Matthew introduced himself. The woman would have been very lovely if not for the suffering in her face. She was perhaps in her mid-thirties and had the same dimpled cheeks and light blond hair as her daughter, for this was surely Madam Kincannon. Her eyes had been tortured by tears and were as black as a tropical storm. She wore a dark blue gown with a ruffle of white lace at the throat, and she was trying very hard to comport herself with dignity and stand tall in this blood-scented chamber, yet her shoulders kept wanting to bend forward under the heavy weight of tragedy.
“I met your daughter today,” Matthew explained. “I was passing by on my way to see Mr. Muldoon. I also met your husband, in Jubilee. May I ask what his condition is?”
“He is abed,” the woman answered. “He lies still with his eyes open and is unable to speak. A rider has gone to fetch Dr. Stevenson. May I ask what you’re doing in this chapel? This is private property.”
“My apologies, but I wished to see the body.”
“Private property,” Madam Kincannon repeated. “Pegg, why did you let them in here? I told you…no one was to enter. I had my doubts about asking you to watch over her…since it was your blood who did this. But I thought you could be trusted as a good friend to Sarah!”
“I’se sorry, ma’am,” the slave answered with her head lowered. “I think they was just leavin’.”
“Get out, the both of you!” growled the man, who was maybe forty or so, was thick-waisted and corpulent and sported the red flush of anger in his heavy jowls. He had curly blond hair receding from a broad forehead and a small blond beard designed to hide the roll of fleshy dough beneath his chin. His eyes were dark blue and dangerous below wild blond brows that aimed sprouts of hair in every direction, and he carried at his side an equally dangerous-looking musket. He wore a plain white shirt, tan trousers, white stockings and brown boots.
“This is Joel Gunn,” said Magnus casually, as if Matthew hadn’t already guessed.
“Get out!” Gunn repeated, harsher still. He took a step forward and made a motion as if to raise the musket to a firing position. “This minute!”
“Surely,” Matthew said to Madam Kincannon, “you wouldn’t have Mr. Gunn defile this chapel and your time of sorrow with another killing, would you?” He kept his voice calm and his expression tranquil. “I did enjoy meeting your daughter today. She seemed a delightful young woman. It is a terrible shock to see her lying like this. But do you mind if I ask a few questions…if just to salve my own curiosity?”
“What are these questions?” Now some red was creeping into the woman’s cheeks. “How dare you come in here and invade our time of mourning!”
“I will tell you that I am from New York, that I am an associate of a company called the Herrald Agency, based in London, and I am a…” Matthew paused for a few seconds, and then he went on. “I have experience in investigating crimes, madam. Including the crime of murder. I am possibly the closest representative of the law that you’re going to find tonight. If you’ll allow me, I’ll offer my help to you in whatever way I can.”
“We need no help!” Gunn said, with another step forward. “And you ain’t the law! Are you a constable, or ain’t you?”
“Not a constable, sir, but—”
“Then you ain’t the law! Mrs. Kincannon wants you out of here! Now move!” This time the musket did come up, aimed between Matthew and Magnus.
Matthew did not move. His heart was pounding, but he levelled a cool gaze at Joel Gunn and stood his ground. “Sir,” he said, “did Abram have the knife in his right hand or his left?”
“What?”
“I understand you saw the slave standing over Sarah’s body, holding the knife. Was it in his left hand or his right?”
“His right hand! He’s right-handed, I know that for sure!”
“And—pardon me for asking this, madam, but…how was Sarah lying on the ground? On her back or on her stomach?”
“Her stomach. She’d tried to run away from him and he’d stabbed her in the back a half-dozen times. But maybe she was on her side, I don’t know. When I ran to get Griff and we came back, she was lyin’ on her stomach.”
“Please,” said Madam Kincannon, who held up a trembling hand and had to lower herself onto a pew.
Matthew doggedly went on, though he knew the pain Sarah’s mother was feeling; he was going by instinct and by what Granny Pegg had said. “So…you had a lantern with you? You could positively tell this was Abram standing over Miss Sarah?”
