A mystery story from my new collection Protons and Fleurons: Twenty-Two Elements of Fiction… especially for those who would like to see more historical Lutheran pastors featured in detective stories. Or, if you’d rather, listen to me read it in a bonus episode of Queen of the Sciences, and then get yourself a copy of the audiobook!
Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was old, sick, stiff, and hungry. For all that, he was the most able-bodied of his household. His wife Anna, terrified by reports of the battle in Long Island and little comforted by news of the Continental Army’s timely retreat, hid in the bedroom, alternately sleeping and indulging in fits of hysterics. Henry’s daughters and daughters-in-law had their hands full minding her and their little ones, not to mention the heavy burden of fear concerning the fate of their husbands. One daughter-in-law’s parents, their house in New Jersey having been quartered by the British, had fled and taken refuge at the Muhlenberg home, but they were still weak and in shock at losing all their worldly possessions. Not to mention the narrow escape en route from bandits, who enforced their own version of the law when the armies were engaged elsewhere.
All Henry wanted, then, was a nice dish of sauerkraut and dumplings, followed by a good night’s sleep. What he got instead was a pounding at the door and a summons from Lieutenant Colonel Brodhead’s men. “It concerns a prisoner. You are needed to translate” was all the flunkeys would say.
So Henry set his spectacles on his nose and buckled his shoes, slid into his frock coat, set a tricorn hat on his head with one point carefully positioned over his left eye, and headed out into the cool air of an early September eve. The captain of the band sent him back for his Bible. Then the retinue mounted their horses and set out, heavily armed and wary of both bandits and British. They spent the night at a Quaker hostel in Plymouth Meeting and the next day arrived at the Walnut Street Prison in Philadelphia.
Only on arrival and following a very formal presentation to Brodhead was Henry enlightened as to their purpose in summoning, not to say seizing him from his home in Trappe. “It concerns a grave and shocking crime,” Brodhead said with the air of one aiming to intimidate.
Henry removed his spectacles and polished them. “My dear sir,” he said, his German accent unmistakable even thirty years after his arrival in the colonies, “I am a clergyman. In my time I have dealt with murderers, thieves, and notorious drunkards. I have even dealt with charlatans masquerading as clergymen. There is little that shocks me anymore.”
Brodhead nodded and his manner softened slightly. “You have no doubt heard of the rout in Long Island,” he continued, “and the capture of Lord Stirling.”
“Ach! The latter part I did not know. May God spare and protect him.”
“Indeed. He little knew how outmanned his troops would be, for the British had in their employ thousands of Hessians. Your countrymen,” Brodhead added pointedly.
“I, sir, am an American,” Muhlenberg declared with dignity. “And at any rate, I was born not a Hessian but a Hanoverian.”
“A Hanoverian? Like ‘Good’ King George?” Brodhead leaned in toward his quarry a little.
“I do not deny that my birthplace was in Hanover and that it was the British who originally financed my mission here. But I assure you, sir, that after three decades I have come to regard this nation as my own. I publicly vowed my support when independence was declared last year. Moreover, my son Peter was asked by Commander Washington himself to take the post of Colonel of the Eighth Virginia Regiment. My American bona fides”—he pronounced the Latin with exquisite correctness—“are beyond doubt.”
“Hmm,” said Brodhead, plainly unconvinced. Henry had experience enough of human nature to know that impassioned speeches were evidence of nothing, so he could hardly blame the Lieutenant Colonel for regarding his own speech with suspicion. Though why Henry should be under suspicion at all remained a mystery. He waited.
“There is someone I would like you to speak with,” Brodhead said. Henry and the contingent of soldiers followed the Lieutenant Colonel out of the small office at the front of the building, down a dark and stinking hall. Prisoners shouted and banged on walls and doors as they heard free men walk by. Henry was no stranger to prisons but had never grown accustomed to them. The Quakers’ innovative form of punishment did not sit well with him; better an honest caning and a stiff penalty, to his mind.
They entered a small, dank, and no less stinking cell. On the floor sat a wretch of a man, hands shackled, all alone. A damp-wilted Bible on the floor propped up his elbow. Puzzlement showed on Henry’s face.
