Rogues' Wedding

by Terry Griggs

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  no lies

  What she did was nail him with his own shoe. Vermin in the bedding. She clipped him hard, the full sandbag weight of her personality behind the blow, and might have left a burning crescent on his jaw if the heel had not been so worn. As pulped as he felt.

  “Get up,” she hissed. Then, “You’re not safe here.”

  So delivered, this was hardly news. He raised a hand, lifted it right out of the depths of sleep, and touched his jaw, waggled it tentatively. Didn’t she know he was fragile?

  “Hattie?” he said to the figure hovering above him, her features obscured, a silhouette only; but with that raven-tumble of rocks in her voice, and her lethal version of the womanly touch, it could only be her.

  “Hurry.” She began tossing his clothes on the bed—socks, pants, jacket.

  He thought, I won’t.

  What he registered of the night and what was going on in it came in fragments, disconnected, as if perception too had been knocked on the head and shattered: a faint burning smell, a gleam of light burnishing the window, the rasping bark of a fox outside, the Japanese harp on the back porch tinkling, Hattie’s agitated breath falling on him, the taste of fear rising in his throat. No laughter anywhere, none whatsoever.

  “They’ve found her,” she said. “Get up.”

  “What?”

  “Polly. In the field.”

  “My God, not …?”

  “Yes, and soon they will know what you did to her.”

  “I did nothing.”

  No response. In the dark her face might as well have been missing.

  “I swear, I never touched her.”

  “Don’t talk, just come.”

  He thought, I will. Flight being his first and only recourse.

  He leapt out of bed and dressed in haste, fumbling with his clothing, while she stood, still enfolded in the night’s shadows, watching and, he assumed, making her unsparing assessment.

  She said, “If Edgar finds you, he’ll cut off your balls and make you eat them.”

  She might as well have thumped him again, his ears ringing with this threat, but it was more her vulgarity than anything that injured. A sickness had entered the minds of women, and was pouring out of their mouths like black blood.

  “Why him?” was all he could think to say.

  “Are you blind as well as simple?” she said. She grabbed his arm roughly and pulled him through the door, although not before he had pocketed his incriminating journal, so infested with evidence, so spoiled, he hated to touch it.

  As they crept down the hall and then quietly down the stairs, he listened closely for sounds of distress, for weeping or anger or oaths of retribution; but nothing seemed amiss. The house was discreetly containing its horror, allowing only the usual midnight disturbances: a shifting, settling groan, a tocking grandfather clock, a mouse scratching behind a wall, a sleeper concealed in a nearby bedroom snoring lustily.

  “Where is everyone?” he whispered into Hattie’s back.

  “Quiet,” she warned. Even lowered, her voice contained a dangerous mettle.

  They were all outside, then, he thought, except for the snor-er, whom they must not have wanted to waken. Rosie, he guessed. He could picture the others out in that cursed field, silenced by so sudden and profound a grief, shocked into immobility. It wouldn’t last, this reprieve their immediate suffering gave him. This very moment a family procession might be closing in on the house, William Cormany carrying his dead daughter in his arms, his face struck dumb, tears rivering down. Edgar’s face the livid mask of a devoted brother. The childish Cormanys in their rage would act like children—impetuously, furiously. They would tear him apart, exact some communal vigilante justice, blind to the knowledge that it was one of their own, slyly concealed in the mob, who was the murderer.

  He had no idea why Hattie was helping him (if she was) and no desire to follow her lead, but he was desperate to get out, to escape, and he trailed after her as if she were the ever-receding door he had to reach.

  On the first-floor landing he got too close and trod on her heel. She elbowed him sharply in the ribs and he backed off, but not so far from her that he didn’t still smell the tang of sweat that rose off of her, her unwashed hair, the odour of camphor in her clothes. They were as married in this exploit as two sneaking thieves, and despite his distaste he stuck to her like the quaking soul she perhaps didn’t possess.

