The Burden of Souls (Hawker's Drift Book 1)

by Andy Monk

  Even more than his disinterest in the child bearing potential of a girl’s hips, the stoutness of her shoulders or the quality of her bread making, it was the thing he could never mention to his Ma. He didn’t want to marry a girl suited to a life on the farm because he didn’t want that life for himself.

  He wanted to roam, and explore, and love, and laugh and live! Which, by and large, were all things his Ma neither cared for nor understood. All that mattered was the farm, their small homestead out on the grass, which the Hallows had been working for generations. She wanted someone to take over from her, someone who could be trusted to look after him, someone who would produce the next generation to be tethered to this small patch of flat grass covered land.

  And it would break her heart to know her only child wanted nothing more than to run away from it.

  The Widow

  Molly stared at the figure on the sheet of paper before her. She cursed. Again. She’d always considered herself quite inventive when it came to cussing, but no matter however colourful the abuse she threw at the figure it remained the same, as stubborn and ugly as a mule; a small, flea-bitten and wholly inadequate mule at that.

  Was that all her life was worth? Really? Every last thing she owned didn’t come to a fraction of the sum her fool of a dead husband owed the Mayor.

  She screwed the list up and threw it across the room. It wasn’t at all satisfying. She needed something that would break, preferably loudly and spectacularly, while she screamed the foulest words she could think of, but the only suitable thing to hand was a bottle of whiskey and she wasn’t quite desperate enough yet to waste hard liquor.

  She looked out of the window; two of her new friends were still loitering across the street. They looked bored. She guessed they’d look even more bored in three months’ time. Was the Mayor really that bothered that she’d skip town? Admittedly, she would if she could, but the only way out of the town was the twice weekly stagecoach, and the stage office, like pretty much everything else in the town, was owned, directly or indirectly, by the Mayor. She’d never be able to buy a fare without it getting back to her new chaperones, and even if she did, they’d ride her down.

  Maybe she could get a horse. No doubt the livery had been briefed not to sell her one without reporting it. She could just steal one and ride off into the night. Of course, if they caught her she’d be hung as a horse thief, strung up high in the town square for her neighbours to gawp at. Unlike poor Tom, she’d get a bumper crowd to see her off. A good hanging was as much about public entertainment as law and order in Hawker’s Drift.

  How far could she walk? They were a long way from anywhere here. Save for a ring of farms and ranches, there was nothing but grass for an awful lot of miles. They’d just catch her and bring her back. And when her three months were up? She didn’t know what the Mayor had in mind for her, but she suspected it was something that she wouldn’t like very much.

  Her only hope was to find the provisions Tom had bought, but she’d run out of places to look. For a fool he’d turned out to have a remarkable talent for hiding stuff.

  If there was anything to hide of course.

  She poured herself another slug of whiskey. It had crossed her mind that all the bills might be false, that, for reasons unknown, the Mayor just wanted her to stay in town. That was just nonsense of course, why would the Mayor want to keep her in town? It made no sense, if they thought she knew something why didn’t they just kill her, like they probably had Tom? If they thought she knew nothing, then why not let her just leave?

  Her eyes moved over the stack of bills. If they weren’t real, then most of the town was in on the game. Mr Murphy in the livery had confirmed he’d sold Tom a horse and two mules and no, he didn’t know what he’d done with them, Mrs Pickering had sold him dried foodstuff, Mr Smith had sold him a rifle and ammunition, Mr Jacobson had sold him a tent and a shovel, Mr Calhoun had sold him dynamite (which she’d thought was a bit odd for a baker).

  They’d all confirmed he’d come into their shops, and all had no idea what he’d done with the goods he’d bought. Apparently Tom had just muttered something about having “plans” when he’d been asked.

  That, at least, sounded like Tom; shifty and uncommunicative.

  So, Molly accepted her husband had been breezing around town buying provisions, all on the Mayor’s credit. She just didn’t know what he’d done with them or why he’d bought them.

