She didn’t answer him. Instead she whispered to the boy, “Edwin?”
He raised his eyes—just his eyes—over the edge of his arm to look at her. They were brown eyes, and exhausted ones. He was no older than nine or ten years of age, and thin in the way orphans were expected to be, but without the hollow look of a child who starves.
Maria opened her arms and gave him what she hoped was an encouraging smile.
He unfolded from his crouch and let her lift him up as if what happened to him didn’t matter anyway, and he may as well let the woman hold him if that’s what she wanted to do.
He wasn’t very heavy. Maria pulled him up onto her hip, where she held him easily. He latched his legs around her waist and put his head down on her shoulder.
“You. What are you doing?” Steen asked.
With her free hand, she dropped her handbag and revealed the Colt. “I’m leaving. And I’m taking this child. Don’t do it—” she added as he reached for his belt and the gun that was holstered there. “You either,” she said to Brink, and her voice was as calm now as it had been hysterical a minute before.
She motioned with her gun that the two of them should stand together, and she circled her way around the desk, and around the room. She saw the diamond then, and she wondered how she could have ever missed it in the first place. It was perched on the desk like a paperweight, glittering as if it were alive—cutting the sunlight into ribbons, squares, and shining specks.
But Maria didn’t let her glance linger there for long.
She said to the boy with his face buried against her shoulder, his elbow bent into her cleavage, “Close your eyes, Edwin. We’re going to have to hurry.” She tried her best to estimate how long she’d lingered, and she couldn’t imagine that she had long before Hainey—and her thought of him was punctuated by another round of shots being exchanged outside—decided that her time was up.
“You,” she said to Brink. “Open that door. Now.”
“I don’t take orders from—”
“I don’t have any trouble with you,” she said to the pirate, speaking over his complaint. “I don’t care if you live or die, so I’m sending you on your way, and if you have any sense you’ll leave before I change my mind, or before you give me a reason to shoot you. Now go. Get out.”
He didn’t need to be told more than twice.
Brink reached for the knob, turned it, and checked outside to see if anyone was waiting to shoot him. Seeing no one, he pretended to tip a hat at Ossian Steen and said, “Pleasure doing business with you,” in a tone of voice that fooled no one. With a flash of brown and white and red, he was out the door and running.
Maria used her gun to urge Steen away from the door, which flapped itself shut behind Felton Brink. She came to stand beside it, her gun still aimed at the officer, and she said, “I’m going to destroy that weapon, and you’ll never have a chance to build another one.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he growled.
“Oh yes I do. You want to wipe Danville off the map—”
He interrupted her, “And in doing so, yes—end this blasted war…and I just now think, I believe, I think I know…You’re Boyd, aren’t you? I’ve heard stories, but—”
“Yes, that’s me,” she said, and she sounded like she wanted to spit, but she didn’t. She said, “And if you wanted the war to end so badly, you’d speak to your superiors about withdrawing, and allowing the South to go its own way. You wouldn’t create a weapon to demolish a city with the press of a trigger!”
He was angry now, and it showed around his eyebrows, and in a flushing of his ears. “Is that all you think? Is that as far as you can see?” He pointed a finger at her and said, “The union must be preserved, the will of an old spy be damned. The war can’t drag on forever; it can’t go on like this, like a mill grinding men’s bones to flour, year after year. Something must stop it, Belle Boyd. Something must end it in one blow—and if that means the death of thousands, then my soul will sleep easy at night. For I will have preserved the lives of tens of thousands—even your own soldiers! Even the lives of the Rebel boys who, even now, dress up in their fathers’ and brothers’ uniforms and wait until they’re tall enough to take to the field…even those boys will be saved if one city burns!”
Suddenly, and inexplicably, Maria’s eyes were wet and it was not an actress’s trick.
She aimed the gun at his forehead and said, “Then go burn down Washington, you son of a bitch!”
And she fired, and a hole opened up in Ossian Steen’s face. The back of his skull went splattering out behind him, all over the desk, and all over the priceless piece of carbon that sat on the edge like a paperweight.
Maria gasped—at her own actions, or with frustration, or relief, or some other emotion that she couldn’t pin down as it raged inside her. But she squeezed the boy, whose small fingers were clawing at her neck as if he could burrow down inside her body and stay there, and not hear another gunshot so long as he lived.
