A Study in Revenge

by Kieran Shields

  Dearest Perceval, my good, strong, lovely boy, I pray that in time you will come to understand and forgive me. There are truths this life will show you that are beautiful beyond description, yet others that are beyond bearing. It is my final hope for you that you’ll have the courage to see fully all the truths that are to be seen in this life, and the greater courage still to carry on—always.

  Know that your father loved you, that I love you.

  Grey folded the book once more and felt the stiff cover beneath his fingers, as if he could draw something further out of it. His grandfather’s muffled voice and the slow procession of feet down the staircase reached his ears. He carefully replaced the Bible and walked out the door and a short way down the hall.

  “Yes, Perceval, come out of the library. I can’t believe there’s anything left in there that you haven’t already conquered.” A thin smile crept onto Cyrus Grey’s pale, arid face as he spoke, revealing long, yellowish teeth.

  Perceval guessed that the welcome was intended as a feint, an effort by his grandfather to make his descent down the stairs seem effortless. Even though thick carpet runners lined the steps and made a slip unlikely, Herrick followed at his master’s elbow ready to lend assistance. Grey studied his grandfather’s appearance. The stark white light beaming down from the electric chandelier made Cyrus’s fair skin seem almost translucent. There was barely a difference in hue between the eighty-year-old man’s bald pate, stretched taut across his cranium, and the strip of ghostly white hair that circled from temple to temple, dropping down at each end point to form long, scraggly sideburns. The dark sheen of the railing beneath Cyrus’s hand only highlighted the pallor of the man’s meager flesh.

  Grey’s eyes darted aside, finding another image of Cyrus, this one decades younger, staring down from its place among the formal portraits that lined the wall above the staircase. Men and women, most of them past the prime of their lives, stood shoulder to elbow, in a rising cavalcade of close-set gilded frames. Perceval knew most of that pantheon of somber-looking Greys by name only. Apart from his own mother’s portrait, Cyrus’s was the only one that he recognized by sight, though the artist’s brush had been kind and there was little resemblance left to the man now before him.

  Cyrus’s hand grazed across Grey’s arm as he motioned toward the living room.

  “We have a few minutes until dinner.” Cyrus made his way into the large room and across to a side table set before a series of tall windows. Grey meandered over to the room’s grand piano and sat on its bench.

  “Had it tuned again, at long last,” said the old man.

  Grey watched, though he tried not to blatantly stare, as his grandfather poured himself a glass of brandy. The cut-crystal decanter shook in the old man’s hand and sent diamond-shaped reflections shimmering across the ceiling.

  “Doctor’s orders?” Grey asked.

  Cyrus made a short scoffing sound. “Has Herrick been in your ear? That man gets at me worse than your grandmother ever did.”

  Before he replaced the crystal stopper, Cyrus glanced at his grandson. “Care for a bit, Perceval?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “As my own father used to say, you don’t always have to be quite so proper to be a proper gentleman. Though I’m not sure that animal still exists: the proper gentleman.”

  Cyrus dropped the stopper into place with a clatter and then, tumbler in hand, took his customary seat in a tall chair near the brick-faced fireplace that dominated the end of the spacious living room.

  “Whatever it is that passes for proper these days, some of us have to work harder to be seen as measuring up,” Grey said.

  “Is that it? Don’t want to show any weakness, eh?” There was a note of approval in the old man’s voice.

  “At least not that one. You’re doubly damned if you show any sign of the flaw they expect to see in you. Even a simple toast to good health: One man’s social grace is evidence of another man’s, an Indian man’s, weak nature.”

  “Ah, a teetotaler out of spite for all those who doubt your character at first glance.”

  “Not spite.” Grey shifted about on the bench, bringing his legs under the keyboard and flipping open the fallboard. As he studied the keys, he explained, “I just never cared to give them the pleasure of thinking their ignorant opinions were justified.”

  “That’s you, Perceval. Always having to prove yourself right by proving everyone else wrong.”

