The Constable's Tale (2 page)

Toby looked like she was about to say something further, but Harry seized on the pause to change the subject. “I’m sure our courts aren’t much different from yours,” he said. “The lawyers are always talking about precedents in English law.”

“Husband, everything is different in America.”

“The trials are going at a quick pace. Olaf McLeod doesn’t stand on legal ceremony. I’ve given up trying to guess how he’ll rule on any particular thing. Or when. Sometimes he’ll just decide he’s heard enough, hand down a verdict, and move on.”

“I am sure I’ll have much to tell my journal tonight.”

Harry had mostly resisted peeking into Toby’s diary. She had begun it a few days after the wedding. She said she wanted their future children to know how they lived when they were young. He had looked only a few times. Her neat handwriting for the most part dealt with monotonies of everyday life, making him wonder why she even bothered. The time she got up mornings to stoke the cooking fire. The day’s weather. Chores she did. The visit of a neighbor now and then.

His eyes once did land on a longer piece of writing in which she put down her thoughts about the mystery of time. How one moment flowed into the next and that into the following, and so on, making an endless chain of tiny packets that defined one’s existence. How no one could know what any approaching moment might hold. How they whisper by like leaves in a stream or hurtle past with great uproar, each with the prospect of changing the lives of people and nations.

She also wrote of choices—thinking, maybe, of her own decision to put herself up for indenture. She had told Harry how the idea first had surprised and then worried her father, who, according to her, was a respected and reasonably well-to-do citizen of South Wales. Directing manager of one of the new copper smelting works. The way she explained it to Harry, she wanted to get away from what had become a humdrum life in a house shared with five brothers and four sisters.

Ye Choices wee make are bourne on each of ye tiny Fractions of Time that flow through a Needle’s Eye of ye Present. Once made, Choices can not be recalled, but become Frozen, mile-markers in ye ever refeeding Paft.

Just below the last sentence she had made a little flourish with her pen, as she did at the end of each day’s entry. Her words made Harry reflect but only briefly. He had animals to feed.

*

They reached the end of the woods. The first sign of a town was a badly weathered wooden rail fence that stretched out on either side as far as
the eye could follow. Rails hung from posts at every angle, some fallen altogether and rotting in the weeds. The gate had been missing since Harry could remember, leaving only the rusting remains of hinges looking like broken teeth. Harry made a note in his mind to bring up the condition of the fence again at the next meeting of the town commissioners, though several earlier efforts to fix it had bogged down over this thing or that.

A short distance farther along, signs of a proper settlement came into view. Streets broad enough to allow four carriages abreast. Neatly laid-out plots with one-and two-story timber-framed houses, stores, and offices. A few burned-out hulks remained from the Tuscarora uprising, their blackened bones nearly petrified from more than forty years of exposure to rain and parching sun and the occasional snow. Most of the existing buildings had gone up within the past ten years, made with new-baked brick and fragrant, fresh-hewn lumber, some of it bought from the Woodyard plantation. Harry had acquainted Toby with the town’s tragic history soon after she had arrived. How the founders had named it New Bern out of nostalgia for their Swiss homeland. How most of them were now awaiting final judgment, their torn and broken remains resting in the old cemetery.

As they entered the streets under the steadily strengthening sun, signs of storm flooding became apparent. Stains crept up clapboard sidings, musty memorials of high water. The smell of mildew was about. Doors and windows stood open to allow moisture to escape. Stray sheep and chickens investigating bits of litter scattered sullenly as they rode by.

Harry looked back again as they drew near the village center. Toby was brushing wisps of hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. Face damp in the morning heat. “I’ve never seen so many people in New Bern at one time,” she said. “It looks like a fair.”

