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  His pencil hovered. There was no purpose served by giving her fears, and besides, his principle had always been that the idea preceded the action. If he pretended to know what he was doing, and pretended to be unafraid, then soon enough he would figure out what to do, and the fear would go away. He must act as if he had a clear purpose, and soon enough the purpose would emerge.

  We had a most interesting encounter with one of the native folk today, a real woods ruffian, although his manner was gentlemanly. We are out of the swamps and into the hill country, and I believe I can detect a change in the air already—

  He laid the notebook aside. He couldn’t bring himself to write what was in his heart. I am afraid. I feel a fool. I never meant for people to take my ideas so seriously. I wish I was with you, back in Kansas.

  He would have to finish the letter in the morning. As he rolled out his blanket on the rocky riverbank, Turner thought of the words his father-in-law had spoken to him before he left, trying to talk him out of this scheme: Man is a wolf to man.

  Chapter 2

  Three summers in Kansas, and Adam Cabot still had not adjusted. He started his mornings as he had in Boston, early and brisk, but by ten o’clock the sun had baked him dry. He rose early and campaigned hard, a foolish move, he knew, but an impulse he couldn’t shake. Running for office meant visiting homes, shaking hands, arguing over ideas. He couldn’t campaign from the safety of Lecompton; if he was going to be Leavenworth’s representative to the constitutional convention, he needed to know the people of Leavenworth.

  His friends warned him of the danger, but he’d been living with danger ever since he crossed into slave territory in the spring of ‘54 with fifty fellow abolitionists and a dozen wagons of supplies, each with a crate of Beecher’s Bibles hidden under a false bottom. They’d stayed off the main roads through Missouri, crossing in the far north where the proslavery sentiment was not as strong.

  Once in Kansas, most of the men headed toward the Free-Soil settlements farther south, but Cabot stayed in Leavenworth; the town was booming, and it felt like a place where a man could do some good. That was all he’d asked when the Anti-Slavery Society had called for volunteers to emigrate to Kansas, volunteers who would tip the scales against slavery by the simple weight of their bodies—to do some good. He had no skill with plow or ax. All he had was the freedom of youth, a college degree, and a desire to fight the great evil.

  He had grown up in world where a certain amount of mild abolitionism was acceptable, even expected, as long as one kept it under control. It was fashionable to attend the lectures and to express one’s outrage, but one stayed to the back of the hall and watched the loons try to shout each other down. One evening, though, Cabot had gone to see the famous William Lloyd Garrison, and something about the man’s manner—his knife-edged precision of speech; his eyes, magnified by rimless spectacles, giving his gaze a strange, luminous, penetration; the curious contrast between his mild, intellectual appearance and the vehemence of his opinions—captured his imagination. He stayed after the speech to introduce himself.

  “How can I help your cause?” he stammered.

  Garrison’s gaze flickered over him as if he were choosing fish at the market. “What are your capabilities, young man?”

  Cabot was taken aback. “I can write. I can—” He stopped, uncertain.

  A smile crossed the man’s thin lips. “Harvard boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, perhaps you can write, then. Do you have money?”

  “Some,” he said, blushing. “Not much.”

  “A Harvard boy with no money! You are a rarity.”

  “Some of my classmates are going into politics. Perhaps—”

  Garrison interrupted him. “Politics! The art of compromise. How does one compromise? Make a man part slave? Perhaps only the right arm is enslaved, and the rest of the body free? No, my well-wishing friend, do not embrace politics. The Declaration of Independence is whistling wind, and the Constitution is the devil’s document.” He broke off abruptly, gathering his papers and turning to the door. “But you must excuse me. I speak at Uxbridge tomorrow.”

  Over his shoulder, he called, “Write something for The Liberator. We’ll see if we can use you.”

  “What shall I write?”

  Garrison paused, a look of amusement crossing his face. “Write an account of this lecture. I was planning to do it myself. We shall see whose is better.”

  The next week, it was Garrison’s account of his lecture that appeared in The Liberator’s pages, but by then Cabot was committed. Throughout his youth and college years, he had intended—what? He had never been sure. A career in the ministry, perhaps; or law, like his father; or a comfortable spot in business somewhere. But now he had a cause, something larger than himself, and devoting himself to it gave him a sense of meaning he had never known. He spent his days at The Liberator office and his nights at anti-slavery meetings. Old friends from parties and dances dropped away; new friends, earnest people with vigorous ideas and a penchant for argument, came into his life. And when the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed Congress, with its provision for popular sovereignty in the territories, Cabot saw a chance to act on his beliefs.

  After the first territorial election, when Missourians swarmed across the border to send a slavery man to Congress, Cabot understood Garrison’s words. Politics was a game for reasonable men, and Kansas was no place to be reasonable. Cabot did not have it in his nature to join the fighters, unlike those hollow-eyed fanatics he had come to the territory with, so he sought to be useful within the range of his talents. He wrote East for a Washington press and labored to learn typesetting, eking out pamphlets, broadsides, and a four-sheet newspaper when he could manage it. He filed for office and rode the trails west and north, encouraging the settlers to come out and vote for him. A quixotic move and likely dangerous, given the last election, but at least he saw himself as a part of the making of history rather than a bystander to its creation.

