The Ozark trilogy Read online

“Afraid you’ll fall in the water, are you?” he teased. “Tell you what, dear heart, I’ll carry you down the landing ramp.”

  “You touch me, Lewis Motley Wommack,” she said between her teeth, “and I’ll scream you a scream they’ll hear all the way to Castle Brightwater.”

  He leaned one elbow on the gunwale, set his chin in his hand, and looked at her sideways, considering. She had a scream that was deservedly famous, did Jewel, and the potential scene had a certain appeal for him. There they’d be, pulling up to the mooring, the great ship easy in the calm water of the harbor, and all the passengers crowding politely onto the ramp three abreast. And there’d be all the elegant citizens waiting on the landing in their Sundy best-Jubilee best!-standing under the ancient trees that shaded them and watching the delegations and their households disembark. And there he’d be, carrying his screaming squalling sister through all the decorous lines of pleasant people . .

  “Don’t you think it,” she said firmly. “Don’t you even think it! You’ll rue it, I swear you will.”

  “Will you set a Spell on me, little sister?” he asked, mock-terrified before her prowess, and then he gathered her against him and held her close to his side. It was a good deal like holding a sapling whipping in the wind, if you’ll allow a sapling the skill to curse without ceasing; but she was no more trouble to him than the buttons on his cloak. He could have held half a dozen more like her, all screaming and spitting, and not begun to exert himself.

  Jewel was fighting him only for the principle of the thing, having learned in the course of her twelve and a half years that it was a useless activity for any other purpose. She had seen her brother lift a full-grown man over his head and throw him into a tree, and he hadn’t even been angry at the time, just slightly fussed. And then she had an idea.

  The wicked point of the broochpin that she’d had at her throat took him right in the armpit, where there was little clothing and less muscle. The group behind them stepped back hastily at his roar of pain, and Jewel braced herself to be flung over the side. It would spoil her gown and her cloak and her fine new shoes, and she would lose her hat and her travelbag in the process. It would mean being hauled in dripping wet before the grave watching eyes of Silverweb of McDaniels, that she could see standing among those waiting on the Landing, and somebody near enough her age that she’d half hoped to have her for a friend. But it would be worth it all. She’d happily have swum ten miles before all the Grannys of Ozark assembled, in a full set of winter clothes and wrapped in a quilt to top it off, if it would of gained her one point against Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd. For all that she worshipped the ground he walked on and the air he breathed.

  “Well?”

  “Well what, Jewel of Wommack?”

  “Well, aren’t you going to pitch me overboard?” She braced herself again, and then felt her cheeks flood crimson as he patted her on the bottom like a Mule colt; right in front of all those people.

  “No, Little Wickedness, I’m not going to do any such thing,” he said. “Smile pretty now, there comes the land-and I expect you to walk that ramp like a highborn lady, which you are, and if you do fall in and shame us all I’ll put you over my knee right there under those trees soon as you’re fished out. Provided I don’t let you drown, that is.”

  The men had tied the lines, and the First Officer secured the gleaming ironwood steps that would allow the passengers to walk up to where the ramp met the gunwales instead of scrambling over on a rope ladder like the crew was used to doing. There were a few cheers from the younger children, hastily hushed by their elders, and Jewel heard the resounding smack of a sturdy hand against someone’s backside. That, she thought, would be a Purdy female, and a Purdy child; neither Wommack nor Traveller would of laid hand to one of their offspring in public-or needed to. “Why?” she demanded softly, still clutched to her brother’s side -and then she realized that in the noise of the landing, everyone talking quietly but everyone talking at once, she didn’t have to be quiet, and she shouted it at him. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  She wiggled violently, and he set her aside with a courtly smile, not scrupling to tickle her ribs as he did so.

  “Why aren’t you going to throw me overboard?”

  “One, it would give you far too much satisfaction,” he said promptly. “Two, I’ve already told you-a dozen times, if I’ve told you once-I intend to be careful of the Wommack reputation at this Jubilee. I’m tired to death of being only one cut above the Purdys-they’re stupid and we’re cursed, that’s a fine bedamned arrangement! And I’ll not risk a scandal before ever we set foot to Brightwater land, Jewel of Wommack. Not if you run a sword through my armpit instead of a pin.”

