Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen by Sarah Bird

Author:Sarah Bird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

BOOK THREE

Out West

Chapter 44

When we rode out in the black hours before sunrise, I was nothing but an oozing sack of pain slopping around atop Bunny.

“Hang on, Bill. Hang on,” Lem, riding next to me, chanted. “All’s you got to do is make it down to the river. Ain’t but a mile or two. After that, I’ma load you on that boat and you can rest easy. Bill. Bill?”

When I didn’t answer, he suggested, “Maybe you should take them transfer papers.”

I gave him an animal growl left no doubt how I felt about that. Lem went on talking, but his voice came from farther and farther away and then, along with the clang of the riverboat bells and the rusty croaks of a flock of purple grackles, it stopped altogether.

Next memory I had was of opening my eyes on the terrifying sight of a white plume of steam rising up between two tall crowns of iron that stabbed black points into it as its whistle hooted out the mournful song Cotton and slaves. Cotton and slaves. Every splinter of that haunted vessel vibrated its history of evil and cruelty up through me from the planks I laid upon.

“Rest easy, Bill,” Lem’s voice soothed when, whimpering like a sick dog, I struggled to rise up and escape the terrible fate that waited down the river. He patted me back down, my head resting on his jacket, which he’d folded into a pillow since, even more than I had before, I kept a death grip on my own jacket, buttoned up to my chin. My saddle and other belongings sat next to me in the neat stack where Lem had placed them.

“Hard part’s over,” he said. “Leastwise for the next few days. All’s in the world you got to do now is lay back and heal up.” Gently, he patted sweet calendula cream on my ruined mouth, then he brought his canteen to my lips. When he lifted my head so I could drink, he tipped me up enough that I saw how the rest of the company was all sprawled out across the top deck like so much felled timber. This hectic scene doubled and tripled and tilted back and forth for the beating had rattled my brain.

Fearing I would spend the rest of my days trapped in a cartwheeling world, I tried to focus on the paddle wheel turning at the back of the boat. It was a dozen yards wide and tall as a three-story house. Faces, always two of the same one, appeared above me. They were like mirrors reflecting back how bad I looked. The good men in the troop, Fernie Teague, the Georgia boys and them, could barely look upon my battered face. The bad ones had no trouble staring at me with critical eyes. Like I was a piece of poor workmanship. A job that hadn’t been done up to standards. A killing that’d gone half finished. I was mostly out of my head for the next couple of days.

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