“Oh,” she gasped, realizing he had come to have breakfast with her. “Oh!” Again. Softer this time, paling as she stumbled onto the plank pew opposite him at the table.
He ordered eggs with a rasher of bacon, bread and more coffee (hoping for the best) from the slack-jawed young serving wench Delia. He suspected it was she who would do the cooking, too, poor mort.
“Take more than proper care for our guest, now, Delia,” Yadkin warned her. She might as well have been talking to the square-hewn log walls, as the slack-wit shuffled off to the scullery.
“This is such a surprise, sir,” Barbara Yadkin began, fanning herself with one idle hand.
“Well, Mistress Yadkin, you spoke to my daughter, Bess, yesterday, at the Burgwyns …”
“I am so sorry you could not attend, Mr Livesey,” Barbara Yadkin simpered. “It was the most tasteful entertainment. Though the music left a bit to be desired, don’t ya know, but…”
“Bess told me you had discussed Harry’s last night on earth with her,” Livesey prompted.
“Oh God,” Mrs Yadkin sighed sadly, realizing his presence had no personal connection with her, and fearing he was wrathful. “Is that why you came for your breakfast here this morning, then, sir? Forgive me if I caused your sweet, dear girl any anguish, do, please sir! She did call him ‘Uncle Harry,’ and you were close as cater-cousins … I had no thought…” She looked on the verge of scolded, dash-hoped, tears.
“I assure you, ma’am, you caused no pain, no,” Livesey had to tell her. “I’m told talk of the murder was common coin at the party, since it happened. I know that for fact. No …”
Barbara Yadkin extended a fretful hand, begging for forgiveness, and Livesey felt bound to give it a dubious pat or two, in spite of himself. She hitched a breath as if he’d just put his hand up her skirts, but dared to entwine chore-roughened fingers around his. Her eyes grew even more disconcertingly large as she peered at him, as if she could wring some sign of affection from him.
“Well, hmm. Haa.” Livesey coughed, trying to disengage himself with what would not appear to be unseemly haste. “Sam’l and I rode to the murder scene yesterday, you see …”
“How terrible for you!” she blurted, her abandoned hand still on the table, flopping like a landed catfish for attention.
“Aye, but…” Livesey nodded. “What I meant to ask you … you’d told Bess that you’d seen me and Harry depart, I believe?”
“Aye, I did. I had … I had an errand to run, out on the porch,” Mrs Yadkin stammered. Livesey thought she had come to the door to peer after him with her usual calf-eyed longing.
“Then he came back inside, paid his reckoning, and had a drink, a stirrup cup, as it were?” he proceeded.
“He did.”
“And could you tell me how long you thought that might have been, between my leaving and his that night, Mistress Yadkin?”
“A candle inch, I told your sweet girl, sir. Perhaps a quarter-hour. My mantel clock is not the best, but it seemed to me to bejust about a quarter-hour. La, poor Mr Harry, he was so gay and chirpy when he left. Joshing and teasing, as was his wont, don’t ya know …”
“Hmm. And did he seem anxious to leave, ma’am?”
“Anxious?”
“Eager to go? Or was he dawdling? Chatting up the others, or preoccupied with his own thoughts?” Livesey pressed.
“He was his normal sportive self, Mr Livesey. The crowd was thinning out. ’twas about half past ten that you left. So, ’twas one quarter shy of eleven that he rode off. I’d shut off the liquor right after you departed. Constable Swann and the magistrates don’t like the ordinaries to stay open too late, or get too disorderly. La, don’t you recall the troubles … well, ’twas in ’58, whilst you were away …”
“So Harry did not seem overly eager to be off. Yet he did not seem inclined to dawdle, either, I take it,” Livesey summed up, fearing a screed from her about business, which could waste half the morning.
“About like that. His normal self, as I said.”
“You did not see Sim Bates about that evening?”
“Sim Bates? Bless my soul, Mr Livesey, but that lay-about’s not welcome in my establishment,” Mrs Yadkin huffed. “Nor in the streets that night?”
“The only time I see Sim Bates these past months is when he’s driving his master’s coach into town.” Yadkin sniffed archly. “And a good riddance to bad rubbish, I say! He does his drinking at the New Inlet ferry tavern, or in Masonborough, now, thank the good Lord. He was ever a trial, Mr Livesey! Were he not ruining my floors with his spew, he was rolling in the stable muck, singing or hollering at the top of his lungs … picking fights with people who’d not have a chance against him—”
“Yes, well, but about—” Livesey attempted to say.
