After Sleepy Hollow. Written for Kadorienne, Yuletide 2005.
Crooked House
It's young Masbath that spies the red thread, a fine silken strand caught on the dead man's sleeve and soaked dark with the morning dew. "Look, sir." He crouches down, reaching out before he collects himself and remembers his tweezers, snagging the thread with a sureness of touch that Ichabod notes with approval.
"Excellent!" Ichabod scribbles in his book. "Another clue."
Masbath carefully folds the thread in a slip of paper and tucks it into his pocket. He stands over Ichabod's shoulder, reading. Already the page is bristling thickly with Ichabod's cursive scrawl.
Most of the list requires little explanation. Contents of the dead man's pockets. White powder found on the cobblestones near the body. The red thread, of course.
The relevance of the items at the top of the page is more obscure.
"Pepper," Masbath reads slowly. "Soap. Pins... Sir, isn't that --"
Ichabod shuts the book hastily and stows it in his coat pocket. "Katrina's shopping list," he says, and begins to walk quite quickly. Masbath hurries to catch up to Ichabod's longer strides, stifling a chuckle in his shirt sleeve.
Sharp eyes and sharp wits, Ichabod muses to himself as they walk, are not necessary for the successful detective; for observation can be honed and logic taught. But how fortunate for the one born with both! He glances over at Masbath, trotting to keep up, and is glad. The school term will be starting soon and although Masbath has expressed somewhat less enthusiasm than hoped for, Ichabod is confident he will do very well indeed.
He tells Katrina of the case as they prepare for dinner, making special note of his young companion's contributions. They have a routine now: Ichabods sets the table; Masbath ferries plates between kitchen and dining room; while Katrina sets the final touches to the food.
"And how do you find it, Masbath?" Katrina asks. She rests a hand lightly on his shoulder as she passes.
"Twas alright." Masbath shrugs with one eloquent shoulder. "Awful," he says a moment later, setting down the mashed potato with a thud. "But interesting."
Ichabod approves. "A commendable attitude for a future detective."
"Actually, sir," Masbath says conversationally, "after school I was planning to go to sea. Join a merchant ship or such."
Dismayed, Ichabod drops the forks with a clatter. Even Katrina looks mildly surprised. Masbath, heedless, hums as he reaches for the gravy boat. For a while they eat in a silence which only Masbath seems to find comfortable. A disheartened Ichabod can only prod at his food with a fork.
But there is another quality often found in the best of detectives, and witches too.
Mid-meal Katrina comments mildly that she has always loved to travel, and would love to do so by sea. Ichabod frowns around a mouthful of beef, but the enthusiasm of Masbath's reply does not go unnoticed.
When certain of his ground there are none more tenacious than Ichabod Crane; but he's not one to force the facts to fit the case.
Well, the boy is young yet, Ichabod concedes with an inward sigh, and more than like will change his mind. Why, he himself at that age thought it would be a fine thing to circumnavigate the globe and wrestle with polar bears. Ah, Ichabod thinks fondly, youth!
So by dessert time even Ichabod is musing on latitudes and longitudes, and the origins of the compass, and - cunningly - how useful it would be for a future sailor to apply himself to his studies in mathematics.
He says brightly, "Only four weeks more till start of term, young Masbath," and ignores the sigh that follows.
*
On arriving in New York, Ichabod's rooms are much as he had left them.
His wife and ward soon take care of that.
Katrina is quick to take command of the household. She dismisses one maid and hires another, pulls down the old curtains and orders new, even darns the buttons on his shirts. Ichabod, who failed to notice the missing silver and would have let the drapes fray, is surprised and charmed by her perspicacity.
Then there are other, subtler changes. New books begin to appear on the shelves: romantic novels, treatises on botany, and volumes of poetry line up alongside his battered legal tomes and studies of human anatomy. He comes home one evening to find the narrow windowsills filled with clay pots of swift-blooming annuals and aromatic herbs.
She makes friends, more easily than his own awkward self would have thought possible, and invites them over for tea parties at which they tell each others' fortunes from the leaves. He grows accustomed to the sight of Katrina's fair head bent over some giggling girl's palm, the sound of her voice solemnly reading a spread of tarot cards for the chief inspector's wife.
All these things Ichabod is willing to grant as delightful. But Masbath, now, is another story.
First and foremost, Masbath takes up residence in the room Ichabod had used as a workshop - turning out Ichabod's tools and projects in the process - which he soon manages to fill, despite arriving in New York with only the one small trunk.
Ichabod is a tolerant man but the sight of the skeleton (acquired at no inconsiderable cost, for the purposes of scientific study) forced into the entrance hall, where it makes do as a hatstand, is quite enough to set him sighing.
Moreover Masbath is a boy, and messy. He tracks mud over the floors. He brings home stray kittens and collects bits of scrap metal, the first which he cannot keep and the second which he refuses to throw out. He requires constant feeding. And no matter how quickly one buys him clothes, he seems to outgrow or rip them within the week.
