The Professor's Assassin

by Matthew Pearl

  “Stop it!” Kincaid, the freckled one, shouted, inserting himself between Rogers and his target. “Washington wasn’t out with Semmes that night, it was me!”

  “You?” Rogers asked, taking down his walking stick.

  Kincaid continued with his story. “I told Semmes that night he best return to his room. He was bound to be caught by a professor—things were growing out of hand. Semmes put on his mask and said, ‘If anyone dare to try and stop me, I’ll shoot him.’ That’s when we heard Davis come out of his home. Semmes said he just wanted to scare Davis and told me to go with him. In my heart, I thought things had gone far enough that day, but I agreed.”

  “You saw the shooting happen?” Sheriff Helms asked.

  “No. When Davis came out, I saw him reach for Semmes’s mask, and I ran off. I didn’t see anything. I heard the gunshot and was terrified.”

  “There was firing all day,” Rogers said. “Why would you think this one was different if you didn’t see Davis go down?”

  “I’ve done enough shooting to know the difference between the sound of a blank cartridge and a pistol armed with a ball in it,” Kincaid replied. “I knew Semmes must have loaded something else in his pistol.”

  “Treasonous, every last one of you!” Dabney said, stepping forward boldly. “You knew it was Semmes and sat by and did nothing!”

  Kincaid threw a hard punch at Dabney, who ducked and escaped the impact. Rogers lunged to intervene, but Sheriff Helms held him back, perhaps for the entertainment of a row or out of an old southern philosophy of encouraging men to solve their disagreements through their fists. Dabney swung back, but his aim was poor, and now Kincaid swooped low and pounded him repeatedly in the pit of his stomach. Kincaid’s cohorts closed in to cheer on the thumping of their self-righteous classmate.

  “That’s enough!” Rogers shouted, breaking free from the sheriff’s restraint. “I shall see to it that the next man who throws a punch will never step foot in another classroom in this or any other college in the Commonwealth.”

  Kincaid, his face bright red, pointed at Dabney, who remained doubled over in pain. “Well, he oughtn’t talk like that! We didn’t know Professor Davis was in such a bad way.”

  “What do you mean?” Rogers asked. “Everyone at the university knew.”

  Kincaid continued, “Semmes told us that his bullet barely scraped by Professor Davis, that the wound was entirely superficial and that the story of his being gravely wounded was a lie spread around university by the faculty to turn sentiment against us. We protected him because of it. But as soon as the news came that Professor Davis died, Semmes disappeared.”

  “Why are you in his room now?” asked Sheriff Helms.

  “We’re looking for some sign of where he went,” said the large student, Washington, still rubbing his neck where Rogers had pinned him. “The Volunteers shield him no more!”

  “You have enough evidence now, Sheriff Helms?” Rogers asked.

  Helms nodded gravely. “Evidence, but not enough men to search for Semmes if he’s taken flight. Professor Rogers, I’d like to deputize you.”

  “Me?”

  “I saw how you handled that strapping buck over there,” he said of Washington. “You’ve been performing your own investigation, I know that. Will you refuse?”

  “No, I will do it.”

  “Good. You will need to arm yourself.”

  “Very well. But you should be aware it is the boy Jack’s safe return that concerns me now more than Semmes’s capture, and if I must choose between the two, you know how I will choose.”

  “He could be anywhere by now,” Kincaid pointed out. “Deputize the University Volunteers. We are all good riders, and we are already armed.”

  “You?” Dabney, still holding his midsection, asked. “Do you not think you men have done enough to pry open Pandora’s box around here, Kincaid?”

  “Say what you will, Dabney. We have our cause. But Semmes has besmirched all of our good names and families through association,” Kincaid said. “He lied to us, manipulated us, has stolen a healthy and valuable slave from a grieving family, and we shall see him pay for it.”

  “Professor Rogers, what say you?” Helms asked.

  Rogers considered it, scrutinizing the former rioters, who tried to straighten postures and vests. Grudgingly, Rogers nodded.

  “Professor!” Dabney objected.

