The Constable's Tale: A Novel of Colonial America

by Donald Smith

  He wrapped him in a blanket and gently placed him over his saddle, then put the other two bodies over their mounts. Still marveling over the suddenness with which it had all happened. In Harry’s experience, life usually unfolded gradually. Even the onset of death generally offered a chance to prepare one’s self. But sometimes life’s events came with the suddenness of lightning or an earthquake or the popping of a bubble in the flow of a stream.

  It also occurred to him that Comet Elijah’s training had worked. Maneuvers with knives, tomahawks, pistols, and long guns had become as natural to Harry as eating or sleeping or buttoning a pair of breeches. But it all had been make-believe. He had always wondered whether, or how well, any of it would work against a real opponent. In his youthful brawling he had never been called on to resort to the intricate rules of the tomahawk. But just now he had given battle in a circumstance that was no drill. He had played a game whose stakes were life and death, and he had won.

  It was also a revelation to see just how easy killing really was. He wondered if he would ever come to regret having taken two human lives. Comet Elijah had warned him on this score. Regret almost certainly would set in at some future time, he had lectured.

  But in this instance, Harry doubted it.

  *

  The sheriff in Annapolis identified Rafferty and his dead friend. The latter was the brother of the one who had escaped. All three were tough no-accounts who had spent their lives scuttling around the bottom planes of the city, mostly the docks, committing petty thievery when opportunities arose and offering themselves for whatever odious jobs came along, usually for cash currency in advance. The sheriff theorized that their attack was a rare act of highway robbery. Rare because such business needed more planning than they were known for undertaking. He had no explanation for Rafferty’s quarrelsome nature the previous evening, other than that he might have been trying to take Harry’s measure as a prospective victim. Decide how formidable an adversary he might prove. When it came to the actual deed, the sheriff theorized, they had opened fire because they had lost their courage at the last minute and acted with mindless alarm. Typical of the harbor scum they were.

  “I doubt we’ll see again the one who got away,” the sheriff said. “My guess is he’ll go west, try and make a new life for himself on the frontier. Fewer inquisitive people out there.”

  CHAPTER 14

  108: When you Speak of God or his Atributes, let it be Seriously & wt. Reverence. Honour & Obey your Natural Parents altho they be Poor.

  —RULES OF CIVILITY

  August 8, 1759

  Annapolis, Maryland

  My Beloved Wife,

  I Pray this finds You & every One well. Noah Burke is dead. But do not be Alarmd. I was able to fend off ye attackers that came out of the Woods and Killt two of ‘em. They were trying to rob us I guef.

  I am on my way to ye Cittie of Philadelphia to talk too Someone who awt to no about ye Freemasons Ornament which I found at ye Campbells House. I am forry I have not Writt’n before. Ye Sheriff shewed me a copy of Davis’ North Carolina Gazette which arrived heer by Packet Ship yefterday when there was an Article about Comet Elijah’s effort to efcape from ye Gaol which must have takn place a day or fo after we rode off. I wifh he had Sukfeed’d, since now he is waring irons all ye time, I fear he will be moft Uncomfortable. Noah gave me fome Money before He Died to continue my Enqwirees. I mifs Your fweet Companionship & am moft Concerned for ye Bufinefs of ye Plantation but I feel I Muft do all in my Powr to Prevent Comet Elijah from Hanging. Alfo I defsine to deliver ye awfull News of Noahs Death to His Familie in Philadelphia myfelf.

  Yr. moft ob. & Loving Hufband & etc,

  Henry Woodyard

  IT WAS HIS FOURTH ATTEMPT AND, THOUGH STILL NOT PERFECT, IT would have to do. Writing was just too much of a trial. Also, Harry had found only four sheets of writing paper among Noah’s belongings. Rereading the final version, he wondered if he should have mentioned his experiences in Williamsburg. The governor and his fashionable friends. He probably should have explained how it had been the storekeeper Bannerman’s information that sent him off in the direction of Philadelphia.

