The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You’re in awfully good spirits considering you’re about to become a widow.”

  “Perhaps you’ll win.”

  “The only way that could happen is if I shot at something else and hit him by accident. No statue is safe when I take aim at a bird just released from a trap.” He tapped the driver’s seat with his stick. “Stop here. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “Go on, driver. You know very well I can’t walk far in these heels.”

  “Stop, I said. I’m doing the walking. You’re riding back to the hotel. I don’t know why I let you talk me into bringing you this far. Women don’t attend duelling matches.”

  “I don’t see why not. We’re the cause of most of them.”

  The driver slowed the horses to a walk and twisted in his seat. “Which is it?”

  “Stop.”

  “Go. I won’t get out, Johnny, and you’ll be late for your appointment. What do the blasted rules of chivalry say about that?”

  “Oh, drive on. The least you could have done was put on something less conspicuous. When the sun comes up you’ll stand out like a field of lillies.”

  “I should hope so. It’s such a dour day. Where do you want to lunch?”

  “Buckingham Palace. Or on top of the Albert dome, if you prefer. I’ll have wings by then.”

  “Perhaps we’ll dine in the suite. Ah! Here we are. Good luck, Johnny.” She presented her cheek.

  He took her face between his palms and kissed her on the lips. “Good-bye.”

  As he struck off through the wet grass toward where the party awaited him, she opened her reticule and repaired the damage to her makeup. Then she swung open the door.

  “You’d best stay here, missus,” said the driver. “You never know which way them balls will fly.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” She stepped down and lifted her hem clear of the mud. As she approached the slight rise where the men stood—Johnny, the aggrieved husband, his second, the man who’d volunteered to attend Johnny, and a tall, sallow-faced fellow carrying a doctor’s bag—the sun broke over St. Pancras and the rain stopped. She folded her parasol.

  The movement caught the attention of the men on the rise, who turned their heads her way and began gesturing animatedly.

  “. . . absolutely irregular . . .”

  “. . . rules . . .”

  “. . . no restrictions . . .”

  “Yellow cad.”

  This last, from the husband, reached her ears all in one piece, unbroken by the open distance. Johnny made no response, but as no one approached her she assumed the controversy of her presence was settled.

  Johnny selected a long-barreled pistol from a box in the hands of the husband’s second and made a show of testing its balance and accuracy, raising it to shoulder level and holding it at arm’s length, sighting along it; bits of business straight out of the third act of The Count of Monte Cristo. The husband, obviously unfamiliar with the production, seemed hesitant at this display of expert knowledge, but then Johnny spoiled the effect by dropping the pistol at his feet. A delay followed during which the second extracted the ball and wadding and damp powder, cleaned and oiled the weapon, and reloaded it. The sun by this time was clear of the distant roofs, and April adjusted her position.

  At last the curtain rose on the action. Johnny and the husband, a burly brute with the erect bearing of an experienced campaigner, stood back to back with pistols elevated and started pacing.

  “One . . . two . . . three . . .” Johnny’s second called the count.

  April loosened the drawstring of her reticule, dangling from her right wrist.

  “. . . seven . . . eight . . .”

  A cloud crept in front of the sun. April took her lower lip between her teeth and held it until it passed.

  “. . . ten.”

  The duellists turned and leveled their pistols. April jerked open her parasol. The white lace caught the sun like a sudden puff of smoke. The husband, startled, jerked his trigger. Smoke shot out the end of the barrel. A yew three twenty feet behind Johnny stirred its branches.

  A brief silence followed, ending when Johnny’s second cleared his throat. “You may take your shot, sir.”

  Johnny swayed, and April worried he’d been hit after all. Then he stiffened his stance, pivoted wide to the right, and fired at an uninhabited section of the heath.

  April exhaled and tied up the reticule with her little Remington inside.

  Johnny stood with arms akimbo among their packed trunks and valises. “Why don’t we extend our stay a few days? Paris has waited for us this long. It will still be there at the beginning of next week.”

  “You’re saying that only because you’re the social lion this week.” April, seated at the secretary, circled an item in the Times. “As if surviving a ridiculous stunt carries any sort of merit.”

