‘The masters at St Louis Academy would crack our knuckles with a ruler if we didn’t prepare our own.’ January turned the two quills over in his fingers, while Hannibal held the torch close. ‘A woman named Zalie used to sell them on the Rue du Levée, ready stripped of the vanes. I think he could smell them and tell whether we’d cheated and bought them.’ He rubbed his knuckles reminiscently, thinking of that outsize, too-black-for-polite-society boy he’d been, laboring over his penmanship lessons at the back of the class.
‘But these are fresh,’ he added. ‘I didn’t think anybody used quills anymore.’
‘Fresh indeed.’ Hannibal lowered his torch, to where another stain – free of flies, much smaller, and darker – blotted the cave floor. He knelt, carefully, to sniff. ‘There’s the ink. You said our friend’s fingers were stained.’
The two men moved back into the darkness. His experience in caves – both in France, and in the horrible hollows of the old pyramids at Rancho Mictlán – told January to carry his lantern low and step carefully. Close to the bloodstain, and the scraped marks on the cave floor, he saw the hollows where a place had been scooped to lay out a bedroll; he guessed where the man’s food-waste had been disposed of, and was fairly sure that the place would have been used as a privy as well.
He was right. The passageway at the back of the cave narrowed and twisted, the ceiling lowering until January and even Hannibal had to bend to avoid the toothy spikes. Around a curve of the passageway a pit gaped, some thirty feet deep, and the damp air that rose from it bore the smells of a short term of human residence. When January held his lantern down, its light glinted on broken glass.
‘Inkwell,’ guessed Hannibal. ‘Look, there’s another quill.’
‘What was he writing?’ January looped the rope around the stoutest of the stalagmites, jerked on it several times, then dropped it over the pit’s edge. It wasn’t a sheer drop, and the rock had been much soiled and smeared from its usage as a privy. January studied and counted for a moment, then said, ‘Looks like he was here three or four days. Somebody must have known it, since he had food – not to speak of a table and a chair and a bedroll …’
‘Why not dump his body down here as well?’ Hannibal held both lanterns out over the rim of the pit as January, hanging onto the rope, edged down the steep slope.
‘Not deep enough. Coyote could get down – and back up. Somebody was bound to notice, if scavengers started prowling around the cave. It’s Jalisco’s job, and Creed’s, and the job of every man on the place, to notice if it looks like some living thing has died back in these canyons – or maybe hasn’t died, but has just gotten itself trapped. A man’s body would have to be accounted for.’
He balanced on the steeply slanted floor, where the pit narrowed to a very uneven cone. The table – a light camp-table, such as military men used on campaign – had been thrown down first, along with the folding camp-chair, the bedroll last. ‘Trade-blanket.’ He picked it up – then dropped it as a dozen white, gelatinous-looking little spiders scrambled wildly out of the striped wool.
‘Like the blanket on my bed back at the hacienda?’ inquired Hannibal.
‘Just like those very ones.’ Wishing he’d brought a stick with him, January prodded with the toe of his boot at the ruins of the chair, flipping it aside to reveal a man’s blood-crusted shirt and piss-crusted drawers, and beneath them the gray coat, blue-and-yellow waistcoat, and checked trousers he remembered seeing on the Rosabel. ‘And I might add,’ he continued, ‘like the ones on every other bed we’ve slept in since we reached Texas: in Galveston, in Houston, on the trail, at Eberly’s Tavern, and at the Ekholms’.’
Boots and socks lay close by. A pair of spectacles clinked and fell out of the coat, like the skeleton of a murdered pixie. Underneath all that – lying on top of the garbage and the sewage – a pair of saddlebags.
January put those over his shoulder, shook out the clothing very carefully and rolled it into a bundle which he tied into the end of the rope, and climbed back up, thinking every foot of the way that he felt more of those nasty little white spiders creeping around the back of his neck.
They sat in the daylight at the mouth of the cave – the sky bright now above the canyon, though shadow still filled it, all save a sharp line of gold on the rocks above their heads – and opened the saddlebags.
