The Furies

by John Jakes

  Her palms turned cold. Not Tunworth again—

  “Who is it, Brigid?”

  “He didn’t present a card, ma’am. But he says his name’s Stovall.”

  “Stovall!”

  Amanda seized the arm of the chair. The pages of manuscript spilled off her lap.

  “Where’s Michael?”

  “In the kitchen, ma’am. He and Louis are eating a bite of supper I fixed. ’Tisn’t as good as cook’s fare, but I did my best. I looked in at seven to see if you’d want some, but you were asleep—”

  “Seven? What time is it?”

  The clock showed half after eight.

  Tense, Amanda picked up the manuscript pages and piled them at the foot of the chair. Brigid noticed her extreme nervousness.

  “Would you like me to tell the gentleman you’re indisposed?”

  “No, Brigid, I”—fear crawled in her like some venomous invader—“I’ll receive him.”

  “In the sitting room?”

  Amanda dabbed at her perspiring upper lip, glanced from the objects on the mantel to the painting of her grandfather. Her voice grew a little firmer. “In here. Light the gas, please. Did you bolt the front door again?”

  “Of course, ma’am.”

  “All right. I’ll see to the visitor.”

  Still plagued by an ominous feeling, she left the library and walked toward the front door where Stovall waited, his gold-knobbed cane under one arm and his silk hat held in his gloved hand.

  Outside, Amanda heard a carriage horse stamp. The immaculate white scarf bisecting Stovall’s face had a silken sheen in the gaslight. His visible eye sparkled bright as a bird’s.

  Staring at him, her sense of dread worsened. Her gaze went past his shoulder to one of the narrow windows flanking the door. Except for the flare of the lantern on his carriage and the dimmer lights on the far side of the square, she saw nothing but darkness. Somehow that terrified her too—

  “Kind of you to receive me, Mrs. de la Gura,” Hamilton Stovall said with a slight bow. “Or would it be more proper if I addressed you by your correct name? Kent?”

  iv

  From a shadowed place in the hall, Mr. Mayor meowed. The sound of Brigid’s footsteps faded at the rear of the house. She kept her voice as steady as she could.

  “Whatever you prefer, Mr. Stovall. Please come this way—”

  “Thank you.”

  Amanda’s arm trembled as she held the library door open. Inside, the gaslight glowed.

  Stovall went in. She wanted to strike him. But she held back, struggling for control, for mastery of the inexplicable mixture of loathing and terror his presence generated.

  Yet he behaved politely enough, taking the chair she’d vacated beside the hearth. She walked around the desk and sat beneath the painting of Philip, almost as if she needed some sort of physical barrier to prevent her from attacking him.

  Stovall acted quite relaxed. Smiled—though there was no cordiality in his eye. His artificial teeth glimmered like old bone as he laid his cane across his knees and set his silk hat on the floor.

  “It seems my suspicions weren’t entirely unfounded,” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “You do recall our little encounter at the Douglass lecture?”

  “Quite—quite well.”

  Never had ordinary speech required such effort; never had she churned with such overpowering hate. At the same time, her fear of him grew; she was terrified of his assured manner, that skull’s grin—

  Almost as if he were chiding an infant, he continued. “You lied to me. Your motive for wanting to buy Kent and Son was not entirely a matter of business—”

  “That conclusion hardly seems a sufficient reason for you to call in person, Mr. Stovall.”

  He wouldn’t be prodded. “You can imagine my stupefaction after I browsed through Monday’s Journal and saw the mention of your relative—”

  “Get to the point!”

  Her outburst amused him; he clearly enjoyed unsettling her. Breathing loudly, she brushed a stray lock of white hair from her forehead.

  “Certainly,” he murmured. “I drove here to satisfy my curiosity—and to pass on two items of information. Shall we take those in order?”

  He leaned forward slightly. “Who are you?”

  “The cousin of a young man named Jared Kent.”

  He sat bolt upright—a point scored.

  “That’s right,” she said. “The boy who served with you aboard Constitution.”

