The Pale Blue Eye

by Louis Bayard

  “Thank you,” he replied, in that dry ironical way of his. But all the same, there was something rising in him, something not so ironical—demanding to be heard.

  “Mr. Landor,” he said at last.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  He must have thought it would be easier to say it if he turned away, but it was still a torment.

  “I wish to note that if—if the exigencies of this business have rendered me . . . which is to say, if I ever, out of intemperance, impugned your—your integrity, or your competence, then I’m—I’m very . . .”

  “Thank you, Captain. I’m sorry, too.”

  Which was as far as we could go without fatally embarrassing ourselves. We nodded. We shook hands for the last time. We parted.

  And I left the guardroom just in time to see that drummer beating the reveille. The first rumbles of life were coming from inside the barracks. Young men were tumbling out on hand and knee, kicking their bedding and seizing their uniforms. Beginning again.

  * * *

  Mrs. Marquis, since leaving the icehouse, had taken the signal step of not retiring to her bed. The pressure of grief had forced her upright. She refused every offer of escort and wandered in and out of the assembly yard on missions held close to her bosom. So it was that a pair of third classmen, coming back from sentinel duty, were accosted by a hard-grinning woman in a gray monk’s robe, who asked if they might help “raise her children.” It would take just a minute, she assured them.

  There was, in fact, no thought of recovering the bodies anytime soon. That would be a labor of days. And until then, there was other work to be done. Work, that was Dr. Marquis’ answer to grief. In his last official act before submitting his resignation, he even bound the wounds of Cadet Fourth Classman Poe. Upon which he took the young man’s pulse and declared that he’d lost no more blood than a physician would have drawn in the course of a normal bleeding. “Might have been the best thing for him,” announced Dr. Marquis.

  The doctor himself looked in excellent health. His face had never glowed so redly. Only once did I see it lose color: when he passed his own wife in the assembly yard. They shrank from each other, yes, but found each other, too. Their eyes met; their heads angled together as if they were old neighbors passing in the street. And in that crossing, I thought I could glimpse the future that lay in store for them. Not a brilliant future, no. Dr. Marquis’ conduct would bar him from military postings, and though he might (in light of past service) escape court-martial, the taint of his past would trail him even into the civilian world. They would never realize Mrs. Marquis’ dream of returning to New York—they’d be lucky to find a practice on the Illinois frontier—but they would survive, and they would seldom if ever talk of their dead children, in public or in private, and they would treat each other with grave courtesy and would wait, with all manner of calm, for the closing of Life’s account. So, at any rate, I imagined.

  Poe was put to bed in Ward B-3, the same ward that had housed both Leroy Fry and Randolph Ballinger. In his normal cast of mind, he might have thrilled to the chance of communing with dead spirits—might even have been moved to scrawl a poem on the transmigration of souls—but on this occasion, he fell dead asleep and didn’t wake, I was later told, until halfway through afternoon recital.

  I myself managed some four hours of sleep before one of Thayer’s lackeys came pounding on my door.

  “Colonel Thayer requests an interview.”

  We met in the artillery park. Stood there among the mortars and siege guns and field pieces: trophy guns, many of them, seized from the British and inscribed with the names of the battlefields. And what a noise they’d make, I thought, if we fired them all in unison. But they sat in stillness, and the only sound was the flag, halfway down its staff, snapping in the wind.

  “You’ve read my report?” I asked him.

  He nodded.

  “Do you . . . I don’t know if you have any questions. . . .”

  His voice came back low and hard. “None, I fear, that you can answer, Mr. Landor. I want to know how I can possibly have dined and fraternized with a man all these years, known his family nearly as well as my own, and never fathomed the depths of their distress.”

  “That was by design, Colonel.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  We were both looking northward now. To Cold Spring, which rippled like a fable through the furnace vapors of Gouverneur Kemble’s foundry. To Cro’ Nest and Bull Hill, and further on, the blurred seam of the Shawangunk Mountains. And sewing them all together, the river: flat and puckered with winter light.

  “They’re gone,” said Sylvanus Thayer. “Lea and Artemus.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll never know why they did all they did. Or even what they did. Where one crime began and another ended, we’ll never know.”

  “True,” I allowed. “Although I have ideas on the subject.”

  He bowed his head an inch. “I am all ears, Mr. Landor.”

  I took my time about it. Truth be told, I was just getting a fix on the business myself.

  “Artemus did the cutting,” I said. “I’m sure of that; I saw his work up close. A born surgeon if I ever saw one, even if he did make a . . . well, it was—it was a difficult business with his sister. . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d wager Artemus was also the one who dressed up as an officer. He’s the one, probably, who shooed away Private Cochrane from Leroy Fry’s body.”

  “And what of Lea?”

