Wishful Seeing

by Janet Kellough

  Thaddeus knew he was close to the house when he smelled woodsmoke. As he rounded yet another turn in the path, he saw a small, squat building that appeared to be a rude settler’s shanty that had been improved in a haphazard fashion. A room had been added to one side and a shed built at the back, but the basic log structure was still clearly visible. He rode farther into the dooryard and called out. There was no answer but the plaintive bellow of a cow, and off in the distance the yelp of a dog.

  Behind the house a privy leaned at an alarming angle, surrounded by untrimmed nettles and stalks of goldenrod. Beyond a square of kitchen garden was a small barn, little more than a drive shed, with a hole above the carriage door where the wind had ripped the boards away. It was a grim holding, slowly falling into ruin, and at complete odds with the prosperous public face the Howells presented.

  He called again, but was answered only by the cow. She was standing behind the barn, in obvious distress, in a small field hemmed in by the outbuildings and the slope of the hill that rose steeply from the meadow. Thaddeus went through the gate and pushed open a Dutch door that led into the back of the barn. One side of the building had been fashioned into stalls of a sort. There was a metal bucket in one of them. Thaddeus turned to discover that the cow had followed him in, hoping, he expected, that someone would relieve the pressure on her bulging udder. He stood aside and she walked into the stall. He grabbed the bucket and a three-legged stool he found beside the door. It had been many years since he had milked a cow, not since he had been a lad back on his father’s farm, and even then he hadn’t done it often. Milking was women’s work. Generally men were too ham-fisted to achieve the sure and regular strokes that reassured the cow and made the milk flow.

  It took him a few minutes to get the rhythm, but then the warm, frothy milk began to squirt into the bucket. Fortunately, this cow wasn’t a kicker, no matter what Ellen Howell claimed.

  He stopped when the pail was half full. The cow seemed content, and the milk would give him an excuse to enter the house, should anyone happen along and challenge him. He turned the beast out into the meadow again and walked to the back door of the house.

  “Hello?” he called. There was no answer, so he pushed the door open.

  “Hello?” he said again. What was the girl’s name? Mrs. Howell had told it to him at the debate, but he met so many people that day that it wasn’t surprising he couldn’t remember it. He would have to ask the Gordons.

  He made only a cursory inspection of the cabin. The stove was quite hot, and there were dishes still on the drain board by the pump. It was clear that someone had been here recently. More than just been here — lived here. If the old farmer was to be believed, it was the Howell girl, but why on earth did she run off whenever anyone approached? More to the point, how did she know when there was someone coming down the lane?

  He set the pail by the sink and left, shutting the door carefully behind him. Ashby had instructed him to take a good look around, but he could scarcely snoop through the house in the face of such obvious habitation. He would have to find answers in some other way.

  Even so, he scanned his surroundings again before he headed back down the laneway. There was nothing to see but the weathered buildings huddled under the tree-covered hill. Again he could hear the bark of a dog, but the sound was muffled. It must be a long way off, he thought.

  To his surprise, the old farmer had pulled to one side of the road fifty feet or so from the entrance to the lane. Thaddeus waved a greeting at him and rode on.

  “Caroline. Her name is Caroline,” Leland said when Thaddeus reached the Gordon house in Sully, “although I’ve never addressed her as anything but ‘Miss Howell.’ She’s never been exactly friendly.”

  “An old farmer I met on the road said she runs and hides whenever anyone comes near.”

  “She’s been doing that ever since her mother was arrested. Ma did some baking the other day and I took a loaf of bread and a pie over to her. We figured that might be something she didn’t know how to do for herself, you see. She was nowhere in sight, so I just left it on the table.”

  Thaddeus was pleased that the Gordons had at least thought of the girl, which seemed to be more than either of her parents had done, or himself for that matter. And maybe other neighbours had reached out to her, only to be ignored.

  “How does she know when someone’s coming?” he asked. “She’d obviously been there, but hid well before I got to the end of the lane.”

  “It’s the dog. Just an old mutt, but he won’t leave her side. I expect he knows someone’s coming before they even turn in and he barks to let her know. That lane is so long, she’d have plenty of time to hide.”

  Thaddeus thought the barks had come from a long way away, but as he thought about it, he realized that the sound had been muffled. It could have come from behind a closed door inside a building. Where had the girl been? The house consisted of nothing more than a couple of rooms and a shed. He hadn’t searched them, but he was sure the barking hadn’t come from inside the house. The barn was a simple woodshed, not nearly as large as the drive shed at the manse. And he hadn’t heard anything while he was inside milking the cow.

  It was puzzling, but since there had been little to see other­wise, Thaddeus doubted that it had any relevance to the case. He’d report his lack of findings to Ashby, and in the meantime get whatever information he could from the Gordons.

  “You don’t happen to know what kind of business Major Howell is in, do you? Or where he goes when he goes away?”

