Piccadilly Doubles 2

by Lou Cameron

“Not for any country?”

  “Well, not unless they invade New Jersey and even then I’d have to think about it.”

  Abby giggled and poked me in the ribs. “Now you’re fooling again. If you don’t want to fight for your country, what do you want to do?”

  I whispered the answer in her ear.

  ~*~

  Later, Abby left me to take a bath, after which she said she was going to report back to Old Dan, to discover if he had any military duties that he wanted her to perform. Her patriotic fervor had returned; she was prepared to take on Connor’s army single-handed. Watching her get dressed, I felt a sadness for this good-natured girl so alone in the world. She was a nice person, somehow innocent for all her knowledge of the mechanics of the bedroom, lonely and wanting to be liked. And it came to me that she could very well be killed by a volunteer’s bullet, an artillery man’s bomb, a cavalryman’s saber. If it had been possible, I would have tied her hand and foot and delivered her to some wagon train bound for the other end of the country, but I knew all this was idle and foolish speculation. There was nothing to be done about it, at least not in that way. I wondered if I should talk about her to Rockwell. I supposed I would. Indeed, he might well come talking to me; as I knew, long afternoons of love-making are hard to keep secret.

  Rockwell seemed to regard Abby as a sort of ward, and it puzzled me, when I thought about it for a time, why a man so resolute in other matters, a man so ready to kill wrongdoers, Mormon or Gentile, hadn’t done something about Hickman. There could be only one reason for that, and that was the position Hickman occupied in the Mormon military and political structure; in fact that he was more a protégé of Brigham Young than a loyal soldier and had been since the earliest days of the church. I did not believe that Rockwell was afraid of the Prophet; the hold Young had on him was one of awe, of infallibility. In Rockwell’s eyes Young could do no wrong, for if such an admission were made the bricks and mortar of Rockwell’s life would crumble; he would be left with nothing.

  Hickman held a high position; therefore, no mistake had been made on Young’s part and so the killer must not be killed, even though in the Western phrase he sorely needed killing. During the past few years, because of the uneasy peace with the United States, the two men hadn’t been thrown together much; their jobs, the vast districts they policed kept them apart, but now that war threatened the struggle for power would resume, and it was my guess that Hickman had worked himself into a stronger position. Hickman, I thought, would be able to move against his enemy with greater confidence if, indeed, he had not done so already My instincts told me I was right in this, yet there was nothing I could do about the situation. To speak ill of Hickman was to attack the Prophets judgments and motives; a man who talked to God when he felt like it could not be questioned in what he did.

  That night I slept poorly, but by morning my doomsday mood was dispelled by brilliant sunshine, the sounds of the city starting to go about its business. There were people walking back and forth from the bathroom, so I didn’t tap on Abby’s door to ask how she had spent the night. We had been indiscreet enough.

  I breakfasted alone reading a weeks-old newspaper from Kansas that someone had left, and though I am an indefatigable reader of newspapers in any language I can understand, on this particular morning I found it difficult to concentrate on what my colleagues in Fort Leavenworth had to say about the state of the world. The Civil War was in the doldrums at the moment; from New York City there was yet another article about some visionary who wanted to build a bridge to Brooklyn, now beginning to rival Manhattan as a center of art and commerce. A Pony Express rider had been eaten while alive by Indians on the Great Plains. This caused me to smile, guessing that some hard-pressed reporter had fabricated that one.

  There was nothing much to do but order another pot of coffee and read the rest of my out-of-date newspaper. By now it was well into the morning and still Abby hadn’t come down from her room. Perhaps she was taking advantage of her newfound freedom to sleep late after all the early mornings in the dining room. Hearing the bustle of the maids in the rooms overhead, I lingered on at my table until copies of the Deseret News came in. Right after the newspapers came the man who edited them. Fleming, looking pleased with himself, was with a woman of about thirty wearing a green silk dress dusty from travel, but she carried herself with great self-confidence. Another man carried her bags and set them down in front of the desk. Fleming did the talking to the clerk, Findlay who kept on making little nervous bows in the direction of the woman. I wondered who she could be.

