by Van Reid
There was Pacif a to think of, however, and least of all she wanted to draw her friend into this unhappy affair. She wondered what Pacif a could hear. Their previous words had been in tones no louder than would be considered conversational, but as he pressed her, his cheek against hers and their mouths within an inch of one another’s ears, what was said came in gasps and whispers, more rapid and furious and less comprehensible.
“You made a promise!” he almost sobbed, and repeated over and over, “You promised me! You made a promise!”
“We were children! Just children!”
The scent of her filled him: her hair, her skin, her breath, the pale and familiar essence of lavender. He gripped her shoulders in a rough caress and pressed his mouth to her cheek. They both wept, she more in sorrow than fear, he almost in rage. He pulled his face away, and the sight of her beautiful eyes welling with tears seemed only to increase his anger. He held her face, and she made a small, animallike cry, sure that he was going to force his mouth onto hers, when a sharp knock came upon the door behind them.
“Charlotte,” came Pacifa’s voice. “Charlotte, you have a visitor.”
“Yes?” said Charlotte. Noble stood away from her with a startled jerk.
“There is a gentleman here to see you,” said Pacif a through the door.
Charlotte was sure that Pacif a must be inventing a caller, and though Roger would be furious, he could be no more so than he was a moment before. Roger Noble meanwhile feared any man’s finding them in such straits.
“Yes,” said Charlotte. She had a handkerchief out and was wiping her eyes and wondering how she could put herself in order before the door was opened and realizing how improper it looked to have Roger and her step out, flushed and out of breath. She thought to ask Roger to wait in Uncle Ezra’s room, but that would be counter to Pacifa’s rescue of her, so she stepped past him and wrenched open the door.
A man was standing in the parlor, and Charlotte could hardly have been more surprised. He was a regular-looking fellow, hardly taller than she, with a pleasant face and broad mustaches. He was well tailored, and he held a crisp fedora before him. He blinked when she opened the door, and she knew that her face was blotched with emotion and that her eyes were still wet.
She stood stupidly in the door to the alcove, with Roger watching over her shoulder. “I beg your pardon,” she said, and with sudden inspiration asked, “Are you here to see my uncle? I am sorry, but he left this morning.”
“A it happens,” said the fellow, glancing from one to the other of the three people before him. “I was looking for Mr. Burnbrake, if he is your uncle, though it was more in the way of finding the Moosepath League.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Charlotte.
“The Moosepath League,” he said again, the drawl in his voice indicating just how much he belonged in the state of Maine.
“The Moosepath League,” she said, suppressing a sudden need to weep again. “The Moosepath League is with my uncle, sir.”
“My name is Daniel Plainway,” said the man. He nodded to Charlotte and Pacifa, then took in Noble.
“This is my good friend Charlotte Burnbrake,” said Pacifa, and she all but swooped Charlotte away from Noble. Roger was left in plain sight, and he mechanically stepped into the parlor.
“I apologize if I came at a bad time,” Daniel said as they shook hands awkwardly.
“Not at all,” said Pacifa. “We were just talking about lunch. Perhaps you could stay.”
Charlotte shot her friend a startled glance.
“Thank you, no,” said Daniel. “I’m simply interested in where I might find the Moosepath League-specifically, I should say, a Mister Tobias Walton. It is a matter of some urgency, as I have information that I know he has been waiting on for some time.” The man worked at the brim of his hat.
“I haven’t met Mister Walton myself,” said Charlotte, “but I can give you the address my uncle was reaching today, and from there you are sure to find Mister Walton’s friends, who may be of more help.” She moved across the room to a table beneath a window where there were some papers.
“Let me,” said Pacifa. Charlotte didn’t know how Pacif a could have any idea where her uncle would be, but her friend was across the room and scribbling something on a piece of paper before she could think of a response. “There,” said Pacifa, and she handed Mr. Plain way the supposed address.
