Maybe Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg had actually got himself a good night’s sleep. Maybe he’d just fortified himself with several cups of coffee or strong tea. Whichever was the case, he seemed alert, energetic, and enthusiastic when Bushell and his companions walked into RAM headquarters the next morning.
“Here - come see,” he said, directing them to a storeroom where RAMs were methodically going through a couple of file cabinets’ worth of documents. “We pulled these from Eustace Venahle’s home and cabinetry shop yesterday. We haven’t seen everything there is to see, but you were right, Tom - he is definitely linked to some men in and round Victoria who are known to be affiliated with the Sons of Liberty. We’ll pay them visits today.”
“That’s - first-rate, sir,” Bushell said. Regardless of whether Sir Horace had taken Irene to bed, his minions looked to have come up with important evidence. If dealing with the evidence meant dealing with Bragg, too, Bushell was willing to make the sacrifice. Solving the case was more important than whether his friendship survived. A huntsman’s eagerness stirred in him. “I want to go along on one of those raids.”
“So do I,” Samuel Stanley said.
“Me, too,” Kathleen added. Before Bragg could say anything, she went on, “Pity you didn’t send your men to Venable’s house and shop a day earlier, Sir Horace. Then they could have been raiding while we were at the embassy banquet last night.”
The RAM commandant, who had been lighting a cigar, suffered a coughing fit. When he’d stopped hacking, he said, “I do regret that, Dr. Flannery. Of course you may accompany Colonel Bushell and Captain Stanley. I have no doubt that you will discover something they overlook.” The irony was thick enough to slice. Kathleen didn’t care. She looked smug. She’d goaded Sir Horace into giving her exactly what she wanted. And, as far as Bushell was concerned, she’d been dead right about when the RAMs should have gone out to Eustace Venable’s residence and business.
“Where do you propose sending us, sir?” Stanley asked. He had no interest in quarreling with Bragg. All he wanted to do was to help push the case forward in whatever way he could.
“Based on the evidence we found at Venable’s shop, we’ve obtained a warrant to search the home of Phineas Stanage,” Bragg answered. Now it was his turn to be smug.
Bushell jerked as if stung by a wasp. “Stanage!” he said. “We never could touch him before. Not enough evidence, the judges kept saying - he’s a sharp devil, and a careful one. But we’ve got it now, by God! Kilbride was visiting with him, that tea-seller up in Boston told me. If Venable is - was - connected to Stanage, too, odds are good he’s up to his neck in the Two Georges case.”
Sam Stanley looked at Bragg with respect perhaps grudging but no less genuine for that. “If you’ve talked a magistrate into granting us a search warrant for Phineas Stanage’s house, sir ... we ought to break things wide open.”
“Let’s hope so,” Bragg said. Bushell nodded in understanding. He and Sam had both thought the case was about to break wide open several times, only to be disappointed. Here in Victoria, Sir Horace must have been sliding from exhilaration to gloom along with them. Now he added, “Stanage isn’t the only chap we’ve tied to your cabinetmaker, either, Tom.” He spoke several other names, two or three of which were familiar to Bushell.
“They’re all guilty as sin, no doubt. Let somebody else bag them, though.” Bushell’s face went predatory. “Stanage is the one I want. Cut off the head and the body dies.”
“Pity you didn’t find anything leading you back to John Kennedy,” Kathleen remarked. Yes, she could hold a grudge: Bushell took note.
For the first time, Sir Horace Bragg looked on her with something other than glowering disapproval, no doubt because it was the first time she’d said in his presence anything with which he agreed. “That is a pity,” he said in musing tones. “Well, no matter. I presume you want to be after the foe.”
Bushell nodded, replying with a couplet from Pope’s Essay on Man: “ ‘One master-passion in the breast, I Like Aaron’s serpent, swallows all the rest.’“
Kathleen smiled; maybe she recognized the quotation. Bragg obviously didn’t. He wasn’t one for poetry or classics - law books suited him better. A competent man, Bushell thought. Philippe Bonaparte notwithstanding, competence was useful and more than useful in a police officer. But could you truly understand what if you’d never thought about why?.
He put aside such musings as unprofitable as he went out to the steamers that would take him and his companions, along with several local RAMs, to Phineas Stanage’s home. The locals were armed. Bushell nodded again, this time in grim approval - Bragg was taking no chances. Bushell had seen Stanage’s home before, when RAMs surveyed it in the hope of discovering something actionable there. The oaks in front of it and the magnolia to one side were taller than they had been years ago. Sometime in there, Stanage had changed the paint on the two-story building from white to light blue. Otherwise, all was as it had been.
No, Bushell found one more difference: now he didn’t have to watch the home from afar. Along with the rest of the RAMs and Kathleen Flannery, he marched up to the front door. The knocker was a shiny brass eagle. He took primitive pleasure in making a racket with it.
The door opened. A servant in a long black skirt and frilly white shirtwaist stared out at the RAMs. “Oh, God,” she said.
One of the local officers brandished the search warrant. In a fine bureaucratic drone, he said, “By authority of His Majesty’s court here in Victoria as symbolized in this warrant, we are authorized to search the property and premises of Mr. Phineas W. Stanage. Please stand aside, Miss, and let us perform our duty.”
“Mr. Stanage, he isn’t going to like this,” the servant predicted.
“What a shame the warrant doesn’t cover his opinions,” Bushell said. He stepped over the threshold. The servant got out of his way.
He - and no doubt the other RAMs with him - took a certain malicious glee in going through the home of a Son of Liberty. By the time they’d been inside for a couple of minutes, the place looked as if a tornado had hit it. The contents of drawers were dumped out onto the floor, then the drawers themselves, then furniture cushions. After that, chairs and sofas got overturned so the RAMs could make sure nothing was lurking in their linings.
Kathleen watched in amazement as what had been a neat and orderly establishment was turned inside out. The maidservant who’d admitted the RAMs and the rest of the staff watched, too, in something more like horror. Bushell felt a certain amount of sympathy for them. Once the RAMs had left, they were the ones who would have to clean up the mess.
Phineas Stanage arrived about half an hour after the RAMs went to work. Bushell presumed one of the neighbors had called him. He was a corpulent man in his mid-fifties, with a close-trimmed white beard and gold-framed bifocals. He wore a suit of Donegal tweed that Bushell wouldn’t have minded having, and looked like what he was: the chairman of a prosperous brewing company. He took one look at the chaos in the front hall and bellowed, “This is an outrage!” He proceeded to embellish and elaborate upon that theme for several minutes, with ever-increasing heat and sulfur content. Bushell listened in considerable admiration. Whatever Phineas Stanage was now, at some point in his life he’d been a soldier, a sailor, or a scatologist’s assistant.
When Stanage started repeating himself, Bushell whistled a couple of bars of “Yankee Doodle.” “That’s a filthy lie!” Stanage shouted.