First Adventure, The Case of the Missing Merchant, Session 009
Sunday Best
This is an emergent narrative; this story is the retrospective recounting of a TTRPG Session that involved emergent play in an open world.
Opening Narration
A city may have any number of respectable institutions, but the Sabbath is the one upon which it places the greatest demands while giving the least thought to the practical arrangements. The general idea is that a man shall wash himself, put on a clean shirt, attend divine service, and refrain from doing anything he would be ashamed to explain to his mother. This is an excellent system for the mothers, who seldom receive an honest explanation in any event. It is less convenient for the men who must spend the remainder of the week undoing all the business that Sunday’s good intentions have left in a heap.
New Orleans has always treated the Lord’s Day with particular ceremony. A good Creole household understands the proper hour for mass, the importance of a well-brushed coat, and the grave social calamity of appearing in the wrong pew. The church bells are not merely instruments of devotion; they are clocks by which the entire respectable world sets its face. A gentleman may possess a very elastic conscience, but he had better not possess a poorly tied cravat. His neighbors would forgive him the first deficiency sooner than the second, because nobody can see the conscience from across the street.
It is a curious thing about propriety that it depends so much upon the door through which one enters. A man may obtain access to a ship on the strength of a letter signed by two insurance companies and be received as a useful servant of commerce. The same man, climbing aboard at night with a pry bar, would be called a burglar, though his opinion of the cargo might remain precisely the same. A person who enters a library with the approval of a nun is a scholar. A person who finds the library locked and begins examining its windows is rapidly promoted, by the police, to a different profession. The books have not changed, nor the research, but suddenly the difference between learning and trespassing is a pane of glass.
There is no shortage of Sunday labor in this town, of course, and never has been. The Mississippi does not quit flowing at the sound of a bell, and a steamer cannot be persuaded to stop leaking until Monday by the finest sermon ever preached. The dockhands must unload the flour, the ferrymen must cross the river, and some poor fellow must keep watch over a damaged ship while his employer goes off to enjoy the comforts of a proper dinner. These practical gentlemen perform the work that allows everybody else to congratulate themselves upon taking a day of rest. The arrangement is wonderfully equitable, provided one does not inquire into who does the resting.
The law, too, is an enthusiastic admirer of appearances. It is prepared to regard two people peering into a shuttered building as suspicious characters right up to the moment one of them offers a sufficiently genteel explanation. Then the same behavior may be reclassified as an unfortunate misunderstanding, and the officer can proceed down the banquette with his dignity uninjured. I do not propose that the law ought to abandon good manners. I merely observe that the difference between a crime and an inconvenience is sometimes settled by which person speaks first and whether that person seems likely to own a carriage.
All this helps explain why so many of the city’s greatest exertions are made in the cause of looking as if no exertion is being made at all. The merchant keeps his books immaculate, the captain describes his cargo as something perfectly ordinary, the antiquarian announces an innocent interest in the past, and the insurance man assures everybody that he is only trying to help settle a claim. Perhaps each is telling the truth, at least to the extent that the truth is presently useful. It is a generous system. No one need become thoroughly dishonest so long as he is capable of being respectably incomplete.
It is Sunday, the fourth of February, eighteen hundred and sixty-six. The churches have opened their doors, the archives have shut theirs, and a steamer lies in a dry dock across the Mississippi with damage that stubbornly refuses to agree with its paperwork. Four investigators are about to discover that a day devoted to proper conduct can demand the most improper ingenuity. They have all, in their different ways, put on their Sunday best. It remains to be seen what the day will do to it.
Late Morning, Sunday, February 4, 1866 – Good News by Wire (Lars, Caleb)
By the time Lars Prittwitz and Caleb Grayson had separated from their companions near Camp and Common, the morning had already yielded more surveillance than either man cared to admire. Lars had succeeded in losing the shadow that troubled him; Caleb had been less fortunate. Their separate routes nevertheless carried them toward the same destination, the insurance office at No. 18 Carondelet Street, where the polished outer face of maritime commerce concealed a considerably less placid occupation.
There, amid the neat files of the Insurance Company of North America and the ordinary papers of a respectable adjuster, Lars received the return telegram he had been waiting for. The wire came from Philadelphia, answering the formal request he had sent after speaking with Harrison Osgood of Atlantic Mutual. Lars opened it and read the few words that mattered: ‘PROCEED. AWAITING PHYSICAL DOCUMENTS.’
It was not the entire contractual apparatus. The original paperwork would follow in the slower and more dignified fashion preferred by corporations that wished to make certain nobody could later deny what had been agreed. But it was authorization all the same. The Insurance Company of North America had sanctioned Lars’s participation in Atlantic Mutual’s examination of the SS Wilmington Lady. He now had a proper reason to present himself at the damaged vessel, which was vastly preferable to the alternative of inventing one at the dock gate.
