Crazy Bett

Prologue

Richmond, Virginia

Thursday, September 25, 1902

By the watery light of a gray dawn, an aged man crept from his rooming house on North 4th near the banks of Shockoe Creek at the city’s northern edge.

The morning had arisen out of sorts, with gunpowder gray clouds, bilious winds, and temperamental rain. A damp fog hugged the surface of the James River at the city’s southern edge. Bargemen and dockworkers, ambushed by the chill, loitered around fire barrels and drank steaming mugs of bitter coffee, while the hazy outlines of barges and steamers bobbed in the river.

To the west, the damp clung to the walls surrounding the cemetery, which never loitered in its task of storing the city’s memories—and perhaps performed it better on gray mornings.

After bidding a stammering good morning to his landlady—a beefy, red-faced Irishwoman with a distracting wen on her nose who ran her establishment with martial precision—the old man directed his steps south, turned right at Hospital Street, and shambled toward the cemetery gates. Through most of his life, his occupation had driven him from his solitary bed at an hour that most of Richmond society would have found appalling, so while his excursion this morning was out of the ordinary, the early hour seemed familiar, comfortable.

A shroud of silence surrounded him, though at odd moments he could just hear the rolling phrases of a mourning warbler, with its chirry chirry chirry choory chorry—as if it sensed the nature of the aged man’s mission and through its cadences shared it. A horse drawing a baker’s wagon added a clop-clop clop-clop. A faint smile of approval cracked the man’s otherwise impassive face.

Thin wisps of gray hair escaped from around the edges of his bowler, and his spectacles were cloudy with damp. He was slim, and in his prime he would have been tall and vigorous, with massive, strong hands and fingers that told the tale of a life spent in trade. But with the passing years, he had become frail and stooped, and he leaned heavily on a burled walking stick. The gnarled fingers of his other hand clung like a memory to a small bouquet of blue bellflowers, the only color the morning mist would admit.