Later he could do little but lurch, clanking from wall to wall in the near dark, feeling the little fires where his wounds had been, the tears and snot drying on his face, careful not to knock over the bucket of his own night soil. His wrists were so narrow the irons had kept sliding off until the sheriff brought in a set made special by the blacksmith, and those ones fit. The only furniture in the room was a bench suspended from the wall on rusting chains and he would lie out on it when he thought it must be night and try sometimes to sleep.
He was lying on it that day when he heard voices in the street outside. It was not mealtime, he knew that much. Mealtime came but twice a day and it was the deputy marshal who brought it over on a tray covered in cheesecloth straight from the sheriff’s kitchen up the street and the deputy marshal would sometimes make a point of spitting in it before setting it down. Charlie hated him, hated and feared him, the casual cruelty in him and the way he called Charlie mongrel and his coarse laugh. But most of all it was the look in the man’s eye that frightened Charlie, the look that said he, Charlie, was just an animal, that he was not even a person at all.
From outside there came the banging of tumblers in the big warehouse door and then the slow heavy tread of boots approaching. Charlie got to his feet, cringing, afraid.
He had killed a man. A white man. That is what they told him. It was that Mr. Jessup who stalked the wharf of the riverboat shipping lines going south to New Orleans and north to St. Louis with a whip singing in his fist, just like it was still 1860, just like no war had ever happened and nothing had been abolished and freedom wasn’t yet the lie it would be proven to be. The man he killed deserved it, he was sure of that, he felt no remorse. But the thing of it was, he did not remember the killing. He knew it had happened because at the hearing everybody had said he had done it, even old Benji, with his sad eyes and trembling hands. In broad daylight, yessir. On the lumber platforms, yessir. Charlie was being whipped for some transgression or other and it went on so long he could feel the slashes beginning to close over and when Mr. Jessup saw it too and swore and started calling down the devil on him Charlie turned in fear, turned too quickly, it must have been, and he knocked into Mr. Jessup and the man had fallen onto the pier and struck his head funny and that was that. But when they tried to shoot him for it Charlie just started breathing again almost at once and the bullets oozed back out of his flesh in front of the executioner’s very eyes. And when they tied him to a post a second time and took their aim they still could not kill him and they did not now know what to do with him.
Now the footsteps had stopped and Charlie heard the scrape and jangle of the keys on their ring and then the heavy door with its iron locks shook. The sound of a club striking the metal clashed and echoed.
“On your feet!” the deputy marshal shouted. “You got visitors, boy. Straighten up.”
Charlie flinched and moved to the rear wall so that the cold bricks were against his back. He held his hands in front of his face, shaking. No one came to visit him, ever.
He took a deep frightened breath.
The door swung open.
* * *
Alice Quicke, tired, sore-knuckled, world-weary, was standing in the white sunlight outside the ruined warehouse in Natchez, glaring up the steep street as her partner, Coulton, ambled toward her. Four nights earlier, in a wharf-side eatery in New Orleans, she had found it necessary to acquaint a man’s nose with the brass railing of the bar, and only Coulton’s revolver and a hasty exit had prevented real bloodshed. Sometimes men made themselves at home in women’s clothing in a way she had less and less patience for as she got older. She was over thirty now and she’d never been married and never wanted to be. She’d lived by violence and her own wits since she was a girl and that seemed good enough to her. She preferred trousers to bustles and corsets, and wore over her wide shoulders a long oilskin coat, cut for a night watchman, with the sleeves folded back off her wrists. It’d been black once, faded now almost to gray in places, with tarnished silver buttons. Her yellow hair was greasy and tangled, cut to a manageable length by her own hand. She was almost pretty, maybe, with a heart-shaped face and fine features, but her eyes were hard, and her nose had been broken years ago and badly set, and she did not smile enough for the attentions of men to linger. That was fine by her. She was a female detective and it was hard enough to get taken seriously without having her goddamn hand kissed at every turn.
Coulton, up the street, was in no hurry. She watched him drift casually under the leafy green poplars, fanning his bowler hat as he went, one thumb hooked in his waistcoat. All around her lay the shabby riverside stillness of a city still pretty in all its architecture, all of it built on the backs of slaves, pretty like a poisonous flower. Coulton was coming from the sheriff’s house, from the little brick jail beside it.