by John Jakes
Orry raised his eyebrows in a questioning way, at the same time nodding at the lights of Belvedere on the hilltop.
“The Hazard place?” The townsman fingered his chin; anyone visiting the only millionaire in Lehigh Station must be well off himself. “That’s a nickel more.”
Orry agreed with a nod. The open buggy ascended the steep hill. Suddenly a thin, fiery-white line appeared in the black sky above Belvedere. The streak of light fell toward the earth at an angle close to perpendicular. It vanished a moment after Orry realized it was a shooting star.
Scents of the warm springtime were quickly diluted by the fumes of the mill. Hazard Iron’s three furnaces cast a deep red light over nearby hillsides. Smoke billowed from each furnace, and the breeze bore the pounding rhythm of steam engines. A menacing sound, somehow.
Panic seized Orry as the driver deposited him in front of the mansion. He hadn’t thought to telegraph ahead. What if George had gone off somewhere?
An eager boy, breathless from running, answered the door. He was taller than his father and less stocky, but the resemblance was unmistakable.
“William, don’t you recognize me?” Orry removed his hat and smiled. The appearance of that smile in the middle of his tangled beard gave him a less forbidding look. William’s wariness vanished. He whirled around.
“Pa? Pa, come here. Wait’ll you see who’s at the door.” He stepped aside. “Come in, Mr. Main.”
“Thank you, William.” Orry entered and William took his bags. “You’re tall as a tree. How old are you now?”
“Thirteen.” Then he added, “Almost.”
Orry shook his head and walked into the dazzle of the lower hall. He heard a door open, then close on the second-floor landing. He didn’t bother to look up there because George was striding out of the dining room, his shirt-sleeves rolled above his elbows and his ever-present cigar in hand.
“Stick? Godamighty, I don’t believe this.”
He rushed forward. Constance came from the kitchen, equally astonished. George bobbed up and down on his toes, delighted as a little boy. “What the devil are you doing in Pennsylvania? And what’s that?”
Orry glanced down at his lapel. “I had to wear it to get through the enemy lines.”
George and Constance smiled at the little joke, but memories of larger events soon returned with crushing force. That showed when Constance hugged him and said:
“It’s so wonderful to see you. Isn’t the news from Sumter simply terrible?”
“Terrible,” he agreed. “George, I came about a matter of business.”
Once more George looked surprised. “I shouldn’t think there’s much business being done anywhere right now. I keep wondering how secession will affect mundane things: Bank transactions. Postal deliveries—ah, but we needn’t stand here discussing that. Are you hungry? We just finished supper. A couple of fine roast ducklings. There’s plenty left.”
“A little food would be welcome.”
“Then come along. My God, I can’t believe you’re here. It’s like old times.”
Constance put her arm around her tall son. She smiled again as the men walked toward the dining room. Orry did wish it could be like old times, but all he had seen on his journey told him the wish was an idle one. Never again would there be a day like that in 1842 when the two of them had stood at the rail of the Hudson River steamer with their hopes and illusions still intact.
They were old men now. Gray men. George’s hair was streaked generously with it. And they had somehow let their world be pushed into the chasm of war. The knowledge robbed the reunion of joy. Grim-faced, he followed George and his cigar to the dining room.
While Orry ate, they exchanged items of news. Billy had reached Washington safely with his new wife. “And with a slight wound,” George added. “Billy didn’t go into details, but I gather there was an altercation with a former suitor of Brett’s.”
“Yes.” Orry said no more.
“He’s been promised a few days’ leave. I’m expecting the two of them here at any time.”
“I’d like to see them, but I can’t wait. Things are chaotic at home.”
“Chaotic everywhere,” Constance said with a sigh.
George nodded glumly. “They say Virginia will secede tomorrow or the next day. She’ll pull most of the fence-sitters with her. All the border states may go. Feelings are running high”—he pointed his cigar at the rosette—”as you must have discovered.”
