Tory Read online

  Between Tory and her goal, where the drive met the wall, stood an imposing gate, cast from iron. She peered through the gate’s narrow bars. The water called to her; she could almost feel its cool, misting spray on her hot skin, taste its liquid refreshment. She craned her neck, searching for a gardener but, other than the sharp cry of a peahen, the grounds beyond the gate felt empty.

  Surely the owners would not begrudge her a simple drink of water?

  Tory, holding her empty jar, looked around. Across the lane, a little downhill, she saw a line of thick shrubs. She waited until the last pedestrians on the lane had passed before she jogged to the shrubs. With another glance to see if anyone was watching, she pushed her bag deep into the undergrowth. Then she crossed back to the gate, stared at the fountain a moment, and—glad for her thin body—squeezed through the bars.

  She wasted no time, but raced up the drive to the three-tiered fountain and dipped her jar into its lowest well. She drank the jar’s contents down, refilled it, and drank again. Then she filled the jar and screwed down the lid.

  Tory felt much better for sating her thirst and was taking in the shadowed beauty of the house and its grounds when an angry male voice shouted, “Hey! You n****r! Get your filthy black hands out of our water!”

  The shouted words so startled Tory that she almost dropped her precious jar. A man—the gardener, judging from his clothing and hat—jogged toward her, brandishing a set of loppers and shouting, “Get out of here, scum!”

  Tory ran for the gate. She squeezed through and fled downhill, rounding the curve in the wall before stopping. Her heart thundered in her throat, but she smiled and hugged the jar to her chest.

  BASTIANN DECLOUETTE and five men for whose discretion Bastiann would pay (and pay well) halted at the foot of Sugar Tree’s winding drive. They had departed the city in the early morning. Ten miles later, they arrived at the foot of Sugar Tree’s drive.

  Bastiann’s prized chestnut stallion pranced with nervous energy; three of the men who accompanied Bastiann were also mounted. The fourth drove a closed carriage, while the fifth rode beside him up top.

  Bastiann addressed the men in a soft voice that did not disturb the quiet of the countryside. “Listen well. The estate at the top of this drive belonged to my grandmother, then my brother. At his death, it fell to me. Due notice to vacate the house and land was served to the current occupants a week ago.”

  He did not mention that only five of the seven days had passed.

  He lifted his hand and pointed up the drive. “Exercise care: You are to take nothing from the house nor damage any property, but you will search every room and every outbuilding and round up anyone on the premises.

  “I wish to deliver a message to whomever you find trespassing on the estate, and I leave it to you to ensure that they receive my message—with these exceptions: The negress living in the house and her daughter are mine; you are not to harm them. When you find the woman and the girl, put them in the carriage and keep them there—even if you must tie them up.”

  The dominant male in the crew spewed a long stream of tobacco onto the crushed rock lining the drive. “Cain’t we have a bit o’ fun with the women first?”

  Bastiann bared his teeth in a cruel smile. “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Crump. What value do you place on your life? Is a little sport with a woman worth that much?”

  The men attempted to laugh off his questions, but under Bastiann’s unwavering gaze, their chuckles fell flat. The men averted their eyes and shifted uneasily.

  Bastiann murmured, “I have made myself clear, have I not? However, I am not one to withhold the reward of work done well. If you find women other than the negress and her daughter, I care not what you do with them—but only after you have secured what I have come for.”

  Not waiting for their response, Bastiann wheeled his horse about and started up the sloping drive. His hired men followed in silence.

  The moment Bastiann walked his stallion into the house’s courtyard, he sensed he had come too late. The house seemed—it felt—empty. Vacant. Gesturing for his men to surround and enter the house, Bastiann kept his seat and waited. Twenty minutes later, they returned, as silent as they had gone.

  “No one in the house, Mr. Declouette,” Crump said. “No one out back in the kitchen, the lean-to, or the stable.”

  Bastiann cursed under his breath. “Wait for me here.”

