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

  “And Mr Tresmayne knew him, too,” Constable Swann replied, sulking a bit to have his notions questioned. “Mayhap that’s why he was able to get so close. Then even a man with one eye could shoot as well as any.”

  “How close?” Livesey asked.

  “Damn close, Mr Livesey.” Moseley shuddered, kneeling at the side of the body. “Lookee here. You boys recall how gritty we could get on the firin’ line, firelocks poppin’ in our cheeks for hours, ‘til they got so hot we had t’pee on ’em t’cool ’em off? We couldn’t scrub his face much as we’da liked. Lord save us, there ain’t much face left! Major Harry’s powder-burned ‘round where all them pistol balls struck him, peppery as a gunner’d get. Peppery as we got after awhile.”

  “Ahum,” Samuel said from the corner of the room where he had sat for the last half-hour as the attendants peered morbidly down at the ruin of Harry Tresmayne’s once-handsome and distinguished face. He was a young’un—the older men had dismissed his presence, but for sending him on errands to fetch and tote with the house slaves.

  “Father?” Samuel said, after being ignored a piece more.

  “Yes, Sam’l?” Livesey prompted, displaying patience.

  “Well, Mr Harry’s coat and things …” Samuel blushed. “Mr Moseley’s right. His shirt and waistcoat, I recall when you took them off him, they were charred with gunpowder. Little bitty holes like a moth’d been at ’em? And some half-spent powder smudges on his shirt. Had to have been real close, whoever shot him. Maybe no more than a sword-length? Maybe even closer?”

  “Bless you, Sam’l, I do believe you’re right, myboy!”

  Matthew Livesey found occasions to praise Samuel so rare that he made the most of this one, and Samuel straightened from his usual hunched, deferent posture, and positively glowed with unaccustomed delight.

  “Major Harry knew the bastard who kilt him, all right,” Moseley agreed, swallowing against a hiccup. “Let him get right up to ‘im.”

  “The Cuffy,” Constable Swann announced. “To rob him.”

  “To rob him, sir?” Matthew Livesey scoffed, a trifle more loudly and forcefully than he planned. Damn all this sociable rum, he sighed! “Of what, sir?” he continued in a mellower tone. “Here’s Harry’s watch and fob. Here’s his purse, full as it seemed when he left the Widow Yadkin’s last night. His silver snuffbox, his gilt shoe buckles and all… I see nothing of value missing.

  “Mebbe somebody come along an’ interrupted London, before he’d had a chance,” Swann replied, bristling a little. He was a vain coxcomb, and used to having his own way, and the last say.

  “Oh, horseshit, sir!” Zebedee Howe hooted. “Ya shoot a feller, twice! Wake the night, then run off when somebody comes along, then trot inta town to report it?”

  “And if London did it for loot, then why not go back to the … the body, and rifle the clothes after this alleged somebody passed by?” Livesey asked. “No one else reported shots, or finding Harry’s body, did they? No, sir. I do believe Mr Howe is correct. This London is a gentle old fellow, so I’m told. He had no gun. And he had none of Harry’s valuables on him. And he came direct to you to tell you of it. Now, does that sound like the work of a scheming murderer, sir?”

  “Well, now, sir …” Swann gargled, turning a pale purple as he contemplated how wrong he might be, how dead-set his friends and neighbors were on the black’s innocence—and how much work would be involved in finding the real perpetrator, work which might well be beyond his deductive powers. Swann was rich; that didn’t mean he was smart. His place was a sinecure so his wealthy compatriots could control as many county and borough offices as possible.

  “Oh, turn the poor bugger loose, will ya, now, Swann?” Zebedee Howe implored wearily. “Old London’s a simpleton. He’s lucky t’outsmart a crab’r two, but he’s no killer. Ashe’d never have made him free, else.”

  “‘Ere’s no tellin’ how many scoff-laws’r hauntin’ the Sound, yonder, Mr Swann,” Moseley said, getting back to his feetjust a trifle unsteadily. “Stede Bonnet an’ Blackbeard’s buccaneers, not fifty years back? Rogue Injuns? Highwaymen passin’ through, down the New Bern Road? ’tis a wild, lonely place, here t’the little islands an’ the sea, north t’the Holly Shelter swamps. Plenty o’ room fer all sorts o’ black-hearted rogues t’wander about.”

