"In one of her furies, anything was possible. She'd made me, after all; I'm sure she believed she was quite within her rights as a mother to unmake me again. But she didn't get the chance. Marietta distracted her, and Nickelberry spirited me away. I was delirious most of the time but I remember that night-oh my God, how I remember it-stumbling through the swamp, thinking every sound we heard behind us was her coming after us."
"What about Nickelberry-the things he'd seen. How did he deal with that?"
"Oh Nub was a cool one. It was all too much for Charles, but Nub… I don't know, he just took everything in his stride. And he saw power. That was the crux of it. He saw power the like of which he'd never seen before, and he knew that if he had me, he had a piece of that power. He wasn't helping me out of Christian charity. He'd lived the life of an underdog. He'd been brought up with nothing. He'd come out of the war with nothing. But now he had me. My life was in his hands, and he wasn't going to let it slip away."
"Did you talk about what he'd seen?"
"Later. But not for many weeks. I was too sick. He'd brought out medicines that my sister Zabrina had given him, and he promised me that he'd stay with me and make me well."
"What did he want in exchange?"
"At the time, nothing. We made our way out to the shore, and we lived there in the dunes for a few weeks. Nobody came there; we were quite safe from discovery. He made a shelter for us, and I lay in it, listening to the sea, slowly getting well. He was my nurse, he was my comforter; he fed me, he bathed me, he listened to me rave in my fevers. He went out and brought back food. God knows where he got it. What he did to get it. His only concern was to make me well. I know it may sound perverse, but when I look back on that time, I think of it more fondly than any of my time in Charleston. I felt this great weight off me. Like I'd been cured of some sickness. I'd had every excess known to man. I'd made love to so many bodies, had so much beauty in my hands. I'd been so high I thought I'd never come down. And now it was all over. I was living out under the stars with nothing to call my own, just the sea, and time to think. That's when I first began to dream of building myself a boat and sailing away…
"Then one day Nub started talking about his own dreams. And I realized it wasn't going to be so easy. He had a friend in me; that's what he believed at least. We were going to work together, when I was well.
""This is the perfect time to start over,' he said to me. 'If we work together we could make a fortune out there.'"
"What did you say to him?"
"I told him I didn't want to have anything more to do with people. I'd had my fill of them. I told him about my dream of building a boat and sailing away.
"I expected him to laugh. But he didn't. In fact he said he thought it was a very good idea. But then he said: 'You
can't just sail away and forget what we've been through together. You owe me something.'
"And of course he was right. He'd risked his life for me in Charleston, shooting the Morrow brothers. He'd risked his life getting me out of L'Enfant. Lord knows, he'd seen things that would have driven lesser men mad, because of me. And then, when we'd reached the shore he'd tended to me night and day. Without him and Zabrina's poultices I would have been disfigured; maybe died. Of course I owed him. There was no question about it.
"So I asked him what he wanted from me. And he had a very simple answer: he wanted me to help make him rich. The way he saw it there were opportunities to make fortunes out there. Reconstruction was underway. There were roads to lay, cities to rebuild, bellies to feed. And the men who were at the heart of all that-with the wit and the skill to make themselves indispensable-those men were going to be richer than any men in the history of America."
"Was he right about all this?"
"More or less. There were a few oil tycoons and railroad magnates who were already so rich nobody was going to catch up with them. But he'd given the whole business some careful thinking, and he was not a stupid man; not by any means. He knew that as a team-with his pragmatism and my vision, his understanding of what people wanted and my capacity to get the opposition out of the way-we could become very powerful in a very short time. And he was impatient. He'd lived in the gutter for long enough. He wanted a better life. And he didn't care how he got it, as long as he got it." He paused, and stared out to sea. "I could still get myself my boat, he said to me, I could still sail away. That was fine and dandy. He'd even help me find a boat; only the best. But he needed me to help him in return. He wanted to have a wife and kids, and he wanted them to live the good life. It seemed like such a small thing when I was agreeing to it. Anyway, how could I refuse, after he'd done all he'd done for me?
"We made a kind of pact, right there on the shore. I swore I would never cheat him, or any of his family. I swore on my life that I'd be his friend, and his family's friend, for as long as I lived."
Rachel had a sickening sense of where this was going.
"I think you begin to understand," Galilee said.
"He didn't keep the same name…"
"No, he didn't. A couple of days later he came back to the shore in a fine old mood. He'd found a body in a ditch-or what was left of it. A Yankee, who'd died many, many miles from home. In his satchel were all his papers: everything Nickelberry needed to become another man, which in those days was not very much. After that day, he was never 'Nub' Nickelberry again. He became a man called Geary."
This was not remotely what Rachel had expected, but as she contemplated the information she saw how the pieces fitted. The roots of the family into which she'd married were deep in blood and filth; was it any wonder the dynasty that sprung from this beginning was in every way shameful and hollow?
"I didn't know what I'd agreed to," Galilee went on. "I didn't realize until a lot later the scale of Nub's ambition, or what he was prepared to have us do to make it a reality."
"If you had known…?"
"Would I have agreed? Yes, I would have agreed. I wouldn't have liked it, but I would have agreed."
"Why?"
"Because how was I ever going to be free of him otherwise?"
"You could have just walked away."
"I owed him too much. If I'd cheated him, history would have just repeated itself. I would have been pulled into something else-some other piece of human folly-and had to endure that instead. I would have had to pay the price eventually. The only way to be free-at least this was the way I thought of it-was to work with Nub, and help make his dreams come true. Then I'd have earned a dream of my own. I could have my boat, and… off I'd go." Galilee sighed deeply. "It was messy, working for him; very messy. But he was right when he talked about the opportunities. They were everywhere. Of course, to get ahead of the crowd you needed something extra. He had me. I was the one he sent in if he had trouble with somebody, to make sure he never had trouble again. And I was good at it. Once I was in the rhythm I realized I had quite a skill for terrorizing people."
"You get it from Cesaria."
"No doubt. And believe me I was in the right mood to do violence. I was an exile now; I felt free to do whatever crossed my mind, however inhumane. I hated the world, and I hated the people in it. So it made me happy to be the spoiler, to be the bloodletter."
"And Nub-"
"Geary, now. Mr. Geary."
"Geary. He never got his hands dirty? You did all the intimidation, he did all the business?"
"No, he'd get involved when he felt like it. He was a cook. He liked knives and carcasses. Sometimes he'd astonish me. I'd see him do something, so cold, so indifferent to the suffering he was causing, and I'd be… I'd be in awe of him."