  “That’s the question everybody’s asking,” Gordon said, “including the chief constable. Some say it’s something to do with promoting railway bonds, but to tell you the truth, I know so little about that sort of thing I’d be hard-put to tell you what it’s all about — or how anyone makes a living from it. Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve found a barrister who’s willing to represent Mrs. Howell. He’s set up all kinds of inquiries, but I’m not sure which ones in particular will serve to help her case. Neither does he at this point. I’m just looking for whatever information I can find.”

  Gordon looked relieved. “Ma and I talked about trying to find someone, but we were a little afraid of the cost.”

  “As was I. He’s working for free. He’s just graduated and thinks being involved in a high-profile murder trial will cement his reputation.” Thaddeus shrugged. “I figured it was better than court-appointed.”

  “Well, it’s certainly better than we managed.”

  And Thaddeus was reminded once again of the essential goodness of people like the Gordons, who were willing to consider helping a neighbour even when the neighbour wasn’t very neighbourly.

  Martha saw her grandfather off in the morning, then set about tidying up from the dinner party the night before. She had been too keyed up to wash the dishes or shake out the tablecloth after Ashby left, deciding instead to bid Thaddeus good night and go to bed. She lay awake a long time, though, going over and over the rather stupendous events of the evening.

  She had never before encountered anyone quite like Towns Ashby. There had been many gentlemen travellers who stayed at the Temperance Hotel in Wellington — businessmen, salesmen, well-to-do farmers, representatives from the Agricultural Society. They had paid no attention to her, other than to ask her to fetch them a clean napkin or a fresh pitcher of lemonade — except for that one occasion when she had been airing the beds on the second floor and had been cornered by a paunchy, red-faced man who claimed he wanted to show her something, and would pay her a pound if she let him. She had grabbed a bolster and raised it as a weapon.

  “If I scream, my father will be here in thirty seconds,” she said. “Do you really want everyone to know what you just said to me?”

  Then she had backed away from him slowly, until she was close to the door. Keeping her eyes on the man, she reached behind her and wrenched it open. Then she threw t
he bolster at him and ran down the stairs.

  She hadn’t told anyone about it. She figured it was all just a little pathetic. Like the boys at school who had sometimes followed her down the street in a pack, making comments and elbowing each other until the day she reached down and picked up one of the road apples some passing horse had dropped. She spun around and threw as hard as she could, and was rewarded when the nugget landed squarely in the middle of Harry Pitt’s forehead. They hadn’t been so bold after that, and she had ignored them from then on.

  She hadn’t ever had anyone actually bow to her before, like Ashby had done. It had been very slight, and extremely elegant. At first she was amused by it, then a little intimidated, a feeling that intensified during dinner as he and her grandfather discussed the Howells, and Ashby so slowly and deliberately ate his food, delicately dabbing his mouth with his napkin and laying his knife and fork down between bites. Towns Ashby was a cut far above the farmers and shopkeepers and blacksmiths she normally encountered. He was aptly named, she decided. He had town manners. A city shine. Not that she was a bush girl by any stretch of the imagination, but she had grown up in a village, not a city, and she hoped that she hadn’t seemed like too much of a country mouse. She mustn’t have, she finally concluded. Otherwise he would never have included her in the after-dinner discussion about the case. But she resolved that should he ever come to dinner again, she would try to copy his manners, and not wolf down her food quite so hastily.

  When she finally confronted the dinner dishes the next morning, they were caked in a congealed mess from having sat all night. With a sigh, Martha set them to soak, then went into the dining room to clear away the table. She carefully folded the cloth so that she could carry it outside and shake it, but as she was shoving the chair back, her foot bumped against something solid. Puzzled, she reached down to discover a book: Commentaries Volume I, by Sir William Blackstone. It must have been in Ashby’s valise. He’d taken it out, no doubt, when he removed his notes, and then forgotten that he’d set it on the floor. She leafed through it, stopped and read a paragraph here and there, and then, dishes forgotten, she moved a chair closer to the window where the strong morning light would make it easier to read.

  Both the life and limbs of a man are of such high value, in the estimation of the law of England, that it pardons even homicide if committed se defendendo, or in order to preserve them. For whatever is done by a man to save either life or member, is looked upon as done upon the highest necessity and compulsion. Therefore, if a man through fear of death or mayhem is prevailed upon to execute a deed, or do any other legal act; these, though accompanied with all other the requisite solemnities, may be afterwards avoided, if forced upon him by a well-grounded apprehension of losing his life, or even his limbs, in case of his non-compliance. And the same is also a sufficient excuse for the commission of many misdemeanors, as will appear in the fourth book. The constraint a man is under in these circumstances is called in law duress, from the Latin durities, of which there are two sorts: duress of imprisonment, where a man actually loses his liberty, of which we shall presently speak; and duress per minas, where the hardship is only threatened and impending, which is that we are now discoursing of. Duress per minas is either for fear of loss of life, or else for fear of mayhem, or loss of limb. And this fear must be upon sufficient reason.

  This was followed by a long phrase in a language that she couldn’t read. Latin, she suspected, but she would have to ask Thaddeus when he returned. She thought it must reiterate the concept expressed in the paragraph: that killing someone in fear of one’s life was an adequate defence under the law. She wondered if it could be argued that Mrs. Howell had been in fear of her life. Or even Mr. Howell, she supposed. If one of them had shot Paul Sherman because they were both being threatened, then surely the exoneration would extend to the other as well.

  She discovered that it might not be nearly that simple a little further on in the book. “But though our law in general considers man and wife as one person, yet there are some instances in which she is separately considered; as inferior to him, and acting by his compulsion. And in some felonies, and other inferior crimes, committed by her, through constraint of her husband, the law excuses her: but this extends not to treason or murder.”

  Martha was a little taken aback by this passage. A woman could be excused, apparently, for obeying her husband in committing a crime unless it was one of the ones that could get her into the most trouble. Then she was on her own.

  She hoped that she had misinterpreted the text; otherwise, it hardly seemed fair that a woman was deemed inferior and subject to obedience to her husband right up until the time he told her to kill somebody.

  She read on, struggling through the unfamiliar terms and foreign phrases, trying to understand. Thaddeus knew a great deal about a great many things, but she judged that this was beyond even her grandfather’s expertise. She would have to take her questions to Ashby, if she got the chance.

  The sun was high in the sky by the time she put the book down, her eyes tired from reading, her mind whirling with questions. She was about to go to the kitchen to attend to the still-unwashed dishes when there was a knock on the front door.

  And there, on the porch, stood Towns Ashby, as if she had conjured him.

  He tipped his hat. “Miss Renwell, I’m sorry to disturb you, but in the process of packing my things I discovered that I have misplaced one of my books. I wondered if you, by any chance, had run across it.”

  “The Blackstone? Yes, it was by your chair. Please come in. It will only take a moment for me to fetch it. I’m afraid I took the liberty of reading a little of it.”

  He looked surprised. “Really? I would hardly call Blackstone a suitable book for a morning’s light entertainment. I could barely get through it myself.” He stepped into the hall, leaving the door ajar behind him.

  “I think you’ll find that many ladies are interested in more than the latest trashy novels,” Martha said. “The trouble is, no one ever gives us anything meatier.”

  He laughed. “Point taken. From now on I’ll endeavour to leave behind only the driest and most uninteresting of my textbooks. Perhaps I can get you to read them and tell me what they say.”

  She didn’t give an inch. “I’d be delighted.” She went through to the dining room and retrieved the Blackstone. When she returned, a scowling James Small was standing on the porch.

  “Is everything all right, Martha?” he asked.

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  Small shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably. “Well, you know, a strange man at the door, and then he goes inside. You never know. There are a lot of ruffians about. The railway crew and so forth.”

  Ashby had an amused smile on his face, one eyebrow lifted in question. Just then Martha could have leaped at Small and strangled him by his bobbing Adam’s apple.

  “Mr. Ashby may be strange to you, Mr. Small, but he’s not to me.”

  “It’s just that I know your grandfather isn’t home right now. I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “I’m fine, thank you. Mr. Ashby has just come to retrieve the book he left behind last night.”

  “And now that I have it,” Ashby said, taking it from Martha, “I’ll be on my way. I have some information for your grand­father, incidentally, but perhaps it would be better if I wrote to him.” His eyes slid sideways toward Small. “My steamer leaves shortly, but I’ll send a letter as soon as I get back to the city.” He tipped his hat again. “Miss Renwell. Mr. Small.” And then he exited the door and sauntered away down the path.

  “Well, if you’re all right, then I’ll just go too,” Small said, although he didn’t move from where he was standing.

  “Thank you,” Martha said, and closed the door in his face. Then she let out an exasperated sigh. She couldn’t believe how fast Small had come galloping across the yard, and how quickly he’
d managed to chase Towns Ashby away. She’d wanted to talk to Ashby. She’d wanted to ask him questions about what she’d read. She’d wanted to hear what he had found out about the Howell case. But most of all, she’d just wanted him to stay a little longer.

  After a few moments, she allowed herself a peek out the parlour window. Small had finally given up on any thought of being invited in and was loping back across the yard.

  III

  “I stopped at your farm the other day,” Thaddeus said to the figure sitting on the narrow bunk. “I was passing anyway, and I thought it was an opportunity to make sure that everything was all right. I hope you don’t mind.”

  The heavy wooden door to Ellen Howell’s cell had been left open, but Thaddeus hesitated to walk right in, leaning instead against the solid oak jamb.

  “And was it all right?” she asked.

  “As far as I could tell. There seemed to be someone still living there. The neighbours seem to think it’s your daughter.”

  She looked puzzled. “Caroline is still there?”

  “I don’t know that for sure,” Thaddeus replied. “The stove was warm. There were dishes by the pump waiting to be washed. I called, but no one answered.”

  She appeared to take a moment to digest this information. “How odd.”

  “I agree,” Thaddeus said. “I would have thought that someone would take her in. One of your friends, perhaps, if you have no family here.”

  “I have no family anywhere,” she said, “and my friends, unfortunately, are not well-placed to feed another mouth.”