Secret Souls (10 page)

‘Well, I guess I better be starting for home.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘ ’Course I do. It’ll be worse for me if he has to come for me.’

‘No, it won’t,’ Andrew told her. ‘There are things you don’t know that I have to tell you. Mr Chase is a very important man and he has got the law to issue an order that your father cannot come within half a mile of you or he goes to prison. That’s why he hasn’t turned up in Gingertown so far.’

‘You know my pa can’t read, Dr Rudge. And if he could he’d pay no attention to no piece of paper.’

‘Well, he will to this one. I went out to check on your mother and it was I who presented it to him, and explained that if he ever wanted to see the money these men owe him, he would have to abide by the writ issued.’

There was just a hint of a smile on Chadwick’s lips when she said, ‘He must have been hopping mad.’

‘Oh, he was, he is.’

‘That writ, Dr Rudge, is it forever?’

It was Andrew Coggs, who after telling her that he was a lawyer and knew all about these things, who explained the legal aspects of the writ. Still unwell and weak, he had to pause before going on to explain as simply as he could about bringing a case of assault against Ed for the beating he had given Chadwick. He concluded sadly that in his legal opinion they could never get a conviction.

‘So in essence what Andrew is saying, Chadwick, is you’re safe from your father until we pay him the money we owe him, for a little time longer maybe,’ added Sam.

‘Then it’s best I say goodbye now and get on with going home. It’ll take the sting out of it if he sees I come home before he gets his money. I know pa, he’ll think he’s beat us all, got me and the money, and he didn’t have to work to get you to hospital. Well, never mind, we sure did have some adventure, didn’t we? And I think you learned a lot.’

‘How would you like the adventure to go on forever, Chadwick?’ asked Hannibal.

‘Now you’re talking fairy tales,’ she said, very nearly giving him a smile.

‘I’m a grown-up man, I no longer believe in fairy tales. I believe in new beginnings, a new life, in casting out the bad and never looking back. That’s what I’m offering you.’

Now she did laugh and ran her hands through her hair again to push it off her face. ‘Hannibal Chase, that
is
a fairy tale.’

Andrew struggled to sit up and take her hand. ‘One that can come true if you want it to. Hannibal can make it come true. He wants to take you away to live with him as his daughter. Give you a life worth living, an education, and much happier adventures than the one we have just been on. And he can do it, within the law.’

Andrew then explained how adoption worked, that there were millions of people giving children a new home and family.

‘And you would have a family: a grown-up sister Diana, she’s twenty, and a brother Warren, he’s twenty-three. You could be their little sister and my little girl,’ added Hannibal.

‘Have you asked your wife if she wants a backwoods twelve-year-old girl? My ma never wanted me, least that’s what she tells me all the time. Bred me for my pa, she says. My ma, she likes me because I won’t give myself to Pa’s ways like she and my sisters and brothers do, but she hates me too because I won’t and because I can read and write and because I’m separate from them. I never want to go again where I’m not wanted.’

None of this was said with self-pity, more a determined facing up to reality. Chadwick was revealing more about herself in those few words than she had in the entire time she had been with the men, more than she had ever revealed to Dr Rudge. Once she had finished saying what she had to say she seemed once more to retreat into this still, very still, mysteriously beautiful child. There was not one man in that room who was not touched by her inexplicable charm and sensibility.

It fell to the sheriff to say something to break the silence left in the wake of her few words. ‘Chadwick, Bonner Gleason’s here to tell you you are something else, little gal.’

‘Maybe so, maybe not, Sheriff. All I’m doing is the best I can to be me and stay alive just like everybody else, so I’d best go hide my canoe because if Pa finds it he’ll burn it right in front of my eyes. After that I’ll be getting on with goin’ home.’

‘Chadwick, come here,’ invited Hannibal.

She went to him. He took both her hands in his and asked her, ‘How do you feel about me, Chadwick? Do you like me, trust me?’

‘Liked you from the minute I set eyes on you pinned in your seat in the plane. For a minute there even thought you were my handsome prince come to get me.’

Everyone laughed, including Chadwick and Hannibal, and then she continued, ‘Trust you? You and Sam and Andrew, you trusted me with your life. I guess that deserves fair exchange.’

