What Lies Buried: A Novel of Old Cape Fear Read online

  How could a man of Commerce, he asked himself, allowing himself a moment of almost boyish happiness—how could any man gaze upon this, and notbe inspired by both its beauty and the possible fortune it might represent?

  He shooed off a brace of mongrel dogs, and an imperious gander, with his walking stick, shook a good-natured fist at a street-vendor’s boy who was miming his gait, and turned south into Water Street to the uneven, graying cypress piers, towards Chandler’s Wharf. Who could say, he told himself; this might be the day he’d reap that fortune!

  Chapter 4

  SSHE CRAB! Blue crab, missus! Soup’s on t’night!”

  “Fraysh s’rimp, mistuh, big’s ya thumb, ten t’the poun’!”

  “Scallions … wil’ onions … ha’penny a peck!”

  “Bloody Hell,” Captain Prouty grumbled at the intruding hawkers’ cries. Matthew Livesey shuttered the windows of his small rear office and diminished the volume at least a trifle, so they could continue to conduct their business. “Thankee, Mr Livesey. Loud enough t’wake the dead, damme’f they aren’t.”

  “As you were saying, Captain Prouty, sir.” Livesey smiled back, hiding his wince at the sailor’s salty language deuced well. “Or, as you were attempting to say, hey?”

  He stumped back to his desk and sat down heavily in a chair behind it, the bad leg extended. A bottle of rum stood between them, a good Demerara. Though Prouty tossed it off like mother’s milk, and had done so repeatedly for the last hour, Livesey’s glass contained a mere dottle of his first pouring in the bottom.

  “Lookee here, Mr Livesey,” Prouty continued, leaning forward chum-mily. “Roof shakes an’ barrel staves be a fair bus’ness, an’ we’ve turned a goodly profit afore, have we not, sir. But here’s my thinkin’. There’s 25 pound sterlin’ a ton fer sawn lumber, seasoned an’ dry, delivered. Teak, Madiera-oak, scrub pine, cypress’r mahogany, those buggers in th’ West Indies’r so wood-shy they’d buss yer blind cheeks fer kindlin, damme’f they wouldn’t!”

  “Granted.” Livesey nodded sagely, hiding another wince. While he was not a stranger to blunt, Billingsgate language, he thought of himself as a cultured Christian and strove ever to avoid it, as the mark of a gentleman who had read enough to find other ways of saying much the same thing. And had taken the hide off Samuel more than a few times when he heard him practice it.

  “Saw it.” Prouty beamed, tapping his noggin with a sage wink of one rheumy eye. “Twelve foot, eight foot’n trim. An’ keep trim damned spare, short’s a whore’s promise, get me, sir? They take it pre-cut, they save payin’ t’have it done. Three pound more per ton, we could get, me Bible-oath on’t! An’ notjust pre-cut it, oh no!”

  Prouty leaned a little more forward on the table, looked about the small, dim office, as if he were plotting mutiny in the fore-peak cable-tier of a “whippin ship,” to whisper his last with the glee of the about-to-be-revenged. “Pre-paneled, sir! Think on’t!”

  “Hmm,” Livesey replied, scrubbing his stubble dubiously.

  “Goddamme, sir! They need houses, we send ’em houses!” Prouty sniggered, reaching for the rum bottle. “Twelve foot by eight, eight foot by eight, studs, framin’ an’ clapboardin’ altogether! Forty or more pound a ton we’d fetch, with nailin’ an’ bracin’ included, an’ all they’d have t’do is stand ’em up-right, bang ’em t’the roof beams, an’ clap on th’ roof. A snug little house, up in a week, sir.”

  “I would suppose doors and window frames would go over as well,” Livesey wondered. “But our cost, Captain Prouty … the gangs to make those would … dear to make, perhaps too dear to vend.”

  “First inta the market with ’em, an’ we’d be rich, sir,” the sea-captain intoned. “Stap me if they wouldn’t eat ’em up like plum duff!” he insisted, banging a fist on the desk for emphasis.

  “You’d try a ship-load?” Livesey asked quickly. “On a wager, as it were? To front the venture entire would break me ifit failed.”

  “I’d bear the carryin’ charges meself.” Prouty cooled, leaning back from Livesey’s lack of ardor.