Orry finished his coffee, less weary now. But he had experienced no lifting of his spirits. He was glad to be with his old friend, yet he continued to feel this might be their last meeting for a long time.
After a silence, Constance spoke with obvious reluctance:
“Virgilia has come home.”
Orry almost dropped his cup. “From where?”
“That,” George growled, “we do not ask.”
“Is she here this evening?”
George nodded, and Orry recalled the sound of a door’s opening and closing upstairs as he arrived. Had Virgilia seen him?
Well, it didn’t matter. Even though he had taken some elementary precautions down in the town, he really hadn’t planned to make this visit a secret one.
“The poor creature’s destitute—” Constance began.
“It’s her own doing,” George snapped. “I don’t want to talk about it.” His wife looked away. To Orry he said, “Now, what kind of business could be important enough to bring you all the way up here? Don’t tell me Cooper’s ready to launch the big ship.”
“I wish that were the case. I don’t think she’ll ever leave the ways. That’s why I came and why I brought the satchel I left in the hall. It contains six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I’m sorry there isn’t more, but I could only raise that much.”
“Raise? Raise how?”
“Never mind. I didn’t want your investment capital tied up in the South and subject to confiscation. You didn’t loan it to us for that purpose.”
George frowned, glanced at his wife and then back to his friend. “Perhaps we should discuss this in the library.”
“Come, Billy,” Constance said, patting her son as she rose.
“Billy.” Orry smiled. “You call him that?”
She nodded. “When George’s brother is home, he’s Big Billy and this is Little Billy. It’s confusing sometimes, but we like it.”
William pulled a face. “Not all of us like it.”
“He’s right,” Constance said, teasing her son by keeping a straight face. “Stanley claims it’s undignified.”
“That is why we like it,” George said as he stood up. Orry laughed, spontaneously and hard. For a moment he could almost imagine the old times had returned.
“You say Billy’s wound is healing satisfactorily?” Orry asked as George shut the doors and turned up the light.
“So I’m informed. He and Brett are happy even if the country isn’t.” He rummaged for glasses and a decanter. “I think we need some whiskey.”
He poured two stiff drinks without asking whether Orry cared for one. Same old Stump, Orry thought. In charge of every situation.
“No, it isn’t at all happy,” Orry agreed as he took the whiskey. He drank half of it in three gulps. The warmth exploded in his stomach, soothing him a little. He fished for the key and unlocked the satchel he had brought from the hall. He opened it to show the large-denomination bills. “As I told you—that’s the reason I brought this.”
George picked up one banded bundle, struck speechless for a moment. Then he said softly:
“It’s a very honorable act, Orry.”
“The money’s yours. I think you deserve it more than the Montgomery government. Which, by the way, has been established with men of solid and conservative bent in charge.”
“So I noticed. Jeff Davis. Alec Stephens of Georgia—”
“The South Carolina crowd, including our mutual friend Young Hotspur”—at Orry’s reference to Huntoon, George grimace
d—“was virtually ignored. They aren’t pleased.”
“Why were they left out?”
“I’m not sure. I would suspect the conservatives thought them too extreme. Feared they’d detract from the respectability of the new government. In any case, I didn’t think you’d want your money confiscated by men whose principles aren’t exactly compatible with yours.”
George threw him a quizzical look. “Are they compatible with yours?”
“I’m goddamned if I know anymore, Stump.”
He slumped into a chair. His friend snapped the satchel shut, then seated himself next to the library table where the meteorite still rested. Almost without thought, George picked up the dark brown cone as he said, “Well, my assertion stands. You did an exceptionally honorable thing.”
Embarrassed, Orry saluted his friend with his glass. Then his melancholy smile faded, and he pointed to the rough-textured object in George’s hand.
