“And they weren’t?”
“My first husband was a banker who didn’t like to lend anyone money. The last was a U.S. Senator from Delaware. He had no passion for any cause aside from his own reelection.”
I could see why men would find her attractive. She wasn’t beautiful in the classic sense, being a very large woman with wide, child-bearing hips. But she projected a great life force inside her along with keen intelligence and an irrepressible vitality.
“What about children?” I asked.
Her face softened momentarily.
“I wasn’t meant to have any, I’m afraid.”
With those words, I confess that my heart went out to her.
“I want you to come back with me to Washington,” she said, after a pause.
I was too shocked to react at first.
“You don’t have to give me your answer now,” she said. “We can head back as soon as the storm moderates.”
“No,” I said, although it came out louder than I intended. “No,” I repeated more softly.
“You should know that I am a very wealthy woman,” she said, in a tone that implied she had earned every penny the hard way. “My estate in Georgetown is larger than this island. You would be far more comfortable there. Perhaps a fine surgeon …”
“I’m not going.”
She gave me a withering stare.
“According to Mr. Cabot, you haven’t left this island for more than fifty years. It’s simply incredible. You haven’t witnessed a single miracle of the modern age. Why you have probably never seen an automobile, much less an airplane!”
She was right about that.
“You’ve never had a real adventure in your entire life, have you?”
I let that pass. Of course, young people readily assume when they look at someone my age that just because it is our curse to be housed in these ancient husks, we were never once like them.
“Are you afraid? Is it a fear of the world out there beyond the sea?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t believe you,” she answered, her eyes boring into mine. “It’s something else, isn’t it? But what could possibly keep you here?”
“I live life the way I choose. Besides, I don’t like Washington,” I said.
“When were you there last?”
“In … 1863,” I said, finally.
“Abraham Lincoln was president then,” she said, her voice tinged with admiration at her own mention of his name.
“Yes,” I replied. In my mind’s eye I could see his mordant smile again, the good, homely face creased with wrinkles.
“I will be entirely truthful with you, Uncle,” Nancy was saying. “When my mother was dying some years ago, she expressed great concern about your welfare. I made a solemn vow to her that I would look after you in your …”
“Dotage? Well, I am very grateful for her concern, as well as yours, but I don’t need your help.”
“The truth is I was too involved in my work to even think about you until I received the wire from Dr. Boynton three days ago.”
“Don’t worry yourself about it. I’m sure you had more important things to think about.”
“I failed in my pledge to her miserably, and I do not intend to do so another day longer. You are my only living kin.”
“I do not need your help,” I repeated forcefully.
“But you’ll die out here alone,” she said.
“I’ll die the way I please,” I said.
“Then I will stay here with you,” she replied, with all the no-nonsense finality of the modern woman.
“You can’t be serious,” I said, realizing how they had finally won the right to vote.
“You will see just how serious.”
“You wouldn’t want to stay here, Nancy, and there are important reasons why I can’t go with you back to Washington. I understand the pledge you made to your mother, but I release you from it.”
“What reasons?” she asked, the cast of her jawline set in granite.
“Good reasons.”
“Then tell me.”
“I cannot.”
“Why?”
“For one thing I swore an oath that I would never tell a living soul. It was a matter of some importance that took place when I was in the army. And there were innocent people involved.”
“When did you sign this oath?” she demanded.
“In January of … 1863.”
She burst out laughing.
“Then they are all dead,” she said. “And if one of them has managed to survive this long, I doubt he can remember what he had for breakfast this morning, much less what happened all those years ago.”
Another bolt of raw pain knifed through my stomach. It was as if a molten ball was growing inside me, larger with each passing day, twisting inside me like a demented fetus.
“You were speaking about an oath you took sixty years ago … in 1863, I believe you said.”
“Yes. Well, it is a long story.”
A blast of wind shook the timbers that anchored my cottage to the cliff. In the ensuing silence, windswept snow began pelting the windows.
“Neither one of us is going anywhere for a while,” she said.
That was when I surrendered. She was absolutely right, of course. Who was still alive to know or care? The written record of everything that happened may still be buried in some secret archive in Washington, but the reports were probably destroyed long ago by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. When it was over, he made me swear in a written oath that I would never reveal what had taken place. But after more than five decades, who would even care?
“Did you ever hear of a Civil War general named Joseph Hooker?” I asked, over the violence of the wind.
“Isn’t he the one they named the red-light district in Washington after?” she said next.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s the one.”
I looked at the clock on the mantlepiece. It was already approaching midnight.
“I guess it really began on the night of General Hooker’s forty-eighth birthday party,” I said, about to start the tale with the discovery of Anya Hagel’s body near the contraband camp. Before I had concluded another sentence, Nancy interrupted me and politely demanded to know how I came to serve in the army and whether I had actually seen a battle.
