A Study in Revenge: A Novel

by Kieran Shields

  “ ’Cause Horace’s father had threatened us. Said there’d be the devil to pay if we ever mentioned the marks on that ledge.”

  “So why’d you tell?” Helen asked.

  “The same reason as I suppose anyone tells a man’s secrets. To hurt him. Revenge for what he’d done.”

  Lean gave her a sympathetic nod. “Of course. You’d had a youthful romance with Horace. When Horace’s father found out, he beat you severely. Is that how your eye was injured?”

  “For someone who just met me, you know an awful lot about my life, Mr. Lean.” Dastine glanced around, looking as if she wanted assurance that enough people were meandering by to come to her aid in case Lean and Helen started causing her trouble. She ran her fingers down the scar tissue on her cheek and shifted nervously on the bench.

  Helen sensed that Dastine was weighing whether to end this strange encounter and get herself back to the almshouse. She already knew that the woman was a kindhearted soul, so she decided to play the best card they had to appeal to Dastine’s sentimental feelings on the subject of Horace Webster.

  “We’re helping a colleague of ours who’s searching for Madeline Webster, Horace’s granddaughter. Before Horace passed, he asked for her to be found. She’s gone missing, and now she may be in grave danger.”

  “His granddaughter?” A small, wistful smile appeared on the old woman’s face. “What’s that all have to do with those old stone markings? With me?”

  “We don’t know exactly, but something was stolen from the Websters. Whatever the robber was after, I think it has to do with those old markings,” Lean explained. “In order to help Horace’s granddaughter, we need to figure out just what is really going on here. I need to learn everything I possibly can. Before it’s too late.”

  “What’s the girl’s name again? His granddaughter?”

  “Madeline,” Helen said.

  Dastine repeated the name in a whisper. Several moments of silence passed, and her lips trembled with the weight of possibilities long since vanished, thoughts of a very different life she’d once dreamed of living. Helen guessed that the woman had never had any children of her own. Maybe because of the facial disfigurement inflicted by Horace Webster’s father. She tried to imagine what that was like, a life alone. A life without her own daughter, Delia. She reached into her bag and had a handkerchief ready even before Dastine’s eyes welled up. A tear dripped from the old woman’s unseeing left orb. Helen offered the handkerchief, and Dastine dabbed briefly before passing it back. When she spoke again, there was no trace of anguish in her voice.

  “You may know a lot about me and Horace, but you don’t know everything. It wasn’t some sort of fleeting romance between foolish young folks who don’t know better. Horace and me, we loved each other. Very much. Yes, his father beat me and ruined my eye. But worse than that, he took Horace from me. You get used to seeing with just one eye. The pain in my soul, from having my love taken away—that was worse.”

  “You were cast out from the Webster house, and Horace was forbidden to see you ever again,” Lean said.

  “I still went out of my way to see him.” She chuckled at her confession. “From a distance, mind you, in public places where the crowds kept me from being noticed.”

  “He made no effort to see you anymore?” Helen asked with a hint of bitterness in her voice.

  “He would have. I could tell by the look on his face whenever I caught sight of him. The joy that I’d known in him was gone. He’d seen how his father had ruined my face. I wasn’t a beauty anymore. It hurt, thinking that might have made Horace stop loving me. But I believe that the real reason he never came looking for me was he knew what would happen if we was ever caught together again. His father might take it out on him some, but that man would sure as hell have killed me.”

  Helen gave Lean a quick shake of her head to delay any further questioning. Dastine LaVallee was a talker, and Helen suspected that if they let her go on as she would, she’d tell them more than they’d even know to ask.

  “Well, of course that ain’t entirely true. We did see each other one more time,” she said.

  “Despite the danger?” Helen laid her hand on Dastine’s arm.

  “I was terrified of his father, but then we were young and in love. We arranged a secret meeting. It was a spot where no one would ever see us. We’d gone there before to be alone with ourselves. It was our spot over by the Presumpscot River, not too far below the falls. I suppose maybe that’s why I like it here by the little spring—just a hint of the same, without being enough of a memory to hold any grief in it.”

