Simon Pryor
Hatch, Massachusetts
October 1842
GIVE A MAN too much time to think and he will entertain the wildest of notions. I, for a sample, was considering tossing aside my Ashland Gazetteer on this particular Sabbath Day and attending church. Do not mistake my meaning. God makes as little time for me as I do Him, and His is a house to which I afford wide berth. However, faced with a lull in my caseload, I could not deny the benefit of venturing onto hallowed ground to root about for work. Sunday morn, though quiet in other respects, is an ideal time for the flock to pore over its faults and missteps. And, in such heightened states of repentance or resolve, to whom do its members appeal once they have squared themselves with God? Why, as it turns out, to me.
Permit me to engage in the niceties of introduction. After all, one can’t very well play the cynic without giving up a detail or two for some other cynic to hang his hat on when the time comes—as it always does—for the observer to be observed. I am Simon Pryor, and it is my profession to watch and listen without attracting notice so that I might know more, perhaps, than I have a right to know, and share more, perhaps, than I have a right to share. I nose around fires as an inspector for the county, but of interest to me as well are the smaller—and often equally incendiary—mysteries of human behavior. Mind you, I am no altruist. My craft is valuable and, like that of a cobbler, takes time to learn—for a fee, I will take on anything and all.
In the Great Cities, I might tend towards self-aggrandizement and crown myself an “Expert in Incendiaries” and a “Private Investigator,” but in the small towns that serve as mazes to me, I am known rather less grandly as a “sniffer.” I do what I do because there is a demand for the keen senses of a bloodhound and the canniness of a scoundrel—the latter, a talent I acquired in my youth while apprenticed to a local solicitor named Mister Hiram Scales, Esq. He was not the most upright of gentlemen, which rendered him a fine teacher for the line of work in which I find myself at present. He, wicked man, could identify a loophole in the Shroud of Turin and saw it as his duty to enlarge such careless dropped stitches into opportunities sizable enough to thread through with a draft horse.
Not that I was proud to be his messenger, his scribe, his eyes and ears in the alleyway, the forger of his very name. Far from it. But there are moments good and bad that determine one’s path and I am afraid that I experienced one such flash—of the unfortunate kind—when I was but a lad of sixteen.
Alas, who has time for the past? Shall I tell you instead of the scant mysteries I faced as I contemplated spending Sunday morn in rare company with my Maker? Charles Dugsdale, sure that his wife visits the town butcher more times than the meat on their table would suggest is necessary, would like to know what it is she does with the man. In his heart, like most people who find themselves in this position, he knows all too well; still he desires proof, as though it might bestow upon him the power to lure her home. I asked (only to be met with the sullen attitude of the cuckolded man): When has a poisonous truth ever rekindled love? But as he will not let the matter fizzle of its own accord, his wretchedness is money in the bank for me. Miss Elvira Drean, a rich spinster of twenty-seven, seeks information regarding eligible male companions. She pays me to ferret out honorable men who have not yet attached themselves and who therefore might find her an attractive prospect. Here again, I have tried to convince her that I can be of no assistance, for there is not an honorable unattached man within a hundred miles of Hatch. Whether it is local or universal I cannot say, but this is the bald truth concerning romance in our fair county. Either you get married young, or you leave. Either you leave young, or you get married. But you only flee on the flimsy wager that you might find something you don’t already have, and you only marry on the silent prayer that life might, somehow, be miraculously transformed. Miss Drean’s romantic notions—that domestic bliss awaits just round the next bend—have little to do with the coldhearted world she inhabits.