  Lea. The very sound of her name made me hesitate.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m fairly certain she was at Benny Havens’ that night. With Artemus. I assume she was following Poe to see if he was in league with me. And having found he was . . .”

  She did what? That I still didn’t know. She might have resolved to be rid of him. Might have sped up her plans for that very purpose. Or she might have decided to love him—love him even more for betraying her.

  “It must have been Lea,” I added, “who planted the shell outside Artemus’ door. To draw suspicion away from her brother. She may even have planted the heart in his trunk just to keep us guessing.”

  “And the mother and father?”

  “Oh, Dr. Marquis wouldn’t have been any use to them. They wanted only silence from him. As for Mrs. Marquis, well, she may have held open a door or lit some candles, but I can’t imagine her holding down a strapping young cadet or stringing a noose round his neck.”

  “No,” said Thayer, running a finger along his jaw. “That, I presume, was the job of Mr. Ballinger and Mr. Stoddard.”

  “Things look that way, surely.”

  “And that being the case, I can only assume that Artemus killed Mr. Ballinger to prevent from alerting the authorities. And that Mr. Stoddard ran away rather than become the next victim.”

  “You could assume that, yes.”

  He peered at me as though I were the evening sky. “You’re cagey to the last, Mr. Landor.”

  “Old habit, Colonel. I do apologize.” I gave my arms a shake. Kicked my boots together. “In the meantime, we’ll just have to wait to hear what Mr. Stoddard has to say on the subject. If we ever find him.”

  Maybe he heard that as a reproach, for his voice took on an armored tone. “We would be most obliged,” he said, “if you would meet with the emissary of the chief of engineers when he arrives.”

  “Naturally.”

  “And make a full report to any official court of inquiry.”

  “Of course.”

  “Otherwise, Mr. Landor, I declare your contractual duties fulfilled to the letter, and I hereby release you from your contract.” He wrinkled his forehead. “I trust that won’t displease you.”

  Or Captain Hitchcock, I thought. But held my tongue.

  “At the very least,” added Thayer, “I hope you won’t object to accepting our thanks.”

  “Oh, I wish I deserved them, Colonel. There are. . . .” I rubbed the side of my head. “Ther
e are lives that might have been saved if I’d been a little sharper or faster. Younger.”

  “You saved at least one life. Mr. Poe’s.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not that he will necessarily thank you for it.”

  “No.” I shoved my hands in my pockets, rocked on my feet. “Well, never mind. Your superiors should be pleased, Colonel. The jackals in Washington will soon be in retreat, I hope.”

  He made a close study of me then. Deciding, maybe, if I meant it or not.

  “I believe we’ve won a stay of execution,” he said. “A stay only.”

  “Surely they can’t shut down the Academy over—”

  “No,” he answered. “But they can shut down me.”

  Not an ounce of protest. Not a drop of sentiment. He was stating it as flatly as if he’d read it in one of his newspapers that morning.

  I won’t forget what he did then. He leaned his face into the bell-shaped muzzle of a brass eighteen-pounder and . . . held it there for a good half minute. Daring it, I thought, to do its worst.

  Then he rubbed his hands lightly together.

  “I’m embarrassed to confess, Mr. Landor, that in my vanity, I once considered myself indispensable to the Academy’s survival.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I believe it can survive only without me.” He nodded slowly, drew himself a little taller. “And it will, I think.”

  “Well, Colonel,” I said, extending my hand. “I hope you’re wrong about the first part.”

  He took my hand. And, no, he didn’t smile, but his mouth twitched into an angle of wryness.

  “I’ve been wrong before,” he said. “But not about you, Mr. Landor.”

  We stood outside the eastern entrance to Benny’s tavern. Stood a yard apart, staring clear to the other side of the river.

  “I came to tell you it’s over, Patsy. The job’s all done.”

  “What of it?”

  “Well, we can—we can go on, that’s what. As before. And nothing else matters, it’s finished, it’s—”

  “No, Gus. Stop. I don’t care about your job. I don’t care about the damned Academy.”

  “Then what?”

  She looked at me for some time in silence.

  “Oh, it might as well have been you, too, Gus. They made your heart a stone.”

  “Stone can—stone can live.”

  “Then touch me. Just once, as you used to.”

  As I used to. Well, that was an impossible task. She must have known it, too, for there really was regret in her eyes when at last she turned away. She was very sorry to have troubled me.

  “Good-bye, Gus.”

  Before another day had passed, Private Cochrane brought all my clothes and belongings back to the cottage in Buttermilk Falls. I smiled a bit to see him salute me—Lieutenant Landor! He yanked the black bay’s reins, and in another minute, the Academy phaeton had disappeared over the brow of the hill.