“He has been left to himself for two days to contemplate his past, and to decide to confess all the truth of his deeds,” Brodhead remarked indifferently.
Henry could hardly imagine anything crueler than locking a man alone in a small room for two hours, much less two days, but he held his tongue.
“He is a German of some sort,” Brodhead explained. “We suspect him to be a Hessian. He was apprehended in the wake of the fighting in Long Island. We followed him to the home of a known British sympathizer who supplied mercenaries to their forces, whom of course we had already discovered and detained by that time, though we left the lamps burning in his window in hopes of luring more traitors into our trap. You see that it was a valuable stratagem. What we want to know now is whether this man is a spy, and whether he is valuable enough of a spy to trade for Lord Stirling.”
“Quite understandable,” said Henry, “but it is not altogether clear to me why you have taken me of all people away from my family, now left unprotected, to converse with this sorry soul about his treason. Have you no one else here to speak German with him?”
“Yes, of course, there is Colonel Dreyer here.” Brodhead indicated the stern-faced soldier at his side, who ducked his head sharply and returned to perfect stillness. “But the man refuses to give any account of himself; not even with the threat of unlimited imprisonment hanging over him, nor the enticement of a possible return to his countrymen. So we thought perhaps the threat of everlasting damnation for his treachery might motivate him to speak, and a well-known clergyman of his own people would be the one to put the matter to him most effectively.”
Henry nodded. Nothing about the man’s visage or posture suggested that he was a spy, now or ever. But Henry undertook the task laid before him all the same, if only to release the youth from suspicion.
“Good day, young man,” Henry began in pleasant and friendly German. The other lifted his head, acknowledging comprehension of what he heard. “I am a pastor, and I’ve been brought here to have a word with you. What’s your name?”
“Klein,” replied the man. “Karl Klein.”
Henry felt a momentary doubt regarding the authenticity of such a generic name but pressed on. “I understand you were up in New York when this terrible recent battle was fought,” he said. “What took you there?”
Karl shook his head. He said nothing.
Henry glanced up at Brodhead, whose arms were folded over his chest, his face impassive. Dreyer, carefully monitoring the conversation, whispered an English translation.
“I am given to understand that they take you for a spy in service of the British.”
“I am not! God knows I am not. That, never! I swear to you by all that is holy.”
Henry was startled by the force of the response, though no more convinced than Brodhead had been by his own speech. Karl read the uncertainty in the pastor’s face.
“I promise you, I swear to you, I swear to God above, that I would never aid the British. I would only aid them on their way to hell!”
“Now, now,” said Henry soothingly. “Let’s have less of that kind of talk. God is not pleased with such oaths. But I am afraid that unless you give a better account of yourself, these men will not be persuaded even by the strongest of curses.”
Karl sagged a little.
“Surely you can understand their position: you were near to the battle which the Continental Army so hideously lost, there were Hessians fighting on the side of the British, and you were taken in front of the home of the man who organized the mercenaries. If you are not a spy, how else can you explain your presence there?”
“I was taken for a fool,” said Karl, bitterness on his tongue. “They’ll execute me one way or another, won’t they?”
Henry kept the possibility of a trade for Lord Stirling to himself, sensing the young man’s nearness to a full confession.
Karl seemed to collapse in upon himself. “I will tell you the truth of it,” he breathed. “I have refused to tell them anything of myself because—because—well, the fact is, I have run away from the master to whom I am indentured without paying my debt in full. He is British and a loyalist, God curse him. And a brutal man. He beat me day after day, never satisfied with anything I did, and there is only so long a body can take it. I confess to you, Pastor, since I can do no worse at this point, that I had murder on my mind. I contemplated the prospect night and day. In the end I decided that if I were to commit a crime, I’d rather it was leaving my debt unpaid and running away than taking a man’s life.”
Henry nodded sympathetically. Unpaid debt was as severely punished by the new Americans as by the old British. But in neither place was it as grave a crime as murder. And Henry had dealt with enough indentured Germans to recognize the truth in Karl’s tale. “And I suppose you told them nothing of this for fear that you would be returned to your master?”
