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Out of sight, a rifle cracked, and the ball chipped bark from the live-oak at January's elbow. Fragments stung his cheek. The bandits' lousy aim was getting better, and that wasn't good.
Shaw set his rifle against his shoulder, and used one gloved hand to push aside some of the heavy undergrowth screening them from the road and the bandits, before bracing the weapon and coolly squeezing off a shot. Out of sight, someone screamed, and a fusillade of inaccurate gunfire responded. January hoped to hell and back that Shaw's aim was good enough not to hit Minou, but that hadn't been a woman's scream, at least.
Shaw ducked down and rammed another ball and charge down the rifle's barrel. There were a brace of pistols at his belt, the bulge of another in his pocket, but at this distance nothing but the long Kentucky rifle was useful. "Don't know how you get yourself into these fixes, Maestro. You got worse luck'n a one-legged polecat."
"I don't plan these things!" January said. "They just -- happen."
He risked a peek over the bushes, trying to see Minou. The bandits were using her overturned carriage and the dead coach horses for cover, but he glimpsed ruffled skirts peeking out from one side and, for an instant, a shapely ankle which quickly drew back out of sight. She was still all right, for now at least, and hopefully had the sense to keep her head down.
If they'd been Creole, he'd hope they were taking her for ransom; Henri Viellard would pay just about anything to get her back. But he'd seen and heard enough to know they were American, and January doubted if Americans would consider a colored courtesan a worthy target for ransom money. His stomach went cold at the thought of what else they might want her for.
Shaw waited until one of the bandits popped up to fire, and then shot him through the head before he could squeeze off a shot. The man dropped out of sight and Shaw ducked to reload again.
January struggled to think of options, plans, and for a moment he wished that Shaw weren't there -- his choices would be broader if he didn't have the lawman looking over his shoulder. His eyes dropped to the unused pistols on Shaw's gunbelts. "I can't do much with my bare hands against rifles," he said.
Shaw looked up from his powder horn. His gray eyes followed January's down to the pistols. "Well now, Maestro, I know what you're thinkin' and can't hardly blame you, but it's against the law, and I'm an officer of the law an' all."
January's hands curled automatically with an old, deep anger. With an effort, he released them. "That's my sister down there. Sir."
"On t'other hand," Shaw went on as if he hadn't heard him, "bein' as I'm kinda busy, if'n I was to drop somethin' an' someone was to pick it up, doubt I'd have time to notice."
He drew a pistol and laid it carefully on the heavy layer of leaf-mold in which they crouched, then turned away with the rifle.
There was a small, cynical part of January that couldn't help suspecting a trap. But also, there was Minou to consider. He picked up the loaded pistol.
"Durn shame I didn't bring more boys from town," Shaw said, sighting down the rifle. "Make this a good bit easier if'n I had somebody could circle 'round behind them boys down there."
January had already had that thought, and was up and moving; the pistol was no good from up here anyway. Hoping Shaw took care what he shot at, January went low and fast down the side of the hill, to where the road doubled back through an elder thicket and he could cross without being seen. More gunshots reached his ears, muffled and directionless in the dense vegetation. He forced himself to slow his steps as he approached the road and began catching glimpses of the tipped carriage and Minou's bright skirts through the broad, vine-draped trunks of the trees. He began slipping from tree to tree, placing his feet with care as he worked his way closer. The urgency of the situation gnawed at him, but he was still outnumbered and he had only one shot.
The only bright spot was that the bandits did not seem to have thought of using Minou as a hostage. For once, January thought grimly, he could be glad for their dismissal of her; the idea that she might have value to others, beyond her price as a commodity, didn't seem to have occurred to them, so she was being ignored in the fighting. And she appeared to be uninjured. She had her back against the carriage and her hands were in her lap, bound with heavy rope. January counted two more men with her, one holding a hand pressed to a blood-soaked trouser leg.
Another exchange of gunfire shattered the quiet of the humid forest, and January ducked judiciously behind a tree.
"Ha, think I got 'im," the uninjured one barked to the other, his English slurred in a murky backcountry American accent.
"'Bout damn time," his companion retorted. "Billy's dead, Big Jack got his fool head blowed off but not before the idiot kilt the fuckin' horses -- What we gon' do, carry the bitch to the river, with my leg like this?"
Minou looked up sharply. She'd been gagged with a dirty rag stuffed in her mouth, and anger curled in January's belly at the sight of the bruises on her face. However, he saw more fury than fear in her eyes.
"I say we cut our losses, shoot 'er an' hotfoot it outta here," the other said.
Minou's eyes had gone very wide above the gag. She made a stifled sound in her throat. January's heart pounded against his ribs as he swung the pistol back and forth between the two of them. Both were armed; both were much too close to Minou. If they'd actually killed Shaw, no help would be coming, at least not in time to save him or Minou. And firing an unfamiliar weapon at this distance, he wasn't even sure if his aim was good enough to drop the first one with a sure kill -- let alone avoid hitting Minou if he shot too close to her.
