"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 butter 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 scrap 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 passed 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 butter 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 hell 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 noble 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 God. 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 hell. "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.
"God. Isn't she lovely?" I sighs. She's an eighty-eight-gun First Rate Ship 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 ship.