Chapter 6
On the other side of the plantation, Phileas and his group headed toward the main house. They made a ferocious-looking group carrying rifles and a shotgun.
Singleton had insisted on them being carried, but Phileas was not used to being hampered by a long rifle. It was a nuisance to carry the heavy thing. Fogg felt like he was carrying a flagpole, marking his movements for anyone to see.
From now on, the rifle will be packed away.
The house was a large two-story white frame home with a columned, deep porch on the upper and lower floors that wrapped around the house on three sides. Large oak trees dripping with moss shaded the house. Overgrown flowering shrubs circled the place and lined its wide pathway toward the door. Black servants, presently coming in and out the main door and down the path, were packing a wagon parked in front. One man in particular, a dwarf, was running back and forth, ordering the packers to be careful.
"There are too few people," Phileas said. "Your nephews said there were more than two weeks ago."
"Could be they are pulling up stakes," Jason said. "This might not be the base you're hunting for."
Phileas frowned toward the house. "There is only one site spoken of. This must be the League's new base. The question is, where are the staff and soldiers?"
Skirting the plantation further, they found a graveyard. It had rows and rows of new graves; none looked over a week old. To the far side of the burial ground were two black workmen pulling themselves out of a freshly dug hole. This one was much larger than the others. The men pulled away a tarp from a wagon, and removed, not a coffin, but a body out of the back and dropped it without concern into the hole. The wagon was piled with bodies. As the three men watched from cover, fifteen more bodies, all in nightshirts, were dropped into the grave. After the bodies, the workmen dropped in what must have been the dead's personal belongings. Those things included what Phileas thought might be League uniforms. He was proven right when one man tried to keep a coat.
His companion said, "You want the sickness coming to you through those things?"
At that warning, the first man reluctantly dropped the coat into the hole and turned away. Their work done, they climbed into the wagon without filling it in the grave.
"More to come?" Jason said aloud.
"Possibly," Jules injected. "This plantation must be suffering with yellow fever, like the cities."
"They are relocating," Phileas said. "Or at least the survivors are. Let's go find the others."
Continuing around, they found Rebecca and the twins in another large barn. This building was far from the main buildings on the far side of the field and looked to have had recent traffic. Inside, there was nothing but empty burlap bags scattered about the dirt floor. Matt called to Rebecca from the loft just as the newcomers entered.
Jason and Phileas followed Rebecca, climbing up the stairway to see what had been found. An upper room had been made in the loft. It looked to have been a laboratory, now abandoned. Only broken glass beakers and other items were left to identify what it had been used for.
Phileas looked over it all. "What were they doing here?".
Rebecca pulled the large seeds out of her pocket and handed them to her cousin. "Whatever it was, it has to do with these."
Phileas looked at the big seeds, not understanding what they were. They looked vaguely familiar, like something he had seen a long time ago.
"They come from the plants in the field," Rebecca said. "The plants look like weeds to me, but Matt and Mark say they are not native."
Jason took the seeds from Rebecca. "No, they aren't," Jason agreed. "Good thing you are wearing gloves. Those are castor beans, what you make castor oil out of. A friend of mine, before the war, tried to make a cash crop of them. He went bust. This area isn't the best for growing them. It's too humid. I hear they grow better on the north plains. They were only introduced here ten or so years ago."
Now Phileas remembered the beans now. They were a common sight in market places of Egypt. They were strung into necklaces in the bazaar for sale, along with medicines and lamp oil made from them.
"What would the League want with castor beans?" Rebecca said.
"They make lamp oil and soap," Jason said. "It also makes a good red dye for cotton. Medicines are made from it, too. These people didn't do much research into this. Those plants out there will die in time, not just from lack of water and too much humidity, but cotton root rot. They planted those things right on top of a cotton field, just like Martin did. Cotton root rot killed everything within four years."
"Aren't castor plants poisonous, Uncle Jason?" Matt said.
"No, the beans are," Jason said. "Don't be handling these things without gloves. Martin lost some slaves to that." He noticed Matt going pale. "You handling these things?"
"No, Mark did." Matt said.
Jason pointed to a barrel of water outside the door. "Go wash your hands, soak them good. Straight oil from the beans is poisonous. Some field workers didn't wear their gloves when harvesting and got sick from it. A couple died trying to make medicine straight from the beans. The poison is fast acting. It doesn't take but an hour or so for symptoms to show."
"Could the League be extracting the poison?" Rebecca said.
"I cannot see them going into the lamp oil business," Phileas said.
"They've already been harvested. There are six wagons being loaded down with seed on the other side of the field," Matt said.
"And perhaps our last chance to tell what the League has been doing here is being packed out of the main house," Jules said. "Any records will be there or packed with the laboratory."
As they discussed the possibilities, the barn grew dark. Phileas gathered everyone back to horses to make camp. They had biscuits and rabbit for dinner. Jason was asked to meet the Aurora to bring Passepartout and the American agents to the campsite. If Passepartout was on time, and he always was, Agents West and Gordon would land close to eleven that evening.
Phileas and Rebecca went back to the house to watch activity, while Jules, Matt and Mark watched over the barn. It appeared the packing had just started. The laboratory had been packed, and the stored seed had been half loaded by the end of the day. The house was now a beehive of activity.
They took cover in deep shadow on the other side of a curved drive at the front of the house. A small man, a dwarf, was seen at the house, giving orders to servants to stop work just as they settled into their cover.
Moments later, a sumptuous banquet was laid out on the porch and a delicate blonde lady in finery fit for a court ball joined him for the meal. Servants served the intimate dinner with great formality. No League officers came to dinner.
"Have they all died of the fever?" Rebecca whispered to Phileas. "It would be ironic if it were so; to come all this way to start anew only to be cut down by an epidemic?"
"Quite," Phileas said. "But there is still that man on the porch. What is his part in this place? He seems in charge. And… who is his lovely lady?"
Rebecca caught the tone of that last remark and looked to her fiancé, who was paying more than necessary attention to the man's companion.
I thought it was Jules that liked blondes and Phileas preferred tall dark-haired women? Trust a man's mind to wander.
A second thought occurred to her. "Are you trying to make me jealous?"
Phileas stared at her at the accusation and smiled. "Never occurred to me."
Rebecca gave him a sidelong glance as he turned his attention back to the porch.
Maybe not, but I think I just made you inordinately pleased with yourself.
Dismissing the notion, she took another closer look at the lady to see what the extra attention was all about. She was certainly beautiful, but she was overdressed for an open-air dinner at home. That could be forgiven, as it fit in with the rest of her appearance. The woman was a delicate gold blonde with big blue eyes and porcelain skin, a fairy princess. "Every little girl's dream of a porcelain doll," Rebecca whispered, looking through her field glasses. "I think I had one that looked like that."
"I don't remember," Phileas said. Most of the dolls he could remember had red hair, like their owner.
"That is because I kept Kathy in my room where you and Erasmus could not desecrate her," Rebecca said. "I swear you two ruined every other doll I brought to Shillingworth Magna."
Phileas only smiled at that old complaint. He had not been party to that more than once or twice. It was his younger brother and friends who had ravaged her collection. Looking back, he wondered if destroying her dolls had unexpected effects. If her dolls been left alone, would she have been so fast to join their games and become such a little tomboy? No help for that now.'
Rebecca wondered if her cousin's attraction was not of the same variety that had caused his momentary involvement with their cousin Jessica? This one had the same small fragile delicacy of appearance that brought him to his knees for Jessica's sake. Of course, Jessica truly had been in a fragile state, recuperating from a head wound.
She frowned. This woman is with the enemy. I suppose it will fall to me to see to it she doesn't cause us trouble.