Good Time Coming Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by C. S. Harris

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Author’s Note

  Recent Titles by C. S. Harris

  GOOD TIME COMING *

  Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries

  WHAT ANGELS FEAR

  WHEN GODS DIE

  WHY MERMAIDS SING

  WHERE SERPENTS SLEEP

  WHAT REMAINS OF HEAVEN

  WHERE SHADOWS DANCE

  WHEN MAIDENS MOURN

  WHAT DARKNESS BRINGS

  WHY KING CONFESS

  WHO BURIES THE DEAD

  WHEN FALCONS FALL

  * available from Severn House

  GOOD TIME COMING

  C. S. Harris

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2016 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  This eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2017 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2016 by Two Talers, L.L.C.

  The right of C. S. Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8649-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-751-7 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-815-5 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  For Samantha, Danielle, and Steve.

  There’s a good time coming, boys.

  A good time coming:

  War in all men’s eyes shall be

  A monster of iniquity

  In the good time coming.

  Nations shall not quarrel then,

  To prove which is the stronger;

  Nor slaughter men for glory’s sake;–

  Wait a little longer.

  The Good Time Coming, 1846,

  words by Charles Mackay; melody by Stephen Foster.

  One

  I killed a man the summer I turned thirteen. Sometimes I still see him in my dreams, his eyes as blue as the Gulf on a clear spring morning, his cheeks reddened by the hot Louisiana sun. His face is always the same, ever young and vital. But the bones of his hands are bare and stained dark by the fetid mud of the swamps, and his scent is that of death.

  Yet even worse are the nights when I lie awake, when a hot summer wind shifts the festoons of Spanish moss hanging from the arching branches of the live oaks down by the bayou and whispers through the canebrakes in a sibilant rush. That’s when the fear comes to me, cold and soul-shriveling, and I find myself listening lest the hushed breath of the dead betray the secret of what we did that day.

  I tell myself his mouth is filled with earth, his tongue turned to dust. But the dead don’t need to speak to bear witness to the wrongs done them. And though I tell myself the wrongs were his, and that no just God could condemn my actions on that fateful morning, it is a desperate reassurance that brings no real rest. If this war has taught us anything, it is that convictions of righteous certitude can be soul-corrupting illusions that offer no dispensation from hell.

  I first saw him late one hazy afternoon in the spring of 1862, when I was nearly twelve. Finn O’Reilly and I had come after school to splash around in the lagoon near Bayou Sara’s train depot, using a broken copper dipper he’d found in a paddock to catch tadpoles. The warm water lapped pleasantly against our bare calves, the mud billowing up around us with each step as the fine silt squished between our toes. The light had taken on that golden, slanted quality that comes in the hours just before evening, and from up high in the nearby green curtain of vine-draped cypress and willow branches came an endless chorus of birdsong.

  Thanks to the cracks in the dipper’s bowl, the long-tailed pollywogs simply wriggled to freedom in the streams of water that escaped in a sun-sparkled rush every time we raised the dipper high.

  ‘It’s worse than a sieve!’ I said, laughing out loud. Then I paused, aware of an unnatural hush that had fallen over the afternoon. The raucous shouts and laughter from the workmen down at the wharves stilled, along with the rattle of cartwheels and the click of the grist mill and the myriad other sounds that normally formed the background noise of our lives. Even old Toot Magill’s liver-colored hound stopped his infernal barking. It was as if the entire town had suddenly paused to catch its collective breath.

  A woman’s high-pitched voice sang out, ‘Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy! They be acomin’!’

  Finn’s head jerked up, a heavy hank of dark hair falling into his eye, so that he had to put up a hand to shove it back. He was a year older than me but still short, his features sharp, his green eyes disconcertingly pale and tilted in a way that made him look vaguely exotic. He wore a pair of patched canvas trousers rolled up to his knees and a plaid shirt of homespun woven by his mama, the bare skin of his arms and legs sun-browned and still nearly hairless. After more
than a year of the Federal blockade, shoes had become so precious that most folks put them on only when they went visiting or to church. But Finn had never worn shoes much anyway.

  A lot of folks looked askance at the O’Reillys. They weren’t just Irish, they were Black Irish. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it sounded pretty darn bad. Finn confided to me once that he’d been born smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between Dublintown and New Orleans, in what his mama called a coffin ship. He said the Irish were packed in the hold so tight and with so little food and water that at least three or four died every day, their bodies thrown overboard to the schools of sharks that followed in their wake. Neither his mama nor his papa could read or write, and though they worked hard, they’d started from nothing and were still dirt poor. I often heard my classmates’ mothers wondering aloud why my mama let me play with him. They usually came to the conclusion she must not know how much time Finn and I spent together. But when they tried to tell her, she’d just change the subject.

