The Constable's Tale: A Novel of Colonial America

by Donald Smith

  “I can surely sympathize with that.”

  They ordered food and continued conversing through the meal. Goldie doing most of the talking, as if, having gotten over his initial coolness toward an inquisitive newcomer, he was glad to have a fresh set of ears to catch his unhappiness with his current posting.

  “This is an evil country. I can’t speak for what it’s like in winter, thank Providence I ain’t been here for that. But the summer has been disgusting. The forest is hot and dark and moldy and lacks air fit to breathe. These rocks and trees are slick with an especially putrid breed of moss. There are places where you can sink up to your knees in black mulch. Clouds of mosquitoes and black flies suck the blood out of you. The fevers make you sweat and shit yourself. I guess only a redskin could actually like it over here.” Gottschalk’s meaty shoulders gave a quiver. “And French Indians hide behind trees and underneath logs waiting for a British throat to come along for cutting.”

  “Where are you from?” said Harry.

  “Somerset.” Harry guessed that was in England.

  Goldie took a long pull of beer and gently set the glass back down on the table. “How I long to be back there now.”

  *

  Despite his new friend’s assurances, no boats crossed back to the island the following morning. The harbormaster said the next one would not leave until midafternoon. Harry took the opportunity this delay offered to look around.

  Walking farther upriver, he came to a grassy hill and on it an emplacement of cannon. Redcoated crews were busy getting five guns ready for the day’s dose of mayhem. The pieces were deeply dug in, barrels pointing high. The better, Harry could see, to lob shells all the way across the water, up the cliff, over the stone wall, and into the city. He could see it would do no good to demolish sections of walls, as was usual in the siege tactics the New Bern militia had been taught, since there would be no way to get soldiers up the heights and into a breach. He tried to imagine the damage that already had been done inside the walls by the constant cannonading. Wondered how much was left of Quebec.

  Walking up a rise, he came to a ridge, beyond which precise rows of white canvas tents extended into the distance. Outside the reach of French artillery, he guessed. Soldiers in different conditions of dress moved about in the unhurried way of men at routine tasks, some hanging freshly washed clothes on lines rigged between tents, some seeming just to meander. The bits of cloth gave the encampment the flavor of a rag fair.

  Harry continued his stroll with no endpoint in mind. His thoughts turning toward the moment he had been anticipating ever since having overheard the doomed Major Browning speak of Ayerdale’s treachery. Harry pictured confronting the wretch with his treason. But unsettling thoughts entered Harry’s mind. During the sail from Boston he had dwelt only on that satisfying moment when he let fly his accusations. By the strength of evidence he hoped to find, forcing a confession. Now that he was closer to the moment, he began to worry over how exactly the event would play out. His original plan was to act as Browning’s confederate in routing out the traitor. But he had no idea how Browning had thought to go about that business, assuming Browning himself had any plan, which, on reflection, Harry guessed he did not. And now Browning was no longer part of the scheme at all. Everything would be up to Harry.

  How long could he afford to wait for Ayerdale to make a slip, expose himself to the degree that Harry would feel the time ripe to step in? It might take the rest of his stay in Canada. Too late to head off any mischief Ayerdale might have in mind. He had been good at hiding his deceit for a long time. Years, it seemed, and who knew how far back it really went? And now time was closing in.

  It seemed Harry’s only course was to confront Ayerdale as soon as possible, with or without convincing proof, and hope to cow him into confessing.

  A movement ahead caught his eye. A flash of red.

  He stopped. Glancing back, he realized how far he had wandered. No sign of the British guns. The cliff on the opposite side of the river here was considerably lower than the headland, maybe only half as high, and by its appearance not as steep. A small cove at the foot of it. Rising up from that, a subtle crease in vegetation. Possibly indicating a gulley running down the cliff.