  After navigating through a series of rooms made unfamiliar by the night, Grif found himself in a summer kitchen at the back of the house. The floor was cluttered with crocks, pots, a pigeon roaster, a buffalo robe, skates tossed over a chair, a bucket—all of which he avoided, only to trip over an empty birdcage. Why they had to take this strewn and roundabout route soon became evident as Hattie stooped to retrieve a wrapped bundle out of a dough box: provisions swaddled in a tablecloth. Clearly, she was decamping too, for she didn’t hand this over to him but pushed quietly through the screen door and motioned him out.

  “Something’s burning,” he whispered.

  “Quick,” she said.

  The bundle in her arms grunted.

  Master Rumwold. Provisions for the heart, then. Not that this particular package would provide much sustenance for anyone, but he was relieved to know that she had enough motherly sentiment to bring the child along, and it made his flight down the lane with them easier. A small hunted family they might have looked from above, harried and fleeing, but knotted together with loyalty. An unholy family was more like it, improvisational and bound by some sin the nature of which he could only guess at.

  A wagon was waiting for them at the end of the lane, to which Edgar’s horse Enrico was harnessed. This struck Grif as a cumbersome and not overly romantic vehicle in which to make their getaway. They would make better time and be less visible if they both rode the horse. But he said nothing, only climbed up. Hattie took the reins and gave them a snap. She said something to Enrico in his own language, all vowels rolling and tumbling over one another, and he took off at a trot.

  As they pulled away, Grif glanced back nervously. Still no sign of life, although the house was backlit with an orange glow, a cloud of smoke boiling up from behind. One of the outbuildings was on fire—the stable or the shed.

  “Arson,” he muttered under his breath. Abduction. Horse theft. Rape. Murder. He saw his innocence in all this as a blank sheet upon which any number of crimes could be inscribed. It seemed clear that Hattie had roused and rescued him for no other reason than his usefulness and gullibility, his scapegoat’s horns and his brute obeisance.

  The night was cool, and as they rushed along he felt it sliding into him and through him. Hattie and the baby beside her, wedged between them, maintained a complicit silence. He knew it was pointless to ask for an explanation. If he wanted any answers, he was going to have to provide them himself:

  Now tell me Hattie, did you set that fire?

  What do you think?

  Is Polly really dead?

  I didn’t say that, did I?

  Where are you taking me, by the way? To the town jail?

  You’ll find your own way there soon enough. Why should I bother?

  What he actually asked was, “That boy of yours, does he never cry?”

  “He has no need.”

  By which she meant, he supposed, that he was already so full of sorrow that he was replete. He was like an idol that had received so many supplications and hard luck stories over the years that he was dense with accumulated woe. It was a wonder that the wagon could move at all with him on board; although the axles did creak, and the carriage groaned, and the horse’s hooves crunched on the road. And beneath those rhythmic sounds there was another sound, more intermittent and disturbing that Grif was positive he heard.

  “Where are we going?” he tried.

  “We?”

  “You.”

  No answer.

  “Me, then. What about me?”

  “To town. I�
��ll drop you off up ahead. It’s a short walk from there. You can take a steamer in the morning, take a room, find a job. You are free to do as you wish.”

  Free? Before long he would be swinging free, no doubt. If he did have a wish, just one wish, he would ask for a more desperate and truly criminal hand so that he might strangle her with it. If he was going to hang, then he wanted there to be a genuine and gratifying reason for it, and not just because he was fool enough to be caught in some woman’s malevolent design.

  Grif heard it again, that noise, coming from the wagon’s box behind. Attending closely, he could hear a rustling and shuffling, then something knocking against the side of the box, the sound someone might make if tied and muzzled and struggling to break free. It was the very sound he was making himself, if only in his head. He had been slow to arrive at it but knew now that Hattie had taken the wagon because she had human cargo, other than himself, to transport. Nor was it necessarily someone who was hog-tied and restrained—only wanting him to think so. This unknown other might just as easily be hovering at his back, ready to spring if he made the wrong move, his favourite move. He glanced quickly aside, considering it. A leap and a slide, a rolling tumble into the ditch, and he’d be out of the wagon and across the field, gone like a hare.

