The Constable's Tale (15 page)

He slung the second pistol aside and pulled the tomahawk from his belt. Spurring Annie forward into the cloud of smoke, which the breeze was turning back on the attackers, he collided nearly head-on with the unwounded man. This one was now holding a sword. But before he could make use of it, Harry sank the ax into his forehead.
He wrenched it free and watched as the man toppled over, eyes crossed like a simpleton.

Through the smoke Harry could see Rafferty still upright on his horse but sagging, his face turning the color of ash bark. Blood spurted from a chest wound: long, arcing geysers erupting at the steady pace of a heartbeat. He would not last much longer.

Clutching his shoulder, the third man took a last look at the chaos, his expression a blend of surprise and pain, and galloped back into the woods.

Noah was lying on his back on the ground, a hole in his chest. Pink froth forming around his nose and mouth. He peered up at Harry with a calm gaze, his large, deep-set eyes unfocused, as if under water. He made to speak but the effort brought on a choking spasm. After that he seemed content to just lie quiet. His eyes wandered, drifting here and there, and finally came back to rest on Harry as if in silent communication, sharing a mystery. He took another shallow, liquid breath. His lips moved as he exhaled. Harry bent closer to hear what he might say. The last thoughts of a man who knew he was dying.

The words were barely audible yet unmistakable. “The children,” he said, and then he breathed no more.

Harry spent a long time knelt over the body, grief and disbelief cycling through his mind. Trying to accept that the friendly, gentle spirit that lived behind those intelligent eyes had stolen away. He realized more completely than before how he had been liking Noah’s company and looking forward to learning more from the best-educated, and possibly smartest, person he was sure he had ever known. He thought about Noah’s plans for a school for orphans, now never to come to pass. How Noah Burke might have explained what cosmic purpose could have been served by his own death right here, right now, on the swelling tide of his life.

He wrapped him in a blanket and gently placed him over his saddle, then put the other two bodies over their mounts. Still marveling over the suddenness with which it had all happened. In Harry’s experience,
life usually unfolded gradually. Even the onset of death generally offered a chance to prepare one’s self. But sometimes life’s events came with the suddenness of lightning or an earthquake or the popping of a bubble in the flow of a stream.

It also occurred to him that Comet Elijah’s training had worked. Maneuvers with knives, tomahawks, pistols, and long guns had become as natural to Harry as eating or sleeping or buttoning a pair of breeches. But it all had been make-believe. He had always wondered whether, or how well, any of it would work against a real opponent. In his youthful brawling he had never been called on to resort to the intricate rules of the tomahawk. But just now he had given battle in a circumstance that was no drill. He had played a game whose stakes were life and death, and he had won.

It was also a revelation to see just how easy killing really was. He wondered if he would ever come to regret having taken two human lives. Comet Elijah had warned him on this score. Regret almost certainly would set in at some future time, he had lectured.

But in this instance, Harry doubted it.

*

The sheriff in Annapolis identified Rafferty and his dead friend. The latter was the brother of the one who had escaped. All three were tough no-accounts who had spent their lives scuttling around the bottom planes of the city, mostly the docks, committing petty thievery when opportunities arose and offering themselves for whatever odious jobs came along, usually for cash currency in advance. The sheriff theorized that their attack was a rare act of highway robbery. Rare because such business needed more planning than they were known for undertaking. He had no explanation for Rafferty’s quarrelsome nature the previous evening, other than that he might have been trying to take Harry’s measure as a prospective victim. Decide how formidable an adversary he might prove. When it came to the actual deed, the sheriff
theorized, they had opened fire because they had lost their courage at the last minute and acted with mindless alarm. Typical of the harbor scum they were.

“I doubt we’ll see again the one who got away,” the sheriff said. “My guess is he’ll go west, try and make a new life for himself on the frontier. Fewer inquisitive people out there.”

CHAPTER 14

108: When you Speak of God or his Atributes, let it be Seriously & wt. Reverence. Honour & Obey your Natural Parents altho they be Poor.

