Full of Eyes, page 26
“Why did you not dispose of this evidence, Reverend Quillery?” Bishop Lynch asked.
“It is a lovely thing, and I wanted to keep her.”
“So, how did it get damaged?”
“I were angry, see, and I hit him.”
“Why were you so angry ?”James Moseley asked.
The preacher man moved his head ponderously, as if it was almost too much burden for his neck to handle, and looked up at Moseley.
“Why, she were seeing that there papist, man. Why else do ye think?”
“So what? She ain’t your wife, is she?”
“Aye. Don’t I know that too well.”
Then he stopped talking and would say no more. Moseley tried cajoling, then threatening and pleading. All to no avail. The preacher man had ceased to speak. Bishop Lynch got to his feet and went to the window that overlooked the walled yard and small stable. He turned to Quillery. “I see Mrs. Becknell’s buggy out back. Does that mean she is here?”
Quillery’s eyes jumped open, but still he said nothing. From the doorway that led upstairs came another voice, a soft, feminine one.
“Yes, I am here.”
Everyone in the kitchen turned to look at Gretchen Becknell. She was dressed again in white, as she was the first time I had seen her, kneeling in her garden on the day we discovered the body of her lover. Bishop Lynch was wearing his biretta, the one with the amaranth red plume on top. He tipped it to Gretchen, bowed slightly and spoke in a quiet voice.
“Do you agree with the Reverend Quillery’s rendering of the facts as they occurred in the wee hours of April eleventh, madam?”
“I don’t wish to make testimony against a friend of mine, Father. Or are you more than a father, sir?”
“This is Bishop Patrick Lynch, Mrs. Becknell,” Antoine said.
“Well, Bishop Lynch, I trust that you do not expect me to incriminate someone on second-hand information.”
“Second hand, my dear lady? Do you deny that you were in the Cathedral of Sts. John and Finbar on the night when the murder of Jamieson Carter took place?”
Gretchen hesitated and Quillery, who had been staring at her countenance with what can only be described as devotion, spoke out loudly.
“Tell him ye agree with my avowal, fer God’s sakes, woman.”
“Well, Mrs. Becknell,” said Lynch, with his left hand in his fascia and standing tall, “do you agree that Andrew Quillery battered Jamieson Carter to death in the cathedral?”
She put her face in her hands and whispered through them, “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“And how did you come to know this, madam?”
“I—I was there as well.”
She spoke so softly that we had to hold our breath to hear. The room was otherwise silent. Indeed, the entire house and property seemed devoid of noise as this drama played itself out.
“You were there, and you saw Andrew Quillery strike Carter on the back of the head with this statue?”
“Oh, my—”
“Please, madam. You must answer truthfully. This commissioned officer of the peace is taking down all that is said. Your reply could result in this man earning a noose around his neck. We must know the truth.”
Gretchen looked at Quillery. Her face was blanched and stricken, as if she were on the verge of falling away faint. The preacher met her eyes. His were full of resolve. He inclined his head at her so slightly that I could never after swear that Patrick Lynch had actually seen him nod at the woman. She seemed to gain strength from the intercourse, however, and spoke again.
“Yes, sir. I saw Andrew hit Jamieson over the head.”
Then she looked straight at the bishop and said in a firmer voice, “But it was not murder, sir. It was a fit of rage. Jealous rage. He could scarcely control himself.”
“Why would this man be jealous of Jamieson Carter?”
She began to cry then. She shook her head and would not answer. Quillery reached out to her and seemed about to rise, but Moseley put his hand firmly on the man’s thin shoulder.
“I were jealous, man, because I love this here woman as God himself loves all of us. I couldna bear to see her with him.”
That assertion by Quillery stopped all conversation again. In the quiet, Gretchen’s sobs and Quillery’s hard breathing were all anyone else could hear. Until Bishop Lynch spoke again, sharply and with authority.
“So you decided to bear her guilt for her, Reverend Quillery. Have you thought about the guilt she’ll feel before God when she watches you swing from a rope? I don’t think you are doing any of us a favor here, especially not this woman.”
“What—what do ye mean?”
“I mean, Reverend Quillery, that you were in Baltimore buying slaves on the night Carter was killed. Or more likely, on the train home that very night. Wade Manigault held a bill of sale showing your signature and dated April 11, 1861 in Baltimore. That was the day you purchased the slaves you sold two nights ago. He escaped during the melee at the sale site, still holding the sale document he was given for his auction. He gave it to Father Dockery. I have it here.”
He pulled a paper from the pocket of his cassock and flourished it at Quillery.
“Gretchen Becknell has woven her spell over you, Reverend, and you are trying to protect her. When you learned that she had killed Carter, you decided to cover up the deed. When that didn’t work, you decided to take the blame. An admirable effort, my friend, but of no consequence. I doubt any jury of your peers will convict you of conspiracy to conceal a crime once they see the evil ways of this woman. She has deluded you, to say nothing of poor Jamieson and even her husband.”
The preacher shook his head. Moseley spoke up. “Mrs. Becknell has admitted to being there in the church, Reverend Quillery. Since you couldn’t have done the dirty deed, that points the finger of guilt directly at her.”