  He continued walking. At the top of a rise he spotted a lone British soldier. A junior officer, judging from his age, not much older than Harry. The officer’s clothing looked more expensive than the ordinary British issue: knee-length double-breasted overcoat the same intense shade of red that had attracted Harry’s eye and without ornamentation other than two rows of brass buttons. Polished black riding boots and black tricorn. He was tall and thin, almost gangly. No trace of the Paunch of Privilege, as Harry had come to think of it: just enough of a swell of belly to signal that the owner never wanted for rich food and never had to labor for it. He was preoccupied with a spyglass, which he held pointed toward the other side of the river, about where Harry had seen the cove.

  “Good morning, sir,” Harry said when he got within hailing distance.

  “Good morning.” The officer spoke quietly, as if afraid his own voice might break his concentration. He was holding the glass with both hands, long, almost spidery fingers bracing the leather-bound tube like struts of a bridge. Trying to keep it steady.

  “I hear that General Wolfe has gone farther upriver,” Harry said, thinking to make sociable conversation. The idea coming into his mind that if he could make friends, this young man might be able to give him the whereabouts of Richard Ayerdale. Assuming that Ayerdale was as well known in the circles of British officerhood as he claimed.

  No response. The man briefly took his eye away from the glass, blew a puff of air onto the eyepiece as if to clear some small obstruction, and resumed peering through it.

  “I imagine the general is out trying to find a good place to attack the French, don’t you think?” Harry said. “Maybe that place you’re looking at over there? Do you suppose there might be a pathway up that cliff?”

  The redcoat abruptly lowered his glass and gave Harry a sharp look, as if noticing him for the first time. He was not only thin, Harry realized now, but frail, with a pallid complexion and slight tremor about the lips. His face was somewhat rat-like, a receding chin and forehead and an upturned nose too large by about half for the rest of his features. Reddish hair that might have reached his shoulders were it not tied back with a ribbon. His most striking features were his eyes. The rims were red nearly to the point of matching his uniform coat and frighteningly intense against the pallor of his skin.

  A soldier wearing the bishop’s mitre of a grenadier appeared from behind some brushy trees, musket with bayonet attached casually slung over one shoulder. “Is everything all right, General?” he asked.

  “Who are you?” the officer asked Harry.

  “A friend,” Harry said. Realizing finally who he was talking to.

  With a slow, deliberate motion, the sentry swung his musket around until it pointed at Harry.

  “Well, friend, I see you are not in uniform. May I ask what brings you before me this morning?”

  To his dismay, Harry found himself stuttering, stumbling over how to say he posed no threat. Three more soldiers came up, seemingly out of nowhere. Harry wondered how he had been able to blunder past Wolfe’s guard.

  “I’m looking for some friends of mine,” he said. “Colonel Richard Ayerdale of the Virginia militia and his fiancée, Madeleine McLeod. And a minister of the gospel by the name of Fletcher. I don’t suppose you’ve seen them?” He immediately regretted this last part. Seeming to interrogate the commander of His Majesty’s expedition at Quebec.

  “Extraordinary,” said Wolfe. His bright eyes locked on Harry’s with full attention. “I have indeed seen Colonel Ayerdale. And Miss McLeod. Both went missing two days ago, less than a week after they arrived at our camp. Most upsetting. Perhaps you can shed some light on this mystery.”

  “That is news to me, General. I’m afraid I have no idea. . . .”

&nbs
p; “Arrest this man,” Wolfe said. He collapsed his telescope with a snap. “I will question him later myself.”

  Yet another soldier appeared leading a horse. Wolfe grimaced from some hidden pain as he lifted his foot into a stirrup.

  “Please inform my brigadiers, wherever they may have wandered off to, that I shall not be dining with them tonight. I have matters to attend.”

  He wheeled and galloped off in the direction of the camp, trailed by two of the grenadiers at a jog. Leaving Harry now facing two bayonets.

  CHAPTER 24

  11: Shift not yourself in the Sight of others nor Gnaw your nails.

  —RULES OF CIVILITY

  HIS ESCORTS WERE NOT INTERESTED IN HARRY’S STORY. ONE DID promise to try and look up Reverend Fletcher. Harry assured him the minister could ratify his identity and that he was not a spy. The soldier sounded grudging, raising doubts in Harry’s mind as to whether the soldier would bother himself any further once shy of his prisoner.