  As soon as Fleming spotted me he took the woman’s elbow and spoke quietly to her. Then her cool level glance was directed at me with no pretense that she had seen me by accident. Fleming looked annoyed when she nodded in my direction and said something I couldn’t hear. Nodding again, Fleming retained his two-finger grip on her elbow and steered her over to my table. I was on my feet before they got there.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Ah yes, it is to be sure,” Fleming blustered in his dull way. “Mr. Forbes, I would like you to meet Miss Cynthia Mason of the Montreal Daily Mail.” He gave a tittering laugh that was extremely irritating. “You’re going to have some competition in the gathering of the news.”

  “Mr. Forbes,” the woman murmured in a Canadian-British accent. “I just got in on the stage and if there’s any coffee left in that pot. . .”

  “Nonsense, Miss Mason,” Fleming said. “You’re going to have the finest breakfast in Salt Lake City. It can be sent up to your room if you’re tired.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fleming, but for now just coffee,” the woman said, sitting down in the chair I pulled out for her. Her face was angular in that English sort of way that I like on certain women. A face like that can be hard, and this one was a little, but her easy smile and violet eyes made up for it. A newspaperwoman, one of the new breed; not for Cynthia Mason was the reporting of church suppers and literary evenings. Her hair, coiled and pinned up, was jet black with a few becoming streaks of white.

  “I’ll order a fresh pot,” I said. “It will just be a minute. What I have is getting cold.”

  “I practically live on black coffee,” she said when the girl brought it in. “In our profession it’s what keeps us going, don’t you think?”

  Fleming came back from the desk where he had been giving further instructions to the clerk. He stood fidgeting, expecting to be invited to sit down. Disliking him, I said nothing. Heming turned his hat in his hands like a very young man talking to his first lady friend.

  “Will I be seeing you later, Miss Mason?” the dullard asked. “I’d like to show you around our offices and printing plant. Most modern plant in the West.”

  Cynthia Mason said pleasantly, “As soon as I’ve had a bath, breakfast, and some sleep. Thanks for meeting me, Mr. Fleming, and for inviting me to stay at your house. But I’ll be fine here. I’m quite used to living in hotels as I’m sure Mr. Forbes is.”

  Fleming felt he had to get a dig in at me before he left. “Miss Mason is a Canadian,” he told me.

  “I guessed that,” I said.

  “Her newspaper is the biggest in Canada.”

  “I know that, Mr. Fleming.”

  Cynthia Mason masked a smile by drinking coffee.

  “It’s owned by the Daily Mail of London,” Fleming went on, determined to annoy me. “Anything of interest that appears in the Montreal paper is reprinted in London. Both newspapers, I might add, are extremely sympathetic to our situation here.”

  “Good for them,” I said, smiling at Cynthia Mason, who coughed suddenly and dabbed at her lips with a napkin.

  “My, this coffee is hot,” she said.

  Seeing that he was not going to get my goat, Fleming bowed again and departed for his office. As I watched him make his stately way through the door, I decided he must surely have the biggest hind quarters in all of Utah.

  Cynthia Mason drank her coffee and refilled the cup. “The old boy doesn’t
like you, Forbes. What’s going on anyway?”

  I explained the reason for Fleming’s dislike. “Perhaps you’d like the job, Mason. But that isn’t why you came all this way.”

  “I think I’ll have my breakfast now,” she decided. “You don’t mind sitting with a dirty woman, do you? The answer is, I didn’t know you’d been offered a job, I did know Greeley had sent you here. As soon as you left, our New York office telegraphed Montreal. Keep up with what the other papers are doing, is what Greeley’s always saying. That’s the reason I’m here. I hope you don’t mind?”

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Not from what I hear. Why is Washington so hard on the Mormons? From what I’ve seen of Salt Lake, it’s a fine city.”

  The girl came and Cynthia Mason ordered a breakfast of ham and eggs, buckwheat cakes and sausage. “And another pot of coffee,” she added.

  Smiling, I said, “I think you’re here to make a little trouble for Washington. Everybody knows both Daily Mails are anti-American.”

