Silent Time (12 page)

He watched as Leona took up the letters and placed them in a tall-legged sewing chest which stood against the parlour wall. She closed and locked it, then turned to face him.

“Don't believe a word that man tells you, William. He was never no friend of mine.”

Night had once again taken command of the Cape Shore road. The Fiat felt its way along the leafy tunnel revealed by the beam of the headlights. William was relieved to see that Crawford was not only rigidly intent on driving but, judging by the way he gnawed his lower lip, actually nervous. His plump fingers held the steering wheel like a divining rod, sensing every bump and hollow in the road. He seemed grateful for the car's moving pool of illumination and William, too, would not care to confront the night without it.

The Fiat was halfway up Sheep Cove Hill when they thought they saw the light of a second car approaching from the other direction.

“Jesus Christ!” Crawford said. “Whoever that is, they better stop. I won't be able to back down this hill in the dark and there's certainly no room to pull over.” William eyed the dark abyss of the ravine to his right.

“Just keep going,” William said with his heart in his throat. “He'll stop when he sees your lights.” Crawford sounded the horn as they carried on breathlessly to the top to discover that what they thought was a second pair of headlights was, in fact, only the rising of a full moon. They laughed at themselves and drove in peaceful silence for a while after that.

“So, tell me, William,” Crawford said, at last, “is it my driving or my drinking that makes you so nervous?”

The remark took William by surprise. He knew he should just say he feared a drunken man at the wheel, but couldn't manage it. “I don't do
well in cars at the best of times,” he said, “let alone on a road like this. You said yourself you'd hate to get a puncture way out here.”

Crawford wouldn't let the matter drop. “I don't think it's a puncture you're worried about. Your heart has been in your throat the whole time.”

“I mean no offence, John.”

“None taken, but you might as well tell me the truth. It's important to be honest with me right now.”

“All right, I'm concerned about your drinking, too. I have good cause. You know that, don't you?”

Crawford's shoulders sank a little. “Of course, I do. Madeline and the girls are insisting I go to one of those new treatment clinics in the United States.”

“That may not be a bad idea, John.”

“I think I'm going to have to do it to keep the peace at home. You see, I do recognize there is a bit of a problem.” Crawford glanced across at him. “But you can't tell anyone you heard me say that, okay?”

“I won't. I promise.”

“You think I'll count on a politician's promise?”

“This time you can.”

“I believe I can. You kept your promise to that woman, William. Thanks to you, that little girl will have a whole new life. Out of the lies and bullshit of politics, you set one bright star alight, and you even let me share in it a little.”

William breathed a sigh of relief in the dark. He had no desire to offend Crawford, though the man's drinking was legendary in St. John's. William had known several good men who'd insanely continued to drink as their lives and health collapsed irreparably. Yet he could understand, too. The man who sat beside him in the eerie glow of the dashboard lights had, like himself and so many others, suffered a serious blow from the war. Crawford's youngest son had been killed at Beaumont Hamel.

A prolonged silence descended as William's thoughts turned, for the first time in a long while, to the war dead. So many times he had tried to grasp the meaning of that loss, but the calculation always defeated and overwhelmed him. He felt a touch of his old misery, so he forced his thoughts outside, beyond the spectral light of the vehicle, to the great reality unfolding in the darkened sky above, where with each passing second innumerable stars were being born and dying. He sometimes liked to imagine the souls of the war dead finding a new home for themselves among those stars.

In the end, the only thing measurable was his personal pain. It was lessened this night because he had helped rescue one small soul from another kind of darkness. He had done the one good thing. He had something to be proud of at last.

On Monday afternoon William left his upstairs office in the Newfoundland Museum where the Department of Agriculture and Mines was being housed, and walked to the British Hall Building on Gower Street which housed the offices of the Colonial Secretary. He paid a quick courtesy call to his old chum, the Colonial Secretary, William Bennett, then headed down the polished hardwood corridor toward a large oak door. Its frosted glass bore the elegantly lettered inscription
Deputy Colonial Secretary
. Beneath, on a metal nameplate, he read:
Arthur Duke
. He knocked and a voice called, “Come in, please.” He detected one of those pretentious mid-Atlantic accents that upper-class townies used, an accent somewhere between a corner-boy and a Brit. He opened the door and there was Arthur Duke, meticulously groomed, dressed in a brown poplin suit, seated comfortably behind a gleaming oak desk with nothing on it but an enormous paper clip in the form of two gold-plated praying hands.

