by John Jakes
All the eating made him fatter and fatter. And unattractive to girls. But he learned to use the weight to fend off and punish bullies. He would cringe and cower, and when they thought they had him, he’d push them down and fall on them. Once he did that, they left him alone.
A third piece of pie tempted him now. But his belly hurt, so he concentrated on his problem. He still believed a great military future could be his, but not if he died in Kentucky.
He knew only one man who could intercede now. Bent had been warned against contacting him in person, but a desperate plight required desperate measures.
The office of Jasper Dills, Esquire, overlooked Seventh Street, the city’s commercial center. The book-lined room was small, cramped, suggestive of a failing practice. It gave no hint of the wealth and status of its occupant.
Nervous, Bent lowered his buttocks into the visitor’s chair to which the clerk had ushered him. He had to squeeze; the fit was tight. He had put on his dress uniform, but Dills’s expression said it was a wasted effort.
“I thought you understood you were not to call here, Colonel.”
“There are extenuating circumstances.”
Dills raised one eyebrow, which nearly devastated his distraught visitor.
“I need your help urgently.”
Dills kept a clean desk. In the center lay some sheets of legal foolscap. He inked a pen and began to draw, concentrating on the series of stars that emerged.
“You know your father can’t help you any longer.” The nib rasped; another star appeared. “I saw you skulking at the cemetery yesterday—come, don’t deny it. The lapse is forgivable.” Rasp; scrape. Done with stars, the lawyer inked a blocky B. Then he shot a look at his caller. “This one is not.”
Bent turned red, frightened and furious at the same time. How could this man daunt him so? Jasper Dills was no less than seventy and no more than five feet one. He had a child’s hands and feet. Yet neither size nor age diminished the force he could put into his voice or the intimidating way he could eye a man, as he eyed Bent now.
“I beg—” swallow—“I beg to differ, sir. I’m desperate.” In a few jumbled sentences, he described the reason. Throughout, Dills kept drawing: more B’s, then a series of finely detailed epaulettes, each smaller than the last. In the hazy yellow light falling through the dirty windowpanes, the attorney looked jaundiced.
At the end of Bent’s recital, Dills kept him dangling in silence for ten seconds. “But I still can’t understand why you came to see me, Colonel. I have no power to help you and no reason. My sole obligation as your father’s executor is to follow his verbal instruction and see that you continue to receive your generous annual stipend.”
“The money doesn’t mean a goddamn thing if I’m shipped off to die in Kentucky!”
“But what can I do about it?”
“Get my orders changed. You’ve done it before—you or my father. Or was it those men who employed him?” That scored, all right; Dills stiffened noticeably. Here was the crucial bluff. “Oh, yes, I know something about them. I heard a few names. I saw my father twice, remember. For several hours each time. I heard names,” he repeated.
“Colonel, you’re lying.”
“Am I? Then test me. Refuse to help. I shall very quickly talk to certain people who will be interested in the names of my father’s employers. Or my parentage.”
Silence. Bent breathed noisily. He’d won. He felt confident of it.
Dills sighed. “Colonel Bent, you have made a mistake. Two, in fact. As I’ve already indicated, the first was your decision to come here. The second is your ultimatum.” He laid his pen on the scrawled stars. “Let me not resort to melodrama, only make this point as clearly as I can. The moment word reaches me that you have attempted to regularize or publicize your connection with my late client—or the moment I hear anything else detrimental to his reputation, including certain names I really doubt that you know—you will be dead within twenty-four hours.” Dills smiled. “Good day, sir.”
He rose and walked to his bookshelves. Bent burst from the chair, started around the desk. “Damn you, how dare you say such a thing to Starkwether’s own—”
Dills pivoted, closing a book with a gunshot sound. “I said good day.”
As Bent blundered down the long flight to the street, an inner voice screamed: He meant it. The man meant it. What shall I do now?