“No!”
Quillery’s cry was a bellow of agony and despair. It galvanized Gretchen Becknell. She whirled and bolted from the room.
“Quick, James. Her horse is hitched up,” cried the bishop.
James Moseley was a step slow in recovering from Lynch’s remarkable analysis of events, but recover he did. As he took a long stride toward the fleeing woman, Quillery leaped from his chair and crashed into him. Moseley was knocked sideways and into Antoine. Both tumbled to the floor. Without thinking of the damage to my side, I went after Gretchen.
She was almost to her little buggy when I caught up with her. I tackled her, and we both fell under the horse. The animal shied and began to move around nervously. I tried to keep Gretchen from its unshod feet by placing my body over hers.
“Tom,” she whispered. “Let me be. I’ll meet you at the Hell Hole Inn later tonight.”
I must have hesitated, pulled up to look at her face. She shoved me hard in my ribs, and the intense pain caused me to gasp and shift my position. Gretchen pushed her way out from under me, and I did not have the strength suddenly to hold her. I heard the wagon creak as she boarded and whipped the horse. Her bay gelding was now in a wildly confused state. He didn’t like the pressure of the people beneath him. His instinct was to run, but I was still under him and against his back legs when Gretchen laid the buggy whip to his back. He whinnied loudly and reared, twisting to one side and dancing to be free of this torment and turmoil. I curled myself up, afraid of the stomping animal’s hooves. I heard the whip crack again. The horse lunged, pulling the offside wheel over my back. With a great cry, I raised up with my good side and felt the buggy tip. As it went over on its side, the stays came loose as they are supposed to in an accident, and the horse bolted free. He ran down the street, traces trailing, the bit between his teeth.
James Moseley was there, shackling Gretchen Becknell before she could recover her feet. Antoine helped me up. I could barely stand. The bandage that wrapped my ribs was soaked with blood where I’d taken Becknell’s bullet. I could feel it, warm and sticky, easing between my fingers as I sought to clamp down on the pain. My friend and my bishop assisted me to the diocesan carriage while the acting police chief whistled up the constable at the front of the house.
Later, in a courtroom before a magistrate, Bishop Lynch, Father Gagnon, and James Moseley heard Gretchen Becknell deny her guilt and try to lay the blame on first Andrew Quillery and then on Father Tom Dockery.
I was again sitting in bed, listening to Antoine. When he said my name, my eyes opened even wider.
“Me? How in heaven’s name could she think to blame me?”
“She said you were infatuated with her, Thomas. She even gave a treatise in opposition to celibacy and said that years of it had driven you to unslakable lust, so much so that you tried to, er, have your way with her one night in this very house. Because you were unsuccessful, you followed her to the cathedral in frustration. When you saw her meeting with Carter, you killed him. She said that you cried out that if you couldn’t have her, no one would. It was very melodramatic, but we all knew by then that she was grasping at straws. When Quillery heard her accusing you, his Christian decency reasserted itself, finally, and he told us under oath what had happened.”
“Maybe it was less Christian decency that motivated him than it was the scales falling from his eyes.”
“Perhaps. I’m trying to be less cynical and more charitable in the telling, Thomas. Either way, she cooked her own goose with her wild accusations.”
I gulped silently at that and listened while Antoine related what had transpired during the murder in the cathedral, at least the story as pieced together by James Moseley after he had heard all the testimony, including a deathbed statement from Gordon Becknell—although he was not yet dead and was, in fact, beginning to show some murmur of recovery from his wounds under the ministrations of the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy. I wondered as an aside how that nursing assistance from papist nuns would eventuate in his biased mind if he did recover.
“Jamieson Carter had gone to the church to pray for forgiveness. He had ended his romance with Gretchen and sought the solace of his faith after a period of fateful lechery. She followed him, reluctant to give up so easily. Her motivation was hardly love, or even lust. She wanted his cooperation in the cotton scheme her husband had hatched, not knowing at the time that Gordon Becknell was meanwhile persuading Carter’s daughter Annie into agreeing to the smuggling through their chandlery business. This was a new plan in case Gretchen’s efforts to suborn Jamieson Carter’s morals failed to achieve their end. Gretchen was still following the old plan she and Gordon had devised. She was to entice Jamieson with her flesh and then get him to go along with the scheme. Carter was guilty of illicit love, no doubt, but the idea of forsaking the Confederacy for greed was probably more than his conscience could bear.
“He refused her again in the nave of our cathedral and turned to pray. She was furious, she said, overcome with despair in fact, and fearful that her remorseful lover might reveal the whole scheme to authorities. She picked up the statue in a rage and bashed the poor man while he prayed at the communion rail.”
Father Gagnon bowed his head for a moment at the sacrilegious nature of the murder before he continued. “Then she ran from the church, although she had maintained the presence of mind, somehow, to lock the door behind her. When she got near the rectory, she realized she was still clutching the statue.
