The Prince of Rockport

PROLOGUE

May 6th, 1910

Annie slowly unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk. It smelled of camphor and old paper. She retrieved the ring from its soiled blue box, gazed at it thoughtfully for a moment and wiped a solitary tear from her cheek. As she slowly slipped it onto her finger, memories flooded back like a cool spring rain, soaking her to the bone. She shivered slightly as the diamonds and the two ruby snake eyes caught the sunlight from the bay windows. The golden snake with its tail in its mouth shimmered alive and took her breath away, like it had done when Theo first presented it to her so many years ago. The Queen’s ring!

While it seemed right to wear it now, she knew she would have to explain the whole improbable story to Jake. She didn’t have all of the words in place yet, but she had been preparing for this inevitability for some time. She was sure she could find the appropriate words when the time was right. More daunting would be the task of explaining the whole sordid affair to her son Albert who, now at the age of twenty-two, still had no knowledge of his father’s real heritage or his namesake grandfather’s betrayal. There were, however, the letters, and the ring, irrefutable proof. She knew she would find a way when the time was right, perhaps in June when Albert returned from University. Five-year-old Victoria would not have to be told for some time yet…

1

Death Wish

~~~~~~~~~~

When your promise, like a tragic play,

Acts out its final lie,

I’ll help you keep your vow that day,

I’ll be with you when you die!

~~~~~~~~~~~

Havana Jail at La Punta, October 4th, 1887.

The jail guard was a fat greasy little man with a pencil moustache. He spoke only Spanish, chain-smoked large musky cigars, laughed too much in a silly cackling way and reeked with the sourness of unwashed clothes. He took a perverse pleasure in making the lives of the inmates as miserable as possible. The poor wretch who dared even a small act of disrespect might have his meagre daily food ration urinated on, or worse.

The big man in cell forty-three watched him carefully every day, like a cobra swaying to the piper, waiting his chance to strike. He couldn’t tell exactly what he hated most about this Cuban, but he knew that he hated him, and with a clear certainty he would kill him.

He would be patient and wait. He would have only one opportunity and he must not fail. He knew if he did fail the guard would not hesitate for a split second to shoot him dead with his service revolver, probably cackling uncontrollably as he did it.

Twice a day for nearly two weeks the monotony of the buzzing flies in the hot airless cell was broken only by the guard sliding a food tray under the rusty door. The gut wrenching heat and foul air was almost unbearable.

"Soporte lejos de la puerta senor! Soporte lejos!" the guards would warn the prisoners back from the cell doors before warily approaching with food and water. Every day it was a variation of greasy black beans and rice, sometimes mixed with objects he couldn’t recognize. The mouldy bread and water, which looked and stank like a swamp, fed his rampant diarrhea and stoked his seething rage.

Day after sweltering day he watched the blowflies turn the contents of the slop bucket into oozing maggots. He watched the cockroaches scurry across the floor and he methodically studied the daily habits and routines of the guards.

He finally decided his only chance of escape was when the slop buckets were exchanged, usually by the night guard, if at all. It was the only time the cell door was unlocked. The prisoner would place the full bucket close to the door, which opened inward, while the guard selected a key from the large jangling ring, opened the door quickly, switched buckets and relocked. He also noted with great interest that the guards had to fumble with the worn out locks to make them work.

His careful observations of the various guards convinced him that the fat little man he hated so much would be the easiest to work with. He was usually drunk when he worked night shifts and tonight was his night. He would come in around midnight, whistling and talking to himself, usually bringing with him some food items and a large bottle of black rum which he would park squarely on the top of his desk. He seemed to enjoy drinking in full view of the prisoners, sometimes carrying the bottle with him from cell to cell as he made his rounds.

When no one was watching, the big man with the pockmarked face in cell number forty-three began to work his plan. He gathered up as much sand and dirt from the floor of his cell as he could, mixed it with saliva to form a slimy putty and by reaching through the bars, he began stuffing it bit by bit into the keyhole. He then placed the slop bucket next to the door, a little further back than usual, laid down on his cot facing the wall and pretended to be asleep. While he waited, he practiced his planned manoeuvre over and over in his mind. Failure meant certain death. There could be no failure. His body was set like a steel trap, static energy ready to explode on trigger.

Right on cue the whistling guard came in at midnight, made a cursory trip up and down the cell blocks and stopped at cell forty-three.

