Curse Of The Blue Tattoo Part 16

She takes a breath and tries to compose herself. "Do not call me 'Miss Amy,'" she says. "You sound like a slave when you do that. Call me Miss. Call me Amy. But do not call me Miss Amy."

"I will call you Amy as soon as we step off the school grounds, Miss," I say. "When I am in the school I am Jacky Faber, Chambermaid, but when I step off the grounds I am Freebooter Jacky Faber, Seaman, Musician, and Wild Rover."

"There," I say as I step onto Beacon Street. "Amy "

We cross Beacon Street and head across the Common. We wade through a flock of black-faced sheep, pus.h.i.+ng their fat b.u.t.ts out of the way as we go. At least she is easy with animals. She did say she was a farm girl.

We come out onto Common Street and head down through the city, first on Winter Street, then Marlborough, then on to Milk Street. She looks down every alley as if expecting trouble, but she is game and we press on, and as we do I tell her some of what happened when I was taken to jail and to court and how Ezra was so kind and good to me and how he tried to help me in my darkest hour when my heart was so low and I was liable to be beaten in public, and she asks how could I survive something like that and I says you just do, is all.

Then I tell her what Ezra told me about the death of Janey Porter and she makes the connection with the unmarked grave that we had seen that day in the churchyard and my suspicions about it and about the Preacher and how he has designs on me and my money and my future and all.

And then I tell her about the Preacher's pet.i.tion and how Ezra is trying to prevent it from happenin' and she is astounded. Now Amy don't seem so worried about her own self. I can tell she's thinkin' deep about all I tell her.

"So the girl Janey Porter was solely in his care when she died?" she says.

"Yes. It must have been awful for her in that place. With him." I tell her about me spying on the Preacher from the widow's walk and how strange he acted and all.

"You've been busy," says Amy, looking at me sideways.

You don't know the half of it, Miss, I say to myself, thinking about Gully and the Pig and Mrs. Bodeen and the girls and all the other stuff I ain't told her. But what I say is, "I've got to be busy as he wants me over there to take poor Janey's place."

"That is true," says Amy. "We cannot let that happen."

"It won't happen, believe me, Amy, I'll run away first. My seabag is always packed and I can be gone in a minute," I says firmly. Then I tells her about what Betsey said.

"So we go to see Ephraim Fyffe?"

"Even so, Sister."

The furniture shop to which young Ephraim Fyffe is apprenticed is not hard to find, after a few discreet inquiries. The showroom fronts on Milk Street, so named because in addition to the many shops and factories, there are a large number of cows, and, consequently, a lot of milk-milk in buckets, milk in tubs, milk being made into b.u.t.ter and cheese, and probably milk that will soon appear on the table of the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls, and some of that milk will disappear down my neck as well.

The showroom has many pieces of their craft displayed within, and once again I am astounded. When I heard furniture shop from Betsey yesterday I thought rough tables and chairs like in the Pig, but, no, these are the finest examples of the craft-willowy little sticks and boards that somehow come together to form strong chairs that seem to be made of the weakest of sticks but are not and tables with legs carved to look like the legs and feet of lions, tables polished to an impossible sheen. It reminds me of a showroom I saw last week when Peg sent me out with Rachel to get several big joints of meat down at Haymarket. Rachel took me on a route that I did not know and we went by a silversmith's shop and we looked within and I, expecting clumsy little tankards and plates, was amazed to see the silver worked in such intricate ways in grand bowls and servers and ladles and such, and Rachel says that it is the work of our own Mr. Revere, Hero of the Revolution, and I ask whether he really was a hero or not and Rachel says that yes he was 'cause he warned the people of Lexington and Concord of the coming of the British Regulars. But it ain't for all that war stuff that she thinks he's a hero. It was one time, years ago, when the smallpox was sweepin' through Boston and all his children come down with it and the people from the pesthouse came and told Mr. Revere he's got to give up the children to them and he came on that porch up there and says, "You ain't takin my babies!" and they don't and the kids all got better, and that's why he's a hero to her.

I thought upon that and I gave Rachel a light punch on her shoulder and said that then he's a hero to me, too.

