Freedom's Banner Read online

  Russ laughed, urging his horse forward. ‘Don’t worry about him, Mattie – you should see the other fella!’ He grinned widely, and his horse, restless and full of energy as its rider, danced around her. Easily, one-handed he controlled it, swinging away from her, his bright face full of mischief.

  As his brothers moved off, laughing, Johnny swung from the saddle to walk beside her, his arm about her waist, Arrow stepping daintily behind them. ‘Now don’t fuss, Mattie.’

  ‘What did he mean? What other fellow?’

  ‘Don’t be silly – Russ was joking. I took a tumble, is all. We aren’t playing ring o’roses, you know. These things happen.’ He grinned down at her. There was an air of high-strung excitement about him, his eyes were fierce with laughter.

  She laid her head against his arm for the briefest of moments. ‘Oh, Johnny, I do wish you’d be more careful! You really do all look on this as a game, don’t you?’

  ‘A game?’ As she looked up at him he shook his head. ‘No, Mattie – not a game. An adventure. A crusade!’ He swung her to face him, planted a kiss on her mouth. ‘You’ll be proud of us all, Mattie, see if you won’t!’

  * * *

  They were at supper when Joshua came swiftly into the room to bend to Logan Sherwood’s ear. The talk about the table died down in surprise, but before Logan could react to Joshua’s urgency they all heard it; a man’s voice from beyond the door that led to the front porch, lifted in bitter, drawling challenge. ‘You there, Johnny Sherwood? You ready to take me on man to man, ’thout your big brothers steppin’ in to look after you?’ The words were very slightly slurred.

  Johnny stood up abruptly, his chair rocking dangerously.

  ‘Johnny! Sit down!’ Logan Sherwood lifted a sharp finger.

  ‘But, Pa!’

  ‘Sit down, I say! Joshua, I’m sure we can leave this to you? Kindly inform the young man that we are at supper, and that we have ladies present. If he wishes to speak with me or with any of my sons in a civilized manner later, we will be at his disposal. Offer him refreshment, if you will – something other than alcohol, I think.’

  ‘Johnny Sherwood! You hear me? You think I’m gonna let you get away with it? Sniffin’ ’round a man’s wife like a –?’

  Johnny was out of his chair and at the door before anyone could stop him. With a roar he flung himself out onto the porch. ‘You hold your filthy tongue, Taylor, or by God I’ll cut it out, you damn’ drunken Yankee! What I started this afternoon I can finish, here an’ now –’

  Joshua had moved almost as fast as Johnny, and was behind him as Johnny braced himself, hands on the balcony rail, to glare at the figure who stood below him, feet braced, defiant but by no means entirely steady. Just out of the circle of light cast by the lamps in front of the house, feet shuffled in the mud, and shining eyes in faces dark as the surrounding shadows watched, bright with interest.

  ‘Well, I just bet you think you can.’ The words were spoken aggressively slowly and with precise, drunken venom. ‘An’ ain’t that just why I’m here? To show you diff’rent. I don’t care for – unfinished business – of whatever kind.’

  ‘What in the devil’s name is this all about?’ Logan snapped at Will.

  Will shrugged huge shoulders, glancing at Russ. ‘There was a bit of trouble over at Silver Oaks this afternoon, Pa. Johnny and Bram – well, they had a bit of a scrap – we had to pull ’em off each other. The Colonel was real mad – sounds like Bram’s bin off somewheres an’ got himself a skinful.’

  Mattie had frozen in her seat, her face set.

  ‘You wan’ to come down here an’ face me, Sherwood? I done showed you once, last year, who was the better man – you wan’ me to pound it into you? You wan’ me ter make you tell me what you been doin’ sneakin’ ’round my wife when my back was turned, or you goin’ ter do it your own self ?’

  Johnny launched himself too quickly for Joshua to prevent it. His feet were on the rail, and his big body, agile as a cat’s, was propelled through the air to fell the other man in one movement. They rolled in the sticky red mud in a savage, grunting tangle of arms and legs.

