by John Jakes
“What, then?”
Impossible to hide her smile any longer. “I think it’s time to unwrap the sword you’ve kept carefully hidden upstairs.”
19
“OUR ROME,” OLD RESIDENTS called it. As a girl, Mrs. James Huntoon had preferred the study of young men to that of old cities, but a certain amount of enforced education in the classics enabled her to dismiss the comparison as merely another example of Virginia arrogance. That arrogance permeated Richmond and raised barriers for those from other states. At the first private party to which Ashton and her husband had been invited—to have their persons and pedigrees inspected, she felt sure—a white-haired woman, clearly Someone, overheard Ashton remark crossly that she simply couldn’t understand the Virginia temperament.
Someone gave her a smile with steel in it. “That is because we are neither Yankees nor Southerners—the South being a term generally used here to signify states with a large population of parvenu cotton planters. We are Virginians. No other word will suffice—and none says so much.”
Ignorance thus exposed, Someone sailed away. Ashton seethed, imagining she’d faced the worst the evening had to offer. She was wrong. James Chesnut’s wife, Mary, a South Carolinian with a bitchy tongue and a secure place in Mrs. Davis’s circle, had greeted her by name and refused to stop for conversation. Ashton feared that gossip about her involvement with Forbes LaMotte, and the attempt to kill Billy Hazard, had followed the Huntoons to Virginia.
So she had failed two tests in one night. But there would be others, and she was determined to triumph over them. Although she had little except contempt for the well-born gentlemen who ran the government, and for their wives who ruled society, they held power. To Ashton there was no stronger aphrodisiac.
Like the ancient city, Our Rome had hills, but, by comparison, the city was tiny. Even with all the office seekers, bureaucrats, and riffraff swarming in, the population was little more than forty thousand. Richmond had its Tiber, too—the James, looping and winding south and then east to the Atlantic—but surely the air on the Capitoline had smelled of something finer than tobacco. Richmond stank of it; the whole place had the odor of a warehouse.
Montgomery had been the first capital, but only for a month and a half. Then the Congress voted in favor of the move to Virginia—though not without argument. Richmond lay too near the Yankee lines, the Yankee guns, opponents said. Numbers of votes overwhelmed them, as did logic: Richmond was the South’s transportation and armament center, and had to be defended whether the government was there or not.
Those who had resided in Richmond a long time spoke with pride of the fine old homes and churches, but never mentioned the teeming saloon districts. They boasted of families of exalted ancestry, but never acknowledged the degraded creatures of both sexes who sauntered the shady walks of Capitol Square in the afternoons, silently offering themselves for sale. The women, a hard lot, and seldom young, were said to be rushing here from Baltimore, even New York, in search of the opportunity a wartime capital offered. God knew from what sewer their male counterparts had crawled.
Old Rome—with Carolina Goths and Alabama Vandals already inside the walls. Even the provisional President—not yet formally confirmed for his single six-year term—was regarded as a Mississippi primitive. He had the further misfortune of birth in Kentucky, the same state that had given the world the supreme incarnation of vulgarity-on-earth, Abe Lincoln.
Although Ashton was glad to be near the center of power, it couldn’t be said that she was happy. Her husband, though a competent lawyer and a staunch secessionist—“Young Hotspur,” they had called him back home—could find no better job than clerk to one of the first assistants in the Treasury Department. That was in keeping with the contempt shown South Carolinians by the new government. Very few from the Palmetto State had been named to high posts; most were considered too radical. The exception, Treasury Secretary Memminger, wasn’t a Carolina native. Fathered by some low-born German soldier, he had been brought to Charleston as an orphan. Never considered one of the so-called fire-eaters, he was the only kind of Carolinian Jeff Davis deemed safe. It was insulting.
Ashton and James Huntoon were squeezed into a single large room at one of the boardinghouses proliferating near Main Street; that, too, displeased her. They would find a suitable house eventually, but the wait was galling—especially because she was required to sleep in the same bed as her husband. He always left her unsatisfied on those rare occasions—initiated by her when she wanted him to do or buy something for her—that she let him maul and heave and poke her with that pitiful flaccid instrument of his.
