“I am interested in hearing the rest of your story first,” Buchan said. “The family of blacksmiths. In the old country.”
Reilly shook his head. “There was no family of blacksmiths.”
Buchan made a noise in his throat. He leaned out over the water far enough to see his own reflection on the surface of the river. He said, “I am aware that a second Indian was killed on the lake last March, Mr. Reilly.”
“Is this what Mary is telling you?”
“The source of my information is irrelevant. The point is that with regards to that murder, you are lying to protect John Senior.”
“We were speaking about my hand, Captain.”
Buchan unbuttoned a pocket in his tunic and removed the journal and fished for a lead. “As you wish,” he said.
Reilly held his right hand over the pages of the notebook to give him a clear view. There was nothing of sense there that Buchan could see at first, a criss-cross of black lines that began at the base of the thumb and climbed across the back of the hand nearly to the other side.
“It’s still possible to see the truth of it, if you know it’s there to begin with,” Reilly said. He pointed with the index finger of the opposite hand, circling the triangular area of flesh between the tendons cabling the thumb and forefinger to the wrist.
It took a moment for the letter T to surface, for Buchan to register what it meant. He looked up at the Irishman. “There’s worse that could have come to you,” he said.
“And nearly did. Commuted to branding and deportation to the colonies out of regard for my age and the fact it was my first offence.”
“The first offence you were convicted of,” Buchan said.
“A fine distinction, sir. Well noted. You’re a credit to the office of magistrate. I had quite the career behind me by that time.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen, sir. No age to be riding a horse foaled by an acorn, I can tell you.”
Buchan tapped his lead against the pages of the notebook. “What was the charge?”
“Lifting a watch from a gentleman among the crowd gathered at Tyburn to see the hangings. I was a poor pickpocket, I’m afraid. I came to it late, after a long apprenticeship as a river thief.”
“You speak of it as if it were an honourable profession, Mr. Reilly.”
Reilly shrugged. “Every honourable profession on the Thames had their hand in. A revenue officer could make thirty guineas a night to turn a blind eye to all the activity. There were rat catchers on the Thames would carry the same two dozen rats from ship to ship and get paid ten times over for clearing vessels of vermin. And all the while they’d be making note of all that was aboard. It was how we knew which ships were worth stealing from.” Reilly shook his head. “We never cleaned out a vessel, just skimmed from the barrels and then tapped the heads closed again. There was some were more brazen about it. They’d cut the hawsers at night and let the barges drift on the tide to some spot out of the way and then strip it clean like crows picking a corpse.”
Buchan said, “You’ll forgive me if I see no reason to take notes.”
“It wasn’t my intention to sound nostalgic, Captain.”
“Perhaps you could tell me how all of this is connected to John Senior.”
The Irishman leaned over his knees and spat into the clear water. “I never chose to be a thief,” he said. “I’d rather have been selling milk about the streets of St. Giles. It was my father’s calling. He saw me off in London and he expected me back on the first ship out of St. John’s, which was the route taken by most sentenced to the colonies. I made up my mind to stay if I could scavenge a bit of work. Which proved more difficult than I would have liked.” Reilly raised his hand. “Not many men will hire a convicted thief. An Irish one at that.”
“So you concealed it by scarring your hand.”
“It never occurred to me is the God’s honest truth. It was John Senior’s idea.”
Buchan nodded as if this confirmed something he’d suspected about the elder Peyton for years.
“He told me I’d not be allowed to live an honest life if I appeared otherwise.”
“I would say he took the job rather too seriously.”
“I was just a lad still. He walked me out to Quidi Vidi Lake and got me drunk while we laid a fire to heat a poker. He gave me a rolled-up handkerchief to chew on and sat across my back and held my arm to the ground. When I came to myself, my hand was wrapped in strips he’d torn away from the shirt on his back. I didn’t look at it until the smell came through. Had to be brought across to White Bay to have Annie’s mother clean it up, John Senior lost a full week’s work carrying me there and back.”
Buchan stared upriver where the spruce grew to the shore and leaned out over their slurred reflections in the slow current. He felt unsure of himself suddenly. He turned to Reilly. “Was all this enough to warrant lying about a murder?”