Fiddler's Green, Or a Wedding, a Ball, and the Singular Adventures of Sundry Moss

by Van Reid

  Melanie looked interested but uncertain. She squinted up at the third floor of the old tavern and located the window of the room where her father had died. He wasn’t there anymore—or his body wasn’t; someone had come and taken it away. There was to be a funeral on Wednesday, and several people, including Mr. Moss and the Sparks, had pitched in for the expenses. Before the arrangements were finalized, the Moosepath League would help defray costs, and even Burne Ring’s old employer and master mason would show up with flowers for the hearse and a ten-dollar bill for the deceased man’s only surviving child.

  Melanie didn’t know if she should be out in the street playing with Timothy. Perhaps she should be in her own room, alone and contemplating what it all meant. Then again, she recalled what Mr. Moss had said.

  Timothy’s mom came out, and it was strange to see the woman at the front of the tavern, standing on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips. “Melanie Ring!” she said. “You remember how you’re dressed and how you’re expected to act.” She shook a finger, but there was nothing angry or even stern about her manner. Mabel Spark was simply adamant in her sense of propriety. “You can’t climb trees in a dress. And no clambering around on wharves and roofs.”

  “Mom!” said Tim.

  “Timothy Spark!” she returned, but only followed this declaration of her youngest child’s name with a silent expression of precise warning. “Melanie?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Spark,” said the little girl.

  Mabel heaved a large sigh. Before she went back inside, she took the little girl’s face in her round, warm hands and kissed her on the forehead. Timothy looked more upset than Melanie did. He kicked the can against the wall of the tavern with a resounding clatter.

  “You can go if you want,” said Melanie. She looked resigned and shrugged philosophically.

  “You want to see a secret?” he asked, looking around, as if desperate and nearby enemies might be keening their ears.

  She nodded, and he made a gesture to indicate that she should follow him. She really did try to be a little more ladylike and not run so fast, but it was hard to fight the old habit of dodging pedestrians and skipping through the traffic on the streets. When she leaped over a sleeping dog, she glanced back to be sure that she wasn’t being watched, then slowed her pace and made Timothy slow down so that she could keep up with him.

  When they came to the shack behind the old molding mill at the end of Pleasant Street, she stared up after her friend as he scrambled onto the roof. “I’m not supposed to go up there,” she said when he looked back at her.

  Timothy signaled that she should wait for him, and she backed away from the building so that she could see him skittering the rooftops and leaping the tiny places between the tightly packed buildings of the working district. She lost sight of him after a moment and waited, feeling conspicuous by herself and in her girl’s clothes.

  She heard him before she saw him. She had taken to watching a crew that was building a brick wall across the way and was turned in the other direction when his unmistakable hop and jump came down the slope of the molding mill roof and banged on the tar paper shed. Melanie was astonished when she saw what he was carrying. Timothy held the boys’ shirt and trousers, the socks and beaten brogues out to her, smiling as if he had counted coup against their bravest foe. He was out of breath.

  She did not take them at first. She only stared at them and held her hands behind her back as if they might sting her. It was only when the happiness began to fade from Tim’s face that she reached out and took the clothes.

  “You can change into them in that old cellar hole beneath the soda factory,” he said, but not quite as triumphantly as he might have suggested it a moment before.

  She nodded. Perhaps the only thing more fun than running the roofs and wharves as a boy was running the roof and wharves as a girl in boys’ clothes. Her face lit as doubt left her.

  “I’ll stand guard for you,” he said, and he blushed a little.

  Half an hour later they were racing above Danforth Street, climbing one of the taller roofs for one of their favorite views of the harbor, when she heard it again, though the name spoken by that voice was not entirely clear. Melanie stopped, and Tim’s pace was arrested by the sound of her faltering steps. He turned around just above her on the roof and said, “What is it?”

  “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  “The whistle?” he said. There had been a toot from the harbor, but that had been some time and a roof or two ago.

  She shook her head.

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, though in fact, at that very moment, she did. She knew that he couldn’t have heard it and that it would have been wrong side to if he had. She shook her head again and laughed.

  “We’ll have to get you a hat,” he said. “When your hair gets longer.”

  “Race you!” she shouted, and she laughed and she sped ahead of him up the roof as if there were clouds on her feet, and for the first time ever, she beat him to the top.

  She didn’t know where the voice had come from, but she did know to whom it belonged. It might have come from the air above or the street below. It might have come from inside her. All this would have seemed contradictory, or even paradoxical, if a six-year-old street waif, an orphan, and an only child with a brother and a family and a home could have understood such a thing.

  It wasn’t her poor dead mother, and it wasn’t her father calling from his deathbed. It wasn’t anyone else. Someday it might call out her real name, but whatever it said and however often it spoke, she would never have to look over her shoulder again.

  It was a beautiful June day. The sadness caught up with her a little when she and Tim sat at the top of the roof and they began to count sails in the harbor. He seemed to know it and did most of the counting, and when he was done, he suggested nothing else but sat with her in the sun and the breeze. He said nothing and did not look at her when tears came down her cheeks.

  Mr. Spark had always said that Tim was born with philosophy.

