"Fire Bell in the Night" - The First Chapter

From FIRE BELL IN THE NIGHT by Geoffrey Edwards. Copyright © 2007 by Geoffrey Edwards. Reprinted by permission of Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

ONE

June 27, 1850

Horace Simpson looked at his pocket watch for the third time in the space of half an hour, then snapped it shut and absentmindedly let the braided fob slide through his fingers. He regarded it for a moment as it began its slow, pendulous arc, then abruptly snatched it back and stuffed it into his pocket.

The body of the hanged negro he found that morning had swung in the same manner, as the wind had toyed with the corpse, its hands tied behind the back and its legs tied together. The gusts had blown the body in a circular fashion—the motion occasionally interrupted as the feet had bumped the trunk of the oak. With each gust, the rope had creaked like a porch swing.

Simpson ultimately helped to cut him down, for the young man from the mayor’s office obviously had no stomach for it.

“This isn’t normal,” the man stammered.

Simpson did not doubt that the young man was unaccustomed to dealing with hanged bodies; he kept swallowing every few seconds, wiping his mouth with the back of his coat sleeve as if the nausea might overtake him.

“Do you know who he is?” Simpson asked.

The clerk nodded. “His name is Lawrence Mills…a local cabinetmaker.”

“And what did he do?”

“Probably nothing.” The young man made several attempts to cover Mills’s face with a discarded feed sack, but the wind kept blowing it aside. “There have been rumors of unrest among the negroes here in the city. Mills’s name came up, but we knew at City Hall that there was nothing to it. We were pretty sure that a competitor implicated him just to cause him trouble.”

“Looks like he succeeded,” Simpson remarked with more than a trace of sarcasm.

The clerk’s face was earnest as he met Simpson’s eyes. “Charleston is not usually like this. Things just aren’t normal right now—not since the killings over in Habersham County. Civility is part of our upbringing here. We treat each other with common courtesy…”

Simpson found himself smiling as he recalled the young man’s remarks. How typical of Charleston that a civil servant would describe a lynching in terms of a social faux pas. Simpson guessed that the young man had not worked at the mayor’s office very long. In his own experience, visiting Charleston as he had over the years, he knew that lynchings were rarely isolated incidents. They seemed to be the result of too much steam building in the pressure cooker. A black would step out of line, commit a crime against a white man, and the whole city was thrown into an uproar. Black “troublemakers” were rounded up; a few might get some sense beaten into them, and a few might be lynched. After all, to the men who perpetrated these acts, it was not a life—it was just a nigger.

This particular civil servant, clearly a more sensitive type, had obviously been rattled by the incident—so much so that he had subsequently spilled a great deal of information to a wily out-of-town reporter. Characteristically, Simpson took satisfaction in manipulating the situation entirely to his own advantage. How else could he have landed this interview; he alone of all the reporters in town?

Simpson avoided the impulse to recheck his watch and glanced at the sun instead. He again took stock of his surroundings.

He was on one of several wharf-lined spots of land jutting into Charleston’s natural harbor. The bay was calm today, more reminiscent of a lake than a sea, as it gently lapped at the skirts of the barrier islands to the east.

The eight spires of Charleston’s grand churches presided over the city. The irony was not lost on the reporter. New York City had many imposing churches, certainly more than Charleston, yet New York’s other tall buildings limited the view to one or two spires from any perspective. Here in Charleston, however, one was hard pressed to find a spot where one could not see all eight—a constant reminder of the omnipresence of the Almighty. This, in a town one northern theologian had dubbed ‘the unholiest city west of Constantinople.’

The steeple bells were always ringing for one reason or another. They announced the hour of the day and the beginning and end of church services. They rang for births, deaths, fires, and ships in peril. The locals always seemed to know what they signified, but the constant ringing was anathema to a visiting reporter. Simpson never knew if he should be resetting his watch or dashing off to cover some catastrophe. He ultimately resolved to ignore them altogether.

But the bells were blessedly silent now, for Charleston was napping. Curled up in a blanket of summer haze and surrounded by green pines and blue waters, her peace was only disturbed by the busy cicadas whirring to each other in the heat, and irate seagulls calling out taunts as they vied for position near the wharf where the fishing boats docked.

The wharves on the finger of land where Simpson stood were deserted. The hoists and dollies were locked away in a nearby warehouse until the shipping season. “Sandman’s Storage” the wind-routed sign read. Simpson chuckled at the irony. He had checked out the interior of the building upon his arrival and found that it presently housed two militiamen sleeping off a drunk. Both were armed to the teeth. Each napped with his shotgun laid out beside him like a favorite doll, and one had a daunting array of knives lined up in decreasing order of size like instruments in a surgery.

Some of their blue-coated cohorts were making busy on a wharf on the next finger of land about a quarter-mile north, calling to each other in lazy backwoods drawls as they set their hoists in place. “Like water sloshing around in a gutter,” Simpson liked to say when describing southern speech to his fellow reporters. “Most of what they say seems unintelligible unless you know the secret.” Here Simpson would pause and wink. “I have discovered that after about three of their bourbons, it all becomes crystal clear.”

