Cordelia Underwood, or the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League Read online

  CORDELIA UNDERWOOD

  ALSO BY VAN REID

  Mollie Peer

  or

  The Underground Adventure of the Moosepath League

  Daniel Plainway

  or

  The Holiday Haunting of the Moosepath League

  Mrs. Roberto

  or

  The Widowy Worries of the Moosepath League

  Fiddler’s Green

  or

  A Wedding, a Ball, and the Singular Adventures of Sundry Moss

  Moss Farm

  or

  The Mysterious Missives of the Moosepath League

  Peter Loon

  CORDELIA UNDERWOOD

  or the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League

  VAN REID

  Camden, Maine

  Published by Down East Books

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

  Copyright © 2016 by Van Reid

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  ISBN 978-1-6089-3518-5 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-6089-3519-2 (e-book)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Mom and Dad, who kept me safe.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: The Mariner

  July 1, 1896

  Book One

  July 2, 1896

  Chapter 1 The Custom House Wharf

  Chapter 2 Pigs, Not Contraband

  Chapter 3 An Almost Empty House

  Chapter 4 The Sea Chest

  Chapter 5 Enter Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump

  Book Two

  July 3, 1896

  Chapter 6 A Deafening Silence Hushed by the Smell of Bacon Frying

  Chapter 7 Minmaneth

  Chapter 8 Curiosity by the Barrel

  Book Three

  Independence Day, 1896

  Chapter 9 What’s Good for the Soul

  Chapter 10 Freeport

  Chapter 11 The Political Fray

  Chapter 12 A Descent into the Maelstrom

  Chapter 13 The Veiled Invitation

  Chapter 14 Tolerable and Moderately Good

  Chapter 15 A Storm at Mast Landing

  Chapter 16 It Was Their Duty

  Chapter 17 The Wake of the Dash

  Book Four

  July 5-6, 1896

  Chapter 18 The Unasked Question

  Chapter 19 The Vote Is In

  Chapter 20 The Ghost in the Garden

  Chapter 21 The Game Was Big in Wiscasset

  Book Five

  July 7, 1896

  Chapter 22 It Was a Shame about Maude

  Chapter 23 Sundry Moss

  Chapter 24 Oddly Hunting Maude

  Chapter 25 The Extraordinary Befuddlement of Mr. Thump, the Singular Distraction of Mr. Eagleton, and the Superior Determination of Mr. Ephram!

  Chapter 26 A Shaggy Bear Story

  Chapter 27 Chorus for Duck and Bear

  Chapter 28 Colonel Taverner Proposes

  Chapter 29 Captain Coyle’s Riddle

  Chapter 30 Sundry’s Change of Position

  Chapter 31 Night Watch at Fort Edgecomb

  Chapter 32 Voices in the Night

  Chapter 33 The Unexpected Effects of Ducky Planke

  Book Six

  July 8, 1896

  Chapter 34 Boothbay Harbor

  Chapter 35 The Members Are Outraged

  Chapter 36 An Unexpected Expedition

  Chapter 37 Damariscotta

  Chapter 38 A Message Decoded?

  Chapter 39 Thoughts on a Pirate

  Chapter 40 Monstrous Rumors

  Book Seven

  July 9, 1896

  Chapter 41 Fishing for Information

  Chapter 42 Briefly with the Club

  Chapter 43 Cordial Mayhem

  Chapter 44 The Kraken Speaks

  Chapter 45 Caught in the Act

  Chapter 46 Red-Painted Mystery

  Book Eight

  July 10, 1896

  Chapter 47 Composition

  Chapter 48 Walton from Walnut

  Chapter 49 Alces Alces with Undergarment

  Chapter 50 History Beneath the Heaps

  Chapter 51 Formation

  Chapter 52 No Longer Nameless

  Chapter 53 A Slip of the Thumb

  Chapter 54 Mister Walton Proves His Mettle

  Chapter 55 The Writing on the Wall

  Chapter 56 It Was the Effect That Counted

  Book Nine

  July 11, 1896

  Chapter 57 Design

  Chapter 58 Pursuit

  Chapter 59 Below Minmaneth

  Chapter 60 Reprise the Overture, Please

  Chapter 61 Moose Manor

  Chapter 62 Tipping the Scales

  Chapter 63 The Villain Among the Victims

  Book Ten

  July 12, 1896

  Chapter 64 The Man Himself

  Chapter 65 A Deed Nearly Done

  Chapter 66 The Man with the Silver Lining

  Chapter 67 Further Wit in Evidence

  Chapter 68 No One Knew the Day Until the Sun Went Down

  Epilogue

  July 27-31, 1896

  July 27, 1896

  July 30, 1896

  July 31, 1896

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUEJULY 1, 1896

  THE MARINER

  He emerged, when night had fallen, from the rough end of Portland’s wharf district, where illegal liquor was peddled, where sailors and coarse landsmen and hard women caroused, and where well-meaning people did not linger. He rose from that ill-lit place and began his ascent at the foot of High Street, a shadow between the street lamps with a hesitation in his step.

