On Kingdom Mountain (7 page)

Miss Jane's lecture was, as she had promised, a spirited attack on William Shakespeare and his benighted advocates. Her thesis was that the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, had authored each of the plays attributed to the Pretender of Avon. Henry was baffled by her presentation, and Judge Allen seemed, from his all-too-polite silence, to be skeptical about her theory. “In conclusion,” the Duchess proclaimed, glaring at Henry and the judge and beaming at Sadie and A Number One, who were busy washing down her homemade lemon scones with cups of hot tea, “do you think it's even remotely conceivable that this unlettered clown, this low, sneaking, untutored, ill-favored strolling player and glover's apprentice penned the fabled ‘Sceptred Isle' piece? No, he did not. Nor any of the thirty-six plays erroneously attributed to him. All were the work of the much-maligned seventeenth Earl.” She pointed an accusing finger at the Pretender of Avon and thundered, “You, sir, are a fraud!”

Including a ten-minute digression to attack “the Pronouncer of Concord” and “the Proclaimer of Litchfield,” Miss Jane had spoken nonstop for a solid hour. Henry clapped enthusiastically. A Number One emitted a long, appreciative locomotive whistle. Sadie shook her tiny fist in Will Shakespeare's face. Judge Allen congratulated Miss Jane on a most vigorous argument, checked out
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, bought a well-used copy of
The Country of the Pointed Firs
, and went home to read. All in all, for Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain, the tea-and-scones literary evening at the Atheneum had been a pretty successful conclusion to a trying day.

W
HEN HENRY SATTERFIELD
, dressed all in white, slender and handsome and smiling amiably, strolled into the Kingdom County courtroom in the Common with Miss Jane a week later, some of the spectators mistook him for her attorney. Henry, for his part, was impressed by Jane's amazingly confident bearing. Arranging her brief at the plaintiff's table to the left of the aisle in front of the judge's bench, nodding familiarly to the spectators and the court clerk, she seemed as much at home here as in her kitchen workshop on Kingdom Mountain.

Eben Kinneson Esquire sat at the defense table to the right of the aisle. For a weekday morning there was a good crowd of curiosity seekers in the courtroom, many of whom had undoubtedly come to get a good look at the exotic southerner staying with Miss Jane.

As usual, Jane wore a black homespun dress, high-buttoned black shoes, and her frayed red and green wool hunting jacket fastened with the large safety pin she called her everyday brooch. Her hair was pulled back into a severe schoolteacher's bun. A cardboard file fastened with black strings lay on the table in front of her. She had also brought along the homemade ash pointer she had used in her capacity as mistress of the Kinnesonville school.

To a medley of clinking, clanking, and hissing from the steam radiators, Judge Ira Allen entered the courtroom. He began the proceedings in genial fashion by announcing that, next to an old-fashioned wood stove, steam was the most even and comfortable heat going, if the loudest. “You, sir,” he said,
pointing at a talkative radiator in the far back corner. “Are you quite finished? May we proceed?” The radiator behind his bench let out a derisive hiss. “Who asked you?” the judge said, to chuckles from everyone but Miss Jane and Eben Kinneson Esquire.

The large wooden blades of the propeller fans suspended from the stamped tin ceiling whirred around and around. A freight train rumbled through the village. The yard locomotive shifting cars at the American Heritage furniture mill behind the courthouse hooted. Couplings slammed together. Then the mill whistle shrieked out for the 9:30 break. The judge smiled and shook his head. He liked to say that his was a working courtroom in a working town, and that was just the way he liked it. Ira Allen had been born and brought up in Kingdom County and had deep family roots there. Jane had told Henry earlier that morning that she and the judge had vied for the honor of valedictorian at the Kingdom Common Academy. She, of course, had won.

Eventually the freight passed, the yard engine finished making up the local, the radiators subsided into a steady, whispering conspiracy, and the judge called the court to order. He looked at Eben over the top of his reading spectacles. “Where are your clients, sir?”

“I'm representing myself, Your Honor.”

“Isn't the new road, the Connector, a town road? Where are the selectmen of the town of Kingdom Common?”

