"Hmmm. Very well, Jim. Your company will be welcome. Are we ready? Then, let us go." I dig my heels into my mount's flanks and he leaps forward across the bridge.
And with a whoop, I call out, "Steer westward, on a course of 290 degrees, march!"
And westward we do thunder. We ride down Cambridge Street, past the college where only a few months ago my fellow students and I serenaded the Harvard boys, and onto the Boston Post Road, heading west, ever west, away from the dangers of the coast. It is not like me to shy away from the sea, but there is water where I am headed, and I am told there is lots of it, so it will be all right.
We make a good twenty miles on what is left of this day and pull up for the night at Howe's Tavern in Sudbury for the night. How many Howes are there in this world, I ask myself, thinking of Clarissa Worthington Howe, my sometime enemy, my sometime Sister-in-arms.
Tomorrow we push on to Worcester, the route that Ezra Pickering planned out for the conspirators to escape west. But that is the extent of Ezra's knowledge of the frontier, and we will be on our own after that. Just head west is my thought—I've got my compass—and ask directions as we go. Shouldn't be that hard to find the Allegheny River, should it?
Howe's Tavern—a house of entertainment, it calls itself—turns out to be quite a lively place. I wish I could take out my sweet Lady Gay, my fine fiddle—Thanks, Higgins, for remembering to bring her along—and add to the merriment in the room, but alas, I cannot, for safety's sake. Maybe when we get farther inland I can start doing some sets again. After all, we are going to need money.
We take a room, Higgins and I, me being presented as his daughter, and Jim will sleep in the barn, to watch over the horses. We must conserve our coin, and even in the span of this day's ride, the countryside has grown decidedly wilder. At least to this city girl's eyes.
We take our dinner together in the Great Room of the tavern, and I find the dinner tastes wondrous good to me after all that awful burgoo on the Bloodhound, the standard ship's rations on the Juno, and then back to burgoo when I was confined. I'm afraid I disappointed Higgins with the licking of my chops as well as my greasy fingers. Don't care. It's been a long time. I'll be a lady tomorrow.
We go to our room, and a bath is ordered up and a tub is brought to our room and filled with steaming hot water. I disrobe and crawl in and give a great sigh of pure sinful delight as I sink up to my neck in the suds.
"Oh, Higgins, you cannot know, it has been so long since I have had a true bath, ohhhhhh..." I sigh and close my eyes as I lean my shoulders against the high back of the tub. Higgins takes up a small pail and dips it twixt my knees to fill it with water, and that water he pours over my head, and it courses down over my face. I feel a bar of soap put into my hand and I take it and wash my face and neck and shoulders and armpits and then lean back down, to feel Higgins's expert fingers begin to work the soap into my hair.
"I suspect that it feels quite good, Miss, considering what you have recently been through. Although Sylvie was quite expressive in her description of the horrid conditions on the Bloodhound, still, I cannot imagine it. And what are you smiling at, if I may ask?"
I smile to think on Sylvia Rossio, my good and dear but generally quite shy and quiet friend and fellow captive, as well as fellow serving girl at one time, joyously meeting up with her own true love Henry Hoffman there in New York Harbor and then riding with him up to Boston to bring the glad tidings of the deliverance from slavery of the girls of the Lawson Peabody to the once bereft and grief-stricken parents and friends. Just how was your journey from New York to Boston, Sylvie, hmmm? I think, wickedly.
"Oh, nothing," I say. "Just my sinful pleasure at this bath, and in your own sweet company. I'm sure Annie and Betsey would say I'd just bought myself a lot more time in purgatory because of it, but I don't care. I shall offer up some sacrifice on my part in the future to make up for it."
"You have a curious theology, Miss. Here, please lean forward so that I might rinse."
When I lean back again, my hair lank about my face, I ask, "How much money do we have, Higgins?"
"Not a large amount, I'm afraid. Most of the money available from your friends in Boston went to fund your reward. Faber Shipping had twenty-four dollars in its coffers due to Jim Tanner's exertions with the Morning Star's traps. I have one hundred and fifty-five dollars left from the money I got from the sale of the jewel you slipped into my hand when you were confined on board the Wolverine. You will recall that I tendered the bulk of the sale of that jewel to your London Home for Little Wanderers for their continued maintenance, retaining only enough to maintain myself until such time as you were back on your moneymaking feet again, as it were. And Ezra Pickering pressed another hundred dollars on me, begging me to tell you that Miss Amy Trevelyne considered it a small advance on her second book, the one detailing your early adventures in the New World."
This gets another sigh from me, this one not of pure pleasure. "Am I not famous enough, Higgins?"
"Ahem. I believe she has even started on the third."
Oh, Lord! Is there not a single part of me that will remain unexamined? Will none of my depredations against good manners and good order and propriety in all their unseemly tawdriness be kept from the world's curious eye?
I sink under the water in despair.
"A false suicide attempt will avail you nothing," I hear Higgins say. He reaches down and pulls my head from the water, and piles my hair on top of that same head. "Besides, you and your Home need the money, and Miss Amy is most discreet in her revelations, as far as I can discern."
