by John Jakes
Charles heard that the surgeons didn’t think they could save Calbraith Butler’s foot. So much had happened on Fleetwood that day—deaths and small heroisms, some noticed, some not. Charles had given up his only good friend and regained something that he had lost.
He rubbed Sport down and fed him and stroked his neck. “We made it through once more, old friend.” The gray gave a small shake of his head; he was as spent as Charles.
Brandy Station made the reputation of the Union cavalry. It tarnished Stuart’s. And, belatedly, it showed Charles the sharp accuracy of his fear about the relationship with Gus. Such an attachment was wrong in wartime. Wrong for her, wrong for him.
Charles had been observed in action during the assaults on Fleetwood. He received a commendation in general orders from Hampton and a brevet to major. What he got with no official action was a new direction for himself. He must think first of his duty. He loved Gus; that wouldn’t change. But speculations about marriage, a future with her, had no place in a soldier’s mind. They dulled his concentration. Made him more vulnerable, less effective.
Gus would have to know how he felt. That was only fair. Questions of how and when to tell her, he was too tired to confront just now.
83
“PACK,” STANLEY SAID.
Sticky and ill-tempered from the heat of that Monday, June 15, Isabel retorted, “How dare you burst in on me in the middle of the day and start issuing orders.”
He mopped his face, but the sweat popped out again. “All right, stay. I’m taking the boys to Lehigh Station via the four o’clock to Baltimore. I paid three times the normal price of the tickets, and I was lucky to be able to do it.”
Uneasy all at once—he never spoke sharply to her—she moderated her tone. “What’s provoked this, Stanley?”
“What the newsboys are shouting on every corner downtown. ‘Washington in danger.’ I’ve heard that Lee is in Hagerstown—I’ve heard he’s in Pennsylvania—the rebs might have the town encircled by morning. I decided it’s time for a vacation. If you don’t care to go, that’s your affair.”
There had been rumors of military movement in Virginia, but nothing definite until now. Could she trust his assessment of the situation? She smelled whiskey on him; he had begun to drink heavily of late.
“How did you get permission to leave?”
“I told the secretary my sister was critically ill at home.”
“Didn’t he think the timing—well, a bit coincidental?”
“I’m sure he did. But the department’s a madhouse. No one is accomplishing anything. And Stanton has good reason to keep me happy. I’ve carried his instructions to Baker. I know how dirty his hands are.”
“Still, you could damage your career by—”
“Will you stop?” he shouted. “I’d rather be condemned as a live coward than perish as a patriot. You think I’m the only government official who’s leaving? Hundreds have already gone. If you’re coming with me, start packing. Otherwise keep still.”
It struck her then that a remarkable, not altogether welcome change had taken place in her husband in recent months. Stanley’s survival of the Cameron purge, his increasing eminence among the radicals, and his newfound wealth from Lashbrook’s combined to create a confidence he had never possessed before. Occasionally he acted as if he were uncomfortable with it. A few weeks ago, after gulping four rum punches in an hour and a half, he had bent his head, exclaimed that he didn’t deserve his success, and wept on her shoulder like a child.
But she mustn’t be too harsh. She was the one who had created the new man. And she liked some aspects of that creation—the wealth, the power, the independence from his vile brother. If she meant to control him, she must change her own style, adopt subtler techniques.
He postured in the doorway, glaring. With feigned meekness and a downcast eye, she said, “I apologize, Stanley. You’re wise to suggest we leave. I’ll be ready in an hour.”
That evening, after dark, a curtained van swung into Marble Alley. The driver reined the team in front of one of the neat residences lining the narrow thoroughfare between Pennsylvania and Missouri avenues. Despite the heat, all the windows of the house were draped, though they had been left open so that gay voices, male and female, and a harpist playing “Old Folks at Home” could be heard outside. The establishment, known as Mrs. Devore’s Private Residence for Ladies, was doing a fine business despite the panic in the city.