  “I’ll vouch for London, Constable,” Howe offered. “I’ll take him on at my place, to keep him close if you find out he’s the killer later. Though I can’t feature him doin’ such, never in a million years. Let the poor ol’ feller out, why don’t ya?”

  “That was well said, Mr Howe,” Livesey congratulated him. “A most Christian act.”

  “Well, thankee, Mr Livesey.” Howe flushed red. “Weren’t no more nor less’n I’d do for anyone, white or black.”

  “Well,” Constable Swann dithered, gnawing pensive on a knuckle. “Right, then. You take London over t’your place, Howe. I’ll remand ‘im to ye ‘til this is solved. Now, though … what’ll we do with … Harry?” he asked, gesturing at the corpse. “Dress him? Orjust wrap him in a windin’ sheet?”

  “Dress him,” Moseley insisted. “In ‘is uniform, if ya ask me! Let ‘im go inta the ground the brave soldier he was, I say!”

  “His face, though …” Howe grimaced, tossing off a last gulp of hock. “Town’s full, and lots o’ people’ll turn out for the buryin’. Folks’ll wish t’see the body. Better a closed casket, consid’rin’ …?”

  “Uniform, but with a cloth coverlet over his face, perhaps sirs?” Livesey suggested. “So they remember him the way he was, not…” He darted his eyes away queasily. Plum-colored bruises, reddish-black at the center of the many wounds, revulsed him. Livesey more than most wanted to remember Harry Tresmayne the way he’d last seen him, too. There was no face. And the mortal remains left in a hideous relict were now puffy and mottled with rapid decomposition.

  Their sad discussion was interrupted by the rattle and clop of a carriage outside, the squeaking and groaning of axles and straps.

  “That’ll be the coffin comin’ from Taneyhill’s, I ‘spect,” the constable said, going to the door to peer out. He blanched, shut the door, and spun to face them, panic-stricken. “Cover ‘im! Cover ‘im, quick, boys! It’s Osgoode Moore, backwith the widow. Good Christ A’mighty, Georgina’s here!”

  Chapter 6

  THERE HAD NOT been room in little St James’s for all of the mourners, so the doors had been left open, and the vicar, Reverend McDowell, had had to speak up louder than usual. The square little building as yet had no steeple, no belfry but for a ship’s bell in a cradle resembling the public stocks, low to the ground. It had been started years before, but still was not finished. The well-to-do of the parish were seated in oak “double-pew” boxes by families; the rest took crude benches in the back, or clustered by the gaping openings that faced Market Street, the river, or the graveyard. Those better-off up from Brunswick, pledged to even tinier St Philip’s, sat in carriages or heavy farm wagons outside, fanning off the heat, amid the common folk who’d walked to town.

  Samuel and Bess stood on the western lawn, unable to get a seat on the back benches, too poor yet for the purchase of their own pew box. They could see their father, though, up front by the immediate family, dressed in his dark blue and buff colored captain-of-militia uniform, which now hung on his frame like sacking. Too unsteady to lift the coffin as the other militia pallbearers could, he was to bear Harry’s sword to the grave.

  “Thought we’d be early enough for a seat, anyways,” Samuel said, choking in his only formal suit of snuff-colored broadcloth. “They sure turned out early.”

  “And so many, too,” Bess muttered back, pivoting slowly to eye the large crowd. She spotted many faces she’d seen the night before, when she’d gone to Georgina’s house to help at the lying-in.

  Cape Fear funerals were so different from Philadelphia ones, Bess thought. The larger cities made knowing neighbors harder. But here in the South, everyone was a neighbor,
expected to “do” for the grieving family. She’d whipped up a hurried sweet-potato pie, a skillet of corn bread and a platter of crab cakes the afternoon before, soon as she had gotten home. It was simply the expected thing to do. Compared to some of the dishes she’d seen, fetched in by friends and neighbors with slave-help in their kitchens, her offering might have looked meager. But, she comforted herself, it was the thought that counted. This wasn’t charity, she assured herself, and could not ever be taken for it. This was neighborliness: to fill a house with food or drink, so the survivors would not have to bother with mundane things, like cooking, for awhile. They would take care of all earthly cares, to spare the bereft so they could get on with their grieving, and the cares of Heaven.

