The shift room was long but narrow. Alice stepped forward, feeling a great disgust rising in her at the thought of these two men, of this poor boy. Whatever Coulton was saying, she knew that injuries didn’t just heal over on their own. Hell, some of them never healed. She knew a little about that, too.
She pulled off her gloves. Her knuckles were red and bruised. She was looking at the boy’s manacles. “You can start by taking these off,” she called over her shoulder. She looked back. “Alwyn, is it?”
No one moved. The sheriff glanced at Coulton.
“It’s all right, sir,” said Coulton, sliding the letter back into his waistcoat pocket. “I assure you. It’s just for the examination.”
The deputy moved to the far end and kneeled and unlocked the ankle irons and then stood and removed the wristlets. He stepped back, his hands full of the loops of chain.
Alice walked over and stood in front of Ovid and reached out and took his hands in her own. They were soft, unhurt. She was surprised that there were no calluses. In the gloom, he was trembling.
“Is that better?” she murmured, looking up at him.
Ovid said nothing.
“Miss,” called the sheriff sharply. “It won’t do for a lady like yourself to be touching his kind. Not here, not in Natchez. Step back, please.”
Alice ignored him. She tilted the boy Ovid’s chin in the light until she caught his eye. Despite everything he had suffered, despite his trembling and the way he cowered, his eyes when he looked at her were cool, intelligent, unfrightened. He had the fierce stillness of a kid who’d had only himself to rely on. The others maybe didn’t see this. But she did.
“Miss—” called the sheriff.
“Charles Ovid,” she whispered. She could not keep the outrage from her voice. “Charlie, is it? My name is Alice. This is Mr. Coulton. The people we work for sent us here to help you, to take you away from all this. So that no one will hurt you like this again.”
She felt rather than heard the sheriff approach. He slipped his big hand under her arm, not roughly, and pulled her out of the boy’s reach.
“You’ll take that up with the judge,” he said. “But until then, we’ll keep things right and proper here.”
But Alice was watching Charlie Ovid.
If he understood her, he gave no sign; he just flinched as the sheriff emerged, and lowered his eyes, and went on trembling in the lantern light.
* * *
Later that evening, Alice and Coulton sat in the judge’s chambers, in the fine stone courthouse off the treed square. She wore a long blue dress and a corset threaded tightly at her ribs and she fidgeted and struggled for breath, hating it, hating her soft hair just washed and ringed into curls, hating the rouge on her lips. The low sun was coming in through the windows, getting tangled in the curtains. The judge walked around the room, turning on the gas sconces one by one, and then he came back to his desk and sat down. He had walked over from his dinner and was still in his shirtsleeves. He looked at Alice, looked at Coulton.
“Fine evening,” he said, smoothing his long mustache.
The desk was of walnut and absolutely empty and it gleamed in the red glow of the setting sun. He was a heavy man, with a soft juddering neck, and when he set his big hands down in front of him Alice marveled at their alabaster whiteness.
“I don’t know what the sheriff has told you, Your Honor,” Coulton began politely. “We’re representatives of the Cairndale Institute, in Edinburgh. We’re here for the Ovid boy.”
He withdrew the documents and letters of testimony from the satchel beside his chair, and handed them across. The judge studied them, one by one.
“It’s some sort of a clinic, now, is that it?”
“Yes, sir.”
The judge nodded. “Bill says you want to take that boy back with you. Is that it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how on God’s green earth your institute ever heard tell of this boy. You must have left Edinburgh, what, four weeks ago? Six? He hadn’t killed a soul yet. I can’t kindly imagine there’s a register on earth that has account of him even existing. That boy isn’t even a ghost, Mr. Coulton.”
Coulton nodded. “That’s so, Your Honor.”
“Well?”
Coulton glanced at Alice, glanced away. “Cairndale makes it a point to research into possible cases. They can trace through paternity some of those.” Coulton opened his hands wide. “I don’t pretend to understand their methods, sir. I do know the institute has been looking for Charles Ovid’s family for some years, ever since an uncle of his came to their attention.”
The judge tapped two fingers on the papers, turned his face to the window. “You know we killed that boy twice already,” he murmured. “I do believe Bill’s frightened of him.”
“Three times,” said Alice.
Coulton folded one leg over the other, smoothed out his trousers. He turned his hat in his hands. “It’s a medical condition, Your Honor. Nothing more. You’re an educated man, sir, if I may say so. You know how easily folk can be frightened by what they don’t understand.”
The judge inclined his head. “Not just folk. That boy frightens me too.” The light was going and now the shadows from the gaslights picked up his craggy face, the tired lines at his eyes. “And how do I square this with the problem of justice? Charles Ovid killed a man.”
“Yes, sir, he did.”
“A white man,” interjected Alice. “Isn’t that the real issue?”
“A white man, yes, ma’am. Now, I knew Hank Jessup some. He wasn’t a gentleman maybe, but he was honest and upright. Saw him in church every Sunday. And I have a town full of outraged citizens writing me angry letters about the direction this county is going in. Half of them are in the mood for a good old-fashioned lynching.”
“And the other half—?” Alice muttered acidly.
“Charlie Ovid was executed last week, in private,” said Coulton, cutting her short. “No one knows differently.”
“That ain’t exactly true. There’s Bill and Alwyn, for starters. Little Jimmy Mac was in the jail that night. And there’s the wives, Bill’s and Alwyn’s wives. I’d bet a blind man a dollar they know.”
“Don’t forget the men your deputy was letting in all week, to beat on the boy,” Alice added bitterly.
The judge paused. He looked at her.
“Your Honor,” Coulton said quickly. “If you’ll permit me. Who’s going to believe there’s a black kid who can’t be hurt chained up in the Natchez jail? It sounds like something out of the Bible. It sounds like a blooming miracle. It’s just not possible, never mind what your deputies’ wives say at their teas. Folk will gossip, it’s what they do. But if you speak out, and tell everyone the boy has been executed, who’ll question that?”
“That would be a lie,” said the judge.
“Would it?” Coulton grunted, smoothing out his trouser leg. “The only problem you have is a walking corpse you just can’t seem to dispose of. That boy died. He stopped breathing. It doesn’t matter that he came back to life. The sentence was carried out, justice was served. I don’t pretend it isn’t a strange affair. But in the matter of justice, I don’t see any problem. I know other folk might disagree, seeing him walking around still. But it just might be that we’re a kind of answer. The clinic we represent is in Scotland, and I can assure you, if you release him to us, this boy will never be returning to Natchez, Mississippi. His condition is still not well understood. But what has been observed is that, ultimately, it proves fatal. The boy has only a few years left to live.”
“A few years.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why wouldn’t I just commute the boy’s sentence to ten years’ hard labor?”
“Wouldn’t that seem a light punishment, to your constituents?”