The Constable's Tale: A Novel of Colonial America Read online

  THE

  CONSTABLE’S

  TALE

  DONALD SMITH

  PEGASUS CRIME

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For Pat

  Oh, that deceit should dwell

  In such a gorgeous palace!

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  THE CONSTABLE’S TALE

  PROLOGUE

  THE CRIES WERE THIN AND FULL OF COMPLAINT. A BABY SOMEWHERE ahead in the forest, making just enough noise to be heard above the clamor coming from Nicholas’s wagon, which was filled with metal candle holders, cake stamps, spouted coffeepots, milk pails, and tools and raw materials for making and repairing such things.

  The first body he came to was that of a little boy. He must have been eight or nine, lying on his side in front of a house at the edge of a cleared field. Jumbles of pine needles and small limbs and sticky green cones covered the yard except for that spot, which had been swept clean. The grainy clay ground still damp from a storm that had passed through two nights before. His head lay on a pillow. Fluffy blond hair neatly combed back, lips parted. He was in sleeping clothes, a thigh-length white linen shirt with bloused shoulders and ruffled cuffs. Fancy. English manufacture, unless the tinner missed his guess, and he was good at judging merchandise. Bending down over the body, he could see a hole the size of a rifle ball between the shoulder blades. And there was something else. Someone had placed beneath his nose a sprig of rosemary. An emblem of mourning.

  Trying to ignore the chill creeping up his legs, Nicholas went back to the wagon and took out his Pennsylvania rifle. Cocked the hammer, confident it would work if needed. Earlier that day, he had used it to get a squirrel for breakfast.

  The house was of moderate size and made of good sawn timber, a typical second plantation house of the sort put up after the original log shelter had served its purpose. Nicholas eased the door open and entered. In the front room, a man lay outstretched on his back. Head on another pillow, face turned to one side, as if posing for a silhouette. Throat cut. Flies busy at the edges of a thickened pool of blood. Someone had gone to the trouble of turning his stockings down over his shoes and covering him from knees to chest, just so, with a linen sheet. A dark, smeary trail led to a rear room. There, Nicholas found the body of a stabbed woman. She, too, had been positioned. Slumped over on her knees in a corner next to a chimney, hands clasped under her chin as if in prayer. Eyes open, looking into eternity.

  It came to Nicholas that this might be the work of Indians. On fire-lit winter nights back in Williamsburg, the grayhairs seemed to take some twisted old people’s delight in scaring children with tales of horror from the troubled times. How sometimes after one of their raids the savages would leave the dead in mocking poses. In their ignorance of enlightened behavior, their complete lack of understanding of European standards concerning the rituals of warfare and death, it seemed they imagined the white tribe might appreciate their wit, as one might concede a well-played practical joke. But such barbarities were safely in the past. Or so it was thought. In the eighteen years Nicholas had been alive, Virginia and the Carolinas had been free of native violence. Most of the southern tidewater Indians were either moldering in the ground or had moved on. Still, his father had given him a warning along with the rifle, his going-away presents. Be careful, he said. There had been upsetting news from the Carolina frontier two hundred miles to the southwest, the rolling hills and rushing streams of the Sioux and, beyond them, the Cherokee. Young men returning from the war in the North were finding British farmers had moved into their lands. Some were taking revenge.

  “Well, if it was some Indian devils that killed you,” he told the dead woman at his feet, “they must have been lost.”

  The sound of his own voice threw a new fright into him. He looked through the rest of the house and saw no one else. Deciding to ignore the crying child for a while longer, he checked on a pair of small cabins he had seen on the grounds. Both looked like they had been lived in but not for some time. Spanish moss mattresses folded up on the beds, layers of dust everywhere.

  Back in the main house, a foul odor coming from the crib nearly overpowered the smell of rancid flesh in the room. He stripped off the baby’s gown, wiped its bottom with a sheet, and bundled it in its little blanket. As an afterthought, he gave it some water from a half-filled washbowl he found, getting about as much into the tiny mouth as he spilled. From the increasing loudness of bawling, he guessed it was hungry. But that would have to wait.