  She didn’t know what else she could do to find the stuff, the only conclusion she could come to was that he’d stashed them away outside of Hawker’s Drift, the town whose limits she was now precluded from leaving, but she figured there was one person in town that might have an idea as to why Tom had bought so much prospecting equipment.

  *

  “I’ve come to see the Mayor,” Molly announced the moment the door swung open.

  A tall wiry twist of a man with a wide nose and a narrow mouth peered down at her. She felt beads of sweat forming on her neck, partly due to nerves and partly from the afternoon sun that was beating fiercely down on the front door of the Mayor’s residence; however, the heat didn’t seem to concern the man who’d opened the door; he wore a long black coat, a woollen vest and sharply starched collars.

  She didn’t recognise him; it seemed that even in a small town there were strangers.

  Molly half expected to be shooed away, however, the man stepped back and cracked what might have been either a thin smile or a thinner grimace and ushered her inside.

  “The Mayor’s expecting you,” he said as Molly crossed the threshold into the bright hallway.

  “He is?”

  “The Mayor is very sensitive to the needs of his constituents,” the man closed the door, which was heavy and studded with iron, “almost precognitive, in fact.”

  “Shame he didn’t know my husband was gonna fall off his horse… that would have been useful.” Molly met the man’s gaze and held it. She was pretty sure the Mayor knew very well Tom was going to fall off his horse and it had nothing to do with precognition, but either the man knew nothing about that or he didn’t find redheads with a big mouth particularly intimidating as his long face remained quite impassive.

  Of course she might just be plain wrong and the Mayor was entirely innocent, but being wrong was something that Molly usually considered the most unlikeliest scenario in any given situation.

  “Please, come this way Mrs McCrea…” he said, after a further moment of not being intimidated.

  “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced?”

  He rested one hand lightly on her elbow and indicated which way she should walk with the flattened palm of the other, “No, we haven’t.”

  “Then how do you know my name?”

  The man smiled his tight-lipped little smile again; it looked like the smile of a man to whom such things didn’t come naturally, “Your reputation precedes you…”

  Reputation?

  Despite her better judgement she let that little remark pass and moved into the hallway as he indicated, there was an impressive looking staircase rising from the smoothly polished mahogany floorboards.

  “And your name is?”

  “You may call me Symmons.”

  “And you’re the Mayor’s flunky?”

  “That would be one word, this way please Mrs McCrea…” he indicated the stairs.

  Upstairs? The Mayor wasn’t waiting for her in his bedroom, was he? She had heard stories after all.

  “Does everybody call you Symmons?” Molly asked, trying not to look too reluctant as she climbed the stairs, which were wide enough for them to walk comfortably side by side.

  “Yes.”

  “Even your mother?”

  “No,” Symmons conceded, “she just called me a dumb halfwit. Mostly.”

  Molly looked over at Symmons to see if he was joking, but his face was quite impassive, without even the flicker of what passed for one of his smiles crossing his face.

  “Halfwit?”

&
nbsp; Symmons twitched a bony shoulder, “We were never close.”

  On the first floor landing Symmons indicated the nearest door, which he rapped a knuckle lightly upon and opened without waiting for a response. Standing aside, he nodded towards the room, “Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.”

  Sweat was trickling down the back of Molly’s neck now and she wished she’d put her hair up. Actually she wished she’d stayed at home and poured more whiskey down her throat. She’d convinced herself that if the Mayor actually wanted her dead he would have done so by now, and wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of giving her three months to settle her husband’s debts.

  That’s what she’d thought when she’d been sitting in her own home, now…

  The room was in shadow, light poured into the stairwell from a skylight and an ornate stained glass window at the end of the landing, but the light seemed even more reluctant to cross the room’s threshold than she was.

