Alice watched the judge absorb it all. All her life she’d known men like this man, men who knew what they knew with such satisfied certainty, who would rather look at a pretty thing and be admired by it than hear it speak, and it occurred to her, briefly, that perhaps that is what she should do, admire him, make pleasing sounds, coo and blink her eyes. But she would not do that.
The judge in the gloom was studying them over his steepled fingers. Then he sighed and turned and looked out the window. “My missus makes an apple pie like you never tasted in your life,” he said. “It’s won blue ribbons at the Confederate Daughters Picnic three years in a row. And right now there’s a piece of it sitting cold on a plate in my kitchen. I’m sorry you came all this way, I am.”
Coulton cleared his throat, stood. Alice stood too, the dress sweeping her ankles. Coulton was turning his hat in his fingers. “Would you take the night to think it over, sir? We could come back in the morning—”
“Mr. Coulton. I agreed to meet with you out of politeness, that’s all.”
“Your Honor—”
The judge held up a hand.
“Only way your boy’s leaving that cell,” he said quietly, “is in a pinewood box. And I don’t care if he’s still moving inside it or not.”
* * *
“Son of a bitch,” hissed Alice, as they descended the courthouse steps. She was pulling at her corset, reaching under her skirts in a most unladylike fashion to unhook a stay or two and in that way catch her breath. It was already dark, the day’s heat baking back up out of the streets, the cicadas loud in the warm night. “I put on a dress for that?”
“Aye, and look at you. Let’s hope we don’t run into that deputy, Alwyn. His tongue’d just about touch his toes, seeing you all dolled up.”
She bit back her retort. She was still too angry to be distracted. “Is what you said in there true? That poor boy only has a few years to live?”
Coulton sighed. “Charlie Ovid will outlast us all,” he said.
“They’re all so goddamn certain the kid is like Jesus. It just makes it worse for him. Why are they all so goddamn certain he can’t get hurt?”
“Oh, he can get hurt. He just heals, is all.”
There was something in the way Coulton said this that gave her pause. “You believe it?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t see a mark on him. Did you?”
“Maybe if you’d lifted up his shirt. Or maybe his legs were all a mess. How close did you look?”
He sighed. “Close enough to know the world isn’t the way I want it to be,” he said softly. “Listen. I need you to get yourself changed, then send your trunks down to the jetty. Settle our bill. I’ll meet you at the hotel in an hour. I think we’re done with the good town of Natchez.”
Alice stopped. She stood in the grass of the empty square under a statue of some fallen Confederate general and after a moment Coulton stopped too, and turned, and came walking slowly back.
“I’m not leaving without that kid,” she said.
A carriage passed in the street, its lanterns swaying. When it was gone, Coulton stepped closer.
“Nor am I,” he said fiercely.
It was nine o’clock when they left the hotel lobby and walked along the boardwalk of Silver Street to the river and then along the back alleys to the old warehouse. It loomed up dark and rusting in the southern moonlight. They stood a long time in the shadows and then crossed the road without speaking, Coulton’s greatcoat pocket heavy and jangling. Alice kept a wary eye out for anyone on the streets. But there was no one.
It took Coulton only a minute to kneel in front of the thick door and pick the locks. He stood and looked at Alice quietly and then pulled the door open and slipped into the darkness and Alice followed. They did not carry a light, but they walked sure-footed along the passage they had been in earlier that day, and at the boy Ovid’s cell Coulton again withdrew his ring of picks and deftly twisted the locks open.
It was utterly black inside. Alice could see nothing for a long moment and she wondered what Charles Ovid could see, staring out at them, as he must be. Coulton cleared his throat and whispered, “Charlie, lad? Are you in here?” and Alice feared for a sudden long silent moment that the boy had been taken away.
But then she heard a sigh in the darkness, and the sound of chains clinking, and she saw the boy step into the faint halo of moonlight. He did not seem surprised to see them.
“Let me get these off you,” muttered Coulton.
Alice was looking up at the boy carefully. Now that her eyes were adjusting to the darkness she slipped into his cell, speaking softly and slowly. “We’re here for you, we’re here to get you out,” she said. “Will you come with us?”
But Ovid only stood looking at them in the darkness. There was something in his calm watchfulness that Alice found unnerving. “The … papers,” he whispered. His voice was low, raspy, like it hadn’t been used in a long time. “Where are they?”
Coulton blinked. “What papers? What’s he mean?”
Suddenly Alice understood. “Your letter from Cairndale. You showed it to the sheriff. Where is it?”
Coulton took the envelope out of his waistcoat, unfolded the letter. “It won’t make sense to you, lad. It’s just instructions, release papers, legal documents—”
But Ovid ignored the letter and took the envelope instead, and he ran his fingers lightly over the Cairndale crest: twin hammers crossed in front of a fiery sun. “What is this?” he whispered.
“Lad, we don’t have time for—” Coulton began.
“It’s the coat of arms for the Cairndale Institute, Charles,” said Alice. “That’s our employer. It’s who we work for.” A thought occurred to her. “Have you seen this symbol before? Do you know it, does it mean something to you?”
Ovid wet his lips. It seemed he was about to speak but then all at once he raised his face and listened in the darkness.
“He’s coming,” whispered the boy.
Alice froze.
And then she heard it too: the scrape of a man’s boots in the warehouse, approaching. She slid noiselessly to the cell door and closed it softly and leaned up against the wall behind it. Coulton took up his position beside her. He had wrapped the chains around one fist. Now the man had started to whistle and Alice recognized the whistle: it was the deputy, Alwyn.
Coulton was patting his pockets. “Did you bring your gun?” he hissed.
But Alice had not. She’d left it behind on purpose, knowing that if it were fired, the sound would give them away, would draw too much attention. She didn’t need anything but her fists, anyway.
But all at once Ovid was in front of them, a swift movement, he was fumbling in Coulton’s pocket and Coulton, astonished, just let him do it, staring as the boy withdrew the sharpest of Coulton’s lockpicks. He crouched on the edge of his bench and rolled up his sleeves and then he gripped the pick in his right fist like a fork and suddenly, in the darkness, without making a sound, he stabbed his left forearm, working the pick deep into the flesh, carving a ragged cut downward to his wrist.
“Jesus—!” Alice hissed.
The blood dripped blackly in the darkness and she could see the boy grimacing, his teeth clenched, the bubbles of snot as he breathed sharply through his nose. And then he dropped the pick to the floor with a clatter and dug his fingers deep into his own flesh and pulled out of the slick a thin six-inch piece of metal.
A blade.
And then, a minute later, to Alice’s amazement, the cut in the boy’s arm began to stitch itself together, flesh by flesh, until there was only the blood in a long smear and the mess of his shirt and the floor, slippery underfoot.
It felt like a dream. Ovid got to his feet. He said nothing. He stood trembling and fierce in front of the door with the blade gripped low in his right hand, and he waited.