  Another solitary walker—one George Selby of Danforth Street—crossed the street to avoid meeting him. “Walking to my brother’s this evening,” Selby would write in his journal (dated that same night, July the 1st, 1896), “I believe I saw, on High Street, the ghost of the German who is said to haunt the perimeters of his ancient grave site.” Selby was referring to the legend of an early casualty of the Revolutionary War—a man killed by British arsonists, who in October of 1775 burned what was then known as Falmouth in retaliation for the town’s support of the Rebel cause. Never identified by name (he was thought to be German because of an address in his pocket), the man was buried in a nearby field and said to trouble the area with his sad presence.

  So George Selby (by all accounts a cautious man) gave a wide berth to this apparition, which he reported as “hunched and dark and silent.” It was an apt choice of words, for one would not need to believe in ghosts to see something mysterious in this figure.

  Hunched and dark and silent, he stopped where High Street meets Spring Street and considered the large house upon the corner. Tall curtains masked the first-floor windows, partially obscuring the light from two front rooms
. He stood at the end of the walk and watched the slivers of light reach across the lawn. Great elms on either side of him soughed in the warm south-westerly breeze as he pulled a small card from his coat pocket. It read:

  MR. JAMES UNDERWOOD III

  CORNER OF HIGH & SPRING STREETS

  PORTLAND, MAINE

  His footfalls sounded upon the walk and upon the steps as he approached the front door. At the top step he paused some minutes, the card still in hand, then removed his hat before raising his fist to knock.

  Cordelia Underwood was gratefully startled by the knock on the front door that evening; for the better part of the day—indeed, for the better part of several days—she had been plagued by an unfocused sense of restlessness.

  At twenty-three, Cordelia was older than most women still living in their parents’ houses—most women her age were married by now, or at least occupying a suitable position. Her seeming lack of prospects was not due to any want in character or appearance; her hair, more red than auburn, was thought a liability by some, it is true, but as many others considered it more than a little attractive, framing her dark eyebrows and green eyes.

  As for character, she had a good deal of it.

  But, purely through the fault of circumstance, she found herself, on the evening of July the 1st, 1896, in the overfamiliar surroundings of her parents’ home, with no prospect of employment, and very nearly as little of social recreation. Everyone she knew below the age of forty and above the age of seventeen was gone for the summer! To be truthful, her parents were not, in their late years, lions of society.

  So when a knock came at the front door—unexpected at this late hour—she jumped at the sound of the sharp rap as if she had been physically prodded, and was grateful for it.

  Hurrying to the main part of the house, she reached the front hall at the same time as her father, who inquired with raised eyebrows whether she was expecting a visitor. Cordelia, with similar expression, shook her head. Her father, James Underwood III, then stepped forward and opened the door.

  Evening entered first—a scent of new-mown lawn and roses on a cool breeze that felt more of late spring than early summer. It seemed the night itself had knocked; no figure was immediately discernible beyond the light of the hall. Then the shadows materialized into a short, dark-clad man, who stepped cautiously into the doorway. He wore a peacoat and held a shapeless hat in his hands, wringing it like a wet washcloth and hunching over it as if someone might take it from him. He was nearly bald and his beard was short and patched with gray. Everything about him bespoke the sea—the fresh smell of salt, the windburn in his cheek, and the uncertain manner with which he stood on dry land.

  “Good evening to you, sir,” said the fellow, before James could speak. He nodded to Cordelia. “Ma’am. I apologize for the late hour, but I had trouble finding your address, and my ship sails with the first tide tomorrow.”

  “That’s quite all right,” said James. “As you can see, we have not retired. How can I help you?”

  “It’s more that I might help you, sir. It’s to do with your own brother, Captain Basil Underwood.”

  “Basil?” said James, who had himself risen to the rank of naval lieutenant, serving aboard a blockade ship against the Confederacy during the Southern Rebellion. In his sixty-sixth year, he still maintained much of his military bearing. He straightened considerably, however, at the sound of his brother’s name. “Perhaps you have not been informed, Mr. . . .”

  “Stimply, sir. Charles Stimply.”

  “Mr. Stimply, my brother has been dead these past two years.”

  “Aye, and I was with him when he did die.”

  Not a little surprised, James searched Mr. Stimply’s face for motive, but sensed that this last statement was only a means of introduction. “Come in, Mr. Stimply,” said James. He stepped back and ushered the seaman past the door. “Let me take your hat and coat, sir.”

  “I won’t be staying long—I thank you just the same,” returned the man.

  Cordelia’s father glanced at her briefly before waving the man into the front parlor. “You’ll take a cup of tea,” he conjectured. “My wife has just taken a pot from the stove.”

  “Anything more would be prohibit, wouldn’t it, then.”

  James Underwood smiled. Mr. Stimply was referring to the fact that the State of Maine had been without legal recourse to liquor since before the war. “I think we have some medicinal claret in the house, don’t we, Cordelia? This is my daughter, Mr. Stimply.”

