After these matinal proceedings, I stirred my woodstove into action, rewarmed yesterday’s biscuit and coffee and carried plate, jam, and cup over to the gueridon by the window to enjoy my home and its view.
My house is of consequence in Brownville, however inconsequential it might be anywhere eastward of the Missouri. I had it built of three oversized Cincinnati houses, which are ready-framed structures, twenty feet by twenty, and delivered to the frontier on a Saint Louis steamer. Each structure hoped to be its own solitary home, something a squatter might erect on a piece of soil he hopes to pre-empt. However, I, being a devoted Trinitarian, had the ingenuity to meld three into one.
This frontier palace possesses a parlor, followed by dining room and bedroom, side by side, and behind these, and again abreast, a kitchen and bathroom. If the parlor is small, these other rooms are miniscule, but each has its purpose.
Finally, Teddy, a carpenter by profession, built a tall hutch for the dining room to hold dishes in its upper shelves and table clothes and linen down below. He also put up shelves in the kitchen as well as a bookshelf in the parlor. Outside he tacked on two porches, one in front, the other in back. Stretching away from the back porch is my garden, tended by John Carr, an old French laborer, and beyond it, the privy. Water must be drawn from the town well, I haven’t one of my own, and Monsieur Carr helpfully attends to this task as well.
The view from my parlor window looks eastward down Water Street, a broad pathway more than a proper street. It fronts my home, and wanders toward the river, which is obscured by a hill, a scattering of Brownville homes, shacks, a few lonely trees silhouetted by the morning sun, beneath which stretch patches of brambles alternating in thickness. On that morning, the birds had retreated to an orphaned mulberry tree, not too distant, that had so far survived the pioneer’s axe. They pecked at its purple fruit hanging among the upper branches. Some boys had already cleared its lower limbs.
While studying this idyllic picture, framed by my window, the Friend murders came to mind. How the doomed family must have awakened to a similar morning, unconscious of the fact that by the next sunrise they would lay dead and blackened among the ashes of their cabin. Yes, the murderers had been caught, but why so quickly hanged?
I finished my breakfast, washed and stowed cup and plate, then fitted myself for town in a sage-green dress, while topping my red hair with a dark green bonnet and its veil. Winning a complimentary nod from my looking glass, I set off in the direction of Mr. Winslow’s cabin.
In the distance I could hear some commotion. Men hollering and whooping. The uproar seemed to be descending Main Street and flowing toward the river. Mixed in with cries of “Go Jerod!” and “Go Harry!”
The ejaculations reminded me of jubilant exclamations I’d heard more than once in my childhood. Usually they occurred on a Sunday afternoon when we observed the Sabbath as best we could. Jerome, assisted by my other brothers and a smattering of neighbor boys, would bring out Hezekiah, my favorite pony, and Jerome would be so attentive as to saddle up my steed and put on the bridle. I hated putting on the bridle because, when inserting the bit, it seemed Hezekiah repeatedly mistook my fingers for carrots. Then Jerome, strong and gallant, would lift me up by the waist and drop me down into the saddle. I always beamed atop a horse, even a pony. One has a command of one’s surroundings. Confidence. You can’t help but sharing the emotions of Wellington overlooking Waterloo when Blucher finally arrives. And then I would hear Jerome’s words of encouragement: “On your way!” Which, without fail, caused me to look over my left shoulder with eyes grand as an owl’s as I saw the flat of his hand slap down on the rear of Hezekiah. Shrieks of laughter were followed with words of encouragement: “Go Addy, go!”
So, putting two and two together, I divined what all the stir was about in Brownville: A horse race kicking up dust and confusion and no doubt emptying the pockets of more than one gambler. One more thing to warn against in my gazette. I love a fast horse, who doesn’t, otherwise we’d all be riding donkeys. But to see a man lose his week’s wages in a matter of minutes was heartbreaking, especially if he had a wife in tears at his elbow.
I hadn’t yet reached Stewart’s door, when I found the successful entrepreneur already in the street, marching purposefully in the direction of Cyrus Wheeler’s headquarters. Cyrus, with whom Stewart does much business, is the town’s most popular architect.