It was all noise and bright colors, a far cry from a normal day in town. At the intersection of Broad and Pollock, a group of strolling dancers with bells on their shoes entertained onlookers in town for
the court session. Nearby, a leopard rested in a cage and an elephant was tethered to a tree. Their owner, a small, middle-aged man with watery eyes and a paunch and wearing a silver peruke, was chattering about his liqueurs and powders, how they imparted the physical strength of a cat and the mental powers of a pachyderm. Farther along, a storefront sign advertised T
HE
I
NVISIBLE
L
ADY AND
A
COUSTIC
T
EMPLE
: A
N
I
NEXPLICABLE OPTICAL AND AURICULAR
I
LLUSION
. A man named Salenka and his “Learned Dog” from Charleston had established themselves in a tavern. The illustration at the door showed a large beast with shaggy gray hair that could
BEST ANYONE AT CARDS
, and perform
CARD
T
RICKS AND
M
ATHEMATICAL
E
XPERIMENTS
. In addition, Salenka offered fireworks each night in the garden behind the building. A full bill of entertainment for only two shillings. But the showman had strong competition. A touring company of English actors had set up a makeshift stage in an empty lot across the street. They were acting out a scene from a string of plays they had been presenting throughout the week. The evening’s finale would be a double bill, the sidewalk sign proclaimed: the American premiere of the famous George Lillo’s adaptation of a drama from the reign of Elizabeth,
Arden of Feversham
; and another from the same period:
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare, who recently had been enjoying a revival on the London stage.

Harry caught glimpses of Toby smiling, her expression one of wonderment and, he was relieved to see, pleasure. He had won the argument about the garden. At least gained a truce. But he knew better than to gloat, lest she find some other source of discontent. Harry had never known a woman with so many complaints.

“Here we are,” he said as they came to a long, low-slung building on East Front Street. “The Court of Pleas and Quarterly Sessions.”

“But this is a tavern,” Toby said. “You didn’t mention they were meeting in a tavern.”

“The commissioners decided the old courthouse is about ready to fall down. Wonder it hasn’t already happened. What I hear, old man Cogdell is getting five pounds five shillings rent for the week’s use of
his place during the day, and he gets it back each night. We are pledged to keep good order and not let anything get damaged too badly.”

In all the evenings Harry and Toby had spent at Cogdell’s, it never had looked like this. The main room had taken on a cavernous aspect. Tables gone. Chairs and benches were arranged in rows for onlookers, who were beginning to shuffle in and take seats. The raised platform used for entertainments and the occasional political harangue now served as a podium. Two tables set end to end and seven chairs awaited the arrival of the magistrates.

Toby chose a front-row seat. Martin sat next to her and helped get writing materials out of her basket so she could make notes. Harry took a position to one side of the platform. Only one other peacekeeper had arrived. Chief Town Constable John Blinn, a muscular, bald-headed blacksmith with an unexpectedly high voice, had put himself at the front door. Harry wondered if the two other officers enlisted for the week’s duty would show up for the last day. Absenteeism was a continuing problem in their ranks, despite the threat of a two-shilling fine for each offense. Not everyone honored to be asked to volunteer for two or three years of constable duty or the town watch took it as earnestly as Harry and John Blinn.

The rumble of conversation quieted and all stood as the justices filed in. They were wearing their scarlet summer-season robes and freshly powdered white perukes. Chief Justice Olaf McLeod was the last to enter. Six feet, two inches tall, muscular for his age, wisps of graying red hair straying from the edges of his wig, and a large, bony face weathered from years of managing his four-thousand-acre plantation to the southwest of town. The land had been a gift from the king for financial assistance during the late invasion of England by some of McLeod’s deluded Highland neighbors. George did not let such acts of fidelity go unnoticed.

McLeod rapped his gavel and said, “You may be downstanding. This court be now in session,” in a raspy Scotch voice several degrees coarser than usual due to a spell of a summer cold. Harry could smell
spirits of turpentine, the distilled essence of pine that worked miracles as a liniment when smeared on the chest.

Trouble broke out right away.

People were loosening their clothes to let body heat to escape into the room, already rank with humidity and lingering vapors from the floodwater. Two men began squabbling over one of the remaining seats. McLeod had barely got his words out when they were throwing clumsy punches. Blinn, the first to reach them, suffered a glancing blow to the cheek. Harry came up behind Blinn’s assailant and pinned back his arms. Blinn restrained the other and they wrestled both outside.