"Jesus Cristo gringo, no el cuba otra vez!" He slapped his sweaty forehead in disgust, contemplated the bucket for a moment, then waddled over to his desk and took a long slug of rum. For a while, he tried to ignore the bucket, it was lunch time. But cell number forty-three was too close to his desk and the bucket was less than inspiring for his ‘cena de la noche’.

He sighed deeply and resigned himself to the task. Besides, gringo was asleep anyway. He carefully selected the right key, felt the handle of his revolver for assurance that it was at the ready and watched the prisoner for another minute to make sure. One more deep slug of rum for good measure and he was ready to get the job done.

He quietly inserted a key into the lock and turned it, nothing happened. The lock would not budge. He checked the key again to make sure it was the right one. It was. He tried it again and this time it turned slowly, opening with a grating audible clunk. He was sweating profusely now, breath heavy with rum. He stood stock still and watched the prisoner again, like a tiny mouse caught in a room full of sleeping cats. The big man on the cot didn’t moved, his breathing was steady with a slight nasal snore. The fat little guard breathed easier, gringo was sound asleep.

He pushed the cell door open and it connected with the slop bucket making a grating noise on the rough concrete floor. The trap was sprung. Gringo exploded off the cot with all the fury of a tornado! The guard’s eyes bugged open in panic as he desperately tried to haul the door shut. He fought with the keys and grabbed for his revolver at the same time. It was too late! With the gritty muck in the lock, the key just would not turn.

In a fraction of a second the door was jerked inward with such a force that the shrieking guard was drawn in with it and sprawled across the cell floor. The grinning prisoner was on him in a flash. The powerful fingers of his huge hands closed and tightened around the guard’s sweaty neck until the fat little body shook with spasms of strangulation and the bulging eyes could see only darkness.

In one quick motion, he stripped the body of the wide leather belt, the holstered revolver, a sheathed knife, buckled it around his own waist, grabbed the ring of keys and started out. As an afterthought he turned back, grabbed the slop bucket and dumped the stinking mess over the gaping face of the dead guard. Then he tossed the heavy ring of keys into the next cell, wished them luck and let himself out the back door into a dark wet Havana night. Slater Cobb was free!

He kept to the back streets, the darkest streets, as he attempted to retrace his path to the docks. Back to where the captain of the Spanish barque Destino had handed him over to the Havana Policia just two weeks ago.

When he had been discovered on board as a stowaway, shortly after leaving Rockport, it had taken a half dozen able bodied seaman to subdue him and put him in shackles, and in the process these tough seamen had been roughed up pretty badly.

He limped on through the wet steamy night and with every step he felt the pain of Harris’ bullet in his leg and an aching need for revenge, if he could only get back to Rockport.

He finally made his way back to the Havana docks and found an open warehouse door. The huge building housed a variety of cargo items ready for shipment. Baled cotton, stacks of manila rope and several hundred casks of molasses stored in the back where he decided it would be safe to rest awhile. Several of the casks had developed slow leaks and he was able to scrape off some lumps of crystallized sugar to appease his hunger.

Just before first light, Havana’s Fuerza Del Policia were out in great numbers. They were ransacking the dock areas in search of the murderer. He could hear the eerie sounds of baying hounds, still some distance away, trying in vain to catch his fleeting scent in the driving rain. Cobb knew tracking dogs and didn’t think they would be much of a problem in these conditions, but he shivered at the thought of being caught. He knew he would be shot on sight.

He left the warehouse by a back entrance and went out into the scent-cover of the warm rain. He ran down San Pedro and found the entrance to a storm drain at the foot of San Ignacio. It was still quite dark and the few people who inhabited the streets in the pre-dawn hours were too self absorbed to notice a bedraggled stranger around the docks.

Watching his chance, he quickly pried open the heavy manhole cover, climbed in and dragged it back into place over his head. He groped his way slowly through the stinking darkness until he could make out a bit of light coming from the other direction.

In the dim light, he discovered a shelf of stone jutting out from the wall where he could sit and get his legs out of the knee-deep water and sewage, which, swollen by the rains, was flowing rapidly past him.

The perch was already occupied by several large rats who were not happy to share their situation with this intruder. He ripped the holstered gun and knife off the heavy leather belt and slapped at the vermin until they were all dispatched, shrieking into the dark river of sewage. Then he settled down to wait the passing of the hours. He would wait for as long as it took.

