“Eduardo, give me your knife,” I said. The blade was far too wide to fit into the hole, but I didn’t expect it to. I handed the knife to Maria and turned my back to her. “Mari, cut a stay from my corset.”
“Doña Ana!” she said, scandalized.
“Quickly! They will not wait too long to make sure that their poison worked.”
The whalebone stay was soon free. I slid it through the hole, praying to the Virgin as I teased it under the latch. When I pushed down on the near end of the stay, it bent and the latch slipped off. I breathed deeply and tried again. The third time, the latch moved a little. I held my breath and let it inch up, and up, and up, before it fell abruptly back into place. I tried again and this time the Virgin heard my prayers. The latch quivered, then leaped up and swung away. I staggered back into Maria’s arms, dizzy from holding my breath.
“Push!” I said. Eduardo and his son put their backs into it, and the door scraped opened.
We didn’t wait for it to open all the way. We took up the Inglés and the candles, but left the lantern. “It will confuse them,” I said and we pushed the door closed behind us. I found the stone plug and fitted it back into the hole, then Eduardo replaced the latch and, for good measure, jammed it tight with a stone. We crept down the inky tunnel, our little candles almost useless against the dark.
I would have sworn on the soul of my sainted mother that at least twelve hours had passed since I was thrown into the wine cellar, but when we finally emerged it was into the cold, pale light of dawn. We found ourselves in a small pine woods. Three horses were tied up nearby, our two carriage horses and one other. Their saddlebags bulged. From one hung a scrap of black lace—my mantilla, last seen in the hands of the abbot. I will never know how the abbot knew what might happen, or if he had the horses and supplies left in the hopes of a miracle, but it made no difference. Within five minutes we were mounted and headed down the mountain. Maria rode behind me, and Heriberto cradled the Inglés as though the boy was his own son.
A few days later, thanks to the kindness of Don Alejandro Hormigas del Santo, we were safely in his house in Puebla, on the road to Veracruz. Teobaldo had sent to ask him to expect us, and when we did not arrive he took to the road himself to find us, and find us he had. We must have been a pretty sight, tired and dirty, our clothes torn from the journey through the dark tunnel. When I recognized him I wept with delight. Don Alejandro had telegraphed to Veracruz, so that a few days after our arrival four men arrived in a closed carriage and were rushed into the house. My young Inglés’s health had improved, but when he saw the plumpest of the men he cried, “Mycroft!” and fell into the man’s arms.
He recovered in time to share a hurried meal, which was interrupted by our host. Don Alejandro came into the dining room, shaking his head.
“It is a great mystery,” he said. “Apparently General Tomás Pulgón pursued a spy to a monastery in the mountains, but the general has entirely disappeared! His men say that he and his lieutenant traced the spy to a wine cellar. The two brave men followed, but a week has passed and neither of them has been seen since.” Alejandro paused. “Doña Ana, do you know anything of this?”
I looked up from my plate. “Don Alejandro, I am an old grandmother and I do not concern myself with these political matters. I believe your guests are ready to leave.”
Alejandro looked at me a moment longer, his eyes bright, before turning away.
I walked with the young Englishman toward the carriage. I had previously seen him sitting, lying, or being carried, and had not truly comprehended just what a tall, gangly young man he was. I had a fine view of his Adam’s apple, which made a considerable bump in his skinny neck.
“Before you leave, you must tell me something,” I said, putting my hand on his arm to stop him. “How did you know there would be a hidden door in the wine cellar?”
He smiled. Really, once his nose had stopped dripping he was a good-looking young man. “I watched the smoke. Had there been no other opening, the smoke would have blown away from that small chink in the wall, but luckily the larger vent on the exterior wall pushed air in, so the smoke was sucked into the little latch hole and not away from it. I saw footprints on the dusty floor there. The prints of sandals, to be precise, and so I knew that the abbot had expected that someone would need to escape—perhaps he himself.” The boy looked tremendously smug.
