by John Jakes
Bent felt faint. It was not merely because success had finally come after weeks of waiting. It was March now—Baker had postponed the interview three times, pleading emergencies. Bent was light-headed because he was starving. His own money had run out, forcing him to borrow a small amount from Dills. To conserve it, he ate only two meals a day.
Lafayette Baker had the build of a dock hand and the eyes of a ferret. Bent guessed him to be thirty-five. The past hour had consisted of a few questions followed by a rambling monologue about Baker’s history: work he had done for the exiled Cameron, his high regard for Stanton’s opinions and methods. He spent fifteen minutes on a period in the eighteen-fifties when he had been a San Francisco vigilante, proudly purifying the city of criminals with bullets and hang-ropes. On the desk between Baker and his visitor lay a splendid gold-chased cane, California manzanita wood with a lump of gold quartz set in the head. Nine smaller stones surrounded it, each from a different mine, Baker explained. The cane had been a gift from a grateful San Francisco merchant.
“The chief duty of this bureau, as I cannot stress too often, is the discovery and punishment of traitors. I carry out that task using the methods of the man whose career I have studied and emulated.”
Taking the cane, he pointed at a framed portrait on the wall. Bent had noticed it earlier, the sole decoration in the otherwise monastic office. The man in the daguerreotype had a stiff, severe countenance and small eyeglasses perched on his nose.
“The greatest detective of them all: Vidocq, of the Paris police. Do you know of him?”
“Only by name.”
“In his early days, he was a criminal. But he reformed and became the hated foe of the very class from which he sprang. You must read his memoirs, Dayton. They are not only exciting, they’re instructive. Vidocq had a simple and effective philosophy, which I follow to the letter.” Baker slid his palm back and forth over the head of the cane. “It’s far better to seize and hold a hundred innocents than to let one guilty man escape.”
“I agree with that, sir.” Expediency had been replaced by an eagerness to work for Baker.
“I hope so, because only those who do can serve me effectively. We do vital work here in the capital, but we also perform special services elsewhere.” Baker’s small, unreadable eyes fixed on Bent. “Before employing you in Washington, I would propose to test your mettle. Are you still with me?”
Frightened, Bent had no choice but to nod.
“Excellent. Sergeant Brandt will handle the details of placing you on our payroll, but I shall describe your first assignment now.” He stared, intimidating. “You are going into Virginia, Mr. Dayton. Behind enemy lines.”
72
FOR NEARLY A MONTH, they lived in a single room, a room fourteen by fourteen, which Judith divided by hanging blankets around Marie-Louise’s pallet, thus affording her a little privacy.
In the crowded city they had been lucky to get any room at all. A senior officer at Fort Fisher had found this, which had but one good feature—a pair of windows overlooking the river. Cooper sat in front of the windows for hours, a blanket over his legs, his shoulders hunched, his face reduced to gray hollowness by the pneumonia that had kept him near death for two weeks. Learning of Ashton’s involvement with Water Witch had done something to him, but the demise of his son had done something worse.
On the night Judah drowned, the Mains paddled and floundered through the surf and finally reached shore. They collapsed on a moonlit dune two miles above the earthwork that guarded the river mouth at Confederate Point. There were no other survivors on the beach.
Cooper had vomited everything, all the salty water he had swallowed, then gone wandering up and down the shore calling Judah’s name. Marie-Louise lay half conscious in her mother’s arms, and Judith kept her tears contained till she could stand it no longer. Then she wailed, not caring whether the whole damn blockade squadron heard her.
When the worst of the grief had worked itself out, she ran after Cooper, took his hand, and led him south, where she presumed they would find Fort Fisher. He was docile and burbling like a madman. The long walk under the moon had a dreamy quality, as though they were on a strand in one of Mr. Poe’s enchanted kingdoms. At last they staggered into the fort, and next morning a detail was sent out to search the dunes. Judah’s body was not found.
And so they had come twenty-eight miles upriver to the city, where Cooper had fallen ill and Judith had feared for his life. Now he was recovered, at least physically, and he sat by the windows, watching the piers where armed soldiers were on guard to prevent deserters from stowing away on outbound ships.