Around the back is the working area full of sawdust and shavings, and there Amy and I find Ephraim Fyffe. He is taking his midday meal at a table with benches set up outside. He is a solid-looking young man, with a good growth of reddish brown hair on the back of his strong forearms, that same curly hair being flecked with pieces of sawdust. He has a broad forehead and a thick head of hair that is tied in back with a black ribbon. A black ribbon like in mourning, I'm thinkin'.

He looks at us in a guarded but not unfriendly way.

I bob and say, "Your pardon, Mr. Fyffe, but I have this note from Betsey Byrnes." I hand it over.

Suspicion is written all over his face, but he picks up the sc.r.a.p of paper and reads it. One thing that amazes me about this town is that almost everybody can read and write, enough at least to get along. All the downstairs girls can. On our way down here, when we were on School Street, we pa.s.sed the Chambers School where the children were out on playtime. Amy told me that it's a state law that all children shall be taught to read and write. All children. Thanks, London, for nothing.

I know the note says, "Ephraim, you can trust her as she is trying to help about poor Janey. Yrs. Betsey."

He looks up and says, "Would you like something to eat?" He offers to share the bread and b.u.t.ter of his noon meal with us but we say no, to please eat.

I tell him our names and we sit down at the table across from him. He does not rip up the note or crumple it but instead folds it up carefully and slips it into a pocket of his vest. Then he says, "What do you want to know?"

"Tell us about Jane Porter and what happened to her."

His face darkens. "She was a good girl what never did nothin' wrong." He pauses and then says in a voice full of sadness, "She ... died and they came and got me and made me look upon her poor body."

At this I look at Amy and she nods and says, "It is our custom. If a person is suspect in a murder, he is brought forward and forced to look upon the deceased in all their gore, the thought being that the horror and guilt will be too much for him to bear and he will confess to the crime."

"Oh," I say, with doubt in my voice, having known some accomplished liars in my time, including myself, who might've got through such a thing without confessin'.

"Sometimes," continues Amy, "it is done right then and sometimes..." She pauses and looks down at her hands clasped in her lap. "And sometimes later. Much later ... weeks ... sometimes months ... later. With the contents of the grave exhumed."

I reflect on that and think it'd be hard for any person, guilty or not, not to react in some way to such a sight as the dug-up contents of a grave that is no longer green.

"Did Reverend Mather help you?" I ask.

"Help me? He put the police on me, that's how he helped me!" says Ephraim, glowering at his now forgotten bread.

"Why would he do that?" I ask. I know the answer, but I ask it anyway 'cause I want to hear him say it.

"'Cause me and Janey had an ... understanding, and he knew it. We were going to marry in the spring when I finished my apprenticing here."

"What did you do when you looked upon her?" I hate to ask but I do.

He takes a breath and I see that his eyes have welled up. "All I did was stand there and cry. Her all twisted like that. They hadn't even straightened her out and made her proper, even. Just all twisted..."

"Do you think she killed herself?" Amy gives me a bit of her elbow for my cruelty.

His eyes may be tearing, but the look behind them is pure rage. He glowers at me. "She did not do that to herself, Miss. I know that."

"How do you know it?"

"Because she was a happy girl. She was happy we were going to be married. She was happy until..."

"Until the last month or so of her life. I have heard that. Is it true?"

"What is your interest in this?" he says, looking at me intently. "Is it for fun? For excitement? Is it a girlish lark? What?"

"I don't like seeing injustice done, for one. For two, he is after me now."

"Ah," he says, and considers this. He looks down at his strong hands knotted in fists on the tabletop. My answer seems to satisfy him, and I don't blame him for asking the question, 'cause I would ask it, too.

"Yes," he says after some thought. "Yes, her unhappiness and loss of cheer was a sudden thing and I figured it out after a few days even though she wouldn't say nothing about it and I went through h.e.l.l but I told her that it didn't matter 'cause it wasn't her fault-him being a big and powerful gentleman and her being a poor helpless girl caught in his house all alone with him but she still wouldn't say nothing, just shake her head and weep."

"What about her being with child?"

Amy hisses and warns me with Jacky and pokes me again, but I press on. "Could she have killed herself over that?"