  EPILOGUE HARD BUSINESS

  June 16, 1897

  Ican’t understand it! It’s been two weeks and nothing in the papers.” Harold Trowbridge crouched his great shoulders over the scatter of journals on his desk, and when he raised his head and fixed his gaze on the young man at the door, he had the appearance of some powerful animal preparing to lunge. The window shades were pulled and the mahogany shelves and the black leather upholstery of the chairs commanded the room with their hues, the shade behind Trowbridge glowing with the afternoon sun so that the gray-haired man was almost in complete silhouette. “You tell me you went to Harbottle and engaged him to have the barrel delivered.”

  “Yes, Mr. Trowbridge.” The young man did not blink.

  “Yes. I know you did, as I went to talk with him yesterday.”

  The young man already knew this but said nothing.

  “You paid him,” said the older man.

  “Harbottle? Yes.”

  “And he sent two men to deliver the keg of rum.”

  “I watched them carry it in the back door and come back out without it.”

  “What does that mean?” snapped Trowbridge.

  “It means, yes, I saw them deliver it.”

  “Then say so! Don’t be smart when you answer my questions.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the young man. He looked anything but contrite.

  Trowbridge knew he meant none of it, but the young bull always did what was asked of him. The problem here was understanding what went wrong or who was lying. “You called the police from that tavern you haunt.”

  “The Weary Sailor, yes.” The younger man’s expression was not easy to read in the relative gloom. “I saw the police at Walton’s house myself.”

  “And they didn’t know who you were when you called.”

  Apparently the young man had not been very impressed with the previous outburst regarding his answers; he only shru
gged.

  Trowbridge let out a low growl and shifted in his chair. “I can’t understand it. Nothing in the papers. This Walton has more pull in high places than I would have credited. Not so much as a mention or a vague hint of anything untoward on Spruce Street that day. What’s that man of his called?”

  “His servant, there at the house? Sundry Moss.”

  Trowbridge grunted. “Maybe something can be done with him.”

  “Disgrace his servant?”

  “To the devil with his servant! Pay the blackguard to disgrace his employer!” Trowbridge watched the young man’s face—a broad countenance that may have been deemed likable to those who considered such things, a wide sly mouth with white teeth, beneath a nose that had been broken once or twice, and slate blue eyes. Those eyes looked doubtful, and the mouth took a skeptical twist.

  “You don’t think so,” said Trowbridge. This might have been meant as a warning (or a threat) or might have been an honest query into the opinion of one servant about another.

  “No one is going to pay me to disgrace you, Mr. Trowbridge,” said the young man.

  “Are you saying you could?” This was more obviously a warning (or a threat).

  “I’m saying they couldn’t pay me to try,” feinted the man by the door.

  “And who do you mean by ‘they’?”

  The young man did not blink. The mild expression never left his face. His voice was steady and certain. “Everyone else, I suppose.”

  Trowbridge leaned back and folded his hands over his stomach.

  “I think they’re in with the police,” said the young man. “I think this Moosepath League has been working to get control of the wharfside and are just the sort of men, high enough up, to monkey with the law and share the wealth.”

  “Controlling the wharfside,” said Trowbridge.

  “They did for Adam Tweed and if you can believe the papers, Walton himself pulled the trigger. Just last month everyone was talking of Mr. Thump and how he walked right into the Weary Sailor one morning, demanding to see Fuzz Hadley and how Thump warned Hadley off with Hadley’s men standing about and this Thump sipping tea all the while.”

  Trowbridge had seen Mr. Thump and had difficulty picturing this. Only those down in the wharf district, or with connections down there, had even heard of this confrontation; among those in the know, only two people knew that it wasn’t Mr. Thump at all, but his near twin Thaddeus Spark—and one of these was Mabel Spark.

  “You did something wrong,” pronounced the older man.

  “You haven’t paid me yet,” returned the man at the door.

  Trowbridge opened a lower drawer of his desk and pulled out a little strongbox. There was no lock or combination, but only a hasp that he flipped to open the lid. He dipped into the contents, came out with a few small bills, and tossed these on the desk.

  “Much obliged,” said the young man, and he snatched up the money.

  “I will expect results the next time.”

  Counting the bills, the young man said, “Results are only as good as the plan ahead of them, Mr. Trowbridge.”

  “Get out of here,” said Trowbridge.

  The man at the door put the bills away, and from a back pocket he produced a brown cap, which he waved in salute. “Always a pleasure, sir,” he said, and there was no reason to doubt him. Mike Peat prized the extra cash and enjoyed the perilous walk in the company and conversation of Harold Trowbridge. The old man was just that to Peat, but a force to be reckoned with nonetheless, and a physically powerful one with a short fuse and a full charge. Mike Peat felt a little stronger and a little happier every time he left that room unscathed, which was more often than not these days.

  Trowbridge had already, and ostensibly, turned to other matters before Peat closed the door between them. The young man looked up and down the hall, then walked to the front of the house, glancing past doorways as he went, as if searching for some particular thing or person.

  “Mr. Peat,” came a voice. The old man’s daughter stood halfway up the broad front stairs, looking indecisive.