“Philadelphia has agreed,” Lars told Caleb, putting the wire beside the insurance file. “The final papers are still on their way, but we may proceed with the survey.”
“Then we can see for ourselves what bent that shaft,” Caleb said.
The distinction was important. Osgood had described damage too severe to square easily with a cargo of textiles and dry goods. That suspicion did not prove smuggling; it scarcely proved more than that Captain Atwood’s explanation deserved a hard look. A proper inspection, however, might reveal what a ledger could not. They settled upon the McLellan Dry Dock at Algiers Point as their immediate destination and resolved to go there under the authority of the new arrangement.
Caleb raised a practical difficulty before they left. Neither he nor Lars had spent his professional life around steamships. It was one thing to spot a bent piece of iron and quite another to know how the injury had occurred. The sporting world into which Caleb had lately been driven might, he suggested, contain a former sailor who understood a vessel from the keel upward. It was not an unreasonable hope. New Orleans was full of men who had fought one sort of war at sea and were now fighting a very different one to remain fed.
Early Afternoon – The Closed Door (Madeleine, Leopold)
Elsewhere, Madeleine Mercier and Leopold Schuyler had proceeded with a plan that appeared, at first glance, much better suited to a Sunday afternoon. They wished to consult the archives at the Ursuline Academy. The antiquarian had his questions about a mysterious ring and an old body of correspondence; Madeleine had reasons of her own to seek what the city’s older records might preserve. Between them they possessed enough scholarly seriousness to make their errand respectable, even if they had not troubled to ask the calendar whether it would cooperate.
The convent’s exterior offered no encouragement. Its doors were secured, its usual workrooms quiet, and the gentle hush of the Sabbath seemed to have settled over every passage that might otherwise lead to a manuscript. Leopold examined the entrance while Madeleine approached with the confidence of someone whose education gave her a genuine connection to the Ursuline sisters. If an exception could be made for anyone, she had reason to hope the convent might make it for her.
A sister eventually answered their knock. Madeleine explained that they had come on a matter of historical research and hoped to consult the archives, perhaps with the assistance of the nun who oversaw them. The request was courteous and earnest. It was also unsuccessful.
“I am very sorry, mademoiselle,” the sister told her. “The archives are not receiving visitors today. The sister who attends to the records is away upon charitable work. You must return tomorrow.”
Madeleine sought to invoke her Ursuline connection, but the personal appeal did not gain them admission. The refusal was neither hostile nor suspicious. It was simply the ordinary answer a closed institution gives to people who appear at its door on the wrong day. There was nothing to quarrel with. The nuns had work of their own, and the old papers would not vanish before Monday merely because two investigators had chosen Sunday to request them.
Leopold accepted the decision as a statement of the convent’s present intentions. Whether he accepted it as the end of the afternoon was another matter. The distinction soon became apparent.
Early Afternoon – A Sailor in the Sporting Life (Lars, Caleb, Jack Fossier)
Caleb’s hope of finding a useful seaman among his acquaintances proved better founded than one might have expected from the general reputation of the sporting fraternity. Through his connections in the prizefighting world he located a man known as ‘Jumping’ Jack Fossier, a large, red-haired fellow whose fists had given him a second profession after the first had been devoted to ships and the war.
Jack had served aboard a Union ironclad and spent part of his naval service in Texas waters. He knew the kind of machinery that could injure a steamer, the difference between a working sailor’s explanation and a captain’s convenient story, and the practical language of hulls and fittings. He also knew the less formal arts of the bare-knuckle ring. Caleb had good reason to regard him as the very man they wanted.
The two investigators called at Jack’s flat and found that their chosen expert had not expected to be consulted quite so early in the day. It required some persistence to wake him. When he finally appeared, his hair was disordered, his expression clouded, and every movement seemed to be conducted with a careful regard for the consequences of the previous evening. There was no need to inquire closely into the source of his discomfort. Jack was hungover.
“Jack,” Caleb began, “we’ve got a ship we’d like you to look at.”
“A ship,” Fossier repeated, as if hearing of a new species of misfortune. He rubbed at his face. “On a Sunday?”
“It may be worth your while,” Lars said, making the financial inducement plain. “We require an opinion from someone who has actually served aboard one of these things.”
That put the proposal in a different light. Money was offered, the nature of the work explained, and Jack agreed to accompany them. He dressed and made his way downstairs with the grave deliberation of a man negotiating a difficult peace with his own stomach. Out in the street he stopped beside a water barrel and, without asking any of them for advice, plunged his head into it.
