What Lies Buried: A Novel of Old Cape Fear

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Well…!” Bates cried, going as white as fresh-boiled linens.

  “Enough!” Mr Ramseur barked. “I’ll thankee to clean that off, Bowlegs. An’ keep to your side o’ the Cape Fear, in future. I’m the man that owns this’n!”

  “Mean, ya won’t hire me t’cotch yer runaway slaves fer ya any more, Cap’m?” Jemmy Bowlegs said with so much mock, lip-trembling distress that Livesey had to bite the lining of his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. “Ya think t’git Bates t’do it… when he couldn’t foller smoke back to a campfire? Huh!”

  “We’ve wasted enough of my time here, I believe,” Ramseur said in an imperious drawl. “This conversation, and the company, are become bore-some.”

  “Good day to you, Mr Ramseur,” Livesey said with a doff of his hat, though it was to Ramseur’s dismissive back.

  “An don’t you babies ever think o runnin’ f’um yer good ol’ mastah, heah me?” Bowlegs warned the young slave boys, looming over them with an insolent thrust of his chin. “Else I come an’ cotch ya, hah!”

  The two youngsters slammed the coach door, hoisted the steps in a twinkling and leapt to their box at the rear of Ramseur’s coach, as swift as if they’d seen Old Scratch himself!

  Mr Ramseur angrily banged his cane to Bates, who had cringed deep into his clothes. Bates whipped up the team, making the elegant equipage rattle and sway down the Masonborough Sound Road in a sudden haste, mud and gritty sand flying in “rooster tails” from its wheels.

  “Hit do appear t’me, Mistah Livesey,” Bowlegs said in a slow and thoughtful drawl as he spat at the coach’s fresh ruts in scorn, “did a feller take a double-barrel gun in them bushes back yonder, he’d git hit all hung up in th’ branches an’ such.”

  “Hah?” Livesey harumphed, still angry. “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Look at Sam’l’s, thar. Got barrels long as a musket. But if a body wanted t’do a murder in a thicket like that, he’d do better did he have a shorter-barreled gun. One he could fetch up quick, when hit wuz time? Short ‘nough, mebbe, t’hide under a coat’r a cloak, so th’ man he planned t’kill’d never ‘spect a thing til hit wuz too late. If he had a coachman’s gun, that is… hmm?” Bowlegs wryly intimated.

  “I … well, I’m dashed!” Livesey gasped in sudden understanding, whirling clumsily to peer at the coach-and-four, now far down the road. “A double-barreled coaching gun!”

  “Could be, suh.” Bowlegs sourly grinned, ruminating on his quid. “Hit very might be.”

  Chapter 11

  NOW SPURRED with a clue to the weapon, and a very plausible and understandable suspect, Livesey urged Bowlegs to probe further down the game trail.

  “Hey, now!” Jemmy exclaimed about ten minutes later, warning them to lay back a bit. “Here’s whar yer killer stood an’ waited, hit look t’be.” Bowlegs knelt and worked his way down both sides of the trail and the center, almost putting his nose to the dirt to smell or taste for a sign, peering worm-close and very carefully.

  Samuel stayed close to Bowlegs, squatting on his heels with his shotgun between his knees, both young men mumbling together in growing excitement, whilst Livesey held and gentled all three horses, ‘til their guide flopped back on his rump Indian fashion and cross-legged. “‘Twuz only one more feller in heah ‘sides Mistah Harry. Only one man did hit, an’ I don’t think he wuz Sim Bates, after all.”

  “Not Bates?” Samuel spluttered. “Why not, Jemmy?” “Sim Bates got li’l short foots, Sam’l,” Jemmy told him. “Has holes in his soles, too, didn’ ya notice, back at th’ coach, with him a’sittin’ up thar so grand, an’ both shoes on th’ coach front? These heah prints, they’s a lot bigger, with new-like soles. Ya think that skinflint Ram-sewer’d waste good money shoddin’ him? Man’s so tight, I ‘spect he’s still got his birth-string, haw!”

  “He hated Harry enough,” Livesey pointed out. “If Ramseur or one of his crowd paid him, he’d have relished it, ifhe didn’t do it on his own.”