Perhaps she was temporarily deranged. More likely so used to getting her way by using her feminine wiles on men that she could not accept failure. Anyway, she needed to dispose of the murder weapon. She had taken Jamieson’s keys, to lock the church and impede discovery of the body, so she went into the chancery office and hid the statue behind some of the files. She thought that one extra statue in the offices of a church known for statuary and other ornamentation would pass unnoticed. She never thought you would have noticed it missing from the cathedral so quickly.
“Later, when she had deceived Andy Quillery into doing her bidding, she thought she should dispose of it permanently. By then, she and everyone else knew that the constabulary had pegged the Blessed Mother as the murder weapon. The preacher man, by then totally under the spell of Mrs. Becknell, went to find it the night he accosted you in this house. He was apparently looking for the chancery on the bottom floor and gained entrance to the main floor instead. He went in the side door instead of the back. She was waiting outside for her new lover. When you fell off the porch in the struggle with Quillery, she told him where the statue was, and he went to retrieve it while she nursed you back to consciousness.”
“So, that’s when Bones saw him carrying the statue.”
“No, no, Thomas. I must remember your precarious medical condition. You have lost a lot of blood and cannot be thinking clearly yet.”
“How so?”
“He never gained possession of the statue until Gretchen was tending to you on the walk outside this house. Mr. Bones had seen Quillery two days prior to the attack on you here.”
“So, what was Andrew carrying the night Bones saw him?”
“Onions.”
I had to chuckle at that. We suspected the man because of nothing, attributed evil intent to someone who was doing nothing surreptitious at the time. The preacher man’s reputation with the Negroes had colored Bones’ interpretation of innocent movement in the dark. We were so eager for a suspect that we latched onto the fiction poor Bones had unknowingly perpetrated.
“So Andrew Quillery had never seen or touched the murder weapon until the night he attacked me?”
“Precisely. In fact, if the dear Blessed Mother would speak through the statue she could tell the story herself.”
“Perhaps she would tell us that Sister Mary Lucille hid the statue after witnessing the murder in the cathedral,” I interrupted.
That bold assertion gave Antoine momentary pause, but just that.
“I do suppose we have to consider that possibility. She acts as though she saw something that completed her derangement. But whoever put it there, Sister Mary Lucille or Gretchen Becknell, Quillery eventually located the statue hidden in the chancery. He took it to his house to hide it or burn it. The weather has been too warm for a fire in his grate, though, and he was afraid to draw attention to a fire outside, so Gretchen took it out to her meeting with her husband near the Devil’s Hole. By then, Gordon understood that his wife was fornicating with the likes of Quillery and was apparently willing to prostitute herself with anybody for the appropriate gain. He came to understand also the true nature of his mate sometime during their lone sojourn together. She was not willing to live any longer in a rough camp with him, for instance, not for the sake of their marriage, not for the safety of her husband.”
Antoine shook his head slowly at the perfidy of the woman Gretchen, his lips pursed in distaste. He had closed his eyes so that his lashes lay against his skin. Then he seemed to collect himself and spoke again. “I think also that Gordon was a patriot in his own way. He expected to fight the Yankees, for instance, although he was obviously not averse to profiteering from the war. He was not driven by greed, like Quillery, to abandon the Confederacy for the sake of making money. He must have shuddered at the thought of Gretchen meeting some Union officer during the war who was in a position to help her out in some way. He refused to take the statue when she brought it to his camp, told her to bury it in Quillery’s head instead.”
Things began to unravel for the conspirators at that point. Gordon was being hunted by Moseley and his men for both the hanging of Uncle Williams and the failed plot to smuggle cotton north. The net of circumstances was closing. Afraid her husband would turn her in under duress, Gretchen coerced the preacher man into hiding the statue in his already tilled garden. The couple, Quillery and Gretchen, was planning to escape into the turmoil the war would surely bring. The bishop, the priests and the police turned up at his house before any escape was possible. So, she let Quillery offer to take the blame.
“What was the significance of Quillery’s wealth, then?” I asked after digesting the solution to so many questions.
“I, ahem, hate to admit this, but its sole import to the case was as the attractant for Gretchen Becknell to Quillery. One would have thought that a man with his age and experience would have cottoned to something so obvious as her ploy. I mean, had he but looked in the mirror and then at her, he would certainly have known that she was using him for something other than his looks and vibrant personality. But lust blinds men, y’know.”
“Was it mere lust, do you think?”
“Maybe not. He was smitten, no doubt. You were right about that. It was a remarkable bit of insight on your part.”
If Antoine knew that I received the insight because I had almost fallen for the same sort of seduction by Gretchen, he was gracious enough to keep his suspicions to himself. In fact, he did not try to draw a confession of the sort out of me at any time, not then nor in the future. I remembered how I suspected him of political treachery when this whole mess had begun weeks ago.
The sea change in my thinking about Antoine was remarkable in the extreme. I felt the kinship of priestly brotherhood more strongly that day than ever before.
It was that same sense of kinship that drew me to the main service at St. Mary of the Annunciation a month later, on the feast of Pentecost. Father Antoine Gagnon was celebrating the solemn 11 a.m. liturgy with his pastor, Monsignor Reed, in attendance at the altar. The junior priest was scheduled to deliver the sermon.
