Deseret (15 page)

Fearnley-Standish was fair and pale and at his shoulder came
a woman who was brown as a chestnut, and who looked like she had completely
traded civilization for practicality.
 
She wore a man’s vest and cowboy boots and her dress swished loose and
comfortable.
 
At first blush they
looked like opposites, like chalk and cheese, Poe thought the Englishman
himself might say, but then something caught his attention and he saw them
differently.
 
Squinting, he looked
again.

Strip away the dirt, the tanned skin and general weathering
from the woman, and they could be twins.
 

Certainly siblings.

Poe searched his memory for Robert’s files and what they
might have said about a Miss Fearnley-Standish.
 
Disappeared, he recalled.
 
No police investigation, no newspaper articles, no further
mention.
 
Strange for a girl from a
good family like the Fearnley-Standishes to just vanish without a trace.
 

It reeked of scandal and mystery and family honor, and
suddenly Poe realized what Absalom Fearnley-Standish was doing in the Kingdom
of Deseret.

“Captain Burton,” the fair Englishman said, breathing from
the exertion of climbing down into the well of the Tabernacle.
 
He spoke with a crisp educated accent,
the precise vowels of a public school man.
 
Eton or Harrow, Poe guessed.
 
“And Mrs. Snow.
 
Annie.”
 
This last greeting
was more than a little stiff, Poe thought.
 
“And, er, you, sir, however you are calling yourself today.”

“Poe,” Poe said.

Fearnley-Standish nodded.
 
“Fine,” he agreed.
 
“Mr. Poe.
 
This is Mrs.
Abigail Rockwell.”
 
Mrs. Rockwell
curtseyed, a gesture utterly inconsistent with her clothing but showing
glimpses of a good upper middle class upbringing in greater London.
 
Fearnley-Standish shot Burton a look
under his eyebrows, a look that might have been sheepish.
 
“Née Fearnley-Standish,” he said,
barely louder than a mumble.

“Ha!” Burton barked.
 
His eyes gleamed with triumph and holier-than-thou reproach.
 
Fearnley-Standish looked like he wanted
to crumple and disappear under Burton’s glare, but the explorer didn’t press
his advantage and just bowed to his colleague’s sister.
 
“Captain Richard Burton, madam,” he
said to her.
 
“Your servant.”

“Sir,” she acknowledged him.
 

There followed a flurry of bows and curtseys and the
exchange of names, but to one side Absalom Fearnley-Standish approached Burton
and cleared his throat.

“Yes, Absalom?” Burton asked.
 
He was the shorter man, but he pointed his chin at the
ceiling and the cast of his eye made him look like he was gazing down on the
diplomat.
 
Poe looked away, nodded
at the ladies, and listened sharply.

“Dick… er, rather, Captain Burton,” Fearnley-Standish
began.
 
“We must compare schedules
and organize ourselves.
 
I must
make a… er, a small detour.
 
Regarding a personal matter.”

Richard Burton threw back his head and laughed.

*
  
*
  
*

Jed Coltrane ran.

It wasn’t easy, and he wasn’t fast.
 
He had short legs in the first place,
and in the second he carried the long case of the machine gun in one hand and a
heavy pack of ammunition bouncing on his back.
 

The Irishman had John Moses.

The… somebody… the Mormons?… somebody named
Hick
… had Brigham Young, and also Clemens and some very
fancy-looking Mexican man.
 

All of them were in a steam-truck, going somewhere, and the
only clue Jed had as to their destination was the name
Rockwell
.
 
Rockwell’s
place
, that’s where the thugs had said they
were headed.

He had to find Poe.

Just minutes, it seemed, after the steam-truck with its
kidnap victim cargo had pulled out, crowds had descended on the gigantic
egg-shaped building.
 
They came on
foot, by horse and in all manner of vehicle, hitching their animals to convenient
posts and leaving trucks and clocksprung mules standing idle beside plascrete
curbs, but it was like a switch had been thrown on a giant battery, and the
traffic that had used to flow in all directions around the egg suddenly all
fell into it.