  “It’s all water under the bridge anyway,” Lean said with a smile.

  Dastine cackled at the bad joke.

  “That’s why you were familiar with the Presumpscot,” Lean said, “and why you knew about those ancient runes or markings.”

  “Hah! I knew about them ’cause they weren’t ancient at all. My own pépère is the one who carved them into the stone. Horace’s grandfather, Old Tom, had told him what to do, and Pépère got his hammer and chisel and did the work.”

  “Really? Say, if we brought you there, do you think you could still find the spot? The ledge that holds those markings?” Lean asked.

  “Of course. It’s like I said, the old times are still in here.” Dastine tapped her temple. “I still see them as sharp as ever.”

  Lean’s police carriage took them across Tukey’s Bridge, through the town of Deering, and then along the winding roads through Falmouth. After a while of reminiscing over days both old and recent, Dastine nodded off. As they passed along the Presumpscot, drawing nearer to the falls, Helen woke the old woman. She recovered her bearings in time to recognize a curve in the road. They all got out and had to make it the last few hundred yards on foot. First they crossed a field and then ducked into a stand of mixed pine and hardwoods that ran along the river. Dastine relied on Lean for support as they made their way through the undergrowth and over the uneven footing down to the river. They reached a rocky section of the bank a short way north of where Dastine had meant to come out, but another minute and she recognized her spot.

  “It was here that our trouble started. If you want to call it that. Horace and I would sit on this flat space, just below where the dip makes a natural seat. You could sit nice and peaceful as if you’d brought a chair from home and look out on the river.”

  “Did the Websters own this land, I wonder?” Lean asked.

  Dastine settled herself down onto a rock much taller than the old one she’d mentioned, so as to avoid the need to bend her knees too much.

  “Horace’s grandfather, Old Tom, had bought it up years earlier. Had a whole stretch along the river here, but they didn’t do anything with it. I had never seen it myself until I was sixteen years old. I came with Horace and his father and my pépère, who was an old man by then. He and Gra-mère had come from Basseterre, in St. Kitts, to Maine when they were both young. Horace’s grandfather had brought them here, and they married and started their family not long after. This was all back before the Revolutionary War. So my pépère was an old man by the time I first came here. Still strong as an ox, though.”

  “Horace’s grandfather, Old Tom Webster, was dead by the time you came here? He’d have been much older,” Lean said.

  “Yes, he died a while earlier. If I ever met him, I was too young to remember it. But he didn’t die of old age,” Dastine said in a conspiratorial tone.

  “No?” Helen’s curious stare begged her to tell more.

  “Not according to my gra-mère. She always said the man was old, but no older than the day he first brought them to New England. They found him in his workroom, dead on the floor, some broken bottles near him. Family said it must have been his heart. But my gra-mère, she would always cross herself when she talked of him, said it wasn’t natural. She would only mention it when no one was around but us. She swore there was evil done on the old man. Poisoned, is what she told us. Too late for you to investigat
e that one, eh?” Dastine said with a dry laugh.

  “Maybe,” Lean agreed. “Did your grandmother ever say who she thought poisoned him?”

  “The same ones that were always chasing after him, I suppose.”

  “The same ones? Just a moment—there were men pursuing Tom Webster?”

  “That’s why he fled St. Kitts with my grandparents. Why he showed up on that island in the first place.”

  “Who were these men?” Lean asked.

  Dastine shrugged. “Englishmen or other Europeans, Gra-mère never said exactly. But they knew he was in Maine. They’d found him here before.”

  “But he was no longer running away,” Helen said, remembering her research into the properties owned by Old Thomas Webster. “So when they found him earlier, was that at the house on Oak and Free streets, the one he built at the end of the Revolutionary War? A stranger by the name of Clough was reported to have died close by there under ‘mischievous’ circumstances.”