“I had a lantern. I shone it right at him when I came around the side of the barn, he wasn’t standin’ ten feet away. Took him by surprise. He looked at me, flung the knife aside and took off runnin’ down to the quarter. I hollered at him and tried to give chase, but he’s a fast one. Then I knelt down beside Miss Sarah, but she was…I’m sorry for stirrin’ this up, Mrs. Kincannon…she was already dead, or near enough she couldn’t speak, and…the blood was everywhere. I figured I needed to tell somebody quick, so I ran to Griff’s house.” The man glowered at Matthew. “What’s the use of these questions? Abram stabbed Miss Sarah to death, and that’s what happened.” He glanced with disdain at Granny Pegg. “We’re goin’ up that river to get ’em, father and brother too. If they won’t come back easy, it’ll be all the worse for ’em.”
Matthew wasn’t done, and he didn’t intend for Joel Gunn to push him aside. “How was Abram holding the knife, sir? By the blade? By the handle?”
“By the handle, of course!”
“So you assume he’d just finished his work a few seconds before you arrived?”
“Sir! Please!” The lady had pressed a hand against her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut. “Dear Lord…please spare us these questions!”
“I saw what I saw,” said Gunn, with defiance in his fleshy face. “Abram killed Miss Sarah. He was standin’ there with the bloody knife in his hand. Then he ran, and now he’s out on the river with his kin tryin’ to escape judgment. What more is there to know?”
“Well,” said Matthew, turning his attention to the woman, “what was your daughter doing out there, after dark? Did she leave the house alone? Was she meeting someone? And what would’ve been the reason Abram killed your daughter? Do you have any idea?”
Suddenly Joel Gunn was in his face, and Gunn had sweat on his cheeks and showed the brown stubs of his teeth when he seethed, “They’re animals, mister! If you don’t have slaves, you don’t know, but they’ve got to be watched during the day and kept away from the big house at night! They’re the beasts of the field, and every man of them could be a killer if it lit his fancy! The women too! You can’t turn your back on any of ’em, or you’ll get what Miss Sarah got!”
“Settle down,” Magnus advised, towering over Joel Gunn and Matthew as well. “And watch where you’re aimin’ that shooter!”
“Leave this place at once!” Mrs. Kincannon had regained her strength, if not her composure, and stood up. Even so, she wavered on her feet. “Get out before I shoot you myself!”
“As you wish,” Matthew answered calmly. “But as I’ve said, I have experience in situations like this.” He glanced quickly at Granny Pegg and then back to Mrs. Kincannon. “I have one request, and it’s very important.” He paused for a few seconds, to let that sink in if it would. “I know this is a difficult and terrible time. I know I’ve come in here—blundered in here, might be more accurate—in what seems to you to be the end of the world. I do have some…skills in this area—”
“What do we need you for?” Gunn growled. “Abram did it, pure and simple! When Griff ran up to the big house to tell ’em, I went down to the quarters and found out Abram and the others were gone. Then I got to the wharf and saw they’d broken into the boathouse! I seen ’em in their boat paddlin’ up the Solstice! They had a torch lit, I could see ’em all! So you just step aside—and you too, Muldoon—and let justice be done!”
There was a moment of silence, in which Matthew thought he had lost the cause.
But then
the quiet but determined voice said, “Thass why we does need this man, Cap’n Gunn. So justice will be done.”
Gunn looked as if he’d been struck across the face. So too did Mrs. Kincannon. Matthew figured it was unheard-of for a slave—even a woman as elderly as Granny Pegg—to contradict a white man, and especially an overseer. He realized she had decided that it was time to speak up, if ever she was going to, no matter what the consequences might be.
“Say my great-grandson stabbed Miss Sarah to death?” she went on, both commanding the floor and tempting fate. “Say you saw him with a knife in his hand? But you didn’t see him use that knife, did you? Couldn’t he have just found it, and picked it up? And for the why of Abram bein’ there, and Miss Sarah too…I’ll tell you that it was agin’ the law, as set down by Massa Kincannon.” Granny Pegg stared fixedly at Matthew. “For some time…a month or more…Miss Sarah and my great-grandson been meetin’ in that barn at night, after the forbidden hour. He say she always kind to him, and he say she always brought two things with her: a lantern and a book. She was teachin’ Abram how to read. So why under the eyes of God would he kill her?”