“Your Honor, my clients are exceedingly busy men. Their time is very valuable, so they have asked me to represent them today and to convey their regrets that they could not be here.”

“Just how valuable is the selectmen's time, Eben?”

“How valuable?”

“Yes. How valuable per day do you estimate the selectmen's time to be?”

“I should hazard, Your Honor, that their combined time is worth a cool hundred dollars a day.”

“Well, Eben, that is very impressive. Please thank the selectmen for conveying their regrets that they could not come to court this morning, as summoned, to explain why I should not grant Miss Jane's request for an immediate injunction to prevent the Connector from infringing on her property. And please convey the following message to them. That, notwithstanding their exceedingly busy schedule, they will appear in person at these proceedings and that, furthermore, I am fining them one hundred dollars per day for each day they miss, starting today, up to the end of this workweek, at which time I will issue a summary ruling in favor of Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain.”

Here Judge Allen was interrupted by a veritable ovation of clattering from all of the radiators at once. But he was not quite finished. “Also, kindly inform your clients that I am an avid fisherman myself,” he said. “An avid speckled trout fisherman.”

“Char,” Miss Jane said.

“Pardon me?”

“Technically, Ira, there's no such fish as a speckled trout. They're char. Therefore, you are a char fisherman.”

“This has not been a banner morning in my life,” Judge Allen said. “I am about to go trout—
char
—fishing myself. These proceedings will be renewed afresh tomorrow. Let us all hope that we will get off to a more promising start.”

“T
EN THOUSAND YEARS AGO
,” Miss Jane began her testimony the next morning, “Kingdom County was a boreal fastness of soaring mountains, free-running rivers, and dense coniferous forests.”

She was standing at the front of the courtroom, gesturing with her schoolteacher's pointer at some crude mountains she'd sketched on a portable blackboard. For all her great gifts as a sculptor, the Duchess couldn't draw a lick, a fact that somehow endeared her to Henry Satterfield, who again sat beside her at the plaintiff's table in his gleaming white suit, newly whitewashed shoes, and crimson vest.

The three selectmen of Kingdom Common, President George Quinn of the First Farmers and Lumberers Bank, Prof Chadburn, headmaster of the Kingdom Common Academy, and the Reverend, from the Congregational church, sat with Eben Kinneson Esquire at the defense table.

At the blackboard Miss Jane stood as straight as the tree her white-ash pointer had come from. As always, she wore black, with no jewelry or makeup. But this morning her light hair cascaded down her back. She certainly didn't look like a spinster schoolteacher, but rather, Henry thought admiringly, like an exceedingly attractive middle-aged woman. And the rainmaker, watching with courteous, unobtrusive interest, was sure that Miss Jane knew it. Showman that he was, Henry Satterfield was quite vain of his own appearance, and he sensed, perhaps, an opportunity here. Exactly what kind of opportunity, however, even he could not have said.

“Ten thousand years ago,” Miss Jane repeated, “the place
that we now call Kingdom County would have been scarcely recognizable to us. The mountains were thrice their current height. The forests were uninhabited, even by my mother's Memphremagog ancestors. Now enter the great ice sheet—”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Eben Kinneson Esquire interrupted. “We all appreciate the fact that my cousin is an able lecturer. But what bearing does the glaciation of northern New England have upon the town's very generous offer to pay her three times the value of the land appropriated for the right of way and to reroute the Connector around her beloved spawning pool?”

“Jane?” Judge Allen said.

“A gang of Frenchmen in the pay of the Great North Woods Pulp and Paper Company waltzed onto my property without my permission and destroyed the last tract of original forest on Kingdom Mountain. They wantonly despoiled a stretch of river where the descendants of the unique blue-backed char that came south with the glacier have spawned for thousands of years.”

“Judge Allen,” Eben said, “we must protest. Miss Kinneson's reputation as a venerable fixture of Kingdom County notwithstanding, even she was not here to witness those fish spawning thousands of years ago, and so cannot speak with authority on how long the spawning beds have—”

Crack.
Before Eben Kinneson Esquire could finish his sentence, Miss Jane reached across the aisle and brought her wooden pointer smartly down on his knuckles. The astonished attorney gave a yelp and half rose.