  He carried the baby to the wagon and emptied a wooden box of its slabs of tinplate recently arrived from Cornwall. Laid the baby inside, tucking in some rags to cushion its head. Then, climbing into the driver’s seat, he pointed his horse in the direction of the place he had been headed. A Carolina settlement whose recent change from the haunted place it once had been to a bustling center of trade was the talk of the southern provinces. Nicholas planned to open a tinning shop there before some other journeyman got in ahead of him.

  The baby settled into a monotonous drone of discontent. Strange, Nicholas thought, it was still alive. To his knowledge, Indians would never leave infant survivors. Sometimes they would carry a baby back with them, raise it as a slave. They were even known to adopt a child to take the place of one of theirs lost in battle or to sickness. But they were not in the habit of sparing little ones who might grow up to kill Indian children.

  He would think on this mystery of the baby later, and the odd positions of the bodies. For now, he concentrated on driving the wagon as fast as he dared without shaking it apart. The vehicle and its metal cargo protested the unaccustomed speed with a jangling commotion. A din of alarm.

  CHAPTER 1

  23: When you see a Crime punished, you may be inwardly Pleased; but always shew Pity to ye Suffering Offender.

  —RULES OF CIVILITY

  CRAVEN COUNTY ROYAL CONSTABLE JAMES HENRY WOODYARD GAVE his horse’s reins a gentle shake, just enough to remind her that they were on official business, not a leisurely stroll through the woods. Annie had been a gift on Harry’s tenth birthday from his grandfather and their friend Comet Elijah. A handsome foal for a rowdy boy in a world where everything was new, and old age was not even a passing notion. But the sad truth was her lead in animal years was showing as they made their way along the new-cut road, which led past the Woodyard family plantation and into New Bern. The roadbed, equal parts sand and hard clay, was still damp, the air fragrant with earthy smells unlocked by recent winds and rain. Annie picked her way around fallen branches with the measured care of a human approaching elderliness. Longleaf pine trees towered over them in the morning mist like spindly storybook giants. Living monuments, Grandfather Natty liked to say. Ancient before any of them were born.

  “I am still upset, you know,” said Toby. She was riding her chestnut mare just ahead of their Negro manservant, Martin, who was on one of the grays.

  “You’ll be glad you came along, I promise. The seeds can wait one more day.”

  “We’ve planted collards this late before,” Martin affirmed. “They always came up just as good.”

  “It’s not just the collards,” Toby said, a fussy edge to her voice. “According to Missus Logan’s almanac, in this clime we are late with our cucumbers, broccoli, French beans, radishes, and cauliflowers.”

  Harry turned in his saddle and looked back to get a better idea of how upset she really was. She was tall for a woman. The top of her head came to just above Harry’s chin when they danced. Her figure was the kind people called “near skinny,” though Harry’s mother liked a term she had learned from the tutor she had hired to teach her sons: lithe. Toby had brown hair
, light olive skin, and pretty brown eyes that she modestly told admirers were about a fingernail too wide apart. For today’s courtroom outing she had chosen her good silk gown, the dark blue one she usually kept for Sunday wear. It had been a gift from her parents back in Swansea in hopes that a female indentured servant with a good Welsh upbringing, education, and a few pieces of nice clothes would be soon matrimonially indentured. The strategy had worked.

  By her expression, Harry judged that her mood was more one of bother than genuine ire. He said, “I’m sure Martin would let us have a cabbage or two from the servants’ garden, if the worst came to the worst.” Martin nodded agreeably.

  “We will not be stealing from the help,” Toby said. “My father has one of the finest gardens in South Wales. And in my country, the best fruits and vegetables are the ones planted at the correct time.”