‘Chadwick, I have no wife, she died several years ago, and I do very much want to adopt you, give you my name, and a home, and a family who will love and respect you as a human being. You could be called Chadwick Chase, then you would have two names. You do deserve two names. But that would mean leaving your home and your family, never to return. Not that I wouldn’t let you but because your father is an unforgiving, violent man.

‘If you say yes, an agreement will be reached between your father and me, money will change hands and he will be made to sign a document that gives you up to me forever. But if you were ever to return home, I wouldn’t trust your father not to hurt you, for no better reason than that you got away from him. He has what we would call an obsession about you, and not a healthy one.’

‘It’s a great deal to think about,’ interceded Hal Rudge, who bent forward from his chair and turned her around to face him. He pressed his fingers lightly on the bruised side of her face to check the swelling. ‘And not much time to do it in.’

‘And so it turns out that my prince has come,’ she said as she picked up a white three-legged stool and placed it next to Hannibal. She sat down on it and gazed directly into his eyes as
she said, ‘I’m very backwoods white trash, Hannibal. I don’t think this is going to be easy, so best we both be warned.’ Then she offered him her hand.

Two days later, Ed Chadwick, Calumet Cherry and Benjie Stoner arrived in Gingertown in Ed’s pick-up truck and drove directly to the hospital. Bonner Gleason was there waiting with his deputy and four state troopers in obvious evidence round the hospital. The men were asked to leave their hunting rifles at the door. They made no protest. Chadwick was nowhere to be seen. A long table and chairs had been brought into the ward and Hannibal presided at one end, Dr Rudge at the other. The meeting was played low key, using the only spur that seemed to work with the likes of Ed, Calumet, and Benjie: money.

Incredibly the backwoods men asked for triple the amount agreed upon at the crash site. Their reasoning was that they did get the men to the hospital as promised. Chadwick after all did belong to the rescue party or rather Ed, number one justification for their claim. Number two: there wasn’t as much salvageable from the plane as they had thought there would be. Hannibal hung tough. The unpleasantness nearly flared to exploding point until he reached into his briefcase and after withdrawing a huge wad of money, began counting out twenty-dollar bills and placing them in separate piles in front of himself. Greed calmed the volatile situation. They could actually see the men’s anger recede as the stacks of money grew higher and higher. A sum was finally settled on for the rescue of the three men from the crash site.

Then began the bargaining for Chadwick. It opened with a demand from Ed for her return, went way past a sow and three hundred dollars and was concluded at a thousand dollars cash, two hogs and three sows. Hannibal, who had never in his life felt queasy and was in fact a hard man when dealing in business, felt quite sick to his stomach when Ed Chadwick banged his fist on the table and said, ‘Sold! You overpaid for that bitch-child! Can’t suck, never fucked, and you’ll have some time teachin’ her. I saw you lookin’ at her, wantin’ her just as fierce as Calumet here. Well, now you got her an’ good riddance is all I say.’

Ed Chadwick and Hannibal Chase signed several documents
drawn up hastily by Andrew, Ed’s signature being no more than a crude, five year old’s rendition of E. C. One of the men at the table was a judge flown in to Gingertown by helicopter from Memphis so that he could expedite the documents and return with them for registration in his courthouse. The meeting began and finished in thirty-six minutes.

The judge was the first to leave, barely able to restrain himself from charging Ed, Calumet and Benjie with a number of offences. The three backwoods men rose to leave only after they had haggled with each other and finally come to an agreement over the sharing of the money which was painstakingly counted out and handed over by Ed. Then, Calumet and Benjie still grumbling about how they had been cheated, all three left, but not before Ed told Hannibal: ‘You tell that dirt Chadwick, so long as her pa’s alive, she come on his land, she’s dead meat an I don’t need no paper to say so. That’s my country an’ I’m the law.’ The anger and hatred showed in his eyes as he emphasised his words by spitting a smelly stream laced with chewing tobacco in Hannibal’s face. Hannibal knocked him out with one punch, screaming in pain as he did so.

