cold and fatigue, but when a warm breeze washed round her body she knew the spirits were close. She could feel their featherlike caresses.
Go unto my mother, Polly pleaded silently. Minister unto my mother.
A cock crowed. A bell sounded in the gloom of early morning. Mama had taken charge. How did she know where to go? Polly nestled in closer. Ben was waking now as dawn began to brighten the sky behind a slant of frosted hillside, and she pulled him to her as she stared across the stubble of fields puzzling the valley before them. What lay ahead she could not know, only that every creak and turn of their wheels put the past farther behind.
Simon Pryor
Hatch, Massachusetts
October 1842
GIVE A MAN too much time to think and he will entertain the wildest of notions. I, for a sample, was considering tossing aside my Ashland Gazetteer on this particular Sabbath Day and attending church. Do not mistake my meaning. God makes as little time for me as I do Him, and His is a house to which I afford wide berth. However, faced with a lull in my caseload, I could not deny the benefit of venturing onto hallowed ground to root about for work. Sunday morn, though quiet in other respects, is an ideal time for the flock to pore over its faults and missteps. And, in such heightened states of repentance or resolve, to whom do its members appeal once they have squared themselves with God? Why, as it turns out, to me.
Permit me to engage in the niceties of introduction. After all, one can’t very well play the cynic without giving up a detail or two for some other cynic to hang his hat on when the time comes—as it always does—for the observer to be observed. I am Simon Pryor, and it is my profession to watch and listen without attracting notice so that I might know more, perhaps, than I have a right to know, and share more, perhaps, than I have a right to share. I nose around fires as an inspector for the county, but of interest to me as well are the smaller—and often equally incendiary—mysteries of human behavior. Mind you, I am no altruist. My craft is valuable and, like that of a cobbler, takes time to learn—for a fee, I will take on anything and all.
In the Great Cities, I might tend towards self-aggrandizement and crown myself an “Expert in Incendiaries” and a “Private Investigator,” but in the small towns that serve as mazes to me, I am known rather less grandly as a “sniffer.” I do what I do because there is a demand for the keen senses of a bloodhound and the canniness of a scoundrel—the latter, a talent I acquired in my youth while apprenticed to a local solicitor named Mister Hiram Scales, Esq. He was not the most upright of gentlemen, which rendered him a fine teacher for the line of work in which I find myself at present. He, wicked man, could identify a loophole in the Shroud of Turin and saw it as his duty to enlarge such careless dropped stitches into opportunities sizable enough to thread through with a draft horse.
Not that I was proud to be his messenger, his scribe, his eyes and ears in the alleyway, the forger of his very name. Far from it. But there are moments good and bad that determine one’s path and I am afraid that I experienced one such flash—of the unfortunate kind—when I was but a lad of sixteen.
Alas, who has time for the past? Shall I tell you instead of the scant mysteries I faced as I contemplated spending Sunday morn in rare company with my Maker? Charles Dugsdale, sure that his wife visits the town butcher more times than the meat on their table would suggest is necessary, would like to know what it is she does with the man. In his heart, like most people who find themselves in this position, he knows all too well; still he desires proof, as though it might bestow upon him the power to lure her home. I asked (only to be met with the sullen attitude of the cuckolded man): When has a poisonous truth ever rekindled love? But as he will not let the matter fizzle of its own
Go unto my mother, Polly pleaded silently. Minister unto my mother.
A cock crowed. A bell sounded in the gloom of early morning. Mama had taken charge. How did she know where to go? Polly nestled in closer. Ben was waking now as dawn began to brighten the sky behind a slant of frosted hillside, and she pulled him to her as she stared across the stubble of fields puzzling the valley before them. What lay ahead she could not know, only that every creak and turn of their wheels put the past farther behind.
Simon Pryor
Hatch, Massachusetts
October 1842
GIVE A MAN too much time to think and he will entertain the wildest of notions. I, for a sample, was considering tossing aside my Ashland Gazetteer on this particular Sabbath Day and attending church. Do not mistake my meaning. God makes as little time for me as I do Him, and His is a house to which I afford wide berth. However, faced with a lull in my caseload, I could not deny the benefit of venturing onto hallowed ground to root about for work. Sunday morn, though quiet in other respects, is an ideal time for the flock to pore over its faults and missteps. And, in such heightened states of repentance or resolve, to whom do its members appeal once they have squared themselves with God? Why, as it turns out, to me.
Permit me to engage in the niceties of introduction. After all, one can’t very well play the cynic without giving up a detail or two for some other cynic to hang his hat on when the time comes—as it always does—for the observer to be observed. I am Simon Pryor, and it is my profession to watch and listen without attracting notice so that I might know more, perhaps, than I have a right to know, and share more, perhaps, than I have a right to share. I nose around fires as an inspector for the county, but of interest to me as well are the smaller—and often equally incendiary—mysteries of human behavior. Mind you, I am no altruist. My craft is valuable and, like that of a cobbler, takes time to learn—for a fee, I will take on anything and all.
In the Great Cities, I might tend towards self-aggrandizement and crown myself an “Expert in Incendiaries” and a “Private Investigator,” but in the small towns that serve as mazes to me, I am known rather less grandly as a “sniffer.” I do what I do because there is a demand for the keen senses of a bloodhound and the canniness of a scoundrel—the latter, a talent I acquired in my youth while apprenticed to a local solicitor named Mister Hiram Scales, Esq. He was not the most upright of gentlemen, which rendered him a fine teacher for the line of work in which I find myself at present. He, wicked man, could identify a loophole in the Shroud of Turin and saw it as his duty to enlarge such careless dropped stitches into opportunities sizable enough to thread through with a draft horse.
Not that I was proud to be his messenger, his scribe, his eyes and ears in the alleyway, the forger of his very name. Far from it. But there are moments good and bad that determine one’s path and I am afraid that I experienced one such flash—of the unfortunate kind—when I was but a lad of sixteen.
Alas, who has time for the past? Shall I tell you instead of the scant mysteries I faced as I contemplated spending Sunday morn in rare company with my Maker? Charles Dugsdale, sure that his wife visits the town butcher more times than the meat on their table would suggest is necessary, would like to know what it is she does with the man. In his heart, like most people who find themselves in this position, he knows all too well; still he desires proof, as though it might bestow upon him the power to lure her home. I asked (only to be met with the sullen attitude of the cuckolded man): When has a poisonous truth ever rekindled love? But as he will not let the matter fizzle of its own
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