Duke indicated a chair with a slight nod of his head, but did not speak or look up to acknowledge William's presence. He seemed deeply preoccupied with a postage stamp that he was holding in a pair of metal pincers. He was scrutinizing it through a large round magnifying glass. William was struck by Duke's milk-white hands, the nails shiny and immaculately manicured.

He'd recently read a profile of Arthur Duke in the
Newfoundland Quarterly
, where it mentioned that the dutiful civil servant played organ every Sunday at the Gower Street United Church. William could imagine those elegant fingers at the ivory keys of an organ much more easily than he could see them pounding away on the Underwood typewriter that sat on a small table in the corner. It must be with some reluctance that Duke still typed his own correspondence – a mark of inferiority for a civil servant.

Still, William thought, the bastard managed to get a letter out of this office that scared the wits out of Leona. He cleared his throat loudly and
Duke looked up through the magnifying glass. The oversized eye glared wildly at William beside its normal-sized but beady counterpart.

“Ah, Minister Cantwell, you're here for your three o'clock, right on time.”

“Would you mind taking that thing away from your eye, Mr. Duke?” William said. “It makes it hard to look at you.”

“Oh, sorry,” Duke said, with exaggerated concern. “I forget myself at times.” He gave William an insolent little smile. “Let's just leave that there for now.” He laid the stamp, pincers and glass beside the praying hands, then enfolded the fingers of his own white hands to mirror them. “What can I do for you today, Mr. Cantwell.”

“I'm here regarding Dulcie Merrigan, a deaf child of my acquaintance on the Cape Shore. We've exchanged letters on the matter in the last few weeks. I came here to tell you that the girl's mother is a dear friend of mine.”

“Is she, indeed?”

“Yes. She is. I understand that you too are acquainted with her?”

“It so happens that I am, Mr. Cantwell. It so happens that I am.”

There was something unsettling about Arthur Duke's air – the subtle insolence, the needless repetition, the mock sincerity – quite apart from the fact that it made William want to smack the smug bastard.

“Let's just get to the point, then,” William said. “Whatever suspicions you may have had at one time regarding Leona Merrigan's activities, they should have no bearing whatsoever on how you handle this case. The child is desperately in need of proper schooling.”

“I understand that, Mr. Cantwell. What I don't understand is why the Government of Newfoundland should pay for it when the child's mother likely has the means to do so herself.”

William gasped with incredulity. The man certainly didn't mince words, no matter how absurd they were.

“Do you seriously believe that the few cents she makes in illegal rum sales are capable of financing the child's education or, for that matter, are of any consequence to this government?”

“Indeed, it does appear to be of little consequence,” Duke drawled, “when the Minister of Finance himself is imbibing the stuff.”

“You know who was there on the weekend?”

“Yes. I admit to keeping an eye on Leona Merrigan, and for good reason.”

“I've heard that you are the ideal civil servant, Mr. Duke. But I had no idea your sense of duty included harassing a poor widow and obstructing the education of a helpless child.”

“I know it must seem heartless to you, Mr. Cantwell, but you don't know the whole truth. Hear me out, and before you leave here today you'll agree with me that you are being misled and manipulated by this Merrigan woman.”

“You're mad.”

“Hear me out, Mr. Cantwell. That's all I ask.”

William now found himself as wary of Duke as he would be of an animal with one leg in a trap.

“I will hear you out, but know this. Nothing will stand in the way of that child going to school this fall. Is that clear?”

Duke raised his hands in mock cowboy fashion, as if William had just pulled a gun on him.

“I've already drafted the letter giving her passage to school. The uncertainty I indicated in the letter to Mrs. Merrigan was mere formality. You understood that, surely, even if she didn't.”

