Cordelia Underwood, or the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

  “My mother’s family was very friendly with the Cloughs,” said Sundry, unperturbed by the doubt in Piper’s tone.

  “The Chases? The Cloughs?” said Mister Walton, whose curiosity was greatly piqued. “You say a queen was expected here?”

  “Marie Antoinette herself,” said the sheriff.

  “Ach,” said Taverner, though whether from surprise or disbelief it was difficult to say.

  “If we had gone past the Fort Road,” explained Sundry to Mister Walton, “continuing along the eastern shore of the cove, we would have crossed an old wooden bridge and climbed a hill till the path took a severe turn to the left. About halfway up this part of the hill, there is a square two-storied house set back from the road. The Chases live there now, but a hundred years ago Captain Clough and his wife, Sarah, owned the place.”

  Mister Walton listened with a mixture of interest and amusement. Sundry sounded like a guest speaker on the lecture circuit (albeit one speaking sotto voce); his posture, however—seen dimly in the dark—indicated a person who was ready to fall asleep at any moment. Sundry was sprawled upon the bench, his legs stretched before him and his feet crossed casually at the ankles.

  “So it is the Cloughs, in this case, who merit our interest,” said Mister Walton, to indicate that he was paying close attention.

  “Oh, yes,” agreed Sundry. “Captain Clough, by all report, was as stiff-backed and salted down a republican as lived in these parts. He was not a lover of royalty by any means—he was in fact a former officer of the Continental Army. But like many of his peers he was more than a little horrified by the excesses of the French brand of revolution.

  “Our merchant fleet was finding lucrative trade with France’s new rule, but the revolutionaries were constantly suspicious of foreigners, so it is strange that old Stephen came into contact with royalty at all. Somehow he had communication with the queen’s court, which was under house arrest, and she was able to gain his sympathies. Now Captain Clough,” waxed Sundry in a poetical manner of speaking, “was a hard-shelled tight-fisted Puritan of the old school, and Marie Antoinette had lived a life of voluptuous luxury.”

  “Good heavens!” said Seth under his breath. The mere mention of such intemperance scandalized him.

  But Sundry liked the phrase so much that he said it twice. “Voluptuous luxury.”

  “Good heavens!” repeated Seth.

  Taverner gave a low hiss. “Keep it down or say nothing.”

  Elbows on knees, Mister Walton leaned closer to Sundry, encouraging him to continue. “They make an extraordinary pair,” whispered the portly gentleman with suppressed excitement.

  “The queen’s celebrated charms,” said a quietened Sundry, “would have been lost on Captain Clough, but she was known as an honest talker and greatly humbled by the fall of her house. Some sense of Christian charity, or chivalry perhaps, stirred within him and he offered to help her escape to America.

  “Somehow . . .” continued Sundry.

  “There are a lot of somehows in this story,” said the sheriff without looking from his gun slot.

  “Well, somehow is all anyone knows about it,” replied Sundry, as if that answered any doubts. “At any rate, the captain managed, by some means unknown to us, to get many of the queen’s belongings—furniture, wardrobe, and jewels—aboard his ship, the Sally.”

  “He smuggled them, you’re saying,” interpreted Taverner wryly.

  “Unfortunately, the queen’s plans for escape were discovered, and Marie Antoinette, as you know, was subsequently beheaded.”

  Seth put an involuntary hand to his neck.

  “And what happened to her things?” wondered Mister Walton.

  “Many of them are still in the house, though other people own it now. One of the rooms is still decorated with faded French wallpaper that the captain brought back with him from the queen’s court. He might have sold his unexpected cargo, but chose instead to bring it home with him, perhaps so that he might remember the brave woman whose life he had hoped to save.

  “Extraordinary!” said Mister Walton.

  “Who’s to say he didn’t dupe the queen?” said Sheriff Piper. “That he didn’t reveal her plans to the revolutionary committee as soon as he had her belongings on board?”

  This thought offended Sundry’s faith in human goodness, and he let out a low sound of disgust.

  “Ach,” said Colonel Taverner. “You’ve dealt with too many criminals, Charles. Reputation is a powerful force, and if he hadn’t been known as an honest man, I am sure that the prevailing legend would never have stuck.”