  “That was all before my time,” Dastine said. “But Gra-mère just said that she’d thought the men were done coming after him. That he’d taught them a lesson.”

  “And did she ever say why these foreign men were after Old Tom?” Lean asked.

  Dastine’s good eye lit up with a bit of childlike glee. “His golden puzzle.”

  “Which is what, exactly?” Lean tried to keep his voice level.

  Dastine shrugged again. “Gra-mère would only ever whisper about it, and she wouldn’t say much. She wasn’t supposed to know about it. But sometimes she’d see Old Tom with it in his hands, a little puzzle box, all shining gold. And he’d be twisting it this way and that. She never knew what it was, but she figured he was killed over it in the end. She used to tell me to behave or those men would come back.” She let out a chuckle at the childhood memories of her grandmother’s stories. “What do you make of that, Mr. Lean?”

  “I’m not entirely certain. So I suppose I should just get myself back to the original questions that brought us here,” Lean said. He’d been glancing about at the ledges but hadn’t seen any traces of etchings in the rock. “Now, you were telling us about the first time you came here. You saw the markings.”

  “I just tagged along to help out any way I could. Like I said, Pépère had gotten old. Though you wouldn’t know it by the way Horace’s father bossed him about. Brought him here on account of he was the one who’d chipped out the markings in the first place. The river water coming down over the rocks can get going pretty good sometimes. It was wearing the markings down. Horace’s father wanted Pépère to chisel them out again, deeper, to keep them fresh.”

  “And where exactly are the markings?”

  “Oh, we haven’t reached them yet. Come, I’ll show you.”

  She extended a hand, and Lean helped her to her feet, then escorted her through the brush, another fifty yards downriver. They emerged onto a wide, flat ledge that sloped a touch toward the river.

  “This is it,” Dastine said with a nod. “They should be right over there.”

  Helen stayed by Dastine while Lean stepped to where he saw the faint marks on the rock. He crouched down just outside a circle, maybe three feet in diameter, of faded symbols carved into the ledge. The river bubbled past right along the lower edge of the rock. The water level wouldn’t need to rise much for the river to flood over the whole face of the ledge. The river had defeated Lean’s intentions. Once again the waters below the Presumpscot Falls had worn away the markings that Dastine LaVallee’s grandfather had cut into the rock. The symbols were no longer distinct or legible. All Lean could do now was count them and confirm that Professor Horsford’s book hadn’t erroneously included a duplicate of the “I” symbol. That figure did appear twice on the rock, making the total number of separate markings there twenty-four.

  “Seems your grandfather didn’t cut the rock deep enough the second time either,” Lean said.

  “He did what he was told.” Her voice rose as she defended her beloved grandfather. “If someone’s to blame, it’s that Old Tom Webster for not picking a spot back enough from the river in the first place.”

  Lean stood and surveyed the rocks about him. The marks would have been legible to anyone who knew where to look for them and could have been set down in several clear spots farther removed from the river. Maybe the marks weren’t meant to last forever. Lean just shrugged and turned to another subject.

  “Your anger at Horace’s father is understandable. But why go to the newspaper with the story about the etchings on the rock? An odd choice of revenge against the man who’d beaten you so horribly and ripped your young love away.”

  “I was just a girl. A poor black girl with no means at hand. How else could I strike back at the man?” Although she was answering Lean, it was Helen she looked to for understanding. “It was actually Horace who gave me the idea. Like I said earlier, after the trouble we arranged our last meeting at our spot upriver. We came to say our good-byes, to hold each other for a moment longer.”

  Dastine turned and looked back the way they’d come, as if picturing the events of sixty years ago. “Horace was beside himself. I could see horror in his eyes when he saw my beaten, scarred face. This dead eye. He tried to pass it off as anger. And I suppose it was, in part. But looking back on it later, I realized it was horror at the sight of my face as well. He couldn’t stand still. We walked along the bank until we reached the ledge here.

