“Imagine,” came the garbled voice.
“Oh, I can’t imagine. Who would want to?” Matthew paused, considering how to approach the next subject. There was nothing to do but forge ahead. “Everything went well until the summer of 1697. That was the year five people died and many others were sickened near to death in a Philadelphia tavern called the White Stag. Do you know the procedure that Mr. Swanscott went through to buy and deliver wine to his clients, sir? Gordy told me. It seems that wine is shipped over from England in hogshead barrels. These barrels would have been taken from the ships and stored in Mr. Swanscott’s warehouse on the Philadelphia waterfront until orders were sent from the taverns. Depending on the needs of the taverns, the wine is transferred from the hogshead barrels to smaller casks, and these are delivered to the clients. Now, during the transferral from hogshead to cask, an inspector paid for by Mr. Swanscott is on hand to taste the wine to make sure it hasn’t spoiled. The casks are likewise inspected for mold or other problems. When the wine is transferred, the casks are given a seal of approval by the inspector, and the destination tavern’s name is chalked upon them. The casks may sit in the warehouse under lock for another few days awaiting delivery, but no longer than that. Everything should have gone as usual, but on this day it did not.”
The lawyer lifted his head and was listening intently.
Matthew said, “On this day, in the summer of 1697, five people died at the White Stag from drinking wine poured into a pitcher from one of Mr. Swanscott’s casks. Many others-a score, I understand-were brought to death’s door. Some have not fully recovered yet, but have been made so feeble they can’t even walk. In October of 1697 Mr. Swanscott was brought to trial, where both he and the inspector swore the wine was suitable and that the approval was not negligent. The Swanscotts’ attorney, Icabod Primm, handled the defense. A few of the family members of those who died were adamant that the wine had spoiled in the summer heat and had been passed on anyway, or that the cask had been fouled by vermin and not properly cleaned. Up until then, Mr. Swanscott’s reputation had been spotless, but after that day…he was ruined. He couldn’t prove the inspector hadn’t been paid to apply a falsified seal, as some were saying. It didn’t help that the inspector disappeared while the trial was going on.”
“Yes,” said the lawyer. He nodded. “Find the inspector.”
“I don’t have to tell you what was happening to Mrs. Swanscott, as she watched her husband being torn to pieces at court. Just after the incident, she had sent a letter to Trevor, explaining the situation and begging him to come help Primm with the defense. I can envision Trevor’s horror at receiving such a letter, can’t you?”
The lawyer did not respond, but Matthew knew the man had looked upon horror many times.
“He sent back a letter,” Matthew said. “Promising to come, and to prove Mr. Swanscott’s innocence. The only problem was that before Trevor could reach Philadelphia from Portsmouth, whether by accident or design his foster father stepped in front of a fast carriage at twilight on one of those long, straight streets. He lingered for…” There was no need to go into that. “At which point, Emily Swanscott retreated from the world and collapsed. She now sits every day at a window, staring out at a garden. But you know where she is, don’t you, sir? You know, because you put her there.”
The lawyer bent over the desk and gripped it as if he might fall. “Mrs. Swanscott does speak, if only briefly and nonsensically. She keeps asking about the king’s reply having arrived,” Matthew told him. “On the way into Philadelphia I saw some ships whose names were being reworked to honor the Queen. It struck me that the King’s Reply might indeed be the name of a ship. Now, of course, it would be named the Queen’s Reply. When Gordy very kindly gave me a ride back to Philadelphia on his wagon, I went directly to the shipping office to see if there might be any record of a ship called the King’s Reply arriving at Philadelphia probably in the first half of 1698. Actually, it arrived in early March. The clerk there found a list of passengers.”
Matthew saw the man’s shoulders hunch as if readying for a whipstrike.
“Your name was among them, Trevor. In your letter you’d told her the name of the ship on which you’d booked passage. You came one month before your foster mother was put into the Westerwicke asylum. I assume you arranged everything with Icabod Primm. The removal of all personal items and the makers’ marks from the furniture. You wished to hide her, didn’t you? You wished no one to know who she was. I’m unclear on that part of it. Why go to all that trouble?”