  Cissy uttered an excited shriek, jumped from her chair, lifted her skirts and ran out onto the porch. White-faced with anger, Logan Sherwood strode after her. The other three boys sat for a moment, looking from one to the other, obviously at a loss. Mattie flinched as there clearly came the crack of fist against bone and one of the combatants rasped in pain.

  ‘Johnny!’ Logan Sherwood roared. ‘You get back up here this minute, you hear me, boy?’

  The answer was another grim smacking of bone and flesh.

  With one accord Will and Russ moved fast from their chairs to join their father on the porch. Mattie was left facing Robert. She sat quite still, trying not to listen to the savage sounds beyond the open doors. Robert reached a hand in silence. After a moment she took it, accepted its quick, warm grip of sympathy, then stood composedly and went out onto the porch with the others.

  At first glance, in the darkness and after that initial ferocious, muddy scramble, it was difficult to tell one man from the other. Both were plastered from head to toe in red mud, blood smeared both faces. But Johnny had the height, the weight and the reach, and Bram was slighter, and drunk. Even Mattie, appalled, could see that it was no contest.

  ‘Enough!’ Logan’s voice cracked like a whip. ‘Johnny! Enough!’

  Again Johnny’s fist connected with his opponent’s face. Again the other man rocked, and refused to fall.

  ‘Johnny! Enough, I say!’

  Grimly, open-handed this time, and unloosing every savage ounce of power in shoulder and arm, Johnny struck again, knocking Bram Taylor completely off his feet. The man sprawled in the mud.

  Johnny bent and with blind and terrible strength lifted him by his shirtfront. Again open-handed, he slapped the other man’s face, back and forth, his own teeth bared like an animal’s.

  ‘Johnny! Stop it! For God’s sake! Stop it!’ Mattie was at the rail, her hands gripping it as if it were the only solid thing in the world.

  ‘Joshua,’ Logan Sherwood said.

  ‘Dog!’ Johnny lashed out again. Bram staggered, blinded. ‘Yankee bastard!’ Another precise blow. The fair, handsome face was wrecked, swollen and bleeding. Obstinately the drunken man struggled upright once more, fists flailing.

  Mattie put her hands to her face.

  ‘Joshua, you have my permission to stop this.’

  ‘Yes, Sir, Mister Logan.’

  With an economy of movement that blurred the eye, Joshua stepped forward, slid a long arm about Bram Taylor’s narrow waist and lifted him, swinging him bodily away from the next blow, depositing him with neither apology nor ceremony on all fours in the mud before turning to face Johnny’s poised fist. Every watcher held his breath. For one moment it looked as if Johnny would not be able to control himself and that massive fist would explode into Joshua’s dark, shadowed face. For the moment of a long breath they stood so, Joshua still and impassive in the torchlight. Then Johnny’s arm fell to his side. He shook his head, as if waking.

  ‘Johnny. Get back up here.’ Logan Sherwood’s voice was quiet, contained, and brought every eye to his expressionless face. ‘Joshua, have Mister Taylor cared for, please, and escorted home.’ His cold eye cast beyond the torchlit circle. With no sound the watchers began to melt into darkness. Mattie turned and walked back into the dining room where the meal sat congealing on the table, and two wide-eyed house servants stood, waiting, only their eyes moving from face to face as the family came, silent, into the room. Johnny, muddy from head to foot, blood running from his nose and his knuckles raw, stepped last through the door, to face every gaze.

  There was a very long moment of quiet.

  ‘I’m sorry, Pa,’ Johnny said at last, brushing the back of his hand across his marked face, and avoiding his father’s eyes.

  ‘So you should be, son. A more unseemly show I’ve not seen in a lifetime.’ Logan let a significant silence de
velop. ‘But seems to me there’s someone else deserves your apology more?’

  Mattie, as all eyes turned to her, would have given every last drop of her blood to be elsewhere. For a moment she looked obdurately at the carpet. Then, gritting her teeth, she lifted her head to face her husband.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mattie,’ he said. But she could see the anger and resentment in him, sensed her own rising to confront it. Despair gripped her.

  ‘You’d best get yourself cleaned up.’ Logan’s voice was impersonal.