“Yes. I would rather be beheaded than spend another day in service to that brute. But I swear to God that I had nothing to do with any treason against the Continental Army. I don’t know anything about what happened in Long Island. I was only passing through just as it happened. I had hoped to make it to Rhode Island, thinking it was far enough away that I wouldn’t be caught, and maybe I could find work on a whaler.”
Henry did not fail to notice that Karl omitted any mention of the visit to the Hessian mercenary organizer’s house, but rather than proceeding he paused and turned to glance at Lieutenant Colonel Brodhead.
After hearing Dreyer’s translation, Brodhead barked, “Show the good pastor the letter now.”
“Letter?” Henry repeated.
Dreyer produced a sheet of paper, much-folded, and handed it to Henry. “Read it aloud.”
Henry saw at a glance that the letter was written in German, rather erratically spelled and suggesting a dialect other than his own, perhaps Frankish. But he obliged and read aloud:
“Dear Sir: It has come to my attention that your dwelling place is troubled by the presence of kobolde. Having no little expertise myself in the habits of these pests, please allow me to offer my services in advising you on their prompt and thorough disposal. You will find my knowledge extensive, my methods efficient, and my fees reasonable. Please return a reply by messenger if you wish to engage my services. I remain, good sir, yours truly—”
But when he came to the signature, Henry’s eyes flew open and his head snapped up. He saw that Brodhead had been watching closely for a reaction and now said: “Do you not wish to read the name there appended?”
Baffled beyond the point of refusal, Henry finished:
“...yours truly, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg.”
Brodhead and Dreyer waited with the patience of predators on the hunt.
“So then,” Henry managed at last to say, “you have not required me as a translator but hoped to catch me for a traitor.”
“Is that not your name?”
“It is indubitably my name, though it is not my signature.”
“I would not trust the hand you might now produce, but let us look at your Bible and we shall see.”
Henry had quite forgotten the presence of the book in his waistcoat pocket. Dreyer flipped it open to the frontispiece where births, baptisms, and deaths were recorded. To be sure, the signature on the letter and the signature in the book both bore signs of training in German rather than English orthography, but they otherwise differed enough to give the soldiers pause.
“I did not write the letter,” Henry said.
“Who did, then? This Karl Klein?”
Henry turned to the prisoner and addressed him in German. “Did you write this letter? Are you the one who put my name on it?”
Karl’s eyes grew wide and horrified. “Is that your name?” he gasped. “You—you are this Muhlenberg fellow?”
“I certainly am Pastor Muhlenberg, but I certainly did not write this letter. So I ask again: why did you sign my name there under false pretenses?”
“But I can neither read nor write,” Karl protested. “And even if I could, I had never heard of you before they read that letter aloud to me, accusing me of being the man so named.”
Dreyer confirmed: “It is indeed only by chance that my brother, with whom I dined several nights ago, had heard of you and could tell me where you lived.”
“But how then did this letter come into your possession, Herr Klein?” asked Henry. “Did you meet some other man claiming to be me?”
“On my way to Rhode Island I stayed at an inn in Trenton, and there I met a man who could speak German with me. I think he was a Frank, but still, we understood each other well enough. It was a relief to be away from hearing the wretched chatter of my English master. At any rate, when he learned where I was headed, he asked if I would carry a letter to his business partner in New York. I admit, I was in dire need of money, and he offered to pay me handsomely.”
“Did you not find it odd that he would pay so well for such a modest task?”
“I supposed it was on account of the dangers of traveling so close to the fighting.”
“And did he know that you could not read what he’d written?”
“Yes, he learned that I could not read or write before he even asked me to carry the letter. He made me memorize the direction on the envelope before I left.”
“And did he,” Henry pressed on, “did he tell you his name? Or rather, did he give you my name as his?”
“He never told me any name at all,” said Karl. “I was too keen to receive payment for the task to insist on knowing his name.”
