Carrie

The Kansas Territory, September 1856

 

 

 

Nine days ago, I shot my husband. Tomorrow, I am going to lead a band of escaped slaves into Missouri to free eight women, four men, and three children who were kidnapped by Henry Clark and his band of border ruffians. Actually, the escaped slaves are going to lead me. They were trained in the art of war by John Brown himself, and God help any slaver who gets in our way.

When I throw the divining shells and look into the future, I can see that this is only the first battle in a civil war that will soon engulf the entire nation. That war is racing east right now toward New York and Boston, Richmond and Savannah, cracking and roaring like a prairie fire, and there’s not a thing any of us can do but prepare to stand and fight.

Henry Clark welcomes this war. For the past week he’s been hunting me like game. He’s plastered a poster with my description on it on the side of every jail in western Missouri:

WANTED: WHITE WOMAN, AGE 25. BROWN EYES, BLOND HAIR, 5’5” IN HEIGHT, APPROXIMATELY 120 LBS. SLAVE-STEALER, ABOLITIONIST, STATION MASTER ON THE NOTORIOUS LAWRENCE LINE OF THE SO-CALLED UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. GOES BY NAMES “CAROLYN VINTON,” “CARRIE VINTON,” “CAROLYN SAYLOR,” AND “MRS. DEACON PRESGROVE.”

He got most of the details right, but that poster also contains additional information that reads as if it were composed by a madman, which leads me to believe Clark himself wrote it. “Armed and dangerous,” I take as a compliment, but what am I to make of the charge that I am known to “consort with satanic spirits,” or “kill men from afar by mysterious means”? Clark makes it sound as if I’m wanted for witchcraft. I wonder what he’d have written if he’d known I was coming after him with a cavalry unit of black soldiers?

To tell the truth, I’m surprised the word “adulteress” doesn’t appear anywhere, because I’m not just riding into Missouri to free the men and women Henry Clark plans to sell back into bondage. I’m riding to a plantation called Beau Rivage to rescue my lover before Clark hangs him. His name is William Saylor, and I’ve loved him almost all my life. The first day I met him, I pulled a late-blooming orchid out of the mud and thrust it into his hands. “Have a Ca lopogon pulchellus,” I said. “You don’t often see them in bloom this time of year.” That was back in Mitchellville, Kentucky, so many years ago I can hardly count them. William was eleven and I was nine—just children both of us, but from the very first it was as if we had been born to spend our lives together.

William examined the orchid and then stared up at me with dark eyes that reminded me of the black waters of the upper Amazon—a tall, skinny, pale boy with thick, silky hair the color of caramel candy. “You speak Latin?” he said in an awed tone that I found very gratifying. Even in those first few minutes of our acquaintance, I wanted to impress him. Neither of us had the slightest suspicion that we’d just fallen in love or that we’d stay in love forever.

Our lives have been full of so many missed opportunities that when I think about them, they drive me half mad. If I’d stayed in Mitchellville instead of going back to Brazil with my father, we would have married as soon as William got out of medical school, but instead I married the wrong man and spent almost an entire year grieving for William while he grieved for me. Each of us thought the other was dead, and by the time we found each other again, every penny of the great fortune my father had left me was gone, and the war in Kansas had begun. If William and I hadn’t been deceived and lied to, I would never have lost him a second time to Henry Clark or seen my baby boy taken away by Clark’s men, trussed up in a pillowcase like a dead rabbit.

Now it’s up to me to undo the damage. I can’t let innocent people be sold back into slavery because they hid us, fed us, and kept our whereabouts secret, so tomorrow we’ll ride into enemy territory and rescue them. I’ll get Teddy back and cut that rope off of William’s neck before Clark lynches him. But I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t afraid. I have a Sharps rifle, plenty of ammunition, a brown gelding, and the bravest companions a woman could wish for, but still I wonder if I’ll be alive this time next week.

My father always told me courage is the ability to do what you have to do no matter how frightened you are. Dear Papa, that was good advice, but I don’t want to face the guns of the most vicious gang of raiders ever to make Kansas bleed. I’d rather go back to Rio before all this began and fix things so they don’t turn out this way. But although you taught me the name of every orchid in the jungle, you never taught me how to fix the past, the terrible, beautiful past that is forever as unchangeable as death . . .