Speaks the Nightbird

soul.

'Steady, madam,' Bidwell said, but his voice was shaky. 'You must tend to reality, and put aside these visions of the netherworld.'

'We'll all burn there, if he has his way!' she retorted. 'He wants her free, is what he wants! Wants her free, and all of us gone!'

'I'll hear no more of this.' Bidwell turned away from her again, and got out of the room.

'Wants her free!' the woman shouted. 'He won't let us rest 'til she's with him!'

Bidwell kept going, out the front door, with Winston following. 'Sir! Sir!' Barrow called, and he came out of the house after them. Bidwell paused, trying mightily to display a calm demeanor.

'Beg pardon, sir,' Barrow said. 'She meant no disrespect.'

'None taken. Your wife is in a precarious condition.'

'Yes, sir. But . . . things bein' as they are, you'll understand when I tell you we have to leave.'

A fine drizzle was starting to fall from the dark-bellied clouds. Bidwell pushed the tricorn down on his head. 'Do as you please, Barrow. I'm not your master.'

'Yes sir.' He licked his lower lip, plucking up the courage to say what was on his mind. 'This was a good town, sir. Used to be, before . . .' He shrugged. 'It's all changed now I'm sorry, but we cain't stay.'

'Go on, then!' Bidwell's facade cracked and some of his anger and frustration spilled out like black bile. 'No one's chaining you here! Go on, run like a scared dog with the rest of them! I shall not! By God, I have planted myself in this place and no phantasm shall tear me—'

A bell sounded. A deep-tolling bell. Once, then a second and third time.

It was the voice of the bell at the watchman's tower on Harmony Street. The bell continued to sound, announcing that the watchman had spied someone coming along the road.

'—shall tear me out!' Bidwell finished, with fierce resolve. He looked toward the main gate, which was kept closed and locked against Indians. New hope blossomed in his heart. 'Edward, it must be the judge from Charles Town! Yes! It has to be! Come along!' Without another word to Mason Barrow, Bidwell started off toward the junction of the four streets. 'Hurry!' he said to Winston, picking up his pace. The rain was beginning to fall now in earnest, but not even the worst deluge since Noah would've kept him from personally welcoming the judge this happy day. The bell's voice had started a chorus of dogs to barking, and as Bidwell and Winston rushed northward along Harmony Street—one grinning with excitement and the other gasping for breath—a number of mutts chased round and round them as if at the heels of carnival clowns.

By the time they reached the gate, both men were wet with rain and perspiration and were breathing like bellows. A group of a dozen or so residents had emerged from their homes to gather around, as a visitor from the outside was rare indeed. Up in the watchtower, Malcolm Jennings had ceased his pulling on the bell-cord, and two men—Esai Pauling and James Reed—were readying to lift the log that served as the gate's lock from its latchpost.

'Wait, wait!' Bidwell called, pushing through the onlookers. 'Give me room!' He approached the gate and realized he was trembling with anticipation. He looked up at Jennings, who was standing on the tower's platform at the end of a fifteen-foot-tall ladder. 'Are they white men?'

'Yes sir,' Jennings answered. He was a slim drink of water with a shockpate of unruly dark brown hair and perhaps five teeth in his head, but he had the eyes of a hawk.

'Two of 'em. I mean to say ... I think they be white.'

Bidwell couldn't decipher what that was supposed to mean, but neither did he want to tarry at this important moment. 'Very well!' he said to Pauling and Reed. 'Open it!' The log was lifted and pulled from its latch. Then Reed grasped the two wooden handgrips and drew the gate open.

Bidwell stepped forward, his arms open to embrace his savior. In another second, however, his welcoming advance abruptly stopped.

Two men stood before him: one large with a bald head, one slender with short-cropped black hair. But neither one of them was the man he'd hoped to greet.

He presumed they were white. With all the mud they wore, it was difficult to tell. The larger—and older—had on a mud-covered coat that seemed to be black under its earth daubings. He was barefoot, his skinny legs grimed with muck. The younger man wore only something that might serve as a nightshirt, and he appeared to have recently rolled on the ground in it. He did wear shoes, however filthy they might be.

The mutts were so excited by all the commotion that they began to snarl and bark their lungs out at the two arrivals, who seemed dazed at the appearance of people wearing clean clothing.

'Beggars,' Bidwell said; his voice was quiet, dangerously so. He heard thunder over the wilderness, and thought it must be the sound of God laughing. His welcoming arms fell heavily to his sides. 'I have been sent beggars,' he said, louder, and then he began to laugh along with God. Soft at first it was, and then the laughter spiraled out of him, raucous and uncontrollable; it hurt his throat and made his eyes water, and though he ardently wanted to stop—ardently tried to stop—he found he had as much power over this laughter as if he'd been a whirligig spun by the hand of a foolish child. 'Beggars!' he shouted through the wheezing. 'I . . . have . . . run ... to admit beggars!'

'Sir,' spoke the larger man, and he took a barefooted step forward. An expression of anger swept across his mud-splattered features. 'Sir!'

Bidwell shook his head and kept laughing—there seemed to be some weeping in it as well—and he waved his hand to dismiss the wayfaring jaybird.

Isaac Woodward pulled in a deep breath. If the night of wet hell had not been enough, this crackerjack dandy was here to test his mettle. Well, his mettle broke. He bellowed, 'Sir!' in his judicial voice, which was loud and sharp enough to silence for a moment even the yapping dogs. '1 am Magistrate Woodward, come from Charles Town!'

Bidwell heard; he gasped, choked on a last fragment of laughter, and then he stood staring with wide and shocked eyes at the half-naked mudpie who called himself a magistrate.

A single thought entered Bidwell's mind like a hornet's sting: // they send us anybody, it'll be a lunatic they plucked from the asylum up there!

He heard a moan, quite close. His eyelids fluttered. The world—rainstorm, voice of God, green wilderness beyond, beggars and magistrates, parasites in the apples: ruin and destruction like the shadows of vulture wings— spun around him. He took a backward step, looking for something to lean against.

There was nothing. He fell onto Harmony Street, his head full of cold gray fog, and there was cradled to sleep.

 five

A KNOCK SOUNDED on the door. 'Magistrate? Master Bidwell sent me to tell you the guests are arrivin'.'

'I'll be there directly,' Woodward answered, recognizing the housekeeper's Scottish brogue. He recalled that the last time he'd heard a knock on a door, his life had been near snuffed. Of course the mere thought of that wretch wearing the gold-striped waistcoat was enough to make him fumble in buttoning the clean pale blue shirt he had recently put on. 'Damn!' he said to his reflection in the oval wall mirror.

'Sir?' Mrs. Nettles inquired beyond the door.

'I said I'd be there directly!' he told her again.

She said, 'Yes sir,' and walked with a heavy gait along the corridor to the room Matthew occupied.

Woodward completed the task of buttoning his shirt, which was a bit short at the sleeves and more than a bit tight across the belly. It was among a number of clothes—shirts, trousers, waistcoats, stockings, and shoes—that had been collected for himself and Matthew by their host, once Bidwell's fainting spell had been overcome and the man made aware of what had happened to their belongings. Then Bidwell, realizing his providence was at hand, had been most gracious in arranging two rooms in his mansion for their use, as well as gathering up the approximately sized clothing for them and making sure they had such necessities as freshly stropped razors and hot water for baths. Woodward had feared he'd never be able to scrub all the mud from his skin, but the last of it had come off by the administrations of a rough sponge and plenty of elbow oil.

He had previously put on a pair of black trousers—again, a shade snug but wearable—and white stockings