Cordelia Underwood, or the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

  “Thank you,” said Scott, and he sat down at her kitchen table, looking weary, and laid his hat on his knee.

  “What, are you going to eat and run?” she asked, snapping up the hat and finding a hook for it by the back door. She made a pleasant clatter with the kettle on the stove and the pie plate from its cupboard and the plates and cups. “That was a piece of work you managed, rescuing Miss Underwood,” she said.

  “She would have rescued herself, I think, given the time,” he answered.

  “I daresay you’re right, though her family was glad enough not to wait. They’ll be talking about that trick with Pete Stem’s privy from now until the cows come home.”

  Scott made a sound like a laugh, and Mrs. Cuthbert had more hope for him. It seemed unsensible not to enjoy your own cleverness just a bit.

  “Willy, over at the livery,” she said, “says he’s going to fix his outhouse down before one of the boys gets a funny idea.”

  “How was Miss Underwood?” he asked suddenly.

  Mrs. Cuthbert never hesitated in her movements—slicing the pie, easing the pieces onto the plates. “She was pretty shaken, still, when she got here. She went upstairs and fell asleep in her mother’s arms like a child. But she came down the next morning, and it looked like excitement more than fright, now that she knew it was all over. Her jaw was still a little sore.” The landlady laid a large piece of strawberry pie in front of the guide. “Just as pretty as ever,” she added.

  He glanced up at her, then took the fork that she handed to him.

  “She was sorry that she couldn’t thank you again before she left. They all were. You didn’t meet Mister Walton, did you?”

  “Mister Walton?”

  “Well, you should,” she said, without explanation. “Oh, and I have something for you . . .” She scurried into the parlor and returned with an envelope. “Well, take it,” she said, when he didn’t immediately do so.

  Scott looked at the envelope and saw James Underwood’s name in one corner. “What is it?”

  “It’s payment for work, I imagine.”

  “But Mr. Underwood and I settled up before we left.” He peered at the enclosure, as if it might divulge its contents out of fear from a hard look.

  “You’ll know more about it if you open it up,” suggested Mrs. Cuthbert, who was not above admitting that she was curious.

  He hooked a big thumb into the envelope and tore it open. Several slips of paper fell out onto the table. The first bore James Underwood’s handwriting:

  Dear Mr. Scott,

  I hope that someday you might know how precious a child is to his or her parents, and if ever that child is in peril, I hope that someone like yourself is nearby to lend a hand.

  James Underwood

  The next piece of paper unfolded into a bank note of embarrassing proportions. Mrs. Cuthbert’s eyebrows arched when Scott looked up. “I can’t accept this,” he said, holding up the bank note.

  “And why not?” she asked.

  “I just couldn’t, is all. You contract out to guide people, you don’t take money for . . .” He was almost angry with Mr. Underwood for his generosity.

  “He knew you didn’t expect anything, which is probably why he left it.”

  “Well, he shouldn’t have. I can’t accept it. I’ll send it back to him. Is there a return address?” He couldn’t find one on James’s short letter, so he opened the third piece of paper. A handwriting that he had never seen, but immediately recognized, unfolded before him. It read:

  Dear Mr. Scott,

  I do hope you will understand how truly grateful I am for your troubles on my behalf. I have seldom felt myself in such capable hands and was never so glad to see someone as I was to see you when you arrived at the cabin where I was being held.

  I fear that my behavior on the trail home showed little graciousness and I can only plead exhaustion in hopes that you will forgive me.

  I would like someday to return to my land near Millinocket, and I would be thankful for any advice as to what I might do with it. I promise, there are no more buried treasures, as far as I know, and a visit there would surely prove less eventful.

  My mother asks me to tell you that she is perturbed with you for not letting her thank you personally for my rescue.

  And I thank you again.

  With fond regards,

  Cordelia Underwood

  At the bottom of the page, deliberately (some might say boldly) written, was the Underwoods’ address in Portland. Scott stared at the letter for some minutes, forgetting his pie.

  Mrs. Cuthbert could see the feminine hand through the paper from her seat opposite Scott. “She was worth the trouble, I think,” she said.

  Scott looked up, looking as if he would have liked to agree with her, but only took a deep breath before saying, “I can’t keep this bank note.”

  “You’re supposed to cash it in, not keep it.”

  Scott pulled a frown. “I’ll send it back to them.”

  “Send it?”

  “Yes.” He began to fold the papers back into the envelope.

  Mrs. Cuthbert didn’t seem to hear the tea kettle whistling. “Send it?” she said again. “You don’t send something like that back, like a badly tailored suit! You deliver it personally!”

  “Take it myself?”

  “How else?”

  “Hand it to Mr. Underwood myself?” Scott’s ears grew red, just thinking of it.

  “You couldn’t send it in the mail. It would seem like an insult.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “If you give it back, which you say you must, you have to deliver it yourself and inquire after Miss Underwood.”

  This gave Dresden Scott pause for thought.

  “It’s really the only way to soften the act of returning their gift to you.”

  It all sounded sensible to Scott somehow, but he shook his head. “I don’t think she wants to see me again.”