  “I’d be more than happy to quit my end of that equation, if only everyone else would give up the annoying habit of being wrong so much of the time.”

  Grey’s fingers deliberated over the keys before touching down and working into the low, solitary notes of the opening of Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor.

  “Horace Webster passed away the other day,” Grey said.

  “Yes. The service was well attended, though mostly in connection with the younger generations. Not many left now who knew him in his greener years.”

  “You did. What can you tell me about him and his family?” Grey asked.

  “Why the sudden interest?”

  “He asked me to perform a service before he died.”

  Cyrus paused a second. Then, seeing that his grandson was not volunteering any further details, he said, “I suppose it’s not the sort of thing I’d wish to hear about anyway.”

  With slow, stiff movements, the man rose from his chair and strolled closer to the piano, forcing the blood to move and stir what recollections his mind could muster.

  “A longtime widower, same as me. The oldest son works in munitions; he’s done well with it. Started that up when he came back north after the war. The other has never given much account of himself, from what I understand.”

  Close to a minute into his playing, Grey’s fingers suddenly sprang into action as the piece exploded to life. He played another thirty seconds, then stopped.

  “There was a third son, wasn’t there?”

  “Oh, yes.” A glint of remembrance came into Cyrus’s dull eyes. “Of course, young Alexander. Horace’s favorite. He loved that boy—his loss was such a blow. After Alexander’s funeral was one of the last times I really talked with Horace.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, no falling-out or any such. We were each just busy. And he was always an eccentric sort. Only got worse as he got older.”

  “I meant with the third son,” Grey said.

  “Tragic. The sorry fool blew his brains out with his service revolver. Was wearing his old Union officer’s uniform when he did it. Horace had been so proud of him, enlisting just like his oldest brother. The middle son avoided it with health complaints or something. Bought his way out of it. But Alexander did his duty. Horace said he was never quite right in the head after: moody, forlorn. Left two daughters behind that Horace then raised up, as I recall.”

  The two men exchanged a wary look, each cautious to avoid prompting the other into expanding that topic beyond its current range. They silently agreed to leave the matter where it was, pinned safely to some other family.

  Cyrus coughed and lurched back into the conversation, “But, as I said, the whole lot of them are a bit on the eccentric side. Runs in the family.”

  “How so?” Grey asked.

  “The older ones were a bookish lot. I don’t recall how they made their money. Horace’s father was an inventor of some kind. Always dabbling about in science treatises and chemicals. A violent temper on him, though. He almost killed Horace once, when we were young men, just coming into our own.” Cyrus took a sip, then added, “Over a girl.”

  Grey leaned forward. “Horace Webster and his father quarreled over the same woman?”

  “No, not like that.” Cyrus shook his head. “You always get the queerest ideas flying through your brain. His father disapproved of her. She was a pretty servant girl, a young Negro. What was her name? Something odd or fanciful, and French-sounding: Destiny, perhaps.”

  “Could it have been Dastine?”
<
br />   Cyrus’s head tilted as a faint memory rattled down from one side of his brain. “It might have been.” He looked at his grandson with surprise.

  Grey quickly asked, “What were you saying about her and Horace?”

  Cyrus wavered between a demand for how his grandson knew that detail and his own memories, finally opting for the latter. “Horace’s grandfather had come to Maine from England, by way of the West Indies. Brought a family of servants from there. Obviously, none of us, his friends, approved when we found out.”

  “Obviously.”

  Cyrus ignored his grandson’s sarcasm. “The girl had her charms, to be sure, but still. When his father discovered what was going on, he beat the tar out of the girl, drove her from the house. Put a pistol to Horace’s head. Said he’d kill him if he ever saw the girl again.”

  “Did he? See her again, that is?”

  “No. He was a fool in love—I suppose.”

  Grey noted Cyrus’s discomfort as the old man tacked on the last two words, as if he couldn’t bring himself to wholly endorse the concept of actual love existing between his white friend Horace and a woman of Caribbean descent.

