The Constable's Tale: A Novel of Colonial America

by Donald Smith

  —RULES OF CIVILITY

  August 18, 1759

  Boston, Massachusetts Bay

  My Beloved Wife,

  Greetings and all fine Salutations,

  I am forry that I have been gone fo long and Traveled fo far away from You and our Plantation. I pray all is well & Martin is remembering to falt the Cattle and Sheep once a week as he is fupposed too do. The Sheep muft be penned up at night to protect againft Dogs and Wildcats and bears and fundry other Dangerouf Beaftees that rome our forefts. I am relying on his Knowleje and Good Intenshuns to fee these things are done, but you mite find it Convenyunt to remind Him from tyme to tyme. Worft of all I feer I will not bee home in tyme to Put In the Tobacco. Thif is hot and sticky work and I am forry I cannot help but Martin shood be abel to figger out how to get it all done with ye help of ye others.

  My deareft I am Torn in two diff’rent Directions my Desire to return to You and my Beleef that there is Urgent Busynef that compells my Presenfe in Canada. I have received Informations of ye Utmoft Importance which I Dare not divulge in thif Letter when it could fall into mifchefuf Hands. I pray you Truft I am doing ye right Thing. If all turns out as I ekspek I am certain Olaf McLeod and ye rest of ye People of Quality in New Bern will forgive my long absunce from my Dutees and reward me with their Approval when they come to learn ye full ftory. I will rite again when I can. Please convay my love and beft wishes to Mother and Grandfather. And to Martin and the other Servuntf.

  In hafte,

  Yr. moft ob. & Loving Hufband, &etc.

  James Henry Woodyard

  HE FOUND HIS WORDS DISAPPOINTING. AGAIN. HE JUST COULD NOT find the ones that a clever man with better breeding might use to say how much he really missed Toby, his two moments of weakness notwithstanding. And how he longed to return to his own people, his own country. At the same time, the act of sitting at a writing table and searching for the right things to say made him think on the distances that had been growing, year by year, between himself and the people he considered most his own.

  The judge had allowed him glimpses into his world, a place as different from the one Harry inhabited as the two poles said to lie at opposite ends of the earth. Representations had been made. Harry could not honestly call them promises, but certainly they were assurances, founded on the expectation of Harry’s continued good behavior, his practice of courtly manners where appropriate, and his accumulation of wealth through canny management of his acres and the acquisition of more. If those things continued to be done, Harry one day would be welcomed into the bosom of privilege and rank, leaving behind for good the brawlers and pranksters and wenchers he previously had kept company with. Their ignorance, profanity, poor table manners, even the places they congregated would be forever a regretted part of Harry’s past.

  But what then? People of quality might seat Harry at their tables and allow him to join their clubs, but how likely were they to forget his origins? Could those who knew his story ever really overlook the order of events that had sent him off on his path toward respectability?

  And what of his own family? To be accepted into the highest circles of Carolina society, would there not come a time when he would need to put fences between himself and them? Neither Talitha nor Natty was likely ever to be invited to a social gathering at the judge’s house or the houses of his friends. Could Harry turn his back on his mother and grandfather? And what about Toby? Could the uppermost layer of Craven County society embrace a former indentured servant?

  Thoughts of Toby made him wonder again how she was getting along in his absence. Even more worrisome, he realized, was the possibility that she might be getting along very well. Even adjusting to his being gone. He felt a fresh wave of remorse for abandoning her to go off in search of the Campbells’ killer and to save Comet Elijah. He longed for Toby’s touch, her loving glances. He feared that in his fixation on his own affairs, he risked losing her.

  The truth about Comet Elijah came to Harry in a blaze of clarity. When he got back to New Bern, he would have to break the man out of jail.

  Maybe he could do it on the sly. Maybe slip in a blacksmith’s file for him to use on the window bars. Or bribe a friend on the town watch to leave locks unfastened one night. That would be easier. But he would need to choose carefully. What if he misjudged the loyalty of his would-be confederate?