  I’d been holding my skirts and pinafore bunched up in one fist, but as the shout from the waterfront was taken up by first one voice, then another, I let them slip so that they trailed in the water. ‘Reckon it’s the Yankees?’

  Finn’s gaze met mine. Tadpoles forgotten, we raced each other to the levee.

  Finn and I lived on the outskirts of the town of St Francisville, which perched like a dainty lady high above the Mississippi on a narrow ridge overlooking the river. But the depot was half a mile below at the foot of the bluff, in a technically separate town called Bayou Sara. Once, Bayou Sara was the busiest port between New Orleans and Memphis. It’s all gone now, its mile of brick warehouses reduced to blackened rubble, its bustling shops and banks, hotels and taverns, sawmills and livery stables only a memory marked here and there by a solitary chimney thrusting up from a tangle of vines. When the river is high, its raging brown floodwaters sluice over the crumbling levees and forgotten foundations, and creepers reclaim what were once streets and lovingly-tended rose gardens. Yet on that hot spring day, I thought it as permanent and eternal as the sky. I’d no notion, then, how quickly life can change, how ephemeral everything I took for granted around me actually was.

  We climbed the levee to find the grassy slope thick with folks, knots of dockworkers and field hands in white jean cloth trousers and loose shirts mingling with hoop-skirted women and gray-whiskered men in black broadcloth coats and tall silk hats. The air was thick with the reek of working men’s sweat and ladies’ talcum powder and the stench of burning cotton as planters up and down the river set fire to their stores rather than see them confiscated by the enemy. We had to duck low under boney elbows and squeeze around wide hips, murmuring, ‘’Scuse me, Mr Marks, ’scuse me, Miss Jane,’ until we finally reached the water’s edge.

  The Mississippi was running treacherously high that year, a mile-wide torrent yellow-brown with mud. Great spreading trees, washed from distant banks to the north, swept along on the fast current, and a smoky haze muted the dazzle of the sun off the water as the wind kicked up choppy waves flecked with foam. But what made my breath catch and my scalp pull tight was the sight of a massive sloop of war, its high prow riding above the raging floodwaters, a colossus of gleaming wood and wind-snapped lines and deadly, dark-bored cannon mouths. In its wake steamed a flotilla of smaller, two-masted gunboats guarding a procession of confiscated paddle-wheelers that had been pressed into service as troop transports. Streams of white smoke belched from their stacks, joining the black smudge from the burning cotton.

  ‘Holy mackerel,’ whispered Finn. ‘Look at ’em all.’

  The wind off the river snatched at the loose hair from my braids and whipped it around my face, so that I had to put up both hands to catch it back. As the flotilla drew closer, I could see the flags and brightly-colored streamers that flew from every mast and peak, an incongruous note of gaiety that added one more bizarre element of unreality to the scene. From every deck, a thick horde of blue-coated men stared at us.

  We stared silently back at them, as if they were some exotic species, as if we hadn’t seen men in these familiar uniforms marching back and forth across the Baton Rouge parade ground all our lives, as if our own loved ones hadn’t worn similar uniforms in the wars to wrest Texas and California from Mexico and the western territories from the Indians.

  My own Uncle Bo still wore blue, although we didn’t talk about him much – and not at all when my Grandmother Adelaide was around.

  The first of the flotilla was drawing abreast of us now. Rolling swells curled away from the endless hulls and churning paddle-wheels to crash against the slope at our feet and throw up a fine spray that seemed to sting my cheeks.

  ‘Reckon they’re comin’ here?’ asked Mr James Marks, Bayou Sara’s portly, middle-aged mayor. His face was soft and round and pink with the heat, his watery eyes blinking rapidly as if struggling to bring what he was seeing into focus.

  ‘Not here. Vicksburg.’

  The answer came from a tall, mahogany-bearded man in homespun who stood at the edge of the crowd. He had blade-like features and the hard, whipcord body of a man who spends his days in the saddle or on the march. He kept his slouch hat pulled low, his eyes narrowed against the sun as he cradled a new Enfield rifle in his arms. He wasn’t from around here and I didn’t know his name, although I had seen him before. I’d heard rumors that he was an observing officer sent by General Ruggles, but I knew better than to believe too much of what was said.