  She would of liked to say she was sorry, but she didn’t dare. If there was one thing that made her brother furiouser than somebody doing something outrageous, it was that somebody saying they were sorry, afterwards. She stood shaking in her finery and trying to get her breath back, and she held her tongue.

  “All right now,” he said, and gave her a gentle push toward the steps. “Here we are, and this is the famous Brightwater Landing, and I’m right behind you. No simpering, no giggling, no lollygagging, sister mine. Move!”

  She moved. The press of people behind her would have moved her in any case. Up the nine shining steps; and then, with a hand from the First Mate to steady her against the gentle rocking of the ship, across the narrow space and her foot on the landing ramp that stretched out into the harbor. And down the ramp between the rows of flags brilliant in the May breeze, in front of all those staring people-not that they stared openly, but she knew they watched her, all the same. She turned an ankle once, but no one would of guessed; Lewis Motley was at her elbow and he steadied her instantly.

  “It’s miles long, this ramp!” she fretted. “Suppose that’s to give the Brightwaters ample time to look everybody over as they land!”

  “No,” he told her, “it’s so the ramp will reach out into the harbor far enough to let people land from an oceangoing ship with a deep draft. You have a mind, Jewel, and known to be spectacular; use it. Nobody’s looking at you.”

  “They are!” she insisted.

  She knew they were, in her bones. She was not quite sure when it had begun; one day she was a child, fresh out of Granny School and not caring if the whole world looked at her nor even thinking they might care to. And the next she knew herself the center of everyone’s attention, at all times. For the women at Castle Wommack to tell her that this carne of being twelve and would disappear with turning thirteen, approximately, was no help to her. Thirteen might as well of been ten years away as four months, for every day stretched out long and lanky before her full of ordeals. They had told her who knew how many times. Her nose was not too pointed; her freckles were not ugly; the copper-colored hair that fought its way instantly out of any attempt she made at bringing it to order was not untidy; her breasts and hips were not too big; her legs were not too long. It didn’t help any. Her days were a misery and she endured them, that being a woman’s place in this world; but she defied anyone to expect her to enjoy them,

  “Jewel, sister Jewel,” he said as they stepped off the ramp onto the stones of the Landing-sure enough, each one was a good four feet square, and blinding white, just as she’d been told!-”I am counting on you.”

  She would have clung to him in despair and hidden her face against his chest; but he knew that, of course, and he was gone in an instant. He disappeared into the clusters of talking people like thread into a needle’s eye, and was out of her sight.

  “Jewel.” The voice at her elbow was like a blessing pronounced twice; she turned joyfully to greet it. There stood Gilead of Wommack, Jewel’s niece despite her seventeen years; and Jacob Donahue Wommack the 23rd, Gilead’s father and the Master of Castle Wommack; and there stood Grannys Copperdell and Goodweather, both bristling with impatience to get on with it, whatever it might he; and all the rest of her homefolks.

  “Oh, I am so
glad to see you!” she declared, doing her best to disappear into the middle of the group, and she meant it most fervently. Whatever it was that her beloved brother was “counting on” her for, she intended to postpone it as long as possible.

  “Lewis Motley’s upset her,” said Gilead to the others. “I knew he would.”

  “She’s no business letting him,” snapped Granny Copperdell.

  “Granny,” objected Jacob Donahue, “the child’s only twelve!”

  “When I was twelve I had a babe at my breast,” said the old lady, “and it would of been a cold day in a warm place before any nineteen-year-old lout such as that one would of upset me.”

  Jewel had no doubt that was true. Indomitable twelve-year-olds such as that make good Grannys, and Granny Copperdell was one of the finest,

  “If I had a babe at my breast,” said Jewel staunchly, “I’d have it hind-end to, and youall know it.”