  In all likelihood Harry would have to break him loose himself. The risk of discovery, and thus Harry’s undoing, would be great. But he felt more sharply than ever that he held Comet Elijah’s life in his hands, just as his old friend once had held Harry’s.

  He pushed away from the writing table and got out of his chair. It was nearly four in the morning. The taper he had been using, now nearly gone, guttered from the disturbance of air. He stretched his back and looked out a window at the darkened street below, vacant except for a dog-shaped shadow slinking silently down an alley. Despite lack of sleep, his thoughts turned again to his life in North Carolina over the last ten years. Until Toby’s arrival it had settled into a routine that varied little from year to year. The passage of writing he had seen in her diary came to mind. He could not remember the exact words, but he had not forgotten the idea. Something about how moments of life flow by in a constant stream. Any one held the prospect of turning the world upside down.

  By leaving New Bern, Harry had defied the customary order, the keepers of the rules themselves. That moment could not be relived. And now the stream had become a winding river, flowing ever faster in an ever less predictable direction.

  *

  The sun was coming up when Harry collected Annie and set out for the docks. He had gotten no sleep but felt wakeful. The innkeeper, an early riser himself, had encouraged Harry’s guess that the best way to Quebec would be by ship. Although going by horseback would be more direct, fewer miles, a ship would take about the same amount of time: roughly two weeks, depending on winds and tides. Also, a land route would bring him through enemy territory, where he might be detained, even executed as a spy. A voyage, too, would be easier on Annie. She seemed to have become accustomed to the nautical life, although after disembarking in Boston she had spent the good part of an hour weaving around the street like a drunk. The only drawback of sailing would have been the cost, but with Noah’s purse, money was no longer a concern. He remembered the Quebec-bound packet that Browning had said he would be traveling on. The trick, he supposed, would be to convince the captain to let him come along on such short notice.

  He arrived at the dock at seven, an hour ahead of the turning of the tide. “I am on my way to join the North Carolina battalion with General Wolfe’s army,” he lied to the captain, who with his leathery skin, tradesman’s clothes, and floppy woolen cap looked more like an aging dockhand than commander of a ship. Harry drew from his pocket a Pennsylvania three-pound note.

  “Son, I don’t mind if you be going to fight the Turks in Mesopotamia,” the captain said, snatching the bill with one hand and touching his forehead with the thumb of his other. “You are welcome aboard my ship.”

  Harry started away to see about Annie’s welfare, then turned back.

  “An acquaintance of mine is traveling aboard your ship. I wonder if you can tell me if he has arrived and where I might find him? His name is Browning. Major Browning of the Massachusetts militia.”

  Harry already had rehearsed what he would say. He would claim he had been so inspired by the sight of American and British uniforms at the ball, and conversations he had heard around the punch bowl about the progress of the war, that he had made up his mind to join the brave men at the final battle of the campaign season. God willing he had arrived in time for it. He would reveal the story of his eavesdropping at a later time, after gauging Browning’s disposition toward him.

  “I’m afraid Major Browning won’t be making this trip,” said the captain.

  “I’m sorry to hear it. I understand he had some sort of leg injury that had prevented him from joining his militia company earlier. Maybe it h
as flared up again. How soon will another ship be going out?”

  The captain looked grim. “I’m sorry to tell you that Major Browning will never be going to Quebec. We had the news less than an hour ago. It looks like his carriage ran off the road in the dark while coming back from a dancing revel in the country. Him and his driver were found pitched out of the cab. Both necks broke.”

  CHAPTER 23

  82: Undertake not what you cannot perform but be carefull to keep your promise.

  —RULES OF CIVILITY

  THE PECULIAR ODOR OF BURNING HOUSES GHOSTED OVER THE MAIL sloop Penguin. It was late afternoon, cool and river-bottom dank under a gloomy sky as they drifted past a tip of land identified by a crewman as Île d’Orléans, the last island on the Saint Lawrence before Quebec. The smell grew stronger as they continued upriver on a flood tide, the air taking on a thin, nauseating graininess from the smoke, inky billows of it rising on either side of the river. Ragged columns that stretched into the gray distance.