The performance was short but thorough. When Jack emerged dripping, water streaming through his bright hair and down the collar of his shirt, he seemed at least sufficiently revived to recognize the world around him. Caleb, whose sporting acquaintances included men of many useful and questionable habits, had produced a naval adviser. Lars had to admit that the method of preparation was unconventional, though it appeared to answer the immediate difficulty.
“Better?” Caleb asked.
“Better,” Jack said, wiping his face. “Now let’s see your miserable boat.”
The three men set off for the ferry and the dry dock on the opposite bank of the Mississippi. They had a legitimate insurance purpose, a paid expert, and a damaged steamer waiting to be explained. No one could fairly accuse them of arriving without preparation, even if one member of the expedition was still soaking wet.
Early to Mid-Afternoon – A Question of Access (Madeleine, Leopold)
The refusal at the Ursuline entrance ought to have been conclusive. Leopold Schuyler, however, was a man for whom a locked door was an answer to one question and an invitation to several others. He suggested that they examine the premises more carefully before surrendering the opportunity. To his evident encouragement, Madeleine did not object to the idea outright. The two moved around the building, studying what could be reached from the street and the adjoining passages.
The principal entrance was secure. So was the rear door. Leopold examined each, bringing an experienced eye to the construction and the means by which it was fastened. Neither offered a practical prospect of quiet entry. The iron and timber were not going to yield to courtesy, and he lacked any straightforward means of opening the locks without doing damage or attracting attention. For a time it appeared the convent had settled the question definitively.
Then the windows along the rear alley presented a different possibility. Their cantilevered arrangement suggested that they might be manipulated without smashing the glass or forcing a door. It was not a certainty. It was merely the sort of mechanical opportunity that encourages an inquisitive gentleman to begin an experiment before considering whether he possesses the right to perform it.
Madeleine remained on the main street to keep watch while Leopold worked around to the windows. It was an awkward division of labor, for a respectable young woman standing outside a convent was an ordinary sight, whereas a gentleman applying close attention to its shuttered windows required a more elaborate explanation. Still, the arrangement gave them some prospect of warning if anyone took an interest in their efforts.
A municipal policeman came along the banquette and greeted Madeleine. She returned the courtesy without incident. The exchange might have ended there, with both parties going about their business, but the officer’s eye wandered past the ordinary scene before him to the less ordinary activity near the academy. Leopold had become visible at the windows.
The policeman’s attention sharpened. He had plainly noticed enough to make a closer inquiry worthwhile. A gentleman examining the rear windows of a closed religious institution in broad daylight presented the sort of case that even the most indolent constable could recognize without assistance. Leopold’s scholarly errand had acquired the makings of an arrest.
Madeleine intervened before that possibility could become a reality. She did not announce an interest in forcing the archive or attempt to persuade the policeman that regulations governing entry were unimportant. Instead she supplied a reason that belonged entirely within the officer’s ordinary understanding of a respectable young lady’s troubles.
“I fear there has been a most unfortunate mistake, officer,” she explained, making the situation sound embarrassing rather than criminal. “I left a valuable piece of jewelry among my things when I was here. We found the archives shut for the day, and my companion has been trying to determine whether we might discover if it is still inside. I should be dreadfully concerned to lose it.”
It was a story improvised for the occasion, not an account of any jewelry actually left behind. It nevertheless had precisely the advantages the circumstances demanded. A missing ornament was plausible. A young lady’s anxiety about it was equally plausible. And a gentleman’s clumsy attempt to assist her could be regarded as bad judgment without requiring the full machinery of the criminal law.
The officer accepted the explanation. The immediate threat of arrest fell away, though the archive remained just as closed as it had been when the sister refused them entry. Madeleine had rescued the expedition, not opened the building. There was nothing further to be gained by testing how much of the officer’s patience remained. Leopold gave up the windows, and the pair withdrew. Their scholarly research had produced no document, no copied inscription, and no glimpse of the papers they had come to read.
They returned toward the Mercier family residence, carrying with them the useful knowledge that the archives would receive them on Monday and the less flattering knowledge that a convincing social explanation can sometimes be more effective than a well-constructed lock.
Afternoon – Across the River to McLellan (Lars, Caleb, Jack Fossier)
The ferry to Algiers Point carried the three men away from the better-known bustle of the New Orleans waterfront and toward another collection of wharves, workshops, and vessels under repair. From the river the city took on a different aspect. Its churches and countinghouses receded into a broken line of rooftops while the practical business of steam navigation occupied the foreground: derricks, timbers, cables, and the scarred hulls of craft whose owners were spending money they had intended to make elsewhere.