One contained three shirts and four pairs of drawers, one still clean, three obviously worn. There were socks, shaving gear, soap, and a toothbrush, as well as a copy of Dryden’s Aeneid and four twenty-dollar gold pieces.
The other bag held the satchel that Hookwire had been clutching on board the Rosabel. Opening it, January found half a dozen trimmed quills, three pen-knives, three bottles of ink, two steel-nibbed pens, a box of spare nibs, three candles, five sticks of sealing-wax in various colors, and several packets of paper.
No, thought January, turning them over in his fingers. Not paper. Or not all of them paper. ‘Parchment?’ He ran a testing finger along its edge. ‘And this is vellum – who writes on parchment?’ Two other bundles were paper, old, yellow, stiff, and blank. A little further exploration at the bottom of the satchel unearthed a half-dozen small glass jars, which contained what looked like lamp-black, powdered ochre, the soft brown pigment known to artists as umber and another of the redder dust called sienna, and a slightly larger jar of powdered chalk.
There were also four small blocks of wax, wrapped carefully in blue paper; some soft enough to be molded with January’s powerful fingers, but one harder, almost like the modeling clay his friend Carnot had used back in Paris.
‘He was an artist,’ he said softly.
Hannibal sniffed, almost a derisive laugh. ‘Oh, I’d say so, yes,’ he agreed. ‘But not the way you mean.’
January looked at him in surprise. ‘I thought you said you didn’t know him.’
‘I didn’t – bar having seen him at the Countess Mazzini’s bagnio a time or two. But I know what all that paraphernalia is, because I use it all the time myself. At least,’ he added, taking the packets of yellowed paper and unfolding the sheets, ‘I’ve used some of them.’ He held them up to the light for a watermark, examined the edges where they had been scuffed and browned. ‘And old Bridemere, who tutored me at Oxford, God bless his sticky-fingered soul, in things Balliol College never knew of, had the whole kit: papers of various ages and colors, inks of different strengths and consistencies, quills of different sorts that could be trimmed and shaped to match whatever tricks of handwriting any given don of the college – or any father or banker to my friends, I daresay – could come up with.
‘The powders are a nice touch,’ he added approvingly. ‘He can discolor any document when he’s finished with it, to any degree of age or decrepitude desired. And I’ll bet … Yes.’ He picked up one of the little knives, which turned out to be, not a penknife as January had thought, but a very fine-bladed scalpel. ‘For carving seals,’ he explained. ‘Or removing them from one document, to be placed elsewhere. Very pretty.
‘I’m not sure what our friend was doing here,’ he added, into January’s astounded silence, ‘or why someone thought it a good idea to murder him. But whyever he was here, just off-hand, I’d say our friend appears to have been a professional forger.’
SIXTEEN
Like Hannibal, Gervase Hookwire possessed seven sets of visiting cards, each set bearing a different name and a different city of residence, ranging from Paris to Chicago. January had not heard enough of the bald man’s speech to guess at a point of origin, but he was interested to note that three of his bogus addresses were in the upper South: Lexington, Kentucky; Baltimore; and Richmond, Virginia. The box of Lucifer matches which was in his coat pocket with them was also marked as coming from a manufacturer in Virginia.
Nothing in the clothing, or the saddlebags, provided information as to who had brought the dead man from New Orleans – where Hannibal had seen him – to Texas, or for what purpose.
The man was, after all, Januar
y reflected wryly, a professional.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any way of proving where Eli Creed was on Monday morning, when Madame Valentina was being shot at,’ he said thoughtfully, folding the clothing into a bundle and stowing it – and the forger’s kit – in the saddlebags. ‘Or on Easter Sunday, when I’m guessing Hookwire was killed. We’ll need to find some way to ascertain Creed’s movements Sunday and Monday without letting him know we’re asking. But any of the three – Francis or his adoring mother and aunt – could easily have brought Taggart to the orchard with a note.’