If the
Liahona
was in
town, Jed guessed, Poe might end up inside the egg, too.
 
And if it wasn’t, hell, he had
absolutely no idea how to get hold of his boss.
 
He felt a little conspicuous with the machine gun, but he
looked around and saw that just about everyone else was armed too.
 
The observation calmed him down.

He cut his pace to a walk and went inside the egg, under a
sign that said
SALT LAKE CITY TABERNACLE
above a line of that silly-looking gibberish writing, the same crap that had
filled the newspaper.
 
What was
wrong with these people?

He cut across a crowded circular hall that he guessed must
ring the entire building, then through a wide, people-stuffed plascrete gullet
and suddenly found himself spat out into the abyss.

Jed Coltrane was not afraid of heights.
 
Jed Coltrane was not afraid of crowds,
either.
 
Hell, he’d tumbled from
heights in front of crowds in more small towns on the Chitlin’ Circuit, the
Sawdust Circuit and even the Borscht Belt than he could ever hope to remember.

But the inside of the Tabernacle daunted him anyway.
 
It was huge, the biggest open space Jed
had ever seen that wasn’t God’s own great out-of-doors, like a palace for
human-sized bees, or something bored and decadent Martians might build, or a
node of the Sea King’s stronghold from the bottom of the ocean.
 
It was gigantic, and it shone like
polished brass, and it swarmed with people.
 
Seats climbed up above his head in rows and met somewhere up
there behind giant brass trumpets like amplifying cones.
 
Seats climbed down and piled onto a
smooth plascrete space, in the center of which was a stage with chairs and a
pulpit and a thicket of Franklin Poles.

“Jebus,” he muttered.

Down on the floor, beside the stage, stood Poe.
 
His boss was talking with the
Englishmen, some tall Mexican drink of water and, if Jed’s eyes hadn’t failed
him due to age, exhaustion, or sheer fatigue from having seen so much weirdness
in the past forty-eight hours, the two ladies from the
Liahona
.
 

The one Jed had tried to kill, and the one who had tried to
kill Jed.

They were all talking like friends.

“Okay, Poe,” he mumbled as he rolled down the plascrete
steps.
 
“You’re the boss.”
 
Besides, he needed Poe’s
resourcefulness, his powerful brain, to help him find John Moses and get the
boy back.

The Mexican wore a leather outfit that covered her from head
to toe and was spangled with buckles, straps and small protective shells.
 
She held a helmet with a smoked visor
under one arm and wore a big old handgun on her hip, and if Jed hadn’t
forgotten his military lore, she had sergeant’s stripes on her shoulder.
 
She was talking as he arrived at the
floor.

“Joo may do as joo wish,” she said, in a voice like smoked
honey and bullets, “but mi responsabilidad es el Ambassador Armstrong.
 
I only thought that joo might be
potential allies para mi and Sergeant Ortiz.”

“We might indeed, Sergeant Jackson.”
 
Poe noticed Jed’s arrival.
 
“And this is my associate, Jed
Coltrane,” he introduced the dwarf to the others.

“Uh… okay, boss.”
 
This sudden friendliness made Jed uneasy.
 
It made him want to throw scarabs on all these Englishmen
and Mormons, frankly, and the painful recollection that the Irishman had the
scarabs too didn’t help.

“They know my name,” Poe said, smiling.

Poe looked at his boss and at the others.
 
Was this a test?
 
His boss was such a devious thinker,
with a brain that explored all the twists and turns of every possible outcome
before ever committing to a plan of action, it didn’t seem possible that he had
just up and told these people his real name.
 

Hell, Jed wasn’t even sure that
Poe
really
was
his real name.

“Okay.”
 
He
nodded, trying to look serious.
 
“Fine.”

“Poe,” Poe added, looking irritated.
 
“Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Yeah, I know it, I just… jebus, Poe, how do I know what you
expect outta me?”