She picked up her handbag and the diamond, stuffing the latter inside the former. She leaned on the knob and half pushed, half kicked her way out of the small building and she dashed into the yard with the child in her arm and the gun still smoking in her hand.
At the edge of the treeline she saw one of the guards face-down and unmoving, though she saw no sign of the second one, or of Brink, or of Croggon Hainey—who she’d inexplicably been hoping to glimpse. Her disappointment surprised her, but she did not have time to explore it. Somewhere beyond the hill she could hear the surging hum of an engine lifting itself high into the sky; and somewhere down beyond the sanatorium came the thunder of inrushing feet—Steen’s reinforcements, or the remainder of the garrison, or surely some other problematic bunch of men.
Maria disentangled the boy’s fingers from her neck and set him down on the ground where he shuddered, but stood.
She spoke to him in a hurried torrent of words. “Edwin, you’re a smart boy, aren’t you? That’s why you live with Doctor Smeeks, down in the basement, isn’t that right?” He nodded, and she continued with the same fast patter, “Doctor Smeeks is making a weapon, but only because that terrible man was threatening to harm you. Now you must do something for me, do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said so softly she barely heard him.
“You must return to the basement and destroy the machine—and I don’t think the doctor will stop you. He didn’t want to build it in the first place. You must demolish it completely, so it can never be used and never be fixed. You must run and do it now, before anyone realizes what’s happened here. Do you know where you are?”
He looked back at the building, and then at the trail. He said, “Yes” a bit louder this time.
“You know the way back to the sanatorium?”
“Yes,” he declared, and sounded stronger still.
“Then run. Go. Don’t stop and don’t tell anyone but the doctor what you must do. Or possibly,” she corrected herself, “if you need assistance, you must ask Anne. She’ll help you. Now—off with you.” She patted him on the back and he set off, stumbling at first, foot over foot, but then smoothing out to an ordinary gait that took him off at a sprint down the hill and along the path.
The whine of the engine above was coming closer and soon she could see its shadow, like a swarm of birds or a cloud of insects, rising up over the treetops, and she felt a tremendous surge of joy to see that it was the Free Crow and not the Valkyrie; and on the bridge, through the windshield glass she could see a hulking black figure clad in a blue coat.
“You there!” someone shouted behind her, and she spun ar-ound to see a Union soldier threatening her with a repeating rifle.
“Stop right there!” ordered another uniformed man, the second guard who she hadn’t spied after the commotion in the outbuilding. “Drop your weapon!”
She jerked her attention back and forth between them and for the first time yet, she was uncertain. Maria had no intention of dropping the Colt and even less intention of stopping where she was told; and when the Free Crow soared over the outbuilding even the soldiers who commanded her looked up, and were amazed.
Thusly distracted, she took one last look down the path and saw not the faintest trace of Edwin—so she ran the other direction, back to the trees.
Behind her, the soldiers began to shoot. Bullets bounced off tree trunks and split branches, sending leaves raining down on her escape. They were running, too, pursuing her across the clearing and nearing the woods; but another round of fire blew forth from the sky, cutting a dotted line across their chase and pegging one soldier to the earth with a hole in his chest.
From the corner of her eye, Maria spotted her carpetbag lying where she’d left it. She did not pause her pace, but swept it up by the handle in a jerking lift that just barely threw her cadence off. She staggered, recovered her balance and her rhythm, and kept running while the ship above threw fire to cover her wake.
13
“Well I’ll be damned,” the captain said from the bridge of the Free Crow. “That crazy little woman made it out in one piece.” He pointed down at the flat-roofed outbuilding, and the woman with the child on her hip. “That must be the boy she was talking about. Look, she’s sending him off.”
Simeon said, “Still no sign of Brink. Where’d you lose him?”
“Down there someplace.” Hainey swung his hand around, using his fingers to point out a general area to the east of the outbuilding. “He can’t have gone too far. I winged him, I’m pretty sure.”
“What bit of him did you wing?” Lamar asked.
“Shoulder, I think.”
The first mate shrugged and said, “He might run quite a ways with just a scratch on him. You should’ve aimed lower.”
“I was running,” Hainey groused. “Through a bunch of trees. You’ll have to pardon my lack of precision.”