“But Deklan is deposed, and you’re still confined to the house.”
“Deacon Hollingshead is as powerful as ever, and a Writ of Ecclesiastical Quarantine isn’t so easily suborned. Once issued, it tends to stick. We’re only here, and not in jail along with all the other Found-Ins, because I am a Comstock, and Calyxa is pregnant.” [The law preventing pregnant women from being jailed on suspicion, or prosecuted for proven crimes, dates from the era of the Plague of Infertility. For many years after the Fall of the Cities it seemed as if our human numbers might drop below some critical level—that we would become an extinct species, as so many other species had become extinct during the Efflorescence of Oil. That threat has receded, of course—our numbers are steadily increasing—but the law, along with a host of other laws and customs protecting female virtue and fertility, remains firmly in effect.]
“Julian will fix it,” I said.
“I expect he will,” Mrs. Comstock said, “once he learns about it. He won’t be easily reached, however, now that he’s installed in the Executive Palace.”
“I can find a way to him.”
“I expect it won’t be necessary. Julian has never failed to join me for Christmas, if he was in Manhattan , and I’m sure he’ll send for me this year. In any case Calyxa isn’t due until April, which means Hollingshead can’t act until then. No, Adam, I have another commission for you, if you’ll accept it.”
I could hardly refuse, though this was all a surprise to me, and disorienting in its effects.
“My commission,” Mrs. Comstock said, “involves Sam Godwin.”
“Sam! I haven’t seen Sam since Labrador. He was sent home with an injury. We asked after him at the military hospital in St. John’s , but he had already passed through, bound for New York. He must have arrived long since—have you seen him? I would like to shake his hand again.”
His remaining hand, I thought, but did not say.
“I made similar inquiries,” Mrs. Comstock told me, “and I know he arrived safely in the city, and spent some days at the Soldier’s Rest, but he was released—and promptly vanished, or at least hasn’t bothered to contact me. This isn’t like him, Adam.”
I agreed that it was not. “Perhaps I can find him, and solve the mystery.”
“I hoped you would say so.” She beamed. “Thank you, Adam Hazzard.”
“You don’t need to thank me. But what about the guard on the door? He’ll be back before long, and I can’t stay.”
“Never mind the guard—he’s harmless, and as prisons go this one is comfortable enough.”
“Once I’m out of the house it might be difficult to get back in,” I said. I didn’t like the idea that I might be barred from my marital chamber for some indefinite time. It was cruel, if not unusual.
“Stay at the Soldier’s Rest, if you have to, and say your goodbyes to Calyxa for the time being. We’ll be together again on Christmas Day, I’m sure of it.”
“Welcome home, Adam,” Calyxa added, and she embraced me again; and we exchanged intimacies once more, until Mrs. Comstock indicated by the clearing of her throat and the rolling of her eyes that the time had come for me to leave—too soon!
The guard was returning as I came down the steps into the damp December air. “Thank you, Colonel,” he said. “That was a fine meal, much appreciated, and Merry Christmas to you.”
“Keep a firm watch on the house,” I told him. “Be sure you don’t let any villains in.”
* * *
I passed the night at the Soldier’s Rest near the docks. My rank entitled me to better accommodations than a common soldier would have received, though in practice this was just a cubicle containing a yellow mattress and a threadbare blanket. The bed and the blanket were infested with fleas, who took the opportunity to cavort at will and dine at leisure; and I slept fretfully, and hurried out as soon as the sky grew light.
Sam Godwin was in New York , or recently had been. That much was an established fact. I went to the Regimental headquarters, and the clerk there showed me a ledger which said Sam had been discharged as a wounded veteran. It listed a New York address where mail could be forwarded.
The address was in a disreputable neighborhood, not far from the Immigrant District. I went there directly. The houses in that location were mainly wooden frame structures crowded shoulder-to-shoulder, most of them divided up into rooms for rent, with here and there a tavern or hemp shop or gambling den in which degraded men could indulge their vices without traveling very far out of their way. Smoke poured from every chimney, for the day was cold. The thought of all those coal-grates and wood-stoves made me wary of fire, for these buildings were little more than tinder and brown paper, putting on airs of architecture.
I knocked at a ramshackle door, and after a while an elderly woman with pox scars on her face answered. When I asked for Sam Godwin she said, “I don’t know any.” But I pressed her with a description, and proclaimed him as my friend; and she relented and showed me to an upstairs room at the end of a lightless corridor.
The door was a little ajar. I pushed it and entered, calling out Sam’s name.
He was asleep on a narrow bed no better than the one I had occupied during the night. He wore a ragged shirt, and he had pulled an old overcoat around himself to serve as a blanket. His face was drawn and haggard even in repose. His hair was thinner than I remembered it, his beard unkempt and almost entirely white. His left arm was curled under him and pressed against his belly as if to shelter his missing hand.
There was a bottle on the floor beside him, and on the battered night-table a long-stemmed pipe, and a wooden box with a few crumbs of dried hemp flowers in it.
I sat on the bed beside him. “Sam,” I said. “Sam, wake up if you can hear me. It’s me—it’s Adam Hazzard.”
A few repetitions of this and he began to stir. He groaned, and turned on his back, and sighed, and opened one eye warily, as if he anticipated bad news. At last the light of sensibility seemed to penetrate all the way to his inward parts, and he struggled to sit up. “Adam?” he mumbled in a hoarse voice.
“Yes, Sam, it’s me.”
“Adam—oh! I thought for a moment we were back in Labrador—is that the sound of shelling ?”
“No, Sam. This is New York City , though not a very attractive neighborhood of it. The sound is just freight wagons out on the street.”
He stared at me afresh as comprehension dawned. “Adam! But I left you at Striver. You and Julian. The Basilisk carried me away…”
“It carried us away, too, Sam, a few weeks later, and after considerable tragedy and fuss.”
“I thought—”
“What?”
“The situation was hopeless. Striver was meant to be a slaughterhouse, and seemed to serve the purpose. I thought—”
“That we had been killed?”
“That you had been killed, yes, and that I had failed in my commission of protecting Julian.”
“Is that why you’re living in these circumstances? But we’re alive, Sam!—I’m alive, and Julian is alive. Have you looked at a newspaper lately?”
He shook his head. “Not for… weeks, I suppose. You mean to say Admiral Fairfield reinforced the divisions at Striver?”
“I mean to say that Deklan Comstock is no longer President! If you had poked your head out of this ugly den you might have seen the Army of the Laurentians marching to depose him!”
Sam, in his amazement, stood up suddenly, and then blushed, as he didn’t have his trousers on. He took a crumpled pair from the floor and buttoned himself into respectability with a shaking hand. “Damn me for my inattention!
Deklan Comstock deposed!
And have they installed a new President?”