‘And gotten close enough to him to shoot him point-blank,’ agreed the fiddler. ‘Which I’m not sure Creed could have done. But if Hookwire were forging a will for Brother Francis—’ Hannibal leaned his back against the rocks of the cave-mouth, and pressed his hand to his side to still another spasm of coughing. ‘What’s his customer doing cooped up in the study? Unless Francis knew of Hookwire’s death before we arrived … But if Francis was paying Hookwire, why have a hand in his brother’s murder before those “written instructions” – let alone the will – were complete? This was obviously planned days – if not weeks – before Taggart was actually killed.’
‘Somebody’s certainly playing a double game.’ January frowned into the tops of the oaks below the cave-mouth, each emerald leaf now edged in morning light. ‘It might not be Francis, you know.’
‘Who else would it be, then?’
Again, January shook his head. ‘According to Valentina, there isn’t much Madrecita Taggart wouldn’t do to guarantee her son four hundred thousand acres of Texas land, but it’s a far cry from adoration to murder …’
‘Farther for some than for others,’ remarked Hannibal. ‘Shall we keep the gold, at least? We’re going to need getaway money if Valentina’s arrested—’
January buckled the saddlebags, stood up and slung them over his shoulder, and held down a hand to pull his friend to his feet. ‘I think we’d better leave it as it is for now. We’re going to need this as proof for someone – or against someone – and right now, we don’t know what the presence of the gold proves.’
‘I’d say it proves that God helps those who help themselves,’ sighed Hannibal, ‘and we may regret your devotion to due process when we’re trying to talk our way onto a ship without a penny to pay its captain, but have it your way. That cave back there that you had to climb up to?’
‘Should do.’
Hannibal scrambled cautiously down to the horses, while January re-traced his steps along the top of the crumbly debris slope to the higher cave he’d earlier visited. He concealed the saddlebags in the rocks far at the back, where the passageway narrowed to barely a foot in diameter, then nearly broke his neck when he lost his footing climbing down the talus to the bottom of the canyon.
‘Would a tracker like Shaw be able to guess you’d been up there?’ asked Hannibal, helping him to his feet and dusting him down.
‘I am not going back up there to move the satchel.’ January flexed his arms, scratched the gravel out of his close-cropped hair, and picked up his hat. ‘Shaw could probably guess where we’d been and what we’d been doing if we’d done all this by hot-air balloon.’ He mounted, and they rode down the canyon. The sky was clear, sharp blue above, the line of gold daylight halfway down the canyon’s western rim.
In Texas, everything is about land, Noah had said.
Last month, someone writes to Gervase Hookwire in New Orleans, bringing him to Texas to do a job … unless of course Francis met him by chance in Houston. But how would he have done that?
In either case, Francis brings him to Perdition, presumably to forge Vin Taggart’s will, preparatory to murdering his brother in such a way as to put the blame onto his Tejano wife. He comes after Vin Taggart has put up his men around the property to keep Gideon Pollack’s riders away. So he would need the connivance of someone on the property …
Then either on Easter Sunday, or on Monday while Taggart is actually being murdered, Hookwire is killed …
To cover up his role in the forging of the will?
Did he demand more money? A share of Perdition?
And what the hell was he doing, performing his task in a cave halfway up Witch Cave Canyon anyway? To judge by the dead man’s figure, and the probable cost of his clothing and linen, he’d have preferred the warm, clean comfort of the Capital City Hotel in Austin.
To keep him from prying eyes? Probably.
January frowned into the sharp morning sunlight as they passed from beneath the limbs of the oak tree and into the long grass of the prairie beyond.
What else is going on?
From a distance, he could see no scrum of horses around the hacienda which would have warned that Quigley had turned up with a warrant and a posse earlier than expected. Smoke curled from the kitchen chimneys, reminding him that he was ravenous. The tortillas and coffee he’d cadged from Titus Andronicus in the pre-dawn blackness had been a long time ago.
They approached the house from the north-east, and tied their horses at the edge of the orchard, though January had little hope of finding anything of use three days after the murder. He knew roughly where the killing had taken place – the place where two trees had been hit by lightning was an obvious rendezvous.
