mirror-all sorts of things he had magpied from his “peregrinations” to fascinate children and lend an enchanted air to his performances. To these Lloyd would add some of his own improvisations back at the warehouse.
An ominous rumble of thunder rolled over the encampment, followed by a flash of light and the intoxicating bite of ozone, which always reminded Lloyd of Lodema. A storm was moving in and, given the hothouse air and the voraciousness of the midges and mosquitoes, a dump of rain was seen as a relief. Lloyd considered it a good omen. He wanted the air fresh and clear for the morrow, with a good wind. Not gusty but steady.
The first pregnant drops of rain hit the roof of the tent and the wagon, and Lloyd hastened to gather up his booty. He did not want to get caught in the downpour. Before he departed, he gave the Ladies Mulrooney each a kiss on the cheek and told the professor to be at the courthouse on Fourth Street no later than noon the next day.
“I wish you would let me in on your little secret, my boy,” the showman lamented. “After all, we are partners. Aren’t we?”
Lloyd had grown adept at his management of both information and personnel. He thought of Brookmire’s intensifying questions, and how the easterner was probably pacing back at the warehouse awaiting the final preparations.
“Trust me,” Lloyd said. “Remember what you have taught me.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of!” the showman confessed.
“Fear is the price of surprise,” Lloyd answered.
The professor twisted the ends of his mustache at this remark, trying to think if he had said it or if the boy had out-Mulrooneyed him.
“I’ll be at the appointed rendezvous-with bells on,” the showman confirmed. “How will I find you?”
“That won’t be a problem.” Lloyd smiled and then was gone, picking his way through the trees as fast as he could, eyes ever on the alert for confrontation, the warm big drops of rain sticking to his back like flies.
In spite of the boy’s nonchalance, the professor had the nagging suspicion that he would never see his protege again, and it pained him to think that he was in some way responsible. Little did he know that the boy would be back again later that night.
In the interim, Lloyd had a hectic schedule. He had to return to the mission house and see his mother before lights-out, then slip out of the dormitory, as usual-go meet Brookmire at the vacant warehouse, beautify his creation with Mulrooney’s baubles, make his final inspection, and then return to the showman’s camp amid the storm to perform what would be the most troublesome part of the entire scheme. He had left this crucial element to the last minute because he had no choice. If he had put forward an open request to Mulrooney, he knew the showman would have outright refused.
Once his delicate errand was completed, he would then have to get himself and his unlikely accomplices over the river to where Cahill’s barge was moored and across to Illinois, where they would lie in wait for the morning light. Meanwhile, Brookmire and the covert team he had employed would transport the balloon, the kite assembly, and the parawing glider. If the storm did not pass, all these preparations would be for naught. It would be the busiest night of his life, and a day of reckoning whichever way the wind blew. “So much to do,” he mourned. “And so little time.”
It was the familiar complaint of his father back in his inventing days, Lloyd realized, and the thought of his missing father and the concern over his whereabouts wavered before him like a ghost. “But I can’t think about that now!” he told himself. There were theatrical effects that needed to be applied, checks and counterchecks to be performed. His mother would be fretful and despondent. Brookmire would be wound as tight as a cheap watch. The Vardogers could be laying for him-or some villain like before. And always the specter of Schelling and Mother Tongue’s emissaries haunted him. Even if they meant well, they could derail everything. But there was no turning back now. He had to hurry and be very careful. He darted through the gathering storm unaware of the greater storm that was mounting.
Back at Mulrooney’s, the showman battened down the wagon and the tent. The horses were jumpy, and so were the brothers. Not even a foot rub from his wives could dispel the professor’s apprehensions, so he had a nip of LUCID!, then a vial. Then one more. His silent wives laid him to rest in a rumpled state and extinguished their candles. White barbs of lightning tore the sky and precipitation plummeted, pounding down on their tent so hard it almost drowned out the sound of his snoring.
Yet as deeply as he had fallen asleep, some inner alarm woke Mulrooney. He was still groggy with liquor, but an old traveling man’s instinct had sounded in his dreams and forced him, thick-tongued and sweaty, to his feet. He stepped over his slumbering women and lit a lantern. Outside, the storm had calmed, but the ground around their camp was alive with web-footed rain. No one seemed to be lurking, although the mud was as rich with footprints as Urim and Thummim’s pages were with enigmatic emblems. That thought triggered a sudden horror. He flung back inside the tent and poked the lantern toward the brothers’ modesty screen. It was a very long moment later when Mulrooney accepted what he found. The pygmies from Indiana were gone.
Dumbstruck, the professor staggered out and hunkered down on a log in the slowing rain. The clothes his wives had made for them were still there. He could not imagine what had happened. The coincidence of Lloyd’s earlier visit crossed his mind but could take no clear form that would explain his wards’ abrupt removal. Soaked to the bone and sobering fast, he kept thinking of the whirlwind from which they had supposedly emerged.
What if something in the storm had returned for them? It was improbable. But so were they. He had always been so assiduous in keeping them hidden from prying eyes-never an easy task. Perhaps they had
CHAPTER 4. The Price of Surprise
THE MORNING DAWNED CLEANER AND CRISPER THAN ANY IN months. (For Mulrooney, the feeling was foreboding and recalled the day that the unfortunate Vladimir had gone missing.)
There was a rustling of ledger pages and the tapping of morning cigar ash at the City Hotel-and more than a few wagers laid over breakfast at Planter’s House, which consisted of arrowroot biscuits, coddled eggs, fresh trotters, and a serving of wild pigeon-the aromas of black tea or chicory-laced coffee cutting through the stale fumes of pipe smoke and brandy that had followed the coq au vin and bordeaux the night before.
It was the morning of a major sale. The auction house of Bladon, McCafferty & Co. of Chestnut Street was putting up on the block one hundred of the sturdiest Negro field hands valued generally at a whisker over a thousand dollars each-seventy-five older adult males, forty-eight females, and a litter of children that one squire from Kentucky likened to “French-prattling young crows.”
The event, as usual, was to take place on the steps of the proud domed courthouse on Fourth Street at noon. Typically, the public did not take much overt notice of these occasions, there being studious attention from those informed professionals either bidding or methodically recording the prices submitted by their peers. These seasoned agriculturalists and their entourages had serious business in mind and had come more than a few miles to do it. So the amateurs kept to the fringe.
Slave auctions represented significant investments in new capital equipment-gambles taken on increased productivity. An air of sober deliberation and dispassionate judgment was the rule, and for the most part an auction was no more undignified and violent than a sale of horses or cattle and easier on the nose, since the prize specimens had often been treated to a bath and an improved diet to inspire higher prices. “Beef for muscle, fresh fruit for the teeth and breath, and cod liver oil to put a shine on their hides” was the recommended short-term practice advocated by the trading houses.
No, the systematic brutality of these events was more in the mind, the soul, and heart than in the flesh. But since Negroes were not credited with having minds or souls, any explicit cruelty was considered an unfortunate by- product of what needed doing. Mating a stallion or wringing a chicken’s neck-life was filled with raw necessities, and people were much less squeamish then.