  ‘Yes, Pa.’ With no look to left or right, Johnny left the room. Beyond the door they heard his barking voice: ‘Shake? ’Ziah? Fetch some water, an’ quick about it. Joshua – you got some salve?’

  Mattie stood for a moment longer. She was alarmed to discover that every smallest part of her was trembling, imperceptibly, like an aspen leaf in the breath of a summer breeze; she was surprised to find that her limbs and her voice obeyed her with every appearance of composure. ‘If you’ll excuse me?’ Head up, she followed the sound of her husband’s defensively angry voice out of the room and up the stairs to their rooms.

  * * *

  She watched in silence as his hurts were bathed and doctored. In a silence no less painful, Johnny withstood the ministrations. With the slaves dismissed the room was quiet, deceptively peaceful; the fire flickered in the hearth and the candles in their sconces cast a gentle light.

  ‘I saw you,’ Mattie said, with no preamble. ‘On the night of the party. You and –’ she swallowed, hating the feel of the name on her tongue ‘– you and Lottie Taylor. On the porch.’

  It was obviously the last thing he had expected. She saw the shock in his eyes and was fiercely glad.

  ‘Now this.’ She lifted her head to look at him. ‘Is it true? You’ve been seeing her?’

  ‘No!’ The word was violent. He came to his feet, lifting his big, bandaged hands. ‘No. Mattie – not – seeing her –’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Once,’ he said. ‘Just once. I had to go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mattie, I’ve known her since we both were children – I had to know – if she was happy –’

  ‘You already knew she was not.’ She was astounded – horrified – at the biting calm of the words.

  He set his jaw in stubborn, defensive anger.

  ‘Johnny?’ She forced his eyes to hers. ‘Why did you marry me?’

  The ensuing silence was too long ever to forgive. She turned from him, fingered blindly the lace of a tablecloth. ‘Tell me – do you ever tell me the truth about anything?’ she asked, quietly bitter.

  ‘Do you? Are you so damned sure of your own self?’ The sharp words were followed by the sound of a drawer slamming open.

  She turned, puzzled.

  Johnny threw a small slate and a piece of chalk, which broke as it fell, onto the table. ‘You do know,’ he asked, quiet in the silence, ‘that it’s against the law of this land to teach a slave to read and write?’

  Mattie looked at him in horror. ‘You’ve been spying on me?’

  He shook his head impatiently. ‘In God’s name, when will you learn? There’s no need to spy in a house like Pleasant Hill. I grew up with most of these folks. What they know I know.’ He leaned to her, black eyes bright with anger. ‘You know what could happen to Lucy, iffen I told Pa?’

  She stared at him for a long, quiet moment. ‘You’re despicable,’ she said, still precariously calm.

  His flushed face reddened further.

  ‘You hear me?’ She had never in her life been so angry. That he had lied to and betrayed her was one thing; that he could think to counterattack with threats to Lucy was unforgivable. ‘You think you’re so brave, so gallant, so – honourable –’ She invested the last word with such disgust that she saw him flinch, and was furiously glad. ‘But you know what you really are? You’re a child! A spoiled child, playing games. You married me to spite Charlotte, and wouldn’t admit it, not even to yourself. You and your poetry, your declarations of love! Playacting! That’s what it was. Like this damned silly playing at toy soldiers at Silver Oaks! In God’s name, has it occurred to any of you what war will really be like? Do you ever think of the blood, and the death, and the mutilation?’

  ‘Shut up, Mattie!’ He towered above her, glowering, his damaged face dark with rage, and, had she but seen it, with the shadow of fear. ‘Just shut up!’

  Tears spilled onto her face. Angrily, she rubbed them away with the back of her hand. ‘Do you remember what you said this afternoon, Johnny? You said I’d be proud of you! Proud of you? Tell me what there is to be proud of ? Brutality? Deception? What of honour, Johnny, that you all talk about so much? Integrity? Decency? Where are they in all of this? Where’s the decency in marrying me when you loved her still? Where’s the integrity in lying to me, in seeing her behind her husband’s back? And this – this honour you’re all so proud of, so certain of – what honour is there in a society that treats half its population like animals, that could strip a girl like Lucy naked and flog her because she wants to learn to read? No wonder you think you can do as you like! No wonder you can lie to yourself as well as to me, and not even understand that you’re doing it!’ Her unstable voice had risen.

