Prelude to Glory, Vol. 9

by Ron Carter

  “Think I’ll go to the tavern for supper. I’d like to come back and work on more files afterwards.”

  Driscoll answered, “I’ll wait until you’re back from supper. I’ll have to lock you in and let you out.”

  Dulcey lifted his coat from the hook next to the entrance and was putting it on when the door burst open and a corpulent man stalked in. He wore the hat of a sea captain. His hair was long, his beard full, and he paid no attention to Dulcey as he marched past him, straight to Driscoll’s desk where he stopped and slapped the desktop with the flat of his hand. Driscoll jumped, and his chair moved back.

  “I expected my pay yesterday,” the man growled. “You didn’t come.”

  “I couldn’t leave here,” Driscoll stammered. “Tillotson’s gone, and I have a new man to train. I couldn’t leave him here alone.”

  The man did not turn to look at Dulcey. “Then send him with the money! I have a ship loaded to leave in the morning. The policy is that I’m to be aboard that ship at all times, once she’s loaded.”

  “I can’t send the new man with the money. Tillotson’s orders. I’ll pay you now. You’ll have to sign.”

  “Be quick about it.”

  Driscoll spun the dial on the heavy, black safe in the corner and removed a sizeable metal box. He set it on Dulcey’s desk, used a key to open the lock, and quickly counted out sixty pounds, British sterling, in gold coins. He locked the box, replaced it in the safe, closed the door, and spun the combination dial. With the money on the desk, he unlocked the bottom drawer of the nearest filing cabinet behind his chair and removed a second huge ledger to set it thumping on the desk beside the money. Quickly he opened the old, worn, canvas-covered book, seized his quill, made a hurried entry, then spun the ledger and handed the quill to the man across the desk.

  “Sign.”

  The man scanned the entry, hastily scrawled his name, picked up the stack of gold coins, and turned on his heel. For a silent moment he studied Dulcey, then stalked back out the door into the twilight of early evening.

  Dulcey saw Driscoll’s shoulders slump in relief before he looked at the signature, closed the ledger, and shoved it back into the drawer. He used his foot to push the drawer closed, then leaned forward to close the lock. Driscoll returned to his chair as Dulcey buttoned his coat and spoke.

  “That happen often?”

  There was a mix of fear and anger in Driscoll’s voice, and his face flushed red as he answered. “With him? He’s a part owner. A very small part. Thinks he runs it all.”

  Dulcey started for the door. “I’ll be back as soon as I finish supper. What’s his name?”

  Driscoll shook his head. “It’s not important. Get back soon. I’ll be waiting.”

  Supper at the White Gull Tavern was roast mutton and boiled turnips. Dulcey ate thoughtfully, mechanically, paid at the desk, and walked back to the small office of Bristol Lines with the light of a lantern showing dull in the grime of a small window. Driscoll rose as he entered and shrugged into his coat.

  “All cabinets and drawers are to be left alone. Don’t touch the safe. There’s some files on your desk to work on. I’ll be back at ten o’clock to let you out.”

  Dulcey watched through the window until Driscoll was lost in the muddle of men and cargo still on the docks, then stepped to the yellowed map tacked to the wall behind the stove. For twenty minutes he traced the shoreline of Moose Island, then shifted north to Passamaquoddy Bay that was British territory, then back down to Cobscook Bay west of Moose Island. He held a lantern close to find the roads on the mainland, and carefully traced a winding line leading west from the coastline, then angling southwest and finally due south, down to Machias Bay. He traced the line again with his finger until he was satisfied he had it committed to memory.

  Back at his desk, he noted that all the files he had worked on previously were gone—back into the locked filing cabinets. He went back to his desk and took quill and paper in hand. With the lamp turned low, he carefully wrote down the names of all the companies, all the men, the cargoes and destinations that he had committed to memory, and for a long time studied the list, trying to force an explanation that would answer all the questions that defied reason. He folded the paper and tucked it inside his shirt, then drew and released a great breath and settled into the four new files. At nine-thirty he closed the last file, stood and stretched, and was startled at the sound of the key rattling in the door. The door swung open and Driscoll entered, and without a word walked to the filing cabinets, where he inspected each lock.