  “I shall agree to it on one condition,” Rogers continued. “Dabney is deputized, too, and assists me.”

  “That weakling!” Kincaid cried, balking. “You saw how easy I licked him.”

  “Those are my conditions for assisting,” Rogers said, steadfast.

  “We need all the help we can find,” Helms agreed. “I will have the magistrate draw up the papers granting you and these students temporary powers to make the arrest. In the meantime, you can start right now. This man is to be arrested at once.” The sheriff turned and faced Kincaid.

  Kincaid frowned. “What do you mean? I’ve just told you what happened! I’ve given Semmes up!”

  “I believe what you say,” said Helms. “But you were present, and armed, when the professor was shot. You will have to be brought to the magistrates. There is no choice in the matter.”

  Kincaid swallowed hard, then nodded at his friends. Washington took him by the arm and led him over to Helms.

  Rogers turned to Semmes’s former allies after Helms and Kincaid exited the building. “Men, we have disagreed on a number of principles these past weeks, and will disagree still. But we must now trust each other for the sake of what is right and humane, and to bring back justice where it has taken flight. Washington, take three of your men and search every spot in the university for any sign of him. Ask any others who were known to be his friends, as well.”

  “Sir,” Washington agreed, and chose three companions.

  “The rest of you are to search in town,” Rogers continued. “Interview any women he fancied who might give him shelter. But first you are to show to Dabney and me everything you found in his room so far—nothing is too small to escape my interest.”

  Chapter 9

  The shooter’s former friends had been aggressive but hardly thorough in their search. They had pulled out his dresser drawers, kicked over his boxes, and flipped his bedstead to see what was underneath. Rogers and Dabney cataloged the usual fixtures of a university student’s life—a few gray-colored suits suitable for the classroom, a few flashier ones and an array of hats for town, cigar stubs, favorite books, notebooks. The walls were splattered with tobacco juice. There were scattered drawings, which were rather impressive, of the Rotunda and the other university buildings, each captured with all their particular, sometimes clashing, architectural details. At this point, the most revealing discovery was what was not there—no trace of any money or Dabney’s pistol or bullets.

  “Let us be on our way, Professor!” Dabney pleaded.

  “Patience, Dabney,” Rogers said. He was looking through Semmes’s collection of books for annotations.

  The student was anything but patient. “We should be out there hunting for him. I suppose you do not think I could be of assistance if we were to find him.”

  “Nothing of the kind, Dabney.”

  “But you think me weak and foolish?”

  “A fool, yes, for challenging those roughs. But I think you rather brave for it, too, in spite of myself.”

  Dabney smiled broadly. “Then let us ride and find the scoundrel behind all this!”

  “If Semmes is anywhere expected, his friends will be the ones to find him first. But he could be far away by now, and we need to find some clue to direct us or we will be looking blindly.”

  “Better to look blindly than not at all. This room is the one place where we know he isn’t! Do you really put your trust in those blockheads?”

  “Not really. But they have their own motivations for trying to find Semmes. For this purpose, that is sufficient. Jack Cottrell’s life depends upon it.”
>
  Within the hour, Washington returned to report that two horses had been stolen from the university stables. The sheriff, meanwhile, had sent for his two nearest men to join the search. When Washington had finished sharing his intelligence and exited, Rogers exhaled loudly and fell backward into a chair.

  “What’s the matter, Professor?” Dabney asked with concern.

  “If he took two horses, it means Jack may still be alive,” Rogers said, smiling with relief. “Our only hope is that his desperation to escape, and his need for Jack as a hostage, overtakes his desire to silence the boy.”

  “It’s not your fault, sir,” Dabney said quietly.

  “What?”

  “That the Negro was taken.”

  “Why do you think I believe it so?” Rogers demanded, irked. But when the student did not reply, Rogers continued, “It was my ruse to bring him to the meeting, then immediately exit with him, as a means to suggest he could identify the perpetrator. Whose fault could it be but mine, Dabney?”

