Chapter 57: Jubalee

"Who in the ever-loving world is that?" I asked Amanda, nodding toward a vision of beauty who was shopping at a green-grocer just across the way from us.

"Nobody y'needs t'know," she said, rubbing an apple on her more-than-ample chest.

"Come on," I said. "She is a true beauty that one. You must know her."

"Not for the likes of you, m'boy. She only associates with Redcoat officers of some station; no subalterns for that jumped-up doxey."

"Roundheeled is she?" I asked.

Amanda nodded. "Never seen her w'the same bloke twict."

"What's she called?"

"Audrey, Aubrey," my friend said. "Some such name."

"That her Christian name?"

"No, 'tis but Lee I'm told, like the general. Come along. Don't dawdle."

My beer soaked memory churned up a young girl called Jubilee whose father, I was almost sure, was a well-thought-of Continental officer, a master of field artillery for Washington. And here she was entertaining the enemy. Something did not fit.

"Go along," I said to Amanda. "I'll see you tonight, perhaps."

"You'll jus' get in trouble," the woman said, swinging her hips as she departed, obviously angry.

Jubilee Aubrey and her sister Glory and her brave mother, whose name I could not recall, had been held by a British regiment and abused repeatedly in their own home. I had helped get them back to their husband and father some time before.

I watched the young woman shop, testing vegetables and being carefully selective in what she bought. She was trailed by a small, black woman with a wicker basket who paid for what was chosen.

Jubilee was easy to look at and dressed to the nines, turned out as well as any woman in the city I reckoned, and turning all heads. Her dark hair was curled and her small, tri-corned hat neatly veiled. Her boots shone, and her body was enough to empty a monastery. My root trembled as I stood in the shade and admired her, watched her walk through the market with military bearing and innate grace. I tried and failed to catch her eye and then recognized that a British officer was waiting for her, watching her hawk-like from a doorway. I hoped he had not noted my interest and melted into the crowd.

I followed the three of them to a fine house in a good neighborhood and saw them disappear behind a heavy door. I found a place where I could sit with my back to a tree and watch the front door without being easily seen. By sunset no one had appeared. I stayed and watched until all the windows were dark, my back was sore and my throat dry.

I crawled into my hole, woke myself at dawn and went back to my post. About ten of the clock the girl and her maid came tripping down the steps. I stood, brushed my clothes a bit and intercepted them at the first corner, a smile on my unshaven face.

"Miss Aubrey, I believe," I said, knuckling my forehead and making a small bow.

Her eyebrows knotted and she frowned. "Sir?" she said. Then she took a deep breath, turned to the black girl and said, "May, go back to the house. We'll shop later."

I offered her my arm and she ignored it, thin-lipped.

"How did you find me?" she demanded, her color rising.

"You can't hide beauty," I said.

"Blather, such blather," she said, lifting her chin and looking me up and down as one might examine a farm animal at a fair.

"I need to talk to you," I said.

"Not in public," she replied. "Let's go back to the house."

Again I tried to take her arm, but she pulled away.

"You go the other way; come in the back." She stalked off.

She met me at the back door, hat in hand, put her arms about my neck and stretched up to kiss me, long and hard.

"My," I said, after I let her down off her toes. "That was a fine greeting." She had an odd taste, licorice my brain said, and her young body was firm and warm.

We sat in the back room, and the small black servant brought us some cider and sweet cakes. She curtseyed awkwardly and left.

"What are you doing here?" we both said, almost together. I laughed, but she looked stern and serious.

"You first," she said.

"I'm still in the army, Miss, a scout; some would say a spy. I understand you have some friends among the enemy."

She took a quick breath. "Not friends," she said quietly.

"The man you were with yesterday, is he... ?"

She raised her hand and stopped me with a passing smile. "He's dead," she said, just as quietly. "I killed him."

"You what?" I nearly yelled, shocked, astonished. I tasted bile.

"I killed him" she said quite calmly. "Drowned him in fact. Held his head in a tub of water until he expired, stopped making bubbles."

"Lord," I said, feeling my heart skip a few beats. "I was hoping we, that you, that we might get some useful information from him."

