Words Spoken True: A Novel

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “But Beck, Stanley the same as threatened Father’s life.”

  “Young Jimson ain’t got it in him to shoot nobody.”

  “Who knows what Stanley might do,” Adriane said.

  “I reckon that’s true enough, but you still ain’t going out on them streets today. Not with the way feelings is running so high among the fellers.” He looked at her a moment before turning to take his hat off the rack. “If it has to be done, and I reckon it does, I’ll go find the boss and let him know what’s going on.”

  After Beck left, Adriane paced back and forth across the printing room, pausing every time she passed the window to peer out at the men hurrying past, shouting back and forth at one another and waving guns or clubs in the air. The looks on their faces frightened Adriane. Still, in spite of her fear, Adriane wished she could be out there to see what was going on for herself. It might be bad, but it would be news. Not just news. Headline news. Four-inch headline news. Plus she needed to see her father with her own eyes to be sure he was all right.

  Adriane jumped at the sound of banging on the back door. Beck had made her lock all the doors after he left, something they never did when the boys were running in their reports. For a long moment, Adriane stared at the gun Beck had left on the table, but she didn’t pick it up. It had to be one of the boys, she told herself as she rushed toward the back door.

  Like a shadow, Duff slipped inside the minute she cracked open the door. “Miss Adriane, I was getting worried you wasn’t coming.” His eyes were wide, and he was panting in ragged bursts as if he’d run a long way.

  “Are you all right, Duff?” Adriane reached out to touch a bright smear of blood on his cheek.

  “Ain’t nothing but a scratch.” Duff roughly rubbed away the blood on his cheek. “But things are turning bad out there, for a truth.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “The Know Nothings have took over the streets and are jumping on anybody that don’t look right to ’em and that’s everybody but them.”

  “There are always fights on election day.”

  “This ain’t the normal bit of fisticuffs. I’m not so sure a body could even call them fights. Leastways not fair ones. It’s a dozen of them to one of us.”

  “Us?”

  “You know, the Irish and Germans,” Duff said. “Last I seen them, the mob was headed for Armbrewster’s brewery, but they won’t be forgetting us Irish. So I just came back to be letting you know I couldn’t be running in no more stories. I’ve got to get on home and see that no harm comes to me mother and sisters.”

  “Of course, Duff, but are you sure it’s really that bad?”

  “I don’t want to be worrying you, but they’re like animals out there. I ain’t never seen the likes of it before.” His eyes got even wider.

  “Did you see Mr. Darcy?”

  “Aye. He’s with the mayor. The last I seen them they was trying to talk the men into going home, but the whole thing’s past words now. Too many of the men are wanting to throw their torches. Fires are burning all along Shelby Street already.”

  “Can’t the police stop them?”

  “Ain’t no use depending on the watch.” Duff made a sound of disgust. “Them I seen were shedding their coats and jumping right in with the rest of the crowd.”

  “Surely not all of them.” Adriane didn’t want to believe his words.

  “Maybe not, but them that aren’t can’t fight the whole crowd. Nobody could fight this bunch. They ain’t even letting the firemen through to put out the fires.”

  “This can’t be happening, Duff. Not here. Louisville is a civilized town.”

  He stared at her with his wide, dark eyes a moment before he finally said, “Not tonight, Miss Adriane. Not tonight.” Then as if to back up his words, in the distance they heard a resounding boom. “They must’ve torched the brewery.”

  Adriane listened and knew he was right. Whatever was going on out on the streets couldn’t be stopped. She looked at Duff, and though she wanted to keep him there with her where she could be sure he was safe, she pushed him toward the door instead. “Be very careful, Duff.”

  “You don’t need to be worrying none about me, Miss Adriane. I can keep from being seen.”

  As if to prove it, he slipped out the back door and practically melted into the shadows against the buildings. He was gone from her sight in seconds, but she kept standing there staring out the open door until the old dog came up and stuck his nose against her leg. She reached down to touch the dog’s head. “You’d best hide, Mr. O’Mallory. It’s a night for everyone to hide.”

  Gunfire sounded in the distance, and as the last traces of daylight gave way to night, an unnatural glow lit up the sky to the east. Even before she shut the door and headed back toward the front of the building, she knew what she was going to do. Who knew when Beck would return? She had to see with her own eyes that her father was safe.

  She grabbed her father’s dark gray hooded rain cloak off the rack and wrapped herself in it. It was hot, but at least no one would recognize her. She had watched Duff. She would do the same. Stay in the shadows that were growing deeper in spite of the streetlamps beginning to come on. And if there were no shadows, the cloak would be shadow enough.

  As she opened the front door and looked out on the street that was deserted now, she remembered her promise to Beck to not leave the building for any reason. She stood there, hesitating, while a burst of gunfire tattooed the air in the distance and then flames were leaping for the sky only a few streets away.

  She stared at the sparks flying up above the buildings. The Herald offices were in that direction and Adriane thought Blake Garrett could be his own eyewitness to that story. He could simply step out on his doorstep and take it all down. Of course he wouldn’t be there. He would be down where the news had been happening all afternoon. If the Know Nothing mob saw him, they’d have no mercy after the way he had blasted them in his editorials the last few weeks.