Henry turned back to Brodhead, who had been following Dreyer’s quiet translations closely. “I am as bewildered as you are, sir,” he said, “and I simply cannot fathom why anyone else should claim to be me. There is certainly no great status or fortune to be gained from it!”
Brodhead declined to acknowledge the remark. “But what of this business about kobolde?” he asked. “Dreyer tells me it means some sort of elf or sprite.”
Henry looked down at the paper and shook his head. “Well, yes,” he conceded, “or an evil spirit. It is pure superstition, of course. It comes from miners. They believe the deep places of the earth to be haunted by devils they call kobolde. But why this impostor should be offering help for them—and in my name—!”
“It is obviously a figure for the Continental Army,” Brodhead said impatiently. “Whoever wrote it was a spy and double-crosser, offering his services under a code word.”
“But why kobolde?” mused Henry aloud. “It is such a peculiar choice.”
“It is a German term; it refers to the Hessians,” Brodhead said with a swipe of his hand, dismissing the question.
“But here is another peculiarity,” insisted Henry, rising from the dank floor. “It says to return a reply by messenger. But Karl,” he continued in German, “surely you were not to be that messenger, were you? You said the Frank at the inn knew you intended to proceed on to Rhode Island. Did he ask you to bring the reply?”
“No, and I made it quite clear that I would not in any case. Though of course, I did not tell him plainly why that was.”
“Then how was the messenger to know where to find him? Were you to convey the message by mouth? Was he to be waiting at the same inn?”
“No, sir. Moreover, he left the inn when I did and took a different road.”
“If it was an established business partner,” asserted Brodhead once Dreyer caught him up, “there was no need to specify a return address; the partner would know where to find him.”
“But this is a letter of first contact, not to a well-established acquaintance. I think the word about a business partner was simply a ruse to get Karl to accept the job. He wouldn’t have done it if he’d known he was involved in treason.” He repeated himself in German, concluding, “You wouldn’t, Karl, would you?”
Karl eagerly agreed and renewed his curses upon the British.
“And then to sign it with a false name! How ever would this Frankish swindler expect to get his reply?”
“Unless it was merely a ruse to get this Klein in trou ble,” Dreyer proposed.
“For what purpose? Spite at random?” said Henry.
Brodhead said, “I confess I am not unmoved by your concern to clear Klein of suspicion, but you have not yet applied yourself to the central mystery: why did this mysterious Frank at the inn append your name, of all names, to his letter proposing a business endeavor in treason?”
Henry caught the tone of threat. He stood as straight as his many years and sore leg would allow. “You infer that this mystery figure is in fact my business associate, hiring messengers at my behest.”
Brodhead said nothing.
Henry looked back down at the papers in his hand. “I am simply at a loss, sir.”
“In time of war, bafflement is an inadequate excuse. I will be sorry to do you wrong, sir, but the safety of our fledgling nation requires me to detain you until the next meeting of the Court of General Sessions.”
“And when shall that be?” Henry demanded.
“It is already three weeks detained, due to unavoidable circumstances,” Brodhead said gravely. “Justice must wait until we procure our liberty.”
“What of my liberty?” expostulated the pastor.
“Unless you can present a better explanation of a letter bearing your name delivered to a known British loyalist, I am afraid there is no other recourse for you, your ministerial estate notwithstanding.”
“My help cometh from the Lord,” murmured Henry.
“Take him to the cell at the end of the hall,” Brodhead instructed Dreyer.
“If you please, sir,” Henry protested, “let me stay in here with this poor man. It is inhuman to leave him alone, to say nothing of myself.”
“That you may plot together out of our hearing?”
“Surely you are persuaded by now that this young man was an innocent dupe of a schemer. You may charge me for a traitor if I cast any suspicion on him. I, at least, am convinced of his innocence, even if you doubt mine. No harm can come of our staying here together.”
Brodhead stared into Henry’s eyes a moment, then shrugged. “As you wish.” Dreyer collected the letter from Henry’s hands and then bound them with shackles. The door swung shut behind the two colonels with a bang. The prisoners heard the bolt sliding into place on the other side.
“I am sorry that my idiocy has gotten you into trouble,” whispered Karl. “I should have known to suspect something when I was asked to carry that letter.”