He spoke only when necessary. Blue-black shadows ringed his eyes as he watched the March sun shimmer on the river. Watched the flatboats of the Market Street Ferry put out for the opposite shore. Watched the little sloops owned by local rice planters darting over the bright water.
Wilmington was a boom town, full of sharps, sailors, Confederate soldiers homeward bound on furlough. The streets, even their room, smelled of naval stores: the pine lumber, pitch, and turpentine busy merchants sold to representatives of the British Navy. Managing to secure a letter of credit from their Charleston bank, Judith purchased new clothing for the three of them from the M. Katz Emporium on Market. Cooper’s suit hung in the wardrobe, still wrapped in paper.
Walking at the upper end of their street one day, Judith spied a splendid house with a great many prosperous young men in civilian dress coming and going. From an upstairs window she heard the singing of Negro minstrels. A peddler told her the place was the residence of most of the British masters and mates who ran the blockade. Flush with new money, they held all-night parties, wagered on cockfights in the garden, entertained women of ill repute, and. scandalized the town. Judith was glad Cooper wasn’t with her; the boisterous house would only make him angrier.
For he was angry. His silence told her. So did the queer glitter of his eyes. They shone like metal hemispheres as he sat staring into the March sunshine. They belonged to no man she knew.
At night, Judith often cried for a long time, thinking of Judah; he could not even be given a decent burial. The sorrow was increased by Cooper’s remoteness. He no longer put his arm around her or touched her or said a single word when they lay side by side in the hard bed. Judith only cried more, ashamed of the tears but unable to stop them.
One day toward the end of March, Marie-Louise burst out, “Are we going to stay in this awful room the rest of our lives?” Judith wondered that herself. For the first week or so, she had refrained from pushing Cooper about leaving; he was still weak, and tired easily. Prompted by her daughter’s question, she suggested to him that she telegraph Secretary Mallory and report their whereabouts. He answered her with a bleak nod and another of his peculiar, indifferent stares.
A few days later, she ran up the stairs of the rooming house with a sheet of flimsy yellow paper. Judith had left Marie-Louise in the parlor with a February number of the Southern Illustrated News; she wanted to read the romantic serial and work the word puzzle.
Cooper sat, as usual, watching the piers and darting sloops. “Darling, splendid news,” she said. Three steps carried her across the cramped room. “There was a message from the secretary at the telegraph office.”
Smiling, hoping to cheer and encourage him, she held out the yellow flimsy. He wouldn’t take it. She laid it in his lap. “You must read it. Stephen sends condolences and pleads with you to travel to Richmond as soon as you can.”
Cooper blinked twice. His gaunt face, so curiously alien lately, softened a little. “He has need of me?”
“Yes! Read the telegram.”
Bending his head, he did.
She almost wished he hadn’t when he looked up again. His smile had no humanity and somehow made his glaring eyes appear, to sink deeper into their blue-black sockets. “I reckon it is time to go. I must have an accounting with Ashton.”
“I know you’ve been brooding about that. But she isn’t rea
lly responsible for—”
“She is,” he interrupted. “Ballantyne said it explicitly—the owners wanted no delays. They wanted cargo delivered at all hazards. He gambled with Judah’s life because of greed. His own and Ashton’s. She is very much to blame.”
A shiver shook Judith’s slim frame. The gay, brightly barbed speech of the old Cooper was gone, replaced by pronouncements, bitterly made. She began to fear the consequences of his rage.
“Help me up,” he said suddenly, flinging off the blanket.
“Are you strong enough?”
“Yes.” The blanket fell. He wavered and took her arm, grasping so hard she winced.
“Cooper, you’re hurting me.”
He relaxed his grip without apology, and with a curious, stony indifference. “Where’s my new suit? I want to go to the depot for train tickets.”
“I can buy them.”
“I will! I want to get to Richmond. We’ve stayed here too long.”
“You were ill. You had to rest.”