Why so hard on love, you ask? After all, a young man such as myself at twenty-four years of age might be just the sort of person Miss Drean—for there are so many Elvira Dreans—would consider a worthy companion. I make a decent enough impression, being of a spry if not overly impressive build and possessed of good teeth and a head well-threaded with dun-colored hair. My green eyes have yet to rheum over from excessive vice, and my skin is not so pockmarked as is my conscience. There, of course, I might need to kick a little dirt around to cover certain details of my life so as to conceal from her gentle soul some of my less worthy endeavors. But I am, at heart, a good enough man. And my work, though not as commendable as that of a doctor or magistrate, is undertaken much of the time in service to honest people in need of honorable counsel. The hitch in the rope is this: Though I was once an openhearted boy—with an impractical tendency to view everything in an optimistic light—I notice nothing but misery around me now. I trust no one and have little desire to seek a bond that can only, in the end, bring disappointment and despair. I once expected the world of the world, but no more. It is far simpler, I have found, to dive into other people’s problems than it is to sort out one’s own, and my work provides me ample foxholes. For that, I am ever grateful.
My personal prayer book? The Gazetteer and similar town penny sheets full of pleas for help, if one reads between the lines. After all, the stories contained therein—each at its core—hold an almost biblical truth. In simple typeface, the complexities of human passion, greed, generosity, and desperation are laid bare. One need only wipe clean the magnifier and train it on another’s sad history to find a mirror of one’s own unfathomable existence. Not to mention, the potential for employment.
As luck would have it, moments after I had blown the dust from my Sunday topper, a sharp knocking at the front door spared my soul the Lord’s forgiveness. It was a messenger—one I knew well—and I could not help sighing as I took the paper packet he pushed my way and showed him into my study.
Elwyn Cramby. The mere sight of his tortured frame unnerved me, for he hailed from Burns’ Hollow, the town where I resided when I was young. We had shared little but the schoolhouse and our unequal attempts to survive the bullies it sheltered; still, I am not proud that I turned a blind eye to the humiliations Cramby suffered at the hands of a boy who was, in those long-forgotten days, my friend. One James Hurlbut.
How I wish now that I’d known well enough to take Cramby under my wing. But as a youth, he shriveled in the face of human contact and could not meet another’s gaze were a pistol pressed to his temple. The tic rendered him difficult to like and thus to defend when he became James’s target. While I made excuses to absent myself from such sport, I knew that on any given day, Cramby could be found hanging by his britches from a high branch, or covered in hogs’ filth—which, when it was too cold to wash, soiled him for days at a time.
Misfortune struck us both in the winter of our sixteenth year. It came at different times and for different reasons, yet our miseries are linked. My past will be made plain enough when I’ve a mind to spell it out. As for Cramby, his most dangerous brush with James Hurlbut occurred when he was lured into a sleigh and driven far from town, dumped on a wild stretch of road, pushed into a snowbank, and left to tramp the miles home through darkness and bitter cold. The trick nearly killed him, and for months after, no one saw skinny hide nor lank hair of him. Then, with the blossoms of April, Cramby reappeared. His illness had made of him a walking corpse, and from the way he laughed at odd times and spoke feverishly to himself, people assumed he’d been touched in the head. In a move worthy of his father, Amos Hurlbut—the town’s chief puppeteer and architect of my initial indenture to Hiram Scales—James pretended to play the benevolent and bestowed upon Cramby the dubious honor of becoming his messenger. Almost a decade later, it was a post he still held.
The envelope I accepted from his clawlike fingers was secured with the ornate Hurlbut family seal, and beneath my name, PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL had been penned wi
th great flourish. (Who but the rich—ever certain that their affairs are of interest to one and all—would send a private missive by errand boy labeled in such a manner as to beg inspection? Of course, the canniest lad in search of employ as a messenger always professes illiteracy, for it lends him a frail immunity. As one might expect, however, the boy unable to recite the alphabet during daylight hours can be found poring over the finer points of Machiavelli’s treatises by night. And I say good for him.)
Popping the seal, I read without enthusiasm, for though I was in need of a case, I would have preferred that it come from anyone other than James Hurlbut. He wrote of an incendiary that had broken out the night before on the outskirts of the town of Ashland. As the Hale County fire inspector, I would of course eventually have been apprised of the tragedy, but Hurlbut wanted me to visit the farm as early as possible so that I might “sift through the wreckage before it has been disturbed by clod-footed constables.”