“Honest souls are ill-prepared to deal with the dishonest, as I have learned in my long life,” said Henry philosophically. “Yet the Lord favors the innocent. We will find the truth of this matter, fear not.”
But as the hours passed, and night fell, Henry came no closer to unraveling the mystery that confronted him; a mystery that, if left unsolved, could cost him his freedom, if not his life. And to think of his family alone at home...
It was better not to think of them. They were best served by directing all his energies toward the immediate concern: why was his name on that letter? how would the recipient have responded with no direction as to where to send it? and what on earth was that nonsense about kobolde?
In the very early hours of the morning, Henry finally fell into a kind of sleep, slumped up against the wall, his shackled hands uncomfortably crossed in front of him.
Kobolde promptly invaded his dreams. Dozens, hundreds of them, leaping and grinning and wagging their tongues. Their pointy ears sprouted hair, as did the nostrils of their pointy noses. Three beckoned to Henry to follow him into a pit where he could retrieve his wayward signature, but once inside the pit he tumbled downward. He fell past level after level of miners, who turned their sad eyes on him, their deathly white skin barely visible under layers of grime. Henry expected to hit bottom with a painful thump, but instead he struck a vast soft cushion. The eyes of the kobolde shed light and he saw that the cushion was a deep, rich blue, and that the kobolde were clothed in the same blue. One approached him and said, “Let me paint your face and you will live forever,” but the paint was a livid amber-orange, and Henry protested, “If I live forever, I will never meet my Lord.”
With a start he awoke and saw, through the narrow slit that passed for a window, the amber-orange sun rising above the horizon.
Dreyer arrived some time later with a piece of bread for each of the prisoners and a small cup of water. After they had eaten, he took them to the privy. When Dreyer turned to lead them back to the cell, Henry raised a gentle hand but spoke in a firm voice: “I require an audience with the Lieutenant Colonel.”
“Does one of you propose to confess?” Dreyer replied, staring hard at Karl as he said it.
Henry declined further explanation, allowing his ministerial gravitas to win, slowly but inexorably, its struggle with mere temporal authority. Dreyer insisted on locking Karl up again but then showed Henry to Brodhead’s office.
The latter regarded the rumpled pastor with something approximating sympathy. “I hope you have slept well and devised a suitable solution to this mystery.”
“I am so bold to say that I have,” replied Henry, to Brodhead’s considerable astonishment. “May I see the letter again?”
The Lieutenant Colonel waved a hand. Dreyer plucked the paper from the desk and proffered it to Henry, who took it directly to the fire blazing on the hearth against the chill of the autumn morning. Both soldiers leapt after him, anxious to prevent his burning of the evidence, but with a smile Henry displayed the letter intact.
Yet it looked different.
“A second message!” cried Brodhead, squinting at the dark blue handwriting that had appeared, apparently by magic, perpendicular to the message regarding kobolde that purported to come from Henry, who for his part could not contain a smile at the frank astonishment on the faces of the two soldiers. Brodhead stuttered, “How—?”
“Back when I was a student in Hanover,” said Henry, “it was thought proper for a clergyman-in-training to be well acquainted with the natural sciences, the better to give glory to God the creator. I started a modest collection of cocoons, shells, rocks, and the like, though nothing to compare to some of my companions. I also had the fortune to meet several accomplished alchemists—good souls who wished to discover the secrets of the book of nature, not using their knowledge for diabolical wickedness.”
“Is this hidden writing some kind of alchemy, then?” muttered Dreyer with a horror uncharacteristic of his stoic demeanor.
“It was the reference to the kobolde that jogged my memory,” Henry continued, tactically omitting that it was, more precisely, his dream that did so. “I recalled learning from an alchemist acquaintance that the beautiful blue ore we call ‘cobalt’ is named for the miners’ sprites, because a substance they took for silver ore was in fact an admixture of cobalt that released a toxic gas when heated. But cobalt appears in less harmful forms, and in fact a certain kind of cobalt ore, when dissolved in aqua regia—”
“Again with the Latin!” Brodhead sighed.