Looking like a moving mound of lard in his white linen suit, Elkanah Bent climbed down from his seat beside the driver with much wheezing and grunting. Two other bureau men jumped out through the van’s rear curtains. Bent signaled one into a passage leading to the back door of the house. The other followed him up the stone steps.
The detectives had debated the best way to take their quarry. They decided they couldn’t snatch a noted journalist off the street in daylight. His boardinghouse had been considered, but Bent, who was in charge, finally came down in favor of the brothel. The man’s presence there could be used to undermine his inevitable righteous protests.
He rang the bell. The shadow of a woman with high-piled hair fell on the frosted glass. “Good evening, gentlemen,” said the elegant Mrs. Devore. “Come in, won’t you?”
Smiling, Bent and his companion followed the middle-aged woman into a bright gaslit parlor packed with gowned whores and a jolly crowd of army and navy officers and civilians. One of the latter, a satanic sliver of a man, approached Bent. He had mustaches and a goatee in the style of the French emperor.
“Evening, Dayton.”
“Evening, Brandt. Where?”
The man glanced at the ceiling. “Room 4. He’s got two in bed tonight. Assorted colors.”
Bent’s heart was racing now, a combination of anxiety and a sensation close to arousal. Mrs. Devore walked over to speak to the harpist, and from there took notice of the bulge on Bent’s right hip, something she had overlooked at the front door.
“You handle things down here, Brandt. Nobody leaves till I’ve got him.” Brandt nodded. “Come on,” Bent said to the other operative. They headed for the stairs.
Alarm brightened Mrs. Devore’s eyes. “Gentlemen, where are you—?”
“Keep quiet,” Bent said, turning over his lapel to show his badge. “We’re from the National Detective Bureau. We want one of your customers. Don’t interfere.” The satanic detective produced a pistol to insure compliance.
Lumbering upstairs, Bent threw back his coat and pulled his revolver, a mint-new LeMat .40-caliber, Belgian-made. Used mostly by the rebs, it was a potent gun.
In the upper hall, dim gaslights burned against royal purple wallpaper. Strong perfume could not quite mask the odor of a disinfectant. Bent’s boots thumped the carpet as he passed closed doors; behind one, a woman groaned in rhythmic bursts. His groin quivered.
At Room 4, the detectives poised themselves on either side of the door. Bent twisted the knob with his left hand and plunged in. “Eamon Randolph?”
A middle-aged man with weak features lay naked in the canopied bed, a pretty black girl astride his loins, an older white woman behind his head, her breasts bobbing a few inches from his nose. “Who in hell are you?” the man exclaimed as the whores scrambled off.
Bent flipped his lapel again. “National Detective Bureau. I have an order for your detention signed by Colonel Lafayette Baker.”
“Oh-oh,” Randolph said, sitting up with a pugnacious expression. “Am I to be put away like Dennis Mahoney, then?” Mahoney, a Dubuque journalist who held opinions much like Randolph’s, had been entertained in Old Capitol Prison for three months last year.
“Something like that,” Bent said. The white whore groped for her wrapper. The young black girl, less frightened, watched from a spot near an open window. “The charge is disloyal practices.”
“Of course it is,” Randolph shot back in a high voice, which Bent instantly loathed. The reporter’s receding chin and pop eyes created a false impression of weakness.
Instead of cringing, he swung his legs off the bed almost jauntily.
“Ladies, please excuse me. I must dress and accompany these thugs. But you’re free to go.”
Shooting a look at the black whore, Bent brandished the LeMat. “Everyone stays. You’re all getting in the van.”
“Oh, God,” the white woman said, covering her eyes. The black girl slipped into a gown of ivory-colored silk, then hunched forward, looking like a cornered cat.
“He’s bluffing, girls,” Randolph said. “Leave.”
“Bad advice,” Bent countered. “I call your attention to the nature of this weapon. It is what some call a grapeshot revolver. I have merely to move the hammer nose like this and the lower barrel will fire. It is loaded with shotgun pellets. I presume you appreciate what they would do to any face I chose for a target—?”