“You did that just to upset her. Didn't you?”

“I tell you you'll have the necessary papers before you leave. What more do you want?”

William didn't speak, so Duke removed a small wooden box from his desk drawer and flipped open the lid. His elegant fingers took up a black index card with six stamps on it, each neatly attached by a little paper hinge.

“You recognize this series, don't you? The Royal Portrait Issue.”

William nodded. Each stamp was, indeed, a mini-portrait of a member of the Royal Family.

“Well, who wouldn't?” Duke continued. “You've no doubt used them all at one point or another.” He pointed to the various stamps using the silver pincers. “That's King Edward III as a child on the half-cent. The five-cent, by the way, bears the first portrait of the future King George V ever to appear on a postage stamp. There's good old Queen Victoria on the one-cent and, of course, that widely circulated portrait of Edward VII as the Prince of Wales on the two-cent. The two-cent. That's where things get interesting.”

William was further unsettled by the realization that the portrait on the King Edward VII stamp was a miniature version of the one that, only the day before yesterday, had stared at him from the wall in Leona Merrigan's parlour.

“I don't see what any of this could possibly have to do with Leona Merrigan,” he said, with the odd feeling that he was engaging in some sort of deception.

Arthur Duke laughed. “I have an explanation, but you have to give me your full attention.”

“Go on, then,” William grumbled, increasingly annoyed at the tension growing in his guts. “But get on with it. I haven't got all day.”

Duke held up another card, a single stamp hinged to it this time.

“Do you know this one?”

William recognized the two-cent stamp with a map of the island of Newfoundland on it.

“The Map Stamp. Yes, it's quite common.”

“Yes, like all the two-cents, it's used on letters, so it is, as you say, very common. But it has a unique history, this stamp. It was issued, all on its own, shortly after the Royal Portrait series.” Duke was obviously enjoying the fact that he had drawn William into this unfamiliar territory. “One might well ask why the government of the day suddenly issued a separate two-cent stamp when there was already one available in the Royal Portrait Issue. The King Edward VII, remember? If there was a shortage, why didn't they just print more of those?”

“I've never asked myself that question.”

“I'll tell you the answer, anyway. The Map Stamp comes from a happier era than these sad times we live in now, Mr. Cantwell. People will look back and speak of it as a Golden Age for Newfoundland. It was 1904. Sir Robert Bond's diplomacy had just put an end to those insidious French treaty rights on our western shore and, for the first time in our history, we were truly masters in our own domain. We weren't in the financial mess we're in now, either. We had real leadership back then. Sir Robert had just been re-elected with an overwhelming majority.”

An edge of pride crept into Duke's voice.

“He appointed me his Deputy Colonial Secretary that year. I was just twenty years old.”

“How nice for you. But could you get to the point, Mr. Duke?”

William felt a pang of satisfaction as Duke shot him a look caught strangely between a sneer and a smile.

“Indeed, I will. As you can imagine, I looked after all manner of business for the prime minister. One morning, shortly after my appointment, he informed me that we were running out of two-cent and five-cent stamps from the Royal Portrait Issue. Fresh consignments would have to be ordered, he said. But he had to go to London immediately, and so he left the matter entirely in my hands. Sir Robert took a personal interest in our stamps. I wanted desperately to impress him. I wanted that order completed and the stamps in his office upon his return. I wasted no time
in placing an order with the American Banknote Company in New York for two boxes of the two-cent, and one of the five-cent. It was only a matter of reprinting the existing plates, so I told them to put a rush on it. A week later I received a telegram from the company telling me that the shipment was ready. There was a steamer leaving for St. John's in a few days. To wait for the steamer would have been the prudent thing to do, but the fellow said that the stamps could immediately be put aboard a Portuguese schooner that would arrive in St. John's a day or two earlier, possibly in time for Sir Robert's return. I decided to risk it. I instructed them to put the stamps into the captain's hands. I promised extra payment for the captain when he personally delivered the stamps into
my
hands. I sat back and waited for them to arrive.