“—and the constable and his bailiffs summoned almost every night on me, ‘cause of him! And Sim Bates never had enough coin for his reckoning, when the night was over,” Barbara Yadkin fumed.
“So Bates was not about, good!” Livesey almost barked, putting an end to that subject, he hoped. “But Mistress Yadkin …” he said, steepling his fingers under his chin, “did Harry seem as if he had an errand to run? Did anyone send him a note or letter after I departed? A … uhmm … small bouquet of flowers, perhaps?”
“Flowers, sir?” Mrs Yadkin asked in return, perplexed.
“Or did he receive any note or message before I arrived?”
“Flowers, d’ye say?” Mrs Yadkin repeated. “Oh!” she cried.
“Oh?” Livesey prompted.
“You think ’twas a husband or daddy stopped his business, don’t you?” she gushed in a conspiratorial voice, leaning forward so quickly Livesey almost recoiled. “Everybody’s been saying it was a faction matter, but there’s the other rumors … La, Harry was a handsome rogue, and a great one for the ladies, ‘fore he married, of course, and well I ought to know, growing up together as we did, seeing him out, squiring t’other young ladies …”
She got a dreamy (and wide-eyed) look of dewy softness at that reverie, and hitched a dramatic, regretful-sounding sigh, as if she had missed out on a prime experience and felt forever cheated.
“Poor, poor Georgina,” she sniffed, though. “Betrayed bylove!”
“Well, we don’t know that, surely …” Livesey tried to counter.
“Did they find flowers in his hands, Matthew?” Mrs Yadkin said with a quick flare of enthusiasm. “Oh, how … ! Or fresh flowers on his grave, and no one knows who placed them? How romantic! How sad, too, o’course, but … romantic! How …” she gasped, waving a hand to waft the right word down from the air.
“Lurid?” Livesey suggested dryly.
“Did they, Matthew?” she implored. “Find flowers …by his body?”
“No, ma’am they didn’t,” he answered quickly, not exactly lying. He hoped to hide the existence of those flowers. “But the other rum …”
“Who were they from?” She shuddered, all but fanning herself at such an image. Or the makings of some devilish good gossip!
“Doesn’t matter,” Livesey drawled, hoping to cool her ardor. He flinched at his admission. This interview was going horribly wrong! He’d wished to elicit information with the cool dispatch of the barristers he’d seen in court when he sat on juries. Now his every utterance was turning to fuel to stoke this woman’s fires, and he knew she’d hare off and spread this gossip with the lungs of a town crier!
“Oh, but it does matter, Matthew! Mr Livesey!” she wailed, her bosom heaving theatrically. Her hand came out to seize his once more, this time in a death-grip. “Why, I’ll wager any sum you like, you find who put the flowers on his grave, or who dropped the flowers by his body out there on the Masonborough Road, you have the identity of Mr Harry’s lover! And the husband or father who killed him!”
“There were no flowers, Mrs Yadkin, I was merely asking if he got any sort of message or signal…” Livesey begged, trying to find a decent way to get his hand back before she w
rung it off at the wrist! “And we don’t know what lured him out there that night … ahumm! What reason he had to be out there, rather. We don’t know if Harry was having an … amour!’ Livesey thought the French word more apt, less sordid. Damme, he thought, I should leave before Igive it all away!
“Lured to his death, d’you mean?” she hissed, flushing and fanning madly now as she hung onto her illusions. “Merciful God, how …!”
“Uhmm, well…” Livesey sighed in reply. “Ma’am …”
“Oh, call me Barbara, do, Mr Livesey!” she insisted. I’ll be dashediflwill! he thought.
“Back to the matter at hand, though,” Livesey tried. “Harry got no note that you saw, no one sent him an invitation or letter?”
“No, none.”
“And you saw him ride off, Bess said,” Livesey prompted, hoping he’d heard the last about those damnable flowers.
“Oh, yes! Poor man.” She sniffed, groping for a handkerchief tucked into the tight cuff of her sleeve below her elbow. To do so, she had to unhand Livesey, and he withdrew both his hands out of her reach. “And no flowers did I see on his saddle, either, Matthew.”