  He dismounted, handed his reins to Crump, and walked through the open front entrance. He looked first in the parlor. The room had a cluttered, lived-in feeling. He glanced around, then crossed the hall to the drawing room.

  It had been converted to a bedroom, and the disarray, the open wardrobe and scattered clothing, bespoke a hurried departure. One bedframe, stripped of its mattress and linens, caught his eye, and he frowned.

  He wandered upstairs from room to room and realized the upper part of the house had not been disturbed for weeks, perhaps months. He returned to the drawing room and stared, first at the bare bedstead and then at the painting of his grandmother upon the drawing room wall.

  Where have you gone, Adeline? Who has helped you and where have you taken refuge?

  Bastiann was angry that the woman had escaped him and, frustrated, he grabbed the bedstead and overturned it, hurling the empty frame against the wall.

  With a modicum of his ire expended, he retraced his steps, closed the front entrance behind him, and retrieved his horse. Just then, one of the mounted men returned to the courtyard.

  “Any sign of them?”

  “No, sir; did find what I b’lieve is a fresh grave.”

  “A grave!” Bastiann recalled the stripped bed and stared at his hands with horror. “Whose?”

  The man shrugged. “Someone cobbled t’gether a cross outta scrap wood, scratched coupl’a letters on it. Cain’t rightly make ’em out.”

  “Show me.”

  Bastiann mounted his horse and followed the man around the house and out into the orchard. The unpruned, overgrown branches tore at his fine clothes; he soon dismounted and followed his guide on foot.

  Hidden in the tall grass between two trees, he spied the mounded dirt. The mound was already beginning to settle, and the slapdash cross listed to one side. He yanked it from the earth, surprised to find it longer and more deeply planted than he had expected. The pieces of wood, a dry tree limb broken to about three feet in length and its crosspiece, a weathered slat likely ripped from a low fence, were bound together with baling wire.

  Someone had scratched what could have been a shaky “A” into the slat followed by other scratches. He traced the second letter, down, up, down, up . . . “W,” Bastiann whispered. “A. W. Adeline Washington.”

  Aggrieved—not at the woman’s untimely death, but that his sport had escaped him—Bastiann ground his teeth and hurled the makeshift cross to the ground.

  So, Henri’s whore is dead, but someone packed to leave in a hurry, presumably my brother’s bastard brat.

  Fuming, he walked back to his horse and returned to the courtyard. “We are finished here,” he told the men. “Follow me back to town. I will pay you there.”

  Chapter 6

  Tory leaned around the bend in the wall and peeked up the lane. No one had emerged from the gated drive. She waited a little longer before fetching her bag from the shrubs. Feeling much better for her drink, she ate the last of the bread and decided to brave the crowds.

  Where the people go, I will find shops and stores—and a source of water for travelers?

  Although dreading the stifling press of the crowd, Tory realized that she had to endure the open-air market. Both water and work had to be nearby. She reached the intersection of the lane and the market-going throng, and let them carry her along until they arrived at a trampled dirt-and-grass field.

  The marketplace was worse than Tory had imagined: wagons and booths of fruits and vegetables; cages of chickens and pigs, crafted wares, hanging meat blanketed with bloated flies. The glut of market vendors and
goers joined in a cacophony of shouts and a melee of demanding, pressing, shoving bodies.

  The cloying closeness of so many people was far worse than the noise: Tory could not bear it. Again, she pushed her way to the edge of the throng, out of the densest of it.

  She shuddered. There would be no work for her in this raucous chaos.

  Pushing on, Tory came to another intersection, this time of two cobblestone streets, one leading away from the market, the second street running perpendicular to the first. Tory’s hands were stiff and sore from clutching her bag so tightly. She pulled it up into her arms, hugging it, and walked forward, away from the marketplace.

