“That bastard,” Kemp says to the men who have assembled around him. “I should have known.”
Elliott Price can barely contain himself. “Ask him about Cecily.”
Kemp nods, then sets his gaze on Gilbert. “Is it possible that your pass ain’t the only thing you wrote?”
“I don’t follow,” says Gilbert.
“Did you write a pass for Cecily Patterson?”
“My niece?”
“Don’t act coy.”
“She’s dead, sir.”
“Oh, don’t give me that!” says Price, who is like a kettle, ready to boil. “You are lying!”
Kemp tries to quiet Price, then he turns back to Gilbert. “It does not look good that you failed to tell me something so important,” he says.
“I did tell you.”
Kemp screws up his face. “You said your niece died. But you didn’t say who your niece was.”
Gilbert is so tired of all the cat and mouse games they play. “Forgive me,” he says, “but I did not think it mattered.”
“Didn’t think it mattered? Didn’t think it mattered?” Price is shrieking now. “I want this man arrested! For forgery. For carrying false documents. For aiding and abetting a runaway. All of it.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Kemp says to Price. “We’ve got no proof he aided and abetted anyone.”
But Price is out of control. He’s grabbed a hammer and is waving it around like it’s a bayonet. “If I don’t see that man led away in chains,” he says to Kemp, “I’m going to turn you in, too.”
“Let’s all calm down,” says Kemp in the most soothing voice Gilbert’s ever heard come out of his mouth.
Gilbert sees what’s happening. It’s all well and good for Kemp to go arresting other people’s slaves, but when it’shisslaves, that’s another story.
Price is shaking he’s so angry. “Let him off the hook, and just watch how fast I get that fancy title of yours ripped away from you.”
“Hold on a minute,” says Kemp, who must be busy contemplating how much he likes being able to tell people he is the first officer of the patrol. “No one said anything about letting anybody off the hook.”
Price is at least partially appeased.
“Gibson, Stephens,” Kemp says finally to the two other patrollers in the room. “Let’s take him in.”
The men advance on Gilbert. He sidesteps them, still trying to talk sense into Kemp. “I wrote a pass for myself, I’ll admit it. But I swear to God, I don’t know nothing about Cecily other than that she died in the theater.”
They rush him then. “This will go easier if you don’t fight back,” one of them says in a snide voice, right before he pulls out a pistol and knocks Gilbert upside the head.
CECILY
It’s four o’clock in themorning, and Samuel and Cecily are putting the finishing touches on the chaise, when someone knocks softly on the door of the barn. Cecily ducks behind the carriage, just as she and Samuel had planned, but when she hears her mother’s voice, she stands up and steps into the light.
“Mama,” she says as she falls into Della’s waiting arms.
Della winces. “Careful now.”
Cecily releases her. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “Did I hurt you?”
“I’ll be all right.”
