Lady of Perdition

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Just coffee.’ The broken-nosed man bent over the back of the couch, his crystal-blue eyes curiously cold, as if he were thinking of something else. Calculating something. For a moment January wondered where he’d met him before. Then he realized that the shape of his strong chin and wide lips were those of Valentina Taggart’s elderly gorgon. The eyes – clear, pale blue and drooping a little at the corners – were the same as well.

  This must be Vin Taggart. Valentina’s husband.

  At the same time, somebody in the mob – which was still pressed up around the couch like medical students watching a dissection – said, ‘I seen my cousin puke up, after he been shot at San Jacinto …’

  Blankets were passed over and through the crowd.

  ‘Hell,’ said somebody else, ‘the food we got in Houston’s camp, you didn’t have to be shot to puke …’

  ‘That doctor was right, sir,’ said January, with a quick glance around the crowd. Three of the blankets he folded up, and put beneath Pollack’s hips, then elevated his feet to the arm of the couch. ‘The ball needs to be drawn, and soon. But the bleeding had to be stopped, sooner than soon. He sure would have died, else. Sir –’ he turned to the hotel manager – ‘might a room be made up for him, as close to here as you can get? He shouldn’t be moved at all for most of the day …’

  ‘He can have mine,’ said a gawky Frenchman – obviously one of those who’d surrendered his cravat, for his collar stood open around a throat like a couple of lengths of bamboo. ‘It’s just down the hall there. That was smart work, sir,’ he added, with a nod to January.

  ‘An’ smarter work,’ said a rough-looking unshaven man in a preacher’s collar, ‘chuckin’ Doc Parralee outta here.’ He turned to hold out his hand to Shaw, who had hovered quietly at the foot of the couch. ‘I don’t think Parralee’s drawn a sober breath since God left for Cincinnati, an’ you probably saved Gideon’s life, kickin’ him out. Fancy you recognizin’ the surgeon’s boy from far back as Chalmette! I fought at Chalmette, an’ I couldn’t pick my captain at that battle out of a line of men today, not if I was to be hanged—’

  ‘An’ I bet your captain wasn’t six an’ a half feet tall neither,’ returned Shaw, and spit on the blood-soaked carpet. By the look of the carpet in other parts of the room, January guessed that he wasn’t the only person to have neglected the spittoons in the corners. ‘Damned if I can remember his name, but I was in the sawbones’ tent durin’ the fight, an’ I never seen no man, black nor white, so quick an’ resolute with wounds.’

  ‘My name’s Ben, sir,’ said January, inclining his head respectfully, just as if any of Shaw’s story had been the truth. ‘And I thank you kindly, for remembering me after all those years. I haven’t been with Michie Drake for near to ten years. This man should be seen by a … a reliable surgeon …’

  ‘Well, that for sure ain’t Parralee,’ sighed the preacher, and at that moment there was a stirring around the outer door. The crowd parted to admit a brisk, rotund man with a face like a friendly gorilla in a great ruff of brown beard, carrying a doctor’s satchel. Doc Parralee followed him, still maunderingly insisting on the necessity of immediate extraction, but the newcomer – whom the hotel manager greeted as ‘Doc Meredith’ – took a competent look at January’s work, apologized to the company at large for having been in church, and said to January, ‘Good job on your part – Ben, is it? Very nice work! Even elevated his feet … No, good God, if you tried to draw the ball now you’d kill him. Now, Luke,’ he said gently to Parralee, ‘you’re quite right in your diagnosis. Al –’ to the manager of the hotel – ‘can you stand Dr Parralee a couple of drinks at the bar and charge them to me? Thank you. Yes, by all means leave him where he is for the next few—’

  More commotion around the door. Belated – and covered with the dust and blood of a fist fight – Rance Pollack surged into the lobby, trailed by Marcus Mudsill and two other ranch-hands. He cried, ‘Gideon!’ and flung himself at the couch, and caught Doc Parralee by the sleeve just as Al the hotel manager was leading him toward the bar. ‘He gonna be all right, Doc?’

  ‘No goddam thanks to you!’ Vin Taggart stormed over to the younger Pollack, and fetched him a stunning whack with the back of his hand across the face.

  It was like striking a boulder. Taggart stood six feet tall and was built like a coach-horse, but Pollack, two or three inches taller, was a mountain walking on thighs like oak trees. Rance Pollack let out a Minotaur bellow, and though he’d clearly just finished a major battle out on Congress Avenue, launched himself at Taggart.