Ephraim rises to his full height over me and says low and even, "She didn't kill herself. She didn't kill herself over what he did to her. She didn't kill herself over a baby. She didn't kill herself over anything. She didn't kill herself, Miss Faber..." He sits back down, with the veins in his forearms still standing out over the clenched muscles in his arms.

He takes another breath, never taking his eyes off mine, and then he goes on. "I told her I would raise the child as my own."

"That was very n.o.ble of you, Mr. Fyffe. I know there are not many men who would do that," I says, puffing up my own chest and holding his gaze.

"We were going to open our own shop. We had the place picked out and all. And on that day..." His voice trails off and he looks down at the ground. The words are coming hard for him, I see.

"...and on that day, she was going to tell him she was leaving and ... it is to my ... my everlasting shame that I did not go with her 'cause I felt I shouldn't ask Mr. Olmstead for the time off. And now she is dead and there is nothing. Nothing."

I let the silence hang in the air for a while and then I say, "On that day. When you were brought there to look upon her. Did the Preacher look upon her, too?"

He shakes his head as if to clear it. It is plain that he is a little startled by the question.

"I don't know. When I was brought in, he was over by the window, his hands together in prayer. Looking out."

"Looking out, not at her?"

"Looking out," he says. "Looking out to the field where they buried her the next day."

I stand up and Amy stands up with me. "Ephraim Fyffe. We, also, do not believe she killed herself. But the beliefs of schoolgirls, chambermaids, and apprentices will not hold much water against the power of the Reverend Richard Mather and his position as a gentleman and a man of G.o.d. We must go slowly. But we will go forward, I promise you that, Ephraim Fyffe. I promise you that Preacher Mather will look upon Janey Porter again, and if he is guilty we will bring him down. We will bring him down from the pulpit he does not deserve to be in, and we will bring him down and we will make him answer for his crime."

When we stood to part from him, I laid my hands on his arms and said, "If we need you, will you come?"

He looked at me steadily. "Depend upon it, Miss. You know where I work and Betsey knows where I live. It is on Olive Street, right near to your school. You have only to send word and I will be there."

And there we left it.

"That was certainly fraught with emotion," says Amy, as we head down to the docks for me to mail yet another letter before going to see Ezra.

"Yes. Well. I had to know," says I. Ephraim Fyffe was all I hoped he would be: strong, good, and mad as h.e.l.l. "Look, Amy! There's the Intrepid! Isn't she glorious?"

Amy tucks her bonnet down a little lower on her face and says, "It looks like a dirty killing machine to me, no matter how prettied up with flags it is, and I do not like it."

I forgive her words 'cause she doesn't know my past. As I look down at the Intrepid's gun ports and know well the hulking cannons that lie quiet behind, I have to agree with her, having seen guns like these at their murderous work. Intrepid is a killing machine, but I also know she is not dirty, and that within her, there will be some instances of uprightness and honor.

We get closer and Amy gets more frightened the closer we get.

"G.o.d. Isn't she lovely?" I sighs. She's an eighty-eight-gun First Rate s.h.i.+p of the Line of Battle and has two levels of gun ports instead of just one like the Dolphin had. "Come on!" I says to Amy and skips up to the Intrepid's side. "Well, come on!" I have to about drag her up the gangway.

"But surely we are not allowed..."

"'Allowed'?" I counters. "We're allowed to do anything in this world until someone says we ain't allowed and that someone can back it up."

We get to the top and step on the s.h.i.+p.

"Permission to come aboard, Sir!" I pipes, hand to brow in a snappy salute. The quarterdeck is all fancied up with s.h.i.+ny bra.s.s and bright white rope lace going from post to post to mark off the holy area. There is also a young mids.h.i.+pman on the quarterdeck as Officer of the Watch and he is handsome and bright, too, and he looks properly astounded at the sight o' me.

"No ... No girls allowed on the Intrepid, I'm sorry, Miss," he finally manages to say, blus.h.i.+n' very prettily.

"I just want to send this letter by you to my very good friend Mr. James Fletcher of the Dolphin. He is a brother mids.h.i.+pman and I hope you will do it." I bob and flutter my eyelashes and give him the letter. There is a Bo'sun's Mate of the watch there, too, but he ain't blus.h.i.+n'-he's all smirks and leers as he looks at Amy and me and thinkin' he knows somethfn' about us.