“Good day, Miss Furlough,” he greeted me as chipper as a bird on a well-endowed mulberry tree.
“Good day to you, Mr. Winslow.” I paused my stride and he obligingly approached. I went right to the point as it’s unwise to beat around the bush with pleasantries about the weather and so on when engaging a businessman. “I’m beginning my enquiry into the Friend murders,” I said, “and as you offered advice, I freely seek it.”
“Well,” he said ponderingly as he took me by the elbow and maneuvered me to the side of the broad but uneven trail, “you might best ask dapper Mr. Whitt about the affair.”
My heart sunk; the druggist was the last person I wanted to question. However, I also knew that every path seems to be of little value unless it be encumbered by thorns sown by the Enemy.
“Why him?”
“Oh, I think he may now own the land where the Friend family met its demise.”
Normally I’m wary of land agents, but there is an advantage to having a friend in the business, so I thanked Stewart. He offered me his arm and accompanied me to the druggist’s door. I think he knew that his presence would have a sobering influence on Mr. Whitt’s doubtful behavior around women.
Stewart pushed the door open with the back of his hand to let me pass. Mr. Whitt was removing bottles from a crate and putting them on a shelf. When the door shut, he turned and smiled graciously. “Miss Furlough,” he said with a nod that ignored Stewart. “What can I help you with? I should say that I’ve just received some of the finest French perfumes. Nothing more refreshing and inspiring for a young lady than a sprinkle of heaven in the morning.” He walked over to a shelf, removed a bottle from it, opened it and waved it before my nose as if to mesmerize me. “Enticing, isn’t it?”
The mesmerizing fell flat. I noticed the label said “Parisian Perfume,” but nothing of its pungently sweet odor indicated its provenance from a famed French manufactory.
“For a certain type of woman, I’m sure,” I responded.
Mr. Whitt finally acknowledged my companion. “Mr. Winslow, though, I suspect knows just the lady. I’m sure Miss Sturwell would appreciate a gift of quality. Nothing better than knowing how to please a woman.” He finished his phrase with a glance in my direction.
Stewart moved between us. “Miss Furlough has come to inquire of the Friend murders. She’s looking into them because we believe there might have been more malice done than thought.” He said this rather gruffly, and I appreciated the performance.
Mr. Whitt dropped his smile and took a step back, turning in a circle as he did. “Whatever do you mean? More malice than the slaughter of seven innocent people?”
At this moment my brother Teddy passed through the door. “Hi, Sis. I thought I saw you coming in here. Everything all right? Not like you to be seeking out medicines.”
“We’re talking about the Friend murders,” I said, “and I’m curious as to why the culprits were judged so quickly.”
“Because they were guilty,” said Mr. Whitt, looking straight into the eyes of Teddy, as if my brother would be a favorable arbiter of our discussion. Given that Teddy was working on Mr. Whitt’s house and putting up shelves in his store, he was right.
“You’ve got a good point, Mr. Whitt.”
“But why not question them further,” I asked, “and find out what inspired such a group of men to murder not only the men folk but also the women and children?”
Mr. Whitt lost all his charm and said as gruffly as Stewart had spoken, “Because the settlement wanted to show that we were a community of law and order. You don’t want news getting out that mu
rderers don’t get caught and punished in a new town. Nobody would want to live in such a place.”
After he said this, I couldn’t help asking myself, What if they were not guilty, what if the town fathers had just rounded up a gang of ne’er-do-wells and hanged them before anybody would know if they were guilty or not? In that case, the real murderer or murderers could be alive and well, and possibly amongst us.
“Did they confess their crimes in public?” I asked.
Mr. Whitt looked increasingly irritated. “I don’t know. I doubt it. That’s not the way of things. After the justices questioned them, they let ‘em all go but one. So, the townsfolk, sensing that they ought not be let go, rounded ‘em back up and they gave their confession.”
“Voluntarily?” I asked. “No coercion? Knowing the outcome would be the noose?” No wonder Reverend Cannon thought something askew.