  The room erupted into chaos, and January, Shaw, Al the manager and Doc Meredith swiftly dragged the unconscious Gideon Pollack’s couch behind the counter where the clerk ordinarily sat.

  ‘Idiots,’ fumed Meredith, in the accent of an educated Englishman.

  ‘What the hell happened out there?’ asked January of Shaw, remembering to add, ‘sir,’ since he wasn’t supposed to have met the Kentuckian since the battle of Chalmette. ‘I thought Taggart was part of Pollack’s camp. By what I’ve heard.’ He glanced at Al the manager and Doc Meredith, both checking bandages and pulse.

  ‘Taggart was Pollack’s second,’ explained Shaw. ‘Stanway got off his shot a good second ’fore Parralee dropped his hankie, an’ Rance went after Stanway. Stanway’s a banker an’ lively in the Nationalist Party hereabouts. Ten fellers jumped on Rance, includin’ Sheriff Quigley, an’ Pollack’s ranch-hands all joined in on Rance’s side—’ He moved out of the way as a hurled chair splintered on the front of the counter.

  ‘Then all the way back here, every time the fightin’d sort of die down, Taggart went after Rance, yellin’ at him that he was a coward an’ a pup an’ too stupid to work as a shoe-shine boy let alone a man’s second, an’ Stanway would chime in on that opinion, an’ Rance would go after Stanway again – Stanway bein’ the party that actually cheated in the duel, you understand. Sheriff Quigley arrested Rance two or three times durin’ the course of all this, an’ got hisself thrown into a couple of horse-troughs, an’ I must say I’m a little surprised Gideon Pollack didn’t bleed to death ’fore they got him up here.’

  ‘I am, too,’ agreed Dr Meredith, ducking a thrown spittoon. ‘Al, might I trust you and your good wife to nurse Pollack, once the battle dies down and he can be moved into a room? He should have nothing but liquids – and a lot of them – for the first twenty-four hours. After that I’ll see about removing the ball—’

  ‘By the bruising on his back it looks like it deflected off the left scapula,’ provided January. He flinched as someone flung Doc Parralee, with great violence, against the counter, but evidently the medical man was too drunk to notice. He leapt to his feet and re-joined the fray. ‘I think I could feel it, about two centimeters immediately south-east, you might say, of the bottom corner of the shoulder blade, but I was too concerned with getting pressure on the wound to make sure. But I’m fairly certain you can cut for it through his back without coming anywhere near the artery, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Meredith. ‘That will help very much indeed.’

  In the main body of the room, Taggart managed to get a double handful of Rance Pollack’s shirt-front and slammed him up against the wall by the counter. Both men were covered with dust and blood; both were gasping for breath. ‘You’re a fool and a coward!’ yelled Taggart, in a voice that carried effortlessly over the din. ‘An’ I spit on the day I ever had to do with you or yours! You can shove your cotton-press up your brother’s arse and get your damn sheep off my land—’

  He flung Pollack from him like a sack of meal, then turned, and jabbed a finger at the grizzle-haired Sheriff Quigley, who was just picking himself up from a corner, blood streaming from his mouth and from what remained of the ear of the man collapsed, howling, before him.

  ‘And you!’ Taggart shouted. ‘God damn the suck-arse lot of you! I’m giving orders to my men to shoot the first outsider they see ridin’ across my land, an’ I don’t care who it is!�
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  Turning, he strode from the lobby and into the street, nearly colliding with Hannibal Sefton in the doorway.

  Hannibal looked around him at the ruination – chairs and couches overturned, blood and tobacco soaking into the rugs, every lamp and picture shattered. ‘As o’er their prey rapacious wolves engage,’ he quoted mildly, and crossed to the counter. ‘Man dies on man, and all is blood and rage. Benjamin, I’ve been looking all over town for you, to take care of – ah, you did!’ He leaned across the counter to look down at Pollack. ‘Head to foot/ now is he total gules; horridly tricked with blood … Is he alive? Just as well.’ He added, in Latin – after a glance to make sure that Meredith was fully occupied with the wounded man. ‘I never thought to say so, but I think we’ll actually be better off dealing with Gideon than with Rance.’

  ‘Nihil est ab omni parte beatum,’ said January. ‘I’m not sure if “better” is a term we can apply here.’