After he starts school it gets worse, not better, for he soon discovers that the cry "it's for school!" will stop both Ichabod and Katrina in their tracks. Many an item which might otherwise have been cleanly and easily ejected was thus saved to be put aside, and forgotten, and when at long last rediscovered tossed away anyway.
Katrina laughs at first. "He's just a boy, Ichabod," she says. "That's what most boys are like." When Ichabod retorts that he was never such a boy, Katrina ventures to agree that she is quite sure of it.
However, even Katrina is less than pleased on the occasion when Masbath stumbles as he runs in the door, grabs at the nearest piece of furniture, and sends a large bowl of petunias toppling to the floor. "Sorry, Miss Katrina." He sits, muddied, forlorn and apologetic. "But I tripped." He points at the foot of the skeleton-hatstand.
"So I can see." Katrina folds her arms and looks at the skeleton, on the skull of which rests a hat set rakishly askew.
She comes to a decision. "Ichabod," she announces at dinner that evening, "I think we need a house."
*
They settle on a lopsided little cottage with a cat in the doorway and soot on the sills, nearer to the outskirts of New York where there are more trees and occasionally birds, and the sky is sometimes quite clear. Inside, there is room enough for Ichabod's workshop and Katrina's herbs and Masbath's whatever-he-likes.
They are all very pleased with their choice, especially Ichabod, who preens a little in the satisfaction of a job well done. His perturbation, therefore, when Katrina wakes him in the night whispering that there are noises downstairs, is matched only by his annoyance.
He pretends sleep at first but Katrina is insistent.
"Must I?" he says at last. "We live in a very good neighbourhood, my dear, I'm sure all you're hearing is --"
He jumps more at the crash than she does.
After precious moments wasted hand-holding, they agree that they will descend the stairs, together, Ichabod carrying his pistol and Katrina wielding a poker, and surprise the intruder in his tracks. The plan is carried out exactly, except for the addition of screaming, which Ichabod ad libs.
For instead of a thug or murderer, the only bandit to be found is a stray raccoon, come through an open window to sniff for scraps.
"Only a raccoon," Katrina sighs in relief, and sets the poker down with a clank.
"Only a raccoon?" Ichabod inches back up the stairs, thinking fleas, disease, whiskers.
Katrina shoos the creature out and the next morning busies herself with tucking little dried bunches of herbs about the place, which she says will deter future visitors. She also suggests getting a dog; a wolfhound, perhaps?
Ichabod, calling vaguely to mind slobber and fangs, shudders slightly. When he catches Masbath looking far too eager at the suggestion, he is hasty to turn the conversation by suggesting that they might best take this as a case study in detection.
"We must find the perpetrator of the crime, as well as guarding against his future trespasses. Consider," he muses, pacing quickly about the room, "the means of ingress. The means of egress. Time of entry: dead of night. Motive: theft. Witnesses..."
Ichabod drifts off for a moment, lost in speculation. He imagines questioning the neighbouring tenants. What did you see on the night of the twenty-second? Did you or did you not notice a small, dark, furry...?
Masbath shakes his head, and quietly sets about screwing a stronger latch to the window frame.
*
A red thread, a smear of chalk, a scrap of conversation overheard. From such a good detective might work up a case, and Ichabod is better than merely good. The murdered man will have his justice.
But satisfaction is brief when the corpses pile high in the watchhouse cellar, and Ichabod winds the sheets around five bodies that day alone.
He walks home melancholy beneath a rarely-seen New York moon, and his thoughts begin to turn, as they so seldom do, to Sleepy Hollow...
Then he collects himself with a visible shrug. Though it was where they met, the cusp on which his life turned, he rarely dwells on the Hollow. Why revisit on the horrors of that dark episode, when before him is enough to occupy him to the end of his days?
A prostitute with her throat slit, a man stabbed in the street, a baby smothered with a rag. Thieves, murderers, rapists, grifters, and more. And all in New York is perpetrated by the hand of man, not some unholy demon, or madwoman witch.
There is no hidden darkness here. Only a city of fools and evildoers.
He turns aside these troubled thoughts at the front door and tells Kristina a gentler tale - a story which ends with the bad behind bars and the dead laid to rest, Masbath's sharp eyes winning the day - at the end of which he makes as if to smile.
She doesn't respond in kind, but kisses his hand, the scarred palm turned upwards. There's little that she misses. "Are you unhappy, Ichabod?" she asks.
He thinks on it. "No," he says. "No. I am happy, in fact. Happier than I've ever been." For they've fashioned something good here, in their crooked little house, something right. "But I worry," he admits, "because there's still so much to be done."
"I worry too." Katrina squeezes his hand. "But at least we've made a start."
"Oh." He is faintly surprised. Then suddenly relieved. "Oh. You're right. So we have."
With perfect timing, there's a clatter at the door. It's Masbath arriving home from school, shouting "Hello!"
Katrina smiles and pulls him out of his chair. "Your turn to set the table."
By Rowan (winter_rowan@hotmail.com) December 2005
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