The Tarleton Murders

by Breck England

  We sat in silence for a moment while my mind tried to twist itself round these complications. The small pot of tea was empty, and I could have murdered another cup; but just then I was shocked to my feet by a rap on the door. It was James.

  “Please, suh, let me in. They after me again.”

  Holmes was a blur as he took the stairs in a couple of leaps. I pulled James inside the room.

  “What happened? Why did you come back?”

  Sweating and out of breath, James sagged to the floor. I struggled to get him back on the bed—he was still weak from his ordeal of two nights before, and now bore further marks of a wild race through miry streets.

  Holmes returned to give me a hand. “I saw no one in the street. That is of course no guarantee that they are not out there. We hoped you had found safety, James.”

  “Oh, I been plumb stupid. I knows how to hide in the back country so nobody kin find me, but I stops at a colored tavern on the way out of town—just for a stiffener, you know.”

  Holmes glanced at his flask on the dressing table and groaned.

  “Well, the bartender, he ain’t never heard of no London gin,” James went on, “all he has is corn liquor, so I has me some of that, just a touch cuz it don’t stiffen. But when I walks out to git on my way, who do I see ‘cross the street? A one-arm man. And he looks at me and I looks at him and I knowed it was the same one-arm devil tried to hang me.

  “He shouts at me to stop, but I takes off like li’l brother rabbit, over fences and through trees and even a nasty briar patch, and I been hidin’ in a mudhole under the railroad tracks since sun-up.”

  “You must have succeeded in evading them or they would be upon us now,” Holmes said. “But we must lose no time to be quit of this place. Tuck, take him into the back garden and see that he cleans himself.”

  Holmes stood utterly still for a moment, his arm raised as if turned to stone. I thought perhaps he had heard something.

  “James, this misfortune may turn our way yet,” he said. “I have an idea. Can you read and write?”

  “Yes, suh. I learned at the Freedmen’s school before they shut it.”

  “Excellent. I must send a wire or two and I will return,” and out the door he went.

  “He sure do come and go,” James said.

  Scarcely a half hour later, James was clean (after the application of several pails of cold water from a well behind the hotel) and barely dressed in a dry shirt and trousers borrowed from Holmes—a much leaner man. Just then Holmes came back.

  “Great heavens, Tuck. This man needs clothing. To the rectory!”

  Holmes packed his carpetbag in an instant and the three of us were on horseback headed for the church. Covered by Holmes’s greatcoat and hat, James looked almost respectable—except for his bare, freezing feet. At the rectory, we found some proper clothes for him among the discards collected for the poor, and Holmes donated his coat and hat. Although no gentleman, James now looked at least respectable.

  “Now James,” said Holmes, seated at a table and writing at high speed, “I propose to put you beyond the reach of these pointy-capped scoundrels for a time, and meanwhile you could do us all a great service—that is, if you’re willing.”

  “For a time? How long is ‘for a time’? I’m already missin’ my fam’ly.”

  “Three weeks!” Holmes exclaimed. “Mind, the success of that effort now rests partially with you. If you can succeed with my plan, you shall be completely exonerated and free to return to your family, possibly within the month.”

  James look at us skeptically. He was no fool. “What I got to do?

  “I want you to take ship for Jamaica and stay there until I call you back. Here are two letters. The first is your introduction to a certain gentleman. In the second, I have written instructions for you which you must follow exactly if you are to have any hope of returning.”

  James regarded me as if to ask if Holmes had lost his mind.

  “James,” I said, “I know it sounds like a mad request. But if I were you, I would do as Mr. Holmes asks—and do it exactly as he asks. Believe me, I speak from experience.”

  “Jamaica? I ain’ hardly been out of Georgia but once in my life.”

  Holmes began rushing him out the door. “We will accompany you as far as the station. The rest is up to you. Give him some money, Tuck.”

  I was relieved when the red-brick Union Station came into view, its maw like a whale’s mouth breathing out steam—all the better for us, who were doing our best to be inconspicuous. We bought passage for James to Savannah, where he could board a ship for the West Indies, and saw him safely off on the train.

  “And now I must bid you farewell also, Tuck,” Holmes said.

  I was startled, to say the least. “What? Where are you going?”

  “Lexington, Kentucky.”

  “Of course,” I said with inescapable sarcasm. “Where else?”

  Shivering in the misty depot without his coat and hat, Holmes shrugged and started walking away. I struggled after him.

  “Lexington?” I whispered. “Why?”

  “I am an English gent touring the Kentucky horse country with an eye to acquiring some horseflesh. Why else would anyone go there?”

  “All right, but would you at least enlighten me about James? Why have you sent him to Jamaica? What is he to do there?”

  “I have asked him to find employment at the Tarleton property in Jamaica and to find out as much as he can about the Tarletons, their history there, and what happened to the son of Perdita and Bloody Ban.”

  “And how is James to accomplish all of this? He has no education, no money, no references—and how is he to insinuate himself into a position with the Tarleton plantation?”

  “I gather you have little faith in James,” Holmes responded as we raced across the depot. “I believe he is perfectly equal to the task. And I am giving him a little help.

