The Bermuda Shipwreck

by Eric Murphy

  Will could feel Harley’s stare burning into his back. He looked around the room for something to deflect her intensity and walked over to the sooty fireplace that was set up with rusty old pots instead of the clay pot he’d seen in his dream. But the comfortable-looking spindle chair with armrest that Papineau had sat in was right by the fireplace, and beside it was the very stool he’d rested his feet on while having a shave. Could the barber’s money box still be in its hiding place he wondered?

  Will pointed to the photo on the wall. “Is that Mr. Rainey?”

  As the guide turned to the photo and nodded, Will leaned into the fireplace, reached up, and retrieved the little money box. He pried it open and couldn’t believe his eyes; the folded letter was still there. He slipped it into his pocket and spun around.

  “Oh dear, what’s that?” asked the woman as Will handed her the tin box.

  “I believe this is where Mr. Rainey kept his money,” said Will, shaking the box, which rattled. He made a show of prying the lid open and dropped a tarnished coin in the bewildered woman’s hand.

  “Thank you so much for your help. We really do appreciate it. I think our five minutes are up,” said Will with his most endearing smile as the woman stared wide-eyed at the coin and box in her hands.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lily’s Lament

  Carte-de-visite: French for calling card, one with a black and white photo of the bearer, quite popular in the mid-1800s.

  “What was that letter I saw you steal from that metal box?” whispered Harley in a reproachful tone.

  “I didn’t steal it. I, uh, I borrowed it. It looks like the one Papineau sent to his wife, that’s why I took it,” said Will, not wanting to tell her he’d seen it in his dream. “We can give it back to the Heritage Society before we leave, along with that gold necklace we found on the wreck. But after we figure out what Bennett and Drury were after, okay?” Harley nodded.

  The cousins hurried into the White Horse pub, a white building whose dark green trim drew the eye to the veranda’s cooling shade where they sat, overlooking the harbor. They had twenty minutes to kill before the next bus to Hamilton. Will was so excited his hands shook as he carefully unfolded the letter he’d taken from Rainey’s money box.

  This one was from Lily Benoit in Halifax to her husband, Papineau, in St. George, and dated July, 1863.

  My dearest husband,

  As soon as I got the baby to bed, I read and reread with great interest all of your news.

  It is hard to read how your conscience is so aggrieved by your small part in supporting the slave-owning South. You speak of the great privations of the people of Wilmington. Perhaps, as captain and part owner of your ship, you can determine your cargo; eschew weapons and munitions for much needed food and such?

  On another point, Alexander Keith Jr. has left Keith Hall where his uncle, brewmaster Alexander Keith, runs his empire. He opened his office on Hollis Street with that other Chebucto Grey (the all-white militia) blowhard, Benjamin Weir. They are falling all over themselves to be the agent of choice for all Confederates passing through. I have watched these smoking-room warriors disparage our noble Victoria Rifles militia unit simply because they are made up of blacks from Africville. We have nothing for which to reproach the south when it comes to hating the Negro.

  Keith has taken rooms here at the hotel and once he starts to drink, pays me no heed and throws caution to the wind. I have heard him and Weir talk of the one million dollars Jefferson Davis has earmarked to pay for enterprising, behind-the-scenes acts of terror to be visited upon the North by whatever means available and regardless of loss of innocent lives, all to undermine the Union’s will to fight. They seem to think that the Union’s superior resources justify their cowardly choices of attacking civilian rather than military targets.

  They hurried through her accounts of how Keith Jr. and his partner charged first-class rates for products they knew were inferior.

  They float their mendacity upon a river of the best French champagne. I have heard him mention that he is looking to lease space on ships here and in Bermuda. My heart stilled when the name of your ship crossed their lips. I beg you, be very cautious in any undertaking with these men. Remember Keith is still rumored to be the man behind the 1857 explosion that leveled Halifax’s gun-powder facility. Only his links to his famous uncle the brewer keep the authorities at bay.

  I’ve shared my concerns with our hotel manager, who upbraided me for even listening in on the conversations, while I could do no less without blocking my ears. He says we are not here to judge our guests but to cater to their needs. Money. It is always about money. And being that we are in need of my income and yours to clear our family debts, I too keep quiet in order to keep my wages.

