David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

I stared at him, his face-aging and on the very cusp of becoming elderly-in the dim light, the yellow flame reflecting off the yellow teeth. He was frightened to be alone with me.

All I’d had to drink rushed about in my head, and I forced myself to focus. “I want to know about you and Duer.”

“I won’t speak of it. I am to say nothing, and I shall say nothing.”

“What of your properties in Southwark? You’ve lost them or sold them. And then there is the matter of your loan from the Bank of the United States. I understand your payments are past due, and you won’t even appear when summoned. Are you unprepared to talk about that?”

Pearson’s face twisted into a grotesquerie of hatred. All signs of the rugged man, the handsome man he had once been, were blasted away by an explosion of fury that altered, in a single flash, the landscape of his countenance.

“Do you mean to have your revenge, Saunders? All those years ago, you fled Philadelphia and I happened to marry the girl you once set your cap at. So now you must hound me?”

I could not show how bitter his words made me, and I would not dismiss my feelings for Cynthia-not for his satisfaction or my advantage. I said nothing.

Pearson seemed to grow calmer. He said, “Mrs. Maycott seems fond enough of you, and she’s an excellent widow to catch. Put your mind to that, if you dare, and leave me and my family alone. You are not welcome inside this house again-or any longer, for that matter. I go to bed, but I shall tell my servants that if you are not gone in a quarter hour you are to be removed forcibly.”

Pearson now turned from me and ascended the dark staircase. He did not pause to say good night, which was rude.

When I returned to the sitting room, Mr. and Mrs. Vanderveer were rising and thanking their hostess for an enjoyable evening. Perhaps it was a different, earlier evening they mentioned. They spoke as though the meal had come to a natural and pleasant conclusion. They spoke of the lateness of the hour, the goodness of the food. They thanked the hostess and departed.

Then it was Mrs. Maycott’s turn. “You are a lovely hostess, Cynthia. Thank you so much for having me.”

“Joan.” She cast her eyes downward.

Mrs. Maycott raised a finger to her lips. “It need not be said. We are friends. I shall show myself out. I hope you have no objection if I first speak to your cook. That chicken was marvelous, and I would learn how she does it.”

“Of course.”

The two ladies embraced, and Mrs. Maycott allowed me to take her hand, which was very smooth for the time of year. Then she was gone, leaving me alone with Mrs. Pearson. We were both standing, looking to where Mrs. Maycott had gone, not quite sure what to say.

“She is charming,” said Mrs. Pearson. “And they say her husband left her wealthy.”

“It is good to know that husbands may be good for something,” I said. “Such as leaving money to their wives.”

I feared I may have exceeded my limits, but Mrs. Pearson burst out into a shrill, girlish laugh such as I never thought to hear again.

“Captain Ethan Saunders, let us take a drink in the library.”

“Mrs. Cynthia Pearson, your husband has informed me that if I am not gone in a quarter hour, I shall be tossed out by the servants.”

She smiled at me. “I’ve learned a thing or two after a decade of marriage. The servants are loyal to me. And the library is well removed far from Mr. Pearson’s room. There is no better place to go in the house to avoid his notice.”

“Then, Mrs. Pearson, let us go by all means. I do love a good library.”

Her pretty plump girl led us to the library, where a fire already burned. The girl lit a number of candles and provided us with an excellent bottle of port. She was good enough to pour a glass for each of us, and equally good enough to disappear afterward.

Cynthia let out a sigh and sat in a high-backed chair across from me and, just like that, something changed. That one small gesture did it. It was as though a master carpenter presented two pieces of wood and they fit together with such preordained snugness that they clicked upon joining. So it was that Cynthia, in her good-natured and indulgent sigh, in her uncomplicated slide into a high-backed chair, put me at my ease. I was not an unwelcome intrusion from her past but something far more pleasing.

“It was wrong of Joan to invite you here tonight,” Cynthia said, studying her port. “I think she is mischievous.”

“Such old friends as we are might be in the same room without mischief.”

“It was not what I meant. I wish you had not seen Mr. Pearson in one of his moods.”

“I understand, and yet I have seen it. Mrs. Pearson, you asked for my help before. You asked me to find your husband because you believed yourself and your children in danger. I cannot believe you wished me to find him for his own sake.”

“You mustn’t say that,” she said. “We cannot be together if you speak to me so.”

“Then I won’t speak to you so. It will be all business. I never mind a deception or two if it is to cover one’s own tracks, but you must own up if discovered. Did you ask Mrs. Maycott to invite me here and to do it publicly at the party so all could see it was not of your doing?”

She blushed deeply. “How did you know?”

“Only a feeling. It was a clever maneuver.”

“Thank you. I did learn a thing or two from you during the war. I always loved to hear of your tricks and schemes, and at last I had a chance to put into place a little scheme of my own.”

“To what end?” I asked. “I would like to flatter myself that you wished no more than my company, but I cannot think it so. Can you not tell me more of what you know?”

“It began some six weeks ago,” she said. “Mr. Pearson has never been the most even-tempered of men, but he grew much more irritable than usual. And he began to have around the house a very uncouth sort of man, very western-looking, with a scar upon his face.”

“I know who he is. He works for William Duer. Have you met Duer?”

“Of course. Several times. Philadelphia society, you know. When he worked for Hamilton and lived in Philadelphia, our families came into contact often.”

“When did your husband start doing business with Duer?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“And the reason you contacted me?”

“When Mr. Pearson disappeared last week, I hardly thought anything of it. That man Lavien came around, wishing to ask questions. He’d been around before, and Mr. Pearson had refused to speak to him. Now he wished to know where my husband was and what I knew of his business. It was uncomfortable, but nothing more. Then a man calling himself Reynolds-a tall bald man with an Irish accent-came to see me. He said I must tell Lavien nothing, and if I wished to preserve the safety of my husband, my children, and myself, I would not trouble myself with things that did not concern me.”

The tall Irishman. Yet another man pretending to be Reynolds and making himself conspicuously my enemy. I had no notion of what it could mean, but it made me uneasy. “And that was when you sought me out?” I asked.

She nodded. “I would hardly have concerned myself about Mr. Pearson’s absence. It was not his first, after all. But once the matter involved my children, I did not know what to do, and yours was the only name I could think of. I am sorry to have troubled you with all this.”

“You must not say so. It is my duty to help you.”

“And,” she said, “it is good to see you after so many years.”

It was at this point that the door opened and Mr. Pearson entered the room, red in the face, red in the eyes. His vest was unbuttoned and his shirt disheveled, and his mouth was twisted into a sneer. In one hand he held a silver-handled horsewhip. In the other, he dragged along a boy-perhaps eight or nine years of age-by the collar of a dull cotton sleeping gown. The boy’s hair was mussed from sleep, but he was wide awake. And terrified.