Choose.
"You crazy?" the other argued back. "All this an' nothin' to show for it? Lookit her. Pretty skin, yeller gal too. She'd bring in twelve, fifteen hunnerd easy."
January used the argument as cover to shift a bit closer, gliding from one tree to the next with as much stealth as he could muster.
"There's a dead policeman up there, an' I ain't waitin' 'round 'fore they send out men and dogs from town. This whole thing went south on us, Dan. Better alive an' poor than swingin' from a gibbet."
The injured one looked as if his companion's arguments were persuading him. January set his teeth, stepped around the tree and fired. The one who'd been arguing for Minou's demise went down with a pained grunt. January charged forward, not waiting to see if the other was getting up again, and plowed into the man with the injured leg, using all the momentum of his big frame. They slammed into the carriage and then rolled into the mud. Beneath him, the American cursed and struggled. A hard fist clouted January in the side of the head and he saw stars. This was no time for clean fighting, or for scruples; he kneed the other man hard in the groin, and then drove him head-first into a knotted tree root. There was a wet crunch and the bandit went limp. January didn't think he was breathing.
"You jes' stand up nice and easy, boy."
January clenched his mouth shut on a curse, and rose cautiously to his knees, holding his hands in the air. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw not the man he'd shot, but one of the ones Shaw had taken down, and January had taken for dead. One arm dangled limp and blood-soaked, and broken from the telltale angle of his hand. But he'd set a shotgun against his uninjured shoulder, and his face was chalk-white with pain and anger.
"That's my brother you went and kilt there, boy. Don't know if I oughta just shoot you or hurt you some first."
Behind him, Minou stood up, holding a dead bandit's discarded rifle in her bound hands like a club. She swung it with all her might into the bandit's back. There was a loud crack as the badly-made stock detached from the barrel, and he staggered forward with a hoarse shout. Minou swung the broken rifle again, but her feet had become tangled in her heavy skirts, throwing off her aim. The bandit shoved her hard, sending her down in a flurry of petticoats. January struggled to extricate himself from the mud and the dead man's legs, trying to get on his feet and moving before the bandit could recover enough to shoot her. When a shot echoed down the road, he had time for an instant's stunned horror and grief before the bandit folded slowly and collapsed into the mud, a look of shock on his unshaven face. Blood blossomed across his filthy shirt.
Shaw strolled around the overturned carriage, lowering a smoking pistol, the twin to the one he'd given January. His rifle was slung over his shoulder. "Got to apologize for the lack of timely assistance, folks. Kind of a nuisance reloadin' at the moment."
"I'd say your assistance is timely enough," January said, letting his breath out in a rush. "They apparently thought they'd shot you."
"They did shoot me, right enough." Shaw spat to the side and nodded down at his left hand, tucked into his belt. The sleeve was dark and wet. "Just not where it counts."
"I can see to that for you, in just a minute." January untied Minou's hands and gently extricated the gag from her mouth. She flung her arms around his neck and held on, shaking.
"They hurt you?" January asked, stroking his sister's tangled hair, spilling from beneath her half-unwound tignon.
Minou swallowed, tears standing in her eyes. "No," she said bravely, though the darkening bruise below her eye gave the lie to that. "Not much. But the things they said -- such horrible things. I -- I believe they meant to sell me, Ben!"
She was so shocked by it, so stunned that anyone in the world could mean her harm. Sometimes it was easy for January to forget that his little sister hadn't grown up in the same world that he and Olympe had. Even in the city, she'd seen a different side of it, cushioned somewhat from life's colder realities by the protection that her lighter complexion and Livia's money afforded her.
"It's all right. You're safe now."
"Not to intrude on the moment, ma'am," Shaw said, nudging the bodies of the dead bandits one by one -- checking, January thought, for signs of life. "These men take anything from you?"
"Your papers," January said to Dominique, and even as he did, he could hear the low bitterness lacing through his own words -- that she needed such a thing, to be safe from men such as this. "Did they destroy them?"
"No --" Minou bit her lips and dropped her eyes, stepping back from January. She fussed with her tignon, tying up her hair. "I don't have them on me, Ben."
He stared at her. "You're joking."
"I don't normally; it always seems so much safer to leave them at home. Everyone in town knows me, and if there's ever trouble, I can always call on Mama or Henri to send someone to fetch --"
"Well, clearly not!" January ran his hand over his face, getting control of himself. It wasn't Dominique he was angry at, not really, although her naivety still astonished him at times; it was the world that made such travesties necessary. At least nothing irreplaceable had been lost. He wished the argument had not happened in front of Shaw, but in this, at least, he trusted the lawman: Shaw, whatever his flaws, was not going to question Dominique about her right to walk the streets as a free woman. Perhaps it would be a good idea to have copies of Dominique's papers drawn up, as he'd done for himself.