That a former friend-turned-traitor had me at his beck and call galled me beyond description, but his order did not surprise me. After all, my job as a fire inspector was no coincidence. James’s father had made sure I was named to the post as it afforded him—and now his sons—access to land that might become available to them at a favorable rate under the right circumstances. Need I spell out that having a man like me in your pocket goes a long way towards creating such a happy outcome?
I skimmed the rest of the note. I was to show him my report just as soon as I’d finished it—long before making its findings official. The size of the purse I could expect would be dependent upon my ability to massage the truth in favor of my master’s desires. This was our standard agreement. If revenge was his goal, a finding of arson pleased him best. But if it was a sought-after piece of land that had caught his eye, then declaring the situation an accident was what I was expected to do.
This property was known as “the Briggs place,” though its owner was a farmer named Silas Kimball. Any Ashlander, he wrote, would be able to point me in the right direction. He hoped my investigation would go smoothly and signed his missive “Ever your devoted patron.”
My patron indeed. How I longed to crush the paper in my fist.
One thing puzzled me: why James Hurlbut would be intrigued by an incendiary so far from his fiefdom, and one that had consumed but an isolated farm at that. But his plan would reveal itself soon enough. Writing that I would set out immediately and cast an eye over the premises, I felt a familiar heaviness. Was there no escaping the shackles of the past? I handed my reply to Cramby and nodded a silent farewell. As he set off down the path that leads towards town, his singular stride was crooked and purposeful, a rickety wagon on a rutted road. Messenger. Puppet. How little difference there was between us.
Whether out of carelessness, revenge, or fraud, it is a plain fact that buildings burn and are burned with alarming frequency in our hamlet. After all, the greedy and insane thrive as well on country air as they do on the sooty atmosphere of the Great Cities. Delinquents with too little to occupy their time, drunks, hotheads raging over everything from politics to the property rights of loose-running chickens—these are but a sampling of the reprobates who find reason to set entire livelihoods to flame.
And I’ve yet to even mention the driest fuse in the box where incendiaries are concerned: insurance. Nose long enough round any fire and, like as not, you’ll smell banknotes as sharply as you do burnt timbers. So common are opportunistic arsonists among us that a local tippler once asked whether my skill in exposing their crimes grew from having set a building or two to flame myself. I aimed a dazzling smile at the fellow and responded that I had settled upon my calling only because when presented the opportunity, my matches had been wet. One must, I have found, meet foil with foil and make a game of it when strangers pry.
Truth is, I cannot claim such breeziness when faced with carrying out my duties, for the job is a difficult one. Time and solitude are the greatest of accomplices to the common country arsonist. He inhabits a vast emptiness as compared to the bustling streets of Boston or New York, where witnesses abound and bad news travels quickly. Why, a single day will see a fire set, extinguished, and solved in even the largest cities, while a week may pass before news of a distant incident is brought to my attention. By the time the fire wards dump a single bucket, the property will have been destroyed. Bad luck—perhaps—for its proprietor, and worse still for anyone with an interest in determining the cause. With everything reduced to ash and the boot-prints of constables and curious neighbors, it is only Mother Nature in her greatest fits of pique that can hinder the rural investigator more effectively.
Thus, the sooner I take note of all evidence, the better. And the quicker I can question anyone within a mile or ten, the less likely I am to be fed a string of exaggerations: Yesterday’s fire becomes today’s Vesuvius of destruction, such is our addiction to the misfortunes of strangers.
“What can you do,” I was asked by one beleaguered farmer, “when all that’s left is a pile of ashes?”
“Resurrect it,” I said. For even the tiniest grains of soot must add up to a flaming torch on one side or, on the other, an honest pan of grease placed too close to the hearth.