  “It won’t do yer no good no-how,” said the other. “The general says he wants to question yer, and yer not likely to be let loose ’til ’e does.”

  The jail was two rooms in the damp cellar of a hulking stone church near the dock. The structure looked ancient and fortress-like. Heavy wooden shutters flanking stained-glass windows. Protection against Indian attack in Quebec’s early days, Harry guessed. The larger of the cells contained French prisoners of war. The other was devoted to British soldiers and tars, who, Harry surmised, had run afoul of some regulation or other, and several individuals in civilian clothes. Much of the room was taken up by folding cots, each outfitted with a thick mattress and blanket. Small barred windows let in streams of thin gray light.

  One of the civilians had a familiar face. Harry had last seen it smeared with mud and horse droppings outside Cogdell’s in New Bern.

  “Abel?” Harry said.

  “Well, if it isn’t Harry Woodyard.”

  His clothes looked like they had not been washed since court week. His hair was matted and he had a scraggly growth of beard. But he sounded canty, considering his current situation.

  “What are you doing here?” said Harry.

  “A couple days after you . . . disappeared, old man Dobbs decided it would be a good idea to show the North Carolina standard in Canada for this year’s go-round. Judge McLeod had the town watch round up as many militiamen as they could lay hands on in the space of an evening and shipped us off the next morning on a schooner.”

  “Is Reuben here?”

  “He was passed out drunk in the woods at the time of the muster. I knew where he lay but didn’t let on.”

  “How do you come to be in jail?”

  “A redcoat lieutenant up here made the mistake of letting me know his view of Americans. Well, me in particular. I’m afraid that’s when I pulled him down off his horse and broke his jaw.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I seen the inside of a jail before, Harry. You have, too. Maybe you were right, though.”

  “Right about what?”

  “I need a course of instruction as to how to conduct myself. Maybe then I wouldn’t get into so many scraps. Especially with people I can’t really win arguments with.” He gave Harry a sly look and said, “And what misunderstanding has laid you up in here?”

  Harry recounted his run-in with General Wolfe. “I’m trying to find Maddie McLeod and her fiancé, Richard Ayerdale. And the minister they are traveling with, Reverend Fletcher.”

  “Can’t let an old love go, eh, Harry?”

  Harry let Abel’s guess go unchallenged.

  “I heard Ayerdale and Miss McLeod up and left two or three days ago,” Abel said. “Along with a couple of Indians that was traveling with them. Right around the time I got into my scrap.”

  “I heard about them leaving. But what’s this about Indians?”

  “I guess Ayerdale had taken them on as servants. Reverend Fletcher is still around. He claims he don’t know where they went, is what I hear. Even though they was all staying in the same house.”

  Harry took another look around. The other prisoners were constantly moving about in the weak light, though slowly, like in a dream and without any clear intent. One jostled Harry. He mumbled an apology and continued on.

  “Was there a mutiny here?” Harry asked. “Looks like enough people in this room to fill a couple platoons.”

  “Mutiny? Not bloody likely. These lads would just as soon jump off a crag as turn against an officer. It’s pitiful. You show up late for muster or with dirty breeches, you land in jail. After the whipping, of course. You even look like you’re about to sauce one of your betters, you’re in jail with stripes on your back. They treat these poor sops like animals, Harry.”

  Harry nodded. He had heard stories about British Army discipline.

  “Seems it don’t even enter their thoughts to make a fuss about it. They is more scared of their officers than they is of the enemy. I figure that’s why they is such bad news on the battlefield. An officer tells a lobsterback to stand upright and stock-still in front of people shooting at him, and he’ll do it. I tell you, it’s unnatural the way they act.”

  “Guess there’s no law against locking up Americans.”

  “I’m lucky they didn’t shoot me. They must have decided that killing colonials don’t look so good when it come to getting more militia to join the war. Though they don’t seem to know what to do with us when we get here. I don’t know why they even bother. Look like the only thing to them lower than an American soldier is a red-skinned Indian.”

