The Scandalous Miss Howard

by Nan Ryan

  “Are they occupied?”

  “Only one. A political prisoner and thief by the name of—”

  “So you have three empty cells?” Jimmy asked, cutting him off.

  “Yes, Commandant Tigart, that is correct.”

  Calmly, his face showing no emotion, Major Tigart said, “You are, without delay, to throw the prisoner Ladd Dasheroon into the deepest, darkest dungeon of this prison.”

  Flabbergasted, but pleased, LaKid did not question his superior.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, turned and left Major Tigart’s office.

  More than eager to obey the new prison commandant’s very first command, Gilbert LaKid, motioning a couple of armed guards to follow him, walked into the crowded common room of the prison and shouted Ladd’s name. Ladd’s heart automatically lurched. Then he remembered. No need for dread. Jimmy was now in charge. Maybe his childhood friend was already setting the wheels of his prisoner exchange in motion.

  With an optimism and sense of well-being he hadn’t had in ages, Ladd walked confidently toward the stout, smiling LaKid.

  “Outside,” LaKid ordered.

  Two guards were waiting. Still Ladd was not nervous. They wouldn’t dare do anything to him with Jimmy in command. Expecting to be escorted to Jimmy’s office, Ladd was puzzled when, instead, he was marched to the stone building’s rear.

  Halting, Gilbert LaKid unlocked a solid oak cellar door set in the hard Maryland clay. Ladd, now restrained by the guards, was shoved inside. He blinked. A set of wide stone steps led downward into a dark cellar hall that was dimly lit by wall torches.

  LaKid led the way down, down, down into the narrow hall. Four closed doors opened into the hallway, two on each side. LaKid passed one door, walked another twenty feet and stopped before the door on the right side of the hall, unlocked it, and motioned for the guards to throw Ladd inside. Confused and horrified, Ladd quickly found himself alone in a cell with only one high, tiny, barred window. He shouted and banged on the heavy door until he was hoarse and his fists were bloody, but no one came.

  It had to be a terrible mistake. He was not supposed to be thrown into this dungeon. He was to be left alone, no longer punished. Jimmy had promised. Surely Jimmy would soon learn of this unforgivable mix-up and send someone to let him out. Of course he would. Jimmy would run this prison in a just, fair manner. Which meant that every prisoner would be accounted for at all times. The thing to do was just relax and keep calm. In a matter of hours, a day at the outside, Jimmy would hear about LaKid’s actions.

  Ladd sank down onto the stone floor, assuring himself that he wouldn’t be down here long. Thank God.

  The sun had now set and it was so dark he couldn’t see his hand before his face. He considered the poor souls who had been forced to languish here for weeks at a time. He wondered if they had been able to maintain their sanity. He didn’t see how anyone possibly could. He knew he couldn’t. But there was no need to worry, Jimmy would get him out shortly.

  An honorable man, Ladd could never have conceived of the idea that his old childhood friend might betray him. The thought never crossed his mind. The two of them had grown to manhood together. Jimmy had once saved Ladd’s life, risking his own. They were like brothers.

  Jimmy would never betray him.

  Fifteen

  When Laurette Howard turned twenty in the summer of ’64, she was no longer the sassy, spirited girl she had once been. Circumstances had forced her to grow up quickly, to become sober and responsible, to literally fend for herself.

  Laurette was all alone in the big Dauphin Street mansion. Both her parents were now dead. All the servants were gone. Even the faithful Ruby Lee, realizing that her young charge couldn’t afford to feed the both of them, had finally moved in with relatives downtown.

  Laurette’s father, T. H. Howard, had lost his extensive fortune while away fighting for the Cause. There was hardly anything left, save the neglected Dauphin Street mansion. In the summer of ’63, her father had been killed at Gettysburg. Distraught, her mother, Marion, not really wanting to live without him, had contracted influenza and died that winter at Christmastime.

  Ladd’s father, Douglas Dasheroon, had also perished. He had died in the terrible siege of Vicksburg and Ladd’s grieving mother, Carrie, had sold the Dasheroon mansion for a quarter of its value and fled to New Orleans to live with cousins.

