Read Online A Wicked Way to Burn by Margaret Miles - Free Book Online

of private nest, she ticked off her latest tasks on her fingers, listing them out loud.
    The apples were finished; most of the herbs were gathered in and drying; the root cellar was well stocked with potatoes, turnips, and parsnips from the garden; the bees and their hives had been seen to, although they might need to be fed a little sugar water again, before the hard frosts. And the hay had provided more than enough winter fodder for the dairy herd—she was relieved at that.
    No other areas seemed to need her immediate attention, so she turned her mind eagerly to what her neighbor had called the second part of observation. As she did, the miniature portrait of Aaron on her desk, the one painted before he left Philadelphia, seemed to stare directly into her eyes. Whether he would have liked it or not, she knew what he would have expected her to do. Charlotte leaned on the brocade-covered arm of her chair, and thought.
    The old man had been there, and now the old man was gone. But was he really gone from the earth, or only the Boston road? Maybe the whole occurrence was nothing more than an involved jest—though it certainly seemed a poor one. This, she thought, had been Longfellow’s first opinion. She wondered if he still stuck to it.
    A further possibility was that Jack Pennywort, neverthe most sober of men, had “decorated” (knowingly or not) whatever it was he really saw. But what
had
Jack seen, and
why?
    The stranger might, understandably, have taken fright at being followed up the road from the tavern. Perhaps somehow, cleverly, he had diverted Jack’s attention before slipping away. But how? Unless …
    Charlotte’s next idea seemed even more fantastic, at least at first. The old gentleman might have
planned
to give a dumb show. What if he wanted people to believe he’d gone up in smoke and flames? What if he’d chosen to leave his past behind, to start a new life? Hadn’t that been her conclusion as soon as she’d heard the story of the Long Island farmer and his servant? (She would have guessed that the figure she’d seen herself was well beyond affairs of the heart—but one never knew for sure.) Still, how fast could the bent old man have trotted off? And exactly
how
had he fooled the wary Jack Pennywort?
    On the other hand … Jack wouldn’t have had to be fooled at all …
if he had been a paid accomplice.
Or it could even be that Jack, perhaps with someone else, had actually done away with the stranger.
    Steeling herself to the last unlikely possibility, Charlotte thought on. While Jack returned to the tavern to tell a story that might have been carefully planned, a larger man (perhaps this Frenchman they talked of?) could have taken the body, and the gold, and hidden them somewhere. But this really didn’t seem plausible, either, considering what she knew of Jack’s character. After all, here was a man who rarely did
much
wrong, and who lived in fear even of his wife! Nor could Charlotte imagine anyone else trusting Jack to share that kind of awful secret for long. But for a coin or two, Jack Pennywort
might
have gone along with something
less
than murder….
    Another possibility remained. There could have actuallybeen an extraordinary occurrence of some kind, a phenomenon that had caused the stranger to be entirely consumed by internal flames. Some believed it possible, at least on Long Island. Spontaneous human combustion, Richard had called it. Was it credible? She knew that numerous forces in Nature were still largely unexplained. And some of them
were
deadly. For instance, even though Dr. Franklin had recently coaxed lightning down from the clouds, it still had a mind of its own, and might take a life in an instant.
    Thinking hard, Charlotte recalled having once heard from Aaron’s brother, Captain Noah Willett, about something called Saint Elmo’s fire. Reportedly, this could turn a ship’s entire rigging blue with an eerie, dancing flame that sometimes played on seamen. That sounded