  Of course, Madame Contrecoeur’s name also was missing. And he had decided against confiding his suspicion, which had been mounting, that the attack might have been related to his pursuit of the Campbells’ killer. He did not want Toby to suspect he was losing his reason. Such a connection never would have even occurred to Harry had it not been for the baroness’s note and her reference to the power of the Masons, with their tentacles. The threat they might pose to someone seen to be pursuing one of their members. Rather than Rafferty’s taking a measure of Harry and Noah at the tavern as potential robbery victims, it seemed ever more thinkable that Rafferty had been trying to provoke Harry into a fight. One the two younger men would finish in Rafferty’s favor, with Harry lying dead, or at least incapacitated, on the floor.

  He hired a carpenter to nail together a coffin and scratch out a simple inscription on a slab of wood to stand as a marker until a proper marble could be put up. The rector of a local church granted permission for burial there the next day and accepted payment in advance to say some words. Harry employed the carpenter and his son to work into the night digging the hole and installing a timber plank lining.

  These arrangements were costly, but Harry had discovered a way to pay for them. In Noah’s saddlebag was a money belt containing a thick wad of Pennsylvania paper currency. Assuming a roughly equivalent rate of exchange in North Carolina, it was well above what a skilled tradesman in New Bern might earn in two years.

  Harry reckoned he should return to Noah’s family what he would not need to get to Philadelphia and back to North Carolina, which should not be much. But for now he allowed himself the burden-free, slightly drunken feeling he imagined rich people felt every day of their lives. He decided to stay the night at a more expensive tavern, one closer to the capitol.

  At the cemetery the next morning, under a sky the color of dishwater, the carpenter set the coffin lid aside so Harry could have a last look. Noah was still wearing the blood-stained clothes he had died in. He looked cramped in the box, shoulders pinched together in a shrug. His eyes had come partway open again. Harry pressed them shut with his fingers, then took two coins from his pocket and placed one over each eyelid to keep them down.

  It was the same last loving act he had seen his mother perform all those years ago, so Ned’s soul could rest.

  *

  He had died at seven o’clock one morning in the middle of August. Missed his footing, got caught about the waist between two logs rushing downstream on a roiling tide. The life crushed out of him in one agonizingly long moment. Harry’s older brother was in the ground before sundown the next day, still looking fresh enough in the face to have been only sleeping.

  Talitha had seen a token of death earlier that week. One night a flock of pigeons flew up to her room window, waking her, and, with a great dry battering of wings and claws, nearly tore the window out. She kept this experience to herself at the time, fearing it might pertain somehow to Hendry, her husband, who was still missing in South America. She also worried that by speaking of it she might let out whatever evil it might hold. But she could not have imagined it prophesied Ned’s death. She collapsed straightaway onto the ground when she got the news from the river.

  Ned had been the adored one. He and Harry were the only children out of six who had lived long enough to walk. Ned was five years ahead of Harry and smarter, stronger, and more handsome. At least so Harry thought, and it seemed to him others did as well. People said Ned took after his father, who was much looked-up-to throughout Craven County. Now Talitha’s hopes for the future fell wholly onto Harry. He never got over thinking he was a poor substitute.

  Talitha was firm on giving Ned all he was entitled to, even in death. Every ritual had to be observed as befit the family’s rising station in the community. But unlike those people of the very highest quality, she had n
o clothes set aside especially for mourning. She would have picked out something suitable from Soloman’s, but everyone knew it was bad luck to wear new clothes to a funeral, so a neighbor made her the loan of her black Sunday gown.

  The same neighbor and another friend took over the job of fixing Ned’s body. They opened the window in his room to let in fresh air, changed his bed linens, and, when that was done, stretched him out on the bed for bathing and dressing. Meanwhile Natty took a wagon into New Bern and brought back a casket and black armbands for them all to wear. He and some of the other men worked the rest of the day digging a hole and putting in a liner. Talitha had them do this on a small hill across the road from the main house, where Ned would rest alongside the tiny grave markers of his four sisters.

