“I am familiar, as you say, with the contending powers of the city,” Koffler went on in his clipped, Teutonic way. “It would be a mistake to imagine that Boston burns with the same fever as Salem. There are powerful figures here who even now move to constrain the magistrates and end the little inquisition. Too many have died and the mortal danger threatens to spread.”
The professor checked over his shoulder as though he feared a watchful nemesis.
“Vexatious figures in Salem accuse the governor’s own wife of intriguing with witchcraft. Military officers of unimpeachable repute have been drawn into the outrage, their wives arrested while merely passing through the village and remitted to custody here in Boston. This Magistrate Granville unsettles entrenched interests and divides the forces standing off the French Catholics in Montreal by detailing a company of foot soldiers to search Boston and surrounds for Miss Cadence and a Goodwife Bradbury.”
Smith shifted irritably on his barstool, his temper and impatience getting the better of him.
“If’n you plan on roping this steer,” he said, “I suggest you stop twirlin’ your lasso and throw some dang rope, Professor.”
“What I suggest, Smith, is that I interrogate possible allies among the good burghers of the town, seeking information and alliance against Granville, while you conduct reconnaissance of the lower ranks.”
Smith arranged his face into something that might have passed as a smile, had there been any humor in it.
“I would take offence, sir, at the implied insult, if’n I did not agree with you as to the best disposition of our forces. I am as pleased to be about the hunt as General Sherman was to burn ol’ Georgia to the ground.”
He stood, leaving the rest of his largely untouched drink on the wooden bar, as determined to find Cady as he had ever been to track a fugitive from the US Marshal’s Service. Koffler laid a restraining hand upon his arm.
“You should start here. This was where you intended to stay over while in Boston, was it not? It still makes sense that Miss Cadence would attempt to make her way here on the chance that you returned. She testified to doing just that in her diaries.”
Smith shook his head.
“It makes more sense to begin the search where she came into the city. She took ship from Salem port. She would disembark at the wharves, not here, which is about as far from the tide line as it’s possible to get on this miserable chunk of rock. Good luck rubbin’ elbows with the Boston nobs, Professor. I do pray it helps. But I will ply my trade among the riffraff. I suspect Ms Cady would be more comfortable with them anyways.”
“Wait,” Koffler said, pressing a handful of heavy coins into Smith’s palm. “We should agree to rendezvous. Let us say midnight, back here at the Red Lion.”
“Done and done then.”
Smith pocketed the local currency, mopped up the last of his sowbelly stew with a stale rind of bread, pushed the hat down on his head and stalked away from the saloon bar. Dusk had succumbed to the fullness of night when he strode out onto the high street. He took this wide boulevard to be the high street because the grandeur of its masonry buildings shamed the poorer stock of paling shanties and slab huts he’d passed on the walk up the hill to the Lion. It was Smith’s experience that the higher up a feller lived, the less likely he was to get his hands dirty during the working day. With that in mind, he followed a generally downward path to find his way to the extensive waterfront area he’d spied from higher ground outside the city.
The good people of Boston had impressed themselves upon him as an uptight, puritanical lot, which made sense; them being of the Puritan temperament and all. But the city’s good people would soon enough be indoors, if not abed, as the darker hours fell over the land. There were no streetlamps or such to illuminate the way, but enough light still spilled from the windows of homes and businesses at this comparatively early hour to navigate an easy passage. Many folk found their way by handheld oil lamps, and open fires burned in iron baskets afore the steps of eating houses and the public inns, at least here, in the upper districts. Wagon wheels rumbled on the pebbled roadbed. Horses clip-clopped and whinnied while pedestrians afoot quickened their stride to escape the creeping chill that inched up from the harbor, stealing in through all but the heaviest clothes to settle deep into the bone.
As Smith dropped down through the crosstown streets, following his nose toward the docks, the cloak of night drew itself closer about him. The night was a terror to some, but not to all. The lawman knew there were whole classes of person who came out of hiding at the sun’s demise. The darkness gifted them that concealment and protection they did not enjoy in daylight hours. He had once heard the night called the ‘great leveler’, overturning the given order of things by liberating the lowly from their overseers. The poor, the indigent, the powerless and cursed of humanity, all of them could move with much greater freedom when they could move unseen. For Marshal John Titanic Smith, it was then a hunting time. The fugitive and criminal relished the dark as fully as the trysting lover, and he had learned to love it too. It held no terror for him, only possibilities.
He found the docks and working waterfront with relative ease. The harder undertaking of finding trace of Cady without drawing unwanted eyes upon himself, he commenced in a bond store where the receiving clerk toiled by candlelight in a tiny anteroom office even as the hour of supper came and went by unattended. Smith pushed open a door that was already ajar, casting a long, narrow delta of dancing lamplight out onto the road surface, which here abutted directly the footings of the warehouses and other commercial buildings. He expected a bell to ring, but none did, and he put aside a perverse curiosity about when such a convenience might have come into common use. When you traveled the centuries, he had found, questions were forever arising about such curios and oddments.
“Hey there, feller,” he said, trusting to the watch to effect the translation.
“Yes, sir,” the clerk replied, peering up with the mole-like squint of those who scribble at close quarters for long hours. “How might the firm of Calthorpe and Lawson assist you?”
Smith affected the air of a man who was not quite sure what he needed. Given his overpowering size and intimidating presence, a hint of helplessness was often enough to bring forth sympathetic aid when a straightforward demand for compliance might give such a fright as caused a feller to just clam right up.
“I confess I am not sure, son,” he said. “I had a package to be shipped from Salem, a bundle of correspondence from my brother, but I’m not sure whether it arrived, given the storms. Do you know if any packets from the town have berthed of late?”
“Only one,” the young man smiled, eager to help. “The Herald, which lies at anchor now under commission to the Bradbury company.”
His eyes darted back and forth and he leaned forward as if to impart a confidence.
“There were rumors of the ship and its cargo being impounded by the magistrates,” he said quietly. “A fugitive was said to have stowed away, or even paid for passage. It was searched earlier today, but not by customs.”
“No?” Smith said, his heart pounded just a little harder.
“No, sir. A company of lobsterbacks under the magistrates’ control. They searched both ships.”
“Both?” Smith frowned, not comprehending.
“Yes, sir. The Herald was intercepted by freebooters, in the employ of Montreal it is said. They fought off the raiders and captured the ship, Le Sournois. It is the talk of the town, sir. The prize money alone is said to be prodigious.”
Smith was taken with a sickly nausea, so strong was his dread for Cady’s safety. He did not care to imagine the unholy carnage of a battle at sea in this era. If she had been caught up in that she might not have survived. Or even worse, she may have, but now lay injured and delirious with pain and horrible infections. He recalled from the war that the aftermath of battle was reliably more hideous than the violence itself.
“Well, I would like to secure my papers,” he
muttered. “Is there an officer of this ship, the Herald, I might see?”
The clerk shrugged.
“I suppose you could take a lighter out to the vessels, if you can find a ferryman sober enough to row you at this hour. But you would be as well disposed to simply call in at the better taverns up the quay. The crewmen drink in the worst saloons, of course. But the officers usually take room and board at the Colchester or the Dolphin.”
“All righty, then. I thank you,” Smith said, touching the brim of his hat before exiting back to the waterfront.
He would not be calling at the Colchester or the Dolphin.
He didn’t need to put himself at cross purposes with some stuffed shirt of an officer. Better to mix in with the working tars who would be drunker, dumber and certainly more likely to give up a useful nugget or fleck of information with just a little shaking of the pan. He shivered in the jaws of an icy wind blowing in off the Atlantic, tried to pay no heed of the real fear he felt for Cady a-gnawing at his gizzards, and headed for the loudest, most disreputable drinking lodge he could see: a raucous blood house some way around the curve of the bay where, even as he watched, three men came crashing out of a window, only to continue brawling on the cobblestones of the promenade.
By the time Smith reached them, two of the pugilists had turned on the third and were giving him a stomping. When he stopped screaming they turned back on each other. Smith might once have cracked their heads together, but their dangerous stupidity was no concern of his this eve. He pushed through swinging doors into a saloon of such thunderous tumult and riot that it drove all thought from his mind for the few moments it took to adjust to the noise. When he had reconciled himself to the savage din, he looked about for the tables groaning under the heaviest loads of rum jugs and ale tankards. There, he knew, he would find those fellers with recent prize money burning smoky holes in their pockets. He knew bounty hunters and even marshals who were no different. The shorter the interval between collecting their reward monies, and dissipating the same on strong liquor and grabby whores, the better they preferred it.
He found a noticeable concentration of such fellers in a nest of tables near a large hearth in which a hog on a spit turned over white-hot coals. Shipmates. They drank and roared and played at dice, and drank some more, and yelled at serving wenches to fetch them great haunches of barbecued pig meat cut from the roasted beast. A steady shower of sizzling grease and smoking juice dripped onto the cooking coals. It smelled a good deal more appetizing than the thin sowbelly stew he’d mopped up earlier. Smith muscled through the crowd at the bar, ordered an ale off the wood, and returned to take up station with his back to the fireplace, as though to warm his britches after a cold walk through the town.
He was not long waiting for confirmation that these were men off the Herald. The drink had loosened their tongues and raised their voices, and some of them were ready to unburden themselves of memories they did not care to carry much beyond this night. Again, Smith had seen this before. Some men fought a battle and never spoke of it again. Others could not wait to purge themselves of the thing and did so in noisy recollection, spurred on by whiskey or rum. Himself, he was not a man given to talking about such horrors. He found his relief in a quiet prayer of thanks for his survival, mercy for the dead, and a determination to ride on down life’s trail as soon as might be. But there was more than one man in that saloon who had need of comrades and confessors to hear his tales.
“… his head broke open like a rotten egg…”
“… I run him through, I did, and felt his heartbeat in me dagger is the truth of it…”
“… Aye, there’s few die well that die in bloody contention…”
Smith had been very young when he rode scout for Colonel Jennison, and he recalled many conversations of this type. He was able to sift most of it, like a miner panning for a small golden pebble. It took some time, and he had to refill his tankard more than once, but eventually he heard something that caused him to home in on the speaker like a hawk upon a field mouse in the prairie far below.
“… She were a killin’ harpie, she were. The mistress turned that fight. Her with that poison tinctures putting out their eyes, and the lieutenant striking them down when they were blinded and yowling like branded poddy calves.”
“The bloodworms want her for a witch.”
“The bloodworms be damned! She is too comely to dangle from the hanging tree.”
An older man warned the others to shut their holes or he would close them up himself. He did not look at Smith as he was speaking, but he leaned into the middle of the table and bid his shipmates to do the same. He dropped his voice and let his eyes survey the room, speaking so quietly Smith had not a hope of hearing what he said next. It did not take much to imagine, though. This one was a gnarled and grizzled graybeard of the sort he’d seen a hundred times before. The equivalent of an old cavalry sergeant who had survived more fights than all of his young chargers put together. When they ended their confidential congress, the oldster slammed an open palm down on the table with a sound like a gunshot and roared that it was past time to get ‘bizzled’, which Smith instantly understood to mean spectacularly drunk.
He was getting a buzz from the three tankards of ale he’d consumed during his vigil and resolved to take no more strong drink. He had found sign of Ms Cady for sure. Now it was time to get on with tracking her.
Smith moved away from the fireplace with the hog on the cooking spit. He needed to water the daisies, and he pushed through the heaving crowd, intending to exit the bar for a comfort break.
“Just keep walking, Pilgrim. Or you’ll never walk again.”
The voice was low, but the speaker growled the threat so close to Smith’s ear he had no trouble making out every word. No trouble smelling the foul miasma of halitosis and cheap rum on the man’s breath, either. A hand clamped on to his elbow and he felt the sharp bite of a knifepoint at the base of his spine. Just to the side of the German pistol tucked in there under his jacket.
He kept moving.
He recognized the voice, or thought he did.
The old graybeard, of course.
He wasn’t stupid, and he didn’t try any moves. Smith knew the wrinkled devil would drive the blade through his liver and out of his shirtfront before he got a hand anywhere near the grip of his own knife. There were other moves he might have made, but they all ended up with him or the old man dead on the floor, and he wanted to talk to this varmint even more than he wanted to live. He was the only connection Smith had to Cady. He was sure of it.
They exited the main taproom, and the old salt pushed him on, digging an iron thumb into Smith’s elbow joint and keeping the point of his dagger pressed hard into his back to lift him up onto his toes, just enough to rob him of a stable fighting base.
He was good.
Good enough that there was a chance he might just run Smith through as soon as they were out of sight. He found himself steered through another door and out into the night, into a narrow walk space between the tavern and a grain store next door.
Smith felt his one chance come and go when the old boy lost his footing ever so briefly on a piece of uneven ground. For the space between two heartbeats the point of the knife disappeared and the grip on his elbow slipped.
He did nothing, instead taking the opportunity of the relative quiet outside to speak.
“I am Cadence’s… pardner,” he said.
He meant it as he said it. They were allies of the trail. Adventurers who had partnered up in common cause, no matter what the difficulty of their first meeting. But the urgent, soft-spoken words had a salutary effect on the sailor.
“You be Smith?” he asked. “Mistress Cadence’s husband?”
“Her husband?” Smith coughed, about to say, ‘Hell no!’ But he had not long survived as a boy scout in the war, and later a deputy for the US Marshals, without having some quicksilver brains in reserve of his unusual size and bearlike strength.
“W
e are partnered up, yes,” he said, knowing that the watch would not literally translate the words, but rather the meaning he invested in them. He did not know exactly what the old sailor heard, but he could see the effect on the man, who had come around just a little to get a look at him. His face was still a gnarled and snaggle-toothed mask of suspicion and prospective enmity, but Smith could also see he was weighing up the play. He would not make much of a poker player. Even the famously unlucky Wild Bill Hickock probably coulda taken a few hands off this galoot.
“Mistress Smith said you would come looking for her,” the sailor grumbled. He didn’t seem entirely pleased by the idea. “Said you were a couple of axe handles across and tall enough to knock your thick skull on a mainstay, too.”
He still had Smith by the arm, and the knifepoint was now aimed directly at his kidneys, but the wiry tension of his grip had eased off a good ways. Smith forced himself to relax.
“We got separated in Salem,” he ventured. “She got took on false charges and I been lookin’ for her ever since.”
“Show me the knife you got,” the man said, before adding quickly, “but slow now, or I will gut you like a haddock.”
Smith carefully, and very slowly, raised the hem of his coat and shirt to reveal the Bowie knife in its scabbard on his hip. The sailor’s dagger pressed in harder again, pricking his side and drawing a warm, thin trickle of blood.
“Let me see. Careful now.”
Smith used his thumb and pinkie finger to half-draw the weapon.
The knifepoint twisted and stung in his flank.
“Cover your eyes. Take it all the way out, just like that, with your thumb and littlest finger, and drop it to the ground.”
Smith did as he was told. The seafarer kicked the knife away when it fell. The man moved away, picked up the Bowie knife and whistled admiringly.
“You can put your hand down,” he said. “My name is Gaffer Partridge, of the Herald.”
The Golden Minute Page 28