  “But not a complete fool,” Cyrus continued. “It put a bit of a rip in his sails, I think. He was withdrawn after, slowly drifted away from the rest of us. I suspect he bore a grudge against his father until the day the man died.”

  “Hard to find fault with him if he did,” Grey said.

  “His father’s methods may have been rather blunt. Too forceful, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps?” Grey raised an eyebrow at the word. “You said he beat the tar out of the girl.”

  “I suppose. An overreaction, but sometimes that’s what’s needed to see that things are taken care of. A mere warning would never have forced Horace’s hand. It could have been disastrous if left unchecked.”

  “Yes, who can say what horrors would have resulted?”

  Cyrus gave a half sneer at Grey’s sardonic and self-referential comment. “Very droll, Perceval. But the man had the best wishes at heart for his child. The same as any parent, wanting to protect his child, see right done for him.”

  “ ‘Best wishes.’ An oddly turned phrase, given the results that so often follow.”

  “Easy for you to say with no child of your own to fret over. You do what you can, all that you can, but still, ultimately, you come down to nothing left to offer but wishes for your child.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, now let’s see if dinner’s ready and put our mouths to better use than this.”

  “What do you have left for me, in terms of wishes?” Grey asked with a grin.

  “Nothing. Except maybe a wish that you’d let an old man be and not rake him over the coals with such glee.”

  [ Chapter 23 ]

  PHEBE SAT AT A DESK IN THE STARKLY APPOINTED FRONT room of her Uncle Euripides’ corporate office on Cross Street in Portland. Pages laid out in neat rows showed various production orders, bills of lading, and inventory reports. She stared at the paper in front of her, failing to focus on the array of figures that held no meaning for her at that moment. She’d come into the office that morning desperate to escape the sorrow that draped the house she’d shared with her grandfather. Instead she found herself painfully distracted from the menial paperwork that Euripides handed her.

  Vague thoughts and memories of Horace Webster meandered through her mind, each one colliding with or fading into another. Phebe ignored the vision of the man as he’d been in the past month, feebly lying in bed. Her images were pulled from the prior twenty years, when her grandfather, though old, still carried himself with an inner strength and dignity. She longed for those happier days and his solid, reassuring presence.

  Goose bumps trickled up her arms, and a tingling sensation flashed across the back of her neck, like the reach of fingertips just a hairsbreadth from her skin. Though her head was bowed over the desk, she caught sight of something along the upper reaches of her vision. Phebe saw a man’s body, darkly dressed, standing several feet in front of her desk. Her eyes shot up to meet a serious, wrinkled face interrupted by a long, grizzled mustache and topped by a large, wide-brimmed hat. There was no real resemblance to her grandfather, but the sudden, silent appearance of an older man right before her eyes was still enough to force a curtailed yelp from Phebe.

  “Terribly sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to startle you.” The man doffed his hat briefly, revealing long gray hair brushed back from the front. “I sometimes forget to walk loudly enough for white folk to hear me coming.”

  Phebe wasn’t sure what the man meant, but she did glance toward his feet, where he wore thick-heeled boots. His heavy trousers and dark tan frock coat also looked suited to an active outdoor life. Apart from having a face so weathered that she couldn’t hazard a guess as to his precise age, the man himself looked white. Still agitated from the surprise, Phebe let the man’s apology pass without any other thoughts. She forced a smile.

  “Can I help you?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping. I’ve got to speak with your boss, Mr. ’Ripides Webster.”

  “You mean my uncle.”

  “Ah, forgive me.” The man froze for a second. Then he removed his hat a second time and held it to his breast. “My condolences, miss, on your grandfather’s passing. May the Great Spirit bless him and smile upon him.”

  “Thank you.” At something of a loss, Phebe glanced down at the papers on her desk, futilely seeking guidance from a collection of sheets that had absolutely no relevance to her uncle’s daily schedule. “I wasn’t aware he had any appointments today.”

  “I ’spect he wouldn’t grant me an audience. Except maybe on the first Friday after never. But yet, I assure you, it’s a matter of the utmost importance that I speak with him.”