  “French farms,” the crewman said as Harry put a handkerchief to his nose for a filter. “Seems there’s an endless supply of ’em. The lobsterbacks are always coming across new ones to set alight. It’s worse like this when there’s little breeze, but you get used to it.”

  The river was the same slate color as the sky, whose ashen light cast passing fields and stands of trees in similar dull shades. They were still twenty-five miles from Point Lévis, where he had heard British soldiers had set up camp across the water from the French stronghold. Close enough to hear faint booms of cannon. The reports coming at leisurely paced intervals.

  “Ours,” the crewman said, seeing Harry cock an ear to the sound.

  “How do you know?”

  “The Frenchies are running low on gunpowder. They’re saving what they got left for when they really need it.”

  It had taken the ship twelve days to get from Boston. Winds had favored them, but what the captain originally aimed to be a twelve-hour layover at Louisbourg had turned into three days of recaulking hull seams. The leaks had gotten so bad they threatened to overcome the pumps, which had been manned constantly from the moment of castoff. Repairs involved everyone’s vacating the ship so it could be grounded farther up harbor and heeled over at low tide, exposing the bottom for fresh pitch. The process had to be done twice, once for each side. Harry took comfort from the smell of rendered tar, which still infused the ship eight days later. It made him feel closer to home.

  He was sure Browning’s death was somehow connected to Ayerdale. But it was a puzzle. Browning said he had told no one of his suspicions until the night of the ball. Was it possible that Loring, or even Pownall himself, was involved in some high-level deception? Could one of them have conspired to kill the major to protect Ayerdale’s identity as a spy? It beggared the imagination, but nothing was impossible. Nor could he completely rule out the explanation, unlikely as it also seemed, that Browning’s death was an entirely unconnected turn of fate.

  While in Louisbourg Harry had heard fresh reports from the battlefront. The siege seemed to have settled into a hopeless stalemate. An all-out attack at the end of July, a month after Wolfe’s arrival, had failed embarrassingly, with more than two hundred British dead and about as many wounded. Since then Wolfe had busied the army with daily shellings of Quebec City and a campaign to destroy the countryside, torching houses and fields and slaughtering animals. The intention—so said the banquette generals in Louisbourg—was to demoralize the French, goad Montcalm into venturing from his defenses to attack. To fight this time in the open, not from behind barricades as before. But Montcalm refused to be drawn out despite reports from deserters of horrible conditions in the city and outlying encampments, including near-starvation rations to the point that city residents, those who remained, were eating rats when they could catch them. If the British general was the wolf, the experts lining the banquettes agreed, his adversary was the fox, cunningly staying in his hole, biding his time, waiting for winter.

  Along with these intelligences, rumors had reached Louisbourg that Wolfe himself was the one who now was demoralized. He quarreled with his brigadiers about strategy. Despaired over the increasing likelihood of having to leave the Saint Lawrence before winter ice set in with nothing to show for his efforts but a country turned to charcoal, filled with bloated animal corpses. Nothing left but to slouch back to New England, a botch, the wolf more a whipped cur. An inquiry into the question of competence inevitable. Wolfe’s mood no doubt was not improved by the fact that he was sick. Reportedly he spent whole chains of days in bed paralyzed by bouts of fever and kidney pain.

  They landed near the upriver tip of the island to drop off some mail, then continued a short distance farther to a British camp that had been set up across the water from the fortress of Quebec. Harry formed a silent O with his lips as he beheld how the headland loomed up out of the water. It looked like the prow of an unearthly large ship, its leading edge jutting into the place where the Saint Lawrence joined the Saint Charles. The formation was sharply angled and wondrously steep. Easily 150 feet of rock and scrubby vegetation, so sheer as to baffle even a billy goat. Not until that moment did Harry fully understand how apt was the description he had heard bandied about in Louisbourg. It was spoken in an awed whisper or on an angry thrust of breath from the belly, sometimes punctuated by the sharp report of a clay flagon hitting a tavern table.

  From the headland at least, Quebec was impregnable.

  They had not heard cannon for a while now. Crews done for the day, he guessed. Annie was unsteady on her legs after her long confinement. But happy, Harry could tell, it was over. He arranged for a feed and grooming in the stable attached to the first tavern he saw. It was an old stone building, the French name inscribed on a wooden sign over the door in gold lettering with fleurs-de-lis. L’auberge Frontenac. Off to the side stood two tall, slender Indians in buckskin leggings and bleached linen shirts, their heads shaven halfway back in the Iroquois fashion. They were leaning on their muskets while watching a kilted Scotchman show off some sort of jig without benefit of music, his slippered feet nimbly skipping here and there over a pair of crossed broadswords lying flat on the ground. Bolts of color enlivening a gray day.

  Harry expected the place to have soldiers inside, it being early evening, but he saw none among the scant gathering of diners. Sitting at a table next to a window was a smartly dressed fat man with a small gold ring in one ear and a glass of beer close at hand. His head was bent over a ledger, a look of concentration on what Harry could see of his face. Harry asked if he could sit. The man grunted, which Harry took as a yes.

  “Where are all the redcoats?” Harry said, trying to show a casual manner.

  The man looked up. His face was plump, pale, and shiny with perspiration. Graying hair damp and tangled.

  “Do I know you?”

  Harry said his name and where he was from and offered his hand. The man held onto it, as if not sure what to do next. “I’m Goldie Gottschalk,” he said.

  “I’m looking for some of my friends, Mister Gottschalk.” Harry got his hand back. “I wonder if you might have seen them. Richard Ayerdale and Maddie McLeod. Also an Anglican minister traveling with them, name of Fletcher. They probably arrived here three or four days ago.”

  Gottschalk looked at Harry as if at a slow child. “This is a big place, Mister . . .”

  “Woodyard.”

  “My job is to keep track of supplies that come in here. Not people.”

  “Of course. Well, maybe you could still help me. Mister Ayerdale is a colonel in the Virginia militia, on special duty for the governor of that province. I imagine he will be wherever General Wolfe is.”

  “In that case, you’re out of luck. Far as I know, Jamie Wolfe is with his soldiers. A batch of them went upriver a few days ago to harass the Frenchies.”

  “Do you know when they’ll be back?”

  “No idea. And wouldn’t say if I did. We just assume around here that anybody we don�
��t know personally is a spy. No offense to you, sir.”

  “No offense at all.”

  “Anyway, you’re on the wrong side of the water to see Wolfe, even if he was here. He spends his nights on the island.” Indicating with a tilt of his head the direction Harry had just come from. “Don’t worry though, boats cross back and forth all the time. You can get over there whenever you like.”

  “It is possible my friends aren’t with the general right now, if he is on a patrol.”

  The big man seemed to be loosening his stern manner. Harry’s show of affability paying off.

  “If they’re moving in the same circles as Wolfe, chances are they’ll be staying on the island, too. Jamie has picked himself out a fancy house over there. Belongs to the French overlord—I should say, the French former overlord—of that place. Most of the ranking officers have settled into the same neighborhood. In shouting distance, you might say. And there’s been plenty of shouting.”

  “I heard there’ve been some disagreements over how the war is being carried on,” Harry said.

  “We middling sorts hear only dribs and drabs, but it’s said his brigadiers fault him for what happened at Beauport.”

  “That’s where the French beat back his big attack.” Letting Gottschalk know that Harry was not completely ignorant.

  “Unless he can redeem himself at this late hour of the day, the Battle of Beauport will go down as the great shame of Britain during the war for America. And maybe the end of Jamie Wolfe as a soldier.”

  “Does he deserve the blame?”

  Gottschalk took a swig of beer. Sloshed it around in his mouth as he considered his answer.

  “I’ve heard this and that. What I think, it could have gone in either direction. If he’d whipped Montcalm right there, they’d be striking medals for him in London. But it didn’t go that way, and the brigs take that as confirmation that he has the military brains of a blowfly. It don’t help that they are proper lords, all three of ’em. Aristocrats. Jamie is but a gentleman. So no matter what he does, it’s never quite good enough.”