The Guilty Abroad

by Peter J. Heck

  “I hope they get away,” said little Jean. “I liked Mrs. McPhee. And Papa’s stories about Slippery Ed are funny, too.”

  Mr. Clemens chuckled. “Well, they’ve gotten away so far,” he said. “The ground was getting a little too hot under their feet here in London, and I reckon it’s not the first place they’ve left in a hurry. Lestrade’s mad as a hornet, of course, but he’s not likely to catch them if he hasn’t by now. I’d bet they’ve moved on to someplace where their reputation hasn’t arrived first—most likely in some other country. Maybe they’ll set up as mediums again, or maybe they’ll find another racket to start on. But however it falls out, I can’t imagine either of them taking up honest work.

  “And speaking of honest work, I’m just as glad this whole case is wrapped up. I’ve finally had time to get ready for the lecture series,” he said. “And I’ve had a few more days to spend with my little angels before I go on the road again. I’d been neglecting you girls shamefully with all this murder business.”

  “Oh, don’t feel so bad, Papa,” said Clara, with a saucy laugh. “The murder is the most exciting thing we’ve had to talk about in ages. It’s almost a shame it’s solved—now we’ll have to find some other amusement.”

  “Amusement?” said Mr. Clemens, raising his brow in mock horror. “Are these the same three girls I was calling ‘my little angels’ just a moment ago? Where exactly did you get the idea that talking about a man being shot dead is some kind of amusement?”

  “I cannot imagine where such a morbid fascination comes from, Youth,” said Mrs. Clemens, with a little smile. “Certainly nobody on the Langdon side of the family ever had such unsuitable thoughts.”

  “Hmmph!” he said, making a mock-ferocious expression. “I resent that implication. The girls must be getting these ideas on their own. They’re probably reading some sort of low-class stuff about detectives, like those Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ll soon put a stop to that. We’ll start a course of improving readings soon as we get home—”

  But little Jean burst out laughing. “Oh look, Mama, the bad, spitting gray kitten has come back! We’ve been ever so lonely without him.” She reached up and stroked her father’s hair.

  And at that, even my employer had to let a smile onto his face as the carriage took us home through the twilit streets of London. Life had returned to normal—or as close to normal as it ever got in Mr. Clemens’s company—and I was just as glad.

  If you enjoy the MARK TWAIN

  mystery series,

  you will also want to read

  THE DUMB

  SHALL SING

  by STEPHEN LEWIS

  Catherine had just come out into the garden with Phyllis to see what vegetables might be gathered for supper when she heard a confused cacophony of voices rise from the road that skirted the hill on which her house sat. She and Phyllis hurried around to the front, and there she saw a crowd heading toward the northern edge of Newbury, where the town ran abruptly into the untamed woods. The voices seemed to carry an angry tone. She turned to Phyllis.

  “Catch up with them, if you can, and see where they are going, and to what purpose.”

  She watched as the girl hurried down the hill and trotted toward the people, whose voices were becoming less distinct as they moved farther away. Catherine strained her eyes, keeping them focused on the white cap Phyllis wore, and she saw it bobbling up and down behind the crowd. The cap stopped moving next to a man’s dark brown hat. After a few moments she could see the cap turn back toward her while the hat moved away, and shortly Phyllis stood before her, catching her breath.

  “They are going to the Jameson house. They say the babe is dead. And they want you to come to say whether it was alive when it was born.”

  She recalled holding the babe in her arms and seeing that he was having trouble breathing. She had seen that his nose was clogged with mucus and fluids, and she had cleared it with a bit of rag she carried in her midwife’s basket for that purpose. The babe had snorted in the air as soon as she removed the cloth and then he had bellowed a very strong and healthy cry. The only thing out of the ordinary during the birth that she could now remember was how the Jameson’s Irish maidservant eyed the babe as though she wanted to do something with it. Catherine had seen dozens of births, and usually she could tell when a babe was in trouble. This one had given no indication of frailty.

  “Come along with me, then,” she said to Phyllis. “Just stop to tell Edward to watch for Matthew.”

  Phyllis did not respond, and Catherine motioned to the tree under which Massaquoit had slept.

  “You know,” Catherine repeated, “Matthew.”

  “I see, yes, he should wait for Matthew,” Phyllis said.

  “Edward need not think about going to lecture.”

  “He does not think about that anyway,” Phyllis replied.

  “Be that as it may, I do not think there will be lecture tonight,” Catherine said. “Now go along with you.”

  The Jameson house was a humble structure of two sections, the older little more than a hut with walls of daub and wattle construction, a plaster of mud and manure layered over a substructure of crisscrossing poles. Henry Jameson had recently built a wing onto the back of the house to accommodate his growing family, and this new room was covered in wooden shingles outside and was generally more luxurious inside, having a wood plank floor and whitewashed plaster walls.