“—becomes another alchemical concoction, amber in color. When the cobalt ore is mixed with it, it produces crystals that can then be used to produce an invisible ink.”
“Which is in turn revealed by heating,” Dreyer whispered as if against his will.
“Precisely so. The mention of kobolde in the letter was a clue, if the recipient was aware of this method of communication, to heat the paper and find the hidden message.”
“That suggests a treasonous intention, does it not?” said Brodhead.
“If you like, I will read it to you and we will find out,” offered Henry with consummate politeness.
As he read aloud in German, Dreyer translated:
“Dear Sir, I have been advised that you arrange for the employment of Hessian mercenaries for the British army, and therefore are no doubt in contact with key generals who would be happy to acquire the intelligence I have collected regarding the movements of the Continental Army. If you are amenable to making the introduction, I can be found by making inquiries at the Black Hog Inn on the east road to Emmaus. Yours very truly, Matthias Heebner.”
Upon the utterance of that name, Henry’s face took on a sterner cast. He set the paper down on Brodhead’s desk. “I suggest, my fellow countrymen,” he said, “that you release Karl Klein immediately. And then I propose that the three of us undertake a journey to Emmaus.”
After three cautious days of travel by horse, Brodhead and Henry stood under the eaves of the Black Hog Inn as a chill autumn drizzle dripped around them. Dreyer had entered the inn some minutes before, intending to present himself as the return messenger from the Hessian agent in search of Matthias Heebner.
“What if he isn’t in there?” Brodhead murmured. “Do you know where he lives?”
“Not at present, but I suspect he will not be difficult to trace,” said Henry. “That man has cost me trouble enough as it is, and if my extended absence due to his skullduggery brings harm to my family, even I shall struggle to extend to him the forgiveness that the Lord has extended unto me.”
The Lieutenant Colonel was not a pious man and shifted uneasily at his companion’s vocabulary. They stood silent a long ten minutes until, in a relieved voice, Brodhead said, “Look, here comes Dreyer.”
The Colonel appeared around the heavy door of the inn, and in his wake followed a thin, sallow, aging man with an overlarge nose and bloodshot eyes. Henry recognized the face and the symptoms alike. He strode forward and called, “Matthias Heebner?”
The man’s instantaneous recognition of his own name and Henry’s face betrayed him. “To whom do you speak, sir?” he fumbled, but neither Dreyer nor Brodhead was deceived. At once Dreyer grasped him by the wrists and cranked them backwards. Heebner let out a gasp of pain.
“Fair treatment is due until he is rightfully convicted,” protested Henry.
“Matthias Heebner, I place you under arrest in the name of the government of the United States of America on the charge of sedition and treason,” Dreyer announced drily.
“Have mercy on me! I’ve been deceived and trapped!” cried Heebner, appealing to Henry through his abrupt tears.
“I had mercy on you long ago,” Henry said, a little sadly, “and you have made poor use of it.”
Heebner wept but said nothing in his own defense.
“When I found you, nearly thirty years ago, you had already made treachery your business. I came as one rightly called by the church to establish congregations for Germans in Pennsylvania but found that you had set yourself up as charlatan pastor, arriving at Sunday services late and furthermore drunk, only to dispense vain sermons and void sacraments to unsuspecting Christians who were willing to pay dear for them. And you had a taste for fraudulent pharmacopoeia too, as I recall; no doubt the source of much income as well as your knowledge of invisible ink. A double dose of deceit! But instead of turning you over to the magistrates, as I ought to have, I merely deprived you of your falsely acquired post. And this is what you have made of your freedom! This is how you have thanked me, even these many years later, by soiling my good name and reputation!”
“They will execute me,” sobbed Heebner. “I beg of you, intervene for me! Save me!”
Henry shook his head as Brodhead and Dreyer led their hostage away, bespeaking their thanks to the clergyman, who called after the prisoner, “It is a mystery to me. If you cannot be deterred by the law, nor enticed by the grace of God, what more can be done for you?”
Then he mounted his horse and headed back to his family with a heavy heart.