  “The cost of nails, of skilled labor … hmm … your Lapwing is two-hundred-tons burthen, that’s …” Livesey speculated at the number of board feet it would require. “Why, it may cost me upwards of an hundred pounds to run up a ship-load, even with cheap timber.”

  “God’s Teeth, yer a slim-parin’ bugger, Livesey,” Prouty said. “Afore we warp down t’the Dram Tree an’ cast off fer Nassau, I’ll let ya have me letter o’ credit fer … thirty pounds. An’ twenty pound more o’ coin. You put up fifty pounds in lumber, nails, an’ what it skelps yer purse t’have ’em run up. I carry th’ goods fer free, an’ we split even. We judge wrong, well, we’re neither out so much. If wejudge right, though, an’ I drop hook off the Cape fer quarantine with a barricoe o’ gold for ya, then ya c’n reckon sure as shite do stink we’re onta somethin’. Wot say ye, Mr Livesey, sir?”

  “I’d have to work out the costs first, Captain Prouty. Perhaps not this voyage, if you’re casting off on the morning tide to fall down-river,” Livesey stalled. It was a most promising notion, as seductive as… He almost shivered, considering how he’d been seduced the night before into a rash act.

  “Run up some, whilst I’m gone, an’ see. If ya do bring ’em in fer ten pound a ton, we’re hotter’n a fresh-fucked fox, damme’f we’re not!” Prouty guffawed, offering his hand in agreement.

  Livesey wasn’t sure about labor costs, wasn’t sure if hired slave gangs could do carpentry work, but if they could … for decent fees … he stuck out his hand to shake with Prouty. They mightjust be onto something!

  It had been a profitable day, anyway. The last shipment that Lapwing had run to Nassau and the Turks had shown nearly five hundred pounds net gain, and the rum, molasses and salt, the tortoise-shell, sugar, whale oil and such that Prouty imported through him would yield more on top of that. Less debts, less wares-left-owing he had sold or warehoused, he might end up two hundred pounds free and clear!

  “A dram on it, Captain Prouty. To our new enterprise,” Matthew offered, reaching for the bottle. He was interrupted by a rap on the door to the front counters.

  “Father?” Samuel called out, sounding a touch tremulous, much like he might if he’d sunk a barge loaded with perishable goods, and Livesey cringed.

  “Yes, Sam’l? What is it?” He knocked wood, hopefully.

  “Bess is here, Father. With Mr Osgoode Moore? They need you to come out,” Samuel implored. Yes, he definitely sounded distraught and imploring.

  “Excuse me, Captain Prouty,” Livesey said, rocking forward to lever himself erect with the good leg under him, and both hands gripping the heavy desk. He stumped to the door and stepped out into his display hall, among the ship’s and bosun’s stores, the imported goods and frivolities.

  It must be damned… he thought; deuced bad, he corrected himself. Bess has been crying.And Osgoode looks like a hangedspaniel.

  “Attorney Moore, sir, good day to you, sir. You wished to see me on some matter?”

  “It’s Harry, Mr Livesey,” Moore almost moaned. “He’s dead.”

  “Dear Lord.” Livesey paled. Death, sudden death was no stranger anywhere, most especially in the Cape Fear, where the marshes gave out foetid miasmas, and the heat struck down so many each summer, or the fogs and humid conditions took so many to bloody flux, grippe or quinsy. “But we saw himjust last night, Mr Moore, and he was …”

  “Not took sick, Mr Livesey.” Moore grimaced, swallowing as if to stop his bile. “They found him out on the Sound Road, the one that goes to Masonborough? He’d been shot, Mr Livesey. He was murdered!”

  “Mur …” Livesey gasped. “Shot, you say!”

  “A …” Osgoode frowned, darting a glance at Bess. Livesey understood, and walked down the counter out of her hearing. “A freedman found him just about sunup, sir. Ran to tell the constable. I was told he’d been, well… peppered, Mr Livesey. With a fowling piece. Dear God, his face was gone! And �
�” Moore shuddered. Harry Tresmayne and Osgoode Moore, scion of a cadet branch of The Moores, had been political allies in the law courts, borough affairs and the General Assembly. Osgoode Moore had been Harry Tresmayne’s trusted attorney as well. “Shot twice! Once in the heart, sir! His very heart!”