“There you are wrong, my arrogant young friend,” I said. He raised his eyebrows. “You saw the care with which the abbot treated you, and I saw the care with which he treated his monks, and the care with which he touched the walls of his domain. He would no more desert his people than I would desert mine.”
We arrived at his carriage. I put my hand out to stop him. “There is one further thing undone, joven.”
At this he frowned. “I, I do not think so, señora.”
“Think again. Put yourself outside yourself, if you can, and think again.”
He was painfully bewildered, and at last I felt some small mercy toward him. “You have yet to thank me, or my people, for saving your pitiful English life.” I tilted my head back and, I think, did a respectable job of looking down my nose at him. “And so I will leave you with this final piece of advice, Inglés. You may have a gift for the details, my friend, but you will never amount to anything until you achieve a similar gift for noting the details of the human heart.”
He opened his mouth, either in protest or to thank me, but I raised an admonitory finger to him, turned, and swept away into my own life.
Yes, sometimes it is very good to be a stern grandmother.
Ms. Robertson gives us a story of stage coach banditry and bawdy houses as seen through the eyes of a keen observer of the customs and characters of the old west.
* * *
THE STAGECOACH
DETECTIVE:
A Tale of the Golden West
by
LINDA ROBERTSON
. . . we are here in a land of stage-drivers and highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago.
Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Silverado Squatters
The Royal Family of Silverado, as I called us that summer, were as raffish a dynasty as ever disgraced the most dubious Balkan principality—an invalid literary man (myself), Fanny, my raven-haired American bride, and my stepson Sam, then a crown prince of eleven years.
On a bright day late in July we were making our daily progress from our camp on the mountainside to the little hotel on the toll road where the mail coaches stopped. Rounding the last turn in our path, we saw the Lakeport stage stopped before the hotel, earlier than usual and empty of passengers. The dust from the coach’s passage stood in a chalky cloud above the road.
In the yard, a group of men stood talking urgently among themselves. I saw Corwin, the landlord, dark and hollow-chested, and McConnell, the stagecoach driver, the tallest and broadest of them, glowering and turning his big blond head from side to side, like a caged bear. The landlord’s wife was shepherding a couple of women passengers down the veranda to the hotel door. “Mr. McConnell,” she called out, “can you wait for a bit before going on? I think the ladies could use a little rest and a chance to calm down.”
McConnell turned and fixed his bearlike gaze on her. “I ain’t goin’ anywhere, Mrs. C.,” he answered resentfully. “Gotta wait for the sheriff.” He turned away and spat on the ground. “I guess we’ll have to spend the night here. Be hell to pay in Lakeport,” he added, shaking his head.
Trailed by Sam, I walked to the edge of the group to hear more, while Fanny joined Mrs. Corwin in the hotel.
“Who’s gonna ride to Calistoga and tell the sheriff?” one of the men asked.
“My boy Tom,” said Corwin. “I’ve sent José back to saddle up one of our ponies.”
“We need to put together a posse—go out and hunt him down,” another man said. “Mr. Corwin, how many horses do you have?”
“Not enough,” the innkeeper said. “Bes
ides, the fella’s got a good hour’s start. We’ll need a tracker and bloodhounds, and they’re in Calistoga.” He caught Tom’s eye and pointed over his shoulder to where José, the stableman, was walking up with a saddled horse. Tom ran over, took the reins, swung lightly into the saddle in true western style, and started at a gallop down the toll road.
“Sweet Jesus, Tommy, don’t kill the pony!” Corwin shouted after him, as horse and boy disappeared into the woods. He looked around the bare, dusty yard at the little crowd of passengers, hotel guests, workers, and idlers, and announced, “Come inside and have a beer—it’s on the house. Been a rough morning.”
As we passed down the veranda, I saw one of the hotel residents leaning back in a rocking chair, a newspaper in his lap, watching the happenings in the yard with half-closed eyes. He looked up at us as we walked across the creaking boards.