  Hattie murmured to the horse, words that sounded so soft and sweet.

  He sat listening, waiting, watching an arc of moonlight curving like a blade on Enrico’s flank. He knew that there was enough light to peel away at least one layer of the mystery. If he turned quickly and looked back, he would see who the third—no, fourth—member of their party was. Even if that person were completely bound, he would have a good idea. But he didn’t want to know. Knowledge was an implicating business, and he didn’t want to be dragged even further than he already was into this strange game of Hattie’s. Instead, he stared straight ahead and concentrated on absence, on closing down his senses—hearing nothing, seeing nothing—like a man riding in a tumbrel and about to be parted from his head, getting used to it.

  Not long after, Hattie pulled at the reins and drew Enrico to a halt. “Caro sposo,” she said. The foreign tongue, the softened expression, made her seem warmer and more accommodating, more an actual member of the weaker sex. On the other hand, maybe it was the horse she preferred above them all, her son included.

  “This is where you get off.” The road had come to a fork and she indicated with a curt nod which way he was to go.

  Obediently, he climbed down from the wagon, and was about to set off, without speaking, without looking back at her, when she called to him.

  “Griffith,” she said, his name in her mouth a shock, a sickening intimacy. “Here.”

  He saw a flash of silver, and thinking knife, he spun away, dodging the hit, then turned to glare at her. Astonishingly, for the harm it might do her face, like a wound straining, she smiled at him. Looking down at it, he saw that what she’d thrown was indeed a precision weapon, but one aimed for his open palm and not his back. He stooped to pick it up. It was a pen with the heft of solid silver, but slender and delicate, its embossing so ornate it felt like scar tissue as he ran his fingertips over it. Intended for a hand far daintier than his own, though no less cunning, it was a lady’s pen, and in such a hand would have been used to record all the politic detail of a busy social existence.

  “No lies,” she said, and smiled once again, briefly. Then, with a flick of Enrico’s reins, she moved off down the other road.

  He stood watching until the wagon diminished into a sliver. Two smiles he had gotten out of that woman, neither of which he knew how to interpret. One for innocence, one for guilt? Or one for life, one for death—both sides of the vise that was closing in on him.

  He slid the pen into his pocket and began to walk toward the only light shining in the distance. Venus, he guessed. It was bright enough, yet it seemed too low in the sky, too earthbound, to be either a star or a goddess.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  call us not weeds

  If Grif were music, he’d be a dirge, moving down the road at a balked, funereal pace, a mourning tempo. Lento, retardando … fin. Anything in pursuit could easily have snatched him up and devoured him, and he would hardly have noticed. Or cared. He felt so weary and flightless, it was all he could do to move one dead man’s shoe, rotted as a face, in front of the other. He slurred his steps as he walked, and what filled his lungs was more lament than breath, what he exhaled a sorry and pointless tune. His life the theme of it.

  He arrived in Little Current about the same time as the dawn, and descended a hill following the smell of water and wood, fresh-cut. A port and a mill town. He wandered by houses hushed and sleep-wrapped, past stores with boom-town fronts and signs in limb-high lettering that identified them as Carruthers’ Drugs, Turner’s Dry Goods, Vincent’s Bargain House. A store for everyone. His footsteps made hollow rattling sounds on the wooden sidewalk, and as he waded through patches of morning mist, his pant legs gathering damp, he might have been taken for a revenant, something flushed out of the night and about as substantial. A skunk ran toward him, and then straight across his foot. Even to the creatures he was nothing more than an unravelling patch of grey, fading like the dawn. If it were possible, he would do it—melt into the atmosphere, or become the day’s weather, or even that blasted skunk, if he could figure out how.

  He passed by a blacksmith’s, a photography studio, a combination confectionery/butcher shop—another odd union. Outside of a barroom he saw a man curled up in a wheelbarrow, his digested dinner—or someone’s—from the night before piled déjà spew in his outstretched hand. He walked quickly by; the man smelled rank.