“Because he’s an animal like all the rest of ’em!” Joel Gunn sounded nearly choked with rage. “Because he wanted Miss Sarah for himself and couldn’t have her! Who knows why? I just know she’s dead and he killed her! And teachin’ a slave to read? That’s a damned lie!” He trembled, and for a moment Matthew thought the musket was going to come up to finish Granny Pegg’s last day on earth. “Mrs. Kincannon’s told you to get out! Now get!”
The lady of the plantation had been staring at the floor, supporting herself with both hands gripping the back of the pew before her. She spoke, in a ragged voice. “It’s not a lie. Sarah was teaching Abram to read. She told me, two weeks ago. I said I didn’t approve of it…that if her father found out, he would punish the entire quarter. Donovant does not like the whip, but he would’ve had a man from every house lashed for that crime. And punished Sarah too, in some way. At first I forbade it…but Sarah was going to do it anyway. I know her.” She looked, anguished and red-eyed, at her daughter’s corpse. “Sarah had talked to Abram before. Said she thought he was very smart, and could learn to read. She so loved her books…she wanted to share them. I didn’t wish anyone to be lashed or Sarah to be punished…so I helped her sneak in and out of the house after dark without breaking her neck climbing out an upstairs window. I gave her one hour, from leaving to return. I told her to be very careful that she wasn’t seen by anyone. That would cause problems. Tonight…when she didn’t come back…I knew….I knew something terrible had happened.” Dazedly, she shook her head from side to side. “I’m to blame for this. And for what’s happened to Donovant too. Yes. I’m to blame.” A sob came up from her throat, and she clenched a hand around her mouth as if to catch it before it was born ugly upon the world. “But why?” she gasped. “Why would he have killed her?”
“He didn’t do it, Mizz Kincannon,” said Granny Pegg resolutely. “No’m. Not Abram. He was too happy in her glow. She gave him somethin’ to look forward to, ma’am. It was somebody else killed her, likely saw her one night and tracked her. Left that knife for him to find, and then—”
“I’m not listenin’ to this!” Gunn exploded. “Listenin’ to a damn slave? An old woman who hardly knows what’s real? No! God help me, I’m goin’ outside to get some air…hardly believe what I’m hearin’!” He turned away from Matthew and Magnus, stalked up the center aisle and then out the chapel door, which he closed behind him.
Mrs. Kincannon sat down again. She stared blankly ahead. “You gentlemen need to leave,” she said listlessly. “Please. There’s nothing more you can do.”
“You haven’t heard my request,” Matthew reminded her, and he waited until she could focus on him. “I’d like your permission to look at the wounds on Sarah’s body.” He held up a hand to still her protest if it came, but it did not. “It will only take a few minutes. Wounds can tell a very interesting story…and sometimes much can be learned from them.” He lowered his hand. “May I?”
There was a long moment in which Mrs. Kincannon simply sat staring at the tapestry of Jesus on the Cross. Tears were slowly trickling down her cheeks, dripping from her chin, and at last she whispered, “Yes.”
Eight
The dead young woman was still wearing her yellow dress of the afternoon, now stained with dark red blood across the front from the vicious wound in the hollow of her throat. Matthew had lifted the fouled linens carefully and gingerly, braced for what he might find beneath. A brief look at the throat wound told him Sarah couldn’t have called out if she’d tried; likely she’d been strangling on blood at the very first thrust of the blade.
Mrs. Kincannon shuddered and looked away. She drew a hard-earned breath and kept her head lowered.
“Has the knife been recovered?” Matthew asked.
The woman found a shred of a voice. “It’s in the house. An ordinary knife, nothing more.”
“Who brought it to you?”
“Griffin Royce.”
Matthew nodded. He reasoned from the wound that the knife had about a six-inch-long blade. Ordinary enough, but he’d still like to examine it if he could push Mrs. Kincannon that far. He noted the thick red dampness of the linens beneath Sarah’s body. He didn’t wish to take it upon himself or Magnus to turn the corpse; that would certainly be going too far. “Are the stab wounds on the upper or lower back?” he asked.