  “Miss Trowbridge,” said the young man quietly.

  Alice Trowbridge came a step or two down the stairs and chanced a look over the banister and into the hall. She was well past her majority, Peat knew, but not past her father’s grip. Her features were plain—her nose a little too fine and her jaw not quite fine enough—but her complexion was flawless, and her nearly white-blond hair made for an abundant fall past her shoulders. Her figure, too, was plain enough, to Peat’s way of thinking, but there was something precise in the way she dressed that sparked his interest and curiosity. “What did he say?” she asked him.

  Peat walked around the foot of the stairs to put himself out of sight of Trowbridge’s door. “He’s a little put off that Walton’s name hasn’t shown up in the court news.”

  “Does he know what was in the keg?”

  “How could he?” Peat said quietly. “Who’s going to tell him? I don’t think Ipse is going to take your father’s money, then tell him he took someone else’s to cross him. That was the clever thing, of course; anyone else would have paid him not to deliver it at all.”

  “He would have known if it hadn’t been,” she said. She was undoing the little drawstring purse that hung at the sash of her dress.

  “Maybe.” Peat nodded. “You must admire this Walton fellow. Or is it simply the pleasure of fouling your father’s traps?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “You’re not so afraid of the old man, are you.”

  “You’re not afraid of him.”

  “Harold Trowbridge?” said Peat like the edge of a boast. “He scares me to death,” he finished with all seriousness. “But as my dear mother always told me—” and here he put on the burr of the old country—“‘A man afraid of heights had better find a mountain to climb.’”

  “Here is your money,” she said, and with a quick glance at the hall, she thrust several bills at him.

  “Ach!” he said with a wave of his hand and his mother’s cadence still in his throat. “I couldn’t take it.”

  “What does that mean?” she hissed. “Mr. Peat, you had better take it!”

  “Not for anything I enjoyed so much.”

  She thrust the bills at him again, but he turned her hand aside with an odd smile. She was ready to say something else; but a sound from the hall warned her, and she tucked the money in a pocket just as her father’s large gray head came past the banister.

  “What’s going on here?” demanded the man. He was taller than Mike Peat and seemed to his daughter as tall as she, though she was three steps up the flight of stairs.

  “I was just telling this ... man here,” said Alice quickly, “that he was to employ the service entrance.”

  Trowbridge looked from one to the other of them, suspicion coiling like a snake inside him.

  “It seemed the shortest way,” said Peat with a shrug.

  “Get out,” said Trowbridge, and when Mike Peat offered to walk around him to the back of the house to the service entrance, the older man threw open the front door and said, “Get out!” with just a little more anger and a little less volume.

  Peat did his best to leave gracefully; but his stride had a hitch in it, and his back was stiff with the expectation of a blow or a kick. He caught a heel on one of the granite steps and almost tripped, recovering himself just a little as he made the gate and walked down the sidewalk. He had not left unscathed after all.

  Trowbridge shut the door and fixed his attention on his daughter.

  “Thank you,” she said, which appeared to turn his immediate displeasure, if not his overriding suspicion. He watched her till she turned and went upstairs.

  Alice did not hear him leave the hall, and she did not look around to see if he was still standing at the foot of the stairs. She had been careless, and he had very nearly caught her handing money to Michael Peat. For all his size, her father could walk like a cat. In her room she felt
out of breath and dizzy. She had been careless. If he ever discovered how she had foiled his attempt to discredit the chairman of the Moosepath League, she might finally learn the limit of his anger. Several weeks ago she had been responsible for lighting the spark of her father’s malice for the members of that club simply by an innocent and unmotivated comment about them (inspired by a laudatory newspaper item). It was his scorn and the vehemence of his reaction that inspired the plan she had been wanting to help her escape this house and its master.

  She turned to the mirror above her vanity and considered herself there. What had Mr. Peat been looking at with such interest? She had no illusions about herself. Her father’s craggy features and her mother’s delicate, lovely face had not produced a beautiful child, but her father’s consistent guile and her mother’s slow, sad demise had produced a determined one.

  She thought she could hear him walking below, and then, startlingly, the door to her room opened and he was standing there. Alice had just been thinking that he wasn’t as smart or clever as he thought he was, and now, unexpectedly, she was seeing him as she had when she was a child. She sat very still in the vanity seat and waited for lingering, horrible moments before he spoke.

  “Never talk to that man,” he intoned. “Never talk to him or to any other business associate that comes into this house.”

  She blinked at him, and then, stupidly (and long after she should have), she realized that he required an answer. (She could never guess ahead of time whether an answer would mollify him or be judged an impertinence.) “Yes,” she said, but fearing this was not the correct response, she added, “No, I won’t.”

  There was another lingering, horrible moment as he soaked up her uncertainty and fear. He left, and she thought she heard his footsteps in the hall. His unheralded presence at her door, however, was proof enough of how little she could trust to what she thought she heard.

  She opened the drawer of her vanity, where she kept her mother’s picture, and gazed at the pretty face where it lay among the combs and ribbons. She could not remember her mother ever looking like that, only the sickly, frightened expression that watched from the pillow till it grew so sickly that it need be frightened no more.