IT seemed doubtful the ball at Fort Dennis
could afford any excitement more irregular than the spanking of Lilian Goodnight,
but alcohol continued to run freely and its consumption encouraged various
semi-inebriated parties to retire from the main scene, as might be expected.
Sometimes they went in twos, seeking privacy.
Not in their wildest imaginings did anyone suppose the biggest sensation was yet to come.
Jackson Farraday and Lil took the air in a quiet corner of the parade ground, shadowed by the stockade catwalk.
‘A fat lot of use you were to a girl,’ Lil said bluntly.
Jackson gave her the straight of it.
‘No one with brains would’ve taken cards in your silly game of ridiculing
the general. I warned you against being headstrong. What could a man do?
Start a fight with high-ranking men from Washington? It would’ve been better
if you’d carried on acting like a young lady instead of just looking like
one.’
‘What he did to me was downright indecent!’ she said.
‘After you’d miscalculated the general would wear your sass.’
‘Well, Major Creede had better watch out. I’m not gonna take it lying down – you can count on that.’
In truth, Jackson knew she was right to complain and that he must be sounding
harsher than he felt. She’d been cruelly shamed, which was more than she’d
been due. She’d have hurt feelings to nurse as well as the wear and tear
on her hide. It was a wonder the shocking experience hadn’t caused her to
lose her self-possession completely. He figured she had to be more upset
– no, because she was Misfit Lil, more enraged – than she wanted to let show.
‘The women in town will all leer at me now,’ Lil regretted after a short,
reflective silence. ‘They’ll reckon they know things about me they didn’t
before. And the dirty-minded men will be bolder in their approaches than
ever.’
‘I can’t argue with that. When the charms of a girl your age are made to look available, such is liable to happen.’
Jackson couldn’t reassure her with denials. He’d seen the men’s flushed faces.
He’d heard unexpected words from the women of the company; in particular,
from those who’d been drinking more freely than they were accustomed. Uncouth
observations had issued from the mouths of respectable matrons who, on the
morrow, on the town’s main street, would probably meet him with demure looks
and virtuous countenances and expect him to lift his hat politely.
With him, the whole incident would continue to rankle. How long would it
take before the gossips and the sporting gentry of Silver Vein forgot to
associate with his young friend the image of her pert rear patterned ingloriously
with crimson handprints? How long to the day when gun-savvy Misfit Lil would
claim retribution for the indignity she’d suffered?
‘Maybe I should take you home to your pa’s place,’ he added, though
he knew the Flying G was nowhere she’d want to crawl back, since she’d need
at the least to apologize for past disgrace she’d brought upon the family
name.
‘Huh! Don’t think I need any shoulder to cry on. Not even yours! I’d prefer to suffer my injuries alone.’
In a dark mood, Lil stormed off into the darkness and Jackson let her
go. That her spirit survived in belligerence brought a gathering of anxious
creases to his forehead. Lil could be a sneaky young devil. She would get
back at Creede somehow, maybe in a way no one could predict. And how would
the next run-in end?
Jackson built a cigarette and drew on it, thinking long and hard. Bad
times had come to Fort Dennis for a fact. Tonight’s jollity and its meaner
side brought the state of affairs home to him. The arrogant pair from Washington
would ride rough-shod, not caring what or who was damaged in the process.
He feared that giving offence to Colonel Lexborough’s wife and effectively
assaulting Misfit Lil were no more than trivial preliminaries in their agenda of self-aggrandisement.
Many long minutes dragged by and he lost track of the time. He didn’t feel
like socializing any more and kept his own company till the word was spread
that supper was about to be served in the mess-hall ballroom. He crushed
out his cigarette and joined a throng of folk returning to the organized
festivities.
He wasn’t the only one less than happy.
Fanny Kennedy had a reddened eye and what looked suspiciously like a bruise
on her jaw; either she’d over-indulged on hard liquor and fallen or she’d
been privately beaten by her husband, or both. Tom Kennedy wore a worried,
guilty look.
Colonel Lexborough was stiff and unsmiling. His wife, Geraldine, was still
the polite hostess but the front was clearly strained.
Lil Goodnight, uncommonly quiet, held well back from the centre of activity,
pressed against the wall of plastered stone. Maybe its chill passed through
her lovely ball gown and petticoat to ease a residual, throbbing heat in
her smitten parts. She appeared tolerably more subdued since he’d last seen
her, therefore unlikely to deliver more ill-considered outbursts against the
‘distinguished’ visitors.
General Morgan, looking like a strutting peacock with a fat behind, cast
beady little eyes around the room. Jackson thought that, though powerful
sure of his superiority to all he surveyed, he wasn’t at ease.
‘Where’s my adjutant?’ he demanded of the sycophantic group flanking him.