“Your Majesty. Your Highness,” he said, sitting straighter and tipping his battered straw hat.
“Interesting morning, Joe,” I said. “What’s going on out there?”
“Stagecoach was robbed again.”
“Wow!” Sam said beside me.
“Again?” I asked.
“Twice in the last two months.”
The last few men were clumping across the worn boards of the veranda and through the door of the saloon. “Free beer,” I said to Joe as we turned to follow them. Folding his paper in half, he rose, casually, onto storklike legs and drifted after us.
The barroom was cooler than outdoors. A couple of opened windows at the back brought in a little air and the purling of water in the creek behind the hotel. The reek of old whisky and stale beer rose like mist on a marsh from the sanded floorboards and the varnished bar, stained with the rings of countless glasses. A few flies moved sluggishly through the warm air, as if biding their time until dinner. Corwin and Hoddy, the barman, drew pints of beer and slapped them down on the bar.
“It’s a bad business,” Hoddy said. “Second time this year. McConnell thinks this one was done by the same fellow did the last. Ain’t that right, McConnell?”
“He sure looked the same.”
“What did he look like?”
“Hard to tell much,” broke in a mustachioed man in a new miner’s outfit. “He was wearing a bandana, blue one, tied across his face.”
“I thought it was red,” said a red-faced, balding man in a rumpled gray suit.
“And a broad-brimmed hat,” the first man added.
“Some kind of serape over his clothes.”
“Looked to me like one of them green army blankets.”
“How tall was he?” Corwin asked.
“Tall—a big fellow,” said a stout man in a linen jacket.
McConnell disagreed. “He wasn’t that big—kind of skinny, I thought. Couldn’t really tell much, though, under that blanket.”
All of them remembered he had a large-caliber pistol. “Silver-colored,” said the stout man, and another agreed.
“No—gun-metal, with wood grips,” McConnell said with conviction.
Near me, another man spoke up, in the familiar accent of an Englishman. “He was about five feet six inches in height, dark eyes, reddish hair, very nervous. Brown wideawake hat, with a broad brim, blue bandana, blue work shirt under a serape made from an army blanket, denim pants, black boots. He wore black riding gloves, and the gun was a .45-caliber Colt Firearms Manufacturing Company cavalry model, blue metal with darkened wooden grips—nice observation, Mr. McConnell.”
We all looked at him blankly.
“And how do you know all that?” the miner asked, with the exaggerated suspicion of a fool. “You a friend of his or something?”
The Englishman turned and fixed him with a look of polite scorn. “I looked.”
The miner was undaunted. “Well, shee-it,” he shot back with what I assumed he thought was wit, then turned and spat on the floor. A couple of the other men shifted uncomfortably. Corwin broke the tension. “Come on, everyone, get your beer and settle down.”
As the men moved toward the bar, the Englishman stayed where he was, watching them. I turned to him, introduced myself, and made some observation about being far from home. He shook my proffered hand. “Sherlock Holmes,” he said. “You’re from Edinburgh, I take it?”
“Not hard to tell that, I suppose,” I answered.
He was young—under thirty, I’d say—tall and lanky as a Kentuckian, and thin in the face, with a long, sharp jaw, rather narrow-set eyes, and a high-bridged, aquiline nose that gave his expression the aloof inquisitiveness of a bird of prey. His hair, a nondescript brown, was combed back from his high forehead and parted high on one side. His suit was of a light wool, and his tie carefully knotted. There was an indescribable Englishness about his whole person—something in the cut and cloth of his jacket, the set of his shoulders, and the supercilious way he looked down his long English nose at the crowd of men at the bar.
I asked him what brought him so far from home, and he said he’d been working and traveling in America. He paused and studied me for a few seconds, then said, “I could ask the same of you. I see that you write a lot, but you don’t appear to be employed, and you’re short of money. I’d guess you to be a literary man, but not at this point a particularly successful one.”
The remark was so unexpected and impertinent, coming from someone to whom I’d introduced myself only a moment ago, that I was left momentarily without a rejoinder. “What makes you think that?” I asked, a little hotly.
