By Ed Staskus

   Kieran Foyle was a black-haired man who knew how to get things done. He was Black Irish. He was a careful man, too. He only took chances when there was a good chance of making good. It was why Prince Albert sent him to the Canadian outlands on the clipper ship “Antelope of Boston’” to deliver vengeance on the man who had tried to kill his wife. It didn’t matter that it was an American ship. It didn’t matter that he was an Irishman sent to kill an Englishman. When it came to killing each other the Irish and English were good at it.

   “Either bring the evil-minded rogue back to be hung or, better yet, put him in the ground where you find him and spare us the trouble,” Queen Victoria’s consort said. He had had enough of assassination attempts. There had been one too many. He loved his wife and wanted her to die in bed.

   The Irishman nearly lost his chance when he stepped out of the long boat landing him on the north coast of Prince Edward Island too soon for comfort and almost drowned. The water was deeper near the shore of the cove than he  knew. He sank to the bottom not knowing how to swim and only made it to land on the back of one of the sailors who knew how to dog paddle.

   The man he was after was Thomas Spate, a disgruntled veteran of the Crimean War. He had known how to kill Russians. When he was awarded the Crimea Medal, he threw it in his rucksack and forgot about it. When he was one of the first soldiers to receive the Victoria Cross for bravery at the Battle of Balaclava, he thought about throwing it in his rucksack, too, but didn’t. Instead, he wore it every day pinned to his coat over his heart. He kept it cleaner than anything else he possessed.

   During the war Queen Victoria knitted woolens for the troops and inspected military hospitals, wearing a custom-made red army jacket. When the war ended, she hosted several victory balls in her new ballroom. Tom Spate watched from the outside, driving himself crazy. He was alone and down on his luck. He blamed everybody except himself for the bad things happening to him. He walked incessantly, from one end of London to the other. He goose-stepped up and down Hyde Park. Small groups gathered to watch the performance. The queen saw him often enough to become familiar with him, although she never approached him.

   It was on one of his walks around London he spied Queen Victoria and Prince Albert outside Cambridge House. As their carriage left, it came to a stop outside the gate. Tom Spate had taken to carrying two flintlock coat pocket pistols. They were always loaded. He walked up to the carriage and pulled them out. He didn’t ask himself what he was doing. He straightened one arm and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. It was a dud. He brought the other pistol to bear and pulled the trigger. It misfired. He had just enough time to jump at Queen Victoria and strike her on the head with the butt of one of his guns before Prince Albert grabbed him, shoving him off the carriage. Men on the walk swarmed the would-be assassin and beat him.

   Queen Victoria stood up in her carriage and proclaimed in a firm voice, “I am not hurt,” even though she was gushing blood from a gash on her forehead. The blood was crimson on her yellow crocheted shawl. Prince Albert staunched the bleeding with his handkerchief.

   Tom Spate was arrested, jailed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to transportation and twenty years of hard labor in the penal colony on Tasmania. There was no appeal. There was no changing anybody’s mind. By most calculations he got what he deserved. Prince Albert’s calculations were more severe. “I would have had the rascal drawn and quartered,” he said.

   When Tom Spate escaped his jailers and disappeared, Prince Albert summoned Kieran Foyle, a mercenary adventurer who it was said always got his man. It took almost a year, but in the spring of 1859 he was making his way soaking wet up the hill from the cove to the village of North Rustico. He knew where Tom Spate was and knew he could take his time about the matter. He needed to get out of his clothes. He needed a hot cider and dinner. He needed a good night’s sleep in a feather bed on dry land that didn’t heave-ho all night long. He found the only boarding house in North Rustico and took a room.

   Kieran Foyle’s chuff was living on the far side of the Stanley River, nine miles northwest up the coast. The Irishman had grown up calling miles chains. His man was 720 chains away. It would take him about three hours to walk there on the coastal footpath. He had no intention of taking anybody back to England. The voyage itself took a month. “Jesus and Mary chain,” he grumbled. He had every intention of collecting his reward.

   Tom Spate lived in a rough-and-ready hut he had thrown together, living in it with his new wife and new baby. He had no land to farm and no craft to make his way. He made his way by operating a ferry service from one side of the Stanley River to the other. In the winter he closed it down when the water froze and everybody walked across. In January the ice got thick enough so that horses and wagons could cross. 

   He bought ice skates, carved sticks with a curve at the bottom by hand, and made rough and ready pucks. His wife rented them to youngsters who had eggs, salt cod, and potatoes to trade for playing shinny on the ice. It was a game of fast skating and trying to hit the puck between two sticks of wood marking the goal.

   Most of North Rustico was Acadian. They were Catholic like Kieran Foyle. St. Augustine’s had been built in nearby South Rustico twenty years earlier. It boasted an 80-foot-high tower. A man could see everything from the top of it. The harbor at North Rustico was filled with boats and the fishing was good. There were cattle and horses grazing and fields of turnip and cabbage. Piles of mud dotted the fronts of fields. On his way to send Tom Spate to his maker, stopping to rest, he asked a passing man what the piles of mud were about.