  Dulcey showed no emotion as his mind ran. Returned early to see if he could catch me breaking into the files.

  Satisfied the filing cabinets were intact, Driscoll turned to Dulcey.

  “We need to be out by ten o’clock. If the night watchman sees the light he’ll stop.”

  Dulcey pulled his coat on and stepped out into the cold night air and waited while Driscoll locked the door.

  “See you in the morning.”

  Driscoll nodded but said nothing and walked away.

  In his room, Dulcey drew the paper from his shirt, and for a time carefully read the names and dates and cargoes, making mental notes of the companies he had known previously. It was close to eleven o’clock when he put out the lamp and went to bed. He awoke once in the night to the hum of wind and the steady drumming of rain on the roof.

  Morning broke in a wet, gray world with a raw northerly wind snapping the flags on the mainmasts of the ships rocking in Eastport harbor. At eight o’clock Dulcey waited while Driscoll worked the key in the office lock, and the freezing wind came through the door with the two men to ruffle papers on both desks before they could turn and slam it shut. The two took off their coats and hung them on the wall pegs, and Dulcey kindled a fire in the stove while Driscoll opened one cabinet to select eight large files and drop them on Dulcey’s desk.

  “Start with these,” he said, and returned to his own chair.

  At noon, Dulcey clamped his tricorn on his head, turned up his collar, and hurried to the tavern for sausage and brown bread, then returned to continue reading the files Driscoll laid on his desk from time to time. Twice the work was interrupted by seamen who walked through the door, past the counter, to Driscoll’s desk to leave documents. Both times the man making the delivery spent a moment studying Dulcey but asked no questions. By late afternoon, Dulcey was in a state of stunned disbelief.

  Burlington—Plattsburgh—Cornwall—Crysler’s Farm—Prescott Ogdensburg— Sacketts Harbour—Oswego—Charlotte—Buffalo—Fort Erie—Fort George—Presque Isle—Amherstburg—Detroit. Buyers in towns on the Canadian side of the lakes—towns that weren’t there five years ago—built by Americans who left the United States to buy cheap Canadian land and get into this business of smuggling? Cargoes moving both directions from as far west as Detroit? Amherstburg? From Vermont, New York, Michigan, and Canada? Nineteen separate companies? British, French, American? Thirteen thousand tons of gypsum in twelve days, all traveling north? Gypsum? Enough gypsum to plaster every wall in Quebec and Montreal combined? Lumber—nine hundred tons of cured pine and oak going to England—enough to build a fleet of ships. Potatoes, wheat, flour, beef, pork, all coming from American ports to Canadian buyers? Spanish produce—India tea—Oriental ginseng root—all packed in barrels with bungs? Twenty-two hundred tons in sixteen days? All moving south? And the paperwork all crosses these desks in this office at Eastport?

  At six o’clock Dulcey carefully closed the files on his desk, and Driscoll followed him to the front door. Dulcey paused.

  “See you in the morning.”

  Driscoll grunted an answer, and Dulcey heard the key turn in the lock as he walked away toward the White Gull with the wind cutting through his coat. The small tavern was filling with seamen with white faces who wiped at dripping red noses with their coat sleeves. Dulcey took a small table in one corner to order roast ham and potatoes and a piece of apple pie. A thin woman with gray hair and sad eyes brought
it on a tray and Dulcey picked up the knife and fork. The ham was dry and the potatoes overboiled, but it made a supper. He was starting on the pie, paying little attention to the rough talk of seamen at the tables nursing their steaming mugs of hot buttered rum, when he heard the words “. . . New Haven . . .” He slowed and glanced at four men, all in heavy coats and knitted caps, two tables to his right. He took the first bite of the pie and began to slowly chew, sorting out what he could of the conversation among the four sailors.

  The youngest of them was talking too loud, gesturing, face twisted in loathing at a remembrance. “ . . . caught him four weeks ago . . . trial . . . murdered a city alderman . . . hung him the next day . . . I saw it . . . worst thing ever . . . ever see a man hang? . . . worst thing ever.”