  “Everything is better in Wales, to hear you talk.” Harry turned again and smiled, lest she think he meant this in less-than-good humor. He tried to think of one of the Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation that might apply. Some courteous remark he might make to smooth over any misreading of what he meant as a jest. The judge had made him memorize the rules, 110 of them. But nine years had passed since then. Such advices were hardly ever useful around home, and Harry rarely found himself in the company of people who knew and appreciated them. Without practice, they had begun to fall away from memory.

  Toby was right, of course. The ideal planting times had long since passed due to the three-week wedding holiday Harry had insisted on making. He wanted to show her what lay beyond Craven County, magical places like Roanoke Island, where Comet Elijah had taken him as a boy. Harry had recounted the story for Toby on their way over, how the first English colony in America settled 175 years earlier then disappeared, leaving behind only shreds of its existence. On his own first trip, Harry had dug around the remains of an old fort on the island and found a corroded piece of steel in the shape of a crescent. Grandfather Natty recognized it as a gorget, a bit of English body armor. Comet Elijah said he probably had known the man it belonged to.

  “But how could that be?” Harry had asked. The three of them were then on a hunting trip down near Swan’s Quarter, sitting around a fire, roasting a pair of rabbits. Harry was eleven.

  Comet Elijah seemed not to hear. “They were running low on food as I recall,” he said. “They’d sent back to England for some more supplies but after a while they decided the ship wasn’t coming back, so they packed up their things and left. Run off with some of my people who lived around there at that time. We heard that a ship finally did show up, but they were long away by then.” He blew into the fire to make it hotter, sending sparks into the blue darkness. “I can talk to you more about this later on, if you’re interested.”

  Neither Harry nor Natty pressed the matter. There were things about Comet Elijah, things he would say, that they had learned not question too narrowly. Not because he would take offense, but his answers would just pose more questions. Sometimes when Harry listened to him talk he felt he was losing his ability to reason and beginning to float off the ground.

  “I’ll admit I am interested in how justice is served in America,” Toby said. “Your reports this week have made me curious. Though they won’t fill our bellies as well as a dish of beans. And that reminds me, we need to talk about your ledgers. They’re a mess. You owe this person three days’ use of your oxen for stump-clearing, and that person owes you a barrel of tar for something else. When I kept the books in my parents’ household, we put things down in pounds sterling. I know currency is scarce here, but I can’t begin to figure out where your plantation comes out in the end.”

  “It’s our plantation now, my love.”

  Toby smiled. A good sign. “A pretty thing to say, but we both know that the husband is the owner.”

  “It’s ours if we go bankrupt. Anyhow, I’m grateful for your efforts, but you shouldn’t worry. Everybody in Craven County owes everybody else something. It’s the way we live and get along with each other. Sooner or later, everybody gets paid back. It always works out in the end.”

  Toby looked like she was about to say something further, but Harry seized on the pause to change the subject. “I’m sure our courts aren’t much different from yours,” he said. “The lawyers are always talking about precedents in English law.”

  “Husband, everything is different in America.”

  “The trials are going at a quick pace. Olaf McLeod doesn’t stand on legal ceremony. I’ve given up trying to guess how he’ll rule on any particular thing. Or when. Sometimes he’ll just decide he’s heard enough, hand down a verdict, and move on.”

  “I am sure I’ll have much to tell my journal tonight.”

  Harry had mostly resisted peeking into Toby’s diary. She had begun it a few days after the wedding. She said she wanted their future children to know how they lived when they were young. He had looked only a few times. Her neat handwriting for the most part dealt with monotonies of everyday life, making him wonder why she even bothered. The time she got up mornings to stoke the cooking fire. The day’s weather. Chores she did. The visit of a neighbor now and then.

  His eyes once did land on a longer piece of writing in which she put down her thoughts about the mystery of time. How one moment flowed into the next and that into the following, and so on, making an endless chain of tiny packets that defined one’s existence. How no one could know what any approaching moment might hold. How they whisper by like leaves in a stream or hurtle past with great uproar, each with the prospect of changing the lives of people and nations.