  For the next few days, I was alone. Hagar the cow still hadn’t come back, and the house didn’t quite know me as before. The Venetian blinds, the string of dried peaches, the ostrich egg—they all stared as though they were trying to place me. I walked warily through the rooms, taking care not to alarm anything, and I stood more than I sat, and I went for walks, only to scurry back at the first suggestion of wind. I was alone.

  And then, on the afternoon of Sunday, December the nineteenth, I received a visitor: Cadet Fourth Classman Poe.

  He blew in like a rain cloud and stood there darkly on my threshold. And when I look back on it now, I can see it was a threshold.

  “I know,” he said. “I know about Mattie.”

  Narrative of Gus Landor

  41

  And now, Reader, a story.

  In the Highlands, there dwelt a young maiden, no more than seventeen. Tall and lovely, graceful in line, sweet in repose. She had come to this remote clime to help her father live and had instead watched her mother die. The two of them were left to spend their days in a cottage overlooking the Hudson, where it was no hardship making the time pass. Father and daughter read to each other and played at cyphers and puzzles and went for long walks in the hills—the girl had a strong constitution—and led an altogether quiet life. Not too quiet for the maiden, who had in her pockets of hard silence, not to be penetrated by anyone.

  The father loved his daughter. In his heart, he allowed himself to believe she was his consolation from God.

  But there were more things to do on earth than console. The maiden began to pine, in her quiet way, for company. And might have pined in vain—her father having become, after his long career in the city, a hermit—except that a wealthy cousin of her late mother, the wife of a banker in nearby Haverstraw, took pity on her. Lacking a daughter of her own, the older woman found in the maiden a pleasing substitute, a creature of inborn graces who could be molded into something still finer—something that would redound to the older woman’s glory.

  * * *

  And so, against the father’s objections, the older woman took the maiden on carriage rides and introduced her round at dinner parties. And when the time was ripe, she invited the maiden to her very first ball.

  A ball! Women in pounds of silk and muslin and merino. Frock-coated men with the hair of Roman emperors. Supper tables teeming with cakes and custards and the glint of port glasses. Fiddle players and cotillions! The rustle of women’s dresses, the whir of fans. Copper-buttoned beaux ready to lay down their lives for a single dance.

  The maiden had never coveted any of this—maybe because she’d never known it was there?—but with good cheer, she gave herself over to dress fittings and deportment drills and lessons from French dancing masters. And whenever her father looked grim at seeing her in a new ensemble, she laughed at him and made a pretense of tearing up the dress and, before the day was out, promised once again that he was the only man for her.

  The day of the ball came. The father had the satisfaction of seeing his daughter step into a landau like the flower of one of New York’s finest families. She gave him a curt wave through the window and then was gone, whisked away to her cousin’s house in Haverstraw. For the rest of the evening, he imagined her growing giddy and dry-mouthed as she was whirled round the parquet floor. He imagined quizzing her when she got back, demanding a full reckoning of all she’d done and seen, even as he heaped a dry scorn on it. He imagined asking her, in as polite a tone as he could muster, when she thought she would be done with all this foolishness.

  The hours passed. She didn’t return. Midnight, one o’clock, two. With a sick heart, the father took a lantern and went to search the neighboring byways. Finding no sign of her, he was making ready to mount his horse and ride all the way to Haverstraw—his foot was already in the stirrup—when she appeared, limping down the lane in her slippers. A vision of brokenness.

  * * *

  The hair that had been massed in such dainty ringlets now lay limp and tousled. A long seam of petticoat showed where the lilac taffeta gown had been torn from her. The gigot sleeves she had taken such delight in modeling had been ripped from her shoulder.

  And there was blood. Blood on her wrists, blood in her hair. Blood there . . . so profuse that she must have taken it as a signal of her shame. She refused to let him wash her. Refused to tell him what had happened. For some days, she gave up speaking altogether.

  Stung by her silence, mad with grief, the father went to his wife’s cousin (whom he had already sworn off ) for an account of the evening. She told him then of the three men.

  Young, straight-backed, personable men who had appeared out of nowhere. No one could recall inviting them or even having met them before. Their speech was educated, their manners good, and their dress unexceptionable, though there was a general sense that the clothes were too ill fitting to be truly theirs. One thing was never in doubt: their delight at being surrounded by so many females. They behaved, said one guest, as if someone had set them free from a monastery.

  One f
emale in particular attracted their interest: the young maiden from Buttermilk Falls. Lacking the wiles of the more sophisticated girls, she was at first grateful for their attentions. When she began to see where these attentions were tending, she retreated into her accustomed silence. Far from being troubled, the three young men kept their cheer and continued to track her progress through the various rooms. When the maiden stepped outside for air, they bowed their respects and followed right after.

  They never came back. Nor did the maiden. Rather than present herself in her torn and bleeding state to her hostess, she took the long road home.