“The upper,” she said, with difficulty.
“Six wounds there?”
“I don’t know. Yes…six…I think so.”
The blade had pierced the lungs several times, Matthew thought. At least Sarah had not lingered very long. With all this blood loss, she had passed quickly. “I’d like to question Griffin Royce, if that would be possible.”
“He was heading to the wharf the last I saw him.”
“I’d be curious to know more particulars from Joel Gunn, as well.” Matthew leaned over to examine the throat wound more carefully. Just one brutal stab here, face-to-face with her killer, and then she’d likely turned to run and taken the others in the back. It gnawed at his guts that Sarah had been so alive and bright this afternoon, and already the process of decay would have begun. He saw that her arms were crossed over her body, as she would be resting in her coffin.
“Who arranged her this way?” Matthew asked. “Who pinned her hair up and positioned her arms?”
“I did,” said Mrs. Kincannon, and Matthew thought it was probably the most difficult task the woman had ever performed. “Royce and Gunn brought her in here. I asked Pegg to watch over her, while I went to see about my husband.”
Matthew remembered the girl’s hands clutching her book of poetry. He looked at her fingers, recalling how she’d offered him the purple bottle of fennel seed oil.
Wait, he thought. He leaned closer. And a little closer still.
Wait. What is that, right there?
There was something under the nails of the index and middle fingers of Sarah’s left hand. Something…the crust of a whitish substance…like clay?
He was mindful of his manners and Mrs. Kincannon’s suffering, but he had to carefully lift the left hand and use his own index fingernail to remove some of whatever it was.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Kincannon asked, alarmed.
“Matthew?” Magnus also sounded quite uneasy at this display.
Matthew was able to get a small amount of the claylike substance in the palm of his hand. He smelled it and caught a faint bready odor. Meal? he wondered. Possibly mixed with clay? There were flecks of green in the mixture as well. Herbs of some kind, he thought. Perhaps of a medicinal nature?
“Ah,” he said, as it came to him with a force like a blow to the heart.
“What is it?” Magnus asked, leaning over Matthew’s shoulder to look.
“It,” said Matthew, “is a scraping from the interior of a medical compress. At least that’s what I think. A
mixture of clay, meal and herbs.” He gently lowered the dead girl’s hand and also the linens. He asked Mrs. Kincannon, “You say you last saw Griffin Royce heading to the wharf?”
“Yes, just awhile ago. What’s this about a medical compress?”
“Royce was bitten by a horse, yes? And Dr. Stevenson applied a medical compress to treat the infection? When I saw Royce this afternoon, he had the compress on his right forearm. Tonight when I saw him, the compress was gone and replaced by simple bandages. I believe we should find Royce, and ask why under the nails of Sarah’s left hand is material from inside of that compress, which might have happened when her fingers tore through the cheesecloth.”
“What’re you saying? Why would that be under Sarah’s fingernails?”
“It would be there,” said Matthew calmly, “if she’d tried to grasp Royce’s right forearm for some reason, and broken through the compress. And that reason might be…that she was trying to stop the thrust of a knife.” He let that sink into the silence. “I’d like to examine Royce’s forearm for scratches, as well.” He turned toward Granny Pegg. “The story as you know it, please. Now is not the time to hold anything back.”
Granny Pegg did not reply for a time, and Matthew thought that being a slave for likely a great part of her life had stolen her ability to be forthcoming with anything that might affect the others in the quarter. But then she seemed to steady herself, she closed her eyes for a few seconds as if either to pray or recall details, and then she opened her eyes again and spoke.
“Much goin’ on here neither the massa nor his lady know,” she began. “Massa Kincannon don’t get down to the quarter or out in the fields like he should…his leg givin’ him trouble. So he leave it up to them cap’ns to run things. Now we had a good or’seer with Cap’n Jameson, but he got on older and then they’s hired Cap’n Royce to help him. Wasn’t two month a’fore Cap’n Jameson’s house caught on fire, and they sayin’ he drunk in his bed and knocked over a candle into some clothes and that lit it up.” She made a noise of disgust. “Wasn’t how that been done.”
The River of Souls Page 9