  She also wrote of choices—thinking, maybe, of her own decision to put herself up for indenture. She had told Harry how the idea first had surprised and then worried her father, who, according to her, was a respected and reasonably well-to-do citizen of South Wales. Directing manager of one of the new copper smelting works. The way she explained it to Harry, she wanted to get away from what had become a humdrum life in a house shared with five brothers and four sisters.

  Ye Choices wee make are bourne on each of ye tiny Fractions of Time that flow through a Needle’s Eye of ye Present. Once made, Choices can not be re-called, but become Frozen, mile-markers in ye ever refeeding Paft.

  Just below the last sentence she had made a little flourish with her pen, as she did at the end of each day’s entry. Her words made Harry reflect but only briefly. He had animals to feed.

  *

  They reached the end of the woods. The first sign of a town was a badly weathered wooden rail fence that stretched out on either side as far as the eye could follow. Rails hung from posts at every angle, some fallen altogether and rotting in the weeds. The gate had been missing since Harry could remember, leaving only the rusting remains of hinges looking like broken teeth. Harry made a note in his mind to bring up the condition of the fence again at the next meeting of the town commissioners, though several earlier efforts to fix it had bogged down over this thing or that.

  A short distance farther along, signs of a proper settlement came into view. Streets broad enough to allow four carriages abreast. Neatly laid-out plots with one- and two-story timber-framed houses, stores, and offices. A few burned-out hulks remained from the Tuscarora uprising, their blackened bones nearly petrified from more than forty years of exposure to rain and parching sun and the occasional snow. Most of the existing buildings had gone up within the past ten years, made with new-baked brick and fragrant, fresh-hewn lumber, some of it bought from the Woodyard plantation. Harry had acquainted Toby with the town’s tragic history soon after she had arrived. How the founders had named it New Bern out of nostalgia for their Swiss homeland. How most of them were now awaiting final judgment, their torn and broken remains resting in the old cemetery.

  As they entered the streets under the steadily strengthening sun, signs of storm flooding became apparent. Stains crept up clapboard sidings, musty memorials of high water. The smell of mildew was about
. Doors and windows stood open to allow moisture to escape. Stray sheep and chickens investigating bits of litter scattered sullenly as they rode by.

  Harry looked back again as they drew near the village center. Toby was brushing wisps of hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. Face damp in the morning heat. “I’ve never seen so many people in New Bern at one time,” she said. “It looks like a fair.”

  It was all noise and bright colors, a far cry from a normal day in town. At the intersection of Broad and Pollock, a group of strolling dancers with bells on their shoes entertained onlookers in town for the court session. Nearby, a leopard rested in a cage and an elephant was tethered to a tree. Their owner, a small, middle-aged man with watery eyes and a paunch and wearing a silver peruke, was chattering about his liqueurs and powders, how they imparted the physical strength of a cat and the mental powers of a pachyderm. Farther along, a storefront sign advertised THE INVISIBLE LADY AND ACOUSTIC TEMPLE: AN INEXPLICABLE OPTICAL AND AURICULAR ILLUSION. A man named Salenka and his “Learned Dog” from Charleston had established themselves in a tavern. The illustration at the door showed a large beast with shaggy gray hair that could BEST ANYONE AT CARDS, and perform CARD TRICKS AND MATHEMATICAL EXPERIMENTS. In addition, Salenka offered fireworks each night in the garden behind the building. A full bill of entertainment for only two shillings. But the showman had strong competition. A touring company of English actors had set up a makeshift stage in an empty lot across the street. They were acting out a scene from a string of plays they had been presenting throughout the week. The evening’s finale would be a double bill, the sidewalk sign proclaimed: the American premiere of the famous George Lillo’s adaptation of a drama from the reign of Elizabeth, Arden of Feversham; and another from the same period: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, who recently had been enjoying a revival on the London stage.