Daniel Plainway thanked the dark-haired woman and nodded to the others. He knew that he had stepped into a private complication and was thankful to have what he came for so that he could leave. “Miss Burnbrake,” he said, then glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. There was no address on it at all, but only the words:
If you are at all gallant you will not leave until he is gone!
21. Beyond the Forest of Fallen Trees
“We can keep to the wooded trails,” said Capital Gaines, “but from a distance the steam from these creatures might look like a train passing through. Probably the snow is hiding us.”
The Percherons gave no evidence of tiring, but the vapor that rose from their backs, as they plowed the drifts, rose (when the snow and wind did not hinder it) to the height of a four-story building, well above many of the middle-aged pines and hardwoods ranking the banks of the brook that connected Oaks Pond with Lake George.
Twice Capital stopped the sleigh and, with a hammer, knocked off the snowballs that accumulated on the horses’ hooves. More than once, one of these accretions flew off of its own accord and banged loudly against the dashboard of the sleigh.
Capital’s passengers had only to appreciate his skill with the animals, squint through the increasing snow, and marvel at the wintry silence that occupied the woods and water. Mister Walton thought the husband and wife looked like a pleasant lithograph, snugly wrapped in their furs and blankets. He himself was a picture of wintry delight, with his bespectacled bright eyes and rosy cheeks; his hat was crammed down over his head as a precaution against losing it.
Though he had been impressed by the burglary at Mr. Thole’s home, Mister Walton likened his emotions to a child playing hide-and-seek, when the fear of being found grows out of proportion to the game. It was not altogether an unpleasant sensation, but he didn’t think it would remain so for very long. The hushed atmosphere, the hiss of falling snow, and the steady rush of their progress only heightened the sense of secrecy and the dread of discovery.
They reached the top of a particularly tall slope, and through the snow, as well as through a line of trees and over the heads of other pine and fir below them, they could see the frozen plain of Lake George. They had lost sight of the crow, though occasionally they could still hear a raucous call though the woods. Capital drew up the sleigh and considered their itinerary.
“There is someone on the lake,” said Sundry. He was standing on his seat, hoping that his own long form was hidden by the trees before them.
“What’s that?” Capital pulled a pair of binoculars from the pack at his feet and trained them toward Lake George. The falling snow between themselves and the lake made for an obscured view, but he was able to locate at least three dark figures some yards from the near shore. “They’re not moving,” he said after a bit. The others were straining their own necks. “Ice fishers, maybe,” he suggested. He pointed to two hills in the east. “There’s a small settlement at the foot of those mounds,” he continued, “and there’s a road along the opposite bank.”
“But that’s the other side of the lake,” said Isabelle.
“No telling where the best fishing is,” said the man.
“It’s an odd day to be fishing, isn’t it?” wondered Sundry, considering the rising storm and the persistent and heavy snow.
“It’s an odd day to be out at all,” said Capital with some humor. “They either are fishing or want us to think they are. There’s probably no telling, unless we go up and ask them, so I suggest we take note and carry on.”
“Do you know where we are going from he
re?” asked Frederick, who was feeling an increasing need for hurry. Capital had them moving, even as the clergyman spoke.
“We’ll head almost directly towards Foster Hill and into a wood of fallen trees.”
“Fallen trees?” said Sundry. “It’s been cut?”
“Not at all, but you’ll see for yourself.”
The horses seemed to enjoy charging down the opposite slope, and the passengers felt as if they were almost falling. Mister Walton held his hat to his head and thought of tobogganing down the Eastern Promenade.
The “Forest of Fallen Trees” (as it has been identified in the relevant annals) was not a grove brought dow by the hand of man but a curious testament to the speculative character of the natural world.