  At the thought, Adriane’s heart froze inside her, and without really thinking about what she was doing or why, she went back in the pressroom to pick up the gun and slip it down into the deep pocket inside the cloak. When she went back out on the street, fire alarms were clanging as the firemen rushed toward the blaze. She remembered what Duff had said about the men on the street not letting the firemen through, and she felt a chill as she looked back at the flames rising above the buildings. The whole block could burn.

  Dear Lord in heaven, protect us from ourselves.

  She looked to the east where the sky glowed ever brighter and wondered if perhaps the entire city might burn. Then she pulled the hood of the cloak well over her face and began walking toward the sounds of sporadic gunfire. Smoke drifted through the streets, seeming to carry with it the roiling, grumbling noise of the mob somewhere up ahead.

  At the first sight of a gang of men pushing along the street waving their guns and clubs and shouting, Adriane shrank back into a recessed doorway to hide. The roar of their voices and the looks on their faces as they rushed past left no doubt they were looking for trouble. Adriane hardly dared to breathe for fear one of them might notice her there.

  At last when they were well past, she eased out of the doorway and, staying far back, trailed after the men. There looked to be maybe a dozen of them before a couple of men came out of a building to join up with them. Then three more ran up from a side street. Without pausing, the group absorbed the new additions and kept going in a determined rush forward toward the even greater roar ahead.

  Suddenly Adriane was terrified of this feeling that had captured the city and was leaping like a live thing from man to man. The group of men in front of her made her think of a flooded river picking up more water as it rushed along until it jumped its banks and started knocking down everything in its path.

  A small carriage pulled by one horse burst out of a side street directly in front of the men. With a yell that sent chills down Adriane’s back, they moved in front of the ca
rriage. The horse skittered sideways and stopped. The driver slashed with his carriage whip first at the horse and then the men closing in around him.

  Without Adriane really seeing how it happened, the carriage overturned, spilling out the driver and taking the horse down. In a panic the horse kicked and struggled against the tangled harness. The men stood back, and the driver wasted no time disappearing down one of the side streets. A few of the men started after him, but turned back at the edge of the deeper shadows in the alley. Behind them the other men were slashing open the carriage seats as if they thought gold might be hidden in the stuffing.

  When they didn’t find anything, one of the men touched the stuffing with his torch. Flames shot up at once, and Adriane guessed that the oil from the lamp on the side of the carriage had spilled out. The horse, still on the ground trapped in his harness, whinnied with terror. Some of the men laughed. But then one of the men threw his jacket over the horse’s head and another swiftly cut through the harness lines. The horse found its feet and raced wildly away while the men moved on down the street.

  Adriane lagged farther behind them now, scurrying from shadow to shadow. Beck was right. The street was no place for her tonight. No place for anyone who wasn’t out to find trouble.

  And yet she didn’t turn back toward the offices. She kept following the men almost as if she felt the same pull they did toward the shouting, screaming mass of men ahead. Smoke was thick in the streets now, more smoke than just that from the burning carriage cushions. Suddenly the carriage behind her was engulfed in a whoosh of flames, lighting up the air around her, but none of the men looked back.

  Instead they began shouting and running toward something in the street ahead. Their words floated back to Adriane.

  “Irish pup.”

  “Trying to get away.”

  “Grab him.”

  Adriane barely caught sight of the young boy as they yanked him out of the shadows. She did see the boy’s hat before the men surrounded him. A cap like Duff’s.

  She wasn’t sure how she got to the middle of the group to stand in front of the boy. Perhaps the prod of a gun barrel made the men instinctively give way. Whatever happened, one minute she was watching the backs of the men as they prepared to punish the boy for being Irish, and the next she was staring into their faces, the gun in her hand pointed at the nearest man’s chest.

  “Stand back,” she ordered.

  “Look there! It’s a woman,” one of the men shouted, and Adriane realized the hood of her cloak had fallen back in her push through the men.

  “Rush her,” a big man in the front said.

  Adriane turned the gun toward him. “Do you want to be the body the others step over to get to me and the boy?” She felt no fear, only cold anger.

  “Aw, she probably can’t shoot,” another man said.

  “Don’t count on it.” Somebody spoke up from the back of the group. A familiar voice. “That’s Wade Darcy’s girl. If he taught her to set type, he might’ve taught her to shoot.”

  Adriane’s eyes searched through the men, but she saw no face she recognized. She couldn’t worry about that. She had to be sure she held the gun steady with her finger caressing the trigger while she stared at the men closest to her. She shifted the gun slowly and deliberately, pointing it at first one of them, then another.

  “Which of you wants your name in the paper tomorrow morning?” she asked. “Man shot while attacking a woman.”

  There was a roar from the next street over. “They’re burning Quinn’s Row,” the man in the back of the group shouted. “We’re going to miss it all.”

  The big man in the front suddenly turned away from Adriane. “I didn’t come down here to shoot no woman.”

  “Or be shot by one,” the man in the back said. He split away from the group and began running. The other men barely glanced back at Adriane and the boy as they followed.

