by John Jakes
“I’d like to hear about it.” He guided her hand. “But not now.”
A clock was chiming two when Ashton came swimming up through sleepy satiation. The bedding had been tangled and torn loose. Powell dozed beside her. She brushed hair from her eyes and drowsily studied two surprising objects on a taboret near his right shoulder: a map of the United States and, resting on it, his favorite gun—a rim-fire Sharps pocket pistol whose four blunt muzzles gave it a menacing look. The custom grips were carved with an intricate leaf pattern. She had seen him handling and cleaning it on several occasions.
In a few minutes he woke and asked about the riot. His hand idled between her legs while she described it. “They chanted for bread, but they were stealing anything in sight.”
“They’ll do more than steal if King Jeff continues to run amok. The situation in Richmond—the whole Confederacy—is disastrous. It can’t be borne.”
“But we have all the money we need to replace Water Witch and perhaps buy a second vessel. We needn’t worry about the President.”
“We do if we give a damn about Southern principles.” He said it softly, yet with passion. Alarmed, she realized she had unintentionally angered him. “I do. Fortunately, there is a way to curb Davis and preserve them.”
“What do you mean?”
In the silence, the bedroom clock went tock-tock. Iron wheel rims rumbled over cobbled Franklin Street. Powell’s thin, strong mouth turned upward at the ends, though his eyes remained chill.
“How much do you love me, Ashton?”
She laughed nervously. “How much—?”
“It’s a simple question. Answer it.”
“My God—you know the answer. No man has ever made me feel the way you do.”
“I can trust you, then?”
“Hasn’t the partnership taught you that you can?”
“I believe I can,” he countered, “but if I shared a confidence, then found I’d made a mistake—” he snatched the Sharps and pushed the muzzles into her breast “—I’d rectify it.”
Ashton’s mouth opened as she watched his finger whiten. Smiling, he pulled the trigger. The hammer fell—on an empty chamber.
“What—Lamar—what is—?” Confused, inwardly wild with fright, she could barely form the words. “What’s behind all this?”
He put the pistol aside and laid the map on the tangled bedding. In the southwest corner of the map, he had inked a vertical line through the Territory of New Mexico and to the left of it had inscribed several small squares, none overlapping, with dotted lines.
“What you see right here, love. Our inept generals in Texas lost the Southwest. The Union has it all. Including this—” he tapped the section of the map containing the squares “—the new Territory of Arizona. The Yankee Congress created it with the Organic Act, passed in February. A few regulars from California and some New Mexico volunteers are expected to guard this entire area, which of course is impossible. It’s too large, and, beyond that, the red savages keep the soldiers dashing hither and yon to protect isolated settlements. The new territory is perfect for a plan conceived by myself and some other gentlemen who realize King Jeff will ruin us if we allow it.”
The maddening smile stayed as he rolled up the map and dropped it on the floor. Ashton jumped out of bed on the other side, her buttocks bouncing as she crossed to the window above the garden. She folded her arms over her bosom.
“You’re being mysterious to torment me, Lamar. If you won’t explain what you mean, I’ll dress and go.”
He laughed admiringly. “Nothing mysterious about it, love. Those squares on the map are possible sites for a new confederacy.”
She whirled, a figure white as milk save for the blackness of her hair. “A new—?” She shook her head. “My God. You mean it, don’t you?”
“Absolutely. The idea is certainly not new.” She nodded. She had heard discussions of a third country to be formed in the Northwest, and of a Pacific Coast Confederacy. “What I have done is find the ideal location for a new state, small but impregnable. A law unto itself. A place where each can prosper according to his wishes and ability, and where the breeding and holding of slaves will be encouraged.”
The idea was so awesome she couldn’t quite get hold of it. She padded back to the bed and sat on the edge. “How long have you been hatching this scheme?”
“For over a year. It gained impetus after Sharpsburg, when European recognition became a lost cause.”
“But Davis wouldn’t have any part of such a plan, Lamar. He’d use every resource of the government to block it.”
“My poor, witless Ashton,” he said, stroking her cheek and working his thumb into the little valley beside her nose. “Of course he would. Why do you think I had to satisfy myself that you’re trustworthy? When we establish our new state, the government here will be headless. Mr. Jefferson Davis will have gone to his reward—in hell, I hope. The first order of business is to send him on his way.”
“You mean—assassinate?”
“The President and key members of the cabinet,” he concluded. “Those who might rally forces to oppose us.”
“How—how many others are involved?”
“You need know only that I’m in charge and that we mean to go forward. Now that you’re aware of the plan”—his thumb pressed her cheek; his fingers closed on the back of her neck, turning it ever so slightly, bringing a touch of pain—“you are part of it.”
After the first shock passed, questions began to flood her mind. She asked the most obvious first. How would this new state or country be financed? Small as it was, it would have to be defended. How would its army be paid?
Powell circled the bedroom, tense with excitement. “First, with my share of the earnings from Water Witch. But it will take much more than that to arm and equip the kind of force we’ll need to defend the borders for the first couple of years. Until the Yankees realize they can’t overwhelm us, and recognize our sovereignty.”
