Galore - Michael Crummey [103]
Before the day was fully gone to light Druce took Martha upstairs to bed and Mary Tryphena slipped outside, standing in the cold to listen awhile, testing the quiet. She made her way along the path to the outhouse and called to Jude from the door. His arms coming up through the hole like the pale shoots of some exotic winter plant.
She was surprised to think Father Phelan and his stories would sit so close to the surface of her mind and Judah’s, these years later. Back in the house she knelt on the bare floor to pray for all her dead and gone, for Father Phelan and for Callum and Lizzie and for Devine’s Widow, for Absalom and for Henley wasting in his shroud of salt in the French Cemetery. Druce came back down to the kitchen and she paused at the door, surprised to see Mary Tryphena on her knees, the woman crossing herself before getting up. Druce was embarrassed to have disturbed her and uncertain what to make of the Catholic gesture. —You were praying for the men, Mrs. Devine?
Mary Tryphena shook her head. —Prayers are no use to the living, she said.
For three days constables searched the Gut for Judah. Levi posted a reward of fifty dollars for information leading to his apprehension, though no one came forward. Eli Devine was only nine years old and Barnaby Shambler convinced Levi to release him, but the other Devines were held in the abandoned fishing room in use as a prison. Opinion on the shore was divided as to whether the attack was meant as payback for the burning of Strapp’s barn during the campaign or retaliation for Levi’s ruthlessness as proprietor of Sellers & Co. There was no shortage of people with a grudge against him, some of whom had threatened flesh or property, but no one else was questioned.
Newman visited Levi to change his dressings and he conducted a casual interrogation while examining the sutures. —They were disguised as mummers, is that right?
—Rags and bags and women’s clothes, the works of them.
—They had their veils on, did they?
—Of course they had their veils on.
Newman straightened from his work. Levi’s enormous nose was precipitous, his head unnaturally square. The loss of the ears wasn’t going to do the man’s appearance any favors. —How did you identify them, Mr. Sellers?
—The smell, he said.
—The smell?
—There’s only one person on the shore with that stink on him, Doctor.
—You mean Judah?
—Of course I mean Judah.
—Hold still, the doctor said, and he worked in silence for a time. Newman had long ago figured out that Absalom Sellers was Henley Devine’s father. He didn’t understand Levi’s particular hatred for Judah, the innocent cuckold in the affair. He seemed to despise the man for mirroring his own humiliation to the world so passively. —I don’t mean to play counsel for the defense, Mr. Sellers, but what is your justification for holding the men you have in custody?
—You have just made a very close inspection of the justification, Doctor.
—But your evidence, such as it is, applies only to a man not yet apprehended.
—Birds of a feather, Levi said.
—None of this could possibly hold up before a judge.
—You forget, Doctor, that I am the judge.
Newman reported the gist of the conversation to Bride and she walked the Tolt Road after supper to speak with Mary Tryphena. Patrick’s crowd had moved over from the house at the edge of the Little Garden to stay with her and they were all at the table, Druce, and Martha who was helping Eli with his letters, the boy copying Bible verses she’d written out on a scrap of paper.
—Dr. Newman thinks Levi’s got no case, Bride said.
—Levi will see them hanged, every one, Mary Tryphena told her.
—Hush now, Druce said, nodding toward the youngsters.
Bride said, Levi couldn’t sit as accuser and judge, is what the doctor says.
Mary Tryphena waved off the technicality. —Then he’ll have one of his merchant friends from St. John’s sit