  The boy wasn’t as old as Duff. His eyes were enormous in his face as he looked at her and said, “Thank ye, missy. Our mothers must have been praying for the both of us tonight.” Then without waiting for her to say anything, he slipped away from her and was gone.

  Adriane was still standing there on the street not sure what to do next when she heard footsteps running back toward her. She didn’t even have time to raise the gun again before the man grabbed her and spun them both into the shadows.

  “What in heaven’s name are you trying to do? Get yourself killed?” Blake Garrett gripped Adriane’s shoulders and glared down at her.

  “Blake,” Adriane said weakly. She had to fight the urge to lean against him as she realized it had been his voice at the back of the group. She should have known. “Once more it appears I have reason to be grateful to you, sir.” She tried to pull away from him so that he wouldn’t feel the way she was trembling, but he kept his grip tight on her.

  “Don’t trot out your society manners for me, Adriane. I want to know, and I want to know now, what you think you’re doing out here on the streets in the middle of this rabble.”

  A little fire pushed through her at the tone of his voice. “I don’t know that it’s any of your concern, Mr. Garrett,” she said, her voice tight and controlled. “But if you must know, I thought the boy might be Duff, and I could hardly stay hidden in the shadows and let those animals have him without a fight.”

  “So you thought you’d just let them have both of you.”

  “I daresay, given time, they would have listened to reason.” She tried to make her words sound more confident about that than she felt. He was right. She couldn’t have held off the men.

  “There is no reason this night. Only madness,” Blake said. “You shouldn’t be out here at all.”

  “I know,” she admitted. “But I must find Father. I have to warn him.”

  “Warn him about what? I can assure you he knows about the riots. Men from his party of choice are the ringleaders, the ones who got this mob going.”

  “Father didn’t want any of this to happen.” Adriane’s throat felt so tight she had to force out her words. “He would never advocate this kind of mayhem.”

  “Maybe not, but surely you’ve been reading his editorials.” Blake looked away from her toward the noise of the crowd. “It’s evident the men on the streets have been as well, and now the Irish and Germans are paying.”

  A spattering of gunshots sounded a few streets away. “The Tribune’s not to blame for this.”

  His eyes came back to her. “Can you be so sure?”

  She met his look fully and after a minute whispered, “No.” She felt dangerously close to tears, and she wanted nothing more than to be back at the offices putting together a normal front page full of nothing but the dullest stories.

  All of a sudden, his look gentled and he folded her into his arms. “I’m sorry, Adriane,” he whispered into her hair. “I have no right to accuse you or the Tribune. We’re all to blame.”

  It felt so good there in his arms, so safe. The noise of the shouting crowd faded away. Even the gunshots sounded distant and unimportant. Nothing mattered but his arms holding her, his voice soft in her ear.

  He went on. “But I’ve been half out of my mind ever since I saw you marching beside Stanley Jimson in the parade, and then tonight when I saw you surrounded by those men, I didn’t know what to do.”

  Stanley’s name brought back in a rush why she was on the streets. Why she had to find her father. Beck may have thought Stanley’s threats were just words. Adriane knew better.

  She jerked away from Blake to ask, “Have you seen him?”

  “Who? Stanley?” All the gentleness disappeared from Blake’s face.

  “No. Father. I must find him.”

  Blake’s face was still hard as he answered, “I saw him earlier with Mayor Barbee’s group when they stopped the mob from burning the church at St. Martin’s.”

  She grabbed hold of the front of Blake’s jacket, and when she spoke, she was shamelessly begging. “Could you help me find hi
m? Please, Blake. I’ll do anything.”

  20

  Anything? You shouldn’t make idle promises, dear lady, especially not on a night like this.” Blake stared down at Adriane for a long moment, expecting her to turn her eyes away. When she didn’t, he said, “You don’t love Stanley Jimson.”

  “No,” she said. “It would be better if I did.”

  “That could never be better,” Blake said.

  Adriane dropped her eyes from his. “You don’t know everything.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “There’s not time now.” She looked back up at his face again as she pleaded, “And I know I have no right to ask your help, but I have to find Father. Please, I beg of you, Blake, help me.”

  He stared down at her. Even as he agreed to go with her, he knew it wasn’t what he should do. He should take her straight back to the Tribune offices and lock her inside. She wasn’t safe out here. Nobody was safe on the streets this night.

  He’d seen riots before. He’d been witness to how hatred could ignite and spread like a flash fire through a group of ordinary men, burning away their consciences and turning them into a massive instrument of destruction, but those other times he’d only been a reporter scribbling notes about what was being destroyed. This time he was one of the forces behind the riot. His words. His editorials. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the mob might turn on him if he was recognized.

  He was ready to take that chance as he stayed out on the streets. What was happening might not be news he wanted to happen, but it was news. So with his hat pulled low over his face, he had been doing his best to blend in with the fringes of the crowd while watching the havoc.

  Then he’d seen Adriane, her head thrown back defiantly as she stood between those men and that poor Irish kid, and his heart had almost thudded to a stop. She’d never looked more beautiful to him than she did standing there trying to stare down the men. She couldn’t have done it, not even with the gun. The men had been like a pack of hungry wolves with the scent of a cornered doe in their noses.