—R
ULES OF
C
IVILITY

August 8, 1759

Annapolis, Maryland

My Beloved Wife
,

I Pray this finds You & every One well. Noah Burke is dead. But do not be Alarmd. I was able to fend off ye attackers that came out of the Woods and Killt two of ‘em. They were trying to rob us I guef.

I am on my way to ye Cittie of Philadelphia to talk too Someone who awt to no about ye Freemasons Ornament which I found at ye
Campbells House. I am forry I have not Writt’n before. Ye Sheriff shewed me a copy of Davis’ North Carolina Gazette which arrived heer by Packet Ship yefterday when there was an Article about Comet Elijah’s effort to efcape from ye Gaol which must have takn place a day or fo after we rode off. I wifh he had Sukfeed’d, since now he is waring irons all ye time, I fear he will be moft Uncomfortable. Noah gave me fome Money before He Died to continue my Enqwirees. I mifs Your fweet Companionship & am moft Concerned for ye Bufinefs of ye Plantation but I feel I Muft do all in my Powr to Prevent Comet Elijah from Hanging. Alfo I defsine to deliver ye awfull News of Noahs Death to His Familie in Philadelphia myfelf.

Yr. moft ob. & Loving Hufband & etc
,

Henry Woodyard

IT WAS HIS FOURTH ATTEMPT AND, THOUGH STILL NOT PERFECT, IT
would have to do. Writing was just too much of a trial. Also, Harry had found only four sheets of writing paper among Noah’s belongings. Rereading the final version, he wondered if he should have mentioned his experiences in Williamsburg. The governor and his fashionable friends. He probably should have explained how it had been the storekeeper Bannerman’s information that sent him off in the direction of Philadelphia.

Of course, Madame Contrecoeur’s name also was missing. And he had decided against confiding his suspicion, which had been mounting, that the attack might have been related to his pursuit of the Campbells’ killer. He did not want Toby to suspect he was losing his reason. Such a connection never would have even occurred to Harry had it not been for the baroness’s note and her reference to the power of the Masons, with their tentacles. The threat they might pose to someone seen to be pursuing one of their members. Rather than Rafferty’s taking a measure of Harry and Noah at the tavern as potential robbery victims, it seemed ever more thinkable that Rafferty had been trying to provoke Harry into a fight. One the two younger
men would finish in Rafferty’s favor, with Harry lying dead, or at least incapacitated, on the floor.

He hired a carpenter to nail together a coffin and scratch out a simple inscription on a slab of wood to stand as a marker until a proper marble could be put up. The rector of a local church granted permission for burial there the next day and accepted payment in advance to say some words. Harry employed the carpenter and his son to work into the night digging the hole and installing a timber plank lining.

These arrangements were costly, but Harry had discovered a way to pay for them. In Noah’s saddlebag was a money belt containing a thick wad of Pennsylvania paper currency. Assuming a roughly equivalent rate of exchange in North Carolina, it was well above what a skilled tradesman in New Bern might earn in two years.

Harry reckoned he should return to Noah’s family what he would not need to get to Philadelphia and back to North Carolina, which should not be much. But for now he allowed himself the burden-free, slightly drunken feeling he imagined rich people felt every day of their lives. He decided to stay the night at a more expensive tavern, one closer to the capitol.

At the cemetery the next morning, under a sky the color of dishwater, the carpenter set the coffin lid aside so Harry could have a last look. Noah was still wearing the blood-stained clothes he had died in. He looked cramped in the box, shoulders pinched together in a shrug. His eyes had come partway open again. Harry pressed them shut with his fingers, then took two coins from his pocket and placed one over each eyelid to keep them down.

It was the same last loving act he had seen his mother perform all those years ago, so Ned’s soul could rest.

*

He had died at seven o’clock one morning in the middle of August. Missed his footing, got caught about the waist between two logs
rushing downstream on a roiling tide. The life crushed out of him in one agonizingly long moment. Harry’s older brother was in the ground before sundown the next day, still looking fresh enough in the face to have been only sleeping.