  He touched the white silk with a gloved finger. “The boy who attacked me—”

  “Oh, that’s very funny—you speaking of an attack.

  Wasn’t it the other way around? Once in your cabin? And once on the deck?”

  Now, finally, she’d cracked his defenses; he spoke with soft, seething fury. “Jared Kent forced me to live my life as a grotesque—” Flick went the gloved finger against the silk. “He gave me this.” He held out his gloves, palms up. “And these. Hands so scarred, I can’t display them in public—”

  “I think you extracted payment ten times over. You stole the printing firm from my stepfather—”

  “That foolish Piggott? My dear woman, I won a wager from him!”

  “Not honestly, I suspect.”

  Stovall’s lips pressed together in prim pleasure. “Impossible to prove, of course.”

  “Of course. When my cousin shot your companion—”

  “Poor old Walpole. Retired now. Hopelessly senile.”

  “—you never took steps to correct Jared’s belief that he’d done murder.”

  “Great God, woman, what do you expect from a man who’s been the target of a pistol? Charity? Compassion? Besides, your cousin fled Boston—”

  “Thinking he was a murderer. He carried the guilt all his life.”

  “May I ask where he is now?”

  “He died in California over two years ago.”

  “While you amassed your wealth partly in”—a supple gesture of his right glove—“California! Now I begin to perceive the pattern. A reunion. A pledge of retribution—in the form of regaining the family business. Really rather cheap theatrics, don’t you think? Well, you have at least satisfied my curiosity. And as regards your effort to buy—or in the case of the stock manipulation, I might say steal—Kent and Son, you have failed.”

  He leaned forward again. “How utterly you’ve failed is one of the points I wish to impress on you this evening.”

  She watched the play of firelight on his flesh and the concealing silk. She felt unclean. He was more than a physical grotesque; the shine of his eye said his very soul—if he had one—was malignant.

  “Happily,” he continued, “I checked your little stock scheme in time, thanks to the fortuitous appearance of the Kent name in Monday’s press. I am not entirely the thoughtless and unqualified steward of my own affairs that I sometimes appear to be, Mrs. de la—forgive me. I simply can’t use that name any longer. Mrs. Kent. For some months, I’ve been aware of a good deal of movement in Stovall Works shares. Much more than the firm’s reputation merits, I might add. But if investors had confidence in my company, excellent! That I failed to scrutinize the movement more closely is a tactical error I readily admit. My head’s been busy with other things. Attempting to float a loan. Courting a young woman—at any rate, I was not aware the acquisitions of Stovall shares were in any way organized until the Journal item prompted me to make certain inquiries—and very rapidly, I don’t mind telling you. Naturally the information was there—in the hands of the bankers who act as registrars of the stock. Those fools had neglected to see any significance in the pattern and hence had never called it to my personal attention. All the individual purchasers, it seems, resold their shares to a company known as Boston Holdings. Whose principals, I learned, are the very same Jew financier and the very same attorney who attempted to arrange your purchase of Kent’s—”

  He kept smiling that hateful, insincere smile; his teeth glared red in
the firelight.

  “What was your ultimate goal? A majority position in the stock?”

  She could barely nod. “Yes.”

  “Which you would then exchange for control of the company you wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I don’t accept that lightly, my dear woman. Not lightly at all. You maneuvered against me—”

  “Get out,” she breathed. “Get out of here before—”

  “Before what, Mrs. Kent? You’ve no trump cards to play—they’re all mine. As you’ll soon see—”

  She shivered. His voice had dropped low. He lightened it, almost teasing her. “Naturally when I unearthed your little manipulation on Monday, I acted. At one thirty in the afternoon, I convened the available members of the board—which now includes my prospective father-in-law, by the way. By two, we had agreed to issue the new stock. Thankfully, Mr. Van Bibb had already agreed in principle to invest in the Stovall Works. Instead of making a loan to the company, he and two associates subscribed the entire new issue. Between us, Van Bibb, his friends and I now hold a commanding majority—”

  He pressed the tips of his gloved fingers together.