  Grim-faced older women had come running—widows themselves, or weary matrons who had lost beloved children and knew all about grief. They’d commandeered the house and its order from the mistress. They’d flung themselves with sad practice into arranging chairs, or borrowing from others if there weren’t enough. The hearth-fires had been slaked, the clocks stopped and draped in black. Mirrors and framed portraits were covered. They’d brought daughters or servants to help with last-minute cleaning, took charge of the house slaves, sent their menfolk or boy children off on errands for whatever was needful, so the house would be prepared to fend for itself, on at least a week’s largesse in store. And handle enough left over for those who would come—would surely come—to view the newly dead, and make their shame-faced contact and pay their respects to the bereaved, and sigh most guiltily to be glad it wasn’t any of theirs who had been taken—not this time.

  The gentry would surely come. But there were others, as well, who’d flock to town to note the passing of one so famous and beloved. Small land owners, tradesmen and hardscrabblers, dockmen and laborers, and their families, who didn’t really know Harry, but had known of him, and had respected him.

  Most were English-born; people who’d been indentured long ago and sold into temporary bondage sometimes as harsh as any the Negroes suffered, far back in the piney woods. A few “transported for life” as criminals who’d fallen shy of being hung—which was the fate of most in the Mother Country—who slaved and scratched a meager living from that trackless wilderness, inland. There was a sprinkling of the defiantly Highland Scots, dressed in a polyglot of tartans and wide, slanted bonnets sporting hackle or wing feathers, with sporrans at their waists, skean dubhs in their hose-tops: those who’d been transported after the Rising of’45, come in chains to a new world; or those who’d fled over the seas after giving their Bible-Oath to their conquerors; and their kin who’d followed them to unlimited horizons and larger acreage. It was a murmuring, sometimes roughly guttural, sometimes musical, Gaelic they spoke.

  And even more Irish, or Scotch-Irish, clad in rough home-spun, and flax and hemp. Some even garbed in deer leather whose least words sang with Cymric rhythms, over from the nearby Welsh Tract from South Carolina. A few freedmen Negroes, here and there, too. But for the most part, these backwoods folk, these near-town folk, were not slave owners, or at best had only one or two. Most depended on their own sweat, or that of their many children.

  Bess had been amazed to see these work-worn, sun-baked, dry-as-apple-face-doll folk come shyly to that stately house the night before to queue up and wait for hours for one last look at the legendary gentleman, Harry Tresmayne.

  There, that old man yonder! she noted. He’d touched the wood of the coffin on its bier with a tentative hand, a hand gnarled by a lifetime of hard labor, ungainly and nut-brown; and as shyly as if it had been one of his own who’d passed over. There, another fellow, in poor-fit home-spun, who’d gone to bow to Aunt Georgina and nod, crying real tears as he’d mumbled out a barely intelligible, raw, unpolished, but genuinely heartfelt expression of loss to her.

  Bess noted there were few of the true aristocrats present, not in the outside crowd, at least, or listening from the rare, well-made carriages. Some had come to the house to pay grudging respects. Oh, but they were a pride-ful, testy and irascible lot, and Harry Tresmayne and his clique of younger men had gored them sore, been their bug-a-bear! They were a thin-skinned, touchy folk, jealous of their honor and privileges as the first, and best-off, settlers. And held their grudges, Bess sighed, with the tenacity of wild Indians.

  “Even unto the grave,” Bess murmured to herself.

  “Hhhh?” Samuel asked, drawn by her whisper from ogling those prettier of the common-folks’ daughters crowded close about them.

  “Nothing.” Bess shrugged. It was politics; it was men’s doings, and there was nothing a mere woman could ever hope to say about it.

  Though it was an early morning service, it was already humid, and warm. It had rained the night before—merely a passing drizzle—now and again, and the damp churchyard and lawn almost steamed in the springtime heat. A fitful breeze, which was much cooler, now and then came from the southeast, off the ocean. She looked heavenward, envying the birds who could be reached by that breeze, the pine tops and swaying oak boughs in the forests close at hand. Thankfully it was clear, the sky such an incredible hue of blue, set off by high-piled banks of stark white clouds which loomed over the distant ocean, over the sounds to the south and east. Farther back in the Piedmont, higher up and closer to God, she’d heard some settlers who hailed from there call it Carolinas Blue. As if that hue presaged a benign and merciful God’s blessing on all who walked beneath it. Bess hoped that was so. Her father was worried, his brow furrowed far beyond his grief—worried about what Uncle Harry’s murder boded. They might soon be in need of a blessing.