Richmond might be a tarnished coin, but it was rare and valuable in a few respects. There were important people to be cultivated; power to be acquired; financial opportunities to be seized. There were also quite a few attractive men—in uniform and out. Somehow she would turn all of that to her advantage—perhaps starting tonight. She and James were to attend their first official reception. As she finished dressing, she felt faint from the excitement.
Orry’s sister was a beautiful young woman with a lush figure and an innate sense of how to take advantage of those assets. She had insisted they hire a carriage, to create the proper impression from the moment they arrived. James whined that they couldn’t afford it; she allowed him marital privileges for three minutes, and he changed his mind. How glad she was when he handed her down from the carriage outside the Spotswood Hotel at Eighth and Main, and she heard approving murmurs from a crowd of loungers on the walk.
The July evening was hot, but Ashton wore everything that fashion dictated for a woman of elegance, beginning with the four tape-covered steel hoops under her skirt; all but the top one had an opening in front, to facilitate walking. A web of vertical tapes held the rig together.
Over this, underskirts, and then her finest silk dress, a deep peach color she offset with little jet spangles on her silk hair net, and with black velvet ribbons tied to each wrist. Fashionable women wore a great amount of jewelry, but her husband’s income confined her to a pair of black onyx teardrops hung from her ear lobes on tiny gold wires. So she had arranged her dark hair and chosen her wardrobe to let simplicity and her own voluptuous good looks be her devices for drawing attention.
“Now pay attention, darling,” she said as they crossed the lobby in search of Parlor 83. “Give me a chance to circulate this evening. You do the same. The more people we meet, the better—and we can meet twice as many if you don’t hang on me constantly.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Huntoon said, with that automatic righteousness that frequently cost him friends and hurt his career. James was six years older than his wife, a pale, paunchy, opinionated man. “Here—down this corridor. I wish you wouldn’t treat me as if I were some witless boy.”
Her heart raced at the sight of the open doors of Parlor 83, where President Davis regularly held these receptions; he had no official residence as yet. Ashton glimpsed gowned women mingling and chatting with gentlemen in uniforms or fine suits. She fixed her smile in place, whispering: “Act like a man and maybe I won’t. If you start trouble now, I’ll just kill you—Mrs. Johnston!”
The woman about to enter the parlor ahead of them turned with a polite though puzzled expression. “Yes?”
“Ashton Huntoon—and may I present my husband, James? James, this is the wife of our distinguished general commanding the Alexandria line. James is in Treasury, Mrs. Johnston.”
“A most important position. Delightful to see you both.” And away she went into the parlor. Ashton was glad they’d exchanged words out here; Joe Johnston ranked the other general on the Alexandria line—the one who captivated everyone—but his wife was not one of Mrs. Davis’s intimates.
“I don’t think she remembered you,” Huntoon whispered.
“Why should she? We’ve never met.”
“My God, you’re forward.” His chuckle conveyed admiration as well as reproof.
Sweetly, she said, “Your backwardnes
s demands it, dear—Oh, Lord, look. They’re both here—Johnston and Bory.” Thus, on a wave of unexpected joy, Ashton swept into the crowd, nodding, murmuring, smiling at strangers whether she knew them or not. On the far side of the packed room, she spied the President and Varina Davis. But they were surrounded.
Memminger greeted the Huntoons. The Dutchman brought Ashton champagne punch and then, responding to her request, introduced her to the officer everyone wanted to meet—the wiry little fellow with sallow skin, melancholy eyes, and an unmistakably Gallic cast to his features. Brigadier General Beauregard bent over her gloved hand and kissed it.
“Your husband has found a treasure, madam. Vous êtes plus belle que le jour! I am honored.”
Her look deprecated the flattery and at the same time acknowledged the truth of it; Carolina women knew coquetry, if nothing else. “The honor’s mine, General. To be presented to our new Napoleon—the first to strike a blow for the Confederacy—I know that will be the high point of my evening.”
