by Van Reid
When Eleanor was born and Gwendolyne rallied from her ordeal, a collective relief was palpable throughout the house and the community. She died a year late, almost to the day of her daughter’s birth. Aunt Dora continued on as the baby’s guardian and nanny.
Daniel first met Eleanor Linnett when she was three days old and he had been the family’s lawyer for four years. He had never held a baby before but looked remarkably confident, cradling her in his arms. Even then people sensed a sweetness about Nell that surpassed what a person finds naturally sweet in a child. As mild as May, her father said, which was the month in which she was born. Daniel was asked to stand up as her god father, which honor he happily accepted. He became Uncle Dan, though to Nell he was always Uncle Daniel: she and her grand father always employed his full name, a conscious expression of love and regard that is difficult to explain to anyone who doesn’t already understand.
He was Uncle Daniel, and never was a visitor more happily received, or more delighted to be so received by, the lovely little Nell Linnett. How many times had he stepped into that front hall and heard her squeal of delight as she launched herself down the stairs and into his arms.
She was five, she was eight, she was twelve, she was too old and should have been too dignified to leap into his arms, and she delighted him the more by not caring. When one day he did look a little uncertain despite himself, she simply threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek instead, and though his back might have thanked her, he was a little regretful.
She would play his favorite songs on the piano. But then, he thought without jealousy, she plays everyone’s favorite songs. It seemed her great pleasure to please, and this trait, he was convinced, was unalloyed with any ulterior thought or motive. She could soothe her grand father when nothing else would do.
At Christstide the population of the house increased; gifts were secreted beneath beds and in closets, Nell played carols in the evenings, and their voices rose in the beautiful, stately melodies of the season. On Christs Eve the house was ablaze with candles and laughter and Nell. Sometimes Daniel saw her sitting quietly, beaming at the people she loved, smiling with tears in her eyes. She only pouted when the great tree was taken out on New Year’s Day, though it would make a wonderful bonfire.
They were only human, of course, Nell included, and they did have their foibles and their travails. Daniel knew them all and counseled many.
When, in her sixteenth year, her father (the gifted, amiable, and somewhat idle Bertram Linnett) was killed in a riding accident, Nell held Daniel’s hand through the funeral service and said almost nothing for weeks. Ian invited Daniel (among others) to supper almost every night in hopes that old beloved company might draw the girl out. It surprised Daniel a little. Nell had loved her father that was plain, but the good-natured Bertram had never played a very large part in his daughter’s life. Her quiet, dull sorrow “drew the lights from the house,” said Ian. Everyone waited with patience.
Slowly she came to lie again, with the spring, and something also seemed to come to light: the young woman budding out of the girl. Nell had always been beautiful, as a baby, as a child, as an adolescent; now an early grace was visited upon her, and the recent tragedy of her father’s death seemed only to strengthen the lovely generosity of her smile, even if it had muted it with a touch of life’s dark possibility.
One day she came down the stairs with an unpracticed poise, quietly, her eyes glowing as Daniel stood in the front hall. Old Ian was calling from the parlor that they should come in to him. Nell reached the bottom step and took Daniel’s handing hers, the small embracing the large.
“I am so thankful to God,” she said to him, “every day I am thankful to God for you.” There were tears in her eyes.
It was then that Daniel saw how well she understood that someday he might be gone, that she had, all those long weeks, considered the probability that her grand father and her aunt Dora (a stern but much loved presence) and other people she cared for would precede her from lie and that there were not enough hours in the day, or days in her lifetime, to soak them into her heart.
10. A Tale from Other Seasons
The first train came through Hiram before sunrise proper, and when the tracks veered south, Daniel could see the flush of dawn from his window. The snowy countryside was blue in the morning’s twilight, pines rising like lances against the slopes. Daniel had hoped to use the time to think, but he found the processes of his mind to be fractured, making it difficult to keep the images of the day before (and what he hoped might happen today) in proper sequence.
Before the sun had actually peaked over a distant hill, he fell asleep, lulled by the cadence of the rails. He came awake with a deep breath and the realization that daylight, if not the absolute orb of the sun, had arrived. They were coming into a village, and the whistle blew as they approached a crossing. He watched for the station to see where they were.
“South Windham,” said a man across the aisle. He had not been there when Daniel fell asleep. That and the distance of this station from Hiram told Daniel that he had slept for an hour or so, and deeply.
“I didn’t hear the call,” said Daniel, with thanks implicit in his tone. He nodded.
“South Windham!” came the cry of the conductor, as if the man across the aisle had needed corroboration.
There would be Westbrook next and a change of trains at Cumberland Mills before the short ride to Portland, where he would switch trains a second time. Then the litany of place-names would sound like Mother England with Yarmouth and Freeport and Brunswick and Bath, till they came to Wiscasset, a name that rang confidently with the tongue of the New World. Edgecomb, where the portrait had been found, was only the next town on, and Daniel had decided to stop at Wiscasset, which was a county seat and where (presumably) there would be some informed public officeholders. The sheriff, he was sure, would know something.