“Is that the same one you found in the hills above the Academy?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. I remember some of what you said about it. Something about star iron having the power to destroy families, wealth, governments—the whole established order of things. I do believe we’re about to see that opinion tested. You spoke of honor. There’s damned little of it among individuals and even less”—his voice was low now, sardonic—“a flash or two every century?—among nations and political parties and groups crusading for their holy causes. But if war gets started soon, factories like yours will be responsible for eradicating even the little bit of honor that’s left. Cooper’s known it for a long time. He tried to make us listen. We refused. If there’s to be a war, and it appears there is, it’ll be the kind of new, total war Mahan predicted. Annihilating not just troops of the line but everything.”
He shook his head. His exhaustion, and the whiskey consumed so quickly, produced an odd, light-headed state in which thoughts flowed freely, as did the words to express them. “And what are the South’s resources for that kind of struggle? A vision of the future which is beginning to look pathetically outdated. Our rhetoric. Our slogans. And our soldiers.”
“Southern officers are the cream of the Army, don’t forget.”
“Aye,” Orry said, nodding. “And carrying out their orders will be a lot of tough farmers who can fight like the very devil, even though they never heard of Mahan or Jomini or, ironically, owned a single slave. But what are they up against? Your numbers. Your millions and millions of clerks and mechanics. Your infernal factories.” The next was barely audible. “A new kind of war—”
Orry was silent a moment. Finally he went on, “Regardless of how it comes out—regardless of which side dictates the terms and which side accepts them—we’ll all be the losers. We abdicated, George. We let the lunatics reign.”
He flung his head back and poured the rest of the whiskey down his throat with a single gesture. After a moment he closed his eyes and shuddered. Slowly and with great care, George replaced the meteorite on the table and stared at it.
Orry opened his eyes. He thought he heard a distant tumult. George stirred. “Yes, the lunatics reign. But what could we have done?”
“I’m not sure. Cooper was always cautioning us with Burke.” He struggled to remember and quote correctly. “‘When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall one by one—’”
On his feet suddenly, he reached for the whiskey. “I don’t know what the hell we could have done, but I know we didn’t ask the question soon enough or forcefully enough. Or often enough.”
He poured, drank two-thirds of a glass. George pondered what his friend had said. Then he too shook his head. “That’s such a simple answer. Maybe too simple. The problem’s incomprehensibly tangled. Sometimes I think one man is such a puny thing. How can he change anything when there are great forces stirring? Forces he doesn’t understand or even recognize?”
Orry’s reply was the same depressing truth he had admitted a few moments earlier. “I’m not sure. But if great forces and events aren’t entirely accidental, they must be created and shaped by men. Created and shaped by positive action and by lack of it, too. I think we had a chance. I think we threw it away.”
Inexplicably, his voice broke on the last words. He felt tears in his eyes. Tears of pain, of failure, frustration, and despair—he was damned if he knew all their wellsprings. For one blinding moment the friends stared at each other, stripped of every emotion save their realization of culpability and the fear it generated now that the slogan-chanting mobs were abroad in the North and the South. Abroad and marching steadfastly toward Mahan’s new apocalypse—
Mob. The word, and certain noises, shattered Orry’s dark reverie. He turned toward a window. He heard voices outside. Not a large crowd, but a ferocious one.
George frowned. “Sounds like a bunch of town roughnecks. What do you suppose they want?”
He reached for the velvet curtains. The sudden crash of the door spun him around.
“Virgilia!”
The moment Orry saw her, he knew why the mob had come.
67
OUTSIDE, THE TUMULT INCREASED. George pointed to the window, his voice mingling shock and rage. “Are you responsible for that, Virgilia?”
Her smile was sufficient answer.
“How the hell did they get here?” he demanded.
A rock smashed one of the windows. The heavy drapes kept the glass from flying, though it tinkled loudly on the floor beneath the curtain’s gold fringe. Orry thought he heard someone shout the word traitor. He brushed his hand across his mouth.
“I sent one of the servants to the hotel.” Virgilia looked at Orry. “Right after I saw him step through the front door.”
“In the name of God—why?”
