The Visionist: A Novel (5 page)

Later, there would be time for them to decide what to do. Perhaps there would be mill work in one of the bigger towns, for the noisy factories seemed hungry for young women like herself, girls with nimble hands and sharp eyes. Mama might be able to find employment as a domestic, once she became well again. Polly shook off the hope that they would encounter much in the way of charity. If life had taught her anything it was that trusting Fate to human kindness was like leaning on the wind.

With the turning of the cart track just ahead, she allowed herself to look back once more. The fire was hypnotizing, but then…Were her eyes playing tricks? Though she could not be sure, she thought she saw a smaller blaze spat from the larger, moving, running, falling to the ground and rolling over and over, then up and running again. She closed her eyes against the thought, for surely it was a mere twist of the mind. The flames had been too hot. Not even a man possessed of such evil as her father could have survived. Could he?

She faced forward and concentrated on the road ahead. The horse was blowing hard, breath steaming from his chocolate-colored nostrils; every so often when he turned his head at the sound of dry leaves whispering in the trees, he revealed the whites of his eyes and a flowering of foam at his mouth.
The old boy wants to leave as sorely as we do,
Polly thought.
If only the way were not so difficult.

Cold. It was cold on the wooden cart bench where she sat bone to bone next to Mama, Ben still asleep in his mother’s lap. They turned onto the Post Road, a worn track leading away from town. It was several miles to a neighboring cluster of houses round a small common where townsfolk grazed their fat cattle and held meetings when there was something of a communal nature to discuss. How separately they had lived from the people of this world. Polly went but once a week, to bargain for what they could afford by offering what they could live without. Eggs, butter, cheese—during the good months, they could spare a little of each, enough for dried beans, a pot of lamp oil, a jar of pitch molasses. Otherwise, she only left the farm to help Miss Laurel with the children who attended school on the outskirts of town in a building much like the one they were passing now, dark and empty as it loomed over the road. Her father allowed her to go so that she might learn how to do her sums. But the count is easy when you have next to nothing, so Polly told him one thing and did another, losing her troubles in the task of teaching the younger boys and girls how to read. She would miss the hours she had spent with Miss Laurel. She would miss the books filled with stories of a world so much bigger and more wondrous than her own.

Silver clouds blew across the sky. In blackness, the countryside around them disappeared until the thin moon, unveiled, revealed once more the track, the trees, the school, the slant of the horse’s haunches, all of it bathed in a spectral wash.
Am I really here?
Polly wondered. Her father’s fiery ghost was at her heels.
Have I left my life forever?

She shuddered, pushed closer to her mother. They rolled through the town, and in the windows of the neat houses no lamps were lit; not even the bark of a dog pierced their invisibility. Polly felt they were slipping away from all she had known. Who was she now? They had no family she could recall, no friends to take them in. They were reckoned to be folks best left unto themselves. Who were they to be left unto now? These were night thoughts, she knew, the kind that come when sleep will not, the questions no one can answer, least of all a young girl in the dark.

She knew about the dark; Mama had left her to face it alone for years. Polly had often wondered: Was this her punishment for failing Ben? Her mother never stopped Silas, would not even try. This Polly learned early when, the morning after that first endless night, she asked her mother: “Why am I bleeding?” She was standing barefoot in her chemise, the sun outside just a slit on the horizon. “He climbed into my bed and hurt me in the night.”

Mama turned slowly from scraping the sides of a porridge pot and stared. She took a small step to steady herself. Polly recalled that, for what seemed an eternity to a ten-year-old girl, the only sound in the kitchen was the bubble of boiling water set up for washing in a cauldron over the fire. Then, a faint rustle of skirts and Mama went back to her scrubbing—harder, faster.

“You’d best not speak of this again,” she said, breathless from her exertions. “Little girls think all sorts of things are true when they’re not, and you’ve nothing to fear from something that only happens in your head.”