  “Into Thy hands, O Merciful Saviour, we commend Thy Servant … Harry Tresmayne. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech Thee, a sheep of Thine own fold, a lamb of Thine own flock, a sinner of Thine own redeeming …” the elderly Rev. McDowell pronounced in sad conclusion, his voice soft and echo-ey from within.

  Now what’s so funny ‘bout that? Bess wondered. She flushed hot with indignation as she heard the faint sniggers from the crowd, which was pressed so hound-warm around them. She turned her head to peer, to see both men and women wearing sly smiles, half-shaded and shared under wide brims; waggish looks, thrown cutty-eyed.

  “… let us go forth, in the name of Christ!” the vicar ended.

  “Thanks be to God,” Bess murmured, as she crossed herself with the rest. A great many of the mourners of the humbler sort were satisfied that they’d seen their champion into the ground, proper, and were beginning to thin out, to wander away as the burial party left church behind the coffin, for a new-dug grave. Her father marched behind the coffin, sheathed sword held level. Behind him came Osgoode Moore and Thomas Lakey, to either side of the widow Georgina.

  “She’s bearing up main-well,” Samuel whispered as they moved closer, down into the graveyard.

  “Poor lady.” Bess nodded. Georgina was at least fifteen years younger than Harry had been, as were her escorts. Harry Tresmayne’s first wife had been nearer his age, nearer their father’s age, but she had died in ’57, two years after they’d moved to the Cape Fear. Once home from the War, Tresmayne had married Georgina in ’60.

  Bess had been to the wedding, since Harry had been like a distant uncle to her. They had made a most handsome couple.

  Grieving though she was, Georgina Tresmayne was still a most handsome woman. She was slim and trim, poised and elegant, with a languid, willowy demeanor, cool green eyes and golden hair. In her dark blue sack gown, bereft of white lace or satin trim for the sad occasion, and a dark hat and veil, she was still poignantly lovely as she walked bravely to the grave, not depending on the offered arms of Moore or Lakey, almost crushing her small prayer book in trembling hands.

  The graveside service was mercifully brief: a spoken prayer, the sandy soil cast down as uniformed militiamen lowered the coffin, and the committal. They recited The Lord’s Prayer, and Rev. McDowell read the shortest blessing before dismissing them. Bess and Samuel waited for their father tojoin them as the thinner cro
wd of mourners milled past them.

  “Timin’s ev’rything, don’t ye know,” one of the younger sons of the Ramseurs, who held acres below Wilmington on the long cape-land near Myrtle Grove, said with a sly snigger to his wife as they strolled past. “He couldn’t have had a larger audience if he’d had his heart set on’t. Theatrical to the end, he was.”

  “Sir,” Mr John Burgwyn interrupted, full of pique. “Slur the dead, would you, sir?” John and Margaret Burgwyn farmed The Hermitage near her father’s plantation, Castle Haynes, up north. Burgwyn was the most respected, the most civilized, man New Hanover County could boast, and usually showed the world a genteel and unruffled face.

  “Mr Burgwyn, sir.” The Ramseur scion blushed. “I find it most like poor Mr Tresmayne’s gestures in life, that he passed over at a time when most of the Quality would be in town to attend the funeral.” Blushing or not (most likely at getting caught being snide, Bess thought) Ramseur was bristling with indignation at being called down.

  “And I would expect… sir… that Harry Tresmayne’s passing would have brought out the same numbers, were he interred in a full-blown hurricane,” Burgwyn replied in an arch tone, the sort of high-nosed pose only a graduate of Eton and Oxford could manage. It was said in a very calm voice, but it pricked like a rank ofbayonets.

  “For shame!” Bess found herself saying, and almost gulped in fright at her boldness. Damme, she thought; I’ve gone and done it again! Not only could she not manage “languid,” she had difficulty with keeping properly demure. And silent in men’s affairs.

  “I believe Mistress Livesey speaks for all of us,” Margaret Burgwyn added. “And deuced well said, too. For shame, sir, indeed.”

  “Errp,” Young Ramseur rejoined at last. “I… hahumm! Mean no disrespect, I assure you, ma’am … sir. You will excuse us… ?”

  “Compliments to your father, sir,” Mr Burgwyn said in parting, lifting his hat and making the slightest “leg” for a departing bow as the Ramseurs fled, most un-genteelly and un-languidly.