  Dabney shook his head. “Your scheme was a fair one. We hadn’t enough evidence, and wouldn’t have if not for Professor Davis’s dying.”

  “What if Jack comes to harm?” Rogers asked, looking away.

  “A noble sacrifice!” Dabney exclaimed. “Even for a boy slave.”

  Rogers studied him quizzically, but Dabney was searching the room again.

  “In all events, it was a bullet made with my own hands that killed Davis. I cannot help thinking of it, however loath I am to do so. I confess I’m still mystified, Professor. Why in the land would he—I mean Semmes—leave any clues here about where he would go?”

  “Not intentionally,” said Rogers. “Think of it another way. Let us say one morning you leave your room to attend Latin recitation at Professor Harrison’s pavilion. Let us imagine, the evening after, you leave your room again, this time to go to the gymnasium. Or to pray in the worship room. There would be clues each time about where you went—what you took with you, what you left behind, what hat you selected, the condition of the hearth, and so on. The more learned about the contents of your room, the better informed the speculation about where you had gone.”

  Dabney nodded but still seemed skeptical and restless. “After those blockheads have already torn this room apart, we can hardly see how it was before.”

  “Then perhaps we need to restore order, before we can make any discoveries.”

  They righted the bedstead and picked up the spilled boxes. After they completed their restoration without any clear result, Dabney dropped backward onto the bed, huffing with frustration.

  Rogers raised a disapproving eyebrow but did not admonish him. The truth was, he felt his own fatigue growing and his ideas dwindling.

  “Say, the scoundrel isn’t a bad draftsman, is he? Makes you wonder.”

  “Oh?” Rogers asked.

  “Well, why would it be that God would give a fine talent to a man capable of bloodthirsty murder?”

  “Sometimes the intensity of a mind without a proper outlet can pervert itself,” Rogers said. Then he froze. He had found Semmes’s sketches but had not shared them with Dabney. He turned and looked at the student stretched out on the bed, then followed his gaze to the low ceiling, which was covered in intricate etchings like the fresco of some Italian cathedral.

  “Go to the stables, if you will, Dabney,” Rogers said, “secure half a dozen horses and enough supplies for a week. He is at least a day’s travel ahead of us.”

  “Sir?” the sophomore asked, confused.

  “I believe I know where Semmes is.”

  Chapter 10

  Sheriff Helms didn’t encourage them. He didn’t see the revelation in the art on Semmes’s ceiling that Rogers recognized.

  Semmes had sketched various landscapes on the ceiling of his dormitory room. One appeared to be his home in Georgia. Another was a more refined version of the university Rotunda than the smaller ones Rogers had found, which must have been practice studies. The other location was a cascade in the wilderness Rogers recognized immediately.

  “This is near Turk’s Gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” Rogers had announced to the sheriff, whom Dabney had encountered at the stables and brought back with him. Rogers pointed to the drawing on the ceiling. “I have been studying the limestone formations there for the last four years. The details are, for the most part, accurate.”

  “I fail to see the significance of—”

  “Semmes has done these drawings of places he feels safe, at ease,” Rogers explained, interrupting. “I did not find any studies of the cascade as I did of the Rotunda.”

  “So?”

  “That could mean that he has been there enough to know the place fully by memory.”

  “Professor, that lad could be anywhere!” insisted Helms.

  “The University Volunteers would have found him by now if he was still in our vicinity,” Rogers said, waiting and not hearing an objection. “They know his haunts. Turk’s Gap is remote enough for him to hide until the excitement dies down and near enough for him to reach in a matter of days. And this sketch proves he knows its dangerous terrain well—well enough, indeed, to feel confident in it as a sanctuary. There is this poem, too, which he has dog-eared and marked. It is called ‘A Night Scene Among the Mountains.’ ” Rogers read:

  “In the deep and solemn hour of the night

  The soul luxuriates in a scene like this

  From cliff to cliff she wings her daring flight

  O’er foaming cataract or dark abyss.”

  “I won’t send those fellows off into the wilds on a suspicion and some doggerel,” Sheriff Hale concluded, snatching away the book and tossing it aside. “You speak of dreams, not evidence.”

