Joshua added wood to the fading fire, the first time the stove had been used in the eight days the slaves had been here, for smoke is a traitor. In the second room of the cabin sat two white men with blackened faces, each with pistol and shotgun. When they heard the horses approach, the men took up prearranged positions and Joshua stood by the cabin door, carrying no weapon, and waited for the visitors to knock.
Quinn rode to the rear of Fletch and Blue when they neared the cabin and in his mind heard the music the two banjos made when the cadaverous dancer at The Museum sang his ditty:
Dere’s music in de wells,
Dere’s music in de air,
Dere’s music in a nigger’s knee
When de banjo’s dere.
And then Fletch was telling Joshua that they were working for the federal marshal to track runaway slaves. Joshua spoke in a voice foreign to Quinn, whining and mewling.
“I’s a free man,” he said. “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout no ’scaped slaves. Lived here all my days. You don’t believe that, go ask anybody here’bouts.”
“Ain’t you we’re lookin’ for,” said Fletch. “We’re after two niggers got only three eyes between ’em.”
“Don’t know nothin’ ’bout three eyes,” Joshua said. “You wanna come in and look, you can. I ain’t fightin’ no federal marshal. But ain’t nobody here but Mick the Rat, and that’s me, and that’s what is.”
“We’ll have a look,” said Fletch. He dismounted and tied his horse to a bush, and then with Blue behind him and Quinn bringing up the rear, the three entered the cabin. What Quinn saw was a long shadow of a man in the second room, and Fletch and Blue both drew their pistols and moved toward it. Joshua backed into the room ahead of them and turned toward the shadow, which was made not by a man but a coat and hat on a stick, at which Fletch and Blue pointed their guns. As they did, the shotguns of the blackfaced men rose out of the shadows to the level of their faces, and both slavers dropped their pistols.
“You lookin’ for us niggers?” said one of the blackfaces. “You wanna take us to Virginia?”
Fletch shook his head.
“Thought you did,” said blackface.
Joshua drew a knife from the scabbard on his belt and with deft strokes cut the belts and waistbands on the trousers of Fletch and Blue.
“Sit,” said Joshua, and Fletch and Blue sat.
“Take off your boots,” said Joshua, and they did.
“Stand up and drop your pants,” said Joshua, and they did.
Joshua left the room, lifted the planks, and helped the slaves up from their pit as the blackfaces led Fletch and Blue to the pit’s edge. The slaves huddled by the stove and watched as Joshua and one of the blackfaces tied the arms and ankles of the slave hunters. Fletch wore long underwear to his ankles. Blue’s went to his knees. Neither man wore stockings. When the slavers were bound, Joshua and one of the blackfaces rolled them into the pit.
“We gonna be leavin’ now,” Joshua said to them. “But thinkin’ about how you gonna be all alone down there, we got you some company.”
Then from a corner of the cabin, he dragged out a canvas bag the size of a small child. He undid its drawstring, then upended it, dropping two dozen live rats into the pit. The men yelled, the rats squealed. Fletch and Blue kicked at the rats and backed themselves into a corner together.
As Quinn raised the lamp to see what was happening, a courageous rat began climbing Fletch’s bare foot.
Fletch kicked it, and the rat flew against the wall and rolled over.
Then it righted itself, undaunted.
Quinn, at this point, let the twenty dollars he had taken from Fletch and Blue flutter back down to its rightful owners.
Capricorn was laughing so hard that tears were on their way.
“Oh, that Joshua, he wicked. That man, he know how to do it. How all that come out?”
“Joshua took the horses and they all rode north,” Quinn said. “I guess they made it. I never saw any of them again, except Joshua. Never did know those fellows in blackface.”
Quinn and Capricorn turned toward the house, walking past the pond Petrus built for the wild ducks, six of which were in residence. Quinn looked toward the house and saw Hillegond in the window fourteen years before, and he thought: Queen mother of compassion, I loved you.
But he would not weep.
He would not be diminished.
Joshua, a saint, could diminish Quinn, but not death, not even the death of queenly love. The war, wondered Quinn, astonished anew at his toughness — has it turned my soul into a lump of lead? He pictured the city of corpses where he had lived, and a fear gripped him. He was growing strong because of that city, preening with survival. One by one the corpses struggled upright, began a ragged march in his direction. He remembered his Celtic disk and he imposed its memory on this vision, raised it before his eyes like a monstrance, like a shield. Protected from corpses, he breathed deeply and walked toward the mansion.
As he approached his tethered horse he saw a coach and four coming up the carriageway from the new turnpike that now passed the Staats property, and Capricorn said, “That’s him now. Mr. Fitzgibbon.”
And so it was: Gordon Fitzgibbon, son of Lyman, a man Quinn knew by name but had not met. Beside him in the carriage Quinn saw a woman.
Then he saw it was a woman of love.
Saw Maud.
He could not have suspected or even intuited her presence here, and yet neither was this coincidence. We could call it Quinn’s will to alter existence, to negate life’s caprice and become causality itself. This was not the first time he had willed history to do his bidding, but it was the first time history had obeyed him. He’d come here seeking not Maud’s presence but the ethereal fragrance of her memory, all he could hope to find. Given that, he felt he would be able to trace her. Now here she arrives, and so begins a new confluence for these two strangers of love.
The coach halted at the mansion, and the coachman leaped to the ground, opened the door. Out first stepped Maud Fallon, dressed in black and white silks, her abundant auburn hair upswept into a crown encircled with a white ribbon, her skin exquisitely white; and upon seeing Quinn she said, “Daniel, I feared you were dead,” and gave him her hand, which he took and held.
“I seem to have survived,” he said, “but it may be an illusion.”
Maud turned then to Capricorn and said, “Cappy, will you bring in my boxes?” Then, nodding once at Quinn, she entered the mansion. Gordon Fitzgibbon approached Quinn with extended hand.
“You’re Quinn,” he said.
“That’s a fact,” said Quinn.
“I’ve heard about you and read your writing. You’re quite a famous fellow.”
“I think you exaggerate.”
“Not at all. Everybody knows Quinn.”
“I would have thought almost nobody knows him.”
“I’m a true admirer. You’ve projected me into battles and set me alongside those wounded soldiers. I could feel the weight of their haversacks. You have a talent for creating the vivid scene. Won’t you come into the house?”
“I was just leaving. I came to see Hillegond.”
“Poor Hillegond. But at least they caught the villain.” Gordon nodded sadly and, without waiting for Quinn’s response to his invitation, strode purposefully into the mansion.
Quinn debated whether to follow, stunned by Maud’s brusqueness, then decided he had not exhausted his fate’s capacity for surprise (and that’s why they call it your fate). Also he wanted to hear more about the villain, and so he left his horse and followed Gordon into what he now was forced to think of as the Fitzgibbon mansion. In the drawing room Gordon offered him whiskey, Quinn’s first under these multiple rooves. The two men then settled into facing armchairs, a table between them, and on it a bowl of grapes and apples. Gordon positioned himself so that he was framed from behind by his own enormous portrait: a figure of abundant black hair, strong of jaw and dark of eye, wearing a cloak flared over one shoulder, holding a sheared beaver hat in his right hand, and standing in boots and breeches on the steps of his newly acquired mansion: arrived — for the ages.