They came through Portland’s northern neighborhoods when the day was still young, and his third train took him from the plainer side of the city, where the smudge of many fires made gray the surface of previous snows.
He had brought out some papers to read but found himself distracted by what lay ahead and by the changing face of humanity in the seats around him. The man who had first spoken to him got off in Westbrook, coming home from Canada for the holidays. He was replaced, once Daniel was heading out of Portland, by a drummer who tried to sell him a bottle of tonic, the primary ingredient of which was supposedly extracted from a plant found in the Orient. In volume, of course, the primary ingredient was extracted from a still, and this was one way to circumvent Maine’s abolition of liquor, which by 1896 had been on the books for nearly forty years.
Daniel occasionally indulged in small beer, which was still permissible, or a bit of elderberry wine to close a legal matter, but little else. He thanked the drummer but refused even a free sample.
They were joined in Freeport by a family whose house had burned to the ground and who were traveling to relatives in Bath. They had lost everything but the clothes on their backs, and Daniel sneaked a dollar bill into the youngest child’s pocket and put a finger to his lips to urge secrecy in the matter. a fellow with a cat and a mandolin got on in Brunswick, and he might have been talked into playing the instrument if the animal had not kept his hands busy.
The man with the cat, along with several other people, boarded the train for its ferry ride across the Kennebec, but man and ct got off in Woolwich across the river. They were well away from the higher elevations now, and glimpses of bays and inlets and little rivers had followed them since leaving Portland. These coastal lands were without forests to speak of; rolling fields and granite heights crisscrossed with hundreds of miles of stone wall, so that from a particularly steep slope the snowy terrain looked like a quilt of irregular white patches.
On the other side of Woolwich the conductor called out the count seat of Wiscasset, famous in the papers these days for a sensational murder trial that report
edly involved skulduggery among certain Waldoboro town officials and the falling-out of best friends. The papers, even as far as Hiram, had been full of the business, and the town was bursting with reporters and curiosity seekers, so that private individuals were renting out rooms to supplement the crowded hotels.
A stretch of field and the eminence of Birch Point fell past them, and the Sheepscott River came to view, cold and gray beneath an atmosphere speckled with large flakes. The houses above them and to the left grew large and grand, the shacks and boathouses below more numerous. Tucker’s Castle passed by, the image of a Scottish estate copied stone for stone, its of windows gazing darkly upriver. The whistle blew, a bell rang, the train yard enfolded them, and the Main Street of Wiscasset appeared as they slowed with a burst of steam into the station.
Daniel had never been here before, and he was struck by the handsome buildings along its steep streets, the brick Custom House standing by itself at a riverside corner, the courthouse and a white steepled church looking down from the top of the hill. The day was dark enough so that store windows along the Main Street glowed cheerily, and several establishments were decked out with signals of the coming Yuletide.
He said good morning to the fellow at the ticket booth and asked after Sheriff Piper, whose name he remembered from the accounts of the ongoing trial.
“He’s having his locks shorn,” said the ticket man offandedlly. He was counting out change but took a moment to indicate the general direction that Daniel must take to find the sheriff. It didn’t surprise Daniel that the sheriff’s private business was public knowledge in a small town like this. No one had exactly got on top of a roof and shouted that the man was having his hair cut, but the ear-to-ear telegraph would be nearly as efficient, complete (Daniel was sure) with opinions on whether the sheriff needed a haircut, or perhaps he’d waited too long or needed to look particularly presentable for a day in court.
Looking up the street through a frosty window, Daniel caught sight of the barber pole, and thanked the man in the ticket booth. With his small leather case carrying not much more than it had carried the day before, he stepped out, tightened his coat collar a little, and walked up the street.
There were two customers being groomed at the barbershop, and three more waiting; an infamous trial was surely good for business and gossip both. Talk did not stop, or even quiet much, when Daniel stepped in-a sign of polite behavior his mother would have said. “You don’t stop talking when someone walks in a room,” she would say. “They will think you were discussing them.”
“Good morning,” said one of the barbers when conversation gave him a place to put it in.
“Good morning,” said Daniel. “I’m looking for Sheriff Piper.”
The man in the right-hand chair was being finished up with a shave. He opened an eye and considered the newcomer noncommittally. “How are you this morning?” he said.
“Well enough, thank you,” said Daniel. “My name is Daniel Plainway. I’m from Hiram.”
The sheriff considered his geography. “I think I know where that is,” he said pleasantly.
“Malcolm Henry worked up that way at a sawmill,” said the barber as he considered the planes of Sheriff Piper’s face. He waited to see if the sheriff had anything else to say before applying his razor.
“Quite by accident,” continued Daniel, “I came upon a newspaper clipping yesterday.” He could see that everyone, including the sheriff, took it for granted that he was referring to the trial. “It was just an engraving of a portrait and a caption referring to Fort Edgecomb and a Mister Walton.”
The sheriff opened both eyes now. The barber, sensitive to such subtle indications, pulled his razor back. “Just the picture and the caption,” said the sheriff.