“Where will you get men for an army of that kind?”
“My dear, there are thousands of them in the Confederacy at this moment—in military service and out of it. Disaffected officers and enlisted men. Some of our very best have deserted, disillusioned by all the bungling. We will rally them, adding Westerners who were born in the South or show sympathy for our cause. I have an estimate of at least seven thousand such in Colorado alone. Finally, if need be, we’ll hire mercenaries from Europe. We’ll have no trouble finding soldiers.”
“But you still must pay them.”
A cat’s grin spread again. “We have the resources. Have I ever mentioned my brother, Atticus?”
“In passing. You’ve never said anything about him.”
Powell sat beside her and began to rub her leg. She studied his profile, momentarily wondering about his sanity. He had never struck her as unbalanced, and he didn’t now. He spoke passionately but with the lucidity of one who had spent a long time plotting his course. Her doubt passed.
Contempt crept in as Powell explained. “My brother had no loyalty to the South. He left Georgia in the spring of ’56, traveling west to the gold fields. A great many Georgians did the same thing. There was quite a colony in Colorado, where Atticus found and staked a claim. He worked it until the summer of 1860, and in all that time he cleared just two thousand dollars—respectable, but nothing more. About the time South Carolina seceded, boredom and wanderlust set in again. Atticus sold the claim for another thousand and started for California with the stake. He got as far as the Carson River diggings at the western border of the Nevada Territory.”
“I’ve heard of the Carson River mines. James once talked of buying shares in one. The Ophir, I think. That was before he found out about Water Witch.”
“My brother’s timing turned out to be propitious. The year before, some miners, including an obnoxious, half-mad Canadian called ‘Old Pancake,’ because he ate nothing else, discovered promising sites in two gulches on Mount Davidson. Comstock—tha
t was Old Pancake’s real name—Comstock and the others started placer mining in Gold and Six-Mile canyons. They made a decent profit from the beginning. Five dollars a day in gold. That increased to twenty by the time they made the major discovery—two, really. The lode was richer than they dreamed. Ore pockets scattered all through the mountain. Furthermore, mixed in with the gold was something else. Silver.”
“Did your brother stake a claim?”
“Not exactly. Miners are a queer, complex breed—always dickering, selling, and trading claims. It amounts to gambling on how much ore remains in a given piece of ground. One of the original finders of metal, fellow named Penrod, owned a sixth interest in the Ophir, which he wanted to sell for fifty-five hundred dollars. My brother couldn’t afford that, but Penrod was making a second offering—half interest in a mine called the Mexican for three thousand dollars. Atticus bought it.”
Striding across the bedroom again, Powell explained that the mining camp, christened Virginia City by another of the original claimants, Old Virginny Finney, had undergone rapid and dramatic change during the first two years of the war. By agreement among the miners, it became possible for a man to stake a lode claim, which was much larger than the regulation fifty-by-four-hundred-foot placer claim.
“With a lode claim, you can dig down into the mountain for three hundred feet—and you have rights to all the ground on either side where there are offshoots of your lode. The Mexican started with an open pit, then sank shafts, and in spite of smelting and transportation costs—at first the ore had to be carried over the mountains to California—Atticus and his partner were soon clearing three thousand dollars in silver from every ton of ore and a third as much in gold. Last year saw a great influx of Californians, but of course the richest claims were already staked, so the newcomers called Virginia City a humbug. Atticus’s partner succumbed to the talk. My brother bought him out at a favorable price. Last summer, when the town had grown to fifteen thousand, poor Atticus met an untimely end.”
“Oh, what a pity.”
“I can tell you’re deeply touched,” he said, smiling.
“How did your brother die?”
“Shot,” Powell said with a shrug. “A man accosted him in the elevator of the International Hotel. Robbery was presumed to be the motive. The man was never caught or identified. By coincidence, just the week before, Atticus had written a document, which I keep locked up downstairs. It deeds my brother’s interest in the Mexican mine to me, his only surviving relative. He wrote the deed and posted it to a contact in Washington. The contact got it to Richmond via one of the regular mail smugglers.”
Atticus Powell’s act of generosity had been described with a touch of amusement. Ashton suddenly realized the story was a recitation for the credulous. Powell saw the understanding dawn and confirmed it.
“Consider what it means that Atticus and I were the only remaining members of our family. There is no one to come forward and assert that the handwriting on the deed bears only a superficial resemblance to my brother’s. I now have a fine foreman superintending work at the mine, and he doesn’t care who owns it so long as he’s paid well and on time. I’m happy to say the Mexican is producing at a record rate. There’s plenty of gold and silver for paying a private army.”
He went searching for a cigar, vanishing into another room. Ashton knew Powell had hired the man who shot his brother, just as he had hired some forger to prepare the deed. Rather than being repelled, she felt renewed admiration. He had the kind of ambition and nerve Huntoon would lack through eternity.
“So you see,” Powell said when he came back with matches and an unlit cheroot, “what I propose is not so fantastic. Not with the Mexican to finance it. Therefore I must ask you a question.”