Shaw cleared his throat, his mild, gravelly voice sliding into the heavy silence that had fallen between the siblings. "Seems I dropped somethin' in all the conniptions. You folks seen anythin' in the way of a pistol lately? Little silver-handle thing."
January drew a breath and let it out, swallowing the anger -- at his sister, at the men who'd hurt her, at the world -- as he'd had so much practice at doing. He'd dropped it in his struggles with the injured bandit, but he caught a glimpse of it lying in the mud, under the wheel of the carriage. "That?"
"Yep, I do believe that's it. Much obliged."
Minou, recovering her composure somewhat, dropped a curtsey to the American policeman. "Thank you for your help, Lieutenant. Are you hurt badly?"
"Not to worry, ma'am. Had worse."
January turned away from his sister to size up the lieutenant with his surgeon's eye. It was hard to say for sure, under all the dirt and stubble, but Shaw seemed paler than usual, and January eyed his filthy coat. "Even if he just grazed you, blood poisoning is nothing to fool with. Does anyone have any brandy or anything of that sort?"
Minou looked about and then leaned over the nearest dead bandit, bending from the waist and trying not to touch the body. She liberated a small flask from his pocket. "How about this, Ben?"
"That'll do fine, thanks. If you sit down," January said, nodding to Shaw, "I can clean that for you. Unless you want to risk losing the arm. Sir."
Shaw raised his eyebrows. Minou quickly tugged a couple of cushions from inside the carriage and made a little pile, gesturing him to sit on them, which he did with a grunt of pain. "So is leechin' another of your many talents, Maestro?" he asked as January knelt beside him. Coming from another white man, it might have been heavy with mocking sarcasm, but Shaw just sounded curious.
"I was trained as a surgeon in Paris."
Shaw showed no surprise, but the lazy gray eyes sharpened. "Useful thing."
"Sometimes it is." January helped him shrug out of the coat and cut back the cheap fabric of his sleeve. It looked like a clean graze, but he wet it with the whisky; Shaw hissed softly between his teeth.
"Can I do anything to help?" Minou asked.
January glanced up at her. "Do you have something clean, for a bandage? A piece of fabric -- anything will do."
"I can think of something." Minou turned away from the men, and lifted her skirts in front. There was a ripping, shredding sound. January felt his face heat, and hastily concentrated on cleaning Shaw's wound. Mother, he thought, would drop dead. She would have an apoplectic fit right in the middle of this road.
When Minou turned back around, her skirts were settled and nothing was visibly out of place; however, she held a long, ragged swatch of peach taffeta. "Will this do?"
"Perfect; thank you." January took it and tried very hard not to think about where it had come from.
"If there's nothing else I can do, I'd like to go and see to -- to poor Louis." She bit her lips, looking in the direction of the dead horses and the coachman's crumpled body.
"Here, ma'am," Shaw said, holding out his coat to her with his good arm. "Ain't much of a shroud, but it'll keep the rain off the poor sod, anyhow."
To her credit, Minou took the stained, patched, vermin-ridden coat without so much as flinching. She went off to see to the coachman.
"Plucky gal," Shaw remarked.
"Yes, she is." And many other things besides -- some good, others not. January knotted the bandage and tied the sleeve over it, hiding the glimmer of pink. "You'll want to get this stitched when you can. I haven't the tools or I'd do it here. The bandage should be changed twice a day, morning and evening, and the cut washed. --No, don't poke at it."
"Sounds like a bother," Shaw said.
"Losing an arm is more of a bother." January stood, and offered him a hand up. "Sir."
Minou came back from tending to the coachman's body as January pulled Shaw back to his feet. "How did you get out here?" she asked. "Do you have horses somewhere?"
"Back that way a spell." Shaw pointed with his chin. "Come overland to cut off the coach. Your brother here knew a shortcut. Couldn't take the horses through them woods."
"One of us can ride for town and hire a coach," January said.
"What -- so I can wait out here with a bunch of dead bandits?" Minou protested in disbelief. "How far is it to the horses?"
"Not far, but --"
"But nothing, Ben; I can walk."
"And ride?" January asked, looking at her heavy skirts.
"Put her on the back of a horse, she'll do fine," Shaw said. "Don't need to do nothin' much but hold on."
Minou planted her hands on her hips. "See?"
"Thank you so very much," January said darkly to Shaw.
The American lifted his uninjured shoulder in a shrug. "Gal looks like she got her mind made up. Don't think I'd want to set here with a bunch o' dead men either."
January sighed.