  Tory wandered for an hour, passing other turns, but keeping to worn stone streets. The occasional home became commonplace, the houses growing thicker, closer together, until they were a wall of side-by-side, dirty hovels crammed against each other. Soon the “residential area” gave way to businesses of the seedier sort: disreputable boarding houses, motorcar repair shops, bars, and rowdy gaming dens.

  If this was the business center of the city, Tory would find no work here!

  The afternoon grew toward evening, yet she had found nothing to give her hope of a place to sleep or a job to be had. And she was so tired. She knew she had to reconcile her expectations to the facts at hand and whispered to herself, “I should find somewhere safe to spend the night.”

  She did not add the word, “outside,” but it clamored in her mind.

  She studied two dark storefronts as she passed them. One of them had a sign that read, “Wheel and Axle Repairs.” The other building looked vacant. A narrow passage ran between the buildings. Looking around first to see if anyone were watching her, Tory shouldered her bag and crept into the shadowed space between the two buildings.

  Within seconds she could no longer see the way ahead. She reached out one hand and felt for the rough planks on her right. She kept inching forward. After what felt like a lifetime in the close confines of that black corridor, Tory came to its end. The two stores were built back-to-back against another structure that spanned the narrow passage.

  When her hands encountered cold, moist brick, Tory realized she had gone as far as she could. She looked up and, as her eyes adjusted to the shadows, she realized that the eaves above her overlapped.

  I shall be sheltered here should it rain during the night.

  Tory pulled her cloak about her shoulders, huddled against the damp brick wall, and slept.

  TORY EMERGED FROM THE dank passage into the light of a new morning. She felt as sticky and clammy as the bricks where she had slept.

  “The city must have proper, established shops where—”

  An imp of a boy grabbed Tory’s bag with such speed that Tory might have lost everything had she not had a firm grip on its handle. When he pulled, the bag jerked out of Tory’s hand, but its sudden release caused the boy to stumble. Then he was up and running.

  “Stop!” Tory shouted. Then, “Maman!” The photograph of Adeline!

  With no other thought than to retrieve her mother’s photograph, Tory gave chase. The boy was fast; Tory was faster—her legs were longer and stronger. She was on him in moments.

  “Stop! Thief!” she cried, grabbing hold of his shirt.

  He glanced back, obviously surprised, but he did not stop. Instead, he kept moving forward while trying to shake her off.

  Tory acted purely on instinct: She leapt upon the boy’s back and wrapped her lanky legs around his chest, twined her long arms about his neck. The child ran between buildings, down alleyways, occasionally pausing to buck her off.

  “Git off’n me!” he screeched in outrage.

  “No! You give me my bag!” Tory clung to his back like a tick to a dog. He tried to peel Tory’s arms from his neck, but she squeezed them tighter; the more he swung himself to throw her off, the harder she held to him until he came to a standstill between two brick buildings. He backed into one of the walls and attempted to scrape Tory against it.

  Tory responded by biting his ear. She hadn’t thought to do it; the act was an impulse, a means to protect what was hers.

  “Yeowww!”

  “Let go of my bag!” Tory screamed.

  He did. When the bag fell from his hand, Tory, with a parting cuff to the boy’s head, dropped to the ground and grabbed the bag’s handle. She clutched the bag to her chest and stared with defiance at the boy.

  “You are a thief!”

  The boy, perhaps the same age as Tory but shorter, snarled at her. His hair was dirty and matted, his face and clothes no better.

  “Whatcha got in there?”

  “What I have is not your business.”

  He eyed it again. “You got food?”

  Tory looked closer, noting now how thin he was. How desperate he seemed. “Why? Are you hungry?”

  “What if’n I am?”

  The only food she had left were a few handfuls of apple chips, but she had a thought. “Do you know where I might find a public pump? Water to drink?”

  His expression sharpened. “Mayhap. What’ll ya give t’ know?”

  Tory nodded slowly. “I see. A bargain.” Clutching her bag, she said, “All I have to eat are some dried apple chips. I will give you five slices if you show me where I can get water.”

  He licked his bottom lip once. “Foller me.”