  “Merciful God.” Livesey sighed. “How awful for you, Osgoode. Your dearest friend! And, I know, mine as well. Did you see …”

  “No, sir. Only told, so far. I thought of you, soon as I heard,” Moore muttered on. “The constable came into the courthouse and announced it not a quarter-hour past. I ran into your daughter on my way here. Word had reached the markets, I suppose, so she had already heard, and was coming here, too. I would not like you to think I discomfited her with such horrid news.”

  “Any clue as to who … did it?” Livesey asked. He could not bear to say “killed him” or “murdered him” yet. He could not yet, in fact, grasp the idea that the brilliant, cultured and devil-may-care Harry Tresmayne, a friend for halfhis life, was even dead.

  “Constable Swann threw the nigger in the cells, the one claimed he foundHim,” Moore grumbled. “Probably robbed him. Just shot and robbed the first rider he came across. Damn his black blood!”

  One thing that Philadelphia-born Matthew Livesey could not get used to in his adopted colony was this constant suspicion of anyone of color—curfews, slave-catchers, whippings and hangings—or the cool, dismissive way the owners looked down upon the owned. No matter how profitable, his father had never invested in the trade, never bought shares in any ship on the Middle Passage; though many of their business associates had. Sons of Ham, that much-fallen dusky tribe, but were they not mentioned in the Bible as people? Not his kind, but still…

  “Where would a freedman get a fowling-gun, I wonder?” Livesey speculated. “Aren’t there laws against it?”

  “Well, certainly, Mr Livesey, but…”

  “And you say Harry was shot twice?” he inquired. “If in head or heart, once would have been enough, Lord save us.”

  “Mayhap the first shot did not suffice,” Osgoode said, looking ill. “And when he went to rifle his clothing, he … reloaded, then shot again, so there’d be no witness against him. Oh, God …”

  “Here, Mr Moore, sit you down, sir!” Livesey urged, seeing the young man sink into a half-swoon. “Sam’l, fetch a tot o’ that brandy, from the little keg on the counter yonder. Quick, lad!”

  Moore put his head on his knees, trembling hands agrip about his temples, running fingers through his hair to his neck, and back again. He sipped the brandy thankfully, and after some few minutes began to resemble a human pallor once again.

  “We must see to Georgina,” Livesey realized aloud after Moore had regained his feet.

  “Oh Lord, Mr Livesey, she doesn’t know yet, I’m bound!” Moore exclaimed. “She didn’t come into town for Court Sessions with Harry this time. She’s still out atTuscarora.”

  “Better one of us than the constable or sheriff, Mr Moore,” Livesey decided as the elder man. “Better from a long-time friend, or a man from the old regiment.”

  “I know.” Moore sighed heavily. “I’m … quicker on a horse than you, sir. Sorry. I’ll be the one to ride out.”

  “Thankee, Osgoode. I’ll … uhm … I suppose someone should see to the … uhm … remains.” Livesey winced. He didn’t know which odorous task he disliked least. “I’ll send some runners to people who knew him in our regiment who are still in town. We’ll care for him.”

  “Better let me have a stirrup-cup then, if you would, Mr Livesey,” Moore requested. “’tis a ride I’ll need to liquor my boots for.”

  “I’ll have one with you, Mr Moore. Sam’l?”

  Samuel poured two tots full this time.

  “To Harry,” Livesey offered.

  “And his memory,” Moore rejoined sadly.

  “And catching the bas … the person who did this,” Livesey concluded, grim, before they tossed off their drinks.

  Chapter 5

  COURT SESSIONS, church, militia musters … and death … were the calls for gatherings, Matthew Livesey mused. The Romans, and the London ‘prentices and clerks, had their burial societies to care for departed members, as Masons might gather to inter a fellow brother of a lodge. In Wilmington, it was the militiamen who saw to Harry.

  His townhouse was on a verdant half-acre lot at the corner of Princess Street and Second, a prosperous two-story home with a broad front piazza and upper balconies supported by wooden columns turned and carved by local craftsmen to resemble classical Greco-Roman marble. To guard against fires, which swept the tiny wooden town in the middle of pine thickets regularly, Harry Tresmayne had insisted on ballast stones from un-loading ships for the front face and the first-floor walls. It was a genteelly elegant manse, filled with furnishings as fine as any the town could boast, with a personal library of over one hundred volumes—reflecting Harry’s discriminating taste, as well as the hand of his wife, Georgina.