Damme, we’re back to those bloody blossoms! he cringed.
“And no one approached him in your stable yard?” he asked.
“Just my ‘daisy-kicker,’ George, the little stableboy.”
“So you were standing on the porch, I presume. Bess said you had gone out to chase down a Mr Pocock over his bill, and—”
“Bad as Sim Bates when he’s had a few, that Pocock!” Mrs Yadkin groaned. “Far as keeping his wits about him, that is. Two shillings and four pence he owed me, and tossed down—”
“So you were in the yard,” Livesey reiterated.
“Aye, I was.”
“And the boy gave him nothing, either?”
“Nothing but his reins, and a steady stirrup,” she recalled.
“Ahum.” Livesey nodded, satisfied. “Now, there is one thing I’m puzzled about,” he went on, getting to his major query. “Bess related that you said Harry rode off north, up Third Street for home. To turn onto Princess Street at the courthouse, so he could ride downhill for Princess and Second?”
“No, he took Market Street. By Stjames’s.”
“Ah?” Livesey exclaimed. “Pardon me, ma’am, but…”
“Barbara!” she insisted with a coo, making as if to strike him a teasing love-pat with the folded-up fan she wasn’t holding.
“Uhmm, Barbara,” Livesey said with a strangled sound, at last, “there’s very little light to see by. That night especially, with no moon. I would ask about your eyesight, and … how may you be sure he turned down Market Street?”
“Why, there’s nothing wrong with my eyes, sir!” she replied with a sudden frostiness, for having been teased since childhood over her myopic expression. “As for where he turned, I saw him! I’d come onto the porch, and ’twas so still and warmish that night, I stayed out to get a breath of air before running the last of the topers out. Harry was the only horseman on the street. There was the church lantern lit, and I saw him by that, him in that light blue taffeta coat he had on, and the yellow plume in his hat,” she relayed, adding extra details to confirm her good eyesight out of pique. “And then, there were the lamps by the courthouse. How may I say it… like one of those cutout black paper portraits, those profile portraits? He rode before the lamp-lights as he turned and went down Market. I thought it odd, him taking an extra turning or two for home, but then he may have had call to see Osgoode Moore before retiring. He lives down Market.”
“Osgoode Moore.” Livesey nodded, with a silent prayer of thanks that he’d not have to raise that name, or give her any more suspicions to bandy about.
“They’d met up before you arrived, Matthew,” Mrs Yadkin related, losing her iciness and dropping back into “fond.”
“Let’s see … they came in at … no. Osgoode was here ‘round quarter to seven, and Harry came in about five ‘til, and they both got a bottle of wine to share, and put their heads together over something. You came injust a bit after seven, and the three of you supped together.”
“Aye, we did,” Livesey agreed. “Though Osgoode moved to the long table when the rest of the crowd arrived.” That part of his evening was lucent, at least. “Did you get the impression I interrupted them … or heard what they might have been discussing before I came?”
“No,” Mrs Yadkin told him, with a sly grin, “but whatever it was, they seemed pleased as all get-out over it. Plotting thick as thieves, they were. Like boys planning a prank, back of the barn, and snickering before it’s played out. You and Harry were dawdling over your suppers, and the singing was starting, and that’s when I remember Mr Osgoode moving to the long table with Thom Lakey and them.”
“I see,” Livesey absently replied. But for his arrival, Harry and Osgoode Moore might have been scheming additions to Harry’s speech he was to give the next morning, and Harry might have wished to speak to Osgoode that late at night about a detail they hadn’t covered before he interrupted them. So Harry’s reason for riding down Market Street could be totally innocent! And Livesey could not imagine an angry, wronged husband plotting a murder being able to play the “Merry Andrew” with his future victim!
Now for the last matter, so he could completely put his mind to rest about Osgoode Moore. “Ahem … Barbara. Do ye know, but I can’t recall just when it was that Osgoode left,” he said with a shrug.
“Well, he waved to both of you on his way out,” Mrs Yadkin said with a matching shrug. “Remember? Ah, but you were having the grandest time with the others. That Irish sailor who sat with ya’ll played ‘One Misty Moisty Morning,’ and you got up and sang it, alone.”
Idid? Livesey thought with a cringe; How liquoreddidlget?
“Can’t rightly say what time that was” Mrs Yadkin admitted. “We were so busy, then. Before nine, perhaps half past eight, maybe?”