  “You want Kent’s very much, don’t you? I never cared for that idea once I learned of your—ah—democratic philosophies. Now I have an even more compelling reason for keeping the firm out of your hands. I assure you, my dear—it’s never going to be yours.”

  “Mr. Stovall, you’re exhausting my patience. You’ve made it clear that you’ve defeated m—”

  “But I haven’t! Not completely! You overlooked one additional possibility—”

  Her hands pressed against the desk, she whispered, “What possibility?”

  “Why—the mortality of human flesh. I am older than you by several years. Suppose I were to be struck by a sudden illness. Suppose I were to die. My estate—to be handled by my future wife and my two cousins who sit on the board—might very well accept any reasonable offer for Kent and Son. But it will never happen now. I intend to issue explicit instructions to Miss Van Bibb—to my cousins—and to my attorneys—that you never be permitted to purchase the company. Never as long as you live. Nor any of your heirs, for that matter. Ah, that hurts, doesn’t it? Well, suffer with it. Till the moment you die, suffer with the knowledge that even tens of millions of dollars will never give your family what you’ve striven so desperately to acquire—”

  Amanda absorbed the words almost as if they were physical blows. She knew he meant every one. He’d outpointed her again; she’d never thought of the contingency he’d described—

  “That’s what you came to tell me, Mr. Stovall?”

  “That and one thing more. I want to learn a little more about you—”

  The teasing smile twisted his lips. She was frightened again, trying to decipher his intent.

  “That’s correct—I want to know more about your background. Your life in California—and wherever else you’ve been. I plan to dispatch a pair of trusted investigators to the gold fields. I’m sure a woman as—determined as you can’t have survived merely by the exercise of piety and the performance of good works. I’d like to know how checkered your past really is—”

  Amanda shook her head, still unable to fathom his purpose. What could he possibly learn that would hurt her? That she’d shot a man? That she’d run a brothel in Bexar? Neither fact would be to her credit if it were made public. But scandal couldn’t prevent her from continuing her business affairs, any more than it had prevented him. And she had no hope of being accepted in the higher echelons of society. Unearthing the past seemed a wholly futile exercise—

  Or so she believed until she asked, “Why?”

  She turned icy when he said, “You have a son, do you not?”

  Oh God, no, she thought. Of course that was the reason.

  “An heir to the name of your pretentious family?”

  “I—”

  “Come, I know you do! And I’m sure you have high ambitions for him. Commendable. Let’s hope his reputation isn’t blackened too terribly by whatever I might discover. Because I’ll make it public, I assure you. Any shame which attaches to you will attach to him. In short, I’ll do everything in my power to make his life difficult—to prevent him from rising in the world—I will smear and stain your name—and his—until any aspirations you may have had for your son achieving respectability will be quite gone. No one attacks me with impunity, my dear woman.” The skull smile widened. “No one.”

  “Stovall—” She could barely speak.

  “Ah! I’ve touched a genuinely sensitive spot at last!”

  “Don’t do anything to harm my boy. This is only between us.”

  “Indeed it is not. And I’m encouraged by your reaction. There must be something you don’t care to have aired about—” Abruptly, he seemed nonplussed for the first time. “I fail to understand why you’re smiling.”

  It was a smile bordering on tears. “Do you? I’ll tell you. I once had a plan to use much the same strategy on you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your affairs in the Five Points—with a young man and woman named Joseph and Aggie Phelan—”

  Stovall’s gloved hands clenched. His cane slid off his knees to the floor.

  “I know about them. At one time I thought of informing Van Bibb’s daughter.”

  Warily: “But you didn’t—”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He breathed loudly, relieved. “Scruples. That, of course, is the difference between us.”

  “I didn’t do it, Stovall—and I ask you to be decent enough to act with similar restraint. I don’t care what kind of filth you spread about me. Just don’t hurt my son—”

  Almost weeping, she bent across the desk. “Let’s call a truce. You have the company. Isn’t that enough?”