  Throughout the many tragedies and hardships, Laurette had tried very hard to keep a stiff upper lip as was the custom of well brought up Southern ladies. She kept telling herself that she could withstand anything—anything except losing Ladd. As long as she could hope for his return, she could survive.

  Besides, she was not the only one whose life had been altered by the war.

  Johanna Parlange had been left a widow just weeks after marrying a young soldier from Montgomery. Juliette had never married. A year ago, their stalwart grandmother, Lena, had passed away and now the twins were struggling to maintain the Springhill mansion.

  Her old music teacher, Miss Foster, no longer gave piano lessons. There were no pupils. And the widowed Melba Adair, whose passion was her beautiful gardens, had been forced to sell the estate and move with her daughter, Lydia, into a cramped upstairs dwelling on Herndon Avenue where there was no ground to plant even one camellia bush.

  Times were hard, but Laurette was aware that things could have been worse. The city of Mobile, with its rail and water links to the Confederate heartland, was a valuable asset to the South. The port was well-defended. On the bay’s lower edge, the main entrance to the harbor was flanked, east and west, by twin masonry fortifications, Fort Gaines and Fort Morgan.

  The waterway between them was largely obstructed with driven pilings and moored mines. Through the channel passed fast Confederate steamers with exports of cotton and munitions. But the blockade running trade was constantly harassed by Federal warships sitting just offshore.

  Almost from the beginning of the war, the blockade and the lack of manpower to run the farms and businesses caused the citizens of Mobile to suffer from food and supply shortages. If that was not enough, tax burdens increased.

  Still, the citizens took comfort in the fact that the Union army had not occupied their beloved city. All had heard how the Yankees had swept across the state’s northern counties, ruthlessly burning large sections of Selma and Tuscaloosa.

  Fearing the same fate would befall Mobile, Laurette had buried the family silver beneath an old oak that grew along the far border of the vast estate. Along with the heavy sterling, she had buried some sentimental treasures: an oyster shell comb decorated with semiprecious stones that had belonged to her mother; her father’s gold-cased pocket watch; and last, but most precious of all, the tintype of a handsome sixteen-year-old Ladd in a heavy silver frame.

  Laurette, like other worried Mobillians, kept expecting the city to fall any day.

  Jimmy Tigart, who had come from modest means, had always envied Ladd Dasheroon for what he took for granted: wealth; social position; and most of all, the beautiful Laurette Howard. It all should have been his. With Ladd out of the way, perhaps it would be.

  Tigart recognized this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and seized it. Suffering nagging twinges of guilt, he nonetheless had Ladd thrown into the bowels of the prison where Ladd could no longer see or speak to anyone.

  And, no one could see or speak to him, save the guards who took him meals.

  Who was to know that Ladd Dasheroon was still alive? Nobody. Tigart was confident that he could concoct a serious charge—label Ladd a dangerous political prisoner—that would keep him in that dark prison dungeon long after the war was over. Some crimes carried a life sentence, war or no war. But would that be enough?

  “That’s it!” Tigart said aloud and snapped his fingers as a new idea came to him. He would wait a few months, then quietly have Ladd’s name added to the death list and sent to Confederate graves registration.

  And Ladd would stay down in that cell until he finally did
die. His death would likely occur before too many years passed. No man could survive the solitude and darkness of the dungeon for long.

  Tapping his fingertips together, his hazel eyes slightly narrowed, Tigart began to make plans for his own rosy future. A future that would, he sincerely hoped, include the one woman he had always desired.

  Laurette Howard.

  Alone in the dungeon, Ladd attempted to keep track of time. He had given up on being released from this tiny ten-by-twelve cell where very little daylight ever penetrated. LaKid had gleefully told him to abandon hope.

  Ladd had.

  Hope had been replaced by disbelief and then by hatred. Hatred of his old friend, Jimmy Tigart. Ladd hadn’t wanted to believe the terrible truth. But he knew that a prison commandant was informed of everything that took place inside the walls. Tigart had known, from the minute it happened, that Ladd had been thrown into the dungeon.

  Tigart had ordered it done.

  Tigart had betrayed him.