  “It was gallantry. I could have struck the fellow down but chose mercy instead.”

  “That was luck—and my parasol. You said yourself the only way you could hit him was if you aimed elsewhere.”

  “The parasol may have been unnecessary. Anyone so easily distracted is no kind of marksman.”

  “He’s wounded three men in four years. And you’re forgetting duelling is outlawed in England. We should have left yesterday.”

  Someone knocked at the door. Johnny said, “It’s too early for the porter.”

  She directed him to step into the bedroom and went to the door to inquire who it was.

  “New Scotland Yard, Madam.”

  The door to the bedroom drew shut with a thump. She undid the latch.

  The little man in the hall removed his bowler and introduced himself as Inspector Gargan. He was accompanied by a constable in uniform. “We’re here to ask your husband to come with us,” he said. “He must answer for what took place at Hampstead yesterday morning.”

  “My husband has left for America. He took the boat train to Gravesend two hours ago.”

  His moustaches twitched, increasing his unfortunate resemblance to a rodent. “What ship, please?”

  “The Dolley Madison, bound for Boston. Here, he’s circled it.” She turned briefly, picked up the Times from the secretary, and handed it to him. It was folded to the shipping column.

  He glanced at the mark she’d made. “Why did you not accompany him?”

  “We’ve separated. He was unfaithful to me, and nearly killed another man for his transgression.” Her lower lip quivered.

  “Are all those traps yours?” He peered past her.

  “Yes. I’m going on to Paris. Search the suite if you like.” She stepped aside from the doorway.

  The constable tugged at his helmet and took a step forward. Gargan stopped him with a gesture. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll wire Gravesend. Perhaps they’ve delayed departure. Thank you very kindly, madam. I’m sorry for your trouble.”

  Johnny came out after they’d left. His face was flushed. “That was taking a chance.”

  “Not really. They’d have searched the place on their own if I hadn’t offered.”

  “What if they took you up on it?”

  She smiled. “Then you’d have had your chance to play Sidney Carton. A ‘far, far better thing,’ and all that.”

  “You’ve bought us nothing but time, and little of that. They’ll be watching the hotel and the boat train and the dock.”

  “True.” She sighed. “Well, we smuggled banknotes and double eagles out of half a dozen towns out West. I’m sure we can smuggle you across the Channel.”

  The S.S. Dover Castle sailed with the tide for France. Inspector Gargan, his constable, and others were on hand to watch the passengers ascending the gangplank. The inspector lifted his bowler as April passed, her hat secured with a scarf tied beneath her chin to protect her hair from cinders drifting from the stacks. She nodded in response.

  Her luggage arrived at her stateroom once the ship was in motion. She tipped the porter, twisted the latch on the door, and unstrapped the largest
of the two trunks she’d held out from the hold. Johnny, in shirtsleeves and wrinkled trousers, unfolded himself from inside and stretched, cracking his joints. “I thought for certain they’d mixed up the instructions. I paid for first class, not baggage.”

  “Listen to you complain. You didn’t leave half your London wardrobe for the chambermaid to find in the hamper. I’ll need to start all over again in Paris, and I expect you to pay for it.” April took a skirt from the other trunk and hung it in the closet.

  “In that case, we shan’t afford more than a few days in Rome.”

  “What of it? All anyone ever goes to see is the Coliseum and the Parthenon.”

  “Pantheon, dear. The Parthenon’s in Athens. Really, you should read something besides the plays of Cornelius Ragland.”

  “Be grateful I read the Times.”

  13

  While Johnny and April were taking in the wonders of the Old World and the authorities of Europe, Cornelius Ragland was taking the waters in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and writing The Tragedy of Joan of Arc, for which he hoped to be remembered. He spent an hour each morning parboiling himself in mineral water with steam pouring off it, then returned to his hotel room for a light breakfast in bed and spent the day filling sheets of foolscap, using his tray for a desk and stopping frequently to consult the thick research books stacked on the nightstand, all of them bloated with narrow rectangles of paper marking particular passages for review. In the afternoon he took tea only, saving his delicate appetite for supper in the hotel’s excellent restaurant. He had a preference for poached salmon or boiled beef with steamed vegetables and bread pudding for dessert. Then to sleep. It was a most virtuous existence among surroundings sinfully decadent.