Pleased, he replied, “Près de vous, j’ai passé les moments les plus exquis de ma vie.” Then, with a bow, the Creole general slipped away; many more admirers waited.
Huntoon, meantime, anxiously eyed the crowd. He feared someone had overheard Ashton. Was she so stupid that she didn’t know the high point of the evening should be an introduction to President and Mrs. Davis? In such states of terror over small things did James Huntoon pass most of his life.
Huntoon’s study of the crowd soon generated a new emotion—anger. “Nothing but West Point peacocks and foreigners. Oh-oh, that little Jew’s spotted us. This way, Ashton.”
He tugged her elbow. She jerked away and, with a glare and a toss of her head, sent him off to mingle. This left her free to greet the small, plump man approaching with a genial smile and a hand extended.
“Mrs. Huntoon, is it not? Judah Benjamin. I have seen you once or twice at the Treasury building. Your husband works there, I believe.”
“Indeed he does, Mr. Benjamin. I can hardly believe you’d take notice of me, however.”
“It’s no disloyalty to my wife, presently in Paris, to say that the man who has never noticed you is a man who has never seen you.”
“What a pretty speech! But I’ve heard the attorney general is famous for them.”
Benjamin laughed, and she found herself liking him—in part because James didn’t. A good deal of opposition to the President and his policies had already arisen; Davis was especially scored for allegedly favoring foreigners and Jews in his administration. The attorney general, who presided over a nonexistent court system, was both.
Benjamin had been born in St. Croix, though raised in Charleston. For unexplained offenses said to be scandalous, he had been expelled from Yale, which her brother Cooper had attended. A lawyer, he had moved with ease from the United States Senate, where he had represented Louisiana, to the Confederacy. His critics called him a cheap and opportunistic machine politician—among other things.
Benjamin escorted her to the buffet table and gathered little dainties on a plate, which he handed to her. She saw James, in the act of sidling up to the President, throw her a furious look. Delightful.
“An ample repast this evening,” Benjamin commented. “But not first quality. You and your husband must join me some other night and sample my favorite canapé—white bread baked with good Richmond flour and spread with anchovy paste. I serve it with sherry from Jerez. I import it by the cask.”
“How can you possibly get Spanish sherry through this blockade?”
“Oh, there are ways.” Benjamin smiled, an innocent, airy dismissal. “Will you come?”
“Of course,” she lied; James wouldn’t.
He asked for their address. Reluctantly, she gave it. It was clear he recognized the boardinghouse district, but it didn’t seem to diminish his friendliness. He promised to send a card of invitation soon, then glided away to pay court to General and Mrs. Johnston. They stood by themselves, displeased by the fact and by the crowd around Old Bory.
Ashton thought of following Benjamin, but held back when she saw Mrs. Davis approach the attorney general and the Johnstons. She didn’t have nerve enough to join a group that formidable; not yet.
She studied the First Lady. The President’s second wife, Varina, was a handsome woman in her mid-thirties, presently expecting another child. It was said that she was a person without guile, plain-spoken and not hesitant to state opinions on public questions. That was not traditional behavior for a Southern woman. Ashton knew Mrs. Johnston had called her a Western belle behind her back, and not to compliment her. Still, she’d give anything to meet her.
With a delicious start, she saw that she stood a far better chance of meeting Davis himself. James had somehow engaged him in conversation. Ashton started through the maze of scented feminine and braided male shoulders.
She passed near three officers greeting a fourth, a spirited-looking chap with splendid mustaches and curled hair whose pomade was almost as strong as her perfume. “California’s a long way from here, Colonel Pickett,” one of the other officers was saying to him. “We’re glad you made the journey safely. Welcome to Richmond and the side of the just.”
The officer thus addressed noticed Ashton and favored her with a gallant, mildly flirtatious smile. Then he frowned, as if trying to place her. One of Orry’s classmates had been named Pickett. Could this be the same man? Could he have seen a resemblance? She moved on quickly; she had no desire to discuss a brother who had banished her from her childhood home.