“You won’t shoot,” Randolph said, bouncing on his bare feet. “You government boys are all yellow dogs. As for that detention order you say you’re carrying, toss it in the same fire in which you and Baker and Stanton burned your copies of the first amendment. Now stand aside and permit me to put on my—”
“Guard the door,” Bent growled to his helper. He hauled the LeMat up and across to his left shoulder and slashed down. Unprepared, Randolph took the blow’s full force on the right side of his face. His skin opened; blood ran and dripped into white hair on his chest.
The white woman sobbed melodramatically. There were footfalls, oaths, questions from the corridor. Bent jabbed the LeMat into Randolph’s bare belly, then struck his head again, and his neck twice after that. Eyes bulging, Randolph pitched onto the bed, bloodying the sheets as he coughed and clutched his middle.
Grabbing Bent’s sleeve, the other detective said, “Hold off, Dayton. We don’t want to kill him.”
Bent jabbed his left arm backward, throwing off the detective’s hand. “Shut up. I’m in charge here. As for you, you seditious scum—” He brained Randolph with the butt of his revolver. “You’re going to be fresh fish for Old Capitol Prison. We have a special room reserved for—Watch her!”
As Randolph writhed, the detective leaped for the black girl. But she already had one bare leg over the sill and quickly vanished. Bent heard a sharp cry as she landed.
Fists beat on the door. The other detective stuck his head out the window. “Harkness! One’s getting away.”
“Let her go. She’s just nigger trash,” Bent said. He gave Randolph’s shoulder a hard dig with the gun. “Get dressed.”
Five minutes later, he and his helper dragged the groggy journalist downstairs. They threw his blanket-bundled body into the back of the van. “You hit him too hard,” the other detective said.
“I told you to shut up.” Bent was breathing loudly; he felt as if he had just had a woman. “I did the job. That’s all Colonel Baker cares about.”
Brandt climbed into the van with them. Detective Harkness sat beside the driver. “The coon got away, Dayton,” he said. Bent grunted, calming down. On the floor, the prisoner made mewling noises. Bent began to fret; had he really hit him too hard?
Ridiculous to worry. Far worse took place during many of Baker’s interrogations. He would be forgiven. He had done the job.
“Let’s go or we’ll have the metropolitan police on our necks,” he yelled. The driver shook the reins; the van lurched forward.
Take the case of the Slaves on American plantations. I dare say they are worked hard. I dare say they don’t altogether like it. I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but, they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence.
Wonderingly, Brett reread the remarks of Mr. Harold Skimpole of Bleak House. The author of the novel, which she was enjoying, had toured America, had he not? If he had traveled in the South, however, and if he had found the slaves merely a form of decoration, his understanding had failed him in that instance. Dickens was supposed to be a liberal thinker. Surely he understood what the Negroes really were—human beings converted to parts of an aging, failing machine. Perhaps the views of the elfin, carefree Skimpole weren’t really those of the author. She hoped they weren’t.
Tired of reading and a little put off by her reaction to Mr. Skimpole, she laid the novel on top of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, which Scipio Brown had given her. The book, the most famous of the many in the escaped-slave genre, had been published a good eighteen years ago. But she had never seen a copy of it, or any work like it, in South Carolina. She was alternating Dickens with Douglass, and in the latter finding not only vestigial guilt but sympathy for the narrator and anger over his travail.
Brett lay in her camisole. Hot yellow twilight filled her room this twenty-ninth of June. She was exhausted from helping Mrs. Czorna scrub floors all day. Coming back to Belvedere, she had deliberately avoided Stanley and Isabel and their obnoxious sons, who were playing lawn bowls on the grass between the two houses.
It still surprised her that she was reading—well—differently from before. It was another result of long and frequent conversations with Brown. She resented the way he constantly thrust the issue of Negro liberty at her, but she was beginning to grasp why he did; why he must. She was also beginning to feel herself in the grip of uncomfortable personal changes.
One of the maids tapped on her door, announcing supper in a half hour. She rose reluctantly, splashing water on her face and bare arms. The yellow sun, growing red, sank in the west.