“What I should have learned to expect from you by now,” Poe
snapped, looking exasperated, “is piscine acuity and porcine tact!”

“Boss,” Jed said, feeling very tired and very stupid, “I’ll
tack up all the signs you want, pie signs and poor signs and cuties and
whatever the hell else you jest said, but first you gotta help me find a guy
named Rockwell.”

Chapter Ten

When the steam-truck finally rattled off the tail end of the
armadillo mountain and slammed to a halt, it caught Sam by surprise and knocked
him over.

“Damnation!” Orrin Porter Rockwell cursed.
 

“Port…”

“Sorry.”

The gangplank fell over and Sam blinked for a moment in the
sudden sunlight.
 
He saw a dirt
track through lanky yellow grass, scraping its way up a hill and ending at a
rambling building that looked part hotel, part saloon and part ranch house.
 
At its far end squatted a gigantic
brass bulb, the size of another small building, with man-sized pipes elbowing
out of its side and punching into the ground.
 
Behind the building and the brass tank rose a high gravel
ridge, and above that a sky so pale it was almost white.
 
Off to one side was another building,
one that might have been a stable.

“Yankee piece of trash,” Bill Hickman berated him, and then
the Danites pulled a sack over his head and Sam was blind again and drowning in
the smell of apples.
 
“Who told you
you could take your hat off?”

They dragged him by his shoulders, so that his knees and
feet bounced along in the dirt, Sam guessed for maybe a hundred feet.
 
He heard the burble of water just
before cold splashing on his ankles told him that he was at a stream, and then
he was planted on his knees in chilly mud.
 
On a hotter day, it might even have felt good, but this was
shaping up to be a cool one, and the midday sun was barely warm.

“It’s not too late, Hick,” Sam heard Brigham Young say in a
voice dripping with threat.
 
He
felt relieved to know he wasn’t alone.
 
The darkness and silence and being dragged along in solitude felt just a
little too much like death for his comfort.

“Joo are making a very bad decision,” Ambassador Armstrong weighed
in gravely.
 
“My President will not
tolerate such treatment of her especial representatives.”

Sam was unconvinced that such exhortations would help.
 
“Set us free,” he offered, “and I can
see you get five hundred dollars.”

“
Don’t
set us free,
and I’ll see scraps of your hide nailed to every damn tree between here and St.
Louis,” Rockwell spat, unhelpfully.

Clang!
 
Thud.

Metal struck metal, then something heavy hit the earth and
bounced off Sam’s thigh.

“Whatever Lee has planned, nothing has been done that can’t
be undone.”
 
Sam found the sudden
kindness in Brigham Young’s voice unsettling after all the gruff ferocity.
 
Young sounded stern, but Sam was a
little bit irritated that the man didn’t sound
angry
anymore.
 
“You can still come home, Hick.”

“Shut up,” Bill Hickman said sourly.
 
“
All
y’all.”

Sam was dragged forward again, into a cold space, and then
he was hurled against a wall.
 
He
collapsed onto what felt like a stack of smallish casks.
 
The fact that his hands were still tied
behind his back made it worse, because he couldn’t catch himself or soften any
of the blows.
 
Splashing and
scraping noises and three meaty
thuds
told him that his fellow-prisoners were being made to join him, and then a door
shut.

Snap.

“Damn you!” Brigham Young yelled.
 
“Set us free!”

No one answered him.

There was a long silence.

“Yankee?” Rockwell finally asked.

“I’m here,” Sam said.

“Can you still see?”

“I’m afraid they’ve hooded me again,” Sam informed the other
men.
 
“I’m as blind as Tiresias.”

“Or Bartimaeus,” Brigham Young suggested in a low
rumble.
 
“The man born blind in
John nine, if you didn’t learn that in your Gentile upbringing.”

“I know who Bartimaeus is,” Sam grumbled.
 
“What do you mean,
Gentile?
”

“Be careful what joo say,” the Ambassador warned them.
 