Forty years ago the country they traveled had been stripped of forest; many a house still stood and many a ship sailed that owed its physical existence, if not its soul, to the giants that once guarded these hills. But once the emptied land had been left to its own devices, the descendants of former pine and spruce, of oak and maple, and the soon-to-be-doomed elm, reoccupied the slopes deserted by lumbering armies, and the quicker growths of softwood ventured even into tracts where only bush and fern would safely grow. In peaty soil, amid stands of granite, the pines and their relatives increased their standard foot a year till the poor ground had not sufficient leverage against the wind and the weight of wood. and ice, the great trees crashed in the otherwise silent forest, as one by Throughout the year, but more commonly beneath the burden of snow one they reached some unstable height, and though new trees continued to raise their skeletal shoots, this expanse of thin soil had become a graveyard of leaning trees, the massive networks of roots, round as wheels, lifted like the upturned feet of dead and decaying giants. Snow hung upon everything, and the dark horizontal trunks were thickly shrouded in white.
But this was not an unknown stretch of land, and hunters had cleared a way through this wreckage to the stalking grounds beyond. It was a little sobering to ride past this natural destruction, where the trail picked its way between the fallen trees, occasionally ducking beneath the raised trunk of the largest of them. Mister Walton was reminded of cities he had visited after the war in the former Confederacy, where shattered buildings and heaps of brick lay abandoned and barren.
While they crept around one of these deadfalls, Moxie bounded from the sleigh and charged through the drifts ahead of them. Sundry envied her a little, thinking it might be pleasant to stretch a leg and explore this strange place more closely. The knock from a woodpecker came from the other side of the dying wood.
A the trail avoided the largest of these obstacles, it led them away from the stream and back again several times, so that their weaving path might have been laid out by a drunkard. The brook rose with the land, and the horses heaved against the steepening slope where even the dead pines grew few and massive boulders and sharp verges of granite formed the primary crop. They came to a narrow plateau above which there rose an abrupt and craggy height, what would have been called a tor in the Scottish Highlands.
This eminence lay another ten or twenty yards above them and was impossible for the horses and sleigh to reach. Frederick was the first to throw off his covers and jump down; he was surprised by the depth of the snow and a little daunted to think it would be that much deeper on their return. Isabelle was peering into the sky as he handed her down, as if she might gauge the snow that had yet to fall, but at present they were blinded from the sky itself by an atmosphere filled with heavy flakes.
Moxie bounded alongside them, looking ready to play. Mister Walton had never seen a dog so at home in the snow.
Frederick took up a shovel that he had packed in the rear of the sleigh and shouldered a bag of instruments. Mister Walton and Sundry stood aside, waiting to help with anything that Capital deemed necessary to bring. The older man, however, simply threw the strap of his field glasses over his shoulder, then reached beneath a blanket at his feet and produced a rifle.
“You never know what might be in season,” said Capital when he saw Mister Walton’s wide-eyed expression.
Mister Walton himself had handled a similar firearm not many months before, and the memory of knocking a man down with a single shot was perhaps uppermost in his mind. Frederick and Isabelle too were a little taken aback by Capital’s particular readiness.
“That’s not a rabbit gun,” said Sundry wryly.
“Swamping a man’s house is a severe business,” said Capital simply, referring to the burglary at Mr. Thole’s and suggesting, at the same time, that those capable of such a deed might be capable of other things as well. “You’ve thought of that?” he asked, and there was every indication that he was enjoying himself.
“I appreciate your caution, Mr. Gaines,” said Frederick.
“Capital!”
“I appreciate, Capital, your caution, but it seems-”
“Well?”
“I can’t imagine-”
“Can’t you!” Capital shrugged. “A you wish, Reverend,” he said with a wink, and he slipped the rifle back beneath its blanket, then vaulted down from the sleigh like a young man. “Will your dog stay with the sleigh?”
“I think, yes,” said Frederick.
“Then tell her to give a bark if anyone comes sniffing around.”
