A Mischief in the Snow - By Margaret Miles Page 0,100

their explanation.”

“There's no need for us to pull Ned into this,” Phineas Wise objected. “We all know the lad, and he's got as good a heart as any man here.”

“Better that than let someone else examine him, Phineas,” came an answer from near the back doors.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Samuel Sloan, though Hannah tried to pull him toward their usual seats, “that it would be a shame, as Reverend Rowe says, if the sheriff in Cambridge got the idea to come here and listen to what's being said about murder, and then began to ask about the other thing. Still, he'll find no proof of that, I think.”

“No proof?” objected Reverend Rowe. “No proof! We all know—”

“You may think you know, Reverend. But where is this mold? And is there a forge on the island? I wouldn't be surprised if there was nothing there at all.”

“There isn't,” said Richard Longfellow as he walked briskly up the center aisle. “I was there yesterday and saw no sign of recent activity, though I was told where to look. But there still remain the coins, gentlemen. And the body.”

Again somber tones grew among them, until a further cry arose.

“I say bring back old Bigelow and his grandson. Let's get this over with, now!”

With the meeting house nearly full, it seemed most of the town agreed. A handful of men then rose and went out together, satisfied that they would miss little, while the rest waited in suspense for their return.

Chapter 35

LONGFELLOW GAVE LEM and Charlotte a look, but went on to sit alone in his box at the front of the meeting house, apparently lost in thought.

Charlotte heard a rustling, and saw that someone else had come to sit beside her. For years Moses Reed had been a stranger to village meetings. Now, he asked if he might join her.

Yet today she hardly recognized the lawyer—for he had shaved off his full beard! His face, quite bare, seemed terribly pale. She even wondered if he might not feel the weight of some new concern; his bearing, too, appeared altered. She was relieved when he leaned before her and told Lem calmly that he mustn't worry about what happened next, for it would give proof of his innocence.

“What is it, Mr. Reed?” she asked. He gave a small groan for an answer. “I'm very sorry,” he told her at last, “that what I have feared most, what I fervently hoped would not be true, has proven itself to be so. They won't find Ned Bigelow. It was he who took Godwin's life—he has now admitted it to me.”

“Ned? To you? Why?”

“Because I finally brought myself to tell him a secret of my own… one I'm hardly proud to have kept, all these years.”

Her eyes played over the lawyer's face, trying to read something of his tortured thoughts. Then his pained smile confirmed a suspicion that had come to her. Without the beard, there was something about the lips and chin, something about the bones of his cheeks, that reminded her of another…

“I've already told Richard Longfellow,” he said. “I discussed it with Magdalene—and then, I went and told my son the truth.”

The resemblance, when one knew what to look for, was very clear. The eyes alone were different. They did not dance.

“I promised him I would help, when he swore it was done in the heat of the moment, and that he deeply regretted his action. Still, there is no going back.”

“No,” she said, swiftly calculating the consequences of what she'd heard. “Magdalene will suffer for this as well. But then, you and she—?”

“Were lovers, yes, many years ago. I was called to the island not as a guest, but as a young man who knew the local woods, and could lead hunters to the boars’ lairs, or drive the creatures toward their waiting weapons. Not a pleasant job, but one with a certain amount of excitement to it. That is how I met Magdalene, for even then she walked alone about the island. Her love of nature, her sweet wildness—these things drew us together. And in the end…”

“When you learned she carried your child—?”

“I have never done a harder thing, Mrs. Willett, I swear to you. Yet I had to admit I'd wronged not only Magdalene but my benefactors. John Fisher had been good to me, had taken me from a poor situation in life, and paid me well. When he died, his daughter wished to be sure she had someone