  By late afternoon, word of the disaster had traveled through Craven County. Neighbors and friends began arriving, bearing food. Doors and windows remained open, and they lit as few lamps and tapers as were absolutely necessary so as to add as little heat as possible to the day’s buildup. The next time Harry saw Ned, he was inside the casket and being carried through the hall and into the front room by four sweaty men with sun-darkened faces. They set him on two tables that had been brought together and removed the coffin lid. Ned’s face was pale, but, looking into it, Harry could hardly believe the life had entirely gone out of him. Natty noticed Harry staring and figured out what he was thinking. He whispered into his ear that no one could have survived such injuries as Ned had suffered, but they would keep an eye on him for any signs of life just the same.

  The traffic of visitors slowed but did not stop as the evening wore on. Hushed speaking continued past midnight. Recollections of Ned. Little-boy antics. Funny, grown-up things he would say. How when he was seven he had saved Harry from a sea eagle that had dived into the yard and set its claws into the squirming two-year-old. The bird was having trouble getting back off the ground with its load. Ned beat on it with a toy musket Natty had made for him, chasing it here and there as it tried and failed to gain altitude. Finally, it let Harry go and flew off.

  Natty and Harry stayed up after Talitha showed the last visitors out and took to her bed. With all the windows and doors open, somebody had to keep watch for cats, which will come to corpses if allowed. They will claw or scratch at exposed flesh or lie down inside the coffin, keeping company with the deceased. But none came by that night.

  Talitha returned her borrowed gown the day after the funeral. She wore her store-bought black armband until a year had passed. On the morning of the 366th day, she made a breakfast of eggs and fried pork for Harry and Natty, then said she was going into town to buy a new metal plow for the late-summer planting. It seemed the passing seasons had brought her round the full circle of life, death, and the coming of life again. That is what Harry made of it.

  It was not until much later that he realized Ned’s death, hard as it was on them all at the time, had served a purpose. It made Harry tougher.

  CHAPTER 15

  19: Let your Countenance be pleasant but in Serious Matters Somewhat grave.

  —RULES OF CIVILITY

  HE HAD NO TROUBLE FINDING NOAH’S HOUSE IN PHILADELPHIA. THE first man he asked pointed the way, looking at Harry as if he must have been from another country.

  Peter Burke himself answered the door. He was unmistakably Noah’s father: heavier around the midsection but thin-boned, long-fingered, and with the same hollowed-out eyes that had given Noah the slightly somber look that suited his nature. Burke was dressed in the plain fashion that Harry had come to associate with Quakers.

  “I’m afraid I have sad news,” Harry said. “I knew your son, Noah, in North Carolina.”

  Peter Burke made a coarse sigh and his face seemed to fall in on itself. He beckoned Harry inside and, in a tense silence, led him into a parlor on one side of the large central hall. The room was furnished with tables and chairs of simple manufacture that seemed more suited for an unassuming plantation house than a four-story brick-front mansion. One wall was given over to floor-to-ceiling shelves containing row upon row of leather-bound books. In the center of the room was a long pine table whose surface was mostly hidden by scatterings of books, large paper sheets bearing illustrations of plants and animals, and, lying on a metal dinner plate, the carcass of a small brown bird.

  “Where is Noah?” Peter said.

  “We were attacked by three men on a road outside of Annapolis. Robbers, I reckon. I’m sorry to say Noah was killed by a pistol shot.”

  Harry heard a shriek. Turning toward the door, he saw a woman he took to be Noah’s mother. Peter hurried to her side to steady her.

  Harry told his story, how Noah had agreed to accompany him on his search for a murderer. The proceedings that had led them first to Williamsburg, then toward Philadelphia.

  “This attack,” Peter said. “Did you resist?” They were all seated now, Peter still cradling his wife, whose name was Martha. For a moment Harry considered saying Noah had fallen in a gallant attempt to defeat the robbers. But he told the truth. “They shot at us at almost the same moment they came out of the woods. We didn’t even have a chance to put our hands up.” Deciding a small lie now would be an act of kindness, he added, “I don’t think Noah even had time to understand what was happening. He was killed at once. He did not suffer.”

  Martha uttered another cry.