  There was a brief silence then, the sounds of the night reasserting themselves upon their conscious thoughts. Mister Walton thought he might hear the first sprinklings of rain upon the roof of the fort.

  The colonel spoke again, as if the conversation had never stopped. “I am surprised, though, that some rumor of the dauphin escaping with your Captain Clough hasn’t been intimated.”

  “Actually,” said Sundry, “there are those who think it so.”

  “I’d wager there are, boy,” said the colonel with a wink. His voice descended below a whisper, so that they could barely hear him, and he pointed at his horizontal outlook. “And perhaps these are the ghosts of Captain Clough and the dauphin I see now, sneaking into shore.”

  32 Voices in the Night

  “I CAN HEAR THE FALLS,” SAID CORDELIA, LYING BACK ON HER COUSIN’S BED. The night breeze had stilled and the roar of the falls drummed behind the voices of insects and peepers through the open window. Cordelia had herself wrapped in a blanket against the chill of the night; Priscilla sat at her dressing table with a shawl over her shoulders and combed her long dark hair. They knew that Priscilla’s mother would heartily disapprove of their exposing themselves to the dampening atmosphere.

  Priscilla paused dreamily as she contemplated Cordelia’s romantic evening at the Fourth of July Ball. “I don’t think I have ever had a stranger ask me to dance,” she said wistfully.

  “I wonder if there might be a waterfall on my land,” said Cordelia.

  “And to think of dancing with him all night. Mother would have been horrified.” Priscilla gathered her hair over one shoulder and recommenced combing. Cordelia had always been envious of Priscilla’s hair, which was black and hung down to her waist, but envious in a way that one can be toward a cousin who is also your best friend. Priscilla Morningside did not have Cordelia’s fine features—the flat plain of her cheeks could have been less long, her nose a shade less prominent—but she had, in James’s words, a fine chin, and it was commonly recognized that her dark eyes were beautiful and that she smiled easily despite her mother’s serious example.

  She was also extremely short-sighted, and her eyeglasses complicated an already interesting face. Cordelia thought they added charm. Priscilla was sure they added dowdiness, and would have wagered good money that they had contributed to the fact that she had never had a stranger ask her to dance.

  “I do love your hair,” said Cordelia.

  “I know a hundred women with hair just like it.”

  “Not as full.”

  “Oh, yes. Every bit.”

  “Not as lustrous.”

  “Nonsense. Your hair is radiant.”

  “I’m a carrot top. Most people think red hair is an impediment.”

  “Every boy turns when you walk past.”

  “That is not to say which way they turn.”

  “Oh, for goodness sakes!” Priscilla leaned forward in her search for the right words. “You are a beautiful fall day,” she said with a dramatic air, and almost giggled when she said it.

  “You are the forest in winter,” said Cordelia in a matching tone.

  Priscilla laid her comb on the table and stood. “In your blue gown you are like red-gold leaves against the clear autumnal sky, unclouded and breathtaking, a hint of spring yet to come in the sunlit green of your eye!”

  Still on the bed, Cordelia stretched out her arms in a gestu
re of unlimited generosity. “You radiate the warmth that waits beneath the cover of snow, and even dressed in summer white you are the mystery of starlit nights and the beauty of dark trees against the frost.”

  “Oh, please,” said Priscilla. “You’re embarrassing me. Don’t feel you have to stop.”

  The two young women did their best to repress their laughter. “Which eye has the hint of sunlit green?” wondered Cordelia hysterically. The hour was late and they were silly with it—Cordelia worn out from the long trip north, Priscilla equally tired from anticipation. Unable to speak, Priscilla simply shook her head and collapsed onto the bed beside Cordelia.

  A knock on the door momentarily stifled their hilarity and snapped them into a sitting position. “Priscilla!” came a nettled hiss. “Why aren’t you abed? It’s after midnight! You’re keeping your cousin up.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother. I was just combing my hair.”

  “Yes, well, go to sleep.”

  “You comb your hair so noisily,” said Cordelia when her aunt’s footsteps had receded down the hall.

  Priscilla drew the bedspread over her. “I’m glad she didn’t come in and find the window open.”