Talitha had seen a token of death earlier that week. One night a flock of pigeons flew up to her room window, waking her, and, with a great dry battering of wings and claws, nearly tore the window out. She kept this experience to herself at the time, fearing it might pertain somehow to Hendry, her husband, who was still missing in South America. She also worried that by speaking of it she might let out whatever evil it might hold. But she could not have imagined it prophesied Ned’s death. She collapsed straightaway onto the ground when she got the news from the river.

Ned had been the adored one. He and Harry were the only children out of six who had lived long enough to walk. Ned was five years ahead of Harry and smarter, stronger, and more handsome. At least so Harry thought, and it seemed to him others did as well. People said Ned took after his father, who was much looked-up-to throughout Craven County. Now Talitha’s hopes for the future fell wholly onto Harry. He never got over thinking he was a poor substitute.

Talitha was firm on giving Ned all he was entitled to, even in death. Every ritual had to be observed as befit the family’s rising station in the community. But unlike those people of the very highest quality, she had no clothes set aside especially for mourning. She would have picked out something suitable from Soloman’s, but everyone knew it was bad luck to wear new clothes to a funeral, so a neighbor made her the loan of her black Sunday gown.

The same neighbor and another friend took over the job of fixing Ned’s body. They opened the window in his room to let in fresh air, changed his bed linens, and, when that was done, stretched him out on the bed for bathing and dressing. Meanwhile Natty took a wagon into New Bern and brought back a casket and black armbands for them all to wear. He and some of the other men worked the rest of the day digging a hole and putting in a liner. Talitha had them do this on a
small hill across the road from the main house, where Ned would rest alongside the tiny grave markers of his four sisters.

By late afternoon, word of the disaster had traveled through Craven County. Neighbors and friends began arriving, bearing food. Doors and windows remained open, and they lit as few lamps and tapers as were absolutely necessary so as to add as little heat as possible to the day’s buildup. The next time Harry saw Ned, he was inside the casket and being carried through the hall and into the front room by four sweaty men with sun-darkened faces. They set him on two tables that had been brought together and removed the coffin lid. Ned’s face was pale, but, looking into it, Harry could hardly believe the life had entirely gone out of him. Natty noticed Harry staring and figured out what he was thinking. He whispered into his ear that no one could have survived such injuries as Ned had suffered, but they would keep an eye on him for any signs of life just the same.

The traffic of visitors slowed but did not stop as the evening wore on. Hushed speaking continued past midnight. Recollections of Ned. Little-boy antics. Funny, grown-up things he would say. How when he was seven he had saved Harry from a sea eagle that had dived into the yard and set its claws into the squirming two-year-old. The bird was having trouble getting back off the ground with its load. Ned beat on it with a toy musket Natty had made for him, chasing it here and there as it tried and failed to gain altitude. Finally, it let Harry go and flew off.

Natty and Harry stayed up after Talitha showed the last visitors out and took to her bed. With all the windows and doors open, somebody had to keep watch for cats, which will come to corpses if allowed. They will claw or scratch at exposed flesh or lie down inside the coffin, keeping company with the deceased. But none came by that night.

Talitha returned her borrowed gown the day after the funeral. She wore her store-bought black armband until a year had passed. On the morning of the 366th day, she made a breakfast of eggs and fried
pork for Harry and Natty, then said she was going into town to buy a new metal plow for the late-summer planting. It seemed the passing seasons had brought her round the full circle of life, death, and the coming of life again. That is what Harry made of it.

It was not until much later that he realized Ned’s death, hard as it was on them all at the time, had served a purpose. It made Harry tougher.

CHAPTER 15

19: Let your Countenance be pleasant but in Serious Matters Somewhat grave.

—R
ULES OF
C
IVILITY

HE HAD NO TROUBLE FINDING NOAH’S HOUSE IN PHILADELPHIA. THE
first man he asked pointed the way, looking at Harry as if he must have been from another country.

Peter Burke himself answered the door. He was unmistakably Noah’s father: heavier around the midsection but thin-boned, long-fingered, and with the same hollowed-out eyes that had given Noah the slightly somber look that suited his nature. Burke was dressed in the plain fashion that Harry had come to associate with Quakers.