In the office, Dills replaced the book and returned to his desk. Seated, he noticed his speckled hands. Shaking. The reaction angered and shamed him. Furthermore, it was unnecessary.
Certainly his former client’s employers would want their names guarded. But Dills was confident Bent didn’t know their identities. Further, Bent was patently a coward, hence could be bluffed. Of course, through certain of Starkwether’s connections, Dills could easily have arranged for Bent to take a fatal musket ball. In Kentucky, it could even be made to appear that his killer was a reb. Such a scheme would only work to the lawyer’s financial disadvantage, but Bent didn’t know that.
That two parents with such positive character traits could have produced a son as weak and warped as Elkanah Bent confounded Dills’s sense of order. Born in the meanest poverty in the Western woodlands, Starkwether had been gifted with guile and ambition. Bent’s mother had possessed breeding and a background of wealth and eminence. And look at the sorry result. Perhaps force majeure was more than a legal conceit. Perhaps some illicit relationships and their fruit were condemned in heaven from the moment the seed fell.
Unable to compose himself or banish the memory of his visitor, Dills took a small brass key from his waistcoat. He unlocked a lower desk drawer, reached in for a ring of nine larger keys, and used one to enter the office closet. In the dusty dark, another key opened an iron strongbox. He drew out its contents. One thin file.
He examined the old letter which he had first read fourteen years ago. Starkwether, ailing, had given it to him permanently last December. The letter filled both sides of the sheet. His eyes dropped to the signature. The effect of reading that instantly recognizable name was always the same. Dills was stunned, astonished, impressed. The letter said in part:
You used me, Heyward. Then you left me. But I admit I shared a certain pleasure and cannot bring myself to abandon altogether the result of my mistake. Knowing the sort of man you are and what matters most to you, I am prepared to begin paying you a substantial yearly stipend, provided you accept parental responsibility for the child—care for him (although not necessarily in a lavish manner), help him in whatever way you deem reasonable—but most important, diligently monitor his whereabouts in order to prevent any circumstance or action on his part or the part of others which might lead to discovery of his parentage. Need I add that he must never learn my identity from you? Should that happen, whatever the reason, payment of the stipend will cease.
Dills wet his lips with his tongue. How he wished he had met the woman, even for an hour. A bastard would have smirched her name and spoiled her possibilities, and she had been clever and worldly enough to know that at eighteen. She had married splendidly. Again he turned the sheet over to gaze at the signature. Poor vengeful Bent would more than likely crack apart if he saw that last name.
The paragraph above it was the one of most direct interest to him:
Finally, in the event of your death, the same stipend will be paid to any representative you designate, so long as the boy lives and the above conditions are met.
At his desk, Dills inked his pen again, pondering. Alive, Starkwether’s son was worth a good deal of money to him; dead, he was worth nothing. Without interfering too directly, perhaps he should see that Bent was spared hazardous duty out West.
Yes, definitely a good idea. Tomorrow he would speak to a contact in the War Department. He jotted a reminder on the foolscap, tore it off, and poked it well down into his waistcoat pocket. So much for Bent. Other duties pressed.
Starkwether’s employers had become his, and they were interested in t
he possibility of New York City seceding from the Union. It was a breathtaking concept: a separate city-state, trading freely with both sides in a war whose length the gentlemen could to some extent control. Powerful politicians, including Mayor Fernando Wood, had already endorsed secession publicly. Dills was researching precedents and preparing a report on potential consequences. He returned the letter to the strongbox and after three turns of three keys in three locks resumed work.
14
“WHAT THE HELL DID we do wrong?” George said, flinging away the stub of his cigar. It landed in front of the small, plain office building in the heart of the huge Hazard Iron complex.
“I honestly don’t know, George,” Christopher Wotherspoon replied with a glum look.