As he sat, cowered and hunted, himself now no better than a wet rat in a dank hole, reeking with the effluent of the human masses above, it was easy for him to think that some powerful evil force must have cursed him from birth. He had been robbed and spat upon for as long as he could remember by Cornelius MacKay and others associated with him. His pulse quickened as he remembered the pleasure it had given him to pull the trigger while Cornie grovelled for his life.

He allowed his mind to replay, as it had done many times, the tragic events that brought him to this stinking hole in the ground, hiding from hounds and heavily armed Policia who would end his life in a flash. It was torture to remember but it helped focus his mind on his path of revenge. He would take whatever time he needed to reach his goal. The structures and restraints of time were illusory concepts to him now, like the raindrops pelting the street above his head.

As a young man, he had watched his father lose his timberland to Cornelius Mackay, acre by acre, drained away over the years. Hiram Cobb would drink himself into debt, Cornie would bail him out and take repayment in parcels of land.

Eventually Cornie built his own sawmill operation in Riverhead competing directly with the huge mill which the Cobb family had operated for three generations. It gave Cornie a stranglehold on the supply of timber, and markets, and it served to drive poor old Hiram deeper into the ground, deeper into the solace of the bottle.

He remembered with bitterness the events of that dark day after his father’s funeral. Cornelius and another man from Rockport had arrived at the house around noon to see his mother. When they emerged, after about an hour, Cornelius held in his hands a deed for the Cobb sawmill properties including the remainder of the timberland and the house. The last of Hiram’s debts had been absolved and Mildred Cobb was paid a paltry sum of money with an agreement that allowed her to remain in the house for the rest of her life, after which, it would revert to the Cornelius MacKay estate. At no time could Slater remember receiving any consideration in any of those agreements and secret deals, which had robbed him of his dignity and his family’s heritage.

The sound of the dogs slowly faded and a bit more light filtered down the dark tunnel. They had passed him by, but had they given up the search. He was sure he would be safe for at least few more hours.

His tortured memories carried him back to Rockport in the month of May just passed. He had spent a night drinking at Sadie Forbes’s brothel in Coaltown, and he’d gotten into a drunken rage, which was more than Sadie, or her houseman Randal Kenny could handle. Kenny was a big man but no match for three hundred pounds of a raging Slater Cobb.

A smile flickered briefly on his face as he remembered Kenny’s feeble attempts to evict him that night, but evaporated quickly when he remembered Sadie’s cutting words. Slater Cobb, you’re twenty five years old, you have been treated like shit all your life, an’ there’re some things you need to know about! Then Sadie Forbes, in a desperate attempt to get him out of the house, told him what she knew. A story of the cruellest irony that shocked him into soberness. He remembered every syllable of every word Sadie had said to him. It cut him down as if he had been hit with a double charge of buckshot. As drunk as he was, he remembered and he knew she was telling the truth. It was a cross much too heavy for him to bear and they would pay. Every last one of them would pay!

Then he thought of Annie and that hot spring day seven years ago when he was about eighteen and she was twelve or thirteen. He had tried many times afterward to feel guilt or compassion, even sympathy, but those feelings wouldn’t come to him and he just couldn’t dredge them up. It startled him in ways he couldn’t understand. In any case, how was he to know that he had raped the girl on the very day her mother Claudia had killed herself. He couldn’t be faulted for that could he. At least he would have raped her if she hadn’t fought and clawed like a spitting cat in the woods behind Easthill that afternoon.

When he thought more deeply about Annie, a painful aching came to his throat, which he couldn’t fight off. Then he did what he had never allowed himself to do in all of his twenty-five years. In the abysmal sewers under the streets of Havana, in what was probably the lowest point in his miserable life, he broke. Slater Cobb buried his face in his huge hands and cried. His shoulders shook as he sobbed uncontrollably and pounded his bloodied fists into the cold unforgiving stone of his enclosure. His wailing voice echoed, mocking him up and down the dark unseen tunnels, like the tunnels to hell. He was now at the river’s edge with no coin for the boatman. Even hell wouldn’t claim him now… not quite yet.

She was so beautiful… , he whimpered, Why should anything so beautiful have to die—why does she have to die! he screamed into the darkness. No answer came back to him.