‘Major Ezra Creede, sir?’ a lieutenant said weakly, dismayed that he couldn’t produce the answer.
‘Who else, you damn fool!’
‘He – er – said he was going to his quarters, sir.’
‘What the hell for?’
The lieutenant trembled in his well-polished boots. ‘I believe he mentioned having an assignation,’ he said sheepishly.
Morgan was well into his cups. ‘If you mean the major said he’d found a woman
to poke, say so,’ he said crudely. ‘Go fetch him, man! I want him here when
I give my speech.’
Jackson, intrigued, slipped out of the hall and followed along in the lieutenant’s
footsteps. So also, ahead of him, did Miss Wadsworth, the nosy president
of the Ladies’ Temperance Society. Perhaps she hoped to learn the identity
of the woman who’d granted Creede her favours.
The interest seemed kind of ghoulish – was that the right word? – to Jackson.
Who would want to accommodate such an obvious bully? The unfortunate woman,
whoever she was, had to be drunk. For Miss Wadsworth to take advantage and
spy was another of the night’s unfairnesses.
The door to the room allocated to Major Creede in the officers’ living quarters
was ajar. Hearing no sounds within, and seeing a lamp burning, the lieutenant
pushed it open and stepped through.
Then Purity Wadsworth let out a piercing scream. Whatever she saw over the
lieutenant’s shoulder, ‘ghoulish’ suddenly seemed to have become the appropriate
word.
‘Omigod!’ she shrieked. ‘He’s dead!’
She turned and pushed past Jackson in an unseeing panic. Hitching her skirts
clear of her slippered feet, she rushed back the way they’d come yelling,
‘Murder! Murder!’
The lieutenant backed out of the room.
‘Better get a doc real fast. . . .’ he suggested, white at the gills.
‘Hell, what’s happened in there?’ Jackson rapped.
He went in. The room was stuffy and smelled of lamp oil, sweat and spilled blood.
Ezra Creede was on the floor beside the iron-framed cot. He saw instantly
why the sober Miss Wadsworth had gone to pieces and why the lieutenant hadn’t
the guts for it. A wound in battle was one thing; this was something else,
altogether more shocking and macabre.
The major’s pants and longjohns were in a heap alongside him. He was stretched
out on his back in a dark pool of red, eyes open and staring, mouth twisted
in a rictus of last agony. He still had one hand to the monstrosity at his
hirsute groin; the other was a claw reaching for his chest where he’d been
stabbed in the small, vulnerable triangle just under the rib cage.
It hadn’t been neat or efficient. He’d first been cut bloodily in the throat
and the blade had been ripped downward cutting tunic and shirt. It had finally
been driven deeply in, piercing his heart, completely burying the sharp,
bright, slender shaft of steel.
But the golden hilt of the murder weapon stuck up and was clearly limned
in the flickering lampglow. The feet of the proudly naked little goddess
were planted in an ooze of blood; the red garnets at the points of her breasts
twinkled like tiny fires, the only life atop a dead man.
It was the Medici dagger, beautiful but sinister, put with a deadly thrust to its originally intended use.
Fetch a doctor? Jackson didn’t think so. Major Creede was a job for the undertaker.
For all his crimes – of which Jackson didn’t doubt there’d been many – he’d
paid the price in full.
*
Horror and consternation erupted in the ballroom when the news brought by
the hysterical temperance spinster was confirmed. Major Ezra Creede had been
murdered! It spread through the room like wildfire.
‘Well I never!’ said the Reverend Titus Fisher. ‘Well I never!’ Mindful of
the effect on his status of imbibing spiritous drink in public, he carried
a cup in a saucer. It rattled nervously.
‘More tea, vicar?’ Lil asked meekly, fixing to sound like a lady from a long way east of the Mississippi River.
General Morgan, though shocked, was more affronted than upset by the death of his valuable underling.
‘It’s a calculated blow to undermine my authority!’ he thundered at Colonel
Lexborough. ‘I demand an immediate call of the garrison to full alert! Guests
are detained in the hall until further notice! Guard the doors!’
The general buttonholed Sheriff Hamish Howard as the representative of the
civilian law. Jackson shook his head sadly at Lexborough.
‘He’s a mite pushy . . . high-handed.’
Lexborough was grave. ‘Well, has anybody got a better notion? It’s clear we have to start an investigation on the spot.’
Howard was nothing loath to give the general full co-operation. Obsequiously,
he initiated searches and the questioning of all non-army men present. Colonel
Lexborough was to supervise a similar interrogation of the soldiery. It fell
to Mrs Lexborough to examine the women.
‘What are we looking for?’ Lieutenant Covington asked.
The colonel informed him that Creede had been stabbed with the Italian dagger
presented to his wife, and its crimson velvet sheath had not been found at the murder scene.
