The Devil's Making (19 page)

‘Did you know any of Dr McCrory's patients?'

‘No. Why would I?'

‘How do you think he ended up at Orchard Farm?'

‘Well, he didn't
end
there. Some Injun got him. Probably pokin' his nose in where he wasn't wanted. They say he was doin' some squaw, and her husband got him. I don't believe it. Sure, he'd preen himself in front of a woman, like any ladies' man, but he wouldn't
do
nothin', not even a squaw.'

Quattrini seemed sure of this. Perhaps he had to believe that McCrory's presence at Orchard Farm had been harmless.

‘So that's it?' he said, standing up. ‘Darned if I can say any more about the guy. I know Bella went with that addle-brained friend of hers, Mrs Larose, to one of his lectures. But you can't stop women doin' these things.' He rolled his eyes. ‘That's how he latched onto her and started goin' out there on Sundays. Good riddance, I say. No use wastin' any time on him. If some Injun did it, then string him up. That's the law. But don't waste any time on McCrory.'

Time was clearly important to Quattrini. And not thinking about what he did not want to think about. I thanked him, and let myself be shown to the door. We shook hands. Then Quattrini laughed. ‘I forgot to say, I thought you done well on “mi pungichi, mi stuzzichi.” A tormented lover! Gee, I regretted for one moment bringin' that book. But they'll never take it into their pretty heads to figure out that kinda thing.'

*   *   *

I went to the stables near the courthouse and hired a horse, a seedy-looking roan mare. I mounted and set off up Fort Street and out of town.

I overtook the three Indians on Spring Ridge, trudging along, not turning their heads at the sound of my horse's hooves on the dusty road. I passed them, then reined in and turned around in my saddle. They stopped walking and looked at me impassively. Even Lukswaas' face was dirty and looked dull. They must be tired, having come up the hill in the heat. I called out to them in Chinook that I would be at the camp, with words to say, before the sun went low in the sky. They said nothing. My mare let out a load of droppings onto the ground. I pulled her head around and gave her a kick. She started off with a jerk and I let her break into a canter along the ridge until after a dip the road reached the Cedar Hill fork. I rode along steadily for half an hour or so at the horse's walking pace, feeling my tunic sticking to my back through my shirt.

Firbanks the curate was not at the house where he lodged. The landlady said he would be at St Mark's. I rode the few hundred yards further and hitched my horse to the rail outside the West door of the church. I opened the door. The church was empty and looked more stark than ever. But the altar, with its white and gold cloth for Ascension, the lectern, pulpit and chancel rail of polished oak, all made me homesick. I resisted an impulse to kneel down and pray. Instead I thought of my parents whom, in spite of my differences with them, I missed. I stayed for a while in the church, half hoping that Firbanks would turn up, half not. Then I went out into the sunshine again. I walked around to the North side of the church, to the graveyard, below a tumble of mossy rocks beneath fir trees.

Firbanks was lounging on the grass in the shade above one of the rocks. He sat up when he saw me. He was smoking a pipe and had taken his jacket off: it was folded carefully beside him. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up and he wore no cravat. He still looked like a porcelain angel, but one more capable of falling from grace than the Sunday one. He greeted me in a languid, not very friendly voice. ‘Hobbes. What are you doing here?'

‘On duty,' I said. ‘I want to question you.'

‘Really. About what?' Firbanks looked down his nose at me. I was at a disadvantage standing below the rock looking upward. ‘Have you got a warrant, or whatever you need?'

‘Don't be silly,' I said, picking my way up around the rock and sprawling down beside the curate, in what I hoped was a rather brutal manner. ‘Even in England I could require you to come to the police station to assist me in my inquiries. Would you like to come back with me or shall we talk here?'

‘It's all right here. Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. But your charging around the corner like that gave me a surprise. What can I do for you, old chap?' The bonhomie of this last phrase was so forced that Firbanks betrayed himself by blushing. What an odd mixture, I thought, of the crass and the sensitive.

‘Where are you from in England?' I asked, stretching myself lazily, to show I had all the time in the world.

‘Shrewsbury. You know it?'