  “And everybody knows that some of your expansionist politicians would like to annex Canada after they subdue the South, after they put the Mormons in their place. On the way in here Fleming told me some general or colonel—he got a bit mixed up—named Connor is all set to invade Utah and do all sorts of terrible things. Armies marching toward the north is what makes Canada nervous.”

  I said, “Connor’s coming all right, though I don’t know what terrible things he’s going to do. The Mormons are getting ready to fight. You got here at a good time.”

  Cynthia Mason attacked her large breakfast with enthusiasm. Both of us were newspaper people, so there was no need to be ladylike. We called each other by our last names; that was natural, too. I liked her for saying exactly what was on her mind; we were competitors in a way, but there was no need to be enemies.

  “How do you like the Mormons?” she asked, stabbing at a sausage.

  “I like some of them fine,” I answered, thinking of Abby—and where the blazes was the girl keeping herself? “I know you’re going to ask me what I think of polygamy, so I’ll save you the trouble. I don’t know what I think of it. I haven’t been here long enough to run into it. I’m informed that Brigham Young has about thirty wives and I don’t know how many children.” I smiled. “Of course he can afford to support a large family. I’d hate to try that on what they pay me at the Sun.”

  “Thirty wives,” Cynthia Mason mused while she poured honey on her buckwheat cakes. “That’s impressive, but he has a long way to go before he beats King Solomon’s record.”

  I helped myself to some of her coffee. “Give the Prophet time,” I said. “He’s only sixty-one. What I don’t like about plural marriage is that it must make it hard for the wives who like the husband.”

  “Or easy for the ones who don’t,” Cynthia Mason said. “I’d like to ask you something, Forbes. Are we going to fight, you and I—are we going to have trouble?”

  “Why should we?”

  “I’ll tell you why—maybe. Both the Mails are anti-American, pro-Confederate, and now pro-Mormon. You said so yourself. Therefore, my job is to make the Mormons look like angels descended from heaven. They do have a heaven, don’t they?”

  “Their own kind. I think they go there in human form, not as spirits.”

  “Good,” she said with satisfaction. “Just so long as they have one, I can have them coming down from it. Actually, I won’t go that far—too ripe for the Daily Mail. What I am going to write is that they are the absolute salt of the earth; good, decent people whose only crime is that they wish to be free of the brutal tyranny of Abe Lincoln and his cohorts in Washington.”

  I smiled at her unabashed cynicism. “Strong stuff,” I remarked. “You mean you’re going to write lies.”

  “All newspapers publish lies of one kind or another. My lies—if you want to call them that—will be in a good cause.”

  “Your lies will only get Washington’s back up. The Mormons may delay Connor, even defeat him, but Washington can’t let that be the end of it. Other armies will come.”

  She smiled mischievously. “Perhaps a British Army will come from Canada. Think of this situation for a moment, Forbes. The whole world knows that the French have designs on Mexico. Washington doesn’t want them there, but first they’ll have to beat the Confederacy before they can do anything about it. Now suppose”—she stressed the word—“a French-Mexican army crosses the Texas border and joins the Confederates, guaranteeing them complete independence, of course. The Union would be caught between three armies: British, Confederate, French.”

  I had heard the same idea bandied about in New York and Washington saloons. It was something to think about. Could the Union survive? I doubted it.

  “Why don’t you go whole hog and have the Mormons attack from the west? Perhaps they’ll make you Daily Mail editor for all of North America.”

  “These Mormon sausages are the best I’ve ever tasted.” She held one up on her fork. “Why are you getting angry, Forbes? We were just talking, don’t you know. Next thing you’ll wrap yourself in the flag and rush off to enlist to fight the foreign horde.”

  “Why should I be angry?” I said huffily. “What you’re suggesting is rubbish. How do you know Fleming, by the way?”

  “The old boy has been sending us windy dispatches for several years. The American papers won’t publish them, so he sends them to us. In Montreal, we edit them into readable shape and run them as proof of American despotism. We send him copies of the paper so he’ll know he isn’t being ignored. That’s how he knows my name. So when I telegraphed him that I was coming here, he replied at once and said I was most welcome. You want to hear the latest music hall Mormon joke that’s been making the rounds in Canada?”

