Pure Sin

by Susan Johnson

  “You should win with him.” It was remarkable, she thought, how her smile could be detached from emotion.

  “I’m planning on it.”

  “If you need to leave earlier for the camp—”

  “No,” he quickly interjected.

  “You’re sure? I don’t want to feel guilty about a foolish wager.”

  “I’d like to stay longer if I could.” His voice was soft as velvet.

  Her smile held her old assurance. “We’ve another four hours, anyway.”

  “Four and a half,” he said with a grin. “What kind of chocolate should I order this time? Chocolate with ambergris?”

  “Are you trying to seduce me?” Her voice was fluty with heated allure.

  “Of course not,” he murmured with a faint smile. “Only comfort you.” Brillat-Savarin referred to ambered chocolate as chocolate of the unhappy, for its pleasant capacity to allay suffering of any kind. “Or would you prefer Russian chocolate?”10

  “I’ll have both,” she softly replied. “Will you feed it to me here or in bed?”

  He gazed at her for a moment, his dark eyes heated, covetous, as though he’d not touched her before, as though he were a hot-blooded youth offered his first woman. “I’ll see what you like best,” he murmured, remembering where he’d indulged her in the days past. How he’d fed her chocolate mousse in the chair by the window one afternoon while she’d pleaded for his touch; how he’d offered the little meringue-and-almond chocolate drops to her as she lay on the sofa—in exchange for her kisses. And the Dobos torte, eaten in bed at first, had reminded them both of Budapest and later of a particularly memorable bath.

  “You’re too good to me,” she whispered, a sweet, restless coquetry in her voice.

  “Why shouldn’t I be? You’re peerless delight.”

  She smiled. “For four and a half hours more, at least.”

  “No,” he quietly said, sensitive to the impression she’d made on his life. “For always in my heart.…”

  But Flora eventually stayed an extra half day because she couldn’t bring herself to leave, no more than Adam could let her. And when she finally forced herself to go, they both found their last good-bye difficult.

  “I’m sorry,” Adam quietly said, holding her lightly in his arms, leaning against the door so she couldn’t walk away for a few moments more.

  “It’s too soon,” she softly replied, understanding his cryptic words as if he’d gone on at length about the disarray of his marriage.

  “After marriage to Isolde,” he ruefully admitted, his voice very low, “it might always be too soon.” In his darkest moods he wondered if the scars of his marriage might never be erased.

  The reasons for it.

  The day-to-day misery of it.

  The combative residue of it.

  He’d never be completely rid of Isolde.

  “I understand,” Flora said, sensible, pragmatic, a rational focus having long determined the direction of her life. “Thank you for everything,” she said with a smile. Reaching behind her, she gently removed his hands from her waist and stepped back.

  Adam sighed at the inevitable and then returned her smile. “You’re entirely welcome,” he softly said. “And thank you, too, for a rare pleasure. Lucie and I will miss you.” He pushed away from the door and released the latch so it swung partly open.

  Flora’s smile was less easy suddenly, for she would truly miss them both. But her life had never revolved around any man; she had no intention of bartering her independence for that dependency, no matter how poignant her feelings of loss. “Good-bye, Adam,” she whispered.

  And picking up her valise, she walked out of the room.

  Chapter Fourteen

  With Meagher’s death and the return of Governor Green Clay Smith, the Montana militia was reorganized. All commissions issued by the late acting governor Meagher were reduced to complementary ranks. And though Governor Smith issued a call at the end of July for volunteers for a new six-month enlistment, when General Terry, commander of the Department of Dakota, visited Helena and conferred with him, Terry suggested that nothing had occurred in Montana to justify the alarm over hostile Indians.

  He expressed the opinion that the troops should be mustered out.

  It had all begun with political ambitions as the major impetus, augmented by the greed of the volunteers. A small successful Indian war would have restored Meagher’s reputation as a bold military leader and placed his name prominently in the eastern papers, while the possibility of bounty had driven the troops. But Meagher’s enemies had begrudged him that celebrity and put an end to his ambitions when he ostensibly fell overboard into the Missouri River the night of July I and disappeared forever.11

  By the last days of July it was clear the danger was over, and Adam’s clan was safe once again from the unpredictable forays of the drunken volunteers. Immune to the political and financial machinations only beginning now that Governor Smith was back in the territory and Meagher’s faction was in disrepute, Adam set his affairs in order with his clan and ranch crew and left for Saratoga. In their overland journey to the railhead at Cheyenne, his party avoided the hostile Lakota ranging the Powder River country, a full complement of scouts accompanying them as protection for Lucie should difficulties arise. From Cheyenne his horses traveled in Adam’s specially appointed stable car, his own private; quarters housed in a second railcar, with grooms and cooks and nursemaids for Lucie seeing to the ease of their journey.

  They reached Saratoga the first week in August along with twenty thousand other summer visitors descending on the country village for the August season at the Spa. Every hotel was filled: the large Union Hotel, the equally gigantic Congress Hall, the exclusive Clarendon, where Adam settled his entire party, and all of the numerous other hotels down to the smallest boardinghouse far off the fashionable thoroughfares.

  The leisurely pace of social activities never varied: breakfast between seven and nine; a stroll to any of the score of springs for a drink of the waters; a morning concert, then a light luncheon served in the larger hotels to a thousand guests by a staff of up to 250 waiters; another walk after the meal to settle one’s food; some visiting on the lengthy piazzas lining the fashionable promenades; an afternoon concert with any number to choose from, since each hotel invested in its own musicians; and the de rigueur event of the day at four—the carriage procession to the nearby lakes. At night numerous balls, informally referred to as hops by the initiated, offered amusement while men with other interests could gamble their fortunes in the discreet private clubs where women were barred from the gaming rooms.

  It was an unhurried schedule of eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, walking, reading, riding, dancing, nonstrenuous activities catering to pleasure and requiring at least five changes of costume during the day so the ladies could see and be seen in the full glory of their wardrobes and jewels.

  Adam and Lucie spent their days at Horse Haven, the old course turned training track, overseeing their horses’ practice runs for the August race season. Saratoga offered the best racing in the country, drawing from as far away as the West Coast visitors and horse owners anxious to see the prime thoroughbreds in America pitted against one another during the thirty-day season.

  The first track, built in 1863, had been immediately superseded by a larger course and grandstand the following year to accommodate the intense interest of the Spa visitors. Ten thousand spectators attended the daily races, with betting beginning at nine each morning and the first race starting at eleven. The purses ran from $350 to $1,000, but the real money was in the stakes betting and the auction pools, where private bets ran up to $200,000 a day and the auction pools went up to astronomical heights. The millionaires who brought their stables to the small upstate village each August bet as heavily on their bloodstock as they did on their cards each night at the casinos. The demimondaines, beautifully dressed and carefully chaperoned—for Saratoga still espoused a strict tradition opposed to sin—were dis
played like so many colorful flowers in their fine carriages. For where best to meet the wealthiest of men but at the track?

  Unlike Newport, the other summer retreat for the wealthy that sheltered its inhabitants behind the exclusive barriers of multimillion-dollar villas, Saratoga offered entrée to anyone with the price of a hotel room. So a mélange of eastern financial titans, western bonanza kings, transportation tycoons, statesmen, society dilettantes, and sporting members of the turf aristocracy rubbed shoulders with Middle America on the verandas, at the springs, at meals in the enormous communal dining rooms, in the gambling emporiums, and on the shady walks. And the colorful array of humanity, symptomatic of America’s melting-pot culture, where every man with drive and gumption had an equal opportunity to make his fortune, came together once a year at the Spa to offer a remarkable spectacle—the democratization of elegance.

  However, there were those wealthy visitors who preferred their own residence, and to accommodate them, enormous mansions lined the tree-lined streets, elaborate concoctions and whimsies in the newest eclectic styles: French châteaus, Swiss chalets, Italian villas, Dutch Renaissance manors, Greek Revival temples in white clapboard, and Victorian Gothic concoctions ornamented with towers, turrets, nooks, crannies, and filigreed details like frosting on a cake. The sprawling mansions celebrated with a theatrical flair the obscene wealth of their owners.

  In contrast to the new flamboyant “cottages” erected with the nouveau riche wealth accumulated by profiteers during the Civil War, more sedate homes of the old moneyed families, built in the Federal style of previous decades, sat with stately calm and uncluttered facades, pristine white and grand behind wrought-iron fences and flowering borders. In such a home Flora’s Aunt Sarah had lived each August since Saratoga had been only a sleepy village known for its medicinal waters. And so she dwelt again the season of 1867, a widow for the past ten years, an avid horse breeder, and a remarkably youthful-looking woman at fifty.

  Sarah Gibbon knew Adam Serre as a fellow turf aficionado, having met him in 1863 when the first races were run at Saratoga. They weren’t close friends but social acquaintances, as were many of the wealthy horse breeders who congregated at Saratoga each summer.

  The Comte de Chastellux had brought his daughter this season, Sarah noted with a mother’s eye for children—the girl had his coloring and fabulous eyes. But he’d not brought his wife, she also noted. Rumor had it his marriage was more unorthodox than most.

  In the height of the summer it was so hot on the plains, Four Chiefs’s village had moved into the mountains to escape the sweltering temperatures. Other clans had also moved to the higher elevations, and much visiting occurred between the various camps. The men and women raced their horses, competed in games, gossiped, and gambled, and at night everyone danced under the starlit sky. It was a time of good cheer and familial contacts. And Flora and her father were kept busy recording the events of the summer camp, describing the various games and dances, observing the courtship rituals, deciphering the complicated substructure of the Absarokee family and clan relationships.

  Flora submerged herself in her work again, but thoughts of Adam wouldn’t be dislodged from her mind regardless of how much she devoted herself to her studies. She understood there were limits to love affairs, boundaries one didn’t defy. Intellectually, she understood the parameters.

  One simply said, “Thank you. It was nice,” and stored away the memories like the remembrance of a perfect sunny day or a fine ride or the feeling when a marvelous new discovery was revealed in one’s research.

  But this time logic failed to withstand her longing.

  And her father knew.

  One afternoon, seated in the cool shade of a mountain pine, George Bonham and Flora watched the daily races taking place on a grassy flat below them.

  “You could go to Saratoga too,” the earl quietly said, his gaze on the galloping horses.

  Flora’s head abruptly turned from the race scene. “Is it so obvious?” she said, her eyes trained on her father.

  “Only because I know you,” he replied, turning to look at her. “And Henry said you fought back tears on the trip back to camp after leaving Helena.”

  “Thank you for having him wait for me. I didn’t realize I was so transparent in my designs that night of the Fisks’ party. And if Alan hadn’t been with you, I would have told you the truth. But he’s so pious, I was afraid he’d have an apoplexy if he heard my plans.”

  Her father smiled. “Alan looks at the world with too much solemnity, but he’s a superb artist, so he’s allowed his puritan idiosyncracies.” The earl, as a product of his class, and heir to one of the oldest, wealthiest families in Yorkshire, understood aristocratic privilege to an infinitesimal degree. “Even without hearing your conversation with Adam at the poker table, I could anticipate the outcome. Your sudden interest in traveling with James came as no surprise.”

  “I was planning on hiring guides to accompany me back to camp. And Adam had men he could call on to guide me.”

  “I preferred having you travel with someone I trusted.”

  “You’re very dear, Papa,” Flora softly said, and then she exhaled in a lingering sigh. “I’m feeling out of my depth for the first time in my life. It’s a very strange sensation.”

  “Perhaps you’re in love. It makes one less pragmatic.”