  For a moment Dulcey stopped breathing, then took the next forkful of pie and listened. A burly seaman snorted, sipped gingerly at his steaming rum, wiped his beard on his coat sleeve, and spoke. “. . . name . . .”

  The younger man tossed a hand upward. “ . . . Dorsey . . . Dulcey . . . don’t remember.” He shuddered. “ . . . remember his eyes when they hung him . . popped wide open . . worst thing ever.”

  Dulcey’s expression did not change as he finished his pie. He laid down his fork, paid at the desk, and casually walked down the dim hall to his room. Inside he turned the lamp wheel and sat down on his bed, leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped, as he battled to organize his fragmented thoughts.

  If that man knows, who else knows?—how much time do I have?—must leave now—tonight—got to get into the hold of the Patrice before I go—got to know what’s down there.

  With calm deliberation he packed his seaman’s bag and drew the strings but did not tie them. Then he sat down on his bed and forced himself to wait for more than one hour before he walked back downstairs and out the front door onto the nearly deserted wharf. He stopped with his shoulders hunched against the freezing wind, and for several moments studied the ships that were tied to the docks. He glanced at the heavens, where the moon and stars were hidden by thick, low, billowing clouds, while the first wet snowflakes came stinging, slanting on the wind.

  Dulcey walked back to his room, put on his heavy coat, pulled his knitted cap low, slung his seaman’s bag over his shoulder, blew out the lamp, and walked out into the hall. He did not go back into the tavern; rather, he walked to the door at the end of the hall, out onto the landing and down the stairs into the blackness of the alley. He backed up against the building and waited, eyes closed, listening for any sound that he did not understand, and there was none. He walked steadily down to the slick, black timbers of the waterfront, and again stopped to listen, and to peer intently into the sleet and the darkness, broken only by the dim light of lanterns swinging in the wind from the bow and stern of ships tied to the docks. The only sounds were the whistling of the storm in the rigging of ships and the heavy thump of the hulls as they rose and fell against the dock with the wind-driven waves. There was no one in sight. He moved quickly to the second ship.

  The gangplank had been raised and was up on the deck. He hunched down where the big hawser held the stern of the Patrice against the dock and waited for the seaman on the first deck-watch of the night, to judge the time it took him to make one round. The lantern came past about each six minutes. On the third round, Dulcey watched it come, waited until it was past, then seized the hawser and climbed to the railing and over onto the deck of the ship. He crouched behind the main hatch and waited until the deck-watchman passed on his next round, and two minutes later had the hatch open far enough to slip inside and lower the cover back into place. He stood on the steep stairs in utter blackness for half a minute, eyes clenched shut while he waited for them to adjust to the darkness. He had just opened them and started down the steps when the scent registered, and he froze.

  Sulphur! Two hundred tons of sulphur!

  There was no need to go farther. Quickly he shouldered the hatch cover upward, stepped clear, and was crouched down behind the hatch when the deck-watch passed. He moved silently to the stern, slid down the hawser to the dock, scooped up his seaman’s bag, and trotted, hunched forward, head ducked into the stinging wind and snow, to the office of Bristol Lines. He stopped to peer up and down the waterfront, and there was no one. He bowed one shoulder and rammed the door with all his weight, and the jamb splintered, and the door flew open. He quickly pushed it closed, and instantly the room was locked in blackness. By feel, he moved quickly to the file drawer where Driscoll kept the ledger that controlled the money and felt the lock. He worked his way to the stove, still warm, seized the soot-covered poker, rammed the point through the arch of the lock, and heaved upward. The poker bent, but held, and the hasp of the lock released. Dulcey grabbed the ledger and moved to the middle drawer of the second locked file. Again he drove the poker through the arch, heaved up, and again the poker bent, but the lock clicked and opened. He grabbed the big, heavy ledger with the names of customers, loads, dates, arrivals, and destinations and strode back to his seaman’s bag. Two minutes later he was at the front door with the two ledgers inside the heavy canvas bag, the strings tied tight. He opened the door and stepped out into the howling wind and sleet, stood still for half a minute to be certain no one had seen him come, and then closed the door.