Daniel’s Story (May–June 1891)
They were coming out of choir practice one Wednesday evening when Clayton Bond told Daniel Plainway about seeing “the Linnett girl and that odd brother of Asher Willums down by Ten Mile River.” Clayton was a good fellow, and the information was not offered as a piece of gossip; it was an observation, like seeing an owl by day, and he was reminded of it at that moment only by a passing reference to Neils voice as he and Daniel were discussing the need for another alto in the choir. It was late in May, but the weather had been as warm and sultry as July; the spring had been mild and everything was early: the flowers, the leaves on the trees.
“Do you mean Jeram?” said Daniel. There were several odd Willum brothers in his estimation, but he knew the general consensus.
“I was out checking the west fence, “said Clayton. He was searching his pockets for tobacco, his pipe idle in the corner of his mouth. “They were a little ways away, and I didn’t know them at first. Sitting beneath one of those wild crab apples down by the river. “A Linnett and a Willum in casual conversation were of enough to merit note.
“They were probably both out walking, “said Daniel, who wanted to make the least possible news out of this. “Their places are not so far apart, really.”
“In one sense,” said Clayton; then he added, “Feram always seemed harmless enough.”
The conversation turned elsewhere, but Clayton’s last comment on the subject of Nell and Jeram held more meaning than was easily apparent. Daniel was known as a good friend to the Linnetts, and perhaps Clayton was absolving himself of his duty regarding this accidental knowledge by passing it over to his fellow tenor. Truthfully Daniel rather enjoyed the idea of a friendship between the two young people, Nell was well liked in the town and among her schoolmates but had never gotten very close to anyone her own age. Jeram, as far as he knew, had no friends at all. Then again, as he had said, they had probably simply been out walking separately and their meeting had been accidental.
The thought of Nell with Jeram Willum wasn’t what disturbed Daniel; it was connecting Nell with the Willums at all, as if Jeram might carry a disease, the symptoms of which he had yet to show. That shadowy den on Trafton Pond, hidden even from the water by a crowded stand of willows, stood out in Daniel’s mind like that unfortunate dog, straining at its chain-to be pitied perhaps but feared as well.
He took his own counsel, however-a good, lawyerlike decision-and put the concern from his mind. As it happened, something led his steps to the Linnett house the next afternoon, and he talked with old Ian about town aff airs and the recent problems with Canada over fishing grounds. Eventually he asked after Nell, who had not met him at th
e front door.
“She’ll be combing the fields,” her grand father said. “She does love walking the grounds after school. I don’t believe this hog;wash about young women staying indoors. If the sun and the fresh air are good for me and you, they will be good for her, I say.”
Daniel nodded his agreement.
“It was the matter with her mother, I think. She faded from lack of enterprise, though I’d never say it to anyone else.”
Daniel was pretty sure he had heard just those words from Ian Linnett before, and among other people than himself.
If a body meets a body,
Coming through the rye…
The song followed Daniel home that afternoon, and why wouldn’t someone occasionally meet another body if one frequented the fields and forests? He himself had hailed another fisherman on the opposite bank of what he had considered a secluded pool and been warned of the approach of yet another by the sound of a snapping twig in a hushed autumn wood.
That Sunday, however, before dinner Nell announced that a friend was joining them, and no one was any more startled than Daniel Plainway when the knock came at the front door and Nell escorted Jeram Willum into the parlor. The dominoes of Daniel’s imaginative constructions began to fall, no more so than when Ian Linnett greeted the boy with a friendly handshake and he and Dora accepted Jeram’s presence with the very soul of graciousness. It appeared as if the old man and the great-aunt had known more about this friendship than Daniel could ever have supposed.
Dinner was the scene of further cordiality, and Nell beamed with pleasure, even as Jeram came some distance out of his strange shell and ventured an opinion or two about matters under conversation. He carried himself surprisingly well at the semiformal a ff air that was the Linnetts’sunday dinner, primarily, Daniel suspicioned, because of Nell’s careful tutoring; she did inf act watch him with both the nervousness and pride of a teacher.