Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V (28 page)

“That’s him!” she cried.

The witcher sensed salvation. “Who? Who is he?”

“The English lawyer who was traveling with Alvin Smith! He’s a witch too! He has a knack with wood!”

“So he was also at the witches’ sabbath!” cried the witcher. “Of course Satan quotes the law to try to save his minions! Arrest that man!”

Verily immediately turned to the crowd. “See how it goes! Everyone who stands up for my client will be accused of witchcraft! Everyone will be clapped into jail and tried for his life!”

“Silence him!” cried the witcher. “Make him run along with the others!”

But the tithingmen, who reluctantly took Verily by the elbows because he
had
been accused, had no intention of doing any more running, now that it had been called torture and declared to be illegal. “No more running today, sir,” said one of them. “We’ll have to hear from the judge before we let you do such things again.”

As a couple of tithingmen helped Purity stagger toward the courthouse, she whimpered when she came near Verily. “Don’t bring me near him,” she said. “He casts spells on me. He wants to come to me as an incubus!”

“Purity, you poor thing,” Verily said. “Hear yourself spout the lies this witcher has taught you to tell.”

“Speak no word to her!” cried the witcher. “Hear him curse her!”

To the tithingmen, Verily wryly muttered, “Did that sound like a curse to you?”

“No muttering! Keep still!” screamed the witcher.

Verily answered the witcher loudly. “All I said was, to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail!”

Some people understood at once and chuckled. But the witcher was not one for irony. “A satanic utterance! Hammers and nails! What have you cursed me with? Confess your meaning, sir!”

“I mean, sir, that to those who
profit
from
witch trials
, every word sounds like a curse!”

“Get him out of here with his filthy lies and innuendoes!”

The tithingmen dragged him and Alvin off to the
courthouse, to cells far from each other, but they were near each other several times, and though they didn’t speak, they traded glances, and Verily made sure Alvin saw him grinning from ear to ear. This is working exactly as I wanted, Verily was saying.

Alone in his cell, though, Verily lost his smile. Poor Purity, he thought. How deeply had this witcher twisted her mind? Was her integrity so tied up in knots that she was no longer capable of seeing how she was being manipulated? Somewhere along the line, she had to realize that the witcher was using her.

Let it be soon, thought Verily. I don’t want Alvin to have to wait long in this jail.

Hezekiah Study had already packed his bag for an extended stay with his niece in Providence when he heard the shouting on the common and leaned out his window to listen. He watched the English lawyer embarrass Micah Quill, manipulating the master manipulator until Hezekiah wanted to cheer. His heart sank when Purity denounced the lawyer—and, indeed, she
had
spoken of a lawyer in Alvin Smith’s party right from the start—but the lawyer managed to plant seeds of doubt in every onlooker’s mind all the same. To Hezekiah Study, it was the first time he’d ever seen the early stages of a witch trial without dread and despair seizing his heart. For the English lawyer was grinning like a schoolboy who doesn’t mind the punishment because it was worth it to put the rock through the schoolmaster’s window.

He’s in control of this, thought Hezekiah.

His better sense—his bitter experience—answered: No one’s ever in control of a witch trial except the witchers. The man is grinning now, but he’ll not grin in the end, with either the rope around his neck or his decency stripped from him.

Oh, God, let this be the day at last when the people finally see that the only ones serving the devil at these trials are the witchers!

And when his prayer was done, he came away from the window and unpacked his bag. Come what may, this trial was going to be fought with courage, and Hezekiah Study had to stay. Not just to see what was going to happen, but because this young lawyer would not stand alone. Hezekiah Study would stand with him. He had that much hope and courage left in him, despite all.

Calvin didn’t notice, at first, that he was trapped. With his doodlebug he followed Denmark into Black-town, the section of Camelot devoted to housing skilled slaves whose services were being rented out, or where trusted slaves who were running errands for out-of-town landlords found room and board. Blacktown wasn’t large, but it spilled over its official borders, as one warehouse after another had rooms added on upper floors—illegally and without registration—and where slaves came and went.

It was into one such warehouse just outside Black-town that Denmark went and Calvin followed. Rickety stairs inside the building led to an attic story filled with an incredible array of junk. Boards, bits of furniture, strap and scrap iron, old clothes, ropes, fishnets, and all sorts of other random items dangled from hooks in the ceiling joists. At first he was puzzled—who would spend the time to bind all these things together?—but then he
realized what he was seeing: larger versions of the knotwork that Denmark had collected from the newly arrived slaves.

He was about to return to his body and tell Honoré what he had found and where it was, when suddenly the junk parted and Calvin saw a dazzling light. He exclaimed about it, then moved closer and saw that it was made of thousands and thousands of heartfires, held within a net which hung, of course, from a hook in the ceiling.

What kind of net could hold souls? He moved closer. The individual heartfires were much tinier than those he was used to seeing. As so often before, he wished he could see into them the way torches did. But they remained a mystery to him.

His vision, though, could see what Margaret’s never could: He could see the stout web of knotted cords that held the heartfires. On closer examination, though, he saw that each heartfire danced like a candle flame above one of the little bits of knotwork that he and Honoré had watched Denmark collect from the arriving slaves. So the web probably wasn’t hexy at all.

With that, Calvin drew back, expecting to return instantly to his body to speak to Honoré. He even started to speak. But his mouth didn’t move. His eyes didn’t see. He remained where he was, looking at the heartfires with his doodling sight instead of gazing out of his eyes at the street.

