“Yes, that’s right.”
“Business?” Stamper snorted and a few of the others dared to laugh, but quietly. “Muldoon, only business you can do is spreadin’ a stink wherever you walk.” His hand touched the musket, just in case. “And it’s news to me that you have a friend. Boy,” he said to Matthew, “you must be as poor a soul as he is.”
Quinn leaned toward the man. Her face was tight, her eyes dark, and she said in a voice of fire and ice, “Don’t you talk to him that way, mister. I won’t have it. You hear?”
“Is that so?” Stamper replied, with a quick glance at the other men, for Matthew saw he enjoyed not only being the center of attention, but also being a hornet in a chamberpot. “Why? What’s he to a sad-eyed young wench from Rotbottom?”
“He’s my husband,” Quinn said calmly, “and he’s come back to me from the dead.”
Thirteen
There followed a long, frozen silence.
It was broken when Baltazar Stamper said, “That explains it, then. Fitzy, cut me off some more snake and put it on here!” He held up his sharpened stick toward a thin young man who obediently knelt down and started slicing the meat from a dead brown snake that lay across a rock next to two already well-carved carcasses. Stamper’s deep-set eyes glittered as he appraised Matthew and Quinn. “Mr. Matthew,” he said, “you got yourself one there, it seems.”
Seth Lott wore a grin like an ugly gash. “My services are yours, sir, for a Christian wedding. Or might I say…a renewed marriage.”
“Then you can do the deed to her,” said Caleb Bovie, peeling some skin from his chunk of snake. “Do her good and proper. Right here by the fire, kinda…” He struggled to find the word, his mouth working but no sound being produced.
“Romantic,” said Stamper, who received his portion of reptile from Fitzy and put it over the fire to burn.
“Thank you for your interest and comments,” Matthew replied, taking them in one after another with a hard-edged glare. “Perhaps in Jubilee you have little respect for women…particularly one who might be…confused…but I’d ask you to restrain your jocularity.”
“Big words,” said Bovie, with a frown. “What do they mean?”
“They mean…shut your damned mouths,” Magnus answered, and he rested the rusted pistol against the bulk of a shoulder. “Stamper, I hear you put two wives in the grave. Lott, you got a fifteen-year-old girl with child a couple of years ago and she’s still wanderin’ the alleys of Charles Town, lookin’ for Jesus. And Bovie…you wouldn’t know the backside of a woman from a horse’s ass, would you?”
Bovie flushed red and started to stand up, but Stamper gave a harsh laugh and held out his stick of smoking snake meat to prevent Bovie’s rise. “Let him talk, Caleb. Entertainin’ to hear a fool prattle on. Oh, you men ought to hear what’s said about our friend Muldoon in Charles Town. Speakin’ of a certain society lady, who goes to balls and fancy dances with young handsome men. And then Magnus shows up, like a little boy with a broken heart. Beggin’ himself on her. Oh yes, I’ve heard it told in more than one tavern. How they laugh at him in that town! Our hermit Magnus Muldoon, tryin’ to…” He paused, and took a slow bite of snake. “Be somebody,” he went on. “When ever’body knows, and he knows it too…that he won’t ever in his life amount to any more than the pile of walkin’ shit he already is.” Stamper smiled faintly, with a bit of meat in the corner of his mouth. “But let Magnus reach high, I say. Let him reach up as far as he can. He ain’t goin’ nowhere, and he ain’t gonna catch no star, if that’s what he’s after. Let him reach up, and try and try to get away from what he is by grabbin’ the skirts of a—”
“That’s enough.”
It had been Matthew’s voice. Delivered as strongly as a pistol shot, but with better aim and elegance.
Bovie stared holes through him. “Just ’cause you been arrowshot, boy, and lived to tell the tale don’t mean nothin’ to me. You better watch that smart mouth.”
“Oh, let’s be friends,” said Stamper, with a shrug. “Comrades, out here on the River of Souls lookin’ to do the right thing. Get us some black ears to take back with us. Avenge Miss Sarah’s murder. That’s what it’s about, ain’t it?”
Magnus had said nothing during all this. His face may have tightened and his glowering become more fearsome, but Matthew thought he was admirable in his solidity. The jugs began being passed around the fire once more, the other men began talking back and forth, and after a moment Magnus lowered his pistol and sat down with one side toward the party of avengers and the other toward the river.
“Your husband,” said Seth Lott to Quinn. “As a man of God, I am interested in your story. Of life and death, rebirth and resurrection. What happened to him, dear child?”
Many of the men were listening, though some had started a game of cards to go along with their taste from the jug. Quinn shifted uneasily, perhaps taking note—as Matthew did—of the rapacious eyes upon her.
“My Daniel died last summer,” she said, speaking to the reverend. “It was a hot summer. Dry, like this one. Thunder and lightning, but no rain. You know how it can happen here, all of a sudden. The lightning strikes, and a tree catches fire. Then another one, and one after that, and then the whole woods starts burnin’. It can happen so fast, if the wind is dry and the thicket’s parched. So it was last summer.”
“Wildfires,” said Lott. “Yes, they do start quick. They move fast, until they burn themselves out. It’s God’s will.”
Quinn nodded. “Maybe it is. But it’s a hard will, I think. God must be a long ways from this place. Must be thinkin’ of other things, and helpin’ other people.”
“God helps those who help themselves,” said the preacher. “That’s His mysterious way.”
Matthew wondered if—taking into consideration that Magnus had been more truthful than spiteful—Lott had dismissed his young pregnant mistress with those exact words.
“Could be,” said Quinn, her expression impassive. “When that fire takes hold and starts movin’, nothin’ can hardly stop it. Animals run from it and get caught when the wind jumps the fire from place to place. Happens to men, too. Last summer fire was ragin’ toward Rotbottom. We ain’t much, but we’re somewhere. Got lives and houses and families just like in any place. My Daniel and some men went out to chop down trees and dig firebreaks, stop it from gettin’ any closer to town.”
“I saw the smoke,” said Stamper. “Looked a long way off, though. Happens just about every year.”
“You got the swamp and the river to keep Jubilee from burnin’,” Quinn went on. “We got our picks and shovels and wantin’ to keep what’s ours. Maybe twenty men went out there, to fight the fire that was comin’. Lightin’ up the sky at night like the Devil’s grin, and throwin’ sparks onto anything that would burn. And the wind pickin’ up, and moanin’, and rushin’ those flames on. Gettin’ closer all the time, gettin’ stronger, and startin’ to catch even the swamp trees alight. My Daniel went out there, to help save our town…and he was one of three who didn’t come back, when it was all said and done.”
“Burned up, was he?” asked Stamper, indelicately.
“Not burned,” the girl replied. “Taken.”
“Taken?” Matthew frowned. “How do you mean?”
“By the beast,” said Quinn. “It came out of the smoke. Nearest man saw its shadow…couldn’t tell much of it…but it fell on my Daniel, and he was gone.” She reached out and put her hand on Matthew’s. “You said before you left me…you had a feelin’…a fear that day. But you looked in my face, and you told me how much you loved me, and you said, ‘Quinn…don’t you worry, ’cause I’ll be back.’ Said the child I was carryin’ was too important for distance to come between us…not the distance between our town and that fire, or the distance between life and death. Don’t you remember that?”