  He turned and trotted off; Tory followed behind him, keeping her bag clutched in both arms. She was, she admitted, disoriented. She had lost her bearing while giving chase and while riding the boy’s back through warren-like passages and alleys—and she fretted that the waif was leading her farther into a maze out of which she would never find her way.

  Before long, though, he ducked between two buildings. When Tory caught up with him, he was standing in the alley beside a rusty pump.

  “No one cares if ya drink from this. Everybody does.”

  Tory thought the pump disreputable at best, but it was a source of water, and no one would chase after her with loppers if she filled her jar there. “Thank you.”

  The boy hovered at her elbow. “Where’s m’ apple bits?”

  “Of course.” Tory set her bag between her feet, brought out the sack, and winced at how light it was. She pulled open its draw-string neck. “Hold out your hand, please.”

  The boy eyed her with suspicion, but offered his hand—a dreadfully dirty one. Tory was loath to count the slices into his grubby palm.

  “My, you really ought to wash your hands first, do you not think?”

  “You welchin’ on ourn deal?” he growled.

  “Certainly not!” Tory sniffed with disdain. Arguing with the boy would be unproductive, so Tory reached into the bag, grabbed a handful of chips, and placed five of them in his waiting palm. The moment she counted “five,” his fingers closed on them, and he fled away. Tory stared as he disappeared between the buildings.

  “My goodness.” Tory stuffed the remaining apple slices back into her bag and found her jar. She filled it at the pump, ignored the brackish color of the water, and drank her fill.

  TORY SPENT FIVE EXHAUSTING days walking the narrow, dirty back alleys and avenues of New Orleans, acquainting herself with the layout and commerce of the neighborhood she roamed. She washed her face and hands morning and evening at the rusted, back-alley pump and, despite her wanderings, stayed within range of that pump. She felt tied to the only water source she knew of and dared not stray too far from it.

  She was disappointed in the quality of businesses she found. The few merchants, interspersed among bars, gaming houses, and second-hand stores, were as common and rundown as the streets where they sat. Some shops were less than rundown, bordering on squalid. In the back of her mind, Tory harbored a suspicion that she had yet to find the true business center of town. Surely the wealthy of the city would not patronize such common shops?

  At first, Tory had interrupted passing pedestrians to ask for directions to a better part of town. Their uncivil and sometimes derisive rebuffs stung her and
served to underscore her sense that she was not in the right part of the city. She had also realized how bedraggled her appearance had become and soon stopped asking for guidance.

  With her small supply of food long gone, Tory had forced herself to approach the owners of a grocer, a butcher, a diner smelling of rancid grease, a rundown hardware store, three bakeries, and a seedy boarding house, asking for work. At every attempt, the hard-faced shop keepers had shaken their heads.

  One such owner had looked Tory up and down in a way that reminded her of Bastiann Declouette. The fine hairs on the back of Tory’s neck had prickled and stood on end. She had left the shop abruptly and had run to the end of the block, determined to avoid that street in the future.

  After each rejection, Tory struggled against despondency. She was continually hungry now, growing weaker by the day. One of the bakers she had asked for work—perhaps sensing how desperate Tory was—had offered her a half loaf of day-old bread.

  That had been yesterday. With hunger pangs tearing at her insides, Tory had ducked into the alley behind the baker’s storefront, squatted down between his trash bins, and wolfed the bread in one sitting. Not long afterward, her bowels had given way, leaving Tory craving water and weaker than before.

  She had dragged herself through those five long, humid days, walking a little farther afield each time, yet always returning to the rusted pump. Tory’s thoughts began to stray; they wandered, without moorings, without anchor—except for the blasted pump.

  She had spent long nights hiding from predators, had slept in the shadows where filth accumulated, under molding porches and behind trash heaps. And she had discovered other children like herself, children like the boy who had traded information for apple slices. They wandered the streets as she did, some in twos or threes, but none alone like the boy had been. Like she was.