  They lay at right angles to one another, looking at the ceiling, and said nothing for some time. They might indeed have been icons of autumn and winter: one exuding an enigmatic wit that matched her freckles and red hair; the other plainer in her beauty, her long hair shining in a black spill about her face. The clock in the downstairs hall struck some portion of the hour.

  “Do you think my father had a sense of humor?” asked Priscilla after another span of silence.

  Cordelia took several moments to answer. “I think so. I wish I remembered your father better.”

  “He was often away. Often, when you were here, he was away.”

  Cordelia reached out and gently touched her cousin’s hand. Priscilla gratefully grasped Cordelia’s fingers and pressed them to her cheek.

  “I miss him,” said Priscilla. “For myself and my brother, but mostly for Mother. Sometimes I think I hear him walking past the door, and I look up and it’s Ethan. Do you know,” she said, craning her head back to look at Cordelia, “I think that if he were still alive I would be married by now.”

  “Does your mother keep you so cloistered?”

  “Oh, not really. We just seem to have less confidence without him. I suppose it would be much the same if Mother had gone.”

  “Do you want to be married?”

  “It is what we do, isn’t it?”

  Cordelia recited with wry formality:

  “Goodness sakes!” said Priscilla with a short laugh. “Is Mr. Benning a captain of industry, then?”

  “Less a captain, perhaps, and more of a pirate. Oh, not that he’s dishonest or dishonorable,” Cordelia explained when her cousin shot a wide-eyed glance in her direction. “There is something rakish about him, that’s all.”

  “Don’t tell mother. She won’t let him on the property.”

  “A pirate of industry,” said Cordelia, liking the phrase.

  “Well, I have never had a stranger ask me to dance, much less a rakish stranger.”

  “Probably I will never see him again.”

  “I shouldn’t worry,” said Priscilla. “He sounds quite smitten to me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he showed up at the front door, looking for you.”

  33 The Unexpected Effects of Ducky Planke

  DUCKY PLANKE BARELY NOTICED WHEN THE RAGGED CLOUDS, WITH A SINgle drop of rain, gave him a cold tap on the ear. From his hiding place among the scruffy trees and bushes that lined a small stretch of the Eddy shore he could see the vague movement of shadows as Colonel Taverner’s company positioned themselves at either side of the short gravelly beach. The sound of oars, dipped carefully, and water scuttling along low gunwales entered the echoing perimeters of the cove as a dark mass emerged from the gloom on its way inshore.

  Another rhythmic noise, like oars plying the wind, caught Ducky’s attention, and he looked up in time to sense as much as see the lumbering shape of a great blue heron pass over him.

  Hiding now among some rocks above the shore, Sundry Moss caught the sound of the heron as well and for a moment it startled him. He did not have Ducky’s immediate sense of what was flying past, but decided quickly that it was no phantom. Without having truly appeared, the heron was gone—banking through the darkness to the next head of land—and in its wake, the sound of the incoming boat was clearer still.

  Having ascertained that the night runner was heading for a bit of strand just east of the fort, Colonel Taverner deployed himself and his men behind large rocks on either end of the beach. With rifle and shotgun, the sheriff and Seth took the furthest post, unknowingly creeping a mere yard behind the hidden Ducky Planke in their circuitous route to the cover of a large boulder.

  Waiting from behind a natural buttress of rock overlooking the shore, Colonel Taverner, Sundry, and Mister Walton listened to the boat’s progress. “Keep down, till we’re sure they’re not armed,” had been the colonel’s last hushed words to Sundry and Mister Walton as they had cat-footed out of the fort.

  “It’s probably just another fisherman from Edgecomb,” had been Sundry’s barely audible comment.

  Now the colonel was featureless in the dark, but Mister Walton could see enough of the man’s silhouette to know that he brandished a revolver in one hand and his shuttered storm lamp in the other. Their vigil was not altogether comfortable, for the ground was damp with a low mist and preliminary rain and they were quickly discovered by a small flock of hungry mosquitoes. The seat of Mister Walton’s pants were wet as soon as he set himself down, but he dared not shift his rotund figure for fear of giving away their presence.

  The rain came on in slow earnest to add to their troubles, and they turned their collars against the swarming insects and the cold drizzle.

