The Bishop's Pawn (19 page)

At this point the bells jangled and a
well-heeled gentleman entered.

“Ah, Mr. Throckmorton,” Burchill said with a
failed effort at affability.

“I’ll just let myself out the back way,” Cobb
said quickly, and before Burchill could stop him, he stepped
through a flimsy door and found himself in the silversmith’s
repair-shop. Where Matthew Burchill was hunched over a dented
tureen.

“Matthew?” Cobb said softly.

The lad had been concentrating so hard on his
work that he had not heard Cobb come in. Now he looked up –
startled, then vaguely fearful. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Cobb,” he said
tonelessly. “Does father know you’re here?”

“He does, Matthew. I’ve come to ask a few
questions fer Dr. Withers an’ the inquest he’ll be holdin’ inta the
verger’s suicide.” Cobb was pleased with this harmless fib, though
he wished he did not need to use it on a young man who, despite the
abuse and confinement he habitually suffered, was still trying to
view the world through innocent and unjaded eyes.

“I was sorry to hear about Mr. Dougherty and
poor Reuben Epp.” Matthew placed the damaged tureen tenderly on his
bench.

“Did you know him?”

“A little.”

“You talked to him when you went to
church?’

“And the times he came to build the shelves
over there and fix up the shed out back.”

Cobb did his best not to show his surprise –
and delight. “Recently?” he said.

“A month or so ago was the last time he
helped us out. But he didn’t talk much. I gather he had no family
at all.”

“Did your father pay him in cash?”

Matthew looked suddenly wary. “Father would
not tell me about that sort of thing.”

“Naturally.”

“I’ve got to get back to this repair,”
Matthew said, uncertain whether he should be proud of the fact or
embarrassed by it.

“Well, thanks. You been a help.”

As Matthew’s tap-tapping resumed, Cobb walked
back to the door that led to the retail section of the business. He
paused and waited until he heard the doorbell jangle, then abruptly
re-entered the shop proper.

Burchill was alone. “I thought you’d gone!”
he said sharply to Cobb. “If you’ve been keepin’ Matthew away from
his work, I’ll complain to Wilfrid Sturges about it.”

“We got more important things to discuss,”
Cobb said with quiet menace. “Like your lyin’ to me.”

Burchill placed his large hands on the
counter and leaned forward like a baited bear. “You say that again
and I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life – constable or no
constable!”

“Reuben Epp was here a month ago, buildin’
shelves. You an’ him were chummy as two doves. So don’t tell me you
ain’t been lyin’.”

Burchill glared at the door to the
workroom.

“I just asked the lad – an’ bein’ an honest
son of his father, he told me the truth. You gonna beat him fer
that?”

“I don’t beat my son! I don’t have to!”

“So why did you not mention you was chummy
with Epp?”

“I wasn’t chummy with him! He came and did
his work and went home or off to the bootlegger’s to squander his
earnings. We spoke not a dozen words the whole time. And I
certainly didn’t persuade him to murder Dougherty.”

“You paid him in cash?”

“A few shillings. When he was finished – and
he was a good carpenter – I walked up to Irishtown and paid off his
debt to Swampy Sam.”

Well, Cobb thought, they may not have been
chums, but Epp was clearly in a position to be manipulated by
Burchill. And he
had
lied, however he chose to rationalize
the matter. Cobb now recalled an item in the notes Marc had made on
the case: Burchill could have had a purely personal motive. If so,
that possibility and his outright lie might be sufficient to get a
warrant to turn this place over.

“I believe you had a personal reason fer
killin’ a man you already hated,” he said, staring straight at
Burchill.

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“The fact that young Matthew was secretly
courtin’ Mr. Dougherty’s ward, Celia, must’ve driven you near mad.”
Cobb stepped back and waited for the effect of this bombshell.

He didn’t have to wait long. “What in hell do
you mean? My son never leaves this shop without my permission!”

“Well, he snuck out last Sunday while you was
in church. Celia Langford met him – alone – in a little shed up on
– ”

“Jumpin’ Jesus! I’ll kill the
son-of-a-bitch!”

Cobb thought Burchill’s eyes were going to
pop out of their sockets. His lips began to quiver and his beard
shook like Jehovah’s in a righteous rage. Ignoring Cobb, he spun
about and lurched into the workroom with a thunderous slamming of
the flimsy door.

Cobb waited. There was no immediate violence.
Not even a raised voice. But the low murmuring was fraught with
paternal anger and filial shame. Cobb slipped out onto King Street.
On the plus side, he had proven to himself that Bartholomew
Burchill did
not
have a personal motive for having Dougherty
murdered. On the negative side, he had complicated young Matthew’s
already complicated life and unthinkingly interfered with Celia’s
well-being to boot.

Maybe there
was
something to this
business of tact after all.

***

On Thursday morning Cobb hitched a ride up Yonge
Street to Potters Field, beyond Lot Street at the city limits,
where Reverend David Chalmers spoke a few simple words over the
pine coffin of Reuben Epp who, until the double tragedy of Monday
last, had served His Maker humbly and without complaint. More than
two dozen people were there to witness the interment, having braved
the rigours of a mud-slicked road with ruts as deep as a
gentleman’s boot. Whether all were there to mourn was a moot
question, but Cobb could see no-one who didn’t belong. No
mysterious, long-lost relative stepped forward to claim kinship
with the disgraced verger.

Later that day Cobb got around to checking
out Everett Stoneham’s alibi with the cousins he had claimed would
back him up. And they did, cheerfully. Too cheerfully? Well, how
could one tell without the rack or a decent thumbscrew? After
dictating his notes (kept in his head) to Gussie French, Cobb went
into the Chief’s office and reported that he had run down all the
leads they had developed and had thought might be productive, and
had drawn a blank. Unless Marc and Brodie came up with something
useful in New York City or unless Nestor Peck produced new
information about Epp’s movements on Sunday afternoon and evening
(he had not appeared at Evensong, Marc had been told by Myrtle
Welsh), the search for an accomplice was headed for a dead-end.

“Maybe the bugger did it on his own,” Cobb
muttered to himself on the way out.

But he didn’t believe it.

FIFTEEN

It was late Sunday afternoon when the steamer
Constitution
approached Manhattan Island, urged on by the
Hudson River current and the first tug of the ebb-tide from the sea
beyond. Marc and Brodie stood at the railing of the foredeck.
Despite their fatigue and days spent without a decent wash, a
change of clothes or palatable food, they were excited, taut with
expectation. The setting sun on their right was washing across the
wide, rippling river and bathing the cityscape – which rose up from
the island like a natural extension of its splendour – in a golden,
gently purpling glow. By languid degrees through the low sea-mist,
its form and detail materialized: wharves, piers, docking berths,
and dozens of ships, boats and barges idling amongst them.
Bright-sailed or funnelled, they rocked and sidled as complacent as
waterfowl in their element. Behind them, the silhouette of the
city’s buildings and churches stretched upward, as if to seize the
last radiance of the day. To Marc the scene was reminiscent of a
Turner painting that he had seen in London years before – seducing
the viewer with its mysterious, form-dissolving luminosity.

Beside him, Brodie said, “It’s not this
beautiful close-up.”

***

Their journey along the Erie Canal had been long and
arduous, but nonetheless had produced its own share of wonders.
Marc and Brodie had reached Buffalo just past noon on Thursday.
They were assured that, if they wished to wait for a few hours, a
craft with accommodation suitable for two gentlemen could be had –
for ready cash. But as every hour was critical to their plans, they
took passage on the first available vessel, a well-travelled barge
hauling cowhides that had originated in Chicago and were destined
for France. The single cabin in the middle of the barge had several
compartments, and one of these was assigned to the paying
passengers. Food and refreshment could be picked up on the go.
Drawn along the twenty-foot width of this engineering marvel by
mules and horses – changed at intervals – the barge made all of
five miles per hour. But it never stopped, except to be lowered
like a de-levitating table down one of the several dozen locks on
route to the Hudson River three hundred and seventy-five meandering
miles away. Marc and Brodie slept in the cabin, bought their meals
at a makeshift inn or tavern beside a lock, and took their exercise
by occasionally getting off and treading the muddy towpath, often
at a faster pace than that of the pitiable beasts of burden.

Beth had given Marc her copy of
The
Pickwick Papers
to amuse him, with instructions to read the
chapters on the behaviour of barristers in Mr. Pickwick’s trial for
breach of promise. But Marc had found little time for reading. The
scenery on either side of him was awe-inspiring and ever-changing.
Virgin forests, rolling hills, near-mountains, impressively-cleared
farms, dazzling lakes, and burgeoning towns sprung up to feed on
the wealth that DeWitt Clinton’s canal had wrought: Syracuse, Rome,
Utica, Troy. Here, rugged woodlands and pastoral farms abruptly
gave way to smokestacks and warehouses and shantytowns and the
hilltop mansions of the freshly, deservedly rich. For the first
time Marc was seeing the miracle that was America: the fruits of
its republican fervour, its jettison of the cumbersome and
crippling past.

And over the course of the
three-and-a-half-day journey, Marc and Brodie exchanged
confidences.

With utmost tact, Marc had asked Brodie what
he remembered of his guardian’s public life in New York City. He
had been just seventeen at the time of the sudden decampment, the
young man replied readily, even enthusiastically. He wanted, it
seemed, to keep his uncle alive in his life by talking about him.
Uncle was scrupulous, Brodie said, about keeping his courtroom
antics, with their attendant notoriety, separate from the quiet,
domestic life he led at home – with them. When Dennis Langford’s
wife had died giving birth to Celia, Langford invited his law
partner to live with him and his children. A new wing was added to
the family home on the corner of Broome and Mercer Streets, a block
away from Broadway. The barristers’ offices comprised the three
rooms facing Broome Street, but Celia and Brodie rarely set foot in
them. The law practice of Langford and Dougherty began to thrive as
never before.

Langford was the researcher
par
excellence
, who pored over legal tomes to mine the nuggets that
the theatrical and brilliant Dougherty could deploy in the criminal
and civil courts of the city and state. Paradoxically, once out of
court Dougherty was awkward with people, shy even, disabled as it
were by his overweening intellect and his searing insight into the
foibles and casual cruelties of his clients and their “enemies.” On
the other hand, Dennis Langford, bookworm that he was, found
himself at ease in social situations. Some of this natural,
disarming charm had obviously been handed on to his son and helped
to explain, for Marc, Brodie’s success at the Commercial Bank,
where callow Yankee scions were not exactly embraced.

Celia and Brodie had been raised by a nanny
and tutored at home before being sent to private school as they
approached puberty. Dougherty, whom they saw every day at mealtimes
and who accompanied them on picnics and promenades, encouraged them
to call him “uncle.” But four years ago, in 1835, Dennis Langford
had died of pneumonia, and an idyllic childhood ended without
warning.

“That’s when your uncle became your official
guardian?” Marc said.

“Yes. My father wished it, and I don’t think
Celia and I could have survived without him there in our lives – as
he had been as long as we could remember. Uncle inherited the
business and was made trustee of our legacy. Now we have it all.
But not him.”

Some time later, Marc nudged the story back
towards Dougherty’s career. “Did your uncle make enemies? People
who might wish him harm?”

Brodie gave Marc a wry smile. “He was a
lawyer in New York.”

Brodie then answered the question indirectly
by filling Marc in on the fractious politics of that great city.
After his father’s death, Brodie was sent to an up-state prep
school. There he hobnobbed willy-nilly with the sons of the
aristocracy and the
nouveau riche
. The former, Brodie
explained, were known as Whigs or Federalists, and were tantamount
to English Tories, bent on perpetuating their privileges and
maintaining centralized control in government. The new middle class
called themselves Republicans or Republican-Democrats, and demanded
states’ supremacy, local control, and the unfettered right to make
themselves rich.

But in New York City itself, he said,
candidates for Congress, the State Legislature or the Common
Council of the municipality were predetermined and guaranteed
election by the powerful members of Tammany Hall. The latter was
nominally a fraternal organization – the Society of St. Tammany or
the Columbian Order – but had evolved into the ruling clique of the
middle class, championing the worker in public forums but in fact
exploiting him privately for their own ends. Their corruption was
legion. Even though he had been only fifteen years old, Brodie
learned of these sad truths by listening to the boasts and
arguments of his classmates. He heard tales of men whose careers
had been crushed because they had defied Tammany Hall, their
property auctioned off and their families thrown into the poorhouse
or debtor’s prison. This was the dangerous and unpredictable world
that his father and uncle had taken such pains to shield him
from.