These Honored Dead (24 page)

A single shot rang out.

“M
artha?” I shouted. “Martha, are you harmed?”

For an instant that seemed to stretch without end, there was no answer. Then, from somewhere beneath me, my sister’s voice. “I’m fine, Joshua. It didn’t hit me.”

“Miss Patterson?” I called out, at the same moment Martha was saying, “Phillis? Are you all right?”

“I will be once everyone gets off,” came the hoarse voice of the slave.

Jane did not answer.

I struggled free from the pile of bodies and felt around on the floor in the darkness until I found the candle, which I lit with a match from my pocket. Martha and Phillis were each standing and brushing dirt from their clothes. All three of us looked down in the candlelight. Jane Patterson’s body lay motionless on the dirt floor. There was a dark stain spreading out on the ground beneath her.

Martha screamed.

I knelt beside Jane’s body. Her eyes were wide and frozen and her chest was still. I lay my fingers on the inside of her wrist, feeling for a pulse that did not come. The fabric of her dress by her heart was torn apart and some of her insides spilled out horribly. I looked away and saw the muff pistol still clenched in her right hand.

“Is she . . . ,” began Martha.

“She’s dead,” I said, rising to my feet.

“Did we do that?” cried my sister. “Did
I
do that?”

I held Martha against my chest and stroked her hair. “It’s all right,” I said. “You’re not to blame.”

“But—”

“
Shhhhh
. She shot herself, most likely. I doubt we’ll ever know fully what was in her mind.”

My sister nodded, her resolution flooding back.

We heard shouting from the infirmary room and banging on the door. A female voice called out: “Who’s there? Was that a gunshot?”

“What do we do now?” asked Martha.

“Take back one of my blankets, for starters,” I said.

Twenty minutes later, we had loaded Jane’s body, shrouded in a checkerboard quilt, into the cart in the front yard of the poorhouse. With the help of Martha’s acquaintance Abigail, we’d managed to exit the house through a side door without drawing any more attention than necessary. The poorhouse residents seemed used to persons coming and going in the dark without explanation. I helped Phillis climb into the cart next to Jane’s body and started to hitch up Hathaway’s horse.

“Where are you taking my horse and carriage?” came a harsh voice from behind me. “And my slave?”

I turned and saw Hathaway standing unsteadily at his front door, a shotgun clutched in his hands. Given the iron hand with which he ran the poorhouse, I supposed it was no wonder he had an ally somewhere in its depths who had freed him.

“I’m simply borrowing the horse and carriage,” I said. “I’ll return them tomorrow and pay you twice the market rate. As for the slave—you know full well she’s mine, not yours.”

“She’s mine in this state,” said Hathaway. “And I’ll not let her go.” He swayed before steadying himself on the doorframe. “Not for nothing, anyway.”

I sighed and asked Martha to finish hooking up the cart. Martha nodded, her eyes flickering back and forth between Phillis and Hathaway. I took a few steps toward the poorhouse master. With everything else we still had to accomplish that night, paying the venal man a few coins in exchange for an unobstructed departure seemed the better part of wisdom.

“You yourself said you’d take pennies on the dollar for her,” I said. “At her age, with her physical condition, I can’t imagine her fetching fifty dollars on the St. Louis quay. I’ll pay you two dollars to be done with it.”

“She’s worth at least two hundred,” he said, clutching his shotgun tightly, “but I’ll take forty.”

“How about five dollars, then? That’s the best I can do.”

“Thirty.”

I stopped to consider the absurdity of the situation. Here I was, bargaining over how much to pay for the right to take away a slave who had belonged to my family since her birth in the prior century. What would my father say if he could see me engaged in such folly? But I looked again at Martha and realized such concerns would have to await another day. Over Martha’s shoulder, I could just make out Phillis’s impassive face in the dim moonlight. She seemed to be watching our negotiations closely.

“Very well,” I said, turning back to Hathaway. “Ten for the lot—the slave and the horse and carriage rental.”

His face broke into a jagged, discolored grin. I noted with pleasure that the area around his eyes was swelling with the same black and purple hues of his teeth.

“I always say I’m open to business twenty-four hours of the day,” Hathaway said. “Throw it on the ground and be off with you.” I did so, noting with even greater pleasure his determination to stay far away from my right hand.