‘Not well.' The heart of England. Green rolling hills. Where Charles Darwin had come back to after his five year voyage on the Beagle, concluding that it was the most beautiful place in the world. ‘Where Darwin grew up.'

‘To Shrewsbury's eternal shame. That atheist.'

‘Cambridge?' I asked, changing the subject. Unfortunately even Darwin had gone to Cambridge. I had mentally ‘placed' Firbanks at Cambridge.

‘Oxford.'

‘Really? What college?' The usual question.

‘Keble.'

I tried to keep a straight face. Keble! Founded a few years previously, a gothic monstrosity in red and yellow brick with corridors like a prison, a sort of collegiate railway station chock-a-block with evangelically inclined students of ‘Divvers,' as Divinity was known.

‘You?' Firbanks asked.

‘Univ' – meaning University College. But I felt one of my characteristic bursts of shame at playing social games. If I had been the type to blush, I would have.

My eyes caught something moving at the bottom of the churchyard. The heads of the three Indians trudging along without a glance to either side.

‘Indians,' I said. ‘Have you been to see them?'

Firbanks watched the heads disappear behind the oaks. ‘You mean the Tsimshian at Margaret Bay? I don't think, by the way, that those are they. They must be Saanich who've strayed off the beaten track. Yes, I did go and see the Tsimshian actually, a few weeks ago. They'd been coming along this road selling things, and everyone knew they were out at Margaret Bay, on Cormorant Point. So I walked over to see if I could do a little missionizing.'

‘What?' I had not thought of something so simple as this. My question had been a shot in the dark.

‘On duty,' Firbanks said smugly. ‘It's my duty to try and convert the heathen, and I do.'

‘You convert them, or you try?'

‘Both, of course. I spend a deal of time among the Saanich on the Inlet, and among the Songhees of course.'

‘You speak Chinook?'

‘Goodness yes. And some Salishan.' This was the local language.

‘Tsimshian?'

‘Unfortunately not. Nobody speaks it, except Mr Duncan up at Mektakatla – and that's three hundred miles North of here, as you know.'

‘How did these Tsimshian receive you?'

‘Not very warmly. They take a dim view of Mr Duncan, somewhat to my surprise, although I know a few wretched tribes resist conversion. So as soon as I opened my mouth, they announced I was a “Mektakatla man”, and I was not welcome.'

‘Were they that rude? I find it hard to think they'd say you were not welcome. I doubt if there is even a way of saying it in Chinook.'

‘In a manner of speaking they did. They turned their backs and went on with their business.'

‘So you gave up.'

‘Of course not. I began telling them in my fluent Chinook that their souls, their miserable little tum tums, would burn in Hell. Everything, even the mind, even an opinion, is a “heart” to them. So the soul is a tum tum. With perhaps a “wind” or breath blowing through it – the “spirit” of course. Anyway I told them that their souls might go and burn up in the great “piah” of the “diaub”, or devil. Hellfire is usually enough to get their attention. But for these devils it didn't work. I'm not sure why. Perhaps Mr Duncan's approach is not suitable for all of them.'

‘What is his approach?' I was curious, although I disliked Firbanks' cynicism, which was of a kind Divinity students often affected among themselves.

‘Plenty of hard work, cleanliness, no firewater – sorry, no “piah chuck chuck” – no fornication, no nakedness, no eating of dogs, no eating of humans. They're cannibals, you know, in a rather specific way. At least the chiefs and medicine men are. Normally the eating of dogs, for example, is forbidden because dogs feed on corpse-flesh, which is of course forbidden too. But a really big man will eat dog or human – a slave, of course – from time to time in order to impress his enemies with his capacity to do so foul a deed. It's like their totem poles. You don't see any good ones around here. They are covered with family emblems and crests in the form of faces of animals. But the faces have expressions of terror. Nothing terrifies like terror. Like hellfire! At any rate, Duncan won't even give them the Eucharist. He's afraid it'll make them think Christians are cannibals. “This is my body, this is my blood.” They might take it as literal encouragement.'