Divining truth requires instinct and, of course, more than a few broad assumptions concerning human nature. One must know, for a sample, that men will tell you where, women will tell you what, and a sharp-eyed child will fill in everything between. The dog was tied up there, the old well used to be here, the hog pen opened down-valley to soften the stench. So says the Mister, whoever he may be. As for his wife, she chirps on about berry cobbler, children dressed in tatters, cups and saucers handed down from distant kin. And their boy? Just let him think he’s got it figured and you’ll have advanced your inquiry beyond measure.
Notes are fine where detective work is concerned, but when looking at the scene of a fire, a set of crude sketches takes the advantage. Approach a recalcitrant neighbor with a book full of questions and you’ll knock against lips pursed tighter than those of a dead scold. But show him, with apologies for your artistic ineptitude, a few scratches depicting where you think the stove might have been, and he’s yours. The more you get wrong, the more he will set you right, for there is hardly a person alive who can resist correcting another man’s mistake. From this, one could infer humankind to be uniquely helpful as a species, but I suspect that it all boils down to the deep pleasure we take in showing up one another for the fool.
Of course, in the end it’s witnesses that are the real problem when it comes to a country fire. In the city, it is quite common that a man living just across the street will never have met—or even know the name of—the person who has suffered or caused the nearby incendiary. Being a total stranger, he will offer up his testimony without the slightest hesitation. The rural lands are different. You cannot reside in the country and reside alone. You rely upon one another in times of hardship, celebrate in times of plenty, and are known by name to everyone with whom you conduct business. Friend, banker, merchant: They will all have formed a close attachment to whoever is under suspicion of setting a fire. A companion knows that he will lose a valuable neighbor should he give voice to his doubts, just as a businessman with debts to collect knows he will not get paid should his customer be convicted.
What’s a decent fire inspector to do? I shall tell you. He must find and fasten on to one Mrs. Bumby. That’s right—you are familiar with Mrs. Bumby. There’s one in every hamlet the world over. She’s the busy bee, the sage sure to answer the questions on everyone’s lips, including your own: Who, how, and why.
Mrs. Bumby knows. She belongs to all the social groups, attends church every Sunday, listens in at the baker’s and the bank and the Dry Goods. Listens and talks and then listens again. What’s more, she remembers. But she must not be hurried. Mrs. Bumby has a yarn to spin and she will do so after her own fashion. “Well, I don’t know a thing about the man,” she will say, staring through the steam that rises from her cup o
f tea. “Except…”
Except. Who knew such an unremarkable word could be so entrancing? Oh, she’ll flutter her eyelashes, knot her kerchief, and sigh before protesting that she is only guessing. Really, I don’t know a thing. Except… That’s Mrs. Bumby, bless her hollow heart.
Have you heard enough? Fear not. I’ve a tragedy to examine and so my lecture must come to an end. Somewhere an hour’s gallop or so to the north there are ashes to be read like tea leaves, and it would seem I am just the gypsy for the job.
Sister Charity
IN THE DAYS after Elder Sister Agnes came to me it was decided that I would be released from confinement. She had been unable to scour the markings from my skin. But as she had found no contagion, I was deemed harmless enough to rejoin my fellow believers. To be sure, there were changes with which to reckon: With my body claimed by the Devil, I was no longer fit to serve as my eldress’s assisting sister, and in my absence, all of my effects had been moved and replaced with Sister Columbine’s. She would now sleep where I had lived for as long as I could remember—in a small chamber above the meetinghouse hall, next to where Elder Sister Agnes resides. I lied and told myself that I understood—I wanted to save my eldress the pain of having to comfort me even as she pushed me away—but truth be told, it broke my heart to have been exchanged and I hated my markings most of all for the love they cost me.
It happened so seamlessly. My belongings had been packed into a blanket box and placed in one of the smaller rooms on an upper floor of the North Family dwelling house. Though I knew there had been tittering among the younger sisters, the decision to move me had taken place behind closed doors. Nothing official was said, and on the surface, life continued as though I had always been just another believer. I was just another believer and to have thought otherwise had been my undoing. My newfound deformity was my rightful comeuppance.
The Visionist: A Novel Page 5