  “Jewel of Wommack!” Gilead was shocked, and the Dozens only knew what the Attendant and the servingmaid bringing up the rear with the smaller children thought. But both Grannys cackled with appreciation, and Jewel saw that as a good sign and took up her position between. them. She could think of few safer places to be than flanked an either side by a Granny in a good mood.

  A Brightwater Attendant, splendid in his livery of emerald green piped with narrow silver braid, the crest on his shoulder looking to be embroidered only yesterday, stepped forward then to greet them, making his proper salutations with a flourish.

  “If you’ll follow me,” he said pleasantly, “I’ll take you to your lodgings at the Castle and see you settled in.”

  Lewis Motley, popping up as unexpectedly as he’d disappeared, spoke from the back of the cluster of Wommacks.

  “All of us?” he asked.

  “Beg your pardon, sir?”

  “I said, all of us? That is, is there room for all of us?”

  “At Castle Brightwater?” The Attendant was clearly flabbergasted.

  Lewis Motley Wommack shrugged politely, and made it obvious that he was being too well bred to mention the four hundred some odd rooms at Castle Wommack, or its vast acres of land.

  “Ignore him,” said Jacob Donahue immediately, “and accept my apologies. He has no manners whatsoever and never did have. And keep an eye on him while he’s under your roof, because he can’t be trusted. I’ve done my best with him, poor orphan that he is, but it’s been a hopeless and a thankless task. He grows wickeder with every passing year.”

  Lewis Motley chuckled, and Jewel wondered grimly how he’d of been behaving if he hadn’t been concerned for the Wommack reputation; and the Attendant, confused but doggedly set on his duties, explained that although Castle Brightwater was nothing like the size of Castle Wommack, it could surely manage to put up the delegations of the other eleven Families of Ozark without strain. Gilead moved forward smoothly to soothe the poor man with a steady flow of distracting questions, and Granny Goodweather leaned back and pinched the unruly younger brother’s cheek-a Granny’s privilege, however much it might hurt, and however much the red wheal it left might mar the effect of the young man’s splendid beard.

  They were handed into five of a long line of gleaming carriages, each with the Brightwater crest on its door and harnessed to a matched team of four Mules, and Jewel began to enjoy herself in spite of everything. It was one thing to watch the doings at Castle Brightwater on the comset while she sat at home at Castle Wommack, and it was quite another to actually be here. The carriages were a fine touch, and she could tell she wasn’t the only one to think so. Lizzies would of taken them up to the Castle far more quickly, twelve at a time, but a lizzy had none of the elegance of a four-Mule carriage. They were speckledy Mules, a soft gray flecked all over with a darker shade of the same; their harness was gray leather with silver fittings; and their tails had been done in an intricate five-strand braid, not just looped up and fastened in the usual way. And their hoofs! Jewel had never seen Mules with their hoofs, that were naturally a kind of nothing clayey color, stained a jetty black. It was purely splendid, and polite of the Mules to allow it done.

  And then there were the crests; a crest on the door of a lizzy would of been like a lace collar on a goat. It was well carried out, and a few points for the Family Brightwater.

  Somewhere down the line the remark came-”Waste, waste, and never an end to it!”-and nobody had to look back to identify the source. That would be someone from the Traveller delegation, going through the obligatory rituals in his thrifty suit of coarse black cloth and his plain black coat. The Travellers considered anything either pleasant or attractive to be a “waste.”

  “They are going to be a nuisance,” said Gilead, and her father nodded.

  “Fiddle,” said Granny Copperdell, “they just make for balance. Everybody else says `how nice’ and the Travellers come in all together with `what a waste’ and it evens it all out. Keeps us from getting carried away with delight and debauchery. Right useful of them, if you want my opinion on the matter.”

  “The eeeeequilibrium of the yuuuuuuuniverse is a fraaaaaail and-”

  “Lewis Motley Wommack!” The Granny’s voice whipped through the air in the open carriage, and Jewel tried not to wince. “You mock the Reverend, and on a Sundy at that, and I’ll see you pay dearly for it!”