‘Gerry put the dagger in her reticule and she confesses she knew it had been
purloined during the evening. She didn’t want to make a fuss and spoil such
an important occasion, so she said nothing. The general figures the murderer
might still have the sheath on their person.’
‘Damned stupid if they did,’ Jackson muttered under his breath.
To Jackson, Gerry admitted she’d thought the dagger, though unforgettably
beautiful in its craftsmanship, a repulsive gift. When she’d handled it,
a chill had fingered her spine.
‘I would have been glad never to see it again!’ she said, shivering anew. ‘It was made for a Medici assassin.’
Howard’s deputy, Sly Connor, pasty-faced and sweaty, was soon riled by the
terse and bitter answers he got to his questions of the towners. Many were
offended at the suggestion they could be suspects.
‘Me, Deputy Connor?’ the Reverend Fisher piped. ‘Well I never!’
Connor was exasperated. ‘What’s the point of this tomfoolery, Sheriff? We
all know who killed Creede. She told us her ownself she aimed to make him
pay. Said she see him in hell! Most ever’body heard her say it.’
‘Yuh’re durn tootin’ they did, Deputy!’ Howard said, scowling. ‘I know this
is army property, but soon as Misfit Lil showed up here, I should’ve been
asked to serve a Notice of Removal.’
Jackson said, ‘What a stinking, pompous, good-for-nothing jackass you are, Howard!’
The two peace officers ignored him.
‘Waal, thing is, Sheriff,’ Sly Connor said, ‘has Mrs Lexborough searched the bitch yet?’
The exchange was conducted at a volume where it could be heard in many parts of the hall.
Lil continued to say nothing. Jackson considered it showed great restraint
on her part. Maybe she’d taken to heart the advice he’d given her to behave like a well-mannered young lady.
‘I have, Mr Connor,’ Mrs Lexborough said calmly. ‘Miss Goodnight has acquired
no dagger sheath since we were all obliged to witness for ourselves – disgracefully,
I might add – that she was hiding no weapon. She does, however, now have
a belt and pistol under her skirts which clearly weren’t there before.’
Connor said thinly, ‘Heeled, huh? That’s suspicious.’
‘But not the evidence you’re looking for, Deputy,’ Jackson spoke up again,
electing to argue strenuously in Lil’s defence. ‘Might as well be self-protection
for a girl whose underwear had been stolen.’
Howard stared in disbelief. ‘Yuh’re sayin’ she’s wearin’ a gun cos she ain’t wearin’ drawers?’
But Jackson, though realizing how weak it sounded put so ludicrously, forged on.
‘I don’t believe Lil Goodnight would lure a man into some kind of rendezvous
and stab him with a sneaky foreign dagger, if that’s what you’re charging.
It isn’t her way. Maybe someone’s used her, framed her.’
The Reverend Fisher coughed. ‘She was out of the hall a long spell.’ He made it sound like he was uncovering a grave sin.
Lil broke her silence briefly but very coolly. ‘So were lots of folks.’
‘She was with me some of the time,’ Jackson said.
Howard sneered. ‘Some of the time. . . .’
The general said testily, ‘Stop the palaver and get on with enquiries!’
With sullen grumblings, the Silver Vein lawmen reluctantly returned to what
they reckoned was the farce of interrogation and search.
Jackson was accosted by Lieutenant Covington. He had the air of a man on a promising trail, inspired and eager.
‘How did Miss Goodnight arrive here? She came by herself and met you here, didn’t she?’
‘Sure, she came on her grey and left it in the stables.’
‘Then I’m going to check out that horse and its saddle gear right now,’ Covington
said. ‘She had to get the gun rig from somewhere, which proves she was probably
over to the stables sometime recent.’
He spun on his heels to go.
‘You better look through the train of buggies and carriages everyone else has waiting out there, too!’ Jackson flung after him.
When Covington returned, only minutes later, breathless and triumphant, Jackson’s heart sank to his boots.
‘Misfit Lil’s horse has been saddled up, ready to ride!’ he accused loudly.
‘And in a carpetbag tied on behind, I found this – tucked inside the roll
of her buckskin clothes!’
With a proud flourish, he produced the distinctive red velvet sheath of the antique dagger.
‘Well I never!’ blurted Titus Fisher.
‘Can’t be no doubt about it now,’ Howard declared, his evil mind working
overtime. ‘The vicious cat had her reckonin’ with the major. Mebbe kidded
him she’d gotten the hots from the wallopin’ an’ was point of fact invitin’
him to have his way, then killed ’im fer what she was dealt fair an’ square.
She’s guilty as hell!’
General Morgan roared, ‘Arrest the whore! Makes no difference the culprit’s
a female. A murderess should dance on air at the end of rope!’
His face was empurpled with raw hatred.
MISFIT LIL HIDES OUT