"He was ignorant, a stupid fool," she said firmly. "Not worth bothering about."

"So you killed him?"

She nodded and gave me a small, shy smile.

"Just like that?"

"It's easy," she said brightly. "Really."

"He was a good sized man. I saw him at the market."

"I drugged him, laudanum, a heavy dose."

She sat primly, hands clasped in her lap, looking as if we were discussing rose gardens and flower cultivation.

"What did you do with his body?" I asked, puzzled.

"We have a pit in the cellar, lime filled." She nodded. "May helps me."

"May?"

"The black girl, you met her."

"That little thing?"

"She's quite strong. She was a slave."

"It is hard to believe," I said.

"It really isn't. I bring them here expecting sex, you know, and ... well, sometimes I have to do that first, roger them. Then I kill them."

"Them? He wasn't the first?"

"No, no. Oh no. He was, hm, number fourteen."

"You've killed fourteen men, British officers? Drowned them all?"

She smiled broadly. "No, different ways. I'll stop when I've done a score."

"Why?"

"For my sister, for my mother and me, too. Revenge."

"Your little sister, Glory isn't it?"

"She killed herself; threw herself in the river."

I just sat and shook my head. "Poor girl," I said.

"She never got over it, what they did to her, what they made her do."

"How is your mother?" I asked while my mind tried to make order of the situation.

"Heart broken, but she'll mend. How are you? You certainly look well." She licked her lips and smiled. I melted as her dark eyes held mine.

"City life," I said. "This is good duty."

"But dangerous," she said.

"I suppose, but I take the men I want back to the camp to be questioned. If they are killed, I don't do it."

"But you've killed people. I know you have."

I nodded.

"How many?"

"I don't know," I said.

"More than fourteen?"

"Probably," I said, knowing it was a lot more than fourteen.

"Will you make love to me?" the girl asked, making it sound as if she wanted me to whitewash her outhouse or some such menial chore.

"Of course," I said. "I've thought of little else since I saw you yesterday."

She smiled. "Thank you. I've never done it with someone I wanted, not ever. I've wondered what it's like, dreamed about it. Foolishness I know."

We both stood at the same time, and I bent and kissed her gently. She took my hand and led me up the stairs and to her room. "I never use this place when I do it," she said, turning for me to undo her buttons in a small, carefully-decorated room with a tall window.

"Doesn't it frighten you?" I asked, my fingers fumbling as I quickly hardened.

"What? Killing these scum?" She shook loose her hair and set her combs aside after she shrugged out of her tight-fitting bodice. I was painfully rigid in anticipation, stretching my breeches.

I sat on the side of her bed and quickly got out of my boots and britches while she stepped out of her skirt, sat on a small chair to doff her shoes and stockings and then stood and pulled her stay laces open. My prong leapt up like a piece of spring steel, at least forty-five degrees above the level and much more than my hand could hold, the skin painfully stretched.

I sat still and watched, amused as well as stimulated, my overheated mast hiding up under my shirttail, lying in wait, heating as if in a smith's furnace. "Why do you wear those silly things?" I asked as she stood between my widespread feet with her back to me, and I held her rounded hips.

"It is the fashion," she said tossing them aside, pulling her shift over her head and turning to face me with the lacy garment in her hand. Her lean body glowed with good health. She was still very young, soft with a layer of fat beneath her smooth skin, and her muff was a knot of tiny curls below a rounded belly, her nipples cherries. "Please," she said, stepping closer, "make love to me."

I did and it was wonderful, more than I had hoped for, and I had hoped for much. When we lay together resting in the sunlit room, not yet ready for more, she said, "The first one was the hardest. Do you remember your first?"

"Um," I said, "I shot down a man with gold braid on his sleeves from about a hundred yards, a bit more perhaps, just a lieutenant. He fell like a tree." I showed her with my hand. "Thump, like that." I patted her belly.

"What did you feel?"

"Satisfied, proud, a little shaken that it was so easy. I reloaded my rifle and shot one of the men who came to help the first one, an ensign. Then I ran for it."

"Where was this?"

"Boston. I was with some other Marylanders. The men were marines I think, the men I shot."