  Cornelius was the son of a postmaster in Baltimore and had passed a civil service examination to clerk in the same post office before his health forced him to seek a position in the gentler climate of Missouri. He was asthmatic and suffered from chronic exhaustion, which a Baltimore physician had misdiagnosed as consumption, which had exempted him from the draft. A more cosmopolitan practitioner in St. Louis had corrected the record and recommended Hot Springs. However, accommodations were dear in that popular place for recuperation and recreation, and at the rate he’d managed to put money aside from his salary as private secretary to Peter Argyle, manager of the St. Louis branch of the Gateway Bank & Trust of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver, he’d calculated that it would take him five years to afford to stay there one week. Thanks to his association with the Prairie Rose Repertory Company, he had a suite for the season in the best hotel in town.

  He was, he confessed to himself, a naïf, and still a bit shocked at how easily he’d been corrupted; but a perceptive observer of his companions and especially himself. He assigned whatever skills he had as a writer to that source. Johnny Vermillion held him in thrall. The disgracefully immoral young man from Chicago possessed many of the qualities Cornelius admired, and which he incorporated into the heroes of the plays he cribbed from the work of superior writers: charm, comeliness, audacity, athletic grace, elegant manners, and the sort of personality that drew men to him as well as women. These things gave him confidence Cornelius would never have, and the modicum of arrogance that was shared by most leaders of men. There was no telling how high he might have risen in politics had he followed his father’s example.

  A conscience he had not; and this, too, was a source of envy for a young man who was burdened with rather more than his share. He had witnessed far too much perfidy in banking to feel any sympathy toward the institutions from which the Prairie Rose stole, but that wisdom did nothing more than modify his own feelings of guilt. In the world that had come into being since the War of the Rebellion, he considered it more of an affliction than a virtue, and cursed himself as a weakling.

  Much of Johnny had made its way into Cornelius’ villains as well, although he doubted the man who had inspired them recognized himself there. It was a revelation how many traits knights and brigands had in common, at least when they were practicing their chivalry and treachery in front of painted canvas.

  Cornelius could not be Johnny, as much as he tried to be, through the characters he employed in his plays. Failing that, he found it enough to be near him, and to consider him his friend. He had no others. The head of the company treated him with more warmth and regard than any man he’d known before, beginning with his stern, disappointed father. He praised Cornelius’ writing, gave him courage and patient advice when his turn came to commit robbery—armed robbery, more terrible and exhilarating than his one experiment in the pleasures of the flesh, with a prostitute who’d accosted him on the levee in St. Louis—and in all things celebrated him as an equal.

  Cornelius Ragland loved Johnny Vermillion.

  His feelings toward the others were more ambivalent.

  Mme. Elizabeth Mort-Davies intimidated him with her mannish height, large hands, and top-lofty ways, but on stage was a versatile character actress whose range permitted him to embroider heavily upon Dickens’ grim dowagers, Shakespeare’s dithering nurses, Dumas père’s fawning duchesses, and the long chain of sculls, dames, palm readers, hags, fishwives, nannies, landladies, daubs, frumps, flounces, and queen mothers who rattled and clanked through the distaff side of the British and American theater, to say nothing of the hordes of androgynous sailors, footmen, grave diggers, friars, churls, and sergeants at arms for which her statuesque build and husky contralto suited her. She could also, in a pinch, as when April Clay’s less celebrated talents were wanted elsewhere (in seldom-traveled towns where a female of any description might pass as the Jersey Lily), play the heroine for one brief scene staged artfully; or more convincingly, the romantic lead. Still, he preferred to keep his distance, and to channel whatever suggestions he felt appropriate during rehearsals through Johnny, who proved a patient and persuasive director. The man’s abilities appeared to be without limit.