“Get your hands off me, Henry Woodyard,” said the one in Harry’s grasp as soon as they were clear of the door. The smell of rum was heavy on him. Harry let him go. Suddenly finding himself without support, the man pitched face forward. He landed in the road muck, which contained a fresh line of horse droppings.

“There is no cause for roughness,” he said, turning onto his side and wiping the filth away from one eye with a forefinger. “Me and Reuben was having a private argument.”

“I’m sorry, Abel.” Harry reached down and helped him to his feet. The man started back toward the door. Harry blocked his way.

“I can’t let you back in until you’re sober.”

In an effort to get around, Abel slipped and fell into the sludge again.

“Look at yourself,” said Harry. “Both of you. You’re a disgrace.”

Abel mouthed the words back with a sneer.
“Oh, you’re a disgrace.”

“Really, how can you ever hope to amount to anything until you straighten yourselves up, stop acting like a couple of rapscallions?”

“Why don’t you go bugger yourself,” said Reuben. He reached down to help his brother to his feet, nearly getting pulled down himself.

“Now is not a good time to talk about this,” Harry said. “But when you’re both in a more sober frame of mind, I would like to come around and see you. I can show you some things that would improve your status in New Bern. Some very simple rules of behavior.”

“You’ve changed, Harry,” Abel said as he and Reuben turned to walk off, each bracing the other. “You’ve forgot your old friends. You don’t even come into Speight’s no more.”

“Our boy prefers the company at Cogdell’s nowadays,” said Reuben.

They proceeded away, Abel laughing at another remark Reuben whispered in his ear. Some recollection, Harry judged, of the days when they and Harry were partners in tomfoolery.

CHAPTER 2

16: Do not Puff up the Cheeks, Loll not out the tongue rub the Hands, or beard, thrust out the lips, or bite them or keep the Lips too open or too Close.

—R
ULES OF
C
IVILITY

THE HOURS WENT BY QUICKLY AS MCLEOD PRESSED FORWARD THROUGH
the docket, settling with a stroke of his oaken gavel matters that had been festering since the last session of the court. A man was ordered to pay recompense for killing a neighbor’s hog that had wandered onto his property. A store owner was warned to stop mistreating one of his servants, a woman who had accused him of taking liberties. A fine of twenty pounds of tobacco was levied against a town resident who
had failed to attend public worship—his third conviction on such an offense. A runaway servant had six months tacked onto his five-year indenture for his eleven days of freedom. Two sailors were sentenced to four hours each in stocks for public drunkenness. For the crime of slander, a woman was ordered to pay into the county coffers the handsome sum of seventy pounds’ proclamation money. She had told some neighbors what she called the real reason the wife of a respected member of the General Assembly had spent two months in Charleston, claiming that while there the lady gave birth to “a Negro bastard.” The magistrates did not demand proof of this statement in either direction. A slander was a slander, true or not.

The court also approved a number of administrative recommendations of the town commissioners and the vestry of Christ Church, including placement of the latest crop of orphans and illegitimate children in several different foster homes. The children, two boys and four girls from four to nine years old, huddled together to one side with expressions ranging from confused to desolate as they heard their fates read out. One of the older girls wore a defiant look, as if daring the adults to do their worst.

An odor of turpentine entered Harry’s nose as he and Martin were helping Toby pack up her writing tools. Judge McLeod, now free of his robes, clapped him on the back.

“Fine work today, my boy,” he said. The man standing beside him nodded in agreement. Craven County High Sheriff Randall Carruthers looked uncomfortably warm in his red hunting jacket, which he had opened halfway down his chest, exposing a dark tangle of hair. His naturally fierce aspect was enhanced today by a bandage covering one eye, the result of recent combat with a disgruntled taxpayer.

Turning to Toby with the faintest notion of a bow, McLeod said, “It is a great pleasure to see you, Mistress Woodyard. And looking so prettily done up. I hope you found our proceedings edifying, if not altogether entertaining.”