  The manager took advantage of the situation to insist that I change my last name to give it an English tone. He said it gave the hotel guests a sense of comfort to know they were being cared for by their own kind. He pointed out that I was the last to do so, that Marie Maisonneuve is now known as Mary Newhouse, that Phillipe Gervais, our doorman, has become Phil Jarvis. So now I have gone from Lily Benoit to Mrs. Lillian Bennett. Know, my dear Papineau, that I do this with great reluctance and not without a certain degree of shame. When you return in a more permanent fashion, I will gladly again take on your good Acadian name.

  With all the affection time and distance allows me to express, your Lily.

  Will looked up from the letter out to the harbor where the wind herded the waves in a steady convoy of white caps, pushing the reality that was dawning on them both.

  Harley dialed the older cellphone Dr. Doan had lent them.

  “Dr. Doan, it’s Harley. Could you check with that person you know, the one who told you nobody by the name of Phillip Bennett had recently landed in Bermuda, and check instead if someone called Phillip Benoit has? … Yes, with an ‘o,’ ‘i,’ ‘t’ at the end. Thank you,” she finished, clicking it off.

  Will said out loud the conclusion they’d both come to, “Bennett. He’s Papineau Benoit’s descendant, isn’t he? That’s why he knows about these letters.”

  “And I wonder,” said Harley, “if his wife was right in fearing that those men might hire Papineau. Did they have anything to do with the shipwreck?”

  The cellphone rang.

  “This is Harley … Yes, thank you Dr. Doan. That does make sense now … Well, I’ll explain what little we know as soon as we get back … Yes, we’re catching the next bus to Hamilton … Okay, that’s nice of Yeats. Thanks,” said Harley, getting up as she finished her conversation.

  She nodded to Will, “Bennett is Benoit, which puzzles me because he showed his driver’s license with the name Bennett to me when he ordered those new sails in Lunenburg. Now that I think of it, Grandpa thought it was a bit strange that he paid for the new sails with cash. Probably so we couldn’t trace a check or a credit card transaction. C’mon, let’s get the bus. Yeats will pick us up in Hamilton.”

  As long as Bennett, Drury, Claire Calloway, or the scooter riders with red-tailed black helmets don’t get them first, thought Will. Their list of enemies was growing.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Admiralty House

  Pintail: A piece of iron jutting from wood or stone at a 90 degree angle to hang a rudder or a hinged gate or door.

  Will helped Sherman to haul the fish he was giving to Windy Farm upstairs. “Fresh caught this morning,” is how he qualified it.

  “Your accent,” began Will, “doesn’t sound like —”

  “I’m from Bermuda? I know. See, when I was six, my daddy got a job as a diesel mechanic in South Carolina. We lived there till I was sixteen. When he moved us back here and became a fisherman, I worked with him. That accent and an attitude’s about all I brought back with me.”

  “Oh. Well, I wondered why you didn’t sound like Aubrey,” said Will.

  “How’s Aubrey fitting in here now? I gather he’s spending most mornings here, that right?”
<
br />   “He’s helping with that boy Jason. Right, Humbert?” Will asked the parrot as he lugged a milk crate full of fish filets in plastic bags.

  “You betcha,” squawked Humbert from his perch in the cage, a feathered soldier doing an emphatic two-step.

  “You been friends long? With Aubrey, I mean. You seem to care ’bout him a lot. Especially the other day, you know, when he was sitting out in the ocean with his suit on,” Will asked.

  “Him leaving us would be a waste of a good heart,” grunted Sherman.

  They stopped to catch their breath. Sherman sleeve-wiped perspiration from his brow, which left a dark crescent in the faded green shirt where his arm crooked.

  “How’d you come to know Aubrey?”

  Sherman opened the freezer and removed the contents from one side. He answered Will’s questioning look by saying, “Gonna put this fresh stuff on the bottom, then pile this older fish on top so’s they eat the previously frozen food first.”

  Will helped him stack the frozen packages on the table beside Humbert.