  “The sight of that circle, all those carvings, it made something burst inside him. He went into a frenzy. Cursing his father. Saying the man cared more for this stupid circle than he did about Horace himself. He took up a rock and began smashing it on the ledge, trying to destroy those markings. But all he did was scrape up his hands.”

  Dastine LaVallee clasped her own hands in front of her, rubbing them back and forth like she was soothing an old ache.

  “That put the idea in your head about how valuable the markings were to his father. The man was intent on preserving the marks and making sure they remained a secret,” Lean said.

  “He took so much from me,” Dastine said. “This was the one thing I was free to take from him. I brought the newsman right here. Even helped him make charcoal rubbings of each of the marks. He thought they were genuine. Carved by Indians or ancient travelers of some sort or the other.”

  “The truth wouldn’t have made for much of a story. You wanted the newspaper to get everyone talking,” Lean said.

  “Seems so petty now. But then I hated that man more than anything in the world. I relished the anger he’d feel when the whole world knew about his strange little secret. It must have worked, too. I came back here two weeks later and saw that Horace’s father had put up signs and hired a couple of rough hands to keep trespassers away. It was a very small victory in comparison to what he’d done.”

  “Not the only victory, though, was it?” Helen was remembering the anger she’d felt the prior Fourth of July, when she’d seen dismay in her uncle’s face at the idea of Perceval Grey, an Indian, escorting her to the very public fireworks gala. “The paper reported that you found the marks while out for a romantic stroll with your beau.”

  Dastine smiled. “I wanted to stick that right under his nose. Say it out loud so he’d know right enough that me and Horace loved each other. And it was there on the page in black and white. Nothing he could do about it.”

  Lean couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t diminish the old woman’s declaration of her small and long-hidden claim of retribution against the man who’d so horribly wronged her. He could only nod and turn his attention back to the stone ledge. The author of the news story was the only one who’d definitely seen the markings and bothered to record them. His charcoal rubbings must have stayed in the files at the paper for years after. They remained stashed away for decades until Professor Horsford dug up the story and unearthed the drawings for his last, unpublished book.

  Lean studied the circle of worn-down cuts. Horsford had presented the sy
mbols in a linear series. He’d had to break the circle and select an arbitrary starting point to put the symbols in the order he’d selected for his book. Horsford had opted to commence with the symbol that looked like the first letter in the Norse runic alphabet. Lean wondered whether Horsford’s book preserved the proper order. Did Horsford’s order match the original, now-obliterated pattern?

  “Have you ever shown anyone else this ledge since then?” Lean asked. “An old professor from Harvard, perhaps?”

  Dastine shook her head.

  “The newspaperman, you said you helped him make his charcoal rubbings to copy the marks. Did he do them in a row one after the other, as they were on the ledge, or did he just trace them out in random order?”

  “He kept the order,” Dastine said. “He was very particular. He thought if he could find out what they meant, they might spell out some message from whoever had written them so long ago.”

  “Maybe he was partially right after all,” Lean said.

  Dastine gave him a doubtful look.

  Lean clasped his hands together and gave her a pleading smile. “I know I’m likely trying your patience, but please take my word for it. I’m neither as gullible as your reporter nor as mad as Old Tom Webster for putting these marks here in the first place. But I do believe that in some unknown manner these marks were left as a message of sorts.”

  Dastine shrugged, still unconvinced.

  “Tell me, did you ever see any identical kind of markings at the Websters’ residence that might have given Old Tom the idea for these ones? Perhaps on some strange stone they kept about.”

  “You mean that thunderstone?” Dastine asked.

  Lean nodded. “I’ve heard that Old Tom Webster dug that stone up when he was clearing out earth for a cellar.”

  “And you think that maybe the marks on that old stone are what he was copying down here on the ledge?”

  Dastine gave a shake of her head.

  “Not the case?” Lean asked.

  “Pépère told me Old Tom had found the stone, true enough. They couldn’t believe how smooth it was. But the carvings on that, no. Pépère made them, too.”