting so much as merely shouting at each other now. My captor shifted his weight and cleared his throat.
“Ahh . . . where do you come from, ma’am?” he asked, quite politely.
“What?” I said, no end startled. “Come from? Er . . . ah . . . England. Oxfordshire, originally. Then Boston.”
“Oh? I’m from the north myself.”
I repressed the automatic urge to reply, “Pleased to meet you,” since I wasn’t, and the conversation languished.
The fight had stopped, abruptly as it had started. With a lot of token snarling and growling, the rest of them backed down in the face of Hodge’s bellowed assertions that he was in command here, and they’d bleedin’ well do as he said or take the consequences.
“He means it, too,” muttered my captor, still pressing me firmly to his filthy bosom. “You don’t want to cross him, lady, believe me.”
“Hmph,” I said, though I assumed the advice was well-meant. I had been hoping the conflict would be noisy and prolonged, thus increasing the chances of Jamie catching up to us.
“And where is this Hodge from, speaking of origins?” I asked. He still seemed remarkably familiar to me; I was sure I had seen him somewhere—but where?
“Hodgepile? Ahhh . . . England, I reckon,” said the young man gripping me. He sounded surprised. “Don’t he sound like it?”
Hodge? Hodgepile? That rang a bell, certainly, but . . .
There was a good deal of muttering and milling round, but in much too little time, we were off again. This time, thank God, I was allowed to ride astride, though my hands were tied and bound to the saddle.
We moved very slowly; there was a trail of sorts, but even with the faint light shed by a rising moon, the going was difficult. Hodgepile no longer led the horse I rode; the young man who had recaptured me held the bridle, tugging and coaxing the increasingly reluctant horse through the thickets of brush. I could glimpse him now and then, slender, with thick, wild hair that hung past his shoulders and rendered him lion-maned in silhouette.
The threat of immediate death had receded a little, but my stomach was still knotted and the muscles of my back stiff with apprehension. Hodgepile had his way for the moment, but there had been no real agreement among the men; one of those in favor of killing me and leaving my corpse for the skunks and weasels might easily decide to put a quick end to the controversy with a lunge out of the dark.
I could hear Hodgepile’s voice, sharp and hectoring, somewhere up ahead. He seemed to be passing up and down the column, bullying, nagging, nipping like a sheepdog, trying to keep his flock on the move.
They were moving, though it was clear even to me that the horses were tired. The one I rode was shambling, jerking her head with irritation. God knew where the marauders had come from, or how long they had traveled before reaching the whisky clearing. The men were slowing, too, a gradual fog of fatigue settling on them as the adrenaline of flight and conflict receded. I could feel lassitude stealing upon me, too, and fought against it, struggling to stay alert.
It was still early autumn, but I was wearing only my shift and stays, and we were high enough that the air chilled rapidly after dark. I shivered constantly, and the cut on my chest burned as the tiny muscles flexed beneath the skin. It wasn’t at all serious, but what if it became infected? I could only hope that I would live long enough for that to be a problem.
Hard as I tried, I could not keep from thinking of Marsali, nor keep my mind from making medical speculations, envisioning everything from concussion with intracranial swelling to burns with smoke inhalation. I could do something—perhaps even an emergency C-section—if I were there. No one else could.
I clenched my hands hard on the edge of the saddle, straining against the rope that bound them. I needed to be there!
But I was not, and might never be.
The quarreling and muttering had all but ceased as the darkness of the forest closed in upon us, but a lingering sense of unease lay heavy on the group. In part, I thought it was apprehension and fear of pursuit, but in much greater part, a sense of internal discord. The fight had not been settled, merely postponed to a more convenient season. A sense of simmering conflict was sharp in the air.
A conflict focused squarely on me. Unable to see clearly during the argument, I couldn’t be sure which men held which opinions, but the division was clear: one party, headed by Hodgepile, was in favor of keeping me alive, at least long enough to lead them to the whisky. A second group was for cutting their losses, and my throat. And a minority opinion, voiced by the gentleman with the African speech, was for turning me loose, the sooner the better.
Obviously, it would behoove me to cultivate this gentleman, and try to turn his beliefs to my advantage. How? I’d made a start by cursing Hodgepile—and I was still quite startled that I’d done that. I didn’t think it would be advisable to start cursing them wholesale, though—ruin the effect.
I shifted in the saddle, which was beginning to chafe me badly. This wasn’t the first time I’d had men recoil from me in fear of what they thought I was. Superstitious fear could be an effective weapon—but it was a very dangerous one to use. If I truly frightened them, they’d kill me without a moment’s hesitation.
We had crossed into the pass. There were few trees among the boulders here, and as we emerged onto the far side of the mountain, the sky opened out before me, vast and glowing, fiery with a multitude of stars.
I must have let out a gasp at the sight, for the young man leading my horse paused, lifting his own head skyward.
“Oh,” he said softly. He stared for a moment, then was pulled back to earth by the passage of another horse that brushed past us, its rider turning to peer closely at me as it did so.
“Did you have stars like this—where you came from?” my escort asked.