  “Then I will go on my own,” Rogers said.

  “You said a moment ago it is dangerous,” pointed out the sheriff.

  “I know it better than Semmes. I can do it alone.”

  “You won’t be alone, professor,” said Dabney.

  “Thank you, Dabney,” Rogers said.

  The sheriff laughed heartily. “May I speak to you outside, Professor?”

  When the officer exited, Dabney said, “He laughs at our ideas!”

  Rogers sighed. “Like a busy hen, Mr. Helms cackles when he feels the inward motion toward wit, but he does not always produce the egg. Stay here, Mr. Dabney.”

  Rogers followed the sheriff to the doorstep of the one-story dormitory building.

  The sheriff was in a state of consternation. “Maybe you’re right that Semmes is in those mountains, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it, nor anyone else’s,” he said. “I don’t reckon you’ve had to come across many desperate men in your line, Professor, but I have. If Semmes is in the woods, he’s likely dumped that Negro boy’s dead body already and is hidden away, ready to shoot anyone who comes near. Do you really think that chickenhearted young fellow inside there is capable of surviving that? Tell me, do you?”

  Rogers peered back into the dormitory at Dabney, who was studying the poem and scratching out his own notes with his pencil.

  “Yes,” Rogers answered.

  ***

  Now Rogers and Dabney were riding their hard-breathing horses side by side. The animals were as exhausted as the men, and the woods were growing colder, more piercing, each day. Hindered by bad weather, they had been riding now for three days. But they were getting closer, Rogers promised the younger man several times—and hoped it was the truth.

  They’d make camp whenever night fell and build a low fire, attempting discretion in case the fugitive was nearby. Or was this all a fantasy, as the sheriff had said? Rogers wondered. Had he dragged this trusting sophomore on a fool’s mission?

  It had begun snowing in the mountains. Dabney, covered with three of their four blankets, lay down on the ground by the fire. He looked even slimmer than before, and very pale, though he had not complained or wavered since they had set out.

  “You have been most helpful to me, Dabney,” Rogers said
, trying to buoy his spirits.

  Dabney did seem cheered by this, at least temporarily. “You know, I admit I thought you rather pompous and wordy during your lectures. But now I see you are a professor of true manhood, not just of science.”

  “Thank you for your trust in me, Dabney.”

  “I still think we could have brought some Negroes with us to help.”

  Rogers chewed off a piece of hard bread they had brought. “Semmes already may have harmed one young man for his involvement in this. I won’t force any other man into harm’s way.”

  Dabney studied him with curiosity. “Why don’t you hire any slaves in your pavilion, Professor? It’s the custom. You’ve spent years as a southern man, haven’t you?”

  “I attended the College of William and Mary when I was your age,” said Rogers, nodding. “I came there with my father and have lived mostly in the South since. I see it as a region with men of energy and landscapes of beauty. Slavery is its curse, not its character.”

  Dabney, taken aback by the criticism, thought of this. “I love Virginia and Virginians, Professor. All our wealth and glory here has been possible because of slavery, and the safety and lives of the Negroes depend on the system continuing. How I can love Virginia without loving slavery and protecting our Negroes, sir, I cannot follow. I do not doubt that if the African race were liberated they would wane away, like the Indians, from the pressure of our more powerful race. You are anxious about the safety of Jack Cottrell, I can see that. If we rescue him, as I sincerely pray to the Lord we do, where would you wish him to go?”

  “To be schooled. Somewhere free,” Rogers said cautiously, knowing after all these years that speaking his mind on the subject was dangerous, but feeling a bit liberated by their surroundings and the bond of trust he had forged with this student. “Boston, perhaps.”

  “Far away from his mother, his family, his friends!” Dabney exclaimed. “Do you think Jack himself would wish such a thing?”

  Rogers ruminated, and among the muted sounds of the mountains the two slept soundly. The next morning as they rode through a cold rain, Rogers abruptly pulled his horse to a stop and dismounted.