  He did not go to the docks to stow away on a ship or take a longboat. Rather, he headed northwest at a steady trot, toward the tip of the small island. He was gasping for breath when he stopped and waited in the darkness, watching for a lantern following and listening for a shout, but there was nothing. He ran on, stopping when he must, listening, watching, until he reached the wild coastline with the great granite rocks, where longboats danced at a small dock on the three hundred yards of choppy black water that separated the island from the mainland. He threw his seaman’s bag into the nearest longboat, jerked the tie rope free, and dropped into it. He heaved on the right oar to turn the boat, then bowed his back and dug both oars deep to drive the bucking craft into the wind and the churning water. He took a heading due north, based on instinct and dead reckoning, with the map on the office wall bright in his mind. He missed the mainland docks by thirty yards, leaped into freezing water above his knees, and dragged the boat up into the rocks of the rugged Maine shore. With the seaman’s bag over his shoulder, he took his bearings and started northwest once more, working his way through the scatter of granite boulders, searching for the winding dirt road he had traced on the map. In the storm and the darkness, he passed it and had to turn back fifty yards, searching. He found it and turned west, following it slowly, carefully, with the wind and sleet quartering in from his right. He trudged on in the night, peering downward, feeling his way in the freezing mud and slush of the road.

  Twice in the night he saw the dull glow of lights just north of the road but did not stop. With dawn separating the gray overhead from the gray of the world, he followed the road southwest, clothes dripping, teeth chattering. Midmorning, the wind slackened and the sleet slowed. By noon there were patches of blue overhead, and an hour later the heavens cleared and the winds calmed. He walked on in chill sunshine, shivering, covered with mud to his knees, clothes soaked, listening to the drip of melting snow falling from trees and undergrowth to turn the world into rising steam and brown puddles and ponds.

  The sun was casting long shadows eastward when he left the road to walk a quarter mile north on a path toward a plain, weathered farmhouse. In the farmyard, he paused at a slab-sided building connected to a pen with three Jersey cows grinding their cuds and two draft horses with their muzzles buried in dry grass hay. There was a second pen with a large black-and-white sow and nine weaner pigs. Beyond, there was a chicken coop with chickens clucking while their heads darted up and down as they snatched grain or insects from the ground. He stopped at the door of the building and rapped at the door, then opened it on creaking hinges. A hollow-cheeked old man with a week’s growth of gray beard and one glassy eye sat on a one-legged milking stool, fin
ishing the milking of a fourth Jersey cow into a wooden bucket. The man raised his head in surprise. His voice was high, raspy.

  “Who are you?”

  “Sir,” Dulcey began, “I need a meal and a place to sleep for the night. I can sleep in this milking shed. I’ll expect to pay.”

  The old man turned and buried his forehead in the flank of the cow for a time while he stripped the udder. Then he stood, pushed the milking stool back with his foot, and picked up the milk bucket by the rope handle.

  “I asked, who are you?”

  “Robert Dulcey. I’ve been walking since yesterday evening. From Eastport. I have to get to Port Machias.”

  The old man considered for a moment. “You in trouble?”

  “Trouble? With the law? No, I’m not.”

  “Then why did you walk all night and all day, in the storm?”

  “I have to be in Port Machias as soon as I can, sir.”

  The old man shook his head. “No, you’re in trouble. When did you eat last?”

  “Yesterday evening.”

  “How much?”

  Dulcey’s forehead wrinkled in question. “How much did I eat?”

  “No. How much can you pay?”

  “Whatever is reasonable.”

  “You said Port Machias?”

  “Yes.”

  The old man scratched his beard with his free hand. “I’ve got the winter’s cheeses in a root cellar. Got them sold in Port Machias. Got to get them loaded tomorrow and leave. Should be there in three days. Make you a deal.”

  Dulcey stood silent, waiting, and the old man went on.

  “You help me load the cheeses tomorrow and deliver them in Port Machias, I’ll give you lodging tonight. A hot supper of beef and turnip stew. Sleep in the bed in my son’s room. He got married and left four years ago. My wife died last December. Buried just north of the house. Been hard, doin’ everything around here alone. Hard.”