  It was in this room that Martha had delivered her babe. Catherine remembered that the Irish servant girl had a little space, not much more than a closet, for a bed so that she could be near the infant’s cradle, and that the parents’ bedroom was in the original portion of the house. She also remembered how the girl had fashioned a crude cross out of two twigs, tied together with thread, and then hung it over her bed until Henry had found it there and pulled it off. He had taken the cross outside and ground it into the mud with the heavy heel of his shoe. There was a separate entrance to this side of the house, which gave onto a patch of wild strawberries, and it was before that door that the crowd had gathered.

  As Catherine shouldered her way through the crowd, she felt hands grabbing at her sleeve. She was spun around, and for a moment she lost sight of Phyllis. Someone said, “I’ve got her,” but Catherine pulled away. Phyllis emerged from behind the man who was holding Catherine’s arm. A woman placed her face right in front of Catherine. She was missing her front teeth, and her breath was sour. She held a smoldering torch in one hand, and she brought it down near Catherine’s face.

  “Here, mistress,” the woman said, “we’ve been waiting for you, we have.”

  Phyllis forced herself next to Catherine, shielding her from the woman.

  “Go,” Catherine said to Phyllis, “to Master Woolsey, and tell him to come here right away.”

  Phyllis pushed her way back through the crowd, which was advancing with a deliberate inevitability toward the house. Catherine moved with the energy of the crowd, but at a faster pace, so that soon she reached its leading edge, some ten or so feet away from Henry and Ned Jameson, who stood with their backs to their house. Ned had his arm around the Irish servant girl, flattening her breasts and squeezing her hard against his side. She held a pitcher in her hand. It was tilted toward the ground and water dripped from it. The girl’s eyes were wide and staring as they found Catherine.

  “Please,” she said, but then Ned pulled her even harder toward him, and whatever else the girl was trying to say was lost in the breath exploding from her mouth.

  The Jameson girls, ranging from a toddler to the oldest, a twelve-year-old, were gathered around their mother, who stood off to one side. Martha’s gown was unlaced and one heavy breast hung free as though she were about to give her babe suck. Her eyes moved back and forth between her husband and the crowd, seemingly unable or unwilling to focus. The toddler amused itself by walking ’round and ’round through her mother’s legs. The oldest girl seemed to be whispering comfort to her younger siblings. Then the girl turned to her mo
ther and laced up her gown. Martha looked at her daughter’s hand as though it were a fly buzzing about her, but she did not swipe it away.

  Henry was holding the babe, wrapped in swaddling, and unmoving. It was quite clearly dead. He took a step toward Catherine and held out the babe toward her. His face glowed red in the glare of a torch.

  “Here she is,” he shouted. He lowered his voice a little. “Tell us, then, if you please, Mistress Williams, was this babe born alive?”

  “Who says nay?” Catherine asked. She looked at Martha, who stood mute, and then at the Irish servant girl, who did not seem to understand what was happening. Always the finger of blame, she thought, lands on some poor woman while the men stand around pointing that finger with self-righteous and hypocritical arrogance. She recalled how Henry had asked first what sex the babe was before he inquired as to his wife’s health. “Henry will be glad,” Martha had said as Catherine had held the babe in front of her so that she could see its genitalia. And then Martha had collapsed onto the bed, a woman exhausted by fifteen years of being pregnant, giving birth, suffering miscarriages, and nursing the babes that were born, and always there had been the poverty. She had not wanted to take Ned in, for there was never enough food.

  “Just answer the question,” Henry insisted. “We have heard how soft your heart is for a savage. How is it with this babe? Here, look at it, which is not breathing now who was when it was born. Was it not very much alive when you pulled it out of my wife’s belly not three days ago?”

  A voice came from the back of the crowd, strong, male, and insistent.

  “An answer, mistress, we need to know the truth.”

  Catherine turned toward the voice, but she could not identify the speaker. It came from a knot of people that had gathered just beyond Ned in the shadow of a tall tree.

  “The truth,” the voice said again, and then was joined by other voices, male and female, rising from the group beneath the tree, and then spreading across the surface of the crowd like whitecaps in a storm-tossed sea. “The truth,” they clamored, “tell us the truth.”

  “What says the mother, then?” Catherine demanded. “What says Goody Jameson?”

  “Nothing,” came the response from the group.

  Catherine turned back to Henry.

  “Your wife, Henry, what does she say?”

  “Nothing,” Henry repeated. “She no longer speaks. She came to me not an hour ago, holding the babe in her arms, and handed it to me, and she does not speak.”

  Catherine studied Martha’s face. Its expression did not change as her children moved about her. She did not seem to see that her husband was holding her dead infant in his arms, and she did not hear the insistent cries for the truth. It was as though she were standing in a meadow daydreaming while butterflies circled her head. Every moment or two she extended her hand toward the toddler that clung to her knees, but the gesture was vague and inconsequential, and her hand never found the child’s head.

  Catherine stepped close to Martha, close enough to feel the woman’s breath on her face.