"She wasn't all that discreet in the first one, as I recall. Can you imagine being mercilessly teased by your fellow midshipmen over something written about you and a boy being snugged up for weeks in a hammock on a British warship, a penny-dreadful book that—"
There is a knock on the door and Higgins says, "Who?" and Jim Tanner from outside the door says, "The pallet you ordered, Mr. Higgins."
"Come in, Jim," says Higgins, casting me a glance. Although my back is to the door, I cross my arms before my chest and sink further down into the now soap-clouded water.
Jim comes in, bearing the narrow straw-filled mattress. I had told Higgins that he should sleep with me in the big bed, that I wanted him to sleep with me, as it would give me comfort, but he would have none of it—he felt it wasn't proper, considering.
Considering what? I'm thinking, but I let it go. I turn my head to look at Jim, and he stands there looking over at me, astounded. I imagine the warmth and steam of the room has something to do with that look—the smell of the soaps, the smell of the shampoo, and, possibly, the smell of well-toasted female.
"Here, Jim, let me help you with that," says Higgins, leaving the side of my tub.
While the two of them are setting up the pallet, I splash about a bit and then call over to Jim, "I have just heard that your efforts with the Star in my absence have put a fine twenty-four dollars into our coffers. I am most proud and gratified that my early trust in you has proved most true."
With a very deft move, Jim dodges Higgins's restraining hand and appears at my side. He looks down and stammers, "I-I wish it could have been more. I wish we could've gone fishin' together like we used to do, Missy. I wish—"
Whatever Jim Tanner wishes is cut short as Higgins collars him and tosses him out the door. My trusty wedges are set, and that door will not open again till morning.
I rise and towel off and Higgins gets me my nightdress and cap and I sinfully revel in his attention and then crawl into the bed and sink into the feather mattress with a heartfelt groan of more pure pleasure. I close my eyes and offer up yet another heartfelt prayer for Jaimy Fletcher's safety, and I do it quickly, for I know sleep is coming on fast. Tomorrow I shall think and plot and plan, but for now...
Ah, sweet sleep...
Chapter 3
The next morning, we're up with the dawn. We will have breakfast, then the horses will be saddled and we will be off again.
At breakfast Higgins and I have some time to talk.
"So the plan is to go to this Allegheny River, which you have on good information flows into the Ohio and hence into the Mississippi, and we pay for passage downriver to New Orleans, and then book passage on a ship bound for God-knows-where?" asks Higgins, with not a little doubt in his voice.
"Aye. We'll decide in New Orleans what our next move will be. At least we'll be safe there, as it is a French port. Or a Spanish port. I forget which."
"Ah, Miss. I'm afraid you're mistaken. It is now an American port. Their President Jefferson has recently bought it from our old friend Monsieur Napoléon."
"Indeed? When did that happen?"
"About three years ago. It was called the Louisiana Purchase."
"How much did he pay for it?"
"About three cents an acre, I hear."
"Ah, these sharp Yankee traders," I say, patting my lips with my napkin, a lady again. "Still, they bear no special love for the British, so I should be safe there."
I recalled Amy Trevelyne saying something about all that when we were up on the widow's walk at the school, enjoying the spring air before the disastrous outing that resulted in all us girls (except Amy) getting nabbed by that slaver. At the time, when she said it was an enormous amount of land and a grand and great thing, I came back at her to ask, "Ain't you Yankees got enough land, for God's sake?" and she said that it's more about national borders and protection from foreign invasion than being just about land. She said the President had sent out an expedition to chart the new lands and it was due back this summer. I said, "Oh, Amy, wouldn't you just love to have gone along on that expedition?" and she looked at me as if I had lost my senses and said, "Certainly not, how could you ever think that?" "All those new places and wonders to see," I said back at her, and she said, "All those bugs and red savages and wild animals, you mean. How could you want that, Sister? I swear, had I not seen you déshabillé on many—in fact, too many—occasions, I would suspect that you were not even of the gentle sex." Though she and I are the very best of friends, we are cut from different cloth, I guess.
"And what, Miss, of the Brothers Lafitte, when we get to New Orleans?" asks Higgins.
"I thought of that, Higgins, and I think it would be well that we enter that city in disguise."
"In very deep disguise, I should think, Miss," retorts Higgins. "I well remember Jean Lafitte shaking his fist at us standing at the rail of the Emerald as we parted from him, and vowing eternal revenge on you for the theft of, what, four hundred and fifty slaves?"
"Hmmm. I think that was the number. I recall that his threats were rather colorful. Especially when he described what he planned to do to me and various of my parts."
"Yes, Miss. But perhaps you should not have laughed at him and taunted him so."
"Aye, but I do hate a slaver," says I, patting lips with napkin and rising. "Let us be off."
Higgins, the imperturbable Higgins, gives a small groan as we rise from the table to begin the day's ride. When we get to the barn, I note that young Jim doesn't look too steady on his pins, either, and I know the cause: Although your feet sit in stirrups when riding a horse, you actually stay on the beast's back by squeezing your legs together, which puts great strain on the inner thigh muscles, and if those muscles are not used to the strain, they'll cramp and they will hurt, especially the next day. I well remember the morning after the first riding session I had at the Lawson Peabody, when I rose from bed and fell to my knees with the pain. But I got over it and so will my fellow fugitives.