  All kinds of wild talk had been flying up and down the river in the two weeks since New Orleans fell without a shot being fired in her defense. Oh, a fierce enough battle had raged lower down at the mouth of the Mississippi, a nightmare of screaming shells, choking fire, and sobbing, dying men that ended with the Federal fleet blasting its way past the two red-brick, star-shaped forts that guarded the river’s access. Once Forts Jackson and St Philip surrendered, the city did, too.

  ‘Jimminee, there’s a mess o’em,’ said the Widow Carlyle’s Tom, his dark face shiny with sweat, his eyes hooded in that way habitual to those who must learn early to hide their feelings and reactions from the world. I looked over at him. But it wasn’t until later that I found myself wondering what his thoughts were, watching that fleet.

  ‘Reckon Vicksburg’ll surrender without a shot, like New Orleans and Baton Rouge?’ someone asked.

  ‘If it does, the war is as good as lost,’ said Bernard Henshaw, the gloomy, stoop-shouldered owner of the town’s book and stationery store. But no one paid much attention to him beyond a few mutterings and foul glances. A fussy little Englishman with dainty features and gold-rimmed spectacles he was always pushing up with the pad of his thumb, Henshaw had been loudly prophesying ruin and defeat for over a year now.

  ‘If them Yankees think Vicksburg’s gonna surrender, they’ve got another think comin’,’ said William T. Mumford, the graying, barrel-chested proprietor of the grand China Grove Hotel. A bunch of the men nodded and grunted in agreement. But something about their posture and air of forced bravado reminded me of Finn sticking his hands in his pockets and whistling every time he had to pass a graveyard.

  By now the fleet stretched out in both directions up and down the river. Folks were breathing easier, their shoulders sagging in relief. The slouch-hatted stranger was right; the Federals weren’t coming to Bayou Sara. We were safe – at least for now.

  Then the Reverend Samuel Sweeney, whose steepled, white clapboard Methodist church lay on Sun Street, said, ‘Look at that boat – one of them low ones with the two masts. What’s it doing?’

  Executing a slow, ominous turn, the nearest gunboat swung wide to point its bow in towards shore, its whistle shrill as it pulled away from its fellows. We could see the name emblazoned on its side as it plowed toward us, and though the sun still shone hot and intense, I shivered.

  USS Katahdin.

  ‘Holy cow,’ said Finn. ‘They’re fixin’ to tie up at our wharfboat!’
/>
  Two

  The rat-tat-tat of a drum floated to us from across the water as the gunboat steamed toward us. Singly or in groups of two or three, the assembled townsfolk on the levee began to melt away.

  I glanced over at Mr Marks. The mayor’s plump face was slick with sweat, and he kept opening and closing his mouth like a fish left stranded in a crevasse after the spring floodwaters receded. He was a journalist by trade, editor of The Bayou Sara Ledger, although lately his newspaper had been shrinking steadily as paper and ink grew harder and harder to get. From the looks of things, he’d rather be anyplace but where he was. Yet he stood his ground, a small, rotund man with widely spaced eyes, protuberant ears, and a dark stain of perspiration soaking the back of his threadbare coat.

  The slouch-hatted man with the shiny new rifle had disappeared.

  ‘Why you reckon they’re stopping here?’ asked one of the few men who’d chosen to stand with the mayor.

  Mr Marks only shook his head, although I heard him mutter under his breath, ‘Please God some young fool doesn’t get it into his head to take a potshot at them.’

  He moved to position himself in the muddy lane leading down to the ferry landing, the wind off the river fluttering his black tie and the tails of his coat. He’d always been something of a figure of fun to us children, with his earnest way of leaning forward when he talked and the plump, ink-stained hands he had a habit of fluttering in the air. But it occurred to me, watching him, that maybe I needed to reassess my estimation of Mr Marks.

  The Katahdin didn’t pull up to the wharfboat, but anchored off the ferry landing with a loud rattle and splash. We watched as a longboat full of seamen and marines began to pull toward us, its oars throwing up arcing cascades of water that glistened in the sunlight. One of the ship’s officers, a slim lieutenant with a boy’s smooth round face and turned-up nose, stood at the prow. But for some reason I found my gaze inexplicably drawn to the tall, golden-haired man at his side. The bugle embroidered on the front of his black felt hat and the light blue straps on the shoulders of his dark frock coat marked him as an infantry captain.