  Dr Meredith removed the pistol-ball on the following afternoon – Monday – with January’s assistance. By that time January had had time to read the letter to the Texas Register, and agreed that if he’d been a white man, he’d have sought out its author and slapped him in the face in public, too. In it, Pollack accused the National Party of not only treason to the United States (the original rebellion against Mexico, which could also be construed as treason, went unmentioned), but of cowardice, theft of public monies, manipulation of the National Bank of Texas for the profit of President Lamar’s cronies, and illegally removing the government offices, archives, land office records, and armory from Galveston to Austin, to the detriment of the former city and of many of its employees.

  ‘Demented, the lot of ’em.’ Dr Meredith shook his head. He had a light clear voice, like a teenaged boy’s, incongruous in so powerful a frame. ‘And Vin Taggart – I’d have thought he was a steadier man than to go re-openin’ his quarrel with the Pollacks, when they’d finally made peace between ’em.’

  Gently, he and January arranged pillows – every pillow the Capital City Hotel possessed, by the look of it – behind Pollack’s back and shoulders, to keep both the incision in his back, and the tightly-bound wound in his chest, from irritation or pressure.

  ‘How long til he can ride?’ Rance Pollack reappeared in the doorway, where he’d been hovering, on and off, throughout the brief procedure. Nervous, January thought, glancing back at him. Frightened for his brother, of course. But he wasn’t pale with the pallor of shock, and whenever he’d disappeared from the room, January had heard the murmur of voices in the hall, and booted steps that came and went.

  ‘Good Lord, man,’ said the physician irritably, ‘he’s lucky he isn’t dead! He’ll be abed for a week at least, or risk killing himself. More, if I have anything to say of it. That’ll teach him to fight duels on the Sabbath.’

  The bulky man sidled into the room as January bundled the bloodied linen up to carry it away. ‘Can he …? When’ll I be able to talk to him?’

  ‘Talk to him?’ Meredith stared at Rance. ‘Let the man rest, for God’s sake. I’ve given him pretty much as much paregoric as he’ll hold. Here, Ben, you don’t need to clean up! Get one of the hotel servants—’

  January relinquished the task to one of the housemen, noticing as he did so that the cowhand Mudsill lingered in the hall. Watching the door of Pollack’s room, he thought … Does he really expect Stanway to be back with his nationalist friends, to murder Pollack in his bed?

  And if he expects it, why?

  Evidently, however, he expected something. Two of the Pollack cowhands, in addition to Mudsill, had been loitering in the Capital City’s yard all day yesterday and through the night – even at three in the morning, when January and Hannibal had slipped quietly up in the blackness, to see if there were any chance of pilfering a ladder long enough to reach the third-floor window, men had been there, playing cards by lantern-light.

  There were still men out there now, smoking and yarning with Shaw – who would at least, January guessed, get out of them what their plans were. Los Lobos – the Pollack plantation, Valentina Taggart had said – lay mostly in the creek-bottomlands near San Antonio, two days’ ride from Austin. A mail-coach traversed the route several times a week but Doc Meredith forbade the injured man to take it (‘Good Lord, man, d’you want your wound to open in the first thirty feet?’) and recommended a horse-litter. ‘And not for a week or ten days, you hear me?’

  ‘You watch,’ predicted Mudsill, when January encountered him in the dingy hall. ‘He’ll be on his feet inside two days an’ in the saddle on the third. You can’t stop that man, when he’s got an idea in his mind. Yes, sir,’ he added, springing to his feet as Rance Pollack put his head out the sick-room door.

  ‘You get Shaughnessy up here,’ said the big man. ‘Tell him we need to hire three more riders, to take the stores and the new niggers down to the farm tomorrow. Taggart’s been claimin’ for years that he owns that Bonner’s Prairie land along Onion Creek east of the road, and it’d be just like him, to hold us up an’ make us go ’round.’

  Mudsill said, ‘Yes, sir,’ in a perfectly expressionless voice, and started to head for the kitchen quarters – cowhands were permitted to cross through the hotel’s lobby but not, January had observed, if they were slaves.

  Rance added, ‘You tell him he’s going to be in charge of making sure there’s no trouble.’

  Mudsill looked surprised, but made no comment. Rance went on, ‘My brother wants me here for a couple days – take care of some things for him. An’ Gideon says to tell you, you keep an eye on things, too.’