  “And why not?”

  Scott hesitated, shrugged, then said, “I spoke some harsh words to her, out on the trail.”

  “Did you apologize to her?”

  “Not exactly,” he answered, then shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, then you have to go down there, don’t you.”

  “I can’t go down there. Mr. Benning will just think that I’ve gone down there to lord it over him, after he thought so poorly of me.”

  “Mr. Benning?” asked Mrs. Cuthbert, pausing on her way to the stove. “What makes you think you’ll see Mr. Benning?”

  “He and Miss Underwood were obviously . . .”

  “Good heavens!” said the landlady again. “What you know about it you could fit in a thimble and have room for your finger!” She picked up the kettle and poured the hot water into the teapot. “Mr. Benning is long gone, I can tell you.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I talked with her mother.”

  “Well, it certainly looked to me—”

  “Looked to you! What did the young lady say in her letter?”

  Scott looked uncomfortable. “Did she thank you?”

  “Yes, she did, but . . .”

  “You say you had words. It takes two, you know, to have words. Did she apologize?”

  “Actually, yes, but . . .”

  “Did she say she hoped to see you again?”

  Scott was beginning to wonder if the woman had read the letter herself. “Well, she did, in so many words.”

  Dunking the tea ball in the kettle, Mrs. Cuthbert leaned forward for the coup de grace. “Did she leave her address?”

  This was all a little too fast for Scott. His head was spinning. He scratched at his beard. “Yes . . .”

  “Ha!” said the woman in triumph.

  “What are you saying?” he asked after she had poured out the tea.

  “You can’t win her up here in the woods, can you? Not when she’s home in Portland.”

  She looked him squarely on, and he decided that the only w
ay to confront his own sense of awkwardness was to look her squarely back. “Win her,” he said, so far beneath his breath that it sounded like nothing more than a quick exhalation.

  “Faint heart never won fair maiden,” she intoned, which almost made him laugh.

  “How did you know that I had any feelings for her at all?”

  “Eat your pie,” said Mrs. Cuthbert.

  JULY 30, 1896

  The latter half of July, 1896 proved to be a model of changeable weather across the coast of Maine, with thunderstorms and showers hard upon the heels of sunny humid days and gentle western winds. Clear skies would break behind the rain till the heat and humidity closed once more as the cycle began anew. The thermometers in Portland reached eighty-eight degrees on Wednesday the 29th of July, a day of heavy air and little wind. Mister Walton mopped his brow as he and Sundry left the waterfront in an open carriage, and the breeze from their movement was welcome.

  For two weeks they had taken up the pursuit of the treasure, carefully treading the sometimes narrow path between the authorities in Bangor and the wary denizens of the Devil’s Half-Acre. The authorities themselves were on the prowl—and John Benning as well.

  But the treasure had disappeared, vanished from common knowledge, though Mister Walton demonstrated powers of detection that quite impressed his young friend, and even posited a theory that (though not provable) was close to the truth. He also sensed, wherever they went, the presence of John Benning before them; hence his search for Benning himself, and (with the help of a certain fellow who walked in suspect circles) his visit aboard the Elaborate.

  They had taken some leisure in returning to Portland, but having arrived at the western end of the waterfront, they felt that their immediate duty was to pay their respects to the Underwoods.

  Sundry sat across from his employer and friend, his long legs stretched the limit of the carriage floor, his arms folded and his eyes nearly closed. One would think, in the close air and in so nearly a supine position that the young man’s perceptive faculties were at best vague; but there was something in Mister Walton’s manner, an air of quiet distraction as the bespectacled fellow gazed upon the passing city, that caught Sundry’s attention. He said nothing, but when Mister Walton’s gaze rested briefly upon him, Sundry raised a nimble eyebrow to indicate a wordless question.

  “I have been thinking of Miss McCannon,” said Mister Walton, almost with a sigh.

  “I liked her very much,” said Sundry, suggesting perhaps that thinking of her was not a waste of his friend’s time.

  “Yes.” Mister Walton almost sighed a second time. “We left Damariscotta rather precipitately.”

  “You had no chance to say goodbye.”

  “Exactly. It seemed necessary, of course, to hurry, but I fear she may have felt it odd, after our pleasant two days together, that I simply left without a word.”

  “I sent word to her from the hotel before we left,” said Sundry.

  “Good heavens! Did you?” Mister Walton suddenly sat very straight in his seat. “My good friend, how efficient of you! And how considerate!”

  “All in the day of a gentleman’s gentleman,” returned Sundry with a negligent wave of his hand.

  “Oh, my! I am much relieved. I am only sorry not to know where she lives, and where she was going from Damariscotta. We never did exchange addresses.”

  “I sent her yours with the message,” said Sundry, never stirring from the horizontal.

  Mister Walton let out a delighted laugh then, which turned the head of the carriage driver and those of several nearby pedestrians. Sundry did not smile, but he shook slightly with a suppressed chuckle.

  “Thank you, Sundry,” said Mister Walton. They were on High Street by then, and it was not long before they reached the junction with Spring Street, on one corner of which stood the Underwoods’ home. The driver was asked to wait for them, and he stood in the shade of his own rig while they advanced along the walk and mounted the steps to the door.