A thin trickle of blood ran between Polly’s thighs.
This is not happening in my head,
she thought angrily. But then she remembered how terrifying were her father’s rages—how murderous was the look in his eye when he’d tried to drown Ben—and she spoke of it no more. From then on, when he came to her, she lost herself in other thoughts—good dreams to cover the bad, visions of saviors, scenes of heavenly beauty, the sense that she was being lifted away by gentle hands, taken to a golden land and laid upon cotton clouds. She came to know the place well, to trust that its gates would remain open to her if ever she should need to enter. In this way, Polly heeded Mama throughout every dark sleep and lost herself not in the nightmare but in the dream it forced her to summon.

The wagon lurched. Her mother’s head bobbed against her shoulder, and Polly could feel the tears. She wondered why Mama was crying. For the farm? For the father who had been killed? For the boy she married? It could not be for the man he became.

“Was he right, Mama?” Polly asked, clucking at the bay. “The farm. Was it his or no?”

Mama sniffed and raised her head. “Was it his?” she said. “
His?
No. It wasn’t his. Nothing was ever his.”

“Well, then whose was it?” Polly asked. “Whose
is
it?”

Her mother looked around as though realizing for the first time that she was free. If she felt any relief, however, it was fleeting, for Polly saw her face cloud over as she receded once more into her shawl. “That’s a matter to be settled once we’re…once you and Ben are safe.”

Polly urged the horse to move faster. “Once Ben and I are safe?” she asked. “What about you? You’ll be safe too, right? You’ll be…”

“Hush, girl,” her mother said. “You don’t need to worry about me now. You did a big thing back there—perhaps more than you intended. It’s you I’ll be thinking about for the moment, ’til we’re sure what’s what.”

Polly nearly pulled the bay up short, but her mother leaned over and pushed forward on her hands to keep the reins loose. “If it’s the fire you mean,” Polly said, her voice rising in panic, “I don’t even know…”

“Quiet!” Mama snapped. “Now you say nothing about the fire, you understand? That’s for me…” She paused. “That’s for me to worry about.”

Polly was not used to the tone her mother had used. She’d spoken sharply, with force. She’d said she wanted both of her children safe. How long had it been since Polly had felt protected? Could she trust Mama to make things right?

She could turn to no place in her mind and find peace. She hoped Silas was dead; she feared she had killed him. Should she expect the constables round every bend? Surely a fire-reader would come to the property, a man whose job it would be to parse the devastation. He would pull from the wreckage a record of the past. Perhaps he would conclude that the blaze simply happened as such things often did—an accident of shattered glass and lamp oil. But if he knew from truth, then he would see it plain as day: her hatred spelled out in smoke and ash. Could her mother keep her safe from such scrutiny?

A red fox screamed—a horrid, womanly sound from somewhere deep in a ravine.
There will be time,
she thought as she tried to allow the road away from the farm to erase her worries.
There will be time for a better life once things have settled.
She yanked on the reins to slow the horse as they reached a pitted stretch where the ruts were deep. The carriage swayed and creaked, rolling sideways then down, its wheels at the mercy of the frozen track. She feared they would tip and be stuck here in the cold, for the way was new to her and she did not know where the nearest town might lie. But then the road became dry and smooth again and the horse quickened his pace as though he too wanted to flee the unforgiving ground.

Hours later—it must have been hours, though Polly could not be sure—they paused to let the old bay rest in the shelter of a stand of giant white pines. With trembling hands Polly handed round the hard hunks of brown bread and cheese. In the vast darkness slowly lifting, they had come to a crossroads, but she found herself too tired to think which way to turn. A new land surrounded them, and the hills and craggy ravines that had loomed so menacingly were behind them now. How long had she been driving? How far they must have come. One way revealed a road that seemed to lead into emptiness, but as she peered down the other, she could make out the white lines of neat, straight fences and tall houses sitting upright in the gloom like well-behaved children.

“Where are we, Mama?” Polly asked. Her mother raised her head but refrained from answering, her features thickening as they often did when she resigned herself to performing a difficult task. When finally she spoke, it was as much to herself as to anyone else.