George’s expression conveyed his fury to the hundreds of men streaming along the dirt street in both directions; the early shift was leaving, the next arriving. George didn’t care if they saw his anger. Most would have heard the detonation when the prototype columbiad exploded on the test ground chopped out of the mountainside in a high, remote corner of the property. The big eight-inch smoothbore, cast around a water-cooled core by Rodman’s method, had destroyed its crude wooden carriage and driven iron fragments big as daggers into the thick plank barrier protecting the test observers.
“I simply do not know,” George’s superintendent of works repeated. It was the second failure this week.
“All right, we’ll adjust the temperature and try again. We’ll try till hell freezes. They’re screaming for artillery to protect the East Coast, and one of the oldest ironworks in America can’t turn out a single working gun. It’s unbelievable.”
Wotherspoon cleared his throat. “No, George, you misapprehend. It is war production. So far as I know, this works has never manufactured cannon before.”
“But, by God, we should be able to master—”
“We will master it, George.” Wotherspoon weighted the second word. “We will meet the delivery date specified in the contract and do so with pieces that perform satisfactorily.” He risked a smile. “I guarantee it because Mr. Stanley helped us win the bid, and I am not anxious to displease him.”
“I don’t know why,” George growled, staring at the faces passing. “You could knock him out with one punch.”
“True, but one ought to be frugal with time. That would be a squandering of it.”
The dry, donnish jest did nothing to improve George’s mood. Still, he appreciated the young Scotsman’s effort. And he knew Wotherspoon understood the reason for his impatience. It would be impossible for him to leave Hazard’s or even think seriously about Cameron’s offer until he was sure the company could fulfill the contract.
He had no doubts about Hazard’s doing it, provided the problem wasn’t one of method. He and Wotherspoon had repeatedly gone over the calculations together—and Wotherspoon was nothing if not thorough. That was one reason George had promoted the young bachelor so quickly.
Wotherspoon, thirty, was a slender, slow-spoken, sad-eyed sort with wavy brown hair and a merciless ambition concealed behind impeccable manners. He had apprenticed at a dying ironworks run by successors of the great Darby family at Coalbrookdale, in the valley of the Severn, the same part of England from which the founder of the Hazard family, a fugitive, had fled in the late seventeenth century. As the dominance of the Severn’s iron trade diminished, Wotherspoon had chosen emigration to America over a shorter journey to the new factories in Wales. He had arrived in Lehigh Station four years ago in search of a job, a wife, and a fortune. He had the first and was still in pursuit of the others. If he solved the riddle of the flawed castings, George knew he could place day-by-day control of Hazard’s in the Scotsman’s hands and never worry.
He was certain he must leave Lehigh Station and serve; his quandary was a simple question: Where? By pulling a few wires, he could certainly obtain a field command, lead a regiment. Although he loathed combat, it was not fear that rendered the idea unappealing, but a conviction that his experience would be of greatest use in the Ordnance Department, which meant Cameron and Stanley and Isabel. What a damned, dismal choice.
Wotherspoon broke the glum reverie. “Why don’t you go home, George?” Until a year ago, the younger man had addressed him as sir. Then mutual friendship and trust, and George’s request, put them on a first-name basis. “I shall spend a while reviewing the Rodman notes once more. Somehow or other, I suspect the fault lies with us. The inventor of the process graduated from your school—”
“That’s right, class of ’41.”
“Then he can hardly be wrong, can he, now?”
This time, George laughed. He lit another cigar and spoke with it clenched in his teeth. “Don’t try to sell that opinion in Washington. Half the pols down there think West Point caused the war. Stanley’s last letter said Cameron intends to crucify the place in a report he’s going to issue. And I’m thinking of working for him. I must be daft.”
Wotherspoon compressed his lips, his version of a smile. “No, no—we live in an imperfect world, that’s all. You might also consider this: It’s conceivable that you could help West Point more there than you could here.”
“That’s crossed my mind. Good night, Christopher.”
“Good night, my friend.”