  “You’re going to tell it anyway.”

  “Sure I am, but I’ll keep it short. It happened on Broadway. One sporting gentleman sidles up to another sport and whispers, ‘Who were those ladies I saw you with last night?’ The other fellow, a recent convert to Mormonism, whispers back, Those were no ladies, those were my wives.’ Funny, don’t you think?”

  “Side-splitting,” I answered. “Why don’t you sent it to the Deseret News! Maybe Fleming will give you a dollar for it.”

  “They like me at the Deseret News and they don’t like you. I think I’m going to have a big edge over you when it comes to ‘the gathering of the news,’ as Fleming would say. Smile, Forbes. It won’t crack your face. Look, if there’s anything I can’t use and maybe you can, I’ll pass it along. They’re going to let me inside the palace walls. I’m going to be Salt Lake’s favorite lady.”

  ‘Why do me any favors?”

  “Professional courtesy.”

  “Don’t pass anything on to me. It’s too dangerous. Believe me, Mason, it is.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic,” she chided me, and left to go upstairs. She was an exciting woman, good-looking and sharp tongued, and I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t interested. I hoped she knew what she was doing; there might be trouble for her if Connor took the city and discovered what she had come for. Still, she was a British subject and the Irishman could hardly hang her just for lambasting Uncle Sam. Cynthia Mason was made for better things than hanging.

  The man who carried her bags upstairs came down and went to the bar. Another reporter? A bodyguard? I’d forgotten to ask.

  But I thought he gave me a strange look.

  Chapter Ten

  Propriety be damned, I went to look for Abby.

  The chambermaids had long finished “doing” the rooms; there was no one in the corridor, so I tried her door and found it unlocked. The bed was made, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been slept in the night before. Finally, there was nothing to do but hunt up the maid in charge of the floor. I found her with two other chambermaids, all eating pie and drinking milk in the hotel kitchen. They were startled when I came in with my awkward questions. The best I could dredge up was, “Has anyone seen Abby Brimm
er this morning? I want to send a letter to General Wells.”

  The three girls exchanged glances and remained silent, so I blundered on with, “General Wells is expecting my letter. Please tell me where Abby is.”

  One of the girls spoke up at last. “Abby didn’t spend the night here. I went in to make up her bed and found it made up like yesterday. It must be she stayed the night at Old Dan’s or some of her cousins’. She’s got more than I got fingers and toes.”

  “Maybe she made up the bed herself,” I suggested.

  All at once, the girl gave me a knowing smile; she became impertinent. “What’s all this about Abby and beds, sir? Abby is too sniffy to make up her own bed. Said she paid her way and wasn’t going to make any beds, even if she did work here. Ask the clerk, is what you should do.”

  The only one I was going to ask was Rockwell, if I could find him. There was no way to tell if he had gone to Skull Valley to see his family and property; the ranch probably lay directly in the path the American army would take.

  I found him at the jail studying a pictographic map that he must have made himself. The drawings were good; only the place names were missing. “Well there, William, I was about to send the jailer over with a message when he finishes his lunch. Old Dan reported to Brigham about you and you’re invited over there tonight. We’re all going, the commanders, I mean. Old Dan, me, Widger, Jarrett, Ritter. . . and Hickman. There will be the biggest dinner you ever saw. What’s the matter? You don’t look too interested.”

  “Where’s Abby?” I asked. “Last evening she said she was going over to General Wells’ house. I don’t know if she did. She didn’t come back to the hotel. I asked the maids and one of them said her bed hadn’t been slept in. The maid was sure.”

  Rockwell frowned and rolled up the map. “That’s not like Abby. She values that room as her independence and never stays with her kin anymore. Not for two years, I’d say. Why were you asking about her, William?”

  I said guardedly, “After we left the general’s house yesterday she told me how afraid she was of Hickman. I believed her. She says he keeps wanting to marry her and will kill her sometime because she won’t.”