Blenheim Palace
“FINE! SO BE IT, then! I’ll get along unshod!” bellows a man of similar age and proportions to Jack. He seizes one of his knees with both hands and yanks up. A bare foot emerges from a boot, which is sunk almost to its top in the mud. He plants the foot, grabs the other knee, and repeats. Bob Shaftoe now stands, a free man, in mud almost up to his knees. His boots are stranded nearby, rapidly filling with rain. He salutes them. “Good riddance!”
“Hear, hear!” calls a voice from a tent, pitched nearby on slightly higher and firmer ground. A man rises from a table and turns toward him. The table is lit by several candles even though it is two o’clock in the afternoon.
Bob’s wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat, which supports approximately a gallon of rainwater, distributed among several discrete pools. He cocks his head in a most deliberate and calculating manner, and the pools slide, merge, slalom round the hat’s contours, and spring off its back brim, splatting into the mud behind him. This enables him to get a clear sight-line into the tent.
The man who has just spoken stands in its entrance, gazing down on him; at the table, a peg-legged fellow sits on a folding chair and graciously accepts a cup of chocolate from a woman who has been at work over a little cook-fire in the rear. “Bob,” calls the standing gentleman, “you are now barefoot in the rain, which calls to mind how I first saw you nigh on fifty years ago, and I say it becomes you, and may you leave those boots there to rot, and never again wear such odious contraptions. Now, do come back to us before you catch your death. Abigail has made chocolate.”
Bob wrenches a foot clear of the mud, plants it on a rock, and uses this as a foundation on which to pull the opposite one free. He risks a glance back at the abandoned boots. “Do the bloody plans call for a pair o’boots there?”
“They call for a shrubbery!” announces the peg-leg, peering at Bob through a transit, and consulting a garden-plan spread out on the table. “But never you mind, those boots will be eaten by vermin long before planting-season.”
“What would the Vicar of Blenheim know about planting-season?”
“As much as I know about being a vicar.”
“And that is as much as I know about being a country gentleman,” says the Duke of Marlborough, gazing fretfully across a half-mile of mud and stumps at the still-building pile of Blenheim. “But we must all adapt-we must all learn. Except for Abigail, who is already perfect.” Abigail gives him a skeptical look and a cup of chocolate. Bob squelches another step closer. The gaze of (formerly) Colonel, (and now) the Reverend Barnes strays back to the great map, which looks ever so fanciful when contrasted against the gloomy reality outside. His eye wanders across the orderly geometry of the plan until it fixes upon a wee Chapel and a nearby Vicarage.
Marlborough says, “We shall mount a last Campaign from this tent, and pick off the vermin who are drawn hither by the intoxicating fragrance of Bob’s boots. Bob shall study how to look after plants, Barnes shall learn how to look after souls, I shall learn how to be idle, and Abigail shall look after all of us.”
“It sounds as if it ought to work,” says Bob, “so long as my brother does not show up.”
“He is dead,” Marlborough avers. “But if he shows up, we’ll shoot him. And if he recovers, we’ll pack him off to Carolina, where he may work alongside his offspring. For I am told that you are not the only Shaftoe, Bob, to have turned over a new leaf, and become a tiller of the soil.”
Bob has finally reached the tent’s threshold. “It is a strange fate indeed,” he mutters, “but only fitting.”
“Why fitting?”
“Jack, Jimmy, and Danny ought by rights to become tillers of the soil,” says Bob, “because they have made so much trouble in the past, as soilers of the till.”
“If you are going to make such jests,” says Barnes, “you are welcome to stay out in the rain.”
Carolina
“I SPIED ’EM AGAIN this morning, Tomba! The weather cleared, just after sunup, and I looked to the West and saw ’em, all lit up by the red sun shining in off the sea. A line of hills, or mountains if you please. Laid out, waiting for us, like baked apples in a pan.”
Tomba is lying face down on the sack of desiccated pine-branches that answers to the name of bed here, in the indentured servants’ quarters of Mr. Ickham’s Plantation. Not for the first time in his life, his back is striped with long whip-cuts. Jimmy Shaftoe hauls a sopping mass of rags out of a bucket, wrings it out, and lays it on Tomba’s raw flesh. Tomba opens his mouth to scream, but makes no sound. Danny keeps talking, trying to get Tomba to think about something else. “A week’s hard traveling,” he says, “less than that if we steal some horses. We can manage without food for that long. When we make it to those hills, there’ll be game a-plenty.”
“Game,” says Tomba, “and Indians.”
“Tomba, look at the state you’re in, and tell me Indians are worse than the Overseer.”
“Nothing’s worse than him,” Tomba admits. “But I’m in no condition to run cross-country for seven days.”
“Then we wait until those stripes are healed. Then we do it-”
“Boys, you do not understand. There will always be something. The Overseer knows how to keep men downtrodden. Especially black men. I didn’t understand that, when I came here. It’s different, the way he treats me. Look at my back, and tell me it isn’t so.”
Lines of fire run in parallel courses across the walls of the shack where the sun glares between unchinked wall-planks. A pig roots outside, undermining the corner of their dwelling, but they can’t shoo it away or eat it because it is the Overseer’s pride and joy. They can hear him now, bellowing in the distance. “Jimmy? Danny! Jimmy? Danny! Where the hell have you got to?”
“Lookin’ after our mate you just beat half to death, you bastard,” mutters Jimmy.
“I want to see red necks on the lot of you,” says Tomba, repeating the Overseer’s favorite aphorism. “Tomorrow, red necks all around, save for this Blackamoor-there’s only one way to give him a red neck and that’s with the lash.” Tomba gets his hands underneath him, and pushes himself up on to all fours, then hangs his head low and lets his dreadlocks sweep the floor, he’s so woozy.
“Jimmy? Danny! Jimmy? Danny! Are you feedin’ your pet Blackamoor?” By process of elimination, the Overseer has figured out where they are, and is drawing nigh.
“You’re right,” says Tomba, “he means to kill me today. It is time to unpack.”
“Then unpack we shall,” says Danny.
He bends down and seizes the hay-bag that served him for a bed, and rips it open from one end to the other. Out tumbles an elongated bundle. Jimmy snatches it and tears away several rope ties. The two Shaftoes work together to unroll the bundle, Danny holding his arms out like a pair of shelf-brackets while Jimmy unwinds the bolt of canvas. Tomba paws one hand up the shack’s wall until he finds a hand-hold on one of the hewn logs that make up its frame, and pulls himself to his feet. “They’re not in here, Master!” he calls, “no one in here but poor Tomba!”
“You’re a damned liar!” bellows the Overseer, and hammers the door open with the butt of his whip-handle. He stops, framed in the entrance, unable to see into the darkness of the shed. He can hear, though, the unexpected sounds of two gently curved blades-a longer one and a shorter one-being whisked from their scabbards. Perhaps he even glimpses the unaccustomed sight of Carolina sunlight gleaming from watered steel.
“Don’t tell us,” says Danny, “you want to see some red necks around this place. Is that what you were about to say?”