  The place was dead still, although surely not for long, unless it was Sunday. He pictured the bustle and surge of noon traffic in the street: wagons, horses, dust roiling up, people weaving in and out, a medley of voices, a joke tossed across the road and returned with a laugh. Farmers, fishermen, mill hands, Indians, tourists—more men than women. At present he appeared to be the only actor on this stage, and his performance wasn’t up to much, his soliloquy stuffed so far down his throat he’d never get it out. Someone likely was watching him, someone standing at a window washing his neck with Windsor soap, or sprucing up his hair with Butler and Crisp’s Pomade Divine. He could feel the eyes fixed on him like a gun’s sight, the crosshairs dividing his face like a pie. A drifter, a stranger, anonymous as dirt.

  A wanted man. But only for a legal and concluding formality.

  He surveyed the facade of a large hotel on the corner. The Mansion House, it was called.

  He scanned the windows to see if anyone was watching him and imagined a curtain twitching as a shadowy form stepped back out of sight. No one really—he was only seeing himself, already registered in the hotel’s black book, a party of one standing up there staring out at nothing, scouting for the courage to do away with himself. Surely it wouldn’t be that difficult. He felt so tenuously held together, it could only be a matter of a nick, a slice, a minor undoing.

  Taking in the rest of the street, Grif noticed a much smaller building that was stuck like a skewed hyphen between two taller ones. Stealing a few moments from what he regarded as his rapidly dwindling stock of them—insolvent in time as in much else—he wandered over to see what it was.

  The building’s clapboard was painted Prussian blue and fixed on at a slightly drunken angle, aspiring upward like an optimist’s handwriting. The shutters were a goldenrod yellow, the door green as leaves. The place was too colourful entirely. Grif craned his neck to read the sign that swung above the door, its lettering flowing and molten. The Dancing Sun. A sun was depicted, too, painted against a black background and bouncing along with its rays sticking out like stiff hair. A barbershop, he thought, or an old-fashioned apothecary, a medical hall. Maybe a public house for foreigners, or pagans, as it was plainly not the Talbot House, the Wellington or the Queen’s, where the subjects of the Crown could drink and bellow at one another in a civilized tongue. Wha
t lay behind that green door might be another country altogether.

  He stepped forward and gave the door’s brass knob a tentative twist. It turned easily, invitingly, and so he entered.

  Once in, he was disappointed to find that it was only a saloon, and one that was as sparsely stocked as it was decorated. There was one table and one chair, and behind the bar one bottle of whisky, unless you counted as a second the reflection of that bottle in the mirror—the single ornament in the room. Also visible behind the bar was the furry nub of the barman’s head. He was obviously seated, as custom in this spare watering hole was not going to be overwhelming at the best of times, let alone first thing in the morning. The barman was singing a song, or rather snatches of several, meandering like a bee along some erratic melodic course. The voice was sweet and high. Grif cleared his throat. This wasn’t, after all, some foreign country where you could air your feelings quite so freely, belt out a tune in public as if you didn’t have a care in the world.

  Heading toward the bar, he found himself taking it on the run like a rolling alley. The floor had a considerable tilt to it, and he arrived suddenly, both hands splayed, as if the thing had been tossed at him. The singer, he now saw, was only a boy, a short round boy of about twelve or thirteen, who was busy entering some figures in a ledger. Practising sums for school, Grif supposed.

  “Yes sir?” The boy abruptly stopped singing, snapped the ledger shut and regarded Grif pleasantly. He had dark hair and eyes, but fair skin that looked almost polished, overlaid with a sheen of confidence.

  “Is your father in?” Grif asked.

  “Dead,” said the boy. “As a doornail.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Gone,” he said. “Like smoke.” He smiled widely, as if at this lark of parents disposed of so easily in a phrase or two, gotten rid of in nothing more cumbersome than language—good place for them.