  “Might be, Cap’m, but hit warn’t Bates in heah,” Jemmy replied. “Oh, I reckon he would kill a body, iff’n Prince Dick told him to. But not by hisself is what I’m sayin’. Bates kin bluster all he wants, but he’s got a rabbit heart, suh. Even wuz he damn hot, it’d still take him half a crock o’ whiskey, an’ a pack o’ bully-bucks wif him, ‘fore he’d do anythin’. I ‘fit’ him once’t, an’ I know. Bates’d not do hit face t’face, neither. He’s th’ back-shootin’ kind, Mistah Livesey. Nossuh, this feller heah wuz a cold-blooded man. Come down an’ see. There’s whar a horse wuz tied, an’ th’ killer alit. Then he paced, back an’ forth, back an’ forth, real slow an’ patient. Didn’t stray far at all. Jus’ paced, diggin’ his heels in like he wuz bored. Same path, up an’ back, like a Redcoat sentry. Over heah …” Jemmy said, getting to his feet to indicate with his reed over the prints, so Livesey could spot it for himself. “Heel-an’-toe, some. Puttin’ one foot ahead t’other t’amuse hisself whilst he wuz waitin’. Like a feller walkin’ a ‘narry’ plank. Over heah … see ’em little clods? Musta not keered fer too much muck on his boots, after a while, so he pared ’em off. Smooth, slick sides t’some of’em? Used a jackknife or a ridin’ crop t’do hit, I reckon. Whoever he wuz, he’s a patient huntiri man. Gentleman, too, I’d say. Crisp, well-madeboot prints.”

  “Nothin else in here, not recent,” Samuel said, taking a turn at divining the sign, a little beyond where Jemmy Bowlegs stood. “He rode in from the north, looks like. His and his horse’s prints are still fairly fresh … nobody come lookin’ this far to spoil ’em, when they fetched Mr Harry out. Whoa! Deer tracks, from a big’un! I didn’t think there were that many left, this side of town, or of the river anymore! Uh-oh. These boot prints look … differ-ent,Jemmy. Heavier on the toes, I think?”

  “Runnin’, once’t it wuz done,” Bowlegs said, sagely nodding and bestowing a wink at Samuel’s father, as if proud of a good student.

  “Didn’t go into the glade, though … whoo! Deer, by damn!” Samuel cried. “Come look at this!”

  At the back of the snaking game trail there was a glade in the forest, perhaps three rods across, circled by myrtles, dogwoods and scrub pine, with a much taller lone pine in the center whose branches were high enough for a man to go under without much ducking. Under it lay a hard-packed, trampled bed of pine needles the color of rust that spread at least thirty feet across, and was strewn inches deep.

  Samuel and Jemmy Bowlegs scampered into the small clearing, all but oblivious to the reason they’d come as they eagerly cast about for deer sign, leaving Livesey senior to stump along in their wake.

  “Nighttime hidey-up fer a whole herd o deer!” Jemmy laughed as he ducked under the outermost boughs and pawed the ground. “Ain’t been heah, lately, but give ’em a while, Sam’l, an’ they’ll come back. Soon’s th’ stink of people, guns an’ horses goes away.”

  “Deer?” Livesey barked, sounding almost exasperated with their misplaced enthusiasm. “Deer, is it? When …!”

  “Shy, Mistah Livesey, suh,” Bowlegs explained, shuffling about to face him on his knees. “Deer, they lay up fer th’ night, after a las’ draynk o’ water. Huddle up safe under a big tree like this’un, a ways off any trail. They’ll scat a ways off, too, so they kin smell trouble comin’. They’s a big herd ‘round heah, somewheres. Haven’t been heah in a while, though. Months, mebbe. But they’s out thar.”

  “Scared offby the … murderer?” Liveseygrumpily asked.

  “Oh, long ‘fore that, Cap’m,” Bowlegs said with a smug leer, as he crept round the pine’s trunk, then ducked out to where he could get fully erect. “Place like this, nobody livin’ close-abouts? This is a place where Jacks’ve took their Jills, ya see? Lookee heah, underneath.”

  Livesey was drawn forward in spite of himself, to stoop and bend at the waist as Bowlegs pointed lurid traces out to him, smirking all the while. “Scuff marks, Cap’m. Boot’r shoe toes, between heel marks, don’t ya know. Over heah, they’s heel skids and bare toe
s betwixt ’em. An’ a’leadin’ in an’ out, there’s iddy-biddy ladies’ shoe prints, wif a mess o’ hasty men’s prints alongsides. Dancin’ an’ a’twirling round each other …”

  “Hmmm … tuft or two o’ blanket wool, too, Jemmy,” Samuel said, producing a few strands, looking both immensely pleased with skills that Bowlegs had taught him and secretly smug with amusement, that he, by personal experience, knew what to look for after a man and a woman had pleasured each other. “Wasn’t any woods critters under here!”

  “Dear Lord,” Matthew Livesey groaned. This glade was a trysting place, a secret, but well-used spot where lovers could … Harry’s? he wondered, and, with whom? Was that what made him rush out here? Harry, how could youfhe bleakly thought, his face persimmoned.

  “Warn’t no saint, he,” Jemmy Bowlegs said, guessing the reason for Livesey’s evident distress. “Can’t say who been couplin’ heah, but th’ sign’s ‘bout a week’r two old, no more. Might’s well saddle up, an’ head on out. Nothin’ more this glade’ll tell us. ‘At cool man’s too keerful. Might strike his back-trail, though. Hey, Sam’l… find whar he rode out fer me.”