Two hours later Chadwick boarded the helicopter with the three survivors, Dr Rudge in attendance. They transferred to an ambulance plane waiting for them on the nearest air strip and from there flew out of Tennessee never to return. It was all over: the crash, the ordeal of the three men and their rescue, Chadwick the heroine of the day. They became backwoods history.

Seeing the lights of New York City as the helicopter flew up the East River was the very first time that the survivors allowed themselves the luxury of giving in to pent-up emotion. They were back in their world, a civilisation they could understand and knew how to deal with. Sam covered his face with his hands and sobbed Andrew wiped away the tears settling in the corner of his eyes; Hannibal held back tears of relief and gratitude for their survival, for Chadwick’s sake. And Chadwick? She was so dazzled by seeing the city lights she went from window to window, clapping her hands.

Andrew went by one ambulance directly to hospital from the airport. Sam was met by his family and driven to his house in Greenwich, Connecticut. Hannibal went with his daughter and son, Chadwick by his side, in the second private ambulance to the family town house on East Sixty-seventh Street. The crash and their survival, saved by a backwoods child, did of course make all the papers but Hannibal managed to keep Chadwick not so much a secret as very nearly out of the press.

In those first few months in the house on East Sixty-seventh Street, Hannibal and his children, Warren and Diana, found in the charismatic child who had entered their life and their home a joy that had not been felt since the death of Hannibal’s wife, their mother. It was not difficult to take her to their hearts. In New York she had that same mysterious beauty and quiet intelligence, the sense of a locked-up secret soul, that the survivors had found in the backwoods of Tennessee. Chadwick asked for nothing which made it so easy to give her everything: friendship, caring, affection, admiration, and fun as they fought to indulge the newest member of their family with material things. They wanted to spoil her but a part of their pleasure was that Chadwick was not and would never be a spoiled child.

For the first two months of Chadwick’s new life, Hannibal, while recuperating from his injuries, remained at home with a nurse and his usual staff: houseman, cook, maid, cleaner, chauffeur, and a new addition, a private, live-in tutor for Chadwick. It was the time that was needed to create a unique closeness between Hannibal and Chadwick that neither had ever had in the past or would ever have in the future with another human being. They each of them had had in their own separate ways a near-death experience, and they had been saved by each other. It was during those first months that Hannibal and Chadwick became inextricably entwined and fell in love with each other.

Diana, who had always been a spoiled child and had grown up a spoiled young woman, found that Chadwick, rather than alienating her further from her father, eased whatever tensions there had been between them. She and her brother Warren maintained
separate apartments around the corner from their family home in a building on Fifth Avenue. More often than not during those first few months of Chadwick’s arrival in their family, both son and daughter, having had dinner with Hannibal, would stay the night in their old rooms. There was for once family unity, real affection, and three months after she had flown away from Tennessee, Chadwick had legally become Chadwick Chase.

Of all the wonders happening to Chadwick none would affect her more than that evening after a dinner party when they all withdrew to the garden: Hannibal, Diana and Warren, Chadwick’s tutor Miss Cheevers, Sam and his wife, and Andrew and his.

It was an unusually warm end-of-September evening. The sky was clear and black and spattered with millions of twinkling stars. It was quiet except for the distant sound of New York evening traffic in the background. Akari, the houseman who had been with Hannibal for thirty years, walked from the house carrying a silver tray with crystal champagne flutes on it. He was followed by Telford the chauffeur carrying a baroque silver wine cooler with several open bottles of vintage Krug champagne, followed by Cook with a thin-layered chocolate cake decorated with small white butter cream birds, and a mass of small white candles all alight. Nurse, and the other household staff, slipped unobtrusively into the garden.

‘A birthday party,’ said Chadwick, looking excited at the prospect.

‘A kind of birthday party, Chadwick,’ said Hannibal.

Diana went to Chadwick. In her hand she had a paisley paper-covered box. She opened the lid and showed the contents to Chadwick. She lifted the first sheet of pale mauve-coloured note paper from the box and read aloud the engraved deep ruby red words at the top of the page: Chadwick Chase. She turned to look at Hannibal.

‘I’m a man who always keeps my promises. You have always been a child worthy of a second name.’