He gave me a thin smile. “Your right hand and shirt cuff are ink-stained,” he answered, with a glance toward the offending article, “and the cuff is worn and frayed where it would have rested against a writing-desk. Your clothes are threadbare, your belt is old and too large for you, and your jacket and pants haven’t been pressed or brushed for weeks. Your boots show that you haven’t been staying at the hotel. No hotel guest who could get his boots polished while he slept would let them get into such a state. Your face and hands are brown, but you are not in good health, so your color isn’t likely to have come from working in the sun, which leads me to surmise that you’ve been living outdoors. And,” he said finally, “there are bits of straw in your hair.”
His dissection of my appearance and finances made me flush with shame and irritation. “I apologize if I offended you, sir,” he said, in a tone that suggested that I was not the first person he had affronted with his observations. “I was simply answering your question.”
With some difficulty, I resolved to keep an open mind about my new acquaintance, if only because he was a fellow countryman. “It’s all right, really,” I said, with more lightness than I felt. “I’ve been mistaken for a hobo or a peddler before, but you’ve drawn me to the life—a poor literary fellow, camping here on the mountain for his health—though I confess I didn’t know about the straw.”
“Ah,” Holmes said, clearly pleased with himself. He paused, listening, excused himself, and walked to the bar. Corwin was saying to McConnell, “Why don’t we take a couple of men now and ride down to where it happened? Meet the sheriff on his way and maybe help track the fellow. I have fresh horses for four of us.” Corwin called to his younger son, “Jake, go help José saddle up Eddy, Duke, Pancho, and Red.”
Holmes had reached the counter where Corwin stood, collecting beer glasses. “May I ride there with you?” he asked.
Corwin thought for a second. “I guess so—seems like you could tell the sheriff a good deal more than some of these yokels. You can take Duke.” Holmes thanked him and disappeared out the door.
Corwin turned to me. “Would you like to come see how we handle these things, Mr. Stevenson?”
“But aren’t you out of horses?”
“True,” he said, and thought for a second or two. “You don’t mind riding a mule, do you? Won’t be as fast, but you’ll get there in time to see the fun. I shouldn’t think you’d want to join the posse anyway.”
“I don’t think my wife would stand for i
t,” I said.
Corwin nodded knowingly. “Women,” he said.
Hoddy and Corwin had just cleared the last of the beer mugs from the bar when Jake exploded into the saloon, shouting that the horses were in the yard. Corwin put down the towel he was using to wipe the bar and started for the door. McConnell downed the rest of his beer in one long swallow and followed. From the doorway, Corwin called back, “Tell José I said to saddle one of the mules for you, and we’ll see you there.”
The mule I was given was named Jasper. He was the size of a horse, with a horse’s bay coat, but with a head like an anvil and a most unhorselike self-possession and confidence in his own decisions. José explained, perhaps to reassure me, that he was kept by the hotel to carry ladies and invalids.
I was just as glad to be alone as I rode down the toll road, because I hardly cut a dashing figure on my steed. Jasper’s fastest gait appeared to be a matter-of-fact walk. If I tried to spur him with a kick of my heels in his flanks, he shook his head slightly, in a fatherly way, declining my pleas to enlist him in such recklessness. During our short journey, the stage to Calistoga hurtled past us in a chaos of dust, pounding hoofs, clattering wheels, and shouts. Jasper edged carefully to the side of the road and gazed reproachfully at the receding coach before resuming his dutiful progress.
The scene of the robbery was a ford, where a small creek crossed the road. It had washed out part of the downhill side, and the coach would have slowed to cross it. Tall pines and oaks overhung the road, and vines, bushes, and saplings grew together in a tangled mass beneath them. Its lushness and shade were ominous, as if created for an ambush—the sort of place a solitary walker might pass through with a quickening of heart and pace and a glance or two over his shoulder.
Sherlock Holmes: The American Years Page 27