No, that wasn’t so. He was vaguely aware of the street, as if seeing it out of the corners of his eyes. He could hear sounds, too, Honoré’s voice, but when he tried to listen, he kept getting distracted. He couldn’t pay attention to Honoré, couldn’t focus on what his eyes were seeing. He kept coming back here to the knots and the net, no matter how hard he tried to tear himself away. He could feel his legs moving, as if they were someone else’s legs. He could tell that Honoré’s voice was becoming agitated, but still he couldn’t make out what was
being said. The sounds entered his mind, but by the time the end of a word was said, Calvin had lost his hold on the beginning of it. Nothing made sense.

Now with sick dread he realized that Honoré’s warning had been well placed. This net was designed to catch and hold souls, or bits of souls, anyway, and keep anyone from finding them. Calvin had sent a bit of his own soul into the net, and now he couldn’t get out.

Well, that’s what
they
thought. Nets were made of cord; cord was made of threads wound and twisted; threads were spun from fibers. All of these were things that Calvin well understood. He set to work at once.

Denmark Vesey scowled at Gullah Joe, but the old witchy man didn’t even seem to notice. White men had been known to step back a bit when they saw Denmark passing by with such a look on his face. Even the kind of White men who liked to goad Blacks, like those men on the dock today, they wouldn’t mess with him when he wore that scowl on his face. He only let them push him around today because he had to show the new slaves how to keep White folks happy. But he still felt the rage and stored it up in his heart.

Not that he felt the kind of fury that filled that net of souls hanging up not ten paces away. That’s because Denmark wasn’t no man’s slave. He wasn’t even fully Black. He was the son of one of those rare slaveowners who felt some kind of fatherly responsibility toward the children he sired on his Black women. He gave freedom to all his half-Black bastards, freedom and a geography lesson, since every one of them was named for a European country. Few of them stayed free, though, if they once strayed from Mr. Vesey’s plantation near Savannah. What difference did it make being free, if you had to live among the slaves and work among them and couldn’t leave any more than the slaves did?

It made a difference to Denmark. He wasn’t going to stick around on the plantation. He figured out what letters
were when he was still little and got hold of a book and taught himself to read. He learned his numbers from his father’s cousin, a French student who lived on the plantation to hide out because he took part in an anti-Napoleon rally at the university. The boy fancied himself some kind of hero of the oppressed, but all Denmark cared about was learning how to decode the mysteries that White people used to keep Black folks down. By the time he was ten, his father had him keeping the books for the plantation, though they had to keep it secret even from the White foreman. His father would pat his head and praise him, but the praise made Denmark want to kill him. “Just goes to show your Black mama’s blood can’t wipe out
all
the brains you get from a White papa.” His father was still sleeping with his mother and getting more babies on her, and he knew she wasn’t stupid, but he still talked like that, showing no respect for her at all, even though
her
children were smarter than the dim-witted little White weaklings that Father’s
wife
produced.

Denmark nursed that anger and it kept him free. He wasn’t going to end up on this plantation, no sir. The law said that there wasn’t no such thing as a free Black man in the Crown Colonies. One of Denmark’s own brothers, Italy, had been seized as a runaway in Camelot, and Father had to lay some stripes on Italy’s back before the law would let up and go away. But Denmark wasn’t going to get caught. He went to his father one day with a plan. Father didn’t like it much—he didn’t want to have to go back to doing his own books—but Denmark kept after him and finally went on strike, refusing to do the books if Father didn’t go along. Father had him back in the fields under the overseer for a while, but in the end he didn’t have the heart to waste the boy’s talents.

So when Denmark was seventeen, his father brought him to Camelot and set him up with letters of introduction that Denmark had actually written, so the hand would always match. Denmark went around pretending
to be a messenger for his absentee owner, soliciting bookkeeping jobs and copy work. Some White men thought they could cheat him, getting him to work but then refusing to pay the amount agreed on. Denmark hid his anger, then went home and in his elegant hand wrote letters to an attorney, again using his father’s name. As soon as the White men realized that Denmark’s owner wasn’t going to let them get away with cheating him, they generally paid up. The ones that didn’t, Denmark let the matter drop and never worked for them again. It wasn’t so bad being a slave when your owner was yourself and stood up for you.

That went on till his father died. Denmark was full grown and had some money set by. No one knew his father in Camelot so it didn’t matter he was dead, as long as nobody went back to Savannah to try to follow up on something Denmark wrote in his father’s name. Not that Denmark didn’t worry for a while. But when it became clear that it was all going well, he started to fancy himself a real man. He decided to buy himself a slave of his own, a Black woman he could love and get children from the way his father did.

He chose the one he wanted and had an attorney buy her for him, then went to pick her up in the name of his father. But when he got her home and she found out that a Black man had bought her, she near clawed his eyes out and ran out screaming into the neighborhood that she wasn’t going to be no slave to a Black man. Denmark chased her down, getting no help from the other residents of Blacktown—that was when he realized they all knew he was free and resented him for it. It all came down to this, from his woman and from his neighbors: They hated being slaves, hated all White people, but more than anyone or anything else they hated a free buck like him.

Well, let them! That’s what he thought at first. But it grew so he could hardly bear the sight of his woman, chained to the wall in his tiny room, cursing him whenever
he came home. She kept making dolls of him to try to poison him, and it made him good and sick more than once. He didn’t know a thing about poppeting. He’d spent all his effort learning the White man’s secrets and knew nothing about what Black folks did. He came to the day when he realized he had nothing. He might fool White folks into letting him keep the results of his own labor, but he was never going to be White. And Black folks didn’t trust him because he didn’t know their ways, either, and because he acted so White and kept a slave.

Finally one day he knelt down in front of his woman and cried. What can I do to make you love me? She just laughed. You can’t set me free, she said, cause Black folks are never free here. And you can’t make me love you cause I never love him as owns me. And you can’t sell me cause I tell my new master about you, see if I don’t. All you can do is die when I make you a right poppet and kill it dead.