  “Could this attack have had anything to do with the business you are on?” said Peter. “Your search for the person you say killed this family in North Carolina?”

  “It’s hard to see offhand how the two things could be connected. Though there is something else. We had seen these men before.” Harry recounted their run-in at the tavern the previous night.

  “Is it possible this man was trying to provoke a fight? A brawl that his friends might have joined, resulting in your death or serious injury?”

  Seeming to take Harry’s silence as a yes, Peter said, “Whatever may prove to be the case, I am at your disposal. I will help in any way I can.”

  They asked more about the attack and what Harry knew of Noah’s sojourn in North Carolina. They talked of a journey to Annapolis to see the gravesite and put up a marble. After a while Peter tried to get to his feet, but his knees buckled and he nearly fell to the floor. Harry helped him back into his chair.

  “He was so angry when he left,” Peter said. “It will forever haunt my soul that he went to his death with these feelings toward me.”

  “He didn’t,” said Harry. “Noah told me he’d come to realize he was judging you too harshly. He was looking forward to seeing you again. I believe he wanted to make amends.”

  “Did he really say that?” said Martha.

  “Yes.” Then, to Peter, “He also spoke of how glad he was for all the things you taught him.”

  Peter began to speak, but his throat tightened. “His anger was justified,” he finally managed. “I was too dismissive of his interests. As I’ve grown older, I fear I have lost some of my concern for the human struggle, the kinds of sorrow people are born into and make for themselves. I’ve been so preoccupied with the natural universe that I’ve been blind to the world at my doorstep.”

  Harry stayed the night, falling asleep to the muffled sounds of wailing.

  *

  The next day, over breakfast, they insisted that Harry keep all of what he had found in Noah’s money belt. “Use every farthing to find your killer,” said Martha. “And let us know if you need more. If your inquiries should bring clarity to the death of our Noah . . .” She could not finish the sentence.

  After they had eaten, Peter went with Harry to the merchant’s store. It looked much like Bannerman’s except larger and with more of everything. A clerk went to get the owner. While they waited Harry drew a butcher’s knife from a slot in a wooden block. The oak handle gleamed softly under coats of lacquer. He tested its heft and balance and the edge, its thinness as it rasped sideways against the ridges of his thumb. As sharp as any blade he had ever held.

/>   “May I compliment you on your taste in cutlery,” said Jacob Merkly as he swept through the door, still buttoning his waistcoat. “This is part of a set, the latest production of the Hunter Foundry in Sheffield, just arrived on our shore this week.”

  “It is a handsome thing,” Harry said.

  “There is nothing finer than a well-honed knife, don’t you think? Just let your mind go for a moment to that first cut through a piece of freshly dressed beef or a cauliflower still crisp from your garden. How the blade glides through the flesh. As if cleaving gossamer. Following your every command even as you think to issue it. I don’t know about you, sir, but I find the act of carving a good piece of meat a spiritual as well as sensual experience. It is transporting. Almost as good as a dose of laudanum and probably healthier.”

  Harry realized he had allowed his jaw to sag on its hinge. He had never thought of a knife in such terms.

  “My usual price for something so fine would be two pounds. For my best customers it is one pound, eight shillings, and six pence. That barely covers my purchase cost, but I am a generous man. Also, I buy direct from the foundry and vouchsafe its voyage across the ocean, no factor in between to skinny-up the price.” Merkly held up a forefinger as if to stave off an objection. “I can see by your dress and manner that you are a gentleman, a man of quality. And so, for an even pound-and-eight, it is yours to carry home with you this very day.”

  Before Harry could speak, Peter said, “Jacob, I would like you to meet a young friend of mine, Harry Woodyard.”

  “Well,” said Merkly, his face brightening further, “since you a friend of Peter’s, I would be pleased to make you an even better bargain.”

  Harry decided the only way to get out of the shop without buying a knife was to be direct. He said, “I wonder if you could look at this piece of jewelry and let me know if it might have been sold from your shop.” He showed the badge. “I understand you specialize in this kind of thing, and it may have even come from your store.”