  “Best not to keep the Mayor waiting,” Symmons breathed, his lips suddenly next to her ear, “he’s a very busy man.” He placed his hand upon the small of her back and, for a moment, she was sure he was going to shove her into the dimly lit room and slam the door shut, cutting her off from the light of the world.

  “Well, if it isn’t convenient-”

  “Not at all Mrs McCrea, please do come in…” a deep sonorous voice drifted out of the room and then Symmons did push her, though so gently it could scarcely be described as such. Not in a court of law anyway.

  Faced with the choice of barging Symmons aside and rushing down the stairs like a little girl afraid of the dark or doing what she’d come here to do, Molly flicked a few strands of hair back, gave Symmons a smile tight-lipped enough for him to have patented and strode into the room effecting the air of a woman who knew what she was doing.

  She was relieved that Symmons left the door open behind her and that it was not, after all, the Mayor’s bedroom, but his office. Or at least she assumed it was his office, wooden shutters were closed over the windows and only soft smudged light snuck around the edges. Floor to ceiling book shelves covered every wall, save for the shuttered windows and the door. A massive scroll top desk sat before the windows and the Mayor sat behind it. The desk was quite bare, save for the Mayor’s booted feet which were hooked up on top of it while he reclined in an upholstered chair almost large enough to consume him. It almost seemed the man had been swallowed by some monstrous disembodied maw and only his legs remained to be gobbled up.

  “Mrs McCrea, what a pleasure, I’ve been expecting you…” the Mayor made no move to stand, or even remove his feet from the desk. Molly supposed it was his desk after all. His town too for that matter. The room smelt of sweet fragrant cigar smoke, it was so strong and pungent Molly expected blue-grey clouds to be billowing about her, but the Mayor wasn’t smoking and there was no ashtray that she could see.

  “You have?” Molly bit back on a cough as she glanced around, but as there were no other chairs in the room she was forced to stand in front of the desk, her hands clutched before her, feeling like a schoolgirl sent to the headmaster’s office to explain her poor behaviour.

  “In my experience when someone owes someone else a large amount of money, they usually either run away or go to see their creditor. You haven’t run away.”

  “Well, given the men you have stalking me I couldn’t run away, even if I wanted to.”

  The Mayor laughed, “Which you do of course.”

  “I have family back east; I have a life to rebuild after my husband’s… accident.”

  “There’s nothing for you back east… there’s nothing much for anybody, in fact. You should stay here. It’s where the future is.”

  “I don’t seem to have much choice. Which is why I am here.”

  “I’m always happy to listen to my citizen’s woes.”

  “And help them?”

  “Of course,” the Mayor smiled, his teeth brilliant white even in the gloom.

  Despite the fact Tom had been working for the Mayor, she’d only met him a few times; that had been more than enough for her to decide she didn’t like the man much. He was too neat for her liking, too fastidious, his suits always sharply pressed, his hair precisely greased back, his beard trim and carefully shaped. Then there was his eye. It never stopped moving; it rolled just around the socket, never settling on anything. She didn’t know how he’d lost the left one, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if it hadn’t just popped out of the socket like a ball on an over spun roulette wheel. His eye patch was incongruous too, an old battered piece of leather fixed around his head with what looked like frayed boot laces.

  Why go to the trouble of wearing immaculate, and no doubt expensive, suits, fine silk shirts and shiny boots if you were just going to tie a piece of leather over your eye that looked like it had been hacked roughly and hastily from a blacksmith’s second best apron?

  “I want to know why Tom bought prospecting provisions?”

  “Really?” The Mayor seemed amused, “now that does surprise me. I wouldn’t have put money on that being your first question.”

  “What did you expect me to ask?”

  “Oh, something along the lines of I’m just a poor helpless widow, this debt is nothing to do with little ol’ me, can’t you see your way to letting me off the money. Pleeeease…” he slipped his boots off of the desk and partially extracted himself from his cavernous chair to rest his arms upon the desk, “maybe you’d even flutter your eyelashes at me and try to look all… oh, I don’t know… vulnerable and needy?”