  “At Oxford, I knew a student named Reginald Musgrave—he is the tenant of Hurlstone Hall and a scion of one of the oldest Tory families in England. He and I were much alike, not generally popular among the undergraduates and too diffident to make friends with any but each other. Through him, I met his uncle Sir Antony Musgrave, the governor of the British West Indies. Without going into particulars, Sir Antony has occasionally required my services and is rather obliged to me. James is armed with a letter from me to Sir Antony. I imagine the governor of the colony will have little difficulty arranging a few things for our friend.

  “And now if you will excuse me, I see the train for Nashville is boarding, and I must be on it if I am to make my connections.”

  “But Holmes, what am I to do in your absence?”

  “Do? My dear friend, what does a Jesuit do? I assume you have duties.”

  He walked rapidly toward the train, turned, and called out, “You shall hear from me.”

  And he disappeared down the platform into a veil of steam.

  Chapter 25

  The grinding machinery of the train blasting out fire and smoke brought hell to mind, and my Virgil had abandoned me in the midst of this inferno. Once again, I was forced to go on without Holmes, dropped just like Sprüngli and Jimmy the plumber and his miserable young Deputies of the London streets and everyone else he encountered whose utility was temporary. People were tools to him—to be picked up, used, and packed away when no longer needed. “My dear friend” indeed!

  Cut loose in this fashion, I decided to return to Charleston and my duties, as Holmes had suggested. There was nothing for me to do in Atlanta, and I had been too long away in any case. Sister Carolina was very short with me when I called on her, saying she would prefer to stay with her family until after the Christmas holidays. I returned the chestnut mare to Marta, who startled me by giving me a hug and thanking me for saving her from the “gools” that night in the forest. I protested t
hat it was not I who had saved her, but she did not hear me over her insistent sing-song.

  I also called on Joe Harris to say goodbye. I apologized for Holmes’s brusque behavior toward him, but Harris’s eyes brightened.

  “N-not at all! I found him … delightful. His disguises, his brilliant s-schemes …

  I’d never imagined such a character existed!”

  Neither had I, I confessed.

  “The miracle he p-pulled off in rescuing us from the Klan! … and then pretending to be … to be a messenger-boy from the Constitution and saving James again! R-R-Right under the very nose of the j-jailer… .”

  “Yes, he is a remarkable fellow.”

  “So ingenious and … unselfish … .”

  I agreed in a tepid sort of way. “Will you be writing James’s story for your newspaper? The people of this city should know about the scoundrels that roam their streets and even run the jails.”

  Abashed, Harris said no. We were seated at his desk in the newspaper office: he took a sheet of paper, wrote quickly while a finger rested on his lips, and then quietly passed me the message:

  “My superiors don’t care to publish things that put the South in bad odor. They speak of a ‘New South’ where the old injustices are long past. In their eyes the Klan is no more, and the colored people are all perfectly satisfied and happy and everyone gets along just fine.”

  “But these are lies,” I whispered.

  Harris winced, and we stared helplessly at each other.

  “Well,” I surrendered, standing. “I’ll be on my way. But first I wanted very much to thank you for your acquaintance and help. These few days have been memorable to say the least. I’m sorry Mr. Holmes left you without a word, but it is characteristic of him.”

  “He d-did leave a word. I have a … a job to do for him.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. He wants me to … to … .” Frustrated, he picked up a fresh telegram and showed it to me.

  “To J. Harris, Atlanta Constitution. I am leaving town for a few days. Please know I am grateful for your help while in Atlanta. Be kind enough to arrange for Reverend Grosjean to join the Ring as soon as possible. With all good wishes, S. H.”

  “What podsnappery!” I almost shouted.

  “Sorry?”

  “Excuse me, dear fellow. It’s an English expression meaning, um, ‘what effrontery!’ He said nothing to me about this. And dash it! I don’t even know what it means. ‘Join the Ring’?”

  Amused, Harris began handwriting again in his quick, ornate style. It was much faster for him to write than to speak. I read:

  “The Atlanta Ring is a group of civic promoters headed by my editor, Henry W. Grady. They are mostly businessmen and politicians—the mayor, a senator, railroad men—boosting the New South. No idea why Mr. H. wants you among them, but I have faith in him and will try my best.”

  “You must have faith bang up the elephant,” I was spluttering by now. “Confound his mysteries. Why should the mayor of Atlanta have anything to do with a green Catholic schoolmaster from Charleston!?”

  “I am … already making the c-case.” Harris pulled a document from a machine on his desk that looked like a piano attached to a breadbox. The paper was covered with mechanical writing, the beginnings of a letter.

  “Dear Mr. Grady,

  It has occurred to me that an invitation might be extended to certain religious and academic leaders to join the Atlanta association for advancement of the New South. I think prominent Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish voices joined to yours could very well add influence to your efforts … .”

  I looked up at Harris. “But I am not prominent. Grady will want a bishop, not a junior Jesuit.”

  “I will … persuade him.”

  “You know your business,” I sighed. “But I can’t imagine what purpose it would serve for me to join such a group.”