   “It is mussel mud,” the man, a farmer, said. “The land needs lime to breathe new life into it. We use the mud from bays and riverbeds. It is beneficial, filled with oyster shells.”

   “Do you dig it up?” Kieran asked. He didn’t ask why they called it mussel mud instead of oyster mud.

   “We go out in canoes at high tide and dam up a small space so we can dig it from the bottom. When we are full, we go back and unload it at low tide.”

   “It sounds like a great deal of work.”

   “It is, but without the mud we would starve on the farms, both man and beast. I couldn’t keep one horse but for it. Your cow needs at least a ton of hay to survive the winter. We have been doubling our harvests with the mud. We will have even more of it soon.”

   “How’s that?” 

   “We have got a man engineering a mechanical digger to harvest the mud in the winter through holes in the ice and carry it across the island by sleigh. There’s talk that we will be able to increase our crops of hay five and ten times. And then there’s the ice besides. We cover it in sawdust and put it into an icehouse so that we can preserve foods that go bad in the summer’s heat.”

   Kieran Foyle parted with the farmer, shaking his hand. He liked what he heard about mussel mud. It was a sunny day and the uplands looked fine to him. When he got to the Stanley River, he rang a bell hanging from a post. Tom Spate’s face appeared at a window on the other side. He waved and the next minute was guiding his flatboat across the water, using a rope anchored to oak trees. He pushed with a pole along the riverbed. Kieran paid him his two pennies and put his back to a pillar as Tom Spate pushed off.

   Near the middle of the river the Irishman felt for the sidearm in his pocket. He was carrying a new Beaumont-Adams percussion revolver. The cylinder held five rounds, although he knew he wasn’t going to miss his man with his first shot. He intended to be standing face to face with him when he dispatched the villain. He walked up to Tom Spate.

   “Thomas Spate, I have a message for you from your queen,” he said.

   Tom Spate’s face went white as a ghost when the barrel of the gun pressed into his chest, pressing against the Victoria Cross he was wearing.

   “For God’s sake, I have a wife and child.”

   “For crown and country,” Kieran Foyle said and pulled the trigger. The bullet rocketed out of the barrel slamming into and driving the Victoria Cross into Tom Spate’s heart, putting an end to the one-time war hero’s life.

   Kieran stood over him and decided in an instant that he was going to stay on Prince Edward Island. There was nothing in Ireland or the rest of the United Kingdom for him other than more killing and waiting for the day he would be the one killed. He had neither wife nor family. He would find a woman here, he thought. He would have sons by the colleen. He would raise horses fed with abundant hay grown in the goodness of mussel mud. He didn’t love his fellow man, but he loved horses.

   He bent a knee and using both hands pried open the hole in Tom Spate’s chest. He stuck his fingers into the man, feeling for the bullet and the medal. He couldn’t find the bullet at first but found the Victoria Cross easily enough. He yanked the medal out. It had been cast from the cascabels of two cannons captured from the Russians at the siege of Sevastopol. He probed for the bullet until he found it. He washed the blood on his hands off in the water. He pushed the body off the ferry with his boot. It bobbed in the river and slowly floated out to the ocean on the ebb tide.

   He walked back to North Rustico the way he had come. In his room he packaged the bullet, the medal, and a letter in an envelope. The letter didn’t have a word in it about what he had done, only asking for land on the shoreline where he had landed and the right to name the cove “Foyle’s Cove.”

   He posted the letter in Charlottetown, paying an extra penny to make it a “Registered Letter.” It would sail on the Gazette to Liverpool the next week. He hoped to have a reply by the fall. In the meantime, he would start building a house on the west side of the cove. The land might already be owned by somebody, not that it mattered. It was nearly all forest. Whoever the landlord was, there was no tenant. When and if the landlord showed up from England, the Irishman was sure he could set him straight.

   He sat in his room and fired up his Meerschaum pipe. When he was young and poor, he smoked spone, which was coltsfoot mixed with wild rose petals. Now he carried good tobacco in his purse. The smoke curled up from the Irish clay. He had found a kitten on the ferry and brought it back with him from the the Stanley River. The kitten watched the smoke, jabbing at it with its paws.

   “All the old haunts and the dear friends, all the things I used to do, the hopes and dreams of boyhood days, they all pass me in review.” It was a song they still sang in military barracks. He had been dragooned into the army while still a boy after being plied with drink by a sergeant in a pub. He took the “Queen’s Shilling” and there was no going back, especially after he deserted and went to work for himself, plying a new trade. 

   The window of his room faced west. The setting sun slanted in, the orange glow warming his face. When he was done with his pipe he would go downstairs for haddock, potatoes, and beer. He would bring some bits of fish and milk back for the kitten. Until then, he would sit where he was, smoking and letting his plans slowly unwind themselves from the back of his mind.

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication