Faded Coat of Blue

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  Her eyelids narrowed. “Those creatures. I have a mind to forbid them my door. What that Trenchard asks my girls to do. It’s nothing but corruption. Ruining my little chicks for decent trade.”

  “When were they in last?”

  She fingered the cameo at her neck. “Those boys in trouble?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Well, I for one would put them in Old Capitol Prison and throw away the key. That Trenchard…”

  “When were they in?”

  “A few days back.”

  “Not since?”

  She shook her head again, but less theatrically. “They don’t come by here so much now.”

  “May we go upstairs?”

  “Of course, Doctor. My door is always open to you.” But she could not help adding, “Wasn’t that Fowler boy a gallant, though? Like a hero right out of a book.”

  “Lucy doing any better?” Tyrone asked, making for the stairs.

  “Oh, Lord. That girl. How am I going to keep her on when she just cries and cries? My gentlemen callers don’t want any part of crying girls. At least not the decent ones.” She touched Tyrone lightly on the forearm. “Doctor? Afterwards? Could you spare a minute for my Theodora? I think she has been unlucky.”

  We went up two flights and stopped before the door of a front bedroom. The old woman knocked twice. When there was no answer, she signaled us to wait a moment. She went ahead into the room, which was black, and lit the lamp, cooing all the while at a figure I could not yet see. She might have been soothing a baby in a cradle.

  Then she opened the door to us, and I saw the young woman, and Dr. Tyrone said:

  “Meet Anthony Fowler’s betrothed.”

  What words would ever do? Surely none of mine. She let me understand the bedazzlement of Solomon at the sight of the Queen of Sheba, and the breaking of Marc Anthony, and the siren bed of Dido. Passing strange it was. But one night back I had thought to have laid eyes on the most beautiful woman on earth, that grand wife of Mr. Cawber, yet here was competition and more. In Merthyr we said that fair things come in twos and foul in threes, and so it was. If such judgements lie not beyond a man’s ken, I will tell you that this girl with her milk-coffee skin was even the lovelier of the two, a very enchantress. Then I come closer— at the slow, mind you, as if the vision of her might vanish. And I saw her eyes staring past the lamplight. An unexpected blue they were, and steady. Those eyes were twin to Mrs. Cawber’s, and Anthony Fowler would have seen it from the first.

  A happy heart sits at home, they say, but a broken one roams the wilderness. And what a marvel Anthony Fowler had found on his frontier.

  You will expect that the sight of her put me in mind of things Indian, and of certain losses of my own, and it did.

  “Lucy,” Tyrone said in a gentle voice, “this is Captain Jones with me. He’ll not hurt you, girl. He only wants to talk.”

  She nodded from the depths of a dream.

  “You might leave us now, Effie,” Tyrone told the mistress of the house.

  “You will look in on my Theodora?” she asked, but she went. For she knew her business.

  “Sit down, Jones,” Tyrone said. Then he put the gentleness back in his speech. “I’m sorry to make you speak of these matters again, Lucy, but Captain Jones needs to hear the facts from your own lips.”

  From the lips of an Ethiopian queen.

  “Tell him,” Tyrone said, “about that night. The night Captain Fowler never returned.”

  She inclined her head slightly toward the sound of his voice, with all the tragedy of the ages on her face. Then she spoke, in a child’s tones.

  “My boy-boy. I be all ready to be going with him. Going to New York City.” An immortal sob shook her. “He say we be married in the great Plymutt Church, in Brooklyn in New York. We be in all the newspapers, my boy-boy telling me. He say our wedding bring peace to the white man and the black. That we be the marriage of Africa and Europe here in ‘Merica. We going to show all them folks how love be the conqueror of hatred. He always be talking pretty that way, my boy-boy.”

  “Tell Captain Jones what happened that night, Lucy.”

  She seemed to wake, then to drowse again. Her voice might have been the trick of an invisible spirit in the room. “We be all ready. He so pretty, I knows, my boy-boy. With that soft hair. Lord, I remembers him so pretty under my fingers. But the carriage don’t come up like it supposed. And he say he just going to find out about that carriage. And he kiss me sweet and call me his little angel wife. That what he call me. And my heart just beating for him, how I loves that man and never no other. He was going to lift me up. To save me, he say. Like a fallen angel. Then he go out after the carriage, and I hear that gun-shooting down there, and I just know. I just know it be him…”

  I could not wait for her to resume.

  “What did you see, girl? For the love of God, did you see anything?”

  Tyrone turned to me with a funny look on his face.

  “Don’t be an ass, Jones,” he said. “The girl’s blind.”

  “You see it, then?” Tyrone asked me when we were back in the street. He had washed his hands after tending to the other woman, the sick one, and he reeked of lye soap.

  “I see it,” I told him.

  “And what are you going to do about it?”

  “Will you be at your camp tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I will.”

  “I have business your way. With that sentry boy. The one that found him.”

  “You could come out in the morning.”

  “No,” I said, with the cold in my leg again, “there is another step that must be taken first. I will have to wait until Trenchard and Bates go off and leave Livingston to me.” We passed a cheap saloon all scented with damnation. “Tell me, Dr. Tyrone… might a man go to this Dr. La Bonta for anything other than…” I could not force the word out.

  “Syphilis?” Tyrone said. “Well, maybe for a bad drip. But not for anything else, I don’t think. You wouldn’t risk being seen at that address unless you had a severe case. Why?”

  I tapped my cane over the bit of planking that pretended to be a sidewalk. “Would you judge me a heartless man, Dr. Tyrone? From what you know of me?”

  The question seemed to surprise him. After a moment, he said, “Not at all. On the contrary. Though you can be a bit of a prig.”

  “Well,” I said, “tomorrow I must do a cruel thing. Though for a good end.”

  Tyrone laughed to himself. “You sound like a doctor.”

  Twas then we saw the corpse. Lying on her back she was. Just shy of a lamp, as if she had been drawn to it like a moth or a fly. Of course, we did not know she was dead at first. For drunkards there were plenty, of both sexes.

  Her clothes were disheveled, but there was no look of violence upon her, only of the slattern. Tyrone knelt to her quickly.

  “Don’t think I know this one,” he said. In hardly a second, he added, “Good Lord, she’s dead.”

  He went over her diligently, but rapidly. You could see the brigade surgeon in him then, the man who must work fast after the battle’s butchery, and make decisions without delay.

  “Is it one of those… atrocious diseases, Dr. Tyrone?”

  He laughed another small laugh, but looked under her eyelids before he answered me.

  “Would that it were,” he said. Standing up, he wiped his hands on a handkerchief. “That’s typhoid.”

  Chapter 12

  The photograph almost finished me, though I would not have traded it for an Orient of wealth.

  They were snickering when I come in that morning, although there was less of it from Livingston than the others. The lieutenant looked at me with hatred and fear.

  “Here, Jones,” Trenchard said, in that half-English accent of his, “what’s this now? You look like a rag-picking Jew in that uniform. If you’re going to work here, you should at least have the decency to come properly attired.”

  I went about my business, taking the portrai
t of my Mary Myfanwy from a canvas bag and setting it out on my desk. I had resolved to carry her back and forth with me each day, never to part from her. As to my uniform, I thought Mrs. Schutzengel had done a grand job with the mending, and my buttons were polished, as always.

  “Looks like that cow of a landlady of his took a rolling pin to him,” Bates said. He had ginger hair and a ginger voice. “You weren’t being improper now, were you, Jones? Not taking liberties?”

  I bent down to the safe to retrieve my work. They had not had the combination of me, nor had they asked.

  “Well, anyway, I suppose the uniform hardly matters,” Trenchard said. “I hear the good Captain Jones won’t be with us much longer. He’s going back down to woolens, where his sort feels more comfortable.”

  The safe was empty.

  “What’s this now?” I asked. “What’s this?”

  They all laughed. Trenchard said, “Ripley’s orders. Contents of your safe to be seized. Someone suggested that you were cooking the books, Jones. Though I have no idea who that could be. How’s Philadelphia, by the way? Didn’t you feel just a bit out of place? Although Matt Cawber’s hardly your better.”

  “Who has my papers?” I demanded.

  Unexpectedly, Livingston said, “Colonel Kempner. Down the hall. He’s got the charge now. We’re all going off.”

  I looked at him, at all of them. I would have liked to thrash them each. For there was anger in me, and spite.

  Trenchard smiled. “I’m for England, Jones. What do you think of that? To assist our ambassador. In time for the winter season. And Bates here’s to have a promotion. With an inspectorate of coastal artillery.”

  “I’m going back to Philadelphia,” Livingston said, “to oversee recruiting.”

  “Where do you think you’ll end up?” Trenchard asked me.

  “Go to the devil,” I told them, pardon my vulgarity.

  I fair roared down the hall, leaving my cane behind and staggering like a poor-born half-wit. But I had the sense to calm myself a shade and knock properly on the colonel’s office.

  When he called me in, the man was sitting over my papers.

  “Oh, Jones,” he said. “This is propitious. Listen… I don’t understand these accusations at all. It looks like you’ve been doing wonders…”

  “Sir, with respect, could you draw out the Cawber file? Cawber Steel and Iron.”

  He frowned and gave his whiskers an idle scratch. “I don’t remember seeing anything like that. Were you working on the Cawber account, too?”

  I rushed his desk as though it were a fort to be stormed. He let me leaf through the papers. Everything was in order. Except for the Cawber file. There was no trace of it.

  “What the devil’s the matter?” the colonel asked me.

  “This is a rotten business,” I said.

  The colonel sat back and gave me a pitying look. “Have you only just figured that out?”

  I heard their wicked voices before I opened the door, and, oh, they were laughing.

  “She’s an absolute witch,” Trenchard’s voice declared. “Why, she looks like a damned humpback.”

  “A witch and a warlock, the two of them,” Bates said.

  “He always makes me think of an ogre,” Livingston said, “or some evil dwarf from a storybook.”

  “Imagine meeting the two of them in the street,” Trenchard said, “you’d have to cover the children’s eyes. Why, I’ve never been so drunk that I’d—”

  That was enough. I threw open the door so the handle banged a hole in the wall.

  They were standing behind my desk. Trenchard had my wife’s photograph in his hand.

  “Put it down, you bastard,” I told him. “Put it down.” He gave me a close-lipped smile, held it out, and dropped it on the floor. The glass shattered.

  I leapt across the room. Oh, if ever a man flew, I flew then. He was too low a cur for the fist, so I slapped him so hard it drew blood. Then we all stood.

  “I… challenge you to a duel,” I said. Madness it was, but I was gone from reason.

  Slowly, Trenchard’s face composed itself. He brushed his lip with a handkerchief and grew a terrible smile.

  “Won’t that be jolly?” he said. “And I believe… as the challenged party… I have the liberty of choosing the weapons? And appointing the spot and the date?”

  The other two were not really with us. The heart of it beat between Trenchard and me.

  “What weapons you please,” I said. “And damn you.”

  He glanced at Bates, not bothering about Livingston. “Just below the obelisk will do, I think.” Then he lowered his eyes to me again. “Today? Last light?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  Livingston piped up. “Charlie, dueling’s against the law. And against regulations. They’ll stop it if they see. There could be trouble.”

  Trenchard’s smile stretched another half an inch. “Oh, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about anything. We’ll make short work of it.” He positively grinned. “Won’t we, Jones?”

  Trenchard left then, taking Bates with him. Twas hardly nine in the morning, but those two were scandalous when it come to a sense of duty. As usual, poor Livingston had to stay behind to keep an eye on me. The moment the door shut behind them, he got down on his knees and reached for the photograph.

  “Don’t touch it,” I told him. And I snatched it up myself.

  He stayed down there, doing the penance of picking up the glass. Without looking at me, he said, “Look out, will you? Charlie’s really going to give it to you.”

  “I can handle the likes of him.”

  “You don’t know Charlie Trenchard. He was always the champion. At Penn. Champion of just about everything. Rowing, boxing… and he’s the best sportsman in the city when it comes to shooting.”

  “To hell with him.” My speech had become a disgrace, I will admit.

  He looked up. But as soon as he found my eyes, he cast his own down again. “Jones… yesterday… when you saw me… I had been accompanying a friend… you understand…”

  “Go over to your chair, boy. And sit down.”

  He did as he had been told. Sitting with his hands dead in his lap and his eyes shy as a Musselman girl behind her veil.

  “Are you going to tell?” he asked.

  I let him sweat.

  “I’m going to be cured,” he went on. “It’s guaranteed one-hundred-percent effective. And I don’t have a bad case. I’ll be cured by spring.”

  There was a crease in the photograph, diagonal down through the shoulder, where it had slipped from the frame. I looked at my beloved. And she was beautiful, I tell you. So beautiful she was to me.

  There is a cruelty in men that would shame Satan. “For God’s sake, Jones. I’ll be ruined.” I could not help myself. “And your Miss Cathcart? What about her? What about her ruination? Have you no decency, man?”

  “I’ll be cured before the wedding,” he said. “Jones… please. I’ll do anything. My father’s a rich man. What do you want? Name your price…”

  Again, I let him sit and sweat. I looked out of the window. Twas not yet the end of November, but the sky was gray with the winter’s impatience.

  “I want two things from you,” I told him at last. “First, tell me you knew about Anthony Fowler’s plans to marry.”

  The boy had a colorless face to begin with, but now the very life faded from it. He was a thin dead thing in the gray light. A thin, shocked-to-death thing.

  “You do not need to speak,” I said. “Just nod your head. But do it now.”

  He nodded, ever so slowly: Yes. With his eyes lost. I looked beyond that room again, at all the sorrows I had come to know, at the follies of every one of us. “And Bates and Trenchard knew, of course.”

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Anthony told us. At first… we… just thought it was another one of his mad ideas. He was crazy, you know. Everything was some big cause…”

  “That’s enough for now,” I said.
“Let’s get on to your second task.”

  He looked at me fearfully.

  “I want you to sing for me,” I said.

  It would have been unreasonable to expect him to understand. But I had my purpose. I was going to go forward more methodically this time. To gather every shred of proof. Before I went strutting about trumpeting grand conclusions from here to the Rhondda.

  “I want you to sing me… say, your favorite Philadelphia songs. You need not be loud.”

  “Philadelphia songs?”

  “Something special. Something… only gentlemen from Philadelphia would know.”

  He still did not understand me. There is helpless, that look I remember on his face. “Songs?”

  “When the pack of you were together… all friendly like… didn’t you ever sing? For the pure joy of it, man?”

  He shook his head and his scanty eyebrows drew together. “We weren’t the singing sort.”

  “At your university perhaps… or a club… wasn’t there anything? An anthem, perhaps? Some convivial melody?”

  He brightened from black despair to charcoal. “When we went boating. Sculling. We had a boat-club song. And there was a fraternity song, too.”

  “Sing them for me, boy.”

  He looked at me as though I were tormenting him for no reason.

  “Sing,” I said. “And we’ll be quits.”

  Well, he would never have made a valley choir, I will tell you. Closer to contralto than tenor, he was, and like the droning of the bees in springtime, though with no honey at the end of it.

  “Again,” I said. This time I hummed along. I made him do it a third time, as well. To make sure I got it. Then I made him sing the other one.

  When we were finished, he sat there with his mouth open for a fly trap. He looked a proper moron, which is what his sickness might have made him, had he lived out the week.

  “Is that… all?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I told him. “That’s all.”

  I left Livingston then. Twas all a shambles. They had taken my work away, and made me a dupe. And I knew the duel business was foolishness, but I cannot tell you of the anger in me. You may insult me, and I will only think you the fool. But you will not bother my wife with your wickedness. I would have died to spare the woman the inconvenience of a rain shower. All reason fled me where she was concerned.