“Far from where he can find us,” Mama said, reaching over to take the reins. Yanking them sharply to one side, she clucked the horse forward and they pulled gracelessly onto the track once more. Polly watched her mother direct the cart down the road that led towards the tight little settlement. Her mind was numb with cold and fatigue, but when a warm breeze washed round her body she knew the spirits were close. She could feel their featherlike caresses.

Go unto my mother,
Polly pleaded silently.
Minister unto my mother.

A cock crowed. A bell sounded in the gloom of early morning. Mama had taken charge. How did she know where to go? Polly nestled in closer. Ben was waking now as dawn began to brighten the sky behind a slant of frosted hillside, and she pulled him to her as she stared across the stubble of fields puzzling the valley before them. What lay ahead she could not know, only that every creak and turn of their wheels put the past farther behind.

Simon Pryor

Hatch, Massachusetts
October 1842

GIVE A MAN
too much time to think and he will entertain the wildest of notions. I, for a sample, was considering tossing aside my
Ashland Gazetteer
on this particular Sabbath Day and attending church. Do not mistake my meaning. God makes as little time for me as I do Him, and His is a house to which I afford wide berth. However, faced with a lull in my caseload, I could not deny the benefit of venturing onto hallowed ground to root about for work. Sunday morn, though quiet in other respects, is an ideal time for the flock to pore over its faults and missteps. And, in such heightened states of repentance or resolve, to whom do its members appeal once they have squared themselves with God? Why, as it turns out, to me.

Permit me to engage in the niceties of introduction. After all, one can’t very well play the cynic without giving up a detail or two for some other cynic to hang his hat on when the time comes—as it always does—for the observer to be observed. I am Simon Pryor, and it is my profession to watch and listen without attracting notice so that I might know more, perhaps, than I have a right to know, and share more, perhaps, than I have a right to share. I nose around fires as an inspector for the county, but of interest to me as well are the smaller—and often equally incendiary—mysteries of human behavior. Mind you, I am no altruist. My craft is valuable and, like that of a cobbler, takes time to learn—for a fee, I will take on anything and all.

In the Great Cities, I might tend towards self-aggrandizement and crown myself an “Expert in Incendiaries” and a “Private Investigator,” but in the small towns that serve as mazes to me, I am known rather less grandly as a “sniffer.” I do what I do because there is a demand for the keen senses of a bloodhound and the canniness of a scoundrel—the latter, a talent I acquired in my youth while apprenticed to a local solicitor named Mister Hiram Scales, Esq. He was not the most upright of gentlemen, which rendered him a fine teacher for the line of work in which I find myself at present. He, wicked man, could identify a loophole in the Shroud of Turin and saw it as his duty to enlarge such careless dropped stitches into opportunities sizable enough to thread through with a draft horse.

Not that I was proud to be his messenger, his scribe, his eyes and ears in the alleyway, the forger of his very name. Far from it. But there are moments good and bad that determine one’s path and I am afraid that I experienced one such flash—of the unfortunate kind—when I was but a lad of sixteen.

Alas, who has time for the past? Shall I tell you instead of the scant mysteries I faced as I contemplated spending Sunday morn in rare company with my Maker? Charles Dugsdale, sure that his wife visits the town butcher more times than the meat on their table would suggest is necessary, would like to know what it is she does with the man. In his heart, like most people who find themselves in this position, he knows all too well; still he desires proof, as though it might bestow upon him the power to lure her home. I asked (only to be met with the sullen attitude of the cuckolded man):
When has a poisonous truth ever rekindled love?
But as he will not let the matter fizzle of its own accord, his wretchedness is money in the bank for me. Miss Elvira Drean, a rich spinster of twenty-seven, seeks information regarding eligible male companions. She pays me to ferret out honorable men who have not yet attached themselves and who therefore might find her an attractive prospect. Here again, I have tried to convince her that I can be of no assistance, for there is not an honorable unattached man within a hundred miles of Hatch. Whether it is local or universal I cannot say, but this is the bald truth concerning romance in our fair county. Either you get married young, or you leave. Either you leave young, or you get married. But you only flee on the flimsy wager that you might find something you don’t already have, and you only marry on the silent prayer that life might, somehow, be miraculously transformed. Miss Drean’s romantic notions—that domestic bliss awaits just round the next bend—have little to do with the coldhearted world she inhabits.

