A Mischief in the Snow - By Margaret Miles Page 0,99

Sarah, it happens he went off to Worcester! Somebody had to tell Godwin's family what happened to him. And he is, after all, the constable. Said he'd be staying at the Three Ravens, if you care to go after him— looking for the young man's murderer!”

“He'll be back, as soon as Thankful Marlowe decides he's drunk more than the selectmen will likely pay for,” predicted a wise man.

“Here comes Mr. Rowe,” Lem told Charlotte, for he'd been turned about in his seat, waiting for Hannah's family to arrive. Christian Rowe indeed hurried to the front of the room, to the stand where he usually delivered his sermons.

“We must have order,” he insisted loudly. “Let us wait until the hour. There's no need for hurry, with the boy dead some days—”

“Fine,” said a large woman from under a pink quilted bonnet, “but what about these shillings? And what about our housewares?”

“I've heard Ned Bigelow was the one,” called another, over an infant's wail.

“But he never decided to do it on his own,” insisted the first. “No, he had to be led by someone!”

“It will be the same men who've left maids lying down in the meadow sweet, I suspect, after they've had what they were after,” said Mrs. Proctor dourly.

“Or those who keep secrets from wives, and their poor mothers—” Jemima Hurd added.

“And who make everything we own liable to seizure, under the King's law!” cried Esther Pennywort. This last observation was a truly frightening one, and it started fiercer rumbling.

“Ladies, ladies!” the minister called bravely, holding up his hands. “There has been, I agree, a terrible breach of trust—one committed against myself as much as any other! Yet a charge of murder is even more worthy of our careful—”

“But what if Godwin was killed because of these shillings?” Sarah Proctor interrupted. “What if he was about to tell what he knew? He did threaten Lem Wainwright with something, and said he would tell Mr. Longfellow what some were up to—though why he supposed any of the selectmen would care is a mystery.”

Charlotte saw Lem squirm in his place, and look to the minister to defend him.

“If,” said Rowe, “there is blame—and I am sure there is!—then, we must ask ourselves who had the most to lose by the discovery of this moneymaking scheme. Can that be young Wainwright, when so many older men are obviously involved?” He gave an oily smile in Charlotte's direction, before returning to the fray. “And, we must ask ourselves this: what might happen if Crown officials, rather than our own, begin to ask the questions here? As we all know, Boston cares little enough for us…”

“You should be asking, as we've asked ourselves, who else could have killed Alex Godwin that afternoon,” said Sarah Proctor. A hush fell.

“Constable Dudley,” Dick Craft replied, representing the thoughts of the Blue Boar, “claims it may well have been some stranger off the road, coming by to look for trouble.”

“John Dudley!” cried a woman who lived on the north road, and felt she knew her neighbor. “The sot could barely see his feet that afternoon. And he never picked the boy up and took him into those trees. He probably pissed in his own boot that day, to avoid lifting so much as a finger—”

Charlotte blushed and looked away, glad that Rachel Dudley and her children had not come, after all.

“But if some of you men,” said Rowe uneasily, “can give us ideas as to who was in a position to do such a thing—?”

“There is no need, sir,” said Emily Bowers, rising from a collection of her own nodding supporters. “The women of the village have already counted heads, and we can't see that any of our own men would have been able to get away with such a thing, even if they had good enough reason. It may be, for once, that John Dudley is right.”

“Except for the boy,” Sarah Proctor intoned. “Ned Bigelow has neither wife nor mother to look after him, or to wonder where he's got to. Jonah surely can't follow him far! And he may have wished to stop Alex from talking about what we now know of the shillings—he may even know more about other goings-on, up there on that island…”

This new suggestion, reminding them of the sad fate of Catherine Knowles, quieted the crowd.

“Well, where is he, then?” asked Rowe. “And where is Jonah? It is still a little early—but some of you men, go and fetch them; we'll ask for