  “Nor I,” he replied, and I saw a tiny tinge of mockery in that surprised-looking smile of his.

  “Holmes has considerable faith in you,” I told him.

  “And … in you.”

  Faith in me? I hadn’t thought of that—perhaps he expected more of me than was realistic. Was it possible that Holmes, who saw so clearly through what was mysterious to others, could not quite grasp that people like myself were not nearly as clear-sighted as he?

  As I put on my coat, I pointed to the piano-breadbox and asked, “What is that contraption?”

  “It’s called a … a t-type-writer… . a Remington Number Two.”

  “Remington? I thought they were manufacturers of weapons.”

  “Indeed they are,” said Harris, clear and strong, shaking both of my hands.

  He gave me a sheaf of pamphlets and speeches—information about the Atlanta Ring—and we took our leave of each other. I was soon on the train to Charleston and immersed in the transcript of a speech by Mr. Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution.

  I could hardly believe my eyes:

  The relations of the southern people with the negro are close and cordial… . Faith has been kept with him, in spite of calumnious assertions to the contrary… . Faith will be kept with him in the future. Nowhere on earth is there kindlier feeling, closer sympathy, or less friction between any classes of society than between the whites and blacks of the South today.

  If this were true, then the evidence of my own eyes and ears over the years I had spent in this country was an utter hallucination. Nearly every word of the article was brazen rubbish. If anywhere on earth could be found a more merciless, cold-blooded system of oppression, I could not imagine what it would be. I had seen the freedmen’s schools closed and their farms stolen from them; I had heard of colored people intimidated and whipped from the polls. I knew for myself that a whole people had been reduced through plain piracy and mob terror back into slavery—or worse. “Close and cordial relations?” Pitiless, remote, and contemptuous, more like.

  In the previous ten years, after the brief spark of “emancipation” was crushed, the blacks had been deprived of the education, land, franchise, and even livelihood they were promised. With the Sisters, I had gone about Charleston to minister to the miserable in Cabbage Row and the destitute on Kittiwah Island. I had encountered starvation at Hilton Head and men in rags worked quite literally to death at the harbor of Port Royal. I had seen these people cheated, cuffed, cursed, and chained together as “leased” convicts—mere slaves by another name.

  And, of course, I had just witnessed in a dark wood at midnight the manifestation of what passed for “justice” in this brutal place. If it had not been for Holmes… .

  At Charleston, my life settled into a curious stillness. Christmas came in peace and went the same way. My charges, two-score or so poor children, were showered with gifts by the more charitable families of the parish. At night the Sisters and I scooped into a wagon a load of surplus dolls, wooden horses, cup-and-balls, jacks and marbles, boxes of dominoes, and took them to the State Orphan Asylum—a tumbledown refuge for abandoned colored children. (I little knew then that the governor of South Carolina was about to close even this poor excuse for a shelter as an “economy measure.”)

  The day after Christmas I received in the post a most unusual document—the copy of a letter on a piece of what I later understood to be “carbonated paper.” It was type-written by Joe Harris.

  Dear Mr. Grady,

  It has occurred to me that an invitation might be extended to certain religious and academic leaders to join the Atlanta association for the advancement of the New South. I think prominent Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish voices joined to yours could very well add influence to your efforts. Speaking for the Catholic population, I am sure that the bishops of Savannah and Charleston would be most gratified at the invitation. However, as they are exceedingly busy men, they would undoubtedly wish to nominate emissaries who could b
e permanently attached to the association. A superb candidate would be the Rev. S. P. Grosjean of the diocese of Charleston, a man of intelligence and civic zeal whom I have the privilege of knowing personally. I should be most pleased to discuss this matter further with you at your earliest convenience.

  I am yours sincerely, Joel Chandler Harris

  Out of the envelope fell a piece of note paper with a handwritten message: “He took the bait. J.C.H.”

  I laughed out loud. For all his stuttering and shyness, Harris was nevertheless a crafty fellow with a written word.

  Now I was a member of the Atlanta Ring. For what reason, I could not begin to guess.

  The next day I received a second astonishing missive, possibly connected with the first: A colossal engraved invitation to something called the “St. Cecilia Society Cotillion” on New Year’s Eve. I was about to discard it in a rubbish bin when my superior, Father Claudian, walked by and noticed it.

  “My dear Father Simon, what are you doing?” he said, scanning the document. “This is a great honor! The St. Cecilia Society is the most exclusive of societies. I have lived in Charleston all my life and never even seen one of these invitations before.” Father Claudian had been an eminent lawyer in the city but, like St. Paul, was converted from the error of his ways and became a priest. “The people who are invited to the Cotillion never speak of it, and those who speak of it are never invited. You have been invited: you must go.”

  “But it’s surely a mistake. Why invite a priest to a ball?”

  “The Cotillion is much more than a ball!” Father Claudian exclaimed, his attorney’s voice (which he used to great effect in sermons) and his Irish color rising. “The very cream of the cream of Charleston society will be there. Once you are included, all of the most prominent ears in the state will be open to us … to you, I meant to say. Think of what it could mean for St. Peter’s—for the Church! You cannot, you must not decline.”