  Jewel listened to the laughter in his voice, tucked under the charming apology that came properly and without a second’s hold-back, and wished she could stick him with her broochpin again. There was nothing in all the known universe that her brother feared, and nothing so far as she knew that had ever bested him-excepting perhaps Responsible of Brightwater, who’d run away from him and left him laughing till the tears poured down into his beard on the steps of Castle Wommack, and she hadn’t the least idea what all that had been about . . . but his own brash fearnaught ways were no reason to risk bringing down the wrath of the Powers That Be on the heads of all the rest of the household.

  At her side, Granny Copperdell touched her wrist. “You’ll be having your hands full, child,” she said. And Granny Goodweather on the other side, though she didn’t leave off looking round her at the fields and farms of Brightwater, so much a park by comparison with the rough-hacked land at home on Kintucky, nodded a sturdy agreement.

  “My hands full? Why? Of what?” Jewel’s heart sank-here it came. Holiday or no holiday, Jubilee or no Jubilee, there’d be something; there always was. Botheration!

  “Keeping Lewis Motley Wommack the Thirty-third in order, child,” said the Granny solemnly. “Not a job I’d fancy.”

  Jewel was absolutely silent. Not a word entered her mind that she dared give voice to. But the Grannys went on, and spared her the trouble of trying to frame the questions without the broad words.

  “You keep in mind, now,” said Granny Copperdell, “you are the only woman in your brother’s line. Your parents both dead since you were only babies, no other sisters, and him not married -that makes you responsible for his doings. You may well find out that you’d abeen better off with a half dozen babies, time this is over.”

  “It’ll grow you up some,” said Granny Goodweather calmly, and patted Jewel’s knee. “And high time. You’re near on marrying age, we can’t have you shirking your duties and hiding in grannyskirts forever.”

  “It’s not fair!” Jewel announced, her outrage sufficient at last to let her speak. “And I don’t fancy it either!”

  “Fair!” scoffed Granny Copperdell. “I ever tell you this world was fair, Jewel of Wommack?”

  “No,” she said, speaking sullen into her own collar. “No, I can’t say as you ever did.”

  “Well, then,” said both the Grannys together. And then the carriage pulled up at the gates of the Castle and everyone was suddenly moving about, gathering up what they’d laid down for the ride, and there was no more time for discussion.

  Inside the Castle, Responsible of Brightwater sat at the desk in her bedroom, going over for the tenth time the welcoming speech t
hat she would be giving to open the meeting tomorrow morning, including the elaborate agenda she was counting on to give her time to see how the wind blew. There must be no smallest niche of time left over tomorrow in the scheduled activities to allow the anti-Confederationists to begin their moves. She could count on their obsession with manners to keep them from tampering with that agenda on Opening Day; and good use she’d best make of it, seeing as she could count on nothing for the other four days. The only possibility she could safely exclude was murder-there hadn’t been a murder on the continent of Marktwain in the entire one thousand years of its history-but that left a mighty long list of other kinds of disorder and disarray.

  “Keep ‘em busy!” she said out loud, and made herself jump.

  She was nervous, that was for sure. Her mother had remarked on it. Her uncles and her uncles’ wives and all the children, and even the Housekeeper, had remarked on it. Until Granny Hazelbide had told them all to leave her be, in no uncertain terms.

  “She has enough to think of now,” the Granny’d said, shaming them all-and they deserved it--”without you forever tormenting her. The Confederation of Continents might go down for good and all this week, after five hundred years of nursing it along, and she has that to think of. And if it doesn’t fall, the Twelve Gates only knows what shape it’ll be in after the Travellers get through chopping away at it. If she wasn’t nervous I’d be calling in the Magician of Rank to see to her head, and I’ll thank youall to hush!”

  Responsible grinned, remembering. It was rare that a Granny, or anybody else, came to her defense. It had been a pleasant experience, and one she wouldn’t mind repeating a time or two.

  “You really worried, Responsible?” her grandfather had asked, sounding sorry for his teasing.

  “Some,” she’d said.

  “They’re not such fools as to think that without the Confederation things’d be even half proper-they’ll just make the usual noises, and then back down like they always do. No need for you to fret.”