Why so hard on love, you ask? After all, a young man such as myself at twenty-four years of age might be just the sort of person Miss Drean—for there are so many Elvira Dreans—would consider a worthy companion. I make a decent enough impression, being of a spry if not overly impressive build and possessed of good teeth and a head well-threaded with dun-colored hair. My green eyes have yet to rheum over from excessive vice, and my skin is not so pockmarked as is my conscience. There, of course, I might need to kick a little dirt around to cover certain details of my life so as to conceal from her gentle soul some of my less worthy endeavors. But I am, at heart, a good enough man. And my work, though not as commendable as that of a doctor or magistrate, is undertaken much of the time in service to honest people in need of honorable counsel. The hitch in the rope is this: Though I was once an openhearted boy—with an impractical tendency to view everything in an optimistic light—I notice nothing but misery around me now. I trust no one and have little desire to seek a bond that can only, in the end, bring disappointment and despair. I once expected the world of the world, but no more. It is far simpler, I have found, to dive into other people’s problems than it is to sort out one’s own, and my work provides me ample foxholes. For that, I am ever grateful.

My personal prayer book? The
Gazetteer
and similar town penny sheets full of pleas for help, if one reads between the lines. After all, the stories contained therein—each at its core—hold an almost biblical truth. In simple typeface, the complexities of human passion, greed, generosity, and desperation are laid bare. One need only wipe clean the magnifier and train it on another’s sad history to find a mirror of one’s own unfathomable existence. Not to mention, the potential for employment.

As luck would have it, moments after I had blown the dust from my Sunday topper, a sharp knocking at the front door spared my soul the Lord’s forgiveness. It was a messenger—one I knew well—and I could not help sighing as I took the paper packet he pushed my way and showed him into my study.

Elwyn Cramby. The mere sight of his tortured frame unnerved me, for he hailed from Burns’ Hollow, the town where I resided when I was young. We had shared little but the schoolhouse and our unequal attempts to survive the bullies it sheltered; still, I am not proud that I turned a blind eye to the humiliations Cramby suffered at the hands of a boy who was, in those long-forgotten days, my friend. One James Hurlbut.

How I wish now that I’d known well enough to take Cramby under my wing. But as a youth, he shriveled in the face of human contact and could not meet another’s gaze were a pistol pressed to his temple. The tic rendered him difficult to like and thus to defend when he became James’s target. While I made excuses to absent myself from such sport, I knew that on any given day, Cramby could be found hanging by his britches from a high branch, or covered in hogs’ filth—which, when it was too cold to wash, soiled him for days at a time.

Misfortune struck us both in the winter of our sixteenth year. It came at different times and for different reasons, yet our miseries are linked. My past will be made plain enough when I’ve a mind to spell it out. As for Cramby, his most dangerous brush with James Hurlbut occurred when he was lured into a sleigh and driven far from town, dumped on a wild stretch of road, pushed into a snowbank, and left to tramp the miles home through darkness and bitter cold. The trick nearly killed him, and for months after, no one saw skinny hide nor lank hair of him. Then, with the blossoms of April, Cramby reappeared. His illness had made of him a walking corpse, and from the way he laughed at odd times and spoke feverishly to himself, people assumed he’d been touched in the head. In a move worthy of his father, Amos Hurlbut—the town’s chief puppeteer and architect of my initial indenture to Hiram Scales—James pretended to play the benevolent and bestowed upon Cramby the dubious honor of becoming his messenger. Almost a decade later, it was a post he still held.