So I started all over again, this time with my enlistment in the Twentieth Massachusetts. I briefly mentioned that I had, in fact, witnessed a battle at Ball’s Bluff. When I attempted to move on, she interrupted again, wanting to know everything about the battle and my part in it.
With Nancy, I discovered it was impossible to skip forward to the more important events without her constantly breaking in with new questions. So I finally ended up telling her everything that had happened to me, just as it had all occurred.
As the story unfolded, she sat gazing at me in rapt attention, periodically getting up to replenish the fire or to ask for another detail about something that piqued her interest. At one point she reluctantly suggested that I should probably go up to bed, but I shook my head. The truth is that sleeping for me had become no more than a one- or two-hour exercise, usually snatched in my study chair.
When I responded by suggesting that she must be tired from her journey and ready for bed herself, she stared back at me as if I was a madman and then told me to go on. As the hours passed, the wind grew ever louder, and the pounding of the sea against the cliff below my cottage began to sound like a constant artillery barrage. I was in the middle of telling her about the execution of Laird Hawkinshield, when my voice got hoarse.
“Would you like a mug of hot tea with lemon?” she asked, seemingly alarmed that I might have to stop.
“Yes,” I replied. When she brought it back, I laced it with dark rum, and it restored my voice.
Perhaps there was something therapeutic about finally telling someone the whole story because through that long night there was not one recurrence of my attacks. I had just finished telling
her about my wild horseback ride to the president’s mansion with Billy Osceola in full pursuit when I looked at the clock in the study and was astonished to discover it was four o’clock. I had been talking most of the night.
“You saved the life of President Lincoln,” she said, beaming at me with an expression of wonderment.
“Just for two years,” I said.
“Yes, but look what he accomplished during those two years … the Gettysburg Address, the appointment of Grant, the binding of the nation’s wounds, the freeing of the slaves … he became our greatest president.”
“So some would argue,” I replied, staring into the fire.
“How were they able to keep such an incredible story a secret?”
“Of the few who knew what really happened, no one wanted a scandal of such magnitude to be made public,” I said, “particularly President Lincoln, who was trying to rally the nation after our terrible defeat at Fredericksburg. It was Secretary of War Stanton who personally crafted the public statements that were issued by the War Department. Two days after the battle, it was sorrowfully reported that Congressman Hawkinshield had been shot and killed by a Confederate sniper while observing our attack from across the river. Similarly, it was announced that Sam Hathaway had committed suicide at the White House because of his despondency over the paralyzing wound he had received at Second Bull Run.”
“And that was the end of it?”
“As far as my part in it, yes. Of course a dozen newspaper journalists had witnessed my struggle with Sam at the awards ceremony and were searching everywhere for me. After recuperating for two weeks at the same house where Val had taken me to cure my laudanum addiction, I was told I must disappear. This island seemed like the perfect place for me to go.”
“Did General Hooker suspect what had really happened?”
“He may have harbored suspicions, but the general became quite busy right after the Battle of Fredericksburg. President Lincoln got rid of Burnside and gave Hooker command of the army,” I said.
“Well, he may have been a complete rogue, but I can’t help liking him. He was so honest about himself. I look forward to reading his memoirs.”
“He was one of the few senior generals who never wrote one … but he did get married.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said, with another explosion of laughter.
“It’s true. A few months after the war ended, he married a rich woman from Cincinnati.”
“And lived happily ever after?”
“Right after the ceremony, he suffered a paralyzing stroke,” I said. “From then on, he had to use both hands just to hold a pen.”
“How sad,” said Nancy.
“She died soon after, leaving him all her money. Rumor has it that when he died in 1879, it was in the arms of a young woman. I would like to believe it’s true.”
“What about his friend Sickles?” she asked.
“General Sickles had his right leg blown off by a cannon shell while commanding the Third Corps at Gettysburg. When they took him off the field, he was smoking a cigar and holding his leg under his arm.”
“He died?” she said, as if afraid to ask.
This time I laughed.
“Yes,” I said, “thirty years later. In the meantime, he was made our ambassador to Spain and had a torrid love affair with Queen Isabella.”
“Incredible,” she said.
“When you are back in Washington, you can visit his right leg. He gave it to the army medical hospital there to be put on permanent display.”
“I have many more questions for you,” she said. “But since I was a little girl, I have always tried to save the best present for last.”
“You consider my story a present?”
“A treasure,” she said. “But I am going to make your breakfast now.”
After making me another mug of tea, she headed back into the kitchen. Before I had taken the first sip, another paroxym of pain burned through my stomach like sulphuric acid, and I doubled over in the chair. Unlike my previous attacks, this one kept coming in constant waves, one racking spasm after another. I couldn’t stop myself from crying out.
“Oh, dear God,” cried Nancy, seeing me writhing in the chair.
I heard her moving in the kitchen, and looked up to see her returning with a hypodermic in her hand.