“What is it?”
He made her wait with elaborate match-striking and puffing. “Would you like to be the First Lady of the new confederacy?”
“Yes. Yes!”
Powell touched her breast; the ball of his thumb circled slowly on the tip. “I thought so.” He was unable to keep smugness and a certain faint scorn out of his smile.
In the early afternoon, Huntoon wandered the glass-strewn sidewalks of Main Street. He couldn’t go back to his prison at Treasury. Not after what had happened that morning.
Like so many other government workers in the buildings around Capitol Square, he had rushed outside when he learned of the rioting. He watched the gaunt gray President climb onto a wagon and plead for respect for the law. Davis said every citizen must endure hardship for the sake of the cause. People booed him. As a last pathetic gesture, he turned out his own pockets and flung a few coins to the mob.
It made no difference. It required the mayor reading the riot act and the sight of bayonets wielded by the provost’s guard to restore order. While the riot was still in progress, Huntoon turned the corner from Ninth to Main and saw a familiar carriage outside a fashionable food and wine emporium. He stopped and huddled by the building, morbidly curious.
His wife was in the carriage. She had a hamper and struggled with several poorly dressed women before the carriage got away; swirling clots of rioters prevented him from seeing more.
But a little was enough. The hamper and the store she had been visiting heightened his certainty, growing for months, that she was involved with someone. Ashton never bought Franzblau’s delicacies for their own table. He suspected her lover was Powell, the man who was enriching him, the man he both envied and feared. Huntoon turned and went back to his office but was unable to do any work. So here he was on the streets again.
A lady’s shoe lay in his path. He kicked it into the gutter, the afternoon sunshine flashing from his spectacles. He moved like a sleepwalker, brushing aside two harlots who tried to solicit him. The litter of glass and ruined goods in looted windows seemed symbolic of his life and of the Confederacy.
Davis was destroying the dream of a truly free government on the American continent. The man was contemptible. Impotent.
He had no ability to inspire people and lacked the wisdom to stop his military meddling and give his best generals their head. His answer to runaway inflation, mounting shortages, universal discouragement was to proclaim special days of fasting and prayer—or throw a few coins to a mob. He deserved impeachment, if not something worse.
Like the nation, Huntoon’s personal life was a shambles. In the sleepless hours of many an early morning, with Ashton snoring lightly in the separate bed she now insisted upon, he could no longer deny the truth of that.
Yet he could find no object of blame except Davis. He couldn’t bring himself to leave his wife. She had made him wealthy, and, despite the way she treated him, he loved her. The dilemma made him physically and mentally impotent. Over the past months he had lost all appetite and a dozen pounds. In his confused state, the cancerous truth of Ashton’s infidelity was mingling and becoming one with the cancer of despair for the government.
His frustration grew worse each day. His eyes hurt whenever he tried to work. He perspired or suffered cold chills for no apparent reason. The top of his head frequently felt as if an auger were being screwed into it. If only he had some way to relieve the bad feelings. Some target to strike—
“What am I to do?” he muttered, wandering amid the glass. “What in God’s name am I to do? Murder her? Kill myself? Both?” Two Negro women overheard and stepped off the sidewalk to avoid him.
74
THE WIND WARMED. THE earth softened. The season changed. At the brigade encampment in Sussex County, which they had been roaming in search of replacement mounts, Ab looked down. He and Charles were walking their horses across a muddy meadow to the traveling forge. The boots of both men were covered halfway to the tops; the stuff clung to their spurs like some evil yellow plaster.
Ab sighed. “Will you look at that?” He stamped one foot, then the other. None of the mud fell off. “If anybody asks me have I been through Virginia, I can sure to God tell them yes, sir, any number of places.”
Charles felt good for another reason. It was folded and tucked in the pocket of his butternut shirt.
While the farrier finished with some trooper’s nag, the two scouts cleaned the feet of their horses with picks and uprooted weeds. The farrier searched for more shoes and nails, then pumped up the firebox mounted on a platform between the limber’s two big wooden wheels.
Ab said, “Git your pass all right?” Charles patted his pocket. “You have a care, roamin’ up there in Spotsylvania County by your lonesome. You bump into any of that Union horse, go the other way. I have the same feelin’ you do about them damn ribbon clerks. They’re learnin’ to ride and shoot.”
The uneasy conviction had been spreading since Sharpsburg. In March, farther north, Fitz Lee had sent one taunting note too many to Brigadier Bill Averell, a New Yorker whom Charles remembered from the class of ’55. Fitz dared Averell to bring his boys down across the Rappahannock and fetch along some coffee to be captured. Averell’s division of horse struck south like a thrown spear. The raiders killed Stuart’s famed artillery officer, gallant John Pelham.
It appeared a small event, speaking relatively, but it wasn’t. The passing of any soldier with the legend of glory on him could scar a Southern mind as whole fields of the fallen could not. Pelham’s death and Averell’s lightning attack convinced Wade Hampton’s troopers of one thing: their Yankee counterparts no longer suffered from a fear of being outmatched.