Orry could have answered George’s question. And he was barely able to contain the revulsion the sight of Virgilia produced. She was only a few years his senior, but she looked twenty years older than that. Her print dress, faded from many washings, fit too tightly; she had gained at least fifteen pounds. But the weight was only one sign of a continuing deterioration. Her complexion was pasty, her eyes sunken. Wisps of hair straggled to her shoulders, and when she turned to answer her brother, Orry saw dirt on her neck.
“Because he’s a traitor,” she whispered. “A Southerner and a traitor. He murdered Grady.”
“He had nothing to do with Grady’s death. You’ve taken leave of your—”
“Murdered him,” she repeated, her eyes on Orry again. Those eyes glowed with a hatred so intense, it was almost a physical force. “You did it, you and your kind.”
George shouted at her. “The Federal troops killed Grady!” But she was beyond the reach of reason, and it was then Orry knew what it was that she had brought into the room. It was more than the odor of stale clothes or unclean flesh. It was the stink of death.
“I sent for those men,” she said to him. “I hope they kill you.”
Suddenly, like a bolting animal, she ran at the draperies hiding the broken window. “He’s in here!” she screamed. George leaped after her, grabbed her arm, and flung her backward.
She fell, landing hard on hands and knees. Without warning, she began to sob, great, mindless bellows of pain. Her unpinned hair hung like a curtain on both sides of her drooping head. Mercifully, it hid her madwoman’s face.
George eyed the drapes she had almost reached and opened. He pitched his voice low. “There is a local freight eastbound at eleven o’clock. I think it would be advisable for your own safety—”
“I agree,” Orry cut in. “I’ll go now. I don’t want to endanger your family. I’ll slip out the back way.”
“The hell you will. They probably have someone watching there. You leave this to me.”
George started toward the hall. Virgilia struggled to her feet. George turned back to look at her. “Virgilia—”
He was too overcome to continue. But he didn’t need words. His eyes and his reddening face conve
yed his feelings. She backed away from him, and he strode on to the front hall.
There, Constance, the two children, and half a dozen servants were anxiously watching the main door. Firelight shimmered on the fanlight above. The men outside had torches. Orry saw the door handle shake, but someone inside had been alert enough to shoot the bolt when the mob arrived.
“Who are those men?” Constance asked her husband. “What are they doing here?”
“They want Orry. It’s Virgilia’s doing. Take the children upstairs.”
“Virgilia? Oh, dear God, George—”
“Take them upstairs! The rest of you, clear the hall.” To Orry: “Wait here a moment.” As the servants scattered and Constance hurried the youngsters away, George disappeared into a wardrobe closet beneath the staircase.
He reappeared, struggling into his coat. On the lapel Orry noticed a patriotic rosette, smaller and much neater than his own. Over George’s arm hung a military-issue gun belt. From the holster he plucked an 1847-model Colt repeater.
He flung the belt on a chair and quickly examined the gun. “I keep it loaded and handy in that closet because I’ve had a few surprise callers—employees I’ve discharged, that sort of thing—”
He twirled the cylinder, then turned toward the front door. A stone crashed through the fanlight, spilling glass over a wide area. “Dishonorable sons of bitches,” George growled. “Follow me.”
His short, stocky legs carried him straight toward the door, which he unlocked with no hesitation. Orry was right behind, frightened yet oddly delighted, too. The years had rolled away, and they were in battle again—George in the lead, as usual.
George flung the door open with what Orry thought was calculated bravado. It had no effect on the mob that surged up the steps of Belvedere, shouting and cursing. Orry counted twelve to fifteen men armed with rocks and cudgels. “There’s the damned Southerner,” one screamed as Orry followed George onto the porch. “There’s the traitor.”
Another man shook a smoking torch. “We want him.”
George’s shoulders were thrown back. He looked pugnacious and powerful as he raised the Colt repeater and extended his arm. With the muzzle pointed at the forehead of the man who had just spoken, he thumb-cocked the gun.