  “Must be going on twenty-five, no, more like thirty years ago, I met Aubrey. Man was doing good for hisself. He had quit school at fourteen to work as a stonecutter with his father full time. Then he bought that quarry that’s across the road, behind his house. He done so well for hisself, he bought that piece of land his house is on now and commenced to build hisself a new house.”

  The mist rising from the frozen food on the table as it contacted the warm Bermudian breeze swirled a steam bath of cool air around Humbert, who two-stepped his contentment.

  “Now you got to understand, that back then, no black person had ever lived in that parish. Aubrey was the first. So on that first day he built the walls of what would become the kitchen, parlor, and bedroom. You’ll notice if you look that he’s since added to it, made it bigger when he married and had his son.”

  “That would be Anthony?” queried Will.

  “That would. Now Aubrey’s a big man. Was bigger and faster back then. He’d cut limestone block and had it all figured out. He had a horse and cart that carried all them blocks across the road. Unfortunately, understanding and tolerance didn’t greet him when he crossed that road. No sir, no sir.”

  Sherman placed the last bag of fish from his crate into the bottom of the freezer, then signaled for Will to start loading his.

  “Aubrey was a wonder to watch. He had loaded his cart the night before, so he and his horse arrived on his new property when it was dark and early. He started mixing mortar by coal light and when the sun got its lazy self outta bed, Aubrey had laid out and positioned the whole perimeter of his house. By nightfall, them walls were up and held together by mortar, blood and sweat. That evening, he went back to the small cottage he lived in, back a’ the quarry, and he must’a slept the sleep of the righteous that evening. But it wasn’t the righteous who came calling that night, no sir, no sir,” said Sherman, looking out the window toward the covered paddock as he recollected the moment with a tremor in his voice.

  He shook his head for emphasis, or perhaps out of sadness for the memory. “He came back in the next morning’s darkness to see that his walls ’ad all been pushed over ’fore the mortar could do its work and bind things,” he said, holding his fists firm like the mortar was supposed to have done.

  “Pushed over?” Will asked as he closed the freezer top and followed Sherman back downstairs. Sherman nodded.

  “See,” started Sherman as he thumped down the stairs, “neighbors wanted him to understand that they wasn’t going to sit idly by and let a black man move into the neighborhood. Wasn’t the kind o’ change they was prepared to accept.”

  “What did he do when he saw his walls thrown to the ground like that?”

  Sherman stopped in the shade of the veranda and a little smile crept to the corners of his mouth as the memory of the moment took center stage.

  “He hummed. Yes, sir, he hummed. A hymn. Then he began to collect all his fallen stone and, with his mason’s hammer, knocked off the useless mortar that hadn’t worked for him, no how. He started to rebuild. And he sang. He sang that whole day long with a voice that would still an angel in mid-flight.”

  “You saw this?” asked Will to be sure the story was accurate.

  “Yes sir, I did. I watched him for about an hour. Then I started singing with him and lifting blocks from where they’d landed. ’Bout that time, my wife brought me some coffee in a thermos. She couldn’t believe what she saw.” A big belly laugh interrupted Sherman’s narration.

  “There I was helping the man sort out his blocks. Told my wife I wouldn’t be going fishin’ that morning and to call my father to tell him so. I spent the day rebuilding the walls that small-thinking people had knocked down. We spent the night sittin’ by a fire in the clearing by the house, making sure the mortar had a fighting chance this time. Oh, they came again to do their wicked work. We saw their shadows appear on the edge of the clearing, then rustle back into the darkness from whence they came,” finished Sherman with a nod to the positive ending to his recollection.

  “Wow. So that’s how you became friends?”

  “Started thataway,” said Sherman, shuffling back to his van.

  “I told him that I couldn’t go to church with the same parishioners who thought that going to church on Sunday and knocking a man’s house down on Friday because of the color of his skin was the Christian thing to do. So Aubrey, bless his soul, he invites me to go to his church.”

  “Well, that was nice of him,” said Will.