Trevor Kirby shook his head. It was not denial, but a vain attempt at avoiding the wasps that stung his brain.
“Did you believe that the legal system had failed Mr. Swanscott?” Matthew asked. “Did you set yourself up as an avenger? A righter of wrongs? Because his innocence could not be proven in court, did you decide to murder the men you felt responsible?” Matthew dared to move a few steps nearer the man. “I realized, when I was sitting in Primm’s office looking at his statue of Justitia, that the cuts you made around the victims’ eyes were not supposed to represent a mask, Trevor. They represented a blindfold. Your statement, I presume, that Lady Justice was never so blind as to allow those three men to escape the law?”
“Those three men,” came the nearly strangled reply, “destroyed the only father and mother I ever knew.” He turned now toward Matthew, the light was cast upon his enraged face, and Matthew decided it best to stand very still and not speak.
Kirby was sweating. His face was damp, his eyes swollen with either hatred or torment. Probably both, Matthew thought. “Yes, I did arrive too late. I went to the house and saw her sitting at a window, her head lolling. One of the servants had warned me how bad it was, but I wasn’t ready. I could never have been. I stood there and I heard her cry out, calling for Father and Toby and Michael, but they were all dead. Then she started praying to God and speaking gibberish and sobbing, and I could not-could not-go to her side.” He blinked, his mouth slack for a moment until it could once more form words. “I was afraid that when she looked at me I would see nothing in there but madness. And that is what tears me apart every day and every night. That is why I cannot stand to be with myself, and hear myself think. Because I was not there…” He seemed to waver on his feet, and had to start again. “I was not there, when she needed me. When they both needed me. And I promised I would come and help Mr. Primm prove he was innocent, and I failed. More than that.” His face, once so handsome, was a thing of tortured angles wracked by a shudder. “I was ashamed to speak to her, there in that room. She was so broken. It was an obscenity.”
He looked hopefully at Matthew, his expression begging for understanding. “If you’d seen her, when she was in Italy! When we were all happy! If you’d seen her…what she was then… you’d know why I couldn’t bear it. Selfish, I know.” He nodded vigorously. “Yes, selfish! But as I watched…she gave a moan. One long…terrible moan, and she suddenly stopped crying and praying. It was as if everything…everything had departed from her. I was looking at an empty husk. Dear God.” Tears glistened. “Oh dear Christ, dear Jesus. I turned away from there and I walked out, and I went…I went directly to Mr. Primm. And I said…take care of her. Find a place where she can be…the nearest place to home. If at all possible. Not one of those…those filthy, ugly asylums. Those horrendous bedlams. Find a place, I said. Money is no object. Find a place where she can have some of her pretty things, and no one will steal them. I said find a place that is safe.”
“And why safe to the degree of not even telling the doctors who she was?” Matthew asked. “Why did you remove any possibility of identifying her?”
“Because of the three men,” Kirby replied. “Because I already knew what they’d done, and I already knew who pulled the puppet strings.”
“Who?”
“A man. A shadow of a man. Known as Professor Fell.”
Forty-Three
Matthew didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then: “Go on.”
Kirby reached into a pocket and withdrew a white handkerchief, with which he began to blot the beads of sweat from his forehead. “I didn’t receive Mother’s letter until November. I’d been in Scotland, working on a case. I had other commitments as well. I’d been planning on being married…to a wonderful young woman, the following summer. I was going to write Father and Mother, to let them know. Then I got the post. I dropped everything, of course. I shut my office, I told Margaret I’d be gone for a while, that my family needed me. A few months, I said. Then we’d pick our wedding plans up where we’d left them.” He began to carefully fold the handkerchief into a tight square.
“When I got the letter from Mother…I knew there had to be some other explanation,” Kirby said. “I knew