The envelope I accepted from his clawlike fingers was secured with the ornate Hurlbut family seal, and beneath my name,
PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL
had been penned with great flourish. (Who but the rich—ever certain that their affairs are of interest to one and all—would send a private missive by errand boy labeled in such a manner as to beg inspection? Of course, the canniest lad in search of employ as a messenger always professes illiteracy, for it lends him a frail immunity. As one might expect, however, the boy unable to recite the alphabet during daylight hours can be found poring over the finer points of Machiavelli’s treatises by night. And I say good for him.)

Popping the seal, I read without enthusiasm, for though I was in need of a case, I would have preferred that it come from anyone other than James Hurlbut. He wrote of an incendiary that had broken out the night before on the outskirts of the town of Ashland. As the Hale County fire inspector, I would of course eventually have been apprised of the tragedy, but Hurlbut wanted me to visit the farm as early as possible so that I might “sift through the wreckage before it has been disturbed by clod-footed constables.”

That a former friend-turned-traitor had me at his beck and call galled me beyond description, but his order did not surprise me. After all, my job as a fire inspector was no coincidence. James’s father had made sure I was named to the post as it afforded him—and now his sons—access to land that might become available to them at a favorable rate
under the right circumstances.
Need I spell out that having a man like me in your pocket goes a long way towards creating such a happy outcome?

I skimmed the rest of the note. I was to show him my report just as soon as I’d finished it—long before making its findings official. The size of the purse I could expect would be dependent upon my ability to massage the truth in favor of my master’s desires. This was our standard agreement. If revenge was his goal, a finding of arson pleased him best. But if it was a sought-after piece of land that had caught his eye, then declaring the situation an accident was what I was expected to do.

This property was known as “the Briggs place,” though its owner was a farmer named Silas Kimball. Any Ashlander, he wrote, would be able to point me in the right direction. He hoped my investigation would go smoothly and signed his missive “Ever your devoted patron.”

My patron indeed. How I longed to crush the paper in my fist.

One thing puzzled me: why James Hurlbut would be intrigued by an incendiary so far from his fiefdom, and one that had consumed but an isolated farm at that. But his plan would reveal itself soon enough. Writing that I would set out immediately and cast an eye over the premises, I felt a familiar heaviness. Was there no escaping the shackles of the past? I handed my reply to Cramby and nodded a silent farewell. As he set off down the path that leads towards town, his singular stride was crooked and purposeful, a rickety wagon on a rutted road. Messenger. Puppet. How little difference there was between us.

Whether out of carelessness, revenge, or fraud, it is a plain fact that buildings burn and are burned with alarming frequency in our hamlet. After all, the greedy and insane thrive as well on country air as they do on the sooty atmosphere of the Great Cities. Delinquents with too little to occupy their time, drunks, hotheads raging over everything from politics to the property rights of loose-running chickens—these are but a sampling of the reprobates who find reason to set entire livelihoods to flame.

And I’ve yet to even mention the driest fuse in the box where incendiaries are concerned: insurance. Nose long enough round any fire and, like as not, you’ll smell banknotes as sharply as you do burnt timbers. So common are opportunistic arsonists among us that a local tippler once asked whether my skill in exposing their crimes grew from having set a building or two to flame myself. I aimed a dazzling smile at the fellow and responded that I had settled upon my calling only because when presented the opportunity, my matches had been wet. One must, I have found, meet foil with foil and make a game of it when strangers pry.

Truth is, I cannot claim such breeziness when faced with carrying out my duties, for the job is a difficult one. Time and solitude are the greatest of accomplices to the common country arsonist. He inhabits a vast emptiness as compared to the bustling streets of Boston or New York, where witnesses abound and bad news travels quickly. Why, a single day will see a fire set, extinguished, and solved in even the largest cities, while a week may pass before news of a distant incident is brought to my attention. By the time the fire wards dump a single bucket, the property will have been destroyed. Bad luck—perhaps—for its proprietor, and worse still for anyone with an interest in determining the cause. With everything reduced to ash and the boot-prints of constables and curious neighbors, it is only Mother Nature in her greatest fits of pique that can hinder the rural investigator more effectively.