‘I don’t suppose anyone would write a note, Meet by the seventy-third tree from the left in the twenty-fourth row,’ Hannibal remarked, as they waded through the orchard’s long grass to the spot. The open area around the stumps of the two dead trees was visible ahead of them as a sunnier patch among the green shade. Bees already swarmed among the white and pink blossoms overhead.
Taggart’s horse, Noah had said, had been found, saddled, tied at the far side of the orchard; the same horse he’d had out earlier that day, when he’d ridden down early in the morning to talk to the overseer of his cotton lands. A note would easily have brought the rancher to this place at some specified hour.
But a note saying what?
How many of the vaqueros, or the house servants, could write?
What excuse would someone in his household – his mother, his brother, his aunt – have to arrange a rendezvous here, in secrecy, when they could meet just as comfortably in the house?
January could guess. ‘They’re forging your will – they plan to murder you. I don’t know who’s in on it, so meet me in the orchard.’
Maybe even a less intimate acquaintance could have gotten away with it, but probably no one from outside of Perdition.
And whoever it was, had been able to step up close to him and put a pistol against his chest.
A double game again. Played against whom?
The long, springy grass around the two dead stumps bore no trace of the body that had lain there, or of footprints coming or going. January searched the ground without any real hope of finding anything, and wasn’t disappointed. That Valentina’s shawl had been found ‘nearby’, along with a pistol known by the household to be hers, he disregarded. Evidently the entire household knew where she kept such things.
‘Any thoughts?’
Hannibal shook his head. ‘I did try two or three times last night to get into Brother Francis’s “study”,’ he admitted. ‘It’s that little “cabinet” chamber off his bedroom, at the opposite end of the upstairs gallery where you sleep—’
‘When have I ever slept there?’
‘Don’t be a sissy, Benjamin, you got two whole hours last night. He keeps it bolted from the inside, and I couldn’t well pick the lock on his bedroom door and get through that way unobserved. Even in the middle of the night, when I woke I could hear Aunt Alicia walking about the house in pitch darkness, humming to herself – “The Harp of Love”, I believe it was.’
He turned to look back in the direction they’d come, where the hills were just visible above the new-leafed tangle of the trees. ‘But if it isn’t Francis behind it – or his mother – why else would someone murder Taggart? Ones political or social enemies would presumably do so in a duel,
à la Pollack … Is there a lost mine on the property?’
‘If there is,’ said January, falling into step behind him as they waded through the deep grass back toward the horses, ‘Valentina will be able to tell us.’
‘Not lost, exactly,’ said Valentina, when they put the question to her a half-hour later in the laundry-yard behind the kitchen. She had clearly been watching for their return – or had assigned Enoch or one of the housemen to tell her when they rode in – and had come hurrying out to them as they turned their horses over to Malojo among the corrals. Had listened in startled bafflement to the account of the finding of Hookwire’s personal effects, and of the deductions which could be inferred from them. Francis, she had reported, had come to breakfast looking tired and haggard, but had brushed aside the anxious urgings of his mother and aunt about what he should eat, or the medicine he should take, or which doctor he should send for from Austin (‘I have no need of a doctor and I will not have my brother’s last orders violated until I find his will!’). He was, she informed them, back in his study now, with the door locked.
‘No surprise there,’ remarked Hannibal.
She hadn’t seen whether there was ink on his hands or not.
She went on, ‘There’s an old Spanish copper mine in Witch Cave Canyon, but it ran dry years ago. Everyone knows about it. It’s the first place – I think the only place – Francis actually visited. That’s why there was a road at one time, going up the canyon.’
‘What about the other mines?’ asked January. ‘Your uncle owned this land …’
Valentina thought about it for a time, then shook her head. ‘There were rumors, of course, about the San Diablo Mine, northwest of here and deep in the hills. I’ve never been that far, and my husband said it was all nonsense. The land, he said, had been controlled by the Comanche even when the Spanish ruled. No one could have gotten workers in, or brought silver out. Jalisco would know.’
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