  It also held a superbly wrought wine cabinet filled with such fruits of the vine as would make a statue sit up and beg.

  Sergeant Zebedee Howe was a take-charge, neck-or-nothing sort—which had earned him his half-pike and sash during the War—so he had led the charge when the pony-trap had brought Harry home, past the horrified and grieving house servants, into Harry’s wardrobe for burial clothes, the hot-water to bathe the corpse—and some refreshments for the fellow militiamen who had come to render honors to their dead compatriot.

  It being a rather warm day for only middle spring, and the task a sad one, they had needed to un-cork a few, and were now almost done—and almost as convivial as an Irish wake.

  “… potted that injun, in the end, after lettin’ him take two shots at him,” Howe reminisced fondly. “Bowed from the saddle, he did, took off his hat and let him have second honors. Told the bugger that he couldn’t shoot worth a tinker’s damn. And he was right!”

  “Fearless, Major Harry was,” Private Moseley interjected, with a firm nod. “A gallant an’ fearless gen’lem’n.”

  “A mite reckless, now an’ agin,” chimed another. “Not with the lads, now. Not sayin’ that. With hisself, he was.”

  “Them as show no concern for dyin’,” Zebedee Howe pointed out, “they live a charmed life. Remember Hoskins now, always mopin’ and sighin’, turnin’ pale as milk? Hung back, God rest his soul. And he got it after all, day we broke that French ambush. He’da charged ’em with us, he’d be alive, ‘stead o’ gettin’ cut down with the others when they volleyed from our right, an’ mowed our slow’uns down.”

  “He lived larger than life,” Livesey felt required to say. “He was bolder than any of us. Life’ll be dull without Harry around.”

  “Aye, he was grand!” Moseley agreed with enthusiasm. “An’ amen t’dull, Mr Livesey. Reckon you got that right.”

  “Quieter, that’s fer certain.” Constable Swann sighed. “In the courts, fer sure.” Swann had served with distinction as a lieutenant, though not in Harry’s half-battalion of their regiment.

  “Quieter for the likes o’ Moores an’ Ramseurs,” Moseley sniffed, stifling a belch. “Quit-rents’ll still be owin’. Poll taxes’ll still be so high a body can’t vote. ‘Thout Major Harry, who’s goin’ t’speak fer the small holders an’ tradesmen, I ask ye?”

  “There’s still yer Osgoode Moore, Lakey and his crowd,” Swann grumbled. His family was allied with Moores and Ramseurs and the big land owners, the longest-tenured landgraves. There was so little real crime in New Hanover County or Wilmington that Swann’s post of Constable was more ceremonial than real: officiating at Court Sessions or serving notices, collecting fees and overseeing unruly ordinaries and the prices they charged, with little real law enforcement.

  “He could raise up a power o’ good cheer,” Moseley sighed as he looked down on the corpse, laid out on a bed coverlet on the floor. “Raise up a power o’ storms ‘gin them ‘at’d oppress us, too.” Moseley, in his morose, liquored state,
had trouble with saying “oppress.” “I just wish t’God he’da been able t’give as good’s he got. Drawed his pistols’r somethin’. Not shot down like a dog, way he was.”

  “He wasn’t armed,” Constable Swann told them, as they all took a moment to contemplate Harry Tresmayne’s body. “Oh, there was his knife in a saddle bag, but he wasn’t armed. That Cuffy shot him out of the saddle too quick, and I don’t think he was expecting trouble.”

  “Shot with what, sir?” Matthew Livesey questioned. After one night of weakness—and sociable but abstemious tippling with Prouty, just to be polite—he had limited himself to one well-watered tot of rum, so his acuity was not awash. “Did the freedman have a gun?”

  “Hid it, most likely,” Swann dismissed easily.

  “And where would a freedman black get a gun?” Livesey went on. “Osgoode Moore told me such was against the law. Surely, someone had to have seen the fellow walking about armed before, and told you or the sheriff of it. By the way, just who was he, Constable Swann? I don’t recall you naming him.”

  “Name’s London. One of old man Ashe’s slaves. Freed him back in ’58.”

  “Why, London’s upwards of sixty, if he’s a day, and blind in one eye, sir!” Sergeant Howe exclaimed. “All he’s good for is crabbin’. Why, damme, everybody knows he’s meeker’n water.”