  She looked at him with a curious alarm. “Do you think so? Maybe it’s simply ennui,” she dissented, answering her own question. “I feel so rudderless, in limbo … utterly without direction. It’s very odd. I find myself considering Adam Serre from every conceivable posture—as friend, mere acquaintance, lover—none of the classifications offering the slightest possibility of a workable future.” She sighed again. “But going to Saratoga won’t solve anything.”

  “You might discover love can’t be dealt with in an empirical manner.”

  “Why not, Papa, when everything else responds to the methodology?”

  George Bonham gazed at his daughter for a moment, wondering if their preponderantly scholarly existence had blinded her to the magical qualities of life. “I don’t know,” he quietly said. “I only know the experience is breathtaking, rare, and if possible—not to be missed.”

  “Adam may not agree.” Tracing an idle finger through the fallen pine needles littering the grass, she added, “I think love is very low on his list of priorities.”

  “But you don’t know for certain, and since Sarah has plenty of room at her summerhouse, why not find out?”

  “Is love like the search for the source of the Nile, with the trip alone being worth the effort?”

  “Or like Ludwig Ross’s theory of an Aegean civilization that demanded years of exploration to substantiate. The answers aren’t always readily evident.”

  “He may not want to see me.” She was resisting, the thought of chasing after Adam Serre anathema to her liberated soul.

  “Well, Sarah certainly will, and,” her father went on with an indulgent smile, “I expect numerous men at Saratoga will find your presence gratifying.”

  “It’s a very long way to travel for a man.” Especially, she thought, for a man who was so in demand he needed a dance card to keep track of the females in his life.

  “But not so far to go for love.”

  “Papa, you’re a romantic,” she exclaimed with a modicum of surprise.

  “I knew love once with your mother, and if you could be as fortunate, I’d wish you that same happiness. You’ve been miserable since Helena. Admit it.”

  “But, Papa, how demeaning to chase a man halfway across the country. He’s much too arrogant already. I couldn’t.”

  “Have you ever considered he may feel flattered?”

  “Have you ever considered he may have a dozen women with him? You know how the men arrive at Saratoga and rent the private cottages at the hotels for their fictitious nieces or cousins or secretaries.”12

  “Such possibilities didn’t stop your mother. She arrived at my
hotel room in Boston on the second day after we met, with her maid in tow and a packed valise, drove away from my suite the woman I was entertaining, and informed me she was going to marry me.”

  Flora smiled at the image of her petite mother raising havoc with her father’s hotel guest. “And you agreed?” She’d never heard the details of their elopement.

  “I had to. She wouldn’t leave my room. She threatened to have her father and brothers sent for. And I was mad for her even though I had a fiancée in England. So you see,” he added with a smile, “how indiscreet your heritage.”

  “What ever did you tell your fiancée?”

  “I sent word of my marriage and told her I’d honor the financial agreements of our marriage settlement, which tempered her anger considerably. She found herself another husband very soon.”

  “And you and Mama sailed off around the world.”

  “Within the week. Her family was amenable to my title; I didn’t have need of her fortune—a positive in her Yankee family’s view of me, and I loved her. Everyone came to a happy understanding.”

  “So you think I might have some success barging into Adam’s hotel room and repeating Mama’s drama,” Flora said with a grin.

  “You’re considerably more reserved than your mama; I don’t expect you’ll precisely follow her scenario. But at least go to Saratoga and resolve your emotional tumult.”

  “I’ve never considered myself reserved.” She had in fact viewed herself as wholly unconventional. “I wish I’d known Mama better,” she softly said, her memories of her mother the nebulous images of a six-year-old.

  “Your mama was very young, very beautiful, very spoiled, and the love of my life. You remind me of her every minute of every day, although you’re not in the least spoiled.” He spoke with the unconditional love of a father who wished his daughter every happiness life could offer, and if Adam Serre was the means to that happiness, he would see that she had him. “Now consider, darling,” he went on, “we can have you in Cheyenne in five days.”