  Molly shrugged, “That was going to be my second question.”

  The Mayor chuckled, “I like you Molly, I honestly do…”

  “I want to know why Tom bought prospecting provisions?” Molly repeated, her words slow and careful this time. She didn’t like the way the conversation was turning. Had he expected her to flirt with him, did he want her to? She wasn’t that desperate yet. In fact she’d throw her best whiskey bottle against the wall long before she got that desperate.

  “Why else would a man want prospecting equipment? He thought there was gold in them there hills.”

  “There are no hills here... other than the one this town sits on anyway.”

  “You know Molly,” he said, puckering up his lips and wagging his index finger in her direction, “if I’m honest, I always thought that was the flaw in Tom’s plan.”

  “Yet you still gave him money?”

  “I liked his zeal. I liked his get up an go. I encourage that in my citizen’s. It’s what makes Hawker’s Drift what it is.”

  A strange messed up little town in the middle of nowhere?

  The Mayor’s eye stopped moving, fixing on her as if she had said or done something worthy of capturing his attention. Or thought something. She smiled at the Mayor as sweetly as she could and told herself to stop being silly. He was an unsettling man, but he couldn’t read her mind.

  “You’ve never been much taken with our little town have you Molly? Stuck away out here in the middle of nowhere…” the Mayor eased himself back into the maw of his yawning chair.

  Molly’s smile faltered, and she suddenly felt much less silly about believing the Mayor could hear her thoughts.

  “More a case of the town not being taken with me.”

  “What could possibly make you think that? You are quite cherished.”

  “So cherished nobody came to my husband’s funeral?” Molly snapped, feeling awkward, foolish and patronised all at the same time. None of which were good for her temper.

  “Well, the weather was quite awful – and you know how dangerous the storms can be out here. I believe Preacher Stone did recommend postponing, did he not?”

  “I wanted to get away; I saw not point hanging around for some sunshine.”

  “Well, there you go then.”

  Molly blinked, “People didn’t come because it was raining?”

  “People didn’t come,” the Mayor corrected carefully, “because
they felt insulted.”

  “Insulted! How?”

  “Because you made it clear you were running out on us. We’re a real close knit little family out here Molly. We have to be. People don’t like being snubbed.”

  “Snubbed! They snubbed me and Tom!”

  “Ssssh,” the Mayor insisted, blowing his cheeks out and patting down the air in front of him with little flicking movements of his hands. Molly noticed his fingernails were spotlessly clean and buffed to neat, precise little crescents.

  “Now there’s no need to get all uppity, and there’s no need to worry either. Now you’re going to be staying with us, I’m sure everybody will be prepared to overlook your previous discourtesy.”

  Molly was about to protest again, but the Mayor just talked her down, his eye roving over her as he spoke, “Though it would help if you dressed appropriately – you are a widow after all.”

  “Black doesn’t suit me.”

  “My dear, black suits simply everyone…”

  “I can see that,” Molly said, staring pointedly at the Mayor’s cream suit, upon which she couldn’t see even the tiniest fleck of dirt.

  “Well, if that will be all. I do have quite a lot of work to do,” he swept a languid hand over his empty desk.

  “So, you don’t know why Tom wanted those provisions?”

  “I think I’ve answered that already.”

  “And I don’t suppose you know where they are?”

  “No. I don’t…” the Mayor was starting to sound bored, and his eye had returned to wandering around the room as if he were desperately looking for something more entertaining.

  “Am I allowed to leave town to look for them.”

  “You seem so preoccupied with getting out of Hawker’s Drift Molly. It really is quite disappointing.”

  “I don’t have the money Tom borrowed off you and I don’t know what he did with the provisions!”

  “That is unfortunate.”

  “What will happen to me if I can’t pay you back?”

  His neat little beard split to reveal his white teeth, “Oh, there’s more than one way to pay me back Molly. I take all manner of currencies…”