  “True enough, on both accounts,” said a man who had paused in his wanderings long enough to hear what they were saying. “The only time a Briton respects an Indian is when that Briton is on the sharp side of a tomahawk.”

  He was tall and bony, in his midthirties, Harry guessed. Cheeks covered with a dark beard about the same state of growth as Abel’s. He introduced himself as Ambrose Rutland, a schoolmaster from Massachusetts. He was spending his fourth day in jail for spreading demoralizing thoughts among his colony’s detachment accompanying Wolfe’s army. The ones that Major Browning would have been joining had he survived his trip home from the ball, Harry guessed. In view of Rutland’s polished way of talking, Harry briefly wondered if he should place himself on Rutland’s left-hand side to show deference. Instead, he just introduced himself and asked in a sociable way what exactly had gotten Rutland in trouble.

  “I made the mistake of openly questioning the harsh tactics General Wolfe is employing against the French. The cruelty of destroying an entire city. We’ve heard reports that not a house or a shop has been left untouched by cannonballs. And they’ve laid waste to the countryside by fire and sword. There have been atrocities, Mister Woodyard. Atrocities beyond the bounds of civilized behavior. I found I could not keep quiet about this. I might have escaped censure, for the only people hearing me was other Massachusettians. But word got out I was spreading sedition.”

  “We is lucky we both didn’t hang,” said Abel.

  “Ah, well.” Rutland said something in a foreign tongue. Without waiting to be asked, he said, “Latin. ‘Once let out, what you have said cannot be taken back.’”

  A disturbance near the staircase interrupted their conversation. In the poor light, Harry could just make out two soldiers struggling to haul down a large cooking pot.

  “Wonder what kind of soup they have for us today,” said Abel. “The food ain’t that bad here, if you like soup.”

  “By the way, Abel,” Harry said a few minutes later as they stood in line, “I’ve given some thought to what you told me when I came in.”

  “What’s that?” said Abel.

  “About you needing lessons on how to behave yourself.”

  “Well, if you’re not too busy sometime.”

  “I was wrong. You don’t need any lessons from me.”

  *

  It rained all night and continued past daybreak. The soldiers who had brought in soup c
ame back and set out hard biscuits and buckets of water that smelled of river, then a sergeant called the names of five Britons to be quick-stepped upstairs and back to their units. As soon as they were gone, six more offenders made their way down. All gathered around them to hear the latest news. The young general had left on a frigate to join a redcoat host several miles upriver, where they were keeping an eye on a large French camp on the opposite side. Wolfe still seeming to brood on where to make his second and final attempt of the year to bring down Montcalm. The bearer of this tiding was a middle-aged corporal who seemed to be taking his four-day sentence for filching rations from an officer’s kit as just another unfortunate episode in a soldier’s life.

  “If he has any ideas on where to attack, he ain’t sharing them, even with his brigs, is what I hear,” said the corporal. “I heard it said he’s all but given up and is ready to sail out of this putrid hole. Can’t be soon enough for me. But I’m sure he’ll make one more try, just to satisfy honor.” He said the last words with a snigger.

  Harry thought this valuation of Canada, which jibed with Goldie Gottschalk’s, too harsh. He generally had found the surroundings pleasant enough except for the smoke, which lay over the land like a shroud. Certainly that was not Canada’s fault. He wondered what Noah would have made of the landscape here. It was far more varied than the flatness of coastal North Carolina. Harry also liked the weather. Though rainy, it was cool for the time of year. People made fun of Governor Dobbs’s complaints about New Bern’s climate, especially in summer, but in truth summer was not Harry’s favorite time, either.

  About midmorning, he heard his name called out. He was surprised to see one of the soldiers who had taken him to jail.

  “Well, I asked around and found the place you said your man Fletcher was staying. He weren’t there, so I scratched out a note, said you were here in the church jail, and wanted to see him. Just wanted to let you know.”