“I had to think, too. Clear my head. Find my purpose. I have. I intend to help the secretary prosecute this war to the full. Nothing else matters.”
She shook her head. “I hear you, but I don’t believe you. When the war started, you detested it.”
“No longer. I share Mallory’s view. We must win, not negotiate a peace. I’d like to win at the expense of a great many dead Yankees—and the more of them I can be responsible for, the better.”
“Darling, don’t talk that way.”
“Stand aside so I can find my clothes.”
“Cooper, listen to me. Don’t let Judah’s death rob you of the kindness and idealism that always—”
He slammed the wardrobe open, startling her to silence. Pivoting, his head thrust forward like some carrion bird’s, he stared with those awful eyes.
“Why not?” he said. “Kindness couldn’t save our son’s life. Idealism couldn’t prevent Ballantyne and my sister from murdering him.”
“But you can’t mourn him for the rest of your—”
“I wouldn’t be mourning at all if you’d stayed in Nassau with the children as I begged you to do.”
The shout drove her back from him. Pale, she said, “So that’s it. You must have people to blame, and I’m one.”
“Please excuse me while I get dressed.” He turned his back on her.
Crying silently, Judith slipped out the door and waited with Marie-Louise till he came down twenty minutes later.
73
ASHTON HEARD THE SOUND, a cry of many voices, before its significance became clear.
She was just entering Franzblau’s Epicurean, a fine shop on Main Street that only the wealthiest patronized, never being so indelicate as to ask the sources of its merchandise. Some had come in on the last successful voyage of Water Witch. There would be no more such voyages. The steamer had been trapped and sunk near the entrance to the Cape Fear River, Powell said. It didn’t matter. The profits already realized were enormous.
Last night, while Huntoon once again worked late, a messenger had brought a note from Ashton’s partner. Slyly worded to give an air of courtliness and propriety, it requested that she visit him in the morning so they might give a proper farewell to their late vessel and plan their strategy. Powell loved to tease her with such pretexts—as if she needed any. Already, thoughts of the meeting filled her cheeks with a pink that matched the fluffy dyed marabou trimming the cuffs and collar of her black velvet dress.
Although it was the second of April, a Thursday, the morning was cool. She had arrived at the Epicurean shortly after ten-thirty and now addressed the frail, gray-haired proprietor.
“Mumm’s, if you have any, Mr. Franzblau. And a pot—no, two—of that wonderful goose-liver pâté.”
As she counted out a hundred and twenty Confederate dollars, Franzblau wrapped the two crocks in butcher’s paper, which everyone saved and used for writing letters these days. Again the noise intruded. Franzblau raised his head. So did the black man seated by the door to bar undesirables.
Franzblau put the bottle of champagne beside the wrapped foie gras in Ashton’s wicker hamper. “What are those people shouting?”
She listened. “‘Bread.’ Over and over—‘bread.’ How peculiar.”
The black man jumped up as Homer bolted through the door. “Mrs. Huntoon, we better get out of here,” the elderly houseman said. “There’s a crowd comin’ round the corner. Mighty big and mighty mad.”
Franzblau paled and whispered something in German, reaching under the counter for a six-barrel pepperbox revolver. “I have feared something like this. Will, draw the blind.”
Down came the canvas on its roller, hiding Ashton’s open carriage at the curb. Homer motioned with urgency. Ashton’s heels clicked on the black-and-white ceramic diamonds of the floor. Halfway to the entrance, she heard a crash of glass. She had seen the sullen faces of Richmond’s poor and hungry white women, but she had never expected them to take to the streets.
Homer took the hamper and went outside, pausing in the shop’s recessed entrance. From that vantage point Ashton saw twenty women, then twice that many, storming down the center of Main Street. More followed. Inside, Franzblau said, “Lock the door, Will.” It closed and clicked.
“I run for the carriage,” Homer said. Some of the women had the same idea.
“I’ll follow you,” Ashton whispered, terror-stricken at the sight of hundreds of shabbily dressed women pushing, screaming, hurling rocks and bricks at plate glass, ripping shoes and clothing from the shop windows. “Bread,” they chanted, “bread,” while helping themselves to apparel and jewelry.