  “A pleasure,” said the man. It was clear that his pleasure would be greater if the medicine cabinet was not found wanting.

  There was a dark and undisclosed crime in the Underwood family history, some iniquity so terrible as to be buried by those closest to it from the knowledge of successive generations. All that Cordelia Underwood knew was that some ancestor—a great-great-grandfather, she thought—had barely escaped from the south of England with his life just prior to the first American Revolution.

  In Cordelia’s mind, that ancestor had always represented a small island of dark fascination amidst a sea of dull, if respectable, genealogy. Her late uncle Basil, her father’s younger brother, occupied a similar geography in her imagination; the two, in fact, were almost the same person in her memory.

  Cordelia had known her uncle when she was a child, and then not well. Basil was a handsome man, darker than her father, and not as tall. Papa had told her more than once that life at sea was rough, but if it were (and she had no reason to doubt him), her uncle showed no outward sign of it. He had a gentle manner, almost shy, when he visited his brother’s family, and it only occurred to her in later years that he was unused to women and small children.

  He was a man of strong opinions, however, if careful in his expression of them; and there was about him a sense of latent energy that she imagined to be a product of his career at sea, where quick invention and instinctive deeds could prove the difference between life and tragedy.

  She had been in awe of him, linking him in her mind with that wild ancestor who fled for his life to the colonies. She had transmuted that dark and undisclosed crime into an act of personal integrity and put her uncle Basil’s face upon it.

  An untimely death in a far-off land had only added to Uncle Basil’s mystique; and through the dearth of detail regarding his demise his family had come to a single and erroneous conclusion: that they would never learn very much about his last days.

  Cordelia feared to miss something important between her father and Mr. Stimply in the parlor and, in her haste, came close to dropping the bottle of claret from its shelf in the pantry cupboard.

  “Ah, that would buck up a man greatly!” declared Mr. Stimply when Cordelia offered him a glass of the requested spirit. Her mother, who had arrived in the parlor while Cordelia was gone, declined to join Mr. Stimply in a drink, but James took a glass in order to be polite. Mr. Stimply silently saluted the ladies and took a great gulp of the stuff.

  Cordelia sat upon the sofa beside her mother, as the seaman perched awkwardly on the edge of a chair. James Underwood, who had settled himself in his favorite seat by the dormant fireplace, leaned back and crossed his legs. Cordelia studied the contrast between Mr. Stimply and her father.

  James Underwood was long and thin, and handsome in a long, thin sort of way. His hair was still full, now a brilliant silver, as were his thick mustaches. His attire was elegant; his manner was quiet and his bearing authoritative.

  Charles Stimply was thick with muscles, his back so broad for his size that it looked hunched. He was not a tall man, but he exuded a large presence in their front parlor. He could defer to the amenities proper to such a place, but it was plain that he was accustomed to rougher ways. His voice sounded permanently hoarse, perhaps from bawling over high winds and crashing seas. He was missing the two last fingers of his right hand.

  “Mr. Stimply worked for your uncle Basil in Venezuela,” Cordelia was informed by her father. “And sailed with him bef
ore that, it seems.”

  “Aye, for four years,” intoned the man.

  “Have you been this long returning to the United States, Mr. Stimply?” asked Cordelia’s mother. Mercia Underwood was tall for her sex, though still some inches short of her husband. She was twelve years younger than James, and her hair retained much of its color, a handsome auburn that had never been as bright as Cordelia’s. Though smiles came easily to her pleasant features, they always came softly.

  “In a roundabout way, Mrs. Underwood,” said the man.

  “It’s very good of you to make this effort to visit, Mr. Stimply,” said James.

  “Well, sir, it’s by way of a promise, you understand.”

  “I see.” James leaned forward in his chair, his eyes alight with interest. “Did my brother have any last words he wished brought to us?”

  “He did charge me with passing on his greatest affection,” returned the seaman. He finished off his claret and looked at the empty glass with regret.

  “Let me,” said Cordelia, hurrying to fill it again.

  “I am obliged.” He sipped carefully this time, and smacked his lips lightly. “There was James, which is yourself, sir,” he continued. “And Mercia, which would be your lovely wife. And James the fourth, and Brendan.”

  “Our two sons,” said James the third. “They are not home now. Jamey is in Boston; Brendan is due within the month, aboard the Franklin.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Mr. Stimply. “Your brother sent his greatest affection. And to you, ma’am,” he said to Cordelia, whose face had betrayed some hurt. “Captain Underwood was quite adamant that I deliver his greatest affection and best wishes to little Cordelia.”

  The young woman sat back in the sofa. Little Cordelia—the words touched her in a way that news of her uncle’s death had not. Mercia placed a hand on her daughter’s.

  “There is more,” said Mr. Stimply. “And I would have delivered, too—Captain’s sea chest, which he directed me to pack whenever he came out of his fever long enough to know what he was telling me—and I’d have delivered it but for Mr. Pue at the wharf.”

  “Nathaniel Pue? The Custom House inspector?” asked James.