Daniel felt his skin tightening at the back of his neck. “There was nothing else with the clipping.”
“And that brought you down here.”
“I know the woman in the picture.”
This colloquy was circumscribed by complete silence. The other patrons and the two barbers never looked from their tasks or their newspapers or (in one case) the scene outside the window, but none of them was missing much.
The sheriff leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Give me a moment. I’ll be right with you.”
“Take your time, Sheriff,” said Daniel quietly, belying his growing excitement. “I wouldn’t want to hurry a man’s shave.”
“Forgive me if I seemed to be putting you off in there,” said Sheriff Piper when he stepped onto the sidewalk with the lawyer. He had been revealed, when he stepped out from under the barber’s sheet, as an amiable, rugged-looking fellow with rangy limbs and a square jaw. With the door to the shop closed behind him, he pulled the fur collar of his coat closer about his neck, feeling the lack of hair there, and crammed a round hat over his ears.
“Not at all,” said Daniel.
“There was just the picture then,” said the sheriff again.
“And the caption.” Daniel had the clipping in a coat pocket, and he pulled it out to show the sheriff.
“It’s an unusual matter.” Piper glanced at the engraving before handing it back. “And not all of it has been conducted under the auspices of official business. Do you mind a walk?”
“I’ve been on the train all morning, so a walk would be fine.”
Without saying where they were going, the sheriff led the way up the street, touching his hat to the women as he met them on the sidewalk, greeting the men with a reverse nod. Daniel thought that Piper was well liked among those who knew him, and was pretty sure he liked him too. High sheriff was the term then in use, but Charles Piper seemed content to walk on the same level as everyone else. “Last summer,” he began, “there was a fellow who came into town, named Tobias Walton.”
“He’s not from Wiscasset then?”
“He hails from Portland.”
“I was just through there,” said Daniel, more or less to himself.
“He got into an interesting difficulty with some rusticators and an escaped bear-well, that’s a story itself-but I met Mister Walton, and as it happened, he and a local boy, Sundry Moss, went with myself, and Seth Patterson, the jailer, and a customs agent, known as Colonel Taverner, to watch for smugglers at Fort Edgecomb.” Piper cast an eye in Daniel’s direction. “I told you it was an unusual matter.”
Daniel smiled at the sheriff’s rueful expression.
“We almost caught some-smugglers, that is-but what would concern you would be the presence of a little hoy among them.”
Daniel stopped. “About four years old?”
“You know him?” The sheriff turned when he realized that the other man had come to a halt. He paused a step or two away.
“I may know who he is,” said Daniel. That tight feeling at the back of his neck came back, and he shrugged as if a chill had run through him. “This was last summer?”
“Have you ever known a man named Eustace Pembleton?” asked the sheriff, and when Daniel shook his head, Piper described the man.
“He sounds very like the man who disappeared with the boy,” said Daniel. “Edward Penfen.”
After that Piper interrupted his story only two or three times. Someone sweeping a door stoop or another person walking past would pause for a moment’s conversation. Daniel and the sheriff turned up Federal Street, where there were handsome houses on either side and an old cemetery on their right. Daniel had an unpleasant twinge of fear, for just a moment, that the sheriff was bringing him to a graveside.
They were climbing a long slope then, and the sheriff’s tale had skipped ahead to October, when as it turned out, the little boy known as Bird was rescued by the efforts of several stalwart individuals, not the least being a young woman named Mollie Peer and a baseball player named Wyckford O’Heam, who was badly wounded during a gunfight on the Sheepscott River.
It was in a tunnel beneath the long since decommissioned Fort Edgecomb that the portrait of a young woman was found among a rob
bers’ cache, and it was Mister Walton who first saw the striking resemblance between the little boy and the woman in the picture.
“It was Mister Walton,” continued Piper, “who paid to have an engraving made of the portrait, though it is only a f air likeness.”
“And it is Mister Walton who has the portrait.”
“It is in his custody, yes,” said the sheriff.
“Bird,” said Daniel.
“Yes.” Piper did not press him but glanced now and again to see how close they might be to getting Daniel’s half of the story.
“There is some irony intended there, I think,” said Daniel finally, and his voice did not indicate any humor.
“Irony?”
“It must be him.” Daniel was a little lost with his own thoughts. “He disappeared when he was only a year old. Linnett was his family name.”
“Linnett,” repeated the sheriff. “That’s where Bird would come in, I suppose.”
“Bertram Linnett.” Daniel was thinking of Nell and her baby boy. “Bird,” he said in a breath. It was not much of a name for a little boy to live by. “But where is he now?”
“At Wyckford’s mother’s,” replied the sheriff. They had stopped near the top of the hill. “Up north somewhere. They have a farm, I guess. Mister Walton wrote me to say it was a fine place for a kid. I have to tell you that the boy and Wyck-that is, Wyckford-are pretty tight.”
“I will tread carefully, Sheriff,” said Daniel.
“I told you it was quite a story. Like something out of a book.”