  The road from Easton was stony and bare, and the lowering sun burned on his back. Sweat stung his eyes. With a full day of campaigning behind him, both he and his mare needed water and rest. He patted her flank and thought of the creek ford a couple of miles ahead, where the shade of a birch grove and hazel bushes offered a good place to pause and maybe even nap.

  At the bottom of a small ravine, a man sat on the ground under a blanket draped over two sticks to keep off the sun, his horse tethered to a bush. He stood up as Cabot neared. The man didn’t appear armed, but something about him made Cabot suspicious.

  “Hello, friend,” the man said.

  “Trouble? Horse gone lame?”

  The man was thin and bearded, dressed in a greasy linen shirt that had once been white and a pair of buckskin leggings that were down to a couple of strands of fringe. He gazed down the road where Cabot had come. “No,” he said after a while. “I just stopped to think.”

  “I’ll not disturb you, then.”

  “I was thinking about this road,” the man continued. “How far you think this road goes?”

  Then there was not one man but five, the others stepping out from the thicket on the other side of the road with leveled rifles. Cabot realized that no one in Kansas stopped to think on a summer afternoon.

  “Get down,” the man said, his voice suddenly hard. Cabot did as he was told. “What’s your name, friend?”

  “Charles Adams,” Cabot said.

  “Never heard of you. Ever hear of him, boys?”

  No one answered.

  Cabot’s throat was parched. He could hear his heart beating in his ears.

  “Where you from, Mr. Adams?”

  “Leavenworth.” Short answers—hide the Boston accent.

  “No, before Leavenworth. Ain’t nobody from Leavenworth to start with.”

  “Cincinnati.” Anywhere but New England.

  “You one of them seminary boys from Cincinnati? Jim Lane’s seminary?”

  Cabot tried to laugh, but
his mouth was so dry it came out as a cough. “No seminary for me.”

  “Boys, let’s toss this man in the wagon and take him up to the shed,” the man said. “We’ll see about this Cincinnati rooster.”

  “Alive or dead?” said one of the other men.

  “Oh, alive,” said the leader with a wave of his hand. “Tie him up and hand me them saddlebags.”

  Cabot found himself in a split-log shed a hundred yards off the road, blinking in the darkness as the men rifled through his possessions.

  “How do you like Kansas, Mr.—what’d you say your name was?” the leader asked.

  “Adams.”

  “Right.”

  “I’d like it better if I could travel in peace.”

  The man ignored him as he sorted Cabot’s belongings. Bread, ham, coins, some notes on debts to be paid—and, Cabot recalled with a chill, his battered copy of Emerson, with a letter from his parents tucked in to save his place.

  “Doff your hats, boys, we have a celebrated man among us,” the man called out. “Our friend here is Adam Cabot, candidate for the constitutional convention—from the Free-Soil Party.”

  The men sent up a derisive cheer.

  “I’ll not be intimidated by violence and threats,” Cabot choked out.

  “Oh, we ain’t going to intimidate you,” the man said. “We’re going to tar-and-feather you. Then we’re going to take you down to the square in front of the Leavenworth House. And then we’re going to hang you.”

  Chapter 3

  Charlotte Turner lowered the lid of her trunk, then lifted it again to make sure that the fit was snug yet didn’t crush the dried roses of her wedding bouquet, safely boxed among layers of clothing. She was ready.

  She paused to listen for stirrings from her mother’s room down the hall. Nothing. Mother liked for her to bring tea in the afternoon. Or at least Charlotte thought she did. Her arrival was rarely acknowledged, and often the tea would be sitting untouched and cold when she returned an hour later. But sometimes there would be a murmur of thanks, a few words exchanged. At least her mother was eating regularly now. For the first two weeks after Caroline’s death she had taken no nourishment that anyone could detect, despite the entreaties of Charlotte and Colonel Sumner’s wife. Things were still not good with Mother; she took her meals in her room, rarely changed out of her dressing gown, and spent most days in a chair by the window, writing long entries in her diary.

  Charlotte walked downstairs to the kitchen, where the tea had been steeping. She bent over the pot and inhaled the aroma. How could anyone resist this fragrance, the smell of distant rain and exotic soils? It was hard travel from the slopes of India to this woodstove in Kansas, and she was determined to appreciate that journey. She poured herself a cup and sat on the sofa to listen to the wind.

  Sometimes she still found it hard to believe that they had been transferred to Leavenworth after all those years at West Point. It was true, as Father had reminded them at the dining table, that an officer today was lucky to have a posting at all, what with Congress whittling on the Army every year, and some arguing that it was time to disband it altogether. “Thank heaven for the Indians,” he said mildly as Caroline sniffled into her napkin. “Otherwise I might have to find respectable work at last, a barber or whatnot.”