James saw her coming, turned his back. Bastard. He wouldn’t present her; it was her punishment for talking with the little Jew. He’d pay.
She sought a familiar face and finally located one. She forced herself on Mary Chesnut, caught alone and unable to escape. Mrs. Chesnut seemed friendlier tonight, and inclined to gossip.
“Everyone’s crushed that General and Mrs. Lee are absent—and without explanation. A domestic spat, do you suppose? I know they’re a model couple—they say he never curses or loses his temper. But surely even a man of his high moral character occasionally lets down. If he were here, we’d probably have an impromptu West Point reunion. Poor old Bob—flogged by the Yankee press when he resigned and joined our side.”
“Yes, I know.” They said the woman kept a diary and that it was prudent to speak guardedly in her presence.
Smirking, Mrs. Chesnut tapped Ashton’s wrist with her fan. “You’d think that would make him popular with the troops, wouldn’t you?”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Hardly. Privates and corporals from fine families call him the King of Spades because he sent down orders that they must dig and sweat like the commonest field hands.”
Hanging on her words with feigned interest, Ashton had not failed to see a tall, well-set-up gentleman in blue velvet studying her from the punch table. He let his gaze drift down to the peach silk spread tightly between her breasts. Ashton waited till he met her eye again, then turned away. She left Mary Chesnut and drew nearer her husband and the President.
Jefferson Davis looked several years younger than fifty-one; his military bearing and his slim figure helped create the impression, as did his abundant hair. Worn long at the back of his neck, it showed almost no white. Nor did his tuft of chin whiskers.
“But Mr. Huntoon,” he said, “I do insist that a central government must institute certain measures mandated by its existence in a time of war. Conscription, for example.”
They had fallen into an amiable philosophic discussion, Huntoon and the soft-spoken President and a third man, Secretary of State Toombs. Toombs was said to be a malcontent, already spreading disaffection in the administration. He particularly criticized West Point because Davis, class of ’28, placed a great trust in some of its graduates.
“You mean you would enact it into law?” Huntoon challenged. He had strong beliefs and relished the chance to make them known.
“If it became necessary, I would urge that
, yes.”
“You’d order men out from the several states, the way that nigger-loving baboon has done?”
Davis managed to sound annoyed when he sighed. “Mr. Lincoln has asked for volunteers, nothing more. We have done the same. On both sides, conscription is at this point purely theoretical.”
“But I submit, sir—with all respect to you and your office—it is a theory that must never be tested. It runs counter to the doctrine of supremacy of the states. If they should be forced to surrender that supremacy to a central power, we’ll have a duplication of the circus in Washington.”
Gray eyes flashed then; and the left one, nearly blind, looked as wrathful as the right. Huntoon had heard gossip about the President’s temper; they worked in the same building, after all. It was said that Davis took any disagreement as a personal attack and behaved accordingly.
“Be that as it may, Mr. Huntoon, my responsibility’s clear. I am charged with making this new nation viable and successful.”
Equally hot, Huntoon said, “How far will you go, then? I’ve heard that certain members of the West Point clique have suggested we enlist the darkies to fight for us. Will you do that?”
Davis laughed at the idea, but Toombs exclaimed, “Never. The day the Confederacy permits a Negro to enter the ranks of its armies—on that day, the Confederacy will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced.”
“I agree,” Huntoon snapped. “Now, as to conscription itself—”
“Theoretical,” Davis repeated sharply. “It is my hope to win recognition of this government without excessive bloodshed. Constitutionally, we were entirely right to do what we did. I will not behave, or prosecute a war, as if we were in the wrong. Nevertheless, a central government must be stronger than its separate parts, or else—”
“No, sir,” Huntoon interrupted. “The states will never tolerate it.”
Davis seemed to pale and blur; then Huntoon realized his metal-rimmed spectacles were steaming.