By the time they reached the hired horses, Shaw and Dominique seemed to be getting along fabulously, and January was wondering how concerned he ought to be. He did derive some pleasure from imagining how utterly scandalized his mother would have been, although he could tell that Minou was obviously pushing down her tendency to flirt; she was far worse with Hannibal, even. She obviously understood that Shaw, with his shabby looks and background, was not an appropriate target of her playful affections.
On the other hand, they seemed to actually like each other, which was, in its way, worse, especially since many of Shaw's stories were not suitable for a lady's ears. Shaw kept realizing this in the middle of some anecdote or other, and hastily breaking off or tying it up in a manner clearly inconsistent with its earlier substance.
Such a thing would never have done in town, of course. But here, on the forest road, it seemed to come easier, with all three of them sharing that unspoken camaraderie that January had experienced before among men at war or in the charity hospital -- the unwinding of tension that comes after fear, when death has come close enough to stir the air before slipping away.
Shaw offered Minou his knee for a step up to the back of January's horse. She held on, her skirts cascaded over the horse's hindquarters in a froth of color, as January led the horse.
"Seems likely the two of you'll be called to testify," Shaw remarked as he strolled next to January, leading his own mount. "Prob'ly a good idea to think about what you saw out there."
"I know perfectly well what I saw, Lieutenant," Dominique said, leaning over the horse's neck. "You shot those men and saved me. Ben stayed in the back, mostly; I know he's brave, but there was not really much he could have done under the circumstances. It was over so quickly."
Shaw gave January a lazy, sideways look. "That about jibe with your recollections, Maestro?"
"I'm not really sure how else it could have happened," January said quietly.
They proceeded in silence for a time. The woods grew sparser, broken with cane fields and, increasingly, the raw scars of new roads and newer houses, American houses set close together, spilling out from the city itself.
Shaw swung back up to his horse's back. "Well, best be partin' ways here; I need to get them dead fellers hauled off 'fore the gators get at 'em. Gonna need a statement from both you folks, next day or two, but ain't no reason you can't get the lady home first, get cleaned up a bit."
"Lieutenant, wait." Dominique kicked the horse's sides, inexpertly attempting to nudge it forward; luckily it was a placid gelding, accustomed to a variety of riders, and didn't bolt or try to throw her, though January had to step back to avoid being trodden upon. His sister looked around very carefully to make certain that none of the traffic on the road was near enough to see her, and then she leaned out precariously to give Shaw a brief hug around his bony shoulders.
January caught a glimpse of Shaw's face; he looked, for the first time since January had known him, genuinely caught off guard, a hint of color rising to his rawboned cheeks. Minou regained her seat on the horse, dropped her hands into her lap and looked politely composed. January wondered what it took her not to wipe her hands; the mud on Shaw's shirt was probably the cleanest thing about it.
Shaw blinked at her and then touched his hat. "Ma'am," he said.
They watched him ride off. January shook his head, at his sister or at Shaw or at the whole disaster -- he wasn't sure.
"What an odd man," Dominique said thoughtfully. Her gelding, bored with the proceedings, snorted and leaned down to crop a mouthful of grass from the roadside.
"Just remember who and what he is," January said. "He isn't a bad man, and I think he's --" A friend? Maybe, in a way. But he wasn't sure if he could say that to Dominique, especially not when every word would be repeated back to Livia. "-- someone I can trust, most of the time. But -- he is what he is, Minou." An American. A white man. A representative of the Americans' laws, the ones that kept January and the people he loved in a precarious limbo, one simple mistake or misplaced confidence from becoming chattel.
He wasn't looking up at her, so he jerked when he felt Minou's arms settling around his neck and shoulders. She really was going to fall off the horse if she kept leaning over that way. "Poor Ben," she murmured into his hair. "You carry so much."
Because you do your best to carry nothing at all, he wanted to say, but it wasn't fair, and it wasn't entirely true. Dominique lived in her own cage, and the bars were no less oppressive for being lightly gilt with the Viellards' money. "Are you going to be all right, Minou?" he asked her, raising a hand above his head to touch, unseen, his sister's cheek.
"I will be," she said quietly, and planted a kiss on top of his head before wrestling herself back to a more or less upright position on the horse. "No matter what we have to say at the enquiry, you and I know what really happened, Ben. You were terribly brave, and you did save me, no matter what the rest of the world knows about it."
It wasn't much, especially when he was tired and his feet hurt, and white men were dead, and that would be a dangerous mess to sort out, given his part in it. And there was Livia's condemnation to look forward to, as well; somehow, he had no doubt she'd find a way to turn any maternal worry that she might feel into a poisoned blade. Balancing against that, on the other side of the scales, he had a sister's gratitude, and the somewhat debatable friendship and even more debatable trust of a man on the far side of a divide as deep and wide as the great muddy river.
Most importantly, Minou was unhurt and safe, whatever hidden hurts she'd taken in spirit, and in her safety and health, he took comfort -- a quiet victory all its own.
Under a blood-colored sunset, he took his sister home.