“We are all in the dark, and joo cannot
be sure that our captors are not listening to us.”

There was another pause.
 
Sam still heard the running water and he felt cool air on
his skin, so he guessed they must be in a springhouse.

“I reckon I count four men breathing,” Rockwell whispered,
“but I’ll keep it down in case they got a guard at the door.”
 
He sniffed.
 
“I smell venison, pepper and butter.
 
Didn’t
anybody
see
anything
?”

“I did,” Sam admitted.
 
“Just a bit.
 
I had my eyes
free for a moment, just as they opened the back of the steam-truck and before
they covered my head again.”

“And?” Rockwell prompted him.

“I saw a house,” Sam thought carefully about the glimpse
he’d had and tried to be careful in his description.
 
“It had a wrap-around porch, it was two stories tall, there
were glass panes and white curtains in all the windows.
 
The house was white, and it had
blue-painted trim… a lightning rod, I think… two chimneys.”

Rockwell laughed softly.
 
“You notice anything… funny… about the house?”

Sam chuckled too; in focusing on the trees, he’d almost
forgotten the forest.
 
“Yes, Mr.
Rockwell, I did.
 
There was an
enormous brass tank at one end of it.
 
Almost as big as a small house itself.”

“Like a water tank?” Rockwell pressed.

“Could have been,” Sam agreed.
 
“It had pipes running into the ground.”

Rockwell laughed again.

“You see?” Brigham Young asked in the darkness.
 
“Cogs.”

“What is it?” the Ambassador asked.
 
“Do joo know where we are?”

“We’re at
my
house,”
Orrin Porter Rockwell told him.
 
“I
reckon in my springhouse.
 
I
thought it smelled familiar.
 
And
delicious.
 
And what that
shit-for-brains Hickman don’t know is that I keep a Colt and a Bowie knife in
my food storage.”

“What, in case the milk stampedes?”
 
Sam actually felt glad that Rockwell
knew where he was and had to hand the means of escape, but he couldn’t help
mocking the other man, just a little bit, for keeping weapons in his
pantry.
 
It was a reflex.

“In case bad men come for me while I’m getting out food for
my supper,” Rockwell said.
 
“Or bears.
 
I keep a pistol in the outhouse, too,
for the same reason—you got a problem with that?”

Sam bit his tongue to hold back the obvious snappy answer:
yes,
I have a problem with the fact that you get food for your supper out of the
outhouse
.
 
“Actually,” he told the mountain man, “I can see how it
would be very inconvenient to not have a pistol and be caught with your
trousers down.
 
Though I’m not sure
why you have an outhouse at all, if your hotel has modern plumbing.”

“Just old-fashioned, I reckon.”

“If you have trouble with your pants staying up,” Young
suggested in the darkness, “I’m sure I can find you a new pair.”

*
  
*
  
*

Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy watched Sam Clemens and his
companions in misfortune get dragged out of the back of the steam-truck and
tossed into a little log house straddling a spring at the bottom of a long
hill.
 
The Danites slammed a new
padlock onto the door to replace the one they’d knocked off and left two
pistoleros standing guard outside the springhouse (and shouldn’t two be enough,
in this empty wasteland?) while the rest of them trundled back up to the house
in the steam-truck.

They parked beside the building and went inside.
 
Afraid the truck might get back into
gear and head out again if he waited, Tam quickly unbuckled the boy John Moses,
and the two of them stepped easily off the wheelhouse roof and onto the
shingled slope over the top of the house’s wrap-around porch.

The tar shingles were hot enough to bake bread in the
afternoon sun.
 
Tam shoved his
pistol in the nearest window first, then poked his own beak in between the
fluttering white curtains to be sure the room was unoccupied, then hauled
himself and the gunsmith’s son in and pulled them both to the floor.

“Stay down,” he ordered the boy, then crawled over to check
the door.

Locked, but he could open it from the inside.

The room was a bedroom, and it looked like one that might be
for rent.
 