A produce cart trapped in the center of Main was lifted by a pack of women. Its cargo of crated hens tumbled out with a splintering of slats, a fountaining of feathers, a ferocious flapping and squawking. The farmer cowered underneath the wreckage of the cart.
Jumping into the open carriage, Ashton was horrified to see the women drag the man out and swarm over him. They punched, clawed, and kicked. He yelled, but the cries were quickly submerged in the chanting.
More rioters rounded the corner of Ninth Street, some pouring up from Cary, some down from the direction of Capitol Square. They were not all impoverished householders; ratty boys had joined the mob, and some older toughs as well.
Homer fumbled with whip and reins. Half a dozen women rushed the carriage, hands extended, ugly mouths working.
“There’s a rich one.”
“Got food in that hamper, I bet.”
“Hand it over, dearie—”
“Hurry, Homer,” Ashton cried, just as a gray-haired woman in smelly rags jumped onto the carriage step. A dirty hand clasped Ashton’s wrist and yanked.
“Get her out, get her out,” the other women chanted, pressing around the rag woman. Ashton writhed, struggled. It did no good. Marginally aware of Homer flicking the whip at two boys holding the horses, she bent and bit the woman’s filthy hand. The woman screamed and fell off the step.
“Bread, bread!” More windows shattered. Women charged the door of Franzblau’s Epicurean, broke it, tore down the blind, and jumped through the opening edged with glass. A pistol went off; someone cried out.
Homer whipped one of the white boys, then the other. He got the team started, only to have two women seize the rear of the carriage and hang on. A third attempted to leap in and grab Ashton again. The street was in tumult. “Shoes, shoes!”
“Police down there—”
“Jeff’s coming out to speak.”
“Let him. We’ll cook him for dinner.”
“Give me, little Miss Rich,” panted the woman as she put her hands on the hamper. Ashton’s mouth set. She flipped the hamper open, took the champagne bottle by the neck, and swung it, breaking it squarely across the side of the woman’s head.
The woman howled and let go, falling back, covered with foaming champagne and bits of glass. Ashton jabbed the broken bottle at those nearest the carriage. They melted back.
Damned dirty cowards, she thought.
Grimacing, she knelt on the seat, reached over, and struck at the hands of the women holding the carriage. She slashed left and right with the bottle neck, cutting veins in the backs of their hands. Blood pumped out. “Homer, goddamn you, get moving!”
Like a wild person, he whipped horses and rioters alike. He turned the carriage and charged another group of women, who scattered. Many were running, Ashton noticed as the carriage careened around a corner into Eleventh Street. She heard shrill whistles, gunshots. The metropolitan detail had arrived.
The unexpected violence wrecked Ashton’s schedule for the morning. By the time the carriage reached Grace Street it was twenty past eleven, and another impatient hour went by before she felt she could leave by herself. The servants suspected she had a lover, or so she believed; whenever she went out alone, she was careful not to confirm the suspicion with haste or any kind of outrageous behavior. So she lingered at the house, feigning a case of nerves. Curiously, once she was out of danger, recalling the riot induced a state of arousal.
The war had that same kind of stimulating effect on Ashton. It sharpened every pleasure, from totting up the profits of Water Witch to clasping Powell with arms and legs as he drove into her—love was too soft a word for the nearly unbearable sensations he created. In what other time but wartime could she have brought her husband and her lover into the same business enterprise? It was macabre; but it was exhilarating.
Finally, having washed and refreshed herself, she drove to the Queen Anne house on Franklin Street. She arrived at half past twelve, carrying the hamper with the two pots of foie gras.
“I had a bottle of Mumm’s, but I had to break it to escape the mob,” she explained to Powell in the parlor. He was barefoot, wearing only breeches.
“When you didn’t come on time, I decided not to answer the door if you did arrive,” he said. “Then I heard a drayman shouting something about a riot downtown. So I forgave you.”
“It was the maddest confusion. Hundreds of ugly, utterly filthy women—”