Stewart and I were eyeing each other. I knew what he was thinking: exactly the same thing I was thinking. The people wanted the scandal over with and hurried it along to its conclusion without a care for justice.
As we silently exchanged our thoughts, the door opened and another person entered. He had the airs of a doctor and carried a well-worn leather medical bag.
It seemed Mr. Whitt could read our judgement. “Now look here,” he said, paying no attention to the new customer, “their ringleader, who was George Lincoln and not the Mormon in the end, said they were told that Jacob Friend kept a lump of money or a cache of jewels or something valuable in the floor of his cabin, and that’s what they were after.”
“So why did they kill them?” asked my advocate, Stewart. “Why not wait until the family was in town to break into their cabin?”
“Now that part I do remember,” answered Mr. Whitt. “According to those who were questioning them, George Lincoln said, ‘I was told that if there ain’t no witnesses, there ain’t no criminals.’ Now that part stuck in my ear like tar.”
I rolled this around in my mind a bit and understood why the phrase impressed our druggist. “It is filled with ambiguity, isn’t it Stewart?” I said with some excitement, “You don’t know if this George Lincoln meant that this was just a saying of his youth, one that he had always abided by and applied to all situations, or if someone in particular had told it to him for this specific crime. And that’s significant!”
“Yes, because if it’s the latter,” suggested Stewart, energized by my enthusiasm, “then someone put him and the others up to it!”
“‘Some smug man who thought he knew it all,’” came a voice from across the room. It issued from the newly arrived gentleman. He had his back to us and was running his fingers across the titles of books standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a shelf. “Yes, yes,” he continued, but following another train of thought, “you’re missing The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology by the Fowler brothers. No purpose in dispensing medicines if one doesn’t understand the mind and its relationship to the body.”
He turned to us with a professorial air and lectured. “Although medicinals can alleviate certain malaises, heredity is the ticket. Infinitely more potential in the parental disposition than all education and circumstances of life can import.” He continued in the same vein, reciting by memory chapter titles and contents of the missing book.
The classroom audience stared blankly at this peroration, and I believe my jaw and those on either side of me, lowered a bit, Teddy’s dropping more than Stewart’s, Mr. Whitt’s and mine put together.
Arriving at the conclusion, the gentleman picked up his medical bag, advanced to our position, and extended his hand to Stewart, because Mr. Winslow, with his jaw a little less ajar, looked to be the class leader. “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said. “Christopher Martin, phrenologist.”
CHAPTER 2
The phrenologist, Mr. Martin, had the bearing of an aristocrat, standing straight and erect with his high forehead, ample moustaches and goatee. If we had been in France, I’m sure we would have addressed him as “Your Imperial Highness.” Stewart, however, realizing we were on the American frontier, was somewhat less formal in extending the hand. “Uh, Stewart Winslow, land agent, and this is Miss Adeline Furlough, humm, gazette owner, Mr. Theodore Furlough, carpenter, and, of course, Mr. Whitt, druggist.”
We politely exchanged how-do-you-dos, and then the emperor said patronizingly, “Miss Furlough is no doubt a devotee of Charlotte Wells, your colleague in the print business.”
“I’m a devotee of my Lord God, but none other whom I can think of.”
“Tsk, tsk,” he uttered. “Mrs. Wells is proprietor, with her husband, and prime editor of Fowler and Wells, arguably the most productive publishing house of New York city, and the New World to boot.”
“Unknown in these parts, however. So neither Fowler nor Wells can capture my interest, but what does interest me is your comment,” said I, punctuating my declaration with a brief silence. He lifted his chin and I continued, “What did you mean when you spoke of a ‘smug man’?”
He peered down upon me over the length of his aquiline nose. “A curious mind, you possess. And a fair shape of head and face that betray it.”
“That isn’t the half of it, Sir,” said Teddy, always so proud of his sister. “She packs a punch too, so beware.”
I knew he meant well, but somehow I felt my womanhood diminishing.
“Thank -you Teddy,” I said with a tone that added the codicil, “That will be enough out of you.” Teddy did acquiesce, but he fixed Mr. Martin in the eyes and bobbed his head up and down quickly to let the man know he spoke truth.