We set off through the prairie, me astride Hickory and Martha sitting sidesaddle atop Hathaway’s nag, which pulled the rickety cart. But after about fifteen minutes, we came to a halt.
We were traveling at the pace of a snail; the tired nag was struggling with the weight of the cart and the two bodies it carried.

“We’ll never reach Springfield at this rate,” said Martha. “And if we don’t get there by morning . . .”

“We’ll have to leave the cart here with Jane’s body,” I said. “We can come retrieve it tomorrow. You and Phillis ride atop Hickory. I’ll take the nag. I think there’s still a chance we can make it by sunrise.”

Working quickly, we detached the cart from the horse and dragged it some fifty feet into the tall grasses. It would be perfectly visible to someone looking for it, but someone who wasn’t might miss it. And for anyone who did find it, perhaps the dead body inside would prevent scavenging.

We set off again, cantering side by side through the dark prairie. With the moon and stars providing only a dim illumination of the treacherous, uneven carriage path, I pushed the horses as fast as I dared.

“I misjudged her greatly,” said Martha after a while.

“We all did,” I replied. “But if you think of it, it’s the only thing that makes sense of Patterson’s conduct since his arrest.”

“What do you mean?”

“From the start, the doctor never put up a strong defense. He’s never stood and shouted ‘I didn’t do this.’ You heard Lincoln complain about it himself. Why? Because if he did, he was afraid someone would figure out it was Jane who’d slit Lilly Walker’s throat with surgical precision, Jane who’d borrowed his surgical coat and hat and high-tandem gig and gone to Menard on the night before the muster, Jane who’d used his medicinal liquors to subdue her victims before she killed them. If it wasn’t him, she was the only person it could have been.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Martha said.

My horse whinnied and pranced sharply to the right, and I saw he had narrowly avoided a gaping hole in the dark path.

“
And
it illuminates why insanity was the defense Patterson dreamed up in the middle of trial, once he saw how much
incriminating evidence Prickett had,” I continued. “It’s one of the few defenses where the defendant acknowledges he did commit the crime. The usual defense says, ‘I didn’t do it.’ But insanity says, ‘I did it, but I’m not responsible under the law.’ If Patterson denied having been the one who killed the three of them, then the sheriff might keep searching for the person who did, and Patterson feared the sheriff might come to realize it had been Jane.”

“When do you think Patterson knew she was the killer?” asked Martha.

“He must have suspected it after Jesse’s body was found. And he must have realized then that he had, in effect, unwittingly facilitated Lilly’s murder. Remember, Patterson told Lincoln he was out of town on the night of the first murder, but he was vague about the circumstances. We assumed he didn’t want to tell Lincoln because he didn’t have an alibi. The truth was the opposite—he didn’t want to say because he
did
have an alibi. He was with the Widow Harriman at the inn near Salt Creek that night. The inn’s log proved it. He’d realized his absence from Springfield had given his daughter the freedom to act. To murder.”

I closed my eyes and felt the cool breeze against my skin and my horse’s shoulders working up and down along the trail. I listened to the rhythmic beat of the two horses’ hooves. We rode in silence.

“What do we do when we get back to Springfield?” asked Martha a little later.

“Go straight for Lincoln. He’ll want to call me as a witness, I think. Once the judge and Prickett hear the truth, the charges against Patterson will be dismissed.”

“I wonder if that will be enough,” said Martha. “If you think of it, Jane never confessed anything to us. She was careful in what she said. If she was truly a lunatic, she was a calculating one.”

“Then Phillis shall be Lincoln’s witness,” I said. “She can say what she overheard at the jail cell.”

This whole time, Phillis had been balanced behind Martha on Hickory’s broad back, her legs crossed and her hands clasped in her lap, looking off blankly across the dark prairie. If she was grateful to us for the great effort we’d exerted in rescuing her from Hathaway’s clutches, she’d given no visible signs of such.

As I glanced at her, I was reminded of the fortitude she’d shown in challenging Jane Patterson. Even now, the slave’s boldness at that moment amazed me. But for the Negro’s actions, Jane might well have gotten away with her crimes.

“Will you testify to what you heard, Phillis?” I asked.

“If you bid me to, Master.”

“I may have to. Let’s see what Lincoln says.”

