Galore - Michael Crummey [32]
His shipmates guessed how things had unfolded by his face when he first came back over the Tolt that morning, and they left him to his misery. But they were drunk themselves by suppertime and insisted on offering some distraction. He’d missed the parade, they shouted through the door, and he was in danger of missing the food and drink as well. He didn’t know what parade they were talking about. A sense of disquiet and offense pricked at him but he was damned if he could name its source, and the rush to deliver him to the party at Selina’s House pushed it aside.
He saw the girl as soon as they reached the garden, sitting in the grass beside a pregnant cripple, and the morning rushed back to him, the bile of it closing off his throat. She was smiling up at a tall white bastard who was wearing John Withycombe’s tricorn and acting out a dumb show that could only have been at his expense. Mocking him with his own fucking hat. The captain’s legs shaking with a mortified rage and he started yelling over the noise of the crowd that his hat had been stolen. The man ran off when he saw the captain pointing him out, with young Arscott in pursuit. The soldier jumped onto his back to wrestle him down while a black and white dog savaged the soldier’s stockings.
John Withycombe was buried then in the pell-mell confusion, tramped upon by the shoving crowd and half deafened by the cursing and the screams of the women, until a musket fired and the Irishmen scuttled for the hills. When he pushed himself up he could see his hat trampled to ratshit and the dog lying dead on the grass beside it. Arscott sat cupping a wound in his gut that leaked like a Portuguese trader, the poor little shagger as good as dead now, a virgin still and forever and ever amen.
There was no prison in Paradise Deep and Judah Devine was locked in a fishing room, one soldier assigned to guard the entrance.
Lieutenant Goudie interrogated everyone present at the garden party but the mash of conflicting detail made it impossible to settle events with any certainty. The dog was shot by Kinnebrook who couldn’t force the animal to leave off Arscott in any other way. Arscott died by a wound from his own knife which was found in the grass beside him and which he’d likely drawn to defend himself against the dog’s attack. No one admitted to witnessing the fatal blow but Alphonse Toucher’s name was mentioned several times as a likely suspect and four soldiers were sent off to arrest him. They came back to the fishing room with all three Touchers in custody, each accusing another of being Alphonse. Lieutenant Goudie brought in their parents and siblings and a handful of people from the Gut who failed to make a convincing case in any direction and he was forced to set them all loose in the end. Which left them with Judah as the principal.
Callum thought a plea of self-defense might relieve Jude of the charge, but Devine’s Widow dismissed the notion. Judah was also being held for the theft of Captain John Withycombe’s tricorn and had been apprehended while attempting to escape a soldier of the crown, all of which spoke against self-defense.
The subtleties of the argument were lost on Lazarus. He’d insisted they carry the dog back to the Gut to bury him near the Catholic cemetery and he was tormented by the thought of losing Judah as well. No court in Newfoundland was invested with authority to try capital crimes and Jude would have to be transported to England to face a judge, which was no different than a death sentence in the six-year-old’s mind.