  Heartsick, Ladd cursed the friend who had so coldly forsaken him. And he trembled with fear knowing that he might never get out of this dark cell alive.

  Ladd counted the days, the weeks, the months as 1864 turned to 1865. Shortly after the new year began, he lost count. With the constant isolation and near starvation, he had become confused, was no longer sure what month it was, what year. At times, he didn’t even know where he was.

  At 6:00 a.m. on August 5, 1864, under cloudy skies and with a westerly wind blowing, Admiral David Farragut ordered his fleet to steam past Fort Morgan and into Mobile Bay.

  The Battle of Mobile was underway, a battle that lasted less than four hours. By 10:00 a.m. on that muggy August morning, the bombardment was over. Admiral David Farragut and his Union Navy were victorious, yet Mobile proper remained in the hands of the Confederacy almost until the war’s end.

  But its value to the Confederacy was gone.

  Finally, in April of 1865, the long, bloody War Between the States ended with much of the defeated South lying in ruin. The citizens of Mobile counted themselves fortunate, at least in comparison to those of other Southern cities. Although many in Mobile had lost their fortunes, they were thankful that their mansions had not been occupied or burned by destructive Union soldiers.

  Making the best of her lot, Laurette celebrated along with her two best friends, the Parlange twins, when they heard that the war was over. Fireworks were shot off in the harbor and there was dancing in the streets. Smiling people assured each other that life would now return to normal.

  Yet in their hearts they knew that the languid, graceful, happy days so relished by the residents of the glorious Old South were forever gone.

  “Jimmy! Jimmy Tigart!” Laurette exclaimed in shocked surprise when she answered a knock on the door one sunny day in the first week of May. “Is it really you? I can’t believe it!”

  Smiling broadly, the tall, uniformed Union officer standing on the shaded veranda, his right hand resting on a malacca walking cane, said softly, “It’s me, Laurette. May I come in?”

  “Of course. Where are my manners?” she said, her heart fluttering with the hope that Jimmy might know and tell her where Ladd was, when he would be coming home to her. Noting the cane and his slight limp, she said, “Oh, Jimmy, you’ve been wounded, you’re—”

  “It’s nothing, really,” he assured her. “I’m just fine.”

  “Good, good,” she said nodding, and no sooner were they inside the foyer than she asked, hopefully, “Ladd? Have you heard…I keep expecting him to…to…?” Her words trailed away. She read the look in Jimmy’s hazel eyes and felt herself growing faint. “No,” she protested, a hand coming up to her mouth, her eyes wide with growing horror, “No…don’t…I…”

  “I’m so very sorry, Laurette,” Jimmy said, reaching out to her. “Ladd died in Maryland’s Devil’s Castle prison in the fall of 1864.” He shook his head sorrowfully and added, “It happened just before I was sent there as the prison’s commandant. Had I arrived there in time, I would have had his name put on the prisoner exchange list.” He stopped speaking, looked at her stricken face and almost changed his mind about the deception. He had never seen such naked grief in a pair of eyes.

  “No,” she whispered, her face totally draining of color. “No, no, no. Ladd isn’t dead, he cannot be dead! I can’t stand it, I won’t stand it.” Her chin quivered. Her eyes quickly filled with tears. Her stunned expression changed. She looked wild, as if she were about to spin out of control. She began to shudder, then to wail and scream.

  Jimmy quickly enfolded her in his arms. At first she strained against him, tried to pull away, pummeled his chest with her fists. Then she finally collapsed in racking sobs. He held her while she wept, her tears wetting his uniform, her slender body jerking with her sobs. He patted her back and murmured words of solace for what seemed forever, until finally she had cried herself out.

  Only then did he gently lead her into the parlor and urge her down onto the well-worn sofa. He sat beside her and talked quietly to her, soothing her, urging her to depend on him, to share her grief and troubles with him. To let him help.

  Never had she been more hopeless, more vulnerable.

  Ladd’s death, she said, was just the last—and the worst—in a long line of unbearable tragedies that had befallen her. She told Tigart of the deaths of her father and mother. And she added that Ladd’s father had also been killed in the war. She wasn’t, she knew, the only one who had suffered, but she was so frightened and she couldn’t bear the thought of life without Ladd. She didn’t want to live. There was nothing to live for. No reason to go on.