She hated to see sunset come. Fears about Billy, and her need of him, affected her most at night. In the last two weeks, coincident with Stanley’s unexpected and still-unexplained arrival, Brett’s fears had sharpened because of the military threat to the state. For days now, government workers and private citizens had been packing papers and valuables and leaving Harrisburg by rail, horse, or shank’s mare. Last Friday, Governor Curtain had issued a plea for sixty thousand men to muster arms and defend Pennsylvania for three months. On Saturday, the invasion had been confirmed. Terrified officials surrendered the town of York to Jubal Early, and Lee’s host was sighted at Chambersburg. The whole lower border was afire with panic and rumor, and the smoke blew to every part of the state.
A few minutes later, dressed and sweltering, Brett stepped onto the front veranda. No air was stirring.
“Brett? Hallo! Important news here.”
The thickened voice belonged to stuffy Stanley. In shirt sleeves, he brandished a newspaper on the porch of his own residence. She wanted to be rude but couldn’t do it. The supper bell would ring soon; she supposed she could put up with him till then.
In the molten light spilling from the west, she walked next door, her shadow three times her size on the brass-colored lawn. “What is it?” she said from the foot of the steps. She smelled gin on him and noticed his glassy look. She could hear the twins cursing and quarreling somewhere upstairs.
Swaying from side to side, Stanley held out a copy of the Ledger-Union. “Paper’s got a telegraph dispatch from Washington. On Saturday”—his slurred speech injected a sh sound—“Pres’dent Lincoln relieved Gen’ral Hooker. Gen’ral Me’s now in command.”
“General who?”
“Me. M-e-a-d-e. Me.”
Drunk, she thought. At the other house, she had overheard some servants’ gossip about Stanley’s new habit. She said to him, “I’m afraid I don’t know either of those men or anything about their qualifications.”
“Gen’ral Me is solid. ’F anyone can stop the reb invasion, he can.” A nervous glance southward. “By God, wish we’d settle all this.”
He struck his leg with the paper. The sudden movement threw him off balance. He prevented a fall by clutching one of the porch posts. For a moment, Brett pitied him. She said, “You don’t wish it any more fervently than I.”
He blinked, then pulled at his fine linen shirt where it stuck to his armpit. “Know you’d like to see Billy home. So would I. ’Course—fam
ily loyalty isn’t the only reason I want this blasted war over. Have some political ones, too. Nothing pers’nal, now”—a smarmy grin—“but we Republicans are going to change ol’ Dixie Land forever.”
She fanned herself with a handkerchief, irked again by his alcoholic smugness, yet curious. “Oh, you are? How is that?”
He put his finger over his lips to signal secrecy, then whispered, “Simple. ’Publican party will pretend to be the friend of all the freed niggers down there. Ignorant lot, niggers. ’F we give ‘em the franchise, they’ll vote any way we tell ’em. With the niggers voting, our party’ll be the majority party before you can say that.”
With a broad, almost violent gesture, he managed to snap his fingers. Once more his balance was threatened. Brett caught his arm and steadied him until he lowered his heavy rear into a bentwood rocker, which sagged and creaked loudly.
“Stanley, that’s a very cold-blooded scheme you described. You’re not making it up?”
The smarmy smile broadened. “Would I lie to my own rel’tive? Plan’s been drawn up a long time. By a certain—inner group.” He rolled his eyes. “Better not say any more.”
Outraged, Brett retorted, “You said quite enough. You’re going to exploit the very people you purport to champion—?”
“Pur-port.” He dragged it out, savoring the sound. “Purrr-port. Perrr-fect word.” He snickered at his own humor. “Niggers wouldn’t understand it, an’ they won’t understand that we’re using ’em, either,”
“That’s utterly unscrupulous.”
“No, jus’ politics. I—”
“You’ll excuse me,” she said, her tolerance exhausted. “I must go to supper.”
He started to say something else, but a sound much like the bleat of a billy goat came from an upstairs window. Someone had hit someone else. One of the twins screamed, “Get out of my things, you thieving shit.”