  Mudsill said, ‘Yes, sir,’ as Rance turned and went back into the bedroom, his huge shoulders blotting the light from within as he passed through the door. ‘Lyle Shaughnessy’s an idiot,’ he added quietly, as soon as the door shut. ‘You ever get stuck with keepin’ an eye on some white man an’ makin’ sure he don’t screw up, in spite of all his best efforts to do so? An’ then he kicks the shit out of you if you tell him things like, Let’s put extra guards on the train when there’s been Comanche in the neighborhood? Mr Pollack always pats me on the shoulder an’ says, Good boy! I knew I could rely on you! But he don’t fire the stupid son-of-a-bitch.’

  January shook his head. ‘I thought you knew,’ he said gravely. ‘Gettin’ kicked is part of our job. Would this Taggart fellow have his men keep your store-wagon from crossing his land? Is he that cussed?’ He thought of Valentina, and of the calculating coldness in Vin Taggart’s light-blue eyes.

  A coldness curiously at odds with his fury when he’d proclaimed that no outsiders would cross Perdition. Valentina had said he was reasonable …

  But she also said that he drank. Here in Texas, that frequently meant, drank at breakfast. And January had found, in his journey to Mexico four years before, that the cattle-ranchers – like the American owners of the larger plantations of the Mississippi Valley – tended to regard themselves as kings of their territories, and treated others accordingly. Valentina’s father, he recalled, had ruled his own thousands of acres like a tribal sheik, and had seen nothing amiss in imprisoning Hannibal for no better reason than that he’d wanted his company.

  Being twenty miles from town, and in command of a half-savage band of vaqueros, gave scope for any amount of arbitrary behavior.

  ‘Oh, hell,’ said Mudsill. ‘You shoulda seen the pair of ’em back before him and Pollack buried the hatchet. Once up on Elbow Creek, when I was huntin’ for some of Mr Pollack’s sheep, I got caught by that wall-eyed lunatic that runs his riders, got beat up an’ my boots an’ horse taken, an’ had to walk ten miles back barefoot, an’ I don’t give a crap whether Texas joins the US or not. Jake Sorrel got horse-dragged by some of Taggart’s men – though I will say, him and Shaughnessy beat up Lope, another of the Perdition vaqueros, in back of Eberly’s Tavern. So, yeah, Taggart’s that cussed. More so, I’d guess, now that he’s got his mother and that crazy sister of hers livin’ in the house. Enough to make any man cussed.’


  January located Hannibal at Eberly’s Tavern – where he was engaged in a small-stakes poker game with several of the locals – and relayed to him the information that Gideon Pollack’s wagonload of supplies, plus his newly-purchased slaves, would be on the road to San Antonio in the morning. ‘I presume including Selina,’ he said quietly, during one of the frequent bouts of chafing and joking between hands, when the dark-haired, handsome proprietress came over to replenish the beer and Hannibal’s discreetly disguised ginger-water. ‘Given what Madame Taggart said about Pollack, I doubt he’d leave a woman he’d bought for himself in his brother’s keeping. It may be one reason he’s sending everything down to Los Lobos tomorrow, since Rance is staying here in town.’

  Hannibal’s dark eyebrows pinched. ‘That’s odd, isn’t it? That he isn’t sending his brother to look after the ranch?’

  ‘From what I hear of Rance,’ returned January quietly, ‘it may be that Pollack feels that things will be better run with his brother here where he can keep an eye on him. Particularly if there’s a chance of fighting breaking out with Taggart’s men.’

  Just as well, he reflected, an hour later when, after an early dinner in the kitchen, he and the fiddler returned to the Capital City. He wanted to hear of Pollack’s condition, and also to get a final look around the yard on the off-chance that Pollack’s men were absent.

  Not that it was likely, he thought. He wondered if Selina had seen him and Hannibal in the yard earlier in the day – Hannibal whom she knew as the teacher of Greek and dancing at Rose’s school.

  Wondered if she’d been told at all why she’d been kept locked in that tiny room for the past thirty-six hours. Did she pray that Pollack would die? Or did she know things about Rance, even on short acquaintance, that made her pray that the older brother would live?

  I’ll have to find out from Pharaoh if she’s been let out at all …

  ‘How is he?’ he asked of Mudsill, meeting him as they came through the back door.