  Friends, family, finances, all were gone, sobbed a beaten Laurette, the damn bursting again and all her fears and heartaches pouring out. Jimmy, carefully hiding his relief that there was no one standing in his way, commiserated with the weeping woman.

  “I’m so terribly sorry for your losses, Laurette,” he said, in soft, calming tones. “Bless you dear heart, you’ve been through so much and you’ve had to face it all alone.” He put an arm around her and drew her closer.

  “I—I’ve been so—so—worried and lonely,” she sobbed.

  “I know, sweetheart, I know.”

  “I—I…kept thinking…believing…that Ladd would—would…Ladd…oh, dear God, my darling Ladd.”

  “Sweet little Laurette,” Jimmy murmured, smoothing her golden hair, rubbing her shaking shoulders.

  “I really can’t live without Ladd,” she choked, coughing, her face bloodred and feverish.

  “I understand,” he said, offering only comfort and friendship.

  For now.

  Major James Tigart had been sent by the Union Army to oversee reconstruction in the port city. He was to remain in the position for at least six months, possibly a year. Tigart planned to stay much longer.

  He settled in into a suite in Mobile’s finest downtown hotel, the Riverside. He spent his days helping solve the many problems of reconstruction. And every evening, without fail, he called on the lonely, susceptible Laurette Howard. He listened while she tearfully recalled the many happy times she’d had with Ladd. He heard her go on and on about Ladd until he thought he couldn’t bear hearing Ladd’s name one more time.

  But he wisely concealed his feelings. And after only a month of patiently offering comfort, understanding and friendship, he managed to persuade the vulnerable, heartbroken Laurette to marry him so that he could take care of her, fight her battles, lift the burden off her slender shoulders.

  “We’re good friends,” he reasoned, when he proposed, “good friends who both loved Ladd dearly.” She nodded. He continued, “Successful marriages have been built on less, Laurette.” He took her hand in his, gently squeezed it and said, “I’d never try to take Ladd’s place, I know that would be impossible. But, if you’ll let me, I’ll honor and care for you for as long as I live.”

  Sixteen

  On the warm, sultry evening of June 9, 1865, Jimmy and Laurette were marri
ed in the parlor of the Dauphin Street mansion. It was a private ceremony with no invited guests.

  When the pastor had gone, Tigart turned to his new bride, smiled and said, “Laurette, dearest, why don’t you go up first. I’ll give you some time to…to…”

  “Yes, all right,” she said, nervously and tried to return his smile.

  But as she climbed the stairs to the master suite, she was overcome with dread and apprehension. She had hoped, prayed, that Jimmy would give her a few weeks or at least a few days to get used to the idea of being his wife before they…before he…

  And, perhaps, he would.

  He had, since arriving in Mobile, been nothing but kind and considerate, anticipating her moods, going out of his way to be understanding.

  If, when he came upstairs, she simply told him the truth, that she was anxious and not yet ready for intimacy, he would surely sympathize. He knew her true feelings. She thought of him as a good, kind friend, not as husband and lover.

  There was, and always would be, only one love, only one lover for her.

  A lone lamp burned in the master bedroom. The bed with the fresh sheets she had put on this afternoon was turned down. Her nightgown lay across the mattress. She bent, picked up the plain, long-sleeved, high-necked garment and thought, sadly, that this was not the kind of gown she had planned to wear on her wedding night.

  For her long anticipated wedding night with Ladd she had intended to don a gossamer negligee that alluringly revealed her naked form beneath its diaphanous folds. Planning ahead, she had purchased the expensive, filmy negligee shortly after Ladd left for West Point. It was still in the box and the box rested on a high shelf in her dressing room.

  It would never be worn.

  Sighing, Laurette quickly undressed, slipped the modest white nightgown over her head and got into bed. She’d barely had time to fluff up the pillows at her back before Jimmy, minus his cane, limped into the room, a bottle of brandy in one hand and two crystal snifters in the other.