Chapter Forty-five
When Henry Clark comes riding out of the willows, he looks toward the main house and sees the planters and a dozen of his own men standing by the ruins of the dinner party with their hands raised over their heads. Jed is standing with them waving a white napkin, and the black soldiers are holding them all at gunpoint. Where are the rest of Clark’s Raiders, the fiercest band of bushwhackers in Missouri and Kansas combined? Nowhere, that’s where. Not a one in sight unless you count three dead men, one of whom he himself killed.
Clark feels a wave of disgust. His men never deserved him. They’re disloyal, cowardly, traitorous scum. If he ever meets up with the ones who ran, he may have to shoot them.
Up ahead, he can see the boat that brought the planters to Beau Rivage rocking lazily beside the dock as if all the trouble going on is nothing to get excited about. Now that he doesn’t have to lead a bunch of cowards, he can ride onto the boat, cut it loose from its moorings, drift downriver, and disembark at his leisure. Money won’t be a problem. He still has one of the gold rings he took from Deacon. He can pawn it and treat himself to a hot bath, a shave, and a whore.
His only real regret, besides losing the boy, is that he’ll never be able to tell anyone what happened today. If he did, bushwhackers would be lining up for a chance to hunt down the men who attacked Beau Rivage. He would only have to say the magic words “black men with guns,” and he could just sit back and watch. They’d string up free blacks and fugitives both from here to Topeka without even asking if they’d been part of the raiding party and maybe lynch a dozen Jayhawkers for good measure. While he’s at it, he could probably get them to do away with Carrie Vinton and that doctor lover of hers in some satisfyingly unpleasant way, get the boy back if the little brat hasn’t drowned, and start spending Deacon’s money. But to do all that he’d have to admit he’s been outshot and outsmarted by a band of black soldiers, a woman, and a toddler with teeth like a serpent. He’d never live it down.
Clark kicks his horse into a fast walk. The only thing that stands between him and the boat now is the slave pen, but he never notices slaves unless he’s selling them, buying them, or entertaining himself with them, which is why, when a tall black woman walks out of the gate and stands in front of him blocking the road, he is so taken by surprise that he doesn’t notice she’s holding a rifle.
“Henry Clark!” she yells. “My name is Jane and you hurt my babies!” And lifting the rifle, she pulls the trigger and becomes the death Henry Clark never thought he would meet.
As he lies in the dust bleeding and in pain, she draws close and bends over him. Clark looks up at her with eyes filled with resentment. “You had no right to shoot me,” he gasps. “I should only be shot by a white man.”
“Sometimes you got to take what you can get,” Jane says.
“Is that so?”
“It is.”
Clark blinks and his blue eyes grow opaque. He licks his lips and groans. “It—” he says. He lifts up his hands as if to ward off something big. “It—” he repeats.
“‘It’ what?” Jane asks, but Henry Clark, who has made a habit of not finishing his sentences, does not reply. Waving his hands in an agitated way, he stares at a place just over her left shoulder with a look of such terror that Jane is glad she cannot see whatever he is seeing.