  “Martha, you must speak,” Catherine said, and Martha’s eyes now focused on her, as though she had just returned from that distant meadow. She shook her heard, slowly at first, and then with increasing agitation. Catherine took Martha’s shoulders in both hands and squeezed and then the nodding motion stopped. Still Martha did not speak.

  “My poor wife is distracted by the death of our babe,” Henry declared. “Can you not see that? Mistress Williams, you must answer for her.”

  “Well, then,” Catherine said, “if Martha Jameson will not attest to the truth, I needs must say that this babe was born alive, and alive it was when I left it. Truth you want, and there it is.”

  A murmur arose from the crowd. It pushed toward Catherine.

  “It is surely dead now,” somebody said.

  “If Goody Jameson won’t speak, we have ways,” said another.

  “Yes, press her, stone by stone. She will talk, then, I warrant.”

  “You will leave her alone,” Henry said, and the crowd, which had come within several feet of the clustered Jameson family, stopped. Henry held out the babe toward his wife.

  “Tell them, Martha,” he said. He thrust the babe toward her, but she did not hold out her arms to take it. He shook his head. “She brought the babe to me. It was dead. She said she had been asleep, and when she woke she saw the servant girl leaning over the babe. When she picked it up, it was not breathing. Then she brought it to me. That girl, she did something while my wife was asleep.”

  Catherine felt the anger rise in the crowd toward the servant. She remembered once, when she was a girl in Alford, how a crowd just like this one had fallen upon a little boy whose family was Catholic, and how they had beaten him with sticks until he lay senseless in the road. She strode to Ned and grabbed his arm.

  “Let her go,” she said.

  “You are now interfering with my household, mistress. Leave be.”

  “Step away, mistress,” a woman in the crowd said. “You have told us what we needed to know.”

  “She,” Henry shouted, “standing there with the pitcher, ask her what she was doing with our babe.”

  The servant girl turned her terrified and starting eyes toward her master. Their whites loomed preternaturally large in the failing light of the early evening.

  “A priest, it was, I was after,” she said.

  Ned pushed the girl forward so she stood quivering in front of the crowd.

  “That is it,” he said, “that is how we found her, practicing her papist ritual on our babe, pouring water on its innocent face, and mumbling some words, a curse they must have been.”

  “Its poor soul,” the girl muttered. “There was no priest. I asked for one. So I tried myself to save its precious soul.”

  Henry looked at his wife, whose eyes were now studying the ground at her feet. Then he stared hard at the girl, his face brightening as with a new understanding.

  “You drowned it, for certain,” he said. “Or you cast a spell on it so it could not breathe. What, a papist priest? In Newbury? You have killed our babe and driven my poor wife mad.”

  “Try her, then,” came the voice from the knot of people, still grouped by the tree. “Have her touch the babe. Then we will know.”

  The crowd surged forward and Catherine found herself staggering toward Henry, who dropped to one knee against her weight. Henry threw one hand behind him to brace himself, and Catherine reached for the babe so as to stop it from falling. As she grabbed for it, its swaddling blanket fell. The babe’s skin was cold. Henry regained his balance and wrapped the babe tightly in the blanket.

  “Try her,” again came the cry from the crowd.

  “Surely not,” Catherine said. “Magistrate Woolsey is coming. This is a matter for him.”

  “We need not wait for the magistrate. We will have our own answer now,” shouted one.

  “Now,” said another.

  “Right,” said Ned. “We will try her now.”

  Catherine turned to face the crowd and to peer over it to the road, where day was giving way to dusk. She thought she say two figures approaching.

  “The magistrate is coming even now,” she said.

  Henry looked at Ned, and the boy pushed the servant girl toward him.

  “Touch the babe,” Ned demanded.

  “Yes, touch it,” Henry said. “If it bleed, it cries out against you.”

  “There is no need for that,” Catherine said. “Talk of the dead bleeding. It is surely blasphemy.”

  “The blood will talk,” came a voice from the crowd.

  “Yes,” others confirmed, “let the poor dead babe’s blood cry out against its murderer.”

  The girl clasped her arms in front of her chest, but Ned pulled her hands out. She struggled, but he was too strong, and he was able to bring one hand to the exposed skin of the babe’s chest. He pressed the hand onto the skin, and then let her pull her hand back. Henry peered at the
spot she had touched, and then lifted the babe over his head in a triumphant gesture.

  “It bleeds,” he said. “It bleeds.”

  He held the babe out for the crowd to see. Catherine strained her eyes as Henry and the babe were now in the shadows. Henry turned so that all could view. Catherine was not sure she saw blood on the babe’s chest, but something on its back caught her eye, and then she could no longer see.

  “Blood,” cried voices in the crowd. “The babe bleeds! Seize her!”

  There was a violent surge forward, and Catherine felt herself being thrown to the ground. She got to her feet just in time to see rough hands grabbing the servant girl and pulling her away. . . .