Before long, the shadowy forms of Springfield emerged ahead of us, black on black. We’d been pushing our horses much faster than I’d realized. Glancing toward the sky, I judged an hour or so remained until the sun breached the horizon. As we neared the square, I could see a dull light in the window that looked down from No. 4, Hoffman’s Row. We tied the horses to a post and, weary and stiff-legged, I led Martha and Phillis up the stairs.

Lincoln was bent over at his table, scratching away in front of a candle almost burned down to its nub.

“It’s nearly morning,” I said.

“I can sleep after the trial ends,” he replied, still hunched over. “Have you brought my witness?”

“Your witness is dead,” I said. “And your client is innocent.”

Lincoln looked up sharply. It took a second for his eyes to focus, and they widened as he realized who was and was not standing before him. “Why don’t you all have a seat and tell me what’s happened,” he said.

He struggled to his feet and pushed aside various piles of paper to make three places to sit. Martha and I sat; Phillis remained standing diffidently, eyes downcast, even after Lincoln gestured toward the empty place he had cleared on Stuart’s lounge. After a moment’s pause, Lincoln let the Negro be and turned back to me. “So?”

Hurriedly, I told him everything that had transpired, Martha interrupting me on occasion to add a detail here or there. When we had finished, Lincoln sat silent, his thumb and forefinger running over the stubble on his chin.

“That’s an amazing tale,” he said. “I believe every word you’ve said. And I have absolutely no way to prove it in court when the sun comes up.”

“Is it because Jane never confessed directly to us?” I said. “We’ve thought of that. Phillis can testify to the argument between Patterson and Jane at the jail cell. Everything else follows.”

“Phillis won’t testify,” Lincoln said evenly.

I looked back and forth with indignation between the slave and my friend. “Of course she will. And she should. She’s the one who figured out the truth, after all.”

The slave made no reaction.

“You’re not following me, Speed,” Lincoln said. He seemed to have an odd light on his face. “Judge Thomas won’t allow her testimony. No judge in Illinois would, or could. She’s a Negro.”

“What of it? Is it because she’s a slave? Fine, I’ll free her in the morning then restore her status in the afternoon, when Patterson’s charges have been dismissed.”

“Free or slave has nothing to do with it,” said Lincoln. “No testimony from any Negro is admissible in the courts of Illinois in a case involving a white person.”

“That’s absurd,” I said, my temper rising. Martha, too, cried out in disbelief.

“I do agree,” Lincoln returned with a bitter smile, “though I’m rather surprised to hear
you
say so.”

“Very well,” I said, still convinced there must be an easy way around the obstacle Lincoln seemed intent on throwing up. “Phillis can tell me what Jane said and I’ll testify to it. She already has, in point of fact. I’ll be your witness.”

“That won’t help,” said Lincoln. “If evidence has passed by a black tongue, the State of Illinois doesn’t want to hear it.”

“But the life of a white doctor is at stake!”

“Even so.”

I gaped at him, feeling completely flummoxed. “That’s absurd,” I repeated.

“The slave is not the only one imprisoned by this institution,” said Lincoln, shaking his head. “Do I take it you’re becoming a convert to the cause of civil rights for the Negroes, Speed? Perhaps emancipation, even? Congratulations. I knew it was only a matter of time.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Don’t provoke me. She should be able to testify here. That’s all. It’s only common sense.”

“I’m not provoking you,” said Lincoln seriously.

“But there must be something we can do,” said Martha, wringing her hands. “Surely you’re not suggesting we need stand by mutely while the jury convicts the doctor on faulty evidence.”

We looked at one another helplessly.

“I’ve heard it said, in times like these, you should find a stiff glass of brandywine,” murmured Lincoln, as if to himself. “No matter how far away you have to travel to find it. I’ve heard the Prussians, in particular, believe in this cure.”

Martha turned to stare at Lincoln while I said, “This is no time for your jests. Patterson’s head is on the block.”

“What about the baby?” came a hoarse voice. All of us turned to Phillis.

“That’s right—Molly!” exclaimed Martha. “In all the confusion, I’d totally forgotten. I feel terrible. What’s happened with Molly, Mr. Lincoln?”

“Last I knew, she was still in her labors of birth,” he said. “Dr. Patterson was at her bedside around midnight, when I left the sheriff’s house to return here to write out my closing argument. Hopefully he’ll have delivered of her successfully by now.”