Firbanks would clearly have been happy to ramble on, but I interrupted. ‘I've only heard of cannibalism in connection with the Nootka who met Captain Cook, and their chief Maquinna who seems to have been a monster. Maybe it's just a story they put out to impress people. Just as the Eucharist impresses us, without being literal.' In fact I felt sick at the idea Firbanks might have been telling the truth. ‘So they kept their backs turned?' I changed the subject abruptly.

‘Or laughed. A pretty hardened bunch, I should say. Thoroughly dangerous. People around here keep their doors locked at night, I can tell you, though they say what with the Tyee in jail the Tsimshian may not give any trouble. And with him dead they'll slink away home with their tails between their legs, or be sent home by the Navy. That's what people are waiting for.'

‘And you? What do you think about McCrory's death?'

‘Not in the least surprising. He should have left well alone.'

‘As you did not in your missionizing,' I could not resist saying.

‘You misunderstand my duty to God,' Firbanks said coldly. ‘Our friend the doctor's duty was only to himself.' His face had taken on a noble cast – the prospective martyr, I thought with disgust.

‘You didn't like McCrory?' I asked.

‘Like him? No question of like or dislike. I didn't know the man, except at the Somervilles' little afternoon teas.'

‘Hellfire,' I said softly, relishing the words. ‘Piah diaub. What happens, Firbanks, to the man who lies?'

‘What do you mean?' Firbanks' cheeks were burning in two patches surrounded by the usual waxy pale. His eyes, blue and rather pig-like with their very blond lashes, narrowed.

‘I know you were a patient of McCrory's.'

‘Nonsense. I deny it. Why would I be? What are your grounds for such an assertion?'

‘A little birdie told me.' I could not help being nasty with Firbanks. Looking at him quivering finely with panic, like a white mouse, I realised that he was a reflection of something I might have been, or at least had wanted to be. A missionary among the heathen! Although Firbanks had found a comfortable berth at St Marks and was surely a mere dabbler at missionary work. There but for the grace of God go I.…

‘This is too much,' Firbanks blustered, sitting bolt upright as if riven to the grass.

‘I only mean that a lady who had been visiting the Doctor saw you in his waiting room.'

‘Damn it, who
was
that woman?' Firbanks burst out. ‘There was no carriage or wagon at the door, no horse at the rail. What bad luck! And if I didn't know her, how did she know me? I wasn't wearing my dog collar.'

‘Surely you know that people, especially ladies, point out of windows at passers by and say “Who goes there?” “Oh, that's the young curate out at St Mark's. Isn't he handsome?”'

‘Actually, it was a social call,' Firbanks said, recovering his self control. ‘I'd met the man out at Orchard Farm so I called on him on my way into town one day, to ask a few questions about his practice. I often have occasion to refer parishioners to a doctor.'

‘Did you refer any to McCrory?'

‘No. But I might have.'

‘Let's not beat about the bush,' I said. ‘I have the Doctor's medical records.'

One lie justified another, I told myself. Oddly, I felt less compunction about trapping this man through lies than about showing what I really thought of him.

‘No you don't,' Firbanks shot back. ‘He didn't keep any.'

‘That's what
he
said. They are there, the names disguised to be sure. But they can be matched up to you no doubt. Besides, there is Mr Lee.'

‘That Celestial! He knows nothing, not a word of English.'

‘Wrong again. He's fluent in it.'

‘Well, if you know everything, why play with me like this?'

‘Because I want to hear it from your own lips. Because the records and Mr Lee's memory are ambiguous. Because I don't want to have to arrest you on grounds of suppressing evidence relevant to a crime,' (I was making this up, although I could indeed arrest anyone without a warrant and justify it later), ‘And take you to Dr Helmcken for a medical examination, from which we can match you to McCrory's records.'

‘All right. You will have guessed. I've got clap. That's all. Lots of people have it.'

‘I imagine so. Where did you get it?'

‘Among the Songhees, no doubt.'

‘By doing missionary work?'

‘Don't be so vile. I got it in the usual way – from fornicating with a squaw.'

‘Or squaws?'

‘Or squaws. Look, I'm not perfect, Hobbes. Nor are you.'

‘How do you know you got it from a squaw? Perhaps you brought it with you from St. Ebbes.'