The SS Wilmington Lady sat in McLellan Dry Dock, her injuries exposed to the attention of shipwrights and surveyors. This was not a picturesque place for genteel inspection. Boards had to be crossed with care, workmen moved equipment without troubling to clear a path for visiting gentlemen, and the surrounding structures existed to support practical labor rather than polite conversation. But a dry dock has one virtue that no captain can abolish with his signature: the damaged portions of a ship may be seen without trusting the description supplied in her log.
At the entrance, a watchman stopped them. He was an earnest, fussy man, attentive to instructions and apparently determined that every visitor be admitted in the proper fashion. The arrangement of tools, the movement of workmen, and the correct identification of callers all seemed to matter to him deeply. He was not obstructive for the pleasure of it. He simply believed that a dry dock should be run as carefully as any decent establishment.
“Your business here, gentlemen?” he asked, looking from Lars to Caleb and then to the wet-haired stranger who had joined them.
“Insurance survey,” Lars replied, presenting the authorized purpose of the visit. “The Wilmington Lady. We are here regarding the damage claim.”
The watchman examined what was offered and listened to the explanation. Once satisfied that they had a proper reason to enter, he admitted them. Lars had obtained exactly the advantage the Philadelphia telegram was supposed to provide. He and Caleb could walk openly into the dock under the ordinary expectations of commercial inspection, with Jack accompanying them as a knowledgeable adviser.
Captain Phineas Atwood was less pleased by the visit. The Wilmington Lady was costing him money while she lay idle, and the insurance settlement seemed to retreat another day every time an additional man appeared to inspect what was already broken. That this latest delegation had presented itself on a Sunday did little to improve his humor.
“On a Sunday?” Atwood demanded. “How many times must you gentlemen inspect the same damage? My ship is sitting here with her repairs to pay for, and I’ve yet to see the money to settle the account.”
“We should like to settle the matter promptly as well, Captain,” Lars answered. “A clear report now may save you a considerable delay afterward. We require a proper examination, nothing more.”
The prospect of an expedited claim was the argument Atwood was prepared to hear. His impatience did not vanish, and he did not become a trusting host. But the faster the inspectors finished their work, the sooner his insurers might be induced to release the funds. He agreed to let them proceed and assigned a mate to accompany them aboard the vessel.
That condition was perfectly reasonable in a working ship. A captain need not turn his decks over to strangers merely because an insurance company has sent them. The mate served as guide and escort, directing them through the accessible areas and keeping the inspection within the bounds the captain had permitted. Lars, Caleb, and Jack therefore had to accomplish their work in plain sight. They could observe; they could ask questions; they could examine fittings exposed to a legitimate survey. They could not simply disappear into the captain’s private cabin and begin overturning his belongings.
Jack proved his worth almost immediately. He moved among the ironwork with the practiced familiarity of someone who knew what a seaman would call each part and what sort of failure it was likely to suffer. The difference between a loose piece of tackle and one bent by serious force was not lost on him. He asked questions about the damage, studied the winches and shaft, and compared what he saw with the account offered by the captain’s paperwork.
The bent winches were particularly troublesome to the official explanation. There was evidence of stress and injury that did not sit comfortably beside a manifest describing textiles and dry goods. Cloth might be heavy in quantity, but its reported behavior in the storm did not adequately account for the character of the damage they saw. Lars had come to test an insurance claim, and the ship was doing little to reassure him that the claim was candid.
“That’s a curious way for a load of cloth to behave,” Jack remarked, looking over the fittings. “You may put any name you please on a manifest, but iron does not read it.”
His closer inspection suggested something more definite to him. The Wilmington Lady, he said, bore signs consistent with a grounding. A ship that had run aground could suffer damage of this kind, and the strained fittings appeared to him far more persuasive on that theory than on the tale of a violent squall tossing ordinary merchandise about the hold.
“I’d sooner believe she took the bottom somewhere,” Jack said. “There are things here that look a great deal more like a grounding than a cargo turning over in a storm.”
It was an expert’s opinion, not a legal finding. Jack could read the injuries with the benefit of naval experience, but he had not watched the voyage and could not swear to what had occurred out in the Gulf. Lars and Caleb understood the distinction. Their suspicions had gained an experienced voice; they had not yet become a proved account of the ship’s misadventures.
Their attention shifted from the damaged machinery to the hold and the ship’s more ordinary arrangements. The inspection provided an opportunity to map accessible passageways, storage spaces, and the relation of one compartment to another. They observed the places where cargo might be carried and the routes by which it could be moved. Caleb was as interested in the practical geometry as Lars was in the paperwork; Jack supplied the seamanship that neither of them could claim.