  The thunk of a bow against the shore and the muffled clunk of shipped oars charged them with expectancy, and all discomfort was forgotten. Mister Walton sensed Colonel Taverner stiffen like a dog on point, and they waited again for the sound of boots upon the beach, and the scrape of the boat being pulled up from the reach of the tide.

  There was a small splash and two or three steps that sounded like careful shovelfuls of gravel, a second set of thumps indicating someone in the boat moving to the bow; then a voice on shore called: “Quack! Quack!”

  He was so taut with excitement and the unexpected voice was so incongruous with his expectations, that Mister Walton almost shouted with surprise.

  “Quack! Quack!” came the voice again. It was really a very good imitation of a mallard. “Quack! Quack!” repeated the voice, and the figures on the beach, momentarily frozen, now clambered noisily back toward the water.

  Colonel Taverner leaped up from his place of hiding and lifted the shade of his storm lamp. Across the way, Sheriff Piper followed a similar plan of action and the scene on the beach was captured by two pale shafts of light.

  “Don’t move!” shouted Colonel Taverner. “I am an agent of the Customs Service and I am armed!” He leveled his revolver just in front of the lantern so that those in the boat below him could see the truth of his words.

  Mister Walton had been told to stay down till any possible danger had passed, but his overwhelming curiosity (and perhaps the damp seat of his pants) urged him to his feet, and he raised his eyes over the sheltering rock.

  Two men were discernible: one, slight and bearded, stood in the aft end of a dory which was only three-quarters in the river; the other, built like a bull, was caught on the beach, frozen in the act of pushing the boat from shore.

  On the other side of the small cove the sheriff and Seth could be seen as vague outlines, their weapons glinting in the light of their lantern. “Easy,” said Piper, and he put a hand on Seth’s shoulder to discourage the jailer from stepping out from behind his cover.

  “You on the beach,” said Taverner clearly. He winked away a drop of rain that ha
d landed on the brink of his eye. “I want you to slowly pull that vessel onto shore. You in the dory—sit down and hands up.”

  Sundry took hold of Mister Walton’s arm with the intention of pushing him out of harm’s way. Nothing happened for a series of protracted moments. The boat rose and fell slightly with the movement of the tide.

  “Quick now!” snapped Taverner, and as he said it the man in the boat sat down, dropped his oar, and lifted a hitherto unnoticed form from the bottom of the dory. With a snap of his arms he had pulled a child, a boy no more than four or five years old, up to his chest like a breastplate. His chin resting on the youngster’s head, the man flashed a strange and discomforting smile. The boy gave no indication of fear, looking only confused and wide-eyed, as if he had just wakened.

  Such a turn of events could not have been predicted, and even Colonel Taverner was at a moment’s loss.

  “Push, you fool!” snarled the man in the boat, and the bull-like fellow on shore propelled the dory, suddenly and powerfully, into the river.

  Taverner could not shoot at the man in the boat for fear of hitting the child, but he fired a warning into the air. His plans, however, were to amount to all or nothing that night, and the Bull ducked his head again as he turned shoreward and bolted with surprising speed. Seth alone leveled his weapon, but a sudden sense of proportion stayed his hand. Having seen the huge fellow selflessly save his comrades, and not knowing the extent of his criminality, Seth simply could not bring himself to shoot the big man down.

  “Get him!” was all that Taverner could think to shout, and Sundry hit the ground running, like an unloosed spring, charging down the bank of the shore.

  With a crash the Bull was through the break of trees and pounding up the field that led to the Davis homestead. The dory was almost beyond the range of the lanterns now, pulled first by the tide, then by wiry muscle as the man pushed the boy from him and unshipped the oars.

  Somewhere above them rode a half moon and, though overcast, the sky reflected a strange gray clarification onto the landscape. Clouds showed beyond the great hole in the underbrush where the Bull had broken through; and following him, Sundry bounded into the field, his long legs finding their true speed in the open meadow. The field was wet with rain, and he could hear his quarry shushing through the long grass. The Bull had shown extraordinary speed at the start, but his size began to tell in the long run, and at the top of a steep knoll Sundry narrowed the distance between them to a few feet.