2

The Encounter

~~~~~~~~~~~

I don’t need the sunrise to speak to me today,

She will only tell me lies again, beguiling is her light,

She will just remind me of the lies I need to say

To the spectre of her twilight as she slips into the night.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Rockport Nova Scotia, May 23, 1887

Two hundred feet above the cliff, a bald eagle soared in slow counter-clockwise circles, the hunting flight pattern of his species. Each time he came around he checked on the position of his mate. She was flying her own pattern a quarter mile away and each time they completed a circle they were that much further along on their course. They surveyed the great expanse beneath them with keen eyes, missing nothing.

From their lofty vantage point in the cloudless sky they spotted the lone creature at the top of the cliff, giving it little notice other than to mark its position. It was a thing to avoid. Something deep in their avian brains, evolved over countless eons of time, allowed them to preclude this creature either as a food interest, or an immediate threat to their safety.

The human stood in a green grassy clearing close to the edge of the cliff staring out over a blue-grey ocean. A few squealing herring gulls wheeled and played games in the updraft from the cliff face. Low rolling ocean swells, sprinkled with flickering pin points of light from the early morning sun, lumbered their foamy liquid weight onto the beach below in rhythmic patterns.

She adjusted the bill of her Windsor cap to shield her eyes and watched the sails of three far off fishing schooners flying close-hauled to the freshening breeze. They were racing home from the fishing banks, holds brimming with the finest salt cod in search of the best market prices.

Annie MacKay felt a little flushed after the fast-paced ride up to the look-off. She inhaled the pungent smells of pine, spruce and sea air, and let her mind luxuriate in the aura of familiarity and sanctuary which was the very bones of this place; her place. She came up to the cliff, and the ‘sitting stones’, as often as she could. It was a curiously haunting and peaceful spot.

From this private patch of green atop the cliff she could sit for long quiet hours and dwell on that one single spot out there on the shimmering horizon. Way out there, between resolve and self pity, that indiscernible place between sea and sky and imagination, where the past meets the present and spins clever lies about the future.

She had learned to master some of those lies at an early age, as well as the art of storing away the various pieces of her past. Her survival technique was to package everything neatly away in separate imaginary boxes which she could either visit or avoid at will. But, over time, the boxes had become too numerous to keep track of, or perhaps she had failed to label them properly. She found herself blundering into boxes she never intended to open. They were divided in two groups, the boxes before her twelfth birthday and the boxes after that period.

Now, in her nineteenth year, some of the boxes in the latter group were beginning to break open, spilling their unspeakable contents into the cold light of day. The monsters were demanding to be heard.

The wind picked up a little as the sun climbed higher in the sky, generating the thermal updrafts in which the gulls liked to play. The smaller seagulls were soon displaced by a squadron of Greater Black-Backs shouldering and bullying their way in from offshore to soar high above the cliff on sleek effortless wings.

The flooding tide rolled on to the beach below and around the lighthouse at Cape Farewell, spilling itself into Rockport harbour. From her perch atop the stones, she had a clear view of the town and the waterfront areas. The buildings, red stained and white washed monuments of the MacKay shipyard and lumber docks, which had dominated the features of this coastal town since her grandfather’s day.

The main post road wanders in from the northeast, hugs the coastline for the most part, becomes Dock Street for its brief sojourn through town, and then skulks off to the Southwest in search of other towns and villages. The railway brings coal, mail, passengers, and the stuff of commerce from the city.

Another road meanders inland through the slums of Coaltown and Hogswallow following the tidal River Travis to the villages of Riverhead and Milton where the sawmills are located. It had long been said by the locals that travelling the road to Riverhead was like a journey through Sodom and Gomorrah on the way to the promised land. The two MacKay sawmills churn out a steady stream of sawn timber for shipbuilding at the MacKay yards in Rockport, and timber for export in the holds of MacKay ships to the lucrative overseas markets.

Annie struggled to find an anchor for herself in all this. She was troubled by a growing sense of detachment, of not belonging to either of her two worlds.

Three years of exile at Mount Holyoke Seminary in South Hadley Massachusetts, with regular excursions to Boston, had taken her away from her Rockport home at Easthill, and her father. It had redirected her mind toward more worldly and intellectual concerns. She had outgrown Rockport.

After considerable thought, she had come slowly and begrudgingly to an understanding of her father’s motivation for sending her away to the seminary. It seemed that he’d wanted to immerse her in a sea of religious and academic studies to cleanse her of the memories, to remake her in a fresh new mould as if the rape and her mother’s suicide hadn’t happened.

However, some things couldn’t be erased and the bible studies failed to find fertile ground