  Sherman stopped by his van. “You don’t understand there, Will. His church, well, his church back then hadn’t had a white parishioner, ever. So there I was on a Sunday morning, walking up to the Reverend Boswell, who was outside greeting his parishioners. The line’s shrinking and I’m gettin’ up to him. Aubrey had said he’d be there but he was nowhere in sight and it was a few minutes before service and I wondered if he was maybe waiting for me in the shade of the vestry so I stayed in line. Everyone stopped to look. Those who’d gone in? They all stopped just inside the door to see how the reverend was going to deal with it. With me,” said Sherman, leaning on his van, savoring the memory.

  “Don’t mind telling you I was in a sweat. And not just ’cause of the weather, no sir, no sir. So it’s finally my turn and I says, ‘Good morning, Reverend.’ ‘How can I help you?’ he answers, narrowing his eyes and clutchin’ his Bible. ‘Well,’ says I, ‘I was hopin’ you wouldn’t mind me joining your congregation.’ The reverend pressed his lips together, ’cause he was understandably steamed about me standing there with a preposterous notion. ‘I will not stand idly by while you blaspheme in front of our church,’ he blustered. I thought I’d faint dead away when a big hand clapped my shoulder from behind and Aubrey says, ‘Morning Reverend. This is Sherman. I found the tenor the choir’s been looking for.’ The Reverend looked like he’d been hit by one of Aubrey’s blocks thrown from a distance and at a great pace.”

  Sherman opened the door to his van to let it cool down. “I’ve sung with the choir ever since. I was the poorest voice among those boys but in my little way, I was also the richest soul. The irony was that the Reverend’s sermon that day, because he’d heard what had happened to Aubrey’s walls, was about tolerance. So he preached tolerance as my frightened white face looked out from the front row of the choir.”

  “And the neighborhood finally accepted him?” asked Will, eager for a happy ending.

  “Took a full while, it did. ’Course, him being Bermuda’s best cricketer helped build tolerance. Still took a while to climb over that wall. Heck, took almost a year ’fore my wife agreed to join me in church.”

  “So what happened the other day? I mean, why was he sitting there, just, you know, just waiting for a big wave to …,” asked Will, not quite able to finish his question.

  “Always hard to predict what will topple an empire,” answered Sherman. “But don’t you be thinking of Mr. Aubrey Dill as some sort of Bermuda sh
ipwreck now, hear? Man’s not done by a long shot. Like I said, losing Aubrey would be a waste of a good heart.”

  Sherman backed his van away from the building and stopped long enough to lean out of the window and say, “I keep looking for that boat of yours, Wavelength. They may be moving it around and could end up taking it to a harbor or cove you’ve already looked at.” With a wave of his hand that was more of a waggle, he was off.

  Will stood there thinking that yes, they should still be looking for Wavelength to prove their innocence. But they did have certain responsibilities to Windy Farm, if only to compensate for room and board.

  Will looked up as Yeats eased his scooter off the center stand and started the motor.

  “Where you off to, Yeats?” he called, striving to keep his voice friendly.

  “Hamilton. Off to make final calculations on how many bales of straw we’ll need for the go-kart race. It’s a big deal for us here on the island. And for the farm. They rent the bales to use as a safety buffer along the route. We get ’em all back plus an installation and removal fee. Big help with all this,” he said, twirling a finger around to encompass the farm, then added, “You know there’ll be cameras from all over the world watching this race?”

  “Can I come with you? You know, to have a look in the harbor, in case Wavelength has come into port.”

  Yeats nodded, put the bike on the side stand, opened the big black carry box on the back, handed Will a helmet and waved him aboard.

  It wasn’t a big motor. Most Bermuda scooters weren’t big. This one, Yeats explained, had a 125 cc engine. The island only allowed bikes to go up to 150 cc. However, it was plenty fast enough to scare Will.

  They pulled into the car park opposite a restaurant and bar called The Pickled Onion. Yeats excused himself and scooted over to the sidewalk to shake hands with a man in yellow Bermuda shorts with a pale blue shirt and matching tie.

  Will took advantage of the break to scan the harbor with the small binoculars he’d brought. He lingered here and there when a sailboat hidden by another boat might just be Wavelength. But one by one, none proved to be the fugitive boat.