  Once aboard their horses, again, they walked them northward, on the only other passable path. They rode single-file, Samuel and Bowlegs in the lead, swaying right or left to peer at the ground or undergrowth, though to Livesey if felt like a bootless endeavour, with nothing to see but sand, dirt and only vague disturbances in the path that might have been “sign.”

  “Last horse through here wuz ‘bout a week ago, same’s I said,” Bowlegs called back over his horse’s rump. “Pert soon, we’ll come out on th’ Wrightsville Road, near Smith’s Creek, an’ there won’ be a hope in Hell o’ sortin’ these prints outta all th’ others, Mistah Livesey.”

  “You did what you could, Jemmy, and for that I’m grateful,” Mr Livesey gloomily replied, his mind numbed by the grievous possibilities in what they had already discovered.

  “I still git m’choice o’ new clothin’, like ye promised?”

  “I shall consider it my pleasure, and civic duty, to tog you out the same as we bargained for,” Livesey assured him with a polite smile, the mental image of Bowlegs in gentlemanly finery lifting his spirits for a trice. He had long thought that Jemmy Bowlegs only took a bath when caught in the rain, only changed his attire when the old rotted away!

  To the “better sorts” of the Cape Fear, the far-ranging Bowlegs was a sometimes-useful, but sordid, creature, best kept at arm’s length ‘til his unique skills were required. The very prim loathed him like a baby-stealing Gypsy, though most ordinary folk looked on him with faint amusement, as if he was a mysterious local legend, a character as colorful as any from a “Jack Tale.” The “sporting” young men of the colony especially liked him, and wanted to associate with him, go hunting and tracking with him and learn even a little of his arcane “White Injun” arts.

  It irked Livesey, and made him fear for Samuel’s character, for him to run with Jemmy’s roguish pack, if only on those few work-free days when Samuel didn’t have his nose to the grindstone. But … even the sons of the “better sorts,” with whom Livesey preferred Samuel to associate, would tramp-about with Bowlegs, and even if Jemmy Bowlegs wasn’t present, Samuel and his bachelor friends would follow the same sort of pursuits in emulation. The Carolinas, the Cape Fear, was a frontier, the very nature of gentlemanly Southern Society was more agricultural, much closer to forest, stream and field than staid coastal Pennsylvania, and the only way Livesey could think to fend off what he feared as “bad influences” was to bind Samuel in a “croaker sack” from dusk ‘til dawn, and only free him for the workday, and lead him to the chandlery with a leather leash and collar!

  “Whoa up!” his son suddenly yelped, reining back his horse and leaping from the saddle. To Livesey’s consternation, Samuel hared off through the thickets and brambles to the right—the eastern side—of the game trail, swishing and wading through branches, snags and vines. “Ow!” he was heard to mutter, then “Ow!” again. “Ow … shit fire!”

  “Keep sniffin’ fer snake now, Sam’l,” Bowlegs hooted with glee, leaning back with a hand on his horse’s rump. “Ye cotch a whiff o’ cucumber, be ready t’ skedaddle!”

  “What do you think he saw?” Livesey dubiously asked. “Something to do with the rest of what you found?” He kneed his horse alongside.

  “Most-like,” Jemmy drawled back. “Sam’l’s comin’ along, quick as a whip at huntin’ an’ trackin’. Make a right-smart ‘country boy,’ ye git land t’put him on agin, an’ let him.”

  “That is my … !” Livesey began to bark, before catching himself—irked that it was none of Bowlegs’s business, but dreading that hejust might be right. “Unless he becomes as renowned as you, Jemmy,” he said instead, “Sam’l must stick to his chosen last. You’re reputed to be one of the best at what you do. Else …”

  “One of’em?” Bowlegs lazily snickered. “Mistah Livesey, they ain’t nobody better’n me in th’ whole Cape Fear! An’ I ain’t half th’tracker my pappy wuz … whichever one he wuz. Ye awful hard on him, Cap’m. Sam’l won’t never make a shopkeeper, same as you. But he’s gettin’ right good at what he keers fer… what I teached him.”

  “Jemmy … what you’re teaching him,” Livesey said, trying to make light of the fellow’s unwonted intrusion into his own business. “It’s not the tracking I worry about!” he said with a chuckle, which elicited a deep belly-laugh from Jemmy Bowlegs.

  “Look at this, y’all!” Samuel proudly called as he fought his way out of the clinging thickets, wading chest-deep in a green surf.

  He held a small bouquet of blossoms, little larger than a nosegay bunch, of oleander blooms, all white, red and showy when first cut from a bough. Now, they were limp and too long from water, crackling and wilted, though their perfume was, perhaps, even headier.