  Grace Morningside generally approved of her brother-in-law, and so was sorry that he had allowed so much trouble to occur; James himself had seemed sufficiently apologetic for his part in the affair, so she said very little about it.

  The Underwoods spent only a single night at Ellsworth on their way home to Portland, but in that short time Grace was convinced that her presence was required to rehabilitate them after their traumatic experience in the wilderness. The day after their departure from Morningside House, she decided to follow them. Priscilla and Ethan were ecstatic, though careful to hide from their mother such a superfluity of emotion.

  Convinced that hasty preparation had led to the downfall of the Under-woods’ expedition, Grace took several days to ready her own excursion; one could not, after all, be sure to find in Portland those amenities so taken for granted in Ellsworth. Priscilla and Ethan were mad with impatience, and just as careful to appear otherwise.

  Grace and her children arrived with a small mountain of baggage, which was brought to the gate by two heavily laden carriages and labored into the Underwoods’ house by a horde of porters. James and Mercia were pleased to see Grace, and grateful for her efforts; they were more than a little sobered by their recent trials, and welcomed even Grace’s officiousness as a means of distraction.

  “Don’t concern yourself,” said Grace to Mercia about one domestic chore after another. As it turned out, it was the best thing for Mercia to be so completely inactive, because she grew so completely weary of inactivity that much quicker.

  James wisely took Ethan fishing, where silence and philosophy have always reigned.

  Cordelia was of course pleased to have Priscilla close at hand once more, but that did not prevent her from spending a good deal of time by herself—lost in a haze of melancholia. Priscilla—understanding, if a little disappointed—took her cousin’s inherited copy of Tristram Shandy where she thought her mother wouldn’t find her and wended her astonished way through it in three days. She was closing the book and saying to herself “Good heavens!” on that third day, when the bell at the front door was rung.

  Cordelia was roused by the bell at the front door.

  Fully clothed on her bed, one arm draped over her eyes to bar the distracting light of day—she had lain there for an hour or more, having wandered the house all morning and part of the afternoon like a discontented ghost. Through the window screens she could hear the soft rattle of leaves in the slight breeze, and the ha! hee-hee-hee-hee of a robin in the oak by her window. Her thoughts, predictably, were of the forests she had briefly visited, and of a certain man whose home they were.

  The hours of her abduction and rescue seemed hardly believable to her, and by now she had spent more hours thinking about those two days than she had living them. Certainly she had spent more time talking to Mr. Scott in her mind than she had in person.

  And there was the rub, for she could not regret what had happened, even though the thought of it could make her angry still. Conversely she thought she should regret having met Mr. Scott, the days since their parting had lingered so. But she had only to recall the humor that had spread across his otherwise serious features when he caught sight of her—barefoot, ladle in hand—standing over Ernest’s unconscious form, and she would almost laugh with a quickening and painful pleasure.

  “I will go back,” she said to herself a thousand times, but it was not enough. The bereft heart must feel on good terms with the object of its affections, and she could not imagine that Mr. Scott had much use for her. Her poor showing on the trail back to Millinocket haunted her out of all proportion to the real event; and even the knowledge that this was probably so was small comfort. “I can’t go back,” she said to herself a thousand times.

  And before she had the opportunity to say either of these things to herself a thousand and one times, the bell at the front door rang and she was gratefully startled from her regrets.

  Her heart raced with the absurd notion that Mr. Scott had come to call, and she al
lowed herself this illusion for the brief moment it took to smooth down her skirts and hurry into the front hall. Voices carried up the stairs—her Aunt Grace greeting someone with formal cordiality, and a male voice responding in a courtly manner that Cordelia found pleasingly familiar.

  Mister Walton had not met Grace Morningside and thought that they had come to the wrong door; clearly, from her dress, this was no servant.

  “Pardon us,” he said with a deep and expressive bow, his hat in his hands. “We were looking for the James Underwoods.”

  “I am Grace Morningside,” she said, responding to Mister Walton’s unstudied charm with elegance; she returned his bow with the smallest inkling of a curtsy. In her voice, Mister Walton could hear who she was before she had further introduced herself as Mercia’s sister.

  Clearly he was charmed. Even Sundry straightened his already straight posture, though Grace was of a generation with his parents. James entered the hall then and greeted the visitors with undisguised pleasure.

  Then Cordelia appeared from above, and there was more lilt in her step, when she reached the bottom of the stairs, than she had exhibited in a week. She did not accept a simple bow from Mister Walton, and certainly not a handshake, but embraced him as she might have a beloved uncle. He reddened from ear to ear with pleasure. Even Grace appeared content with this display.

  “I trust you are much recovered,” he hoped aloud.

  “Sir,” said James to Sundry, when the young man was introduced, “I am very pleased to meet you. We are in your debt.”

  “My word,” said Sundry, sincerely taken aback. “How could that be?”

  “Why, for your efforts on our behalf,” said James.

  “I would hope for more success the next time I offer help.”