There was a silence that Mr. Martin broke by saying, “I suspected you were speaking of the Friend murders.”
“Indeed,” I said.
“As it happens, I was in Brownville at the time, although you wouldn’t know it as such if I described what the place resembled back then, just a year ago. An invaded wilderness. A dozen or so shacks among riverine trees as I recall. Anyway, I have made human temperament my life’s study, and at that time I was on my way to visit the savages, following up on Mr. Samuel Morton’s research on the Aboriginal Race of America. You know the title?”
“No, but I fear you do. Could you not stick to the order of business?”
“Yes, certainly, although you must read Morton’s slim volume. In any case, the Pawnee are of particular interest to me. I was anxious to move westward to further my investigation, but when I landed here, the town was astir over a massacre, the Friend murders. I saw the group of thugs they brought in and charged for the crime, including that Mormon, Amos Davis, and I dare say I was not surprised to see them convicted and hanged. Taking the best parts of all their skulls and assembling them together into a single head, you could not have constructed one better than Quasimodo.”
“And the ‘smug man’?”
He gave a light cough in his handkerchief as if to clear his throat for another public performance. “The ‘smug man’ reference comes from the gang leader himself, Mr. Lincoln. He said this on the scaffold. I don’t think he intended to be there so quickly, but apparently the citizens had other things to do that day and expedited the process. Once face to face with the noose, he decided it was time to start talking. He said it wasn’t his idea, and someone in the crowd yelled out ‘Then whose idea was it? Your mother’s?’ Mr. Lincoln took offense at this on behalf of his mother, then said it was....” Mr. Martin paused and opened his medical bag to extract a bound journal. He flipped through the pages until satisfied. “Yes, yes, here it is, the quotation exactly: ‘Some smug man gave me the means, and if you don’t know him a medley...’” He then closed the book.
“A medley?” I asked.
“That’s as far as he got in his defense. As soon as he finished the word ‘medley,’ the floor went out from under him. I suppose the hangman was anxious for his dinner, or, not having much experience yet, accidentally tripped the lever. But I wrote Lincoln’s words down in my journal, as I thought the incident, after seeing the party of
malefactors assembled, a study in itself. They fit the emerson classification of men, as defined by Fowler in his book.”
“Poets?” I asked.
“No, no, certainly not, though Ralph Emerson is partial to phrenology. It’s simply a categorization. You really need to get the book and you’ll see the sketch. The man with the pronounced eyebrows but whose forehead slopes away, whose chin sinks, and whose nose is deflated.”
“And Mr. Lincoln, like the others, matched this textbook sketch?”
“Better than any other.”
“Sounds awfully suspicious to me,” remarked Stewart. “The hangman ‘anxious for dinner,’ I doubt it. What was the real reason for not hearing the poor man out?”
“Because he was attempting to shift the blame, prolong his imprisonment, stay the execution if you will, but being a brute, it never occurred to him that he incriminated himself further. It did not help his case that his thickish skull could not invent a name to stick to the ‘smug man’. If he’d uttered the name of just any old John Doe, they would have heard him out.”
Stewart and I looked at each other in amazement. Our suspicion had become fact. Our town founders wanted the affair over and done with, whether or not the right men died.
Mr. Whitt set the bottle of “Parisian” perfume down on the counter and turned his head slowly in my direction, perhaps so Mr. Martin could get the full measure of his skull. “Miss Furlough,” he said, laying a hand softly upon the counter, his thumb flicking at the edge of it at a measured pace, “why all this interest in the Friend murders?”
“For starters because I think Mr. Lincoln had a point: someone put him up to the crime, someone who has gone unpunished and needs a reckoning. I aim, Lord willing, to see justice come to pass.”
“Uh-hmm,” intervened Stewart. “Well at least as an intellectual exercise, no doubt.”
I knew what Mr. Winslow was up to. He didn’t want me to put myself in any danger in case the man ultimately responsible for these murders discovered my purpose. Any man who would commission the murder of a mother with an infant at her breast and a daughter in the bloom of life would not refrain from doing me harm.
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