“That soon,” Livesey sighed. There was time and enough for Osgoode to ride out of town with a coaching gun and wait for Harry Tresmayne to show up at his trysting spot.
“Bless him, Osgoode Moore’s nothing like his clan,” Mrs Yadkin said with a fond smile. “Not the caterwauler like some of them are. Deep stuff’s more his style. Books, law and politics. Philosophies? He never stays ‘til the wee hours. Ah! Here’s Delia with your breakfast… at last. Girl, top up Mr Livesey’s coffee, and fetch out the West Indies limejam for his toast. Do you like lime, Matthew? Or do you prefer mango? We have that, too.”
“Why … the lime, I s’pose ma’ … Barbara,” he was forced to say. Then, under her adoring but misunderstanding gaze, he pretended to relish his repast, troubled all the while with disturbing fantasies of a cuckold sportingjolly with his impending victim, all the while with murder in back of his eyes. It didn’t improve the food; nothing could. The eggs were done to washleather, the bacon blackened and as tough as Indian trail-jerky, that all went down like dirt and sat on his stomach like a worrisome ballast stone.
Chapter 14
WELL I DO declare!” Constable Swann grunted in surprise as he slouched over a mug of spruce-beer at the chandlery counter. “So it couldn’t have been a faction killin’, not with this for evidence.”
Swann swept a glad hand over the further-wilted bouquet of oleanders on the counter, that Matthew Livesey had summoned him to see. Swann had had a rough week or so, and had taken to hiding out at the courthouse, letting his bailiffs do his work. And with few leads to pursue to begin with, that work had been sketchy at best.
“You didn’t search the woods about the place where Harry died?” Livesey asked him, trying to keep his expression free of adjudging.
“Just the path ‘round the body,” Swann admitted. “Damme, though, sir! Thatjemmy Bowlegs is good as any huntin’ dog, now ain’t he?”
“My son, Sam’l, helped, too. He found these.”
“Makes a funny picture, damme’f it don’t, Livesey,” Swann said with a shaky laugh of
relief that he had something to go on at last. “You out there in the barrens, followin’ Jemmy Bowlegs an’ your son, sniffin’ an’ skulkin’ through the weeds. Rootin’ ‘round like Goodyer’s Pig, sir! ‘Never well, but when in mischief,’ hey?”
“Something like that.” Livesey sighed. Constable Swann offered his empty mug for a refill, and Livesey hid his impatience with the man as he tapped another pint for him. “Some rooting about seemed needful, the way common folk have been talking lately.”
He could not repress that slight reproof from coming out. Swann glowered a bit, but shrugged it off. He’d heard worse, from all sides.
“Captain Tom o’ the Mob, ye mean?” Swann nodded finally. “Well, this’ll take ’em all aback. Now we know ’twas some daddy or husband, they’ll calm down. No more talk o’ armedjustice.”
“But we don’t know that, sir,” Livesey countered. “Not yet.”
“God’s Teeth, Livesey, ‘course we do!” Swann interrupted. “See here, now. We both know … well, least I did, an’ ev’ryone long about the Cape Fear—that Harry Tresmayne had a fearsome itch for quim.”
“Sir.” Livesey scowled, tilting his head toward Bess, who sat on a high stool behind the tall ledger desk, at the other end of the showroom. “My daughter is present.”
“Your pardons,” Swann grunted, lowering his voice and leaning further forward on his elbows to talk more privately. “Fella like him … there he was married to one o’ the finest, prettiest women in the settlement. But two years or so o’ scuffin’ could take the shine off a silver snuffbox, d’ye get my meanin’, hey, Livesey?”
“Umphh,” Livesey replied, appalled by such low talk.
Swann picked up the faded, rotting bouquet and sniffed it and twirled it, making petals flutter away to litter the countertop. He ran a light finger over the bows and ribbons.
“Let’s say the rumors were right, Livesey. Harry was sparkin’ himself some shiny new lass. Oh, he could come into town on business, an’ see anyone he likes. But he was doin’ it on the sly, out in that glade. So that means she was either an unmarried daughter, or she was someone else’s wife. Wasn’t no note needin’. Ye don’t put such down on paper, as could be found. No, theseflowers were the message from his doxy, most-like. Her to him. Maybe him to her.”
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