It was during that survey that the men discovered concealed cargo compartments. They were not merely obscure corners of a large vessel. Their construction offered storage concealed from ordinary view, the sort of arrangement that could permit a ship to carry goods the straightforward inventory did not mention. No clandestine cargo was seized during this inspection, and the men did not establish exactly what had been kept there. Yet the existence of the hiding places was itself a material fact, and one that cast the damaged steamer’s impeccable descriptions in a distinctly unfavorable light.
The mate remained with them as they worked. They did not try to force their way into the captain’s cabin or conduct a secret search beneath his floorboards. This was a daylight inspection performed under an insurance authority, and they meant to preserve the appearance—and the legal substance—of that authority. There would be other questions, certainly, but not every question could be answered while a ship’s officer stood at one’s elbow.
The day’s ordinary inquiries also revealed a habit of Captain Atwood’s that might prove useful. He regularly went out to dinner in New Orleans each evening, leaving the vessel for a time. The information was not proof of wrongdoing. Many men preferred a proper meal ashore to another supper aboard an idle ship. Still, a captain’s routine could matter to anyone who wished to inspect more than the captain had chosen to show them.
When the authorized examination was complete, the three men made their departure without incident. Atwood had permitted the survey in the hope of hastening his settlement. The watchman had done his duty. The mate had shown the visitors what they were entitled to see. Lars, Caleb, and Jack had found evidence sufficiently disturbing to justify further investigation without forcing a single lock or creating an open quarrel aboard the ship. The vessel remained where it had been, under repair and apparently at peace with itself.
Later That Afternoon – Tomorrow’s Archives (Madeleine, Leopold)
By the time Madeleine and Leopold had abandoned the Ursuline windows, the institution’s closed doors had acquired a significance beyond a mere inconvenience. The sisters had offered them a perfectly ordinary solution: return on Monday. Everything they wished to read would then be available through the proper channels, and none of the research required a police explanation or an excursion into a rear alley.
They made their way back to the Mercier estate without the historical evidence they had hoped to obtain. No secret papers had been taken, no window breached, and no special access secured. They had examined the architecture, discovered that the rear windows might be vulnerable, and learned that Madeleine could speak convincingly enough to prevent an awkward encounter from becoming a public scandal. The books themselves remained unread.
It was an oddly respectable conclusion to an improper errand. They had not succeeded in entering the archives; they had succeeded in leaving before there was a reason to summon anyone else. Monday would have to answer the questions Sunday had refused.
Toward Six O’Clock – The Next Inspection (Lars, Caleb)
The more Lars and Caleb considered what the Wilmington Lady had shown them, the less satisfied they were with the limits of a conventional survey. The damage invited a different explanation from the one Captain Atwood had signed. Hidden compartments suggested that ordinary cargo records might tell only a portion of the truth. A seaman with practical experience had pointed toward a grounding rather than a simple storm. And the captain was in the habit of leaving the ship for dinner.
For all that, the day had delivered suspicions rather than a final answer. They had not discovered the ship’s secret cargo, nor had they examined the private materials a captain might keep out of the reach of a visiting insurance adjuster. They had also taken some pains to remain legitimate visitors. An ill-considered accusation now could only warn the men aboard that their vessel was attracting the wrong kind of interest.
“We have looked at what he was willing to show us,” Lars observed. “That is useful, but it does not settle what we came to find.”
“He goes ashore for supper,” Caleb answered. “The ship will be quieter afterward.”
The two agreed upon a return after dark. Their first purpose would be to watch the vessel and its surroundings, to see how the place was guarded and what sort of opportunity might present itself. If conditions allowed, they would attempt to enter places that the official inspection had left beyond their reach. It was a plan for surveillance and a possible burglary, not a maneuver they had yet carried out.
The thought gave the day a peculiar conclusion. They had begun by celebrating an authorization from Philadelphia, a splendid demonstration of commercial propriety, and finished by considering whether that same Sunday ought to include an unlawful excursion across the river. It was possible to justify both decisions in the service of the same investigation. Whether Captain Atwood, the dock watchman, or a New Orleans policeman would appreciate the distinction was another question altogether.
At approximately six o’clock, the session’s activities drew to a close. The Wilmington Lady remained in her dry dock, its concealed compartments undisclosed to anyone except the men who had found them and those who already knew them. Madeleine and Leopold were back at the Mercier estate with the Ursuline research unfinished. The investigators had advanced on two very different fronts and left themselves two equally different kinds of work for later. The night watch, the contemplated break-in, and the opening of the archives belonged to what might happen next. They had not yet happened here.