Well, he don't.

The mids.h.i.+pman gives the letter to the Messenger of the Watch, which used to be one of my jobs on the Dolphin, and I stand there and point out to Amy all the things of interest on the s.h.i.+p-the foretop, the mainmast, the shrouds, the spars, and all, and then the middie comes back with the news that the letter will indeed be sent along. I give him my very best curtsy and heartfelt thanks and I give the Bo'sun's Mate my very best d.a.m.n-your-eyes look and we turn and leave.

I'm twisting around and looking at all the familiar sights of rope and line and tackle and, of course, the foretop, which looks exactly like the foretop on the Dolphin, and Amy has to tug at my sleeve to get me down the gangway and onto the pier.

We're heading up State Street over to Ezra Pickering's office on Union Street, and I'm looking around at all the shops and signs and such when I notice something. Not something that's there-something that isn't there.

"Amy," I asks, "how come there ain't any orphan beggars around this town? In London we'd be knee-deep in 'em by now."

Amy keeps peering down every alleyway as if she expects a parcel of rogues to leap out at us at any second. Satisfied, for the moment, that none are poised for such an attack, she says, "Well, it is because anyone who is orphaned and has no other relations or means is generally given to a farm family in the outlying towns. Many times on the frontier, beyond the Alleghenies. The farmers put them to work in exchange for their keep."

"That's good for the orphans, then?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes they are taken in and treated as a member of the family. Adopted, even, or they marry into the family when they are old enough," says Amy, scooting across a dark alleyway. "Sometimes, though, they are just worked like indentured servants."

I reflect that if I was an up-and-coming young orphan instead of the grizzled and battle-hardened veteran orphan that I am, I'd still choose to take my chances here in the city rather than out there in the woods.

"And there is the New England Home for Little Wanderers, and for those boys big enough to lift a shovel, they are filling in the Mill Pond in the northern part of town. They're sc.r.a.ping off part of Beacon Hill to do it and anyone who can lift a wheelbarrow can-"

"Hey! Ahoy! It's the little nightingale from the Pig!"

"By G.o.d, 'tis!"

Uh-oh.

There's three men standing in front of us, grinning and lifting their caps and it looks like they are seamen and they look a little familiar, like maybe they were in last night's crowd, and by the way they are weaving, it looks like they've had a few.

"Oi believes ye be right, Seth Hawkins," says the man in the middle. "The one what could sing and dance so pretty it fair broke me poor heart, it did!"

"Aye, you were right blubbering in yer beer, ye were, Amos, ye sorry sod!" says his mate, slapping him on the back.

"Don't care," says the one named Amos. "She put me in such mind of my own dear daughter back home who I may never see again that I could not hold back the tears..."

"She may have put ye in mind of your daughter, but that didn't stop you from tryin' to steal a kiss!" roars the other man.

I do remember this crew, I thinks, and I did have to be right nimble to stay out of their reach when I was helpin' Maudie durin' our break, but I did feel there was no harm in them for all their bawdy behavior. I sneak a look at Amy-she looks like her most terrible fears have come true. Ah, well.

"Gentlemen," I says, all bright and brave, "I am very pleased that you enjoyed our show, but now I must bid you all a good day, 'cause me and my sister must be gettin' back to school, and if we're late we're sure to get a whuppin'." I hear Amy let out a whimper behind me.

"Ah, Miss," says Seth Hawkins, "if ye could give us just one tune, for we right now are going back to the s.h.i.+p and we sail on the tide and may never see land nor ale nor pretty young things ever again." He takes off his cap and gives me the mournful eye.

"Very well," says I, and I draw out my pennywhistle. "Just one now, mind." And I tears into "The Queen of Argyle."

Seth and Amos link arms and whirl about in some demented dance while the other hoots and hollers and Amy tries to sink into the masonry of the nearest building.

We're rippin' along pretty good and I adds a few steps of my own and I'm headin' for the end of- "TWEEEEEEET! You! Stop there!"

Oh, Lord.

"Cheese it, boys, it's the constable!" shouts my trio of admirers, and they fly off down the street. They could've saved themselves the trouble 'cause it's me that Wiggins is after, not them.