  Cornelius held Major Evelyn Davies in genial contempt, but found him the perfect blithering foil for Johnny’s urbane swashbucklers, as clever at parlor banter as they were at swordplay and fisticuffs. When the time came to announce the ambassador from the Court of St. James, or the father of the bride, or the bishop who’d made one trip too many to the chamber where the sacramental wine was stored, the fat fellow with the preposterous white handlebars knew no peer. He was also an unscrupulous part-padder and stealer of scenes, and without Lizzie close at hand to still his unpredictable impulses, tended to boast about things best kept inside the company, at a level intended for the back row of the balcony. He made Cornelius exceedingly nervous, both as a playwright and as an accomplice to numerous felonies, each punishable by many years at hard labor. He enjoyed the Major’s outlandish stories about the London stage (which he may or may not have experienced at firsthand), but was contented to leave his keeping to Johnny and the inestimable Madame.

  April Clay was not so easily summed up by language; and language was all he had.

  In the lexicon of melodrama, she seemed to be equal parts guileless maiden and scheming harpy—although a more passive and sweet-natured she-beast would have been difficult to find in the history of theater. She seldom raised her voice, never uttered so much as a mild oath, and apart from that tense hour outside Salt Lake City when Lizzie was thought to have been captured and their own freedom was in question, the playwright had never seen her more than mildly upset. She did not insist, she did not assert, yet there were times when she appeared to be leading the Prairie Rose, and not Johnny. Sex, of course, was the instrument, but there were no secrets in the close society of a company touring the primitive reaches of the frontier, with its shared dressing rooms and tight hotel quarters often separated by no more than two thicknesses of wallpaper, and Cornelius was certain the two were not intimate. But a woman whose merry glance could make a man’s heart miss a step, and whose touch on his arm when he reached up to retrieve her train case from an overhead rack could turn his knees to water, could enslave him without unpinni
ng her hat.

  He was writing St. Joan with her in mind, and it would be one like no other. He could picture her neither listening to any voice outside her own nor succumbing to any flames not of her kindling. In Philadelphia, the authorities would shut down the opening-night performance before the end of the first act; in Wichita, where such Joans were Saturday-night staples in every saloon and bawdy house, the play might run six weeks.

  It wouldn’t, of course. With a sigh, Cornelius Ragland remembered that his was no ordinary repertory company, and that its concept of theater was more sophisticated than most county sheriffs and committees of public vigilance were prepared to embrace.

  He sipped his tea, which had grown cold, and trimmed his pen, which had caked. Just thinking about Johnny, the Davieses, and April made one feel as if he’d been creating vivid characters for hours, when in fact he hadn’t touched nib to paper.

  The editor of the Eureka Daily News had a talent for caricature, and had enlivened his column on last night’s presentation of The Diplomat Deposes with an amusing and accurate pen-and-ink sketch of the fictive elder statesman, resembling a tulip bulb wearing a silk hat, and the erect and somewhat equine object of his passion. At the moment, copies of the sketch torn from the paper were clutched in the hands of Wendell Zick, city marshal, and three of his deputies as they watched passengers board the Northern Pacific bound for San Francisco. They were eager to interview Major and Mme. Mort-Davies in connection with a number of silver snuffboxes, gold toothpicks, and a fine buffalo coat reported missing from the theater cloakroom, and the matter of an unpaid hotel bill.

  Traffic was heavy, with the loggers down from the hills to shake off the effects of the long winter hibernation in the hellholes of Barbary with their accumulated pay, and the Russians remaining from old Fort Ross hurrying to meet relatives for Easter services in the Orthodox church, and all of them impatient to get away from the mud and one another. Several times, Zick and his men had had to lunge to pull likely candidates out of the stream and compare their faces to the features in the illustration. None of those thus delayed took the inconvenience with good grace, and the press of those coming up behind led to collisions, harsh words in a number of languages, and the intervention of officers to prevent fistfights and possibly a knifing or gunplay. Zick himself swore a German oath when a tall Russian in a fur hat and full beard ran over the marshal’s instep with a wicker bath-chair bearing an old woman piled with rugs and wound to her white hair with scarves, a carpetbag in her lap. The couple continued on its way without pausing until a pair of porters stepped down from a car to help hoist woman and wheelchair aboard. Eureka, a rough place when Zick first came to it, but open and friendly, had since the completion of the spur to San Francisco turned as sullen as any of the Gomorrahs in the East.