Simpson bought the mayor’s assistant a drink after their grisly encounter. He probed for inside information on the trial and on the political machinations of the locals. He queried the young man about the presence of the militia in such large numbers for the trial. The clerk seemed loath to speak of them at first, as if their coarseness was yet another blot on the city’s character.

“You’re right,” the young man finally conceded quietly. “There are more of them here than we need for the trial. But you must remember, the Smythe Plantation is less than a hundred miles away. We were not sure at first if the uprising there was the beginning of a general insurrection or, at the very least, a spark that might set off a similar incident.”

“From what I have heard,” Simpson countered, “the incident in Georgia hardly seemed an uprising. Ten dead, weren’t there? Four of the Smythe household, the overseer, three of the house slaves and two bounty hunters. All within twenty-four hours. A murderous rampage, yes. But I do not see evidence of a vast conspiracy… and they caught all but one of the murderers.”

“That’s just the point. They didn’t catch the ringleader, Jebediah Jones. Rumor has it that he is roaming the countryside recruiting an army.”

“Don’t you find it hard to believe that runaways could be present anywhere in such numbers? If even one escapes, a posse of bounty hunters is on the trail immediately.” Simpson shook his head. “I can’t believe that runaways are massing in numbers anywhere.”

“It isn’t really runaways that people are worried about. You must remember something, sir. We have about twelve thousand negroes here in Charleston, a number almost equal to that of the whites. Most are law-abiding, I give you. But there are a few bad apples…” He glanced around to see if anyone appeared to be eavesdropping, then lowered his voice. “I’m sure you have heard of Denmark Vesey.”

“I have.”

The young man sighed and shook his head. “For some reason, the fear never goes away.”

Simpson understood. He guessed that it had come ashore with the first slave ships like a plague transported with the cargo. For the slaveholder, the fear was incubated with the hatred of the heathen souls they could not, would not, assimilate—a hatred that would one day rise up and exact a terrible revenge.

Thirty years ago, their worst fears were almost realized. Denmark Vesey, a slave who bought his freedom after winning the lottery, apparently formulated a horrific plan—an uprising involving hundreds of slaves and free blacks. Simpson had stumbled across old newspaper accounts while sharing a bottle with a couple of cronies deep in the tombs of the Tribune one cold winter night. Piece by piece, investigators exposed the threads of a plot to murder all white slave owners and seize control of Charleston. The blacks would then commandeer the ships in the harbor and sail to Haiti, but only after their vengeance was complete and Charleston lay in smoldering ruins. Slaughter was avoided only because two slaves had misgivings and revealed the plot to their masters. Subsequently, hundreds of conspirators were arrested, and over sixty were hanged, including Denmark Vesey. The severity of the threat and its chance revelation raised goose bumps on the reporters. Simpson could only imagine the effect on Charleston’s whites—the folks with the keys to the shackles.

“So the militia was called up right after the Georgia uprising,” Simpson continued.

“Shortly after, yes. The governor activated them for our protection.”

Simpson leaned forward. “What did your mayor have to do to get the governor to cooperate? Your governor never grants anything without a quid pro quo. I also understand that there has been a history of conflict between those two offices.”

“I really wouldn’t know anything about that, sir.”

At that point the interview ended. Then, this morning, a messenger arrived offering the most unlikely of interviews—one so important Simpson had trouble concentrating throughout the day. The rendezvous was to be here, at this isolated location, at 3:00 P.M.

But Simpson’s contact was nearly one hour late—unacceptable even by southern standards. An idea now began to gnaw at the back of his mind. What if he had been drawn here for some other purpose? What if no one was coming? He looked back at the city and stared for a long moment. Had someone dangled the bait of a secret meeting to keep him from a real scoop back there?

When the fire bells began to ring, they did not surprise the reporter. He had already begun to retrace his steps toward town. A plume of smoke was rising at the south end of the city. Simpson guessed that it was just blocks from his lodgings.

A sound behind him caused him to turn his head, and for a moment he froze.

“My God! What is going on here?”

The militiamen were standing stock-still also, staring right at him. Even at a distance, their expressions and body language were unmistakable. Within a few quickened heartbeats, Simpson leapt to the realization that the sole intent of the appointment was to deliver him to this place, and that his promised contact would never arrive.

He turned and began to run, aware that he had probably uncovered the best story of his career, but might never escape to tell it. He did not look back behind him, just at the rising plume of smoke to the south. He ran until the shuffle of his shrinking strides was swallowed by the thud of footfall around him. He was approaching the first block of buildings, the first paved street. Now he only needed to round the corner and melt into the crowd.

Then came the explosion—or maybe it was only in his head—sparks and darkness. When the light came back, he found he didn’t hurt—not really. But he knew beyond doubt that his body was irreparably broken.

As the light began to fade, he willed himself to focus on the face bent over his. Then maybe he smiled a little at the final irony that the Prince of Darkness should prove to be a young man with blond hair.

Want to learn more about First Chapters runner up Geoffrey Edwards and his new book Fire Bell in the Night? Visit firebell.gather.com. To join the group, click here.