“No,” I protested. “No opiates.”
I was too weak to resist her. With practiced precision, she rolled up my shirtsleeve and smoothly injected the smoky liquid into my arm. Almost immediately, the raw nerve-endings below my belt began to dull to a throbbing ache.
“I’m putting you to bed,” she declared a few minutes later, helping me to my feet and slowly assisting me upstairs to my room. She found a pair of clean pajamas in the chest. After I got into them, she eased me into the bed and covered me with a feather tick.
“I think the storm is moderating,” she said, glancing outside into the sea glaze.
The snow clouds did appear to be finally lifting, although the wind was still gusting to at least fifty knots. The cliff below my cottage is almost two hundred feet high, and the waves were still breaking halfway up its face.
“I’m curious about something,” she said, when I was settled under the covers, and she was sitting next to me. “Did you ever learn why Val Burdette came to rescue you at the hospital?”
I nodded.
“It was because of an old classmate at Harvard, Charlie Wilson. He was in the Twentieth Massachusetts with me. We were together at Ball’s Bluff. Val was a friend of the Wilsons before the war. After Charlie heard about my troubles with laudanum in the hospital, he asked Val whether there was something he could do to help.”
“Is Val still alive?”
I shook my head. Closing my eyes, I could see him then, just as he was when I awoke to find him standing over my bunk in the Glen Echo chicken shed. It was hard to believe that I would never see him again in this world.
“No, the great mastodon is no more. But while he was alive, he never stopped tilting at windmills. After the war it was Val who exposed the Credit Mobilier scandal. He also broke the ring responsible for the New Orleans lottery mess. He went from one cause to another … most of them lost causes … but he never wavered. After Theodore Roosevelt became police commissioner of New York, he brought Val in to investigate the pervasive corruption behind the awarding of public contracts. One night in 1896, he supposedly disappeared on the Staten Island ferry. According to the police report, he accidentally fell overboard, and his body was swept out to sea.”
“Oh,” she said, covering her mouth with her right hand.
“He was murdered, of course,” I said.
She didn’t ask any more questions after that. I fell asleep with her watching over me like a protective lioness. When I awoke again, she was standing in front of the painting of Amelie that hangs above the mantlepiece in my bedroom. She heard me stirring in the bed and turned to face me.
“Amelie was truly lovely,” she said, coming over to sit down again next to the bed.
“I wondered why you hadn’t asked about her.”
“I told you before,” she said softly. “I always like to save the best present for last. But I must confess that I was afraid to ask.”
“We were never apart for more than a day in almost sixty years,” I said.
“You lived here together all that time?”
I nodded.
“What did you do?” she asked, shaking her head as if the whole idea was preposterous.
“I taught at the school.”
“You have a school on this rock?”
“One of the oldest in the country. A one-room school. It’s been here in one form or another since Capt. John Smith arrived here in 1614,” I said, with unconcealed pride. “Of course I only taught for forty-two of them.”
“And Amelie?”
“Like most of the island women, she did many things. In our first years here, she worked in the store, then as a chambermaid at
the inn. She also knitted and did laundry for the summer guests.”
“It sounds … it sounds very tame after what you both lived through.”
“This is a place where life slows down to the rhythm of the tides and the ocean and the weather. It was here that I learned to share my heart with a woman of courage and grace. No one knew who she was or what she had been. Here she was judged solely for her own strengths and weaknesses … here she found peace.”
“I am so very glad of that.”
“Like you, she could never have children. She found joy in caring for the island children.… She bloomed just like the wildflowers in summer. And the islanders loved her back.”
Nancy’s eyes had filled with tears.
“No.… She found peace in this life … you can see it in that watercolor. It was done by a painter named Winslow Homer when he was working out here some years ago.”
“So your love endured,” she said, as if that was something truly rare.
“I pray, if you haven’t already known it, that someday you will have the chance to love someone so fully and completely that you never feel alone again. To always share a passion to be with that one person.… Amelie and I are together even now … She lives within me … We are eternally bound up together.”
Nancy probably thought I was delirious.
“She died seven years ago,” I said. “Her ashes are over there by the window. When I am gone, we will be scattered together in the sea a few miles from here.”
I thought I saw sorrow then in Nancy’s eyes.
“There is no reason for you to feel sorry for us,” I said harshly.
“I don’t feel sorry for you. To the contrary …”
She stood up from the chair and slowly walked back downstairs. A few minutes later, I heard her pumping water out of the cistern as she began making breakfast. It felt good to hear the familiar sounds of someone moving about the kitchen, followed by the aroma of freshly brewed coffee wafting up the stairs.
Now that I had told her the whole story of what had happened to us, I felt a strange sense of release, of finally putting it all to rest. I, too, was at peace. From the painting across the room, Amelie gazed down at me, forever captured with that sweet enigmatic smile.
Unholy Fire Page 33
