Whistling tunelessly, Marc came up to his house, now settled in the snowy dark as if it had arrived here with the glaciers and decided to stay. He opened the front door, the aroma of roasting fowl struck his nostrils, and his stomach rumbled pleasantly. Then he was stopped where he stood by the sight of the three women in his front room. Beth was seated beside Dolly Putnam, trying with minimal success to ease the girl’s wracking sobs. Charlene Huggan was hovering at Beth’s elbow with a steaming teapot in one hand and a cup and saucer in the other, though the two items seemed not to be in the least associated with one another. On the tea trolley before them sat a plate of hot biscuits, cooling. (Charlene, under the impetus of necessity, was actually learning how to cook food that was edible.)
“Dolly, dear, you must try to get a hold of yourself. Tell us exactly what happened. We can’t help you if you can’t tell us why Billy’s been put in jail.”
“In jail?” Marc questioned, and two of the women looked up, startled to see him in the doorway.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Edwards, Billy’s been tossed into a dungeon and they’re gonna hang him!”
“Charlene,” Beth said firmly, “pour us all some tea and then go see that your roast isn’t burning.”
“Everythin’ll be all right now that Mr. Edwards is back, won’t it, ma’am?”
Beth gave the girl-for she was all of seventeen-a look that said, Oh, don’t be daft, though I know you can’t help it.
“Everything’ll be fine,” she said aloud.
At this soothing remark, Dolly burst into fresh tears and dropped her head into her hands. Charlene set out three cups of tea with trembling fingers and quivering lip.
Marc came across the room, dripping melted snow onto the carpet. “Is Billy in jail, dear?”
Beth nodded grimly. “It looks like it. All I can get out of Dolly is something about Billy trying to kill someone. She can’t get any further without garbling her words to death.”
The reference to death induced even harder sobbing.
“How did she find this out?” Marc pulled off his boots and then tossed his hat and coat over a chair. He sat down next to Dolly, her raven curls matted with sweat and her sloe eyes blurred and reddened with weeping. He gave her his handkerchief, then took her right hand into both of his.
“Dolly wasn’t feeling well, so Rose sent her home at three o’clock. It was her mum who’d been downtown shopping who heard the news about Billy being arrested. So, as far as I can tell, the two of them went straight to the police to find out what was going on.”
“Cobb’ll know all the details, then,” Marc said. He lifted Dolly’s chin with his hand and peered into her beleaguered face. “Billy wouldn’t deliberately hurt anyone, Dolly, you know that. There must be some sort of mistake here. I’m a very good friend of Chief Sturges and Constable Cobb. I’ll go down to the police quarters and sort this all out. Just tell me what you know so far. Please.”
Dolly bobbed her head up and down, then took two sips of tea. She swallowed hard and began at last to speak. “Mr. Sturges told us that Billy was caught doin’ a duel this mornin’.”
“A duel?”
“Uh-huh. I told him only rich gentlemen did such things, but he said Billy was found with a smokin’ pistol in his hand, and under the law he had to be charged.”
“Is duelling against the law?” Beth said to Marc.
“Not as such, though it’ll get you dismissed from the army quick enough. However, if someone is hurt, then attempted murder charges may be brought against the one who inflicted the wound. Usually, though, neither party nor the seconds report on the episode. There’s a sort of code of secrecy.”
“But some boy was peekin’ through the fence and come runnin’ to the police. And they got caught!” Dolly sobbed at the injustice of it all.
“Whose fence? Who is Billy supposed to have shot?”
Dolly looked up, and through her tears said with a sort of puzzled pride, “It was that awful Yankee!”
“Good God,” Beth said.
“Not Caleb Coltrane?” Marc said.
“That’s the one,” Dolly confirmed.
• • •
Exhausted, Dolly fell asleep on the chesterfield. Beth and Marc decided to have supper-it was the first complete meal Charlene had prepared from scratch and they were loath to disappoint her-and then, afterwards, mull over some sensible course of action. How Billy McNair had managed to get himself into a duel with an imprisoned felon at the far end of the city was certainly a mystery Marc wanted to have cleared up before he went to bed.
“Chief Sturges will have the whole story,” Beth said, as they returned to the front room and saw Dolly sitting up and rubbing her eyes.
“I’m sure they will,” Marc said.
“But what about Billy, Mr. Edwards? Will he haveta stay in jail?”
“I doubt it, Dolly, especially if he hasn’t actually killed Mr. Coltrane.”
“If we post bond,” Beth said to Dolly, “he can go free till his trial in the spring assizes.”
“But we ain’t got the money!” Dolly cried with a wail only the young can achieve in their despair. “He’ll die in there! He will! And I love him still!”
“We know you do,” Beth soothed. “And when he comes to his senses, he’ll see how foolish he was to break off your engagement.”
“I can’t imagine the bond being more than a hundred dollars,” Marc said.
“I’ll pay it,” Beth said.
“We’ll pay it,” Marc said, and was rewarded with Dolly’s Billy-winning smile.
“And if the charges stick,” Beth added, “Billy’ll need a good lawyer.”
“But-”
“We’ll pay for the lawyer, too,” Beth said.
Dolly looked at her like a grateful pup who has just been picked from a litter of contenders. “Do you know a good lawyer?”
Beth turned to her husband. “I believe I do,” she said.
FOUR
It was Constable Horatio Cobb who had been unlucky enough to interrupt the duel early that Monday morning. The sun was just a scarlet disk on the frigid horizon behind him as he reached his temporary patrol on Hospital Street at Bay.
Following the first of several demonstrations by the Orange Dislodgers, as Cobb called them, and impromptu protests by a gang of Tory toughs (in raccoon coats and beaver hats) outside of Chepstow, Chief Constable Wilfrid Sturges had placed three supernumerary constables and Ewan (Able-but-Unwilling) Wilkie in charge of the eastern sector of the city, and set himself and his three most experienced constables the task of patrolling the western sector, where Chepstow was located. Sir George Arthur’s orders had been clear: the blackguard Coltrane was to be kept alive as fodder for the gibbet at any cost. And so Cobb had left the billowing warmth of his wife’s body, forced down a cold breakfast in the dark, pulled his greatcoat over his food-stained paunch, jammed his helmet down over his stocking cap, and headed west up Front Street towards the seat of trouble.
But trouble there had been none for the past two days. Perhaps the fanatics were having difficulty ratcheting up their venom day after frigid day. After all, Coltrane would surely dance to their cheers from the gallows in the Court House yard. They could pursue his tumbrel from Chepstow to the courtroom with spit and spleen every morning for as long as the trial lasted. Why harass the colonel and frighten his servants when it was the newspapers who insisted on publishing the Yankee’s gibberish and the protesters themselves who scooped up every available copy so they could curse it? The queer ways of his fellow man had ever remained a mystery to Cobb, and he had long ago decided that trying to solve it was not worth the effort. If people ran afoul of the law, then they ran afoul of him. What could be more straightforward than that?