  West Point had been a queer but pleasant existence, growing up one of the twin daughters of Captain Carr. From the time she and Caroline were twelve, cadets were a constant presence, looking for opportunities to serve. Was it her approval they were seeking, or his? Charlotte could never quite tell. Caroline was the prettier one, more vivacious; she knew how to talk to these lads. Charlotte was more inward and self-conscious. She had a strawberry birthmark on her neck and developed the habit of holding her hand over her chin to hide it. Holding a thoughtful pose all the time made everyone assume that she was pondering deep thoughts, and eventually she developed bookish habits that met their expectations.

  Then the war broke out, and the shortage of officers threw her quiet, contented father from his classroom into the line of fire in Mexico. Some of the men he commanded were the same sleepy cadets to whom he had been lecturing about the properties of earth and metal a few months before. A year later, after the treaty had been signed, everything went back to normal, but of course it was not, could never be. The ones who had gone to war were scattered, some out on the frontier, some discharged, some dead. The new classes of cadets were seething, angry that their chances for glory had come so close but missed them. And her father walked along the cliffs in the evening, gazing out toward Constitution Island, his face turned away, always away.

  When the orders came to report to Leavenworth, Charlotte almost welcomed the change. Mexico had cost her father so much of his humor, his equilibrium; he had commanded a battery at Chapultepec, an experience about which he never spoke. The newspaper accounts had been filled with praise for the heroes and their deeds, but when she asked him upon his return to tell her about the battle, he looked at her with the blankness of death in his eyes and simply said, “Homo homini lupus. “Man is a wolf to man.

  That had been five years ago, when she was a girl of sixteen. The years since had been strained, with her father holding everyone at a remove and her mother, never strong of spirit, retreating into her own uninhabited territory of writing in her diary and gazing out the window. She and Caroline had been left to their own devices a good deal of the time—a child’s dream, perhaps, but a loss as well. Caroline in particular turned into something of a coquette, in Charlotte’s eyes, with a father who didn’t notice and a mother who didn’t mind. A posting on the frontier, she had imagined, might do them all some good. But that was before they had actually come here, and Caroline had married her lieutenant, and everything had gone bad.

  But enough mooning. Charlotte was not one to sit and bemoan her fate. The tea was getting cold; she poured a cup and took it upstairs to her mother.

  Father had left early, as usual, without a word, as usual. He retreated into duty as surely as her mother retreated into herself. Every day since the news had come, his uniform seemed to get stiffer, his manners more formal. The three of them moved through the house in silence, although at least Father had the respite of leaving every day to command his men. For Charlotte, relief came only in her occasional visits to town and in her correspondence.

  She wrote to Turner every morning, when her strength was good and there was at least a hope of sounding cheerful and resolute. His letters were less regular, often brief, their penmanship marred by the jostling of the train where they were written, but they came, and they were welcome. She was re-reading Mr. Emerson at his suggestion, and they exchanged opinions. There were times when she found Emerson entirely too sanguine about hman possibility, too enraptured by the Great Eternals, insufficient in his account of the suffering and loss that accompanied it all; but then she remembered that he too had suffered a great loss and took comfort in the knowledge that somehow he had managed to overcome it and see beauty in the world again. As for herself, she had not reached that fortunate place—could not even see it in the distance.

  So the world was cruel, and the wind whistled. She knocked quietly and placed the tea tray on the table by the chair. She had learned by now that if Mother wanted to speak, she would do so, and no prompting would make her if she did not.

  Mother was gazing out the window as usual. “So dry and bare,” she said. “And the wind.”

  “Yes.” Charlotte knew what she was thinking about: the baked soil on the grave, the unbearable thought of weeds and animal tracks across the sacred, scalded plot. They knew the body felt neither heat nor cold, but there was something horrid about it nevertheless.

  The news had come a year and a half ago, on a winter’s day with snow spitting from a leaden sky. Charlotte and her father had ridden out to Fort Riley immediately, but by then Caroline and the baby had already been buried in the fort’s graveyard, a crude wooden marker on the spot. The soldiers fidgeted nervously as Capt
ain Carr stood at the foot of the grave.

  “The woman done all she could,” a sergeant said. “She’s the wife of the trader. She done all she could, she said.”

  Father heard it all without replying. The lieutenant, locked in his quarters wailing, would not see them, and they had not insisted.

  “We’ll be back in the spring with a better marker,” he finally said, turning away. He climbed into the carriage.

  Charlotte had not been ready to join him yet. As the men backed away, she stood at the grave, wanting to speak but with nothing to say, wanting to pray but with nothing to ask for. “Let this pass,” she said finally, although she wasn’t sure what “this” was—this sorrow, this disaster, this life, this deep silence between them all. Whatever it was, let it pass.

  Mother did not appear to want to say anything further, so Charlotte left the tea tray and walked downstairs again.

  Her father was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, home earlier than usual. “Walk with me, would you?” he said.

  “Of course.”

  They stepped onto the porch, where the heat of the day still lingered although the sun hung low in the sky. The air was muggy and still. Three men desultorily whitewashed one of the barracks across the parade ground, while a troop suffered through rifle drills under the gaze of their sergeant.

  Her father anticipated her thoughts. “Better to have them drill in the sun and become accustomed to it than to have them surprised on patrol one day and be unready.”

  “I know. It’s just hard to imagine that occasion around here.”