  “Oleander?” Mr Livesey said as Samuel handed the bouquet over to him, almost bird-dog pleased with a fresh-shot “fetch,” face abeam. “An evergreen … part of the dog’s bane family, as I recall? Odd, to find such a trinket so far out here.”

  “Pizen berries, though,” Jemmy supplied. “Heard-tell of some slaves doin’ in cruel mastahs wif oleander berry juice. Git yer sweet an’ yer bitter, with oleanders. Theyjust comin’ inta bloom.”

  “Tied with a hank o’ ribbon, Father. See?” Samuel eagerly added, pointing out the narrow royal-blue satin, tied in a double bow.

  “Aye, and good material, too, Sam’l… as I’m sure you noted,” Livesey said, taking time from his intense perusal of the nosegay to bestow praise on his son. He felt like a tracker, himself, on his own sort of “spoor,” as he appraised the goods. “Not shoddy. A throwster in London or Paris made this. Not a slub nor a drop to the weave. It might sell for ha’pence a foot. We carry some as good as this in our own shop, son, for two pence, ha’penny a yard.”

  “And the ladies pay it, too!” Samuel crowed.

  “Quite, ah … astute of you to spot it, son,” Livesey further said. “I must own that I had no idea you had such a talent! The apt pupil of an apt teacher, it would appear.” Which added praise almost made Samuel wag his own tail withjoy; he went dirt-kicking red-faced, come over all “aw-shuckin’s.”

  “Just looked a little further afield, like Jemmy always says to, else ya end up trackin’ in circles, followin’ the deer that stood right by the trail, an’ walk right past him. Right, Jemmy?”

  “Done good,” Jemmy added, and Livesey saw that his son was not sure whose congratulations meant more to him: his father’s or Bowlegs’s.

  “Father,” Samuel said, returning to his smaller, in-town hesitance.

  “Yes, lad?”

  “These flowers look t’be a week or more off the branch. Could ah … could this’ve been what Uncle Harry had in his right hand, when he led his horse into the glade back yonder? Ifhe was meeting … uhm?”

  “Mistah Harry didn’t have a weapon, so anyone said, but then he mighta not expected t’need o
ne, yeah,” Bowlegs speculated aloud to Samuel, almost cutting Livesey out of it, “iff n he wuz ‘spectin’ t’meet a woman back thar. Mighta been, at that, Sam’l. Say some man wuz th’ jealous kind, saw what wuz a’goin’ on, an’ laid out a’waitin’ to kill him. Dragged his wife’r girl off, an’ th’owed this purty as far’s he could th’ow it on his way out, yeah!”

  “Nonsense!” Livesey spluttered. “We don’t know that at all! It could have been anyone who … trysted out here and threw it away. The girl spurned her wooer, the girl didn’t show up and the heartbroken …” He would not accept such a sordid end to his finest friend! “Besides … if some lover were here, neither party could carry a bouquet home with them as evidence of their, ah… sin.”

  “Aw, sheeyit, Mistah Livesey,” Jemmy interrupted with a knowing leer and a sarcastic drawl. “I don’t reckon you b’lieve that anymore than I do. Last signs say ‘twuz Mistah Harry an’ his killer th’ onliest people out heah. Lemme see ’em flars.” Bowlegs studied them for a long moment, then held them up for all to see. “Stems ain’t brittle, yit… cut ‘bout a week ago, give’r take. ‘Bout th’ same time as th’ night he rode out here an’ got murdered. How far off th’ trail, Sam’l?”

  “‘Bout four or five paces.”

  “Man th’owed ’em, then. Gals cain’t th’ow that far,” Jemmy decided, spreading his hands as if it was self-evident. “‘Ayr ye go, suh. Cain’t say fer shore what these-heah flars had t’do wif his death, but they’s heah. Mighta been a lure, left off the Masonborough Road t’mark the game trail, mighta been somebody decided t’kill him an’ saw what he wuz about an’ took advantage.”

  “I … see,” Matthew Livesey finally replied, groaning as if in physical pain as he peered off into the thickets where the flowers had been found.

  How blind could he have been, he asked himself, to have thought that Harry Tresmayne had changed his nature! For a moment, he bleakly considered his removing to such a fast-and-loose colony as North Carolina an incredible mistake, nothing at all like staid and proper Philadelphia, that had engendered such licentiousness into even elite Society … that had suckled Harry on its disregard for righteousness from his cradle, producing a man who, for all his grandeur and better qualities, had won the love of two angelic women and yet spurned the long-term joys of monogamy for … thrills! Harry had risked it all, for he was, like many Southern gentlemen, weak when it came to passion and lust. Risked his life … thrown it away … to rut with a cheap bawd. He’d died for … quim! Lived his whole life a sham, and lost it on a rake-hell’s lewd geste. And in such a dismal place.