There was a single bed,
with a cheap but cheerful iron frame and a flattened mattress, and a chest of
drawers with a cracked mirror and a side table and a pitcher of water beside a
tin basin and a kerosene lantern.
 
Tam didn’t see anyone’s personal effects anywhere in the room.

John Moses lay where he had been placed.
 
He was quiet, but he had a cantankerous
glint in his eye like he didn’t really appreciate the genius of Tamerlane
O’Shaughnessy’s plans and didn’t intend to fully cooperate in them.
 
He’d looked sullen all the way from the
Great Salt Lake City, a drive that had taken an hour.
 
He hadn’t made any noise or tried to escape, though, which
was a good thing.
 
Hushers or no
Hushers, Tam didn’t fancy his odds going up against half a dozen of these
Deseret thugs, not unless he got to shoot first and from cover.
 
Which, of course, is what Mother
O’Shaughnessy had always taught him to do, in any case.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Tam said, then kicked himself
for a stupid git.
 
He tightened up
his voice.
 
“Unless you cross me,
of course, you miserable little runt, or disobey me in anything at all.”

John Moses said nothing.

“Right.
 
Where
are we, then?
 
Is this Rockwell’s?”

John Moses nodded.
 

“Rockwell’s what?
 
Is it a well?
 
What’s the
big turtliffic tank nailed onto the side of the building?
 
It looks like a saloon inside a big
home.
 
Is it a bor…” he had been
about to say
bordello
, “boarding house?”

John Moses nodded.

“Talk, you little idjit,” Tam gasped in exasperation.
 
Out of reflex he pointed one of the
Hushers at the little boy, but thought better of it and lowered the gun.
 
No point killing him, me boy.
 
Not just yet.
 
“Talk.
 
What the
fook is this place?”

“This is the Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery,” the boy
said.
 
“The tank is hot water, I
think.
 
You can get a hot bath here
right out of the spigot, without even a boiler or a fire.
 
But I don’t know what a
fook
is.”

Tam giggled.
 
“A
fook’s
not so different from an
idjit
.
 
And
what’s a
Rockwell
, then?”

“Orrin Porter Rockwell.
 
He’s a man.
 
He
owns it.
 
He’s kind of famous.
 
He’s not a… fook, he’s dangerous.
 
He’s a gunfighter.”

“I’ve wet my breeches already.”
 
Tam chuckled.
 
“You drink a lot, do you?”
 
His own head hurt for whisky.
 
A Guinness would do, or anything decent and Irish.
 
He’d almost be willing to drink an
English lager, at this point.
 
“Come here often?”

“Sometimes with poppa.
 
Or with Captain Jones.”
 
The
little boy seemed to be relaxing a bit.
 
“It’s a good place to stop on a trip down to Provo or Nephi or St.
George.”

Tam brushed back one of the curtains and scanned the
landscape around the hotel.
 
“There’s nothing around here for miles and miles but buffalo chips,
lad,” he disagreed.
 
“This looks
like a good place to get scalped by wild Indians.”

“That too,” John Moses agreed.
 
“But you can do that just about any place in the Kingdom, or
in the Wyoming Territory.”

“Smart aleck,” Tam snorted, and restrained himself from
cuffing the brat.
 
“Look around and
see if you can find anything in here to drink.”

He settled in to squint out the window and think while John
Moses opened and shut drawers and dug around under the bed.
 
He could see a stable across the yard,
with at least a couple of horses in it.
 
Hanging offense or not, Tam didn’t object to stealing a horse when he
needed it; of course, Sam would probably insist on paying for the beasts, and
paying too much, if it was at all possible.
 
Either way, once he got Clemens out of his cell, the horses
would give them a way back to the Great Salt Lake City.
 

The springhouse was not quite out of sight at the bottom of
the hill from where he watched.
 
The two men in front of it stood alert, like they were used to standing
watch or being bodyguards.
 
He
didn’t think he could sneak up on them, and he’d rather not attempt a direct
frontal assault when the odds were two to one against him.