“That, sir, is how I dealt with impudence in my schoolroom,” Miss Jane said. “It is how I deal with your impudence. Sit down and curb your impertinent tongue.”

Eben Kinneson Esquire rubbed his knuckles. A smile played at the corners of Henry Satterfield's mouth, and his dark eyes gleamed. But Judge Allen brought down his gavel with a bang.
“Jane, there will be no more corporal punishment meted out in this courtroom. As for you, Eben, stop your whining. There will be no more unchivalrous references to the plaintiff's longevity, either. Hear me well, my friends. This is not Kingdom Mountain nor yet the august headquarters of the Great North Woods Pulp and Paper Company, Incorporated. It is my courtroom. In it we will conduct ourselves with a measure of civility. Jane, you may proceed with your opening statement. Please do us the kindness of making it shorter rather than longer.”

“Kingdom Mountain has always been regarded as a gore,” she said quite defiantly, “one of the last in Vermont. In other words, an unincorporated township unto itself. No Kingdom Mountain Kinneson has ever paid a penny of local, state, or federal taxes. The mountain belongs to me and to me alone. I am requesting one thousand dollars as reparation for my timber and an injunction to prevent the high road from crossing my property. Case closed.”

Jane sat down at the plaintiff's table beside Henry.

“That's all?” Eben said.

“How long does it take to chronicle a grievous wrong and propose away to right it? The truth, cousin, need never be long in the telling. The floor belongs to you.”

Eben Kinneson Esquire smiled thinly and stood up. Continuing to rub his reddened left knuckles with his right hand, he said, with a superior air, “Your honor, the Great North Woods Pulp and Paper Company and the township of Kingdom Common acknowledge that one of their subcontractors cut a few hundred dollars' worth of timber on Miss Kinneson's property. No doubt some minor alterations were made to the riverine terrain. No documented injury was suffered by the fish. Have any dead fish been exhibited before the court? No. Has the defense produced any witnesses? No again. The Great North Woods Company, however, will produce witnesses.
We
will follow proper courtroom protocol. But why waste the time
of the court at all? The town of Kingdom Common has already offered Miss Jane one thousand dollars for the right of way over Kingdom Mountain. Also, the town is willing to route the Connector around my cousin's spawning pool. Indeed, the original right of way map provided to the cutting crew circumvented the pool in question. But instead of referring the matter to me or to the town fathers, Jane Kinneson assaulted my loggers with a deadly weapon.”

Judge Allen did not seem much impressed by the last allegation. “Are you ready to call your first witness, Eben?”

Eben's first witness was the Canadian crew chief. With some difficulty, because of Monsieur Thibideau's heavy accent, Eben established that Thibideau had been given a topographical map with the right of way and the condemned property outlined on its contours. The map was produced, and in her cross-examination Miss Jane asked Thibideau to read the legend at its bottom.

The crew chief grinned. “I can't, me.”

“Why not? Surely you can read?”

“
Oui.
In French.”

Next a college-trained forester, billed as an expert witness for the defense, testified that he had examined the stream in question a few days earlier and found no dead fish.

“A query, forester,” Miss Jane said. “Did you secure permission to check the fish in my spawning pool?”

“Certainly. From Mr. Kinneson.”

“Let me understand this. My cousin gave you permission to come onto my land to manufacture evidence to use against me in court?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Eben Kinneson Esquire said. “Because of the way that question is—”

“I withdraw the query,” Miss Jane said. To the forester she said, “If I see you again on Kingdom Mountain, I won't answer for the consequences.”

“Your Honor,” Eben said, “the sectors of Kingdom Mountain that lie south of the forty-fifth parallel of latitude, designated as the international border between Vermont and Quebec, clearly belong in the township of Kingdom Common. The township is well within its rights to drive a road over the mountain, connecting the county to the Eastern Townships of Quebec and thence to Montreal. Indeed, the so-called Canada Pike Road running over the mountain has never been officially abandoned by the township. If necessary, my clients can simply route the right of way along the pike road. Miss Jane may own Kingdom Mountain. She does not own the road connecting it to Canada.”