Trudging the dusty street among lines of men flowing in both directions, George heard someone sneer about the test failure. He squared his shoulders and hunted for the offender, but of course couldn’t find him. The jibe didn’t bother him long; he knew that no owner could be popular with every person who worked for him. Besides, respect mattered more than popularity. Respect and peace with his own conscience. Hazard’s paid fair wages. George operated no company store to hold his people in thrall. And he refused to hire children.
A headache started above his eyes. So many problems lately. The bad castings. Brett’s unhappiness. The possibility of a War Department attack on West Point—
Stanley’s letter, pretending to be informative, had actually been meant as an irritant, and George knew it. Referring to the Academy as a “seedbed of treason,” his brother said the secretary had cited lax discipline and a vague but sinister “Southern predisposition” to explain why so many regular officers had defected. He shouldn’t even consider working for a hack like that.
Of course Wotherspoon had stated one good reason for a contrary view. George’s Washington lawyer stated another. In two recent letters, he’d described the urgent need for men of talent and honor to offset the hordes of incompetents already placed in jobs by their political patrons. Thank heaven he didn’t have to decide today.
The climb to Belvedere was tiring in the wet, heavy air of late afternoon. He took off his black alpaca coat, loosened his string cravat, and inhaled and exhaled vigorously as he walked. Occasionally some cigar smoke went scorching down his throat, but he was used to that.
On the dusty path, he stopped to gaze up at the mountains. He recalled the lessons his dead mother had tried to pass on to him. He saw the emblem of the most important one above him on the summits—the mountain laurel, tossing in the wind.
His mother, Maude, had instilled in George her own mystic feeling about the laurel. Hardy, it endured the worst of weathers. So did the Hazards, she said. The laurel was strength born of love, she said. Nothing save love could lift men above the meanness woven through their natures and all their days.
She had talked of the laurel when he wondered about the wisdom of bringing Constance to Lehigh Station, where Catholics were largely scorned. He had repeated her words when Billy despaired of Orry Main’s temporary opposition to his marriage with Brett.
Endurance and love. Perhaps it would prove enough. He prayed so.
On Belvedere’s long, broad veranda, he caught his breath. Sweat ran on his neck and soaked his shirt. He was home sooner than usual. It was a rare chance to relax in a tepid bath with a cigar. Perhaps he could reason out the cause of the cannon shattering. A frown on his face, he let himself in quietly and starte
d upstairs, stopping in the library for the copybook containing his notes on the Rodman process.
“George? You’re early. What a grand surprise.”
He turned toward the door.
“I thought I heard you come in,” Constance continued as she entered. Starting to kiss him, she held back. “Darling, what’s wrong?”
“The heat. It’s infernal out there.”
“No, it’s something else. Ah—the test. That’s it, isn’t it?”
He slung his coat over his shoulder, affecting nonchalance. “Yes. We failed again.”
“Oh, George, I’m so sorry.”
She gave herself then, tightly and closely. One cool arm encircled his damp neck while her sweet mouth kissed. Amazing how it helped. She was the laurel.
“I have a piece of good news,” she said presently. “I finally heard from Father.”
“A letter?”
“Yes, today.”
“Good. I know you’ve been anxious. Is he all right?”
“I don’t know how to answer that. Come along and have a glass of cold cider, and I’ll explain. The cider’s turned a little—it’ll lift your spirits better than cook’s lemonade.”
“You lift my spirits,” he said, closing his fingers as she clasped his hand. He took pleasure in letting her lead him out of the library.
When George read the letter, he understood her puzzling answer. “I can appreciate his disgust with Texas. Patrick Flynn loves a great many things about the South, but slavery isn’t one of them. But California? Is that the answer?”
“Not to my way of thinking. Imagine trying to start a new law practice at his age.”
“I doubt he’d have a problem with that,” George said, picturing the ruddy attorney who’d come to the Gulf Coast from County Limerick. George sat on the yard-square chopping block in the large kitchen, his feet dangling six inches above the floor. The cook and her helpers worked and chatted as if the Hazards weren’t there. Constance strove to maintain a relaxed household; except for money matters, there were few secrets.