  “I see,” Phebe said with a glance back at the closed door to Euripides’ office, which offered no hint that her uncle was on the verge of appearing to remedy the unexpected arrival of this stranger.

  “Let me just check with him and see if …” She edged toward the door, then glanced back at the man. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Chief Jefferson.”

  She offered another set smile as she reached for the door handle. “One moment, please.”

  “Kchi oliwni—great thanks,” the chief said.

  Phebe slipped into the office and eased the door closed behind her.

  Euripides spared a glance but continued writing at his large maple desk. “Did I hear some bit of commotion out there?”

  “There’s a man here to see you. Says it’s rather important.” The last part was framed as almost a question. When Euripides stared at her with a crooked eyebrow, she added, “He says his name is Chief Jefferson.”

  Euripides bolted upright, dropping his pen, which splattered ink droplets across the page he’d been working on.

  “That damned arrogant son of a—” Euripides caught his tongue.

  Phebe rushed over to remedy the mess. She set the pen back in its holder and cradled the spotted page in her hands.

  Euripides leaned forward and planted two angry fists upon his desk. “Father’s barely even in the ground and here he is, back again—worse than a bloody vulture.”

  “I’ll ask him to leave,” Phebe said, “and see if I can salvage this page.” She turned toward the door and gasped. Chief Jefferson was standing there, just inside the room. She took a step back and to the side, allowing Euripides to see the uninvited arrival.

  Chief Jefferson gave a solemn nod in greeting. “No disrespect, and I don’t mean to rile you, coming so soon after your father’s death. But you know what I’m after, and I couldn’t risk waiting. In case you had thoughts of selling the item to any other interested parties. Course, I’d be willing to match any other offer for the Stone of Pamola.”

  “It’s not the bloody Stone of Pamola, and it’s not for sale. Even if it were, I’d sell it to someone else for half what you’d offer. Better that than lower m
y family’s name by taking money from the likes of you: some filthy fake Indian!”

  Phebe watched in alarm as the veins bulged in Euripides’ neck. She looked toward the door, hoping for a sign that the chief would accept this rebuke and leave, but the man didn’t move an inch.

  “I understand this is a hard time for you, and you can keep on bullyragging me all you like. But that don’t change the truth.” Chief Jefferson kept his voice level. “What you’re hiding belongs to the Abenaki. It was stolen from our people.”

  “From your people, is it? A traitor to your own race is what you are. Nothing but a two-bit fraud and liar. Stolen from you! I see it now—this visit is just a ruse, a dirty trick learned from ‘your people’ to cover your tracks. You’re the one who stole the thunderstone!”

  The accusation caught Phebe completely off guard. Chief Jefferson looked even more perplexed.

  “What do you mean—I stole it?” The chief took a step toward Euripides, the display of civility that he’d maintained since his arrival finally cracked. “What’s happened to the stone?”

  “Listen to him, pretending he doesn’t know!” Euripides declared.

  “This is some ruse of yours to keep the stone from its true owners,” Chief Jefferson answered back, his voice rising.

  Phebe stepped in front of the man, trying to create a buffer between him and Euripides. Her hands still cradled the inky page before her, giving her the appearance of pleading.

  “Please leave, before matters get worse. I shouldn’t like to have to summon the police.”

  Chief Jefferson turned his attention to her, a hint of disgust upon his cheerless face. “More men with guns, along with badges so that others will think what they’re doing’s right. When all it amounts to is more of the white man’s habit of beating skulls and thievery.”

  She paused a second, unsure of how to respond to the man’s sweeping accusation. Scraping sounds from behind grabbed her attention. Euripides pushed his chair aside and ripped open a desk drawer. He came around the desk, a pistol in hand. Phebe barely had time to react, stepping aside as he rushed forward like a charging bull. Euripides grabbed Chief Jefferson by the shirt front and shoved him back into the wall. He didn’t aim the pistol, only held it before the chief’s face.