“Did you, then, plan to imprison him at Chepstow in order to do there what you weren’t able to do in Baby’s orchard?”
“Oh, no. I had only two thoughts. First I wanted to demonstrate, to all those who doubted, that a forty-seven-year-old dry-goods merchant was worthy of donning the tunic of a British officer by giving a despised enemy commander all the courtesies due him without prejudice. And I wanted to keep him where I could see him: he was as conniving and heartless as a starved pack rat.”
“You extended simple courtesies; he made insatiable demands.”
“Correct. He didn’t have to say a word about the fort or the arms cache or the alleged affair with Almeda, but he let me know that he had the coded letter in his possession and was poised to destroy me. I didn’t believe him at first, but he wrote out an exact copy in his own hand, right in front of me.”
Marc felt strangely reassured by Stanhope’s revelations but also disquieted that he may have seriously misread the man. His head swam with fresh questions: Had he realized how far his daughter had been involved with Coltrane? Did he know that Almeda had very likely slept with Coltrane in Detroit? Did he order Bostwick to leave one pistol blank or two? Would he have allowed Billy McNair to be condemned in his place? But the cutter had reached Chepstow. On the way back, Marc intended to press for answers.
The colonel opened the front door himself. No butler or maid greeted them in the dark vestibule.
“Almeda and Patricia will be in the sewing room,” he said to Marc, and hesitated.
“Please, go right ahead. I’ll wait for you here on the bench.” So the women had been forewarned, it seemed.
The colonel nodded, took a deep breath, and eased the door partly open. He stepped inside and shut it behind him. Marc waited and listened. Above the colonel’s masculine tones, the higher voice of Almeda could be heard, then the softer, more callow sound of Patricia. There were no cries, no weeping, not a word that could be described as raised in anger or sorrow or recrimination. It seemed to Marc to be the sort of hushed murmuring of long acquaintances in the far pews of a church or the back rows of a burial service, not wanting their intimacy to obtrude or offend. Ten minutes passed. Still, no maid bustled about upstairs or in the kitchens beyond the hall. No light showed beneath the door to the butler’s den.
Finally, the sewing room door opened and the colonel came out, again closing the door firmly behind him. He was resplendent in his uniform. The red jacket with the green-and-gold militia facing had been freshly pressed. The leather belting gleamed, even in the gloom of the hallway. Someone had lovingly polished the battle-stiffened boots. Possessed now of a quiet dignity and devoid of the vanity that had contributed so much to his downfall, the colonel walked up to Marc and said simply, “My cap is in the study.” His gaze locked onto Marc’s, but the thoughts behind it were unreadable.
Marc nodded, the colonel’s lips twitched as if anticipating a smile, and then he spun about and marched into his study at the far end of the hall. Marc sat bolt upright on the bench. Not ten seconds elapsed before he heard the plosive snap of a pistol shot. What surprised him was not that it had happened, but that he had done nothing to stop it.
“They’re not going blame you for it, I hope?” Beth asked anxiously.
“No, darling, there’s no chance of that. The whole sad business was prearranged between Thorpe and the colonel at the Court House. A message was sent to Chepstow to alert the women. I was merely the facilitator.”
“But the magistrate used you-”
“He knew, alas, that I still had more of the soldier left in me than I myself realized,” Marc replied. “Anyway, no one, including the magistrate and the governor, wanted to see our Pelee Island Patriot dangling from a gibbet in the Court House square.”
They were snuggled deep into the goose-feather duvet, relying upon it, the fading ripple of the warming pan, and their own shared body heat to keep out the chill of the room. It was after eleven, but neither was in the mood for sleep.
Hoping to banish that ghastly image, Marc said, “Tell me about the celebration at the Baldwins’.”
Beth gave him the highlights, then added, “I got a chance to talk with Celia Langford too.”
“Oh, good. I’m just surprised the great man let her out of his sight.”
“It’s more than that now. She told me her uncle’s decided to send her to Miss Tyson’s Academy to continue the schooling that was interrupted when they had to leave New York.”
“Splendid. I was, frankly, very concerned about her being stuck in that house day and night with a man like Dougherty.”
“You don’t have to dance around it for my sake, love. I’m not a schoolgirl.”
“Well, then, let’s say I’m glad she’s going to get out into the world and have the opportunity to meet some of the young men and women her so-called uncle seems to be keeping her from.”
“Sometimes an uncle can be as good as a father,” Beth said softly.
Marc leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Thank you, I deserved that.” How easily he had forgotten that his own late Uncle Jabez had served lovingly as his adoptive father for all the years he could remember. And that outward appearances can be misleading.
“And you don’t have to worry about Mr. Dougherty pestering her.”
“How would you know about that?” Marc said quickly, startled at his own prudery.
“Celia told me, in so many words, that her uncle preferred the other sex.”
Marc tried to take this in, astonished that Beth would have the least inkling of such sordid social taboos and even more that Celia Langford would confide them to a perfect stranger. However, he had more than once underestimated Beth’s uncanny ability to gain the trust of others and more than once sworn never to repeat the error.
He recovered sufficiently to reply, “Well, then, that may explain his being drummed out of New York society and the legal fraternity. The sin was too horrible to air in public, so instead of disbarring him, they just put him and his belongings on a donkey cart and pushed it towards the border.”
“And the way Brodie Langford was ogling the Baldwins’ maid, I don’t think you need worry there either.”
The moonlight, playing with a set of fickle clouds, shimmered and shied on the coverlet. Though sufficiently warm by now, Marc and Beth made no move to separate.
After a while, Beth asked, “So the murder of Coltrane had nothing to do with adultery?”
Marc’s thoughts had likewise returned to the courtroom drama and its enigmatic central players. “Not directly. The truth turned out to be a lot less romantic. Stanhope had spent most of his sparse capital outfitting himself with uniforms and expensive horses and subsidizing the regiment he had created in order to feed his vanity. The Commercial Bank was threatening to call his loans, so that not only his four warehouses but Chepstow itself was at risk. Broderick Langford gave us the gist of this over the noon hour. Together with the decoded ‘love letter,’ it pointed straight to Stanhope’s desperate need of cash to stave off bankruptcy and carry on soldiering.”
“But how did he actually convince Almeda to write to Coltrane saying she loved him?”
“I’m guessing here, but when Coltrane’s offer of money was agreed to by the colonel, he needed a safe way to confirm the transaction. The map itself was vague enough unless you knew the context. Billy, for example, thought it was a battle plan when he saw it. But I suspect that while the colonel was pondering this problem, Almeda received Coltrane’s letter to her.”
“And she had problems of her own.”