  She was desperate now. If his inquiry agents followed the trail of her past from San Francisco to Los Angeles, then back to Texas, every chance Louis had for a respectable life could be wiped out—

  His mother murdered a man.

  His mother kept a whorehouse.

  His mother was scum—

  Humiliated and hating the man smiling at her beside the hearth, she did the hardest thing she’d ever done.

  She begged. “Please, Stovall! A truce!”

  He laughed in a merry way. “A truce?” He raised a glove to the white silk. “With a family who did this—?”

  The glove lifted the silk. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth as sour vomit climbed into her throat. She averted her head, squeezed her eyes shut—

  When she looked again, he had let the silk fall back into place.

  “No, my dear Mrs. Kent, a truce is out of the question.” His voice grew steadily louder. “If it’s humanly possible—and one or two of your inadvertent reactions make me think it is—I’m going to see that your boy is never welcomed in the kind of home where I’m sure you’d wish him welcomed. Let him live with your money. Let him derive what satisfaction he can from that, because he’ll never have the satisfaction of being called a gentleman—nor the satisfaction of owning Kent and So—”

  The rest of the sentence was blurred by the explosive sound of shattering glass.

  v

  Hamilton Stovall grabbed up his hat and cane, leaped to his feet, spun toward the library doors. Another window broke. The front sitting room—

  She heard the scream of a frightened horse, Michael shouting from the kitchen—

  Stovall loped toward the doors. He was two steps from them when Louis burst in.

  The boy stopped in the doorway, glanced briefly at Stovall, then at his mother. Amanda saw the panic on his face.

  “Ma, there are men out front! Twenty or thirty—come from nowhere—”

  She heard shouting, cursing, the heavy thud of fists pounding the front door.

  Rynders’ thugs. Waiting until dark to strike—

  Stovall realized the danger, even though he didn’t underst
and its source or cause. With a shrill yell—“Get out of the way!”—he bolted for the hall.

  Louis didn’t react quickly enough, didn’t step aside. Stovall’s cane slashed wildly. The gold knob struck the boy’s temple.

  Louis fell sideways, his head slamming the heavy woodwork of the doorframe. He cried out, tumbled to the carpet as fists beat harder on the front door—

  He’s killed him, Amanda thought, all the hatred bursting loose within her. HE’S KILLED LOUIS—

  Screaming for his carriage driver, Stovall stepped over the still form sprawled in the library entrance. Amanda wasn’t even conscious of tearing open the drawer of her desk, pulling out the old Colt and firing.

  A red splotch appeared on the dark fabric of Hamilton Stovall’s coat, between his shoulders. He pitched forward, his hat rolling in one direction, his cane in the other. He fell at the feet of Michael Boyle, who had appeared suddenly from the rear of the hall.

  Unable to speak, Michael stared at the woman behind the desk. Her right arm was extended to its full length. The gun in her hand showed no sign of motion. A tiny wisp of smoke curled out of the foot-long barrel.

  vi

  Abruptly, Amanda came back to life. She ran to the fallen boy, flinging the Colt on the carpet as she knelt between Louis in the doorway and Stovall’s body in the hall. She touched the boy’s lips—

  “He’s breathing!”

  “What in God’s name did Stovall—?”

  “Hit him,” she said. “With his cane—”

  “There she is!” someone outside yelled. “That’s the one who hid the nigger!”

  She twisted around, saw white, distorted faces pressed against the narrow windows on either side of the front door.

  Another voice: “Where’s Mickey? Mickey has the pistol—”

  A third: “Don’t wait for Mickey! Break the goddamn door!”

  Mr. Mayor meowed at the noise of shoulders, battering the wood. The door gave off an ominous crack. The cat arched his back and crept away from the shouting, the thudding, the fist that suddenly smashed window glass and reached around for the bolt—

  Amanda jumped up. “Take Brigid out the back. Brigid and Louis.”