My soft prod stirred in her steady, stroking hand.

"My first was a old colonel who thought he had seduced me. I turned from loosening my laces and stabbed him right in the middle of his skinny chest with a very thin stiletto. He looked surprised. I pulled the blade out and did it again with a very stiff wrist, lunging at him. I can remember how it felt, the shock on my forearm, the slack look of his face. It went right through him, out his back."

She kissed me, and I put her on her back, spread her legs and entered her again, slowly and deeply, spreading her open.

"There was almost no blood," she said as she arched up her hips, wrapped her legs about me and closed her eyes.

Some time later we rose to dine, and I tried to convince her that she had already done more than her share.

"No," she said adamantly, "I swore I would kill twenty and twenty it shall be."

"Why that number," I asked, finishing up my stew. Sometimes I ask question that I wish I had not asked; this was one of those times.

"Back home," she sniffed and looked away, "back home, when they came and occupied our house, an officer took me up to my bedroom, a captain, the room Glory and I shared as children, a filthy captain, and he raped me after he tore off my clothes, took my maidenhead and, and, and then I counted and nineteen more of them did me before they stopped for a while, all different ranks, one right after the other, grunting like pigs. It was dark then, and I slept, feeling abandoned, very frightened, not knowing what had happened to my mother and my sister, unable to move. Twenty men on a maiden, twenty of them."

I sat back in my chair and looked at the lovely girl and wondered at her strength and bravery.

"You'll have to leave," she said with a smile. "I have an admirer coming to visit this afternoon."

"Number fifteen?" I asked.

"Perhaps," she said. "I must get ready."

"I'll be back tonight," I told her after taking a brief kiss, my hand on her arched back. "Give me a signal."

"Yes," she said, "please."

I went back to my watching place and made myself comfortable. I saw her would-be paramour arrive in full kit, a large man in pewter-colored britches and high boots with an out-sized wig and gold-lace on his large hat, a lieutenant-colonel. I suspect that he weighed more than I did at the time, and I wondered how two small women could managed his bulk.

The answer was, they could not.

About ten o'clock, Jubilee came to the front door with a small lanthorn in her hand, stood briefly and then departed, leaving the door ajar. I hurried across, found her waiting at the foot of the stairs and tried to embrace her. She pushed me off and made a fierce face.

"Not now," she said, "we need some help."

I jogged up the steps, and she followed, lifting high her long shift. "At the end of the hall," she said.

There lying on his face with his fancy britches at his knees lay the big officer, his bare buttocks showing beneath his raised shirttail and his forearms turned in toward his chest. His wig had fallen off and his shaved head glistened in the candlelight. A crude garrote had been twisted about his throat with a broken broomstick, and fingers of both hands were trapped under it at the sides. The cord was buried in his bruised flesh and the shaft braced in his collar.

I put my ear to his back. "He is still alive," I told the girl.

"He's got a neck like a treetrunk," May said from the shadows. "I done the bes' I could."

I grabbed the rod with both hands and gave it a few more turns, hearing things crunch beneath me and watching the thin rope disappear. I listened again. "Now he's done for," I told the women.

"Les' git him down t'd'cellar," May said, grabbing one of his booted feet.

"Is there an outside door to your basement?" I asked.

The girl nodded, her hand to her mouth. "I can't count him," she said quietly, absentmindedly.

I hauled the body to the window with my hands in its arms pits and pushed it out into the night head first, understanding what 'dead weight' meant. We heard it crash through some bushes before it hit the ground. Jubilee sat in a small chair, looking morose.

"May and I will take care of him," I said.

"Haul him out in the woods somewhere," the girl said. "I don't want him in my pit."

I nodded and with some difficulty, did what she asked. I removed the thin, silken cord with which he had been choked and dumped his carcass in a muddy area about a half-mile away, stomping his fat corpse into the muck. Then I tramped back to the house, went in the back door and tip-toed up to the girl's bedroom.

She was sitting up in bed, waiting, her nightdress falling from her slim shoulders, the untied ribbon ends at her small breasts and her back to the headboard and a few pillows. I perched on the side of the bed and quickly undressed.