“I figured he’d change trains in Pittsburgh,” O’Flynn said. “How come? Didn’t he?”
“He bought a through ticket to New York, anyhow,” Bushell replied.
“News to me,” O’Flynn said with a shrug. “I dropped him at the station, dug his bags out of the boot, and went on home.”
“How did you get to know Kilbride?”
“We met in a saloon here, a couple-three years ago,” the miner said. “He was down here selling this and that, and we got to talking. He doesn’t say a whole lot, but he’s smart, Kilbride is - you can tell. And he cares about miners; you can tell that, too. And, every so often, he’d send me some good hooch. When he wired me asking if he could stay a couple of days, I said sure. Why not?”
“He didn’t tell you he was in any sort of trouble while he stayed with you?” Bushell asked.
“Not a bit of it,” Michael O’Flynn answered. “I had no idea till my wife told me you came round last night. And now you’re down here.” He shook his head. “Any man who comes down here when he doesn’t have to is plain crazy, you ask me.”
“Well, there you are, Mr. O’Flynn,” Bushell said. The miner cocked his head to one side, not following him. He didn’t try to explain. When he’d ridden down the lift with Rufus Fitzwilliam, his thought had been to get answers from O’Flynn as fast as he could. The more he saw down in the mine, though, the more he thought that everyone down in this pit was crazy, whether he had to be here or not.
“You going to arrest Mike here?” one of the other miners asked, in a tone that warned Bushell would be sorry if he answered yes.
But he’d already decided to answer no, and did. Percy McGaffigan was another matter, though he’d leave him to men who came behind. When he thought about how many problems he was leaving for men who came behind, he felt acutely embarrassed. Were he one of those men, he would have hated him. When weighed against the direct trail - what he devoutly hoped was the direct trail, at any rate - to The Two Georges, though, everything else was trivial.
He turned to Rufus Fitzwilliam. “Take me back to the lift, please.”
“Right y’are.” Fitzwilliam chuckled. “We’ll see how the legs hold up when you’ve traveled out and back.”
The legs barely held up at all. By the time Bushell finally came up into the sunlight again, he was walking as if he’d been galloping a horse for twenty-four hours straight after never getting on a horse till that moment: a slow, bowlegged hobble. When he had to go up a couple of stairs, he took them sideways, crab-fashion, that being the only way in which he was physically capable of ascending. He was also, he discovered, a hell of a mess. When he checked into a hotel in Boston, its cleaning staff would not look on him with delight. Even now, the Charleroi constable seemed less than enthusiastic about having him in his steamer. “Back to the hotel,” he said. The constable might have been thinking about asking him questions, but didn’t.
Back at the Ribblesdale House, Samuel Stanley was full of them. He waved Bushell’s hasty note in his face and berated him for going off alone. “Off into the mines, you mean?” Bushell said, hobbling up to his adjutant. “I assure you, Sam, you didn’t miss a thing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m for the showerbath.”
He thought of McGaffigan and all the other miners who got far filthier than he was and had to try to clean up with a basin’s worth of water.
“Go ahead,” Stanley said. “You’re blacker than I am, and you didn’t start out that way. But what do we do after you get back to your proper color?”
“We go to the train station,” Bushell answered, “and get tickets for Boston.”
XI
Looking around Boston made Bushell despair of ever finding Joseph Kilbride there. It wasn’t that no one would recognize Kilbride; they had the photograph of him back from Chief Lassiter, and local RAMs and local constables were taking copies of it to every hostelry Boston boasted - and it boasted a lot of them.
But Boston was a great city in its own right, and Kilbride had a multitude of places where he might stay that had nothing to do with hotels. And Boston was also one of the places where sentiment against the British Empire ran strong. Someone who quietly sympathized with the Sons of Liberty could keep Kilbride under wraps indefinitely.
“It’s liable to be useless, Sam,” Bushell said as they walked back into the Parker House. “All he has to do is sit tight. Time’s on his side, not ours. The King-Emperor will be in the NAU before long, and if we haven’t got The Two Georges back by then ...” He made himself say it: “They’ll ransom the bloody thing and keep the Sons in business for the next hundred years.”
“We’ll catch him,” Stanley said. “Somebody at the train station will remember him, or the hackman who took him wherever he went, or - “
Bushell made a slashing motion with his right hand. “Odds are, one of his charming friends picked him up when he got off the train, just so he wouldn’t have to take a cab.” He was bound and determined to be gloomy, and would let no ray of hope penetrate that gloom.
The Parker House was the oldest hotel in Boston, which meant it was one of the oldest in the NAU. It had recently been refurbished in gaudy Rococo Revival style, full of gold leaf, ornate woodwork, and walls and ceiling painted with damsels in long, flowing gowns. Kathleen Flannery’s lip curled, ever so slightly, as it did every time she walked into the hotel.
As soon as he was well into the lobby, Bushell’s lip curled, too. The quality - or lack of same - of the place’s decorations, though, had nothing to do with his reaction. Springing up from a tufted, overstuffed sofa and hurrying his way came Michael Shaughnessy and Jerry Doyle.
“Welcome to Boston,” Shaughnessy said, as if he really meant it.
“What are you doing here?” Bushell asked. Even as he asked it, he knew the question wasn’t altogether fair. If the two reporters worked for Common Sense, they likely lived in Boston. But being in Boston was not the same as being in the lobby of the Parker House.
Smiling, Shaughnessy answered, “Why, the very same thing we were doing in Charleroi: watching you bumble about and waste the ratepayer’s hard-earned money. It’ll make quite an interesting little study for the magazine, that it will.”
“How did you know where to find us?” Samuel Stanley asked.
Jerry Doyle stuck his tongue in his cheek. “We have our ways,” he said airily, and then added, “and we don’t have to tell them to the Crown’s hounds, either.”
Any of several people in Charleroi could have put the men from Common Sense on their traiclass="underline" the ticket seller at the train station, the desk clerk at the Ribblesdale, or one of the miners with whom Bushell had spoken. He wasn’t much concerned with how Doyle and Shaughnessy had learned he was in Boston, or even at the Parker House - if someone here recognized him (and he was all too recognizable these days) and passed the word on to the Sons of Liberty, it would get to Common Sense, too.
“Impeding an investigation is a crime,” he remarked, “but of course you fine, upstanding chaps would never do anything like that.”
“Of course not,” Doyle agreed; he could rise to irony, where Shaughnessy was just choleric. “We didn’t bother you even a little bit down in Charleroi, now did we? Answer true.”
The true answer was that they really hadn’t bothered him in Charleroi. He didn’t care to admit that, however. And, before he could say anything, Michael Shaughnessy put in, “We’ll be watching you closer here, though, and not just us, either. You’ll never know when the folk you’re dealing with are friends of Common Sense, so you’d best be on the up and up every waking moment.”