  Johnny’s control snapped; he reached for her, caught her by the shoulders and shook her like a doll. For an instant, seeing the lacerating fury in his bloodied face she was truly frightened. Then he let her go, so that she stumbled, and almost fell as he stepped back from her, a hand in front of his eyes. ‘Mattie – I’m sorry –’

  ‘What for?’ she asked, bleakly and very cold, turning from him, knowing the risk she ran, unable to prevent herself. ‘For marrying me? For taking me from everything I knew and bringing me here? For being a liar and a cheat? For fighting in the mud like an animal over another man’s wife?’ She was so hurt, her love for him so violated, that she wanted in that moment only to inflict pain. ‘I hope there is a war, Johnny Sherwood. At least it means you’ll go away, far away! At least it means I won’t have to watch you thinking of her when you look at me, when you touch me –’ She stopped, appalled, knowing it was a barbarous thing to have said.

  Behind her the door slammed. Johnny’s footsteps clattered along the narrow balcony and down the steep stairs, away from her.

  Slowly Mattie bowed her wet face into her hands; a still figure in a silent room that still rang with the vehement echoes of anger.

  * * *

  The quarrel did not mend easily. As events picked up a momentum of their own, and early one April morning at Fort Sumter, in Charleston, the first shots were fired that were to signal the start of conflict, Mattie and Johnny lived in a cool and open estrangement cloaked only in the necessary civilities of daily life in a household full of people. They slept each night with backs obstinately turned, barely spoke at all on those odd occasions when they could not avoid being left alone.

  True to their plans, Will, Russell and Johnny made preparations to leave. The troop was riding together, north to Athens, to join Colonel Thomas R. Cobb’s Georgia Legion. In the middle of April another wave of secessions began as Virginia joined the Confederacy, soon to be followed by North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee. The South’s ports were blockaded. In North and South tempers and hearts were high and young men answered the impassioned appeals of their chosen governments and flocked to the recruiting stations.

  It was not until the very night before the troop was due to leave that the awful restraint between Mattie and Johnny broke.

  Heartsore though she still was, and grievously hurt, Mattie could not see him go with such unnatural animosity lying still between them. It was hard to perpetuate a quarrel now that war and parting were actually upon them. As she helped Lucy to lay out his grey and blue uniform, with its shining buttons and its jaunty, plumed hat, it was almost as if for the first time she understood that he was truly leaving, truly riding to war, to an experience in which she could have no part and from which it was possible he migh
t never return. In bed that night with no words she turned to him, and as wordless he came to her, ardent and loving as he had ever been. Later, much later, he slept, his head pillowed upon her breast, while the unstoppable tears slid all but unnoticed down her cheeks and into the tangle of her hair.

  The next morning, in their last moments alone, Mattie gave him the small leather-bound volume of poetry that had been her father’s and had seemed to be, to her at least, the first token of their love. ‘Take it,’ she said, over his protests, ‘I want you to have it. It may help pass a few empty hours. At the very least it will remind you of your quarrelsome wife.’

  Johnny bent to her and hugged her for a long, fierce moment, almost lifting her from her feet, crushing her to him as if he would never let her go. With strange detachment then she followed him downstairs and into the house where his brothers, sabres and pistols at their sides, unfeigned excitement in their faces, awaited him and, as calm as if he had been setting out for the market at Macon, watched and waved from the porch with the rest of the household as the brave little cavalcade wheeled smartly and with a rhythmic jingling of harness away from the house and into the dappled sunlight beneath the moss- draped trees of the long, red driveway. Just before they disappeared Johnny turned, lifting his plumed hat in a sweeping wave of farewell. Smiling, she lifted her hand. And then they were gone, and all seemed very quiet.

  ‘God be with them,’ Logan Sherwood said.

  ‘Amen to that,’ Joshua added firmly and quietly; and, turning, Mattie saw to her astonishment that there were tears in his eyes too.