Slaves of Obsession

by Anne Perry

  Far ahead of them, the Capitol looked at first glance like some splendid ruin from Greece or Rome surrounded by the wreckage of the past. Closer, it was clear that the opposite was true. It was still in the process of being built. The dome had yet to be constructed, and pillars, blocks and statues stood amid the rubble, the timber and the workers’ huts and the incomplete flights of steps.

  Hester wanted to say something appropriate, but all words escaped her. There seemed to be flies everywhere. It had not occurred to her in England, or even on the ship, that America would feel like somewhere tropical, the clammy air like a hot, wet flannel wrapping.

  They reached the Willard, and after a great deal of persuasion from Trace were shown to two rooms. Hester was exhausted and overwhelmingly relieved to be, for a few moments at least, in private away from the noise, the dust and the unfamiliar voices. The heat was inescapable even here, but at least she was out of the glare of the sun.

  Then she looked across at Monk and saw the doubt in his face. He stood very still in the center of the small room, his jacket crumpled, his hair sticking to his forehead.

  She was suddenly aware of the ridiculousness of their situation. It was a moment either to laugh or to cry. She smiled at him.

  He hesitated, searching her eyes, then slowly he smiled back, and then sat down on the other side of the bed. At last he began to laugh, and reached over and took her in his arms, falling back with her, kissing her over and over again. They were tired and dirty, totally confused and far from home, and they must not allow it to matter. If they even once looked at it seriously, they would be crippled from trying.

  They met Philo Trace again at breakfast the following morning. It was an enormous meal. It put even the English country house breakfast to shame. Here as well as the usual ham, eggs, sausages and potatoes, were fried oysters, steak and onions and blancmange. This was apparently the first of five meals to be served through the day, all of equal enormity. Hester accepted two eggs lightly poached, some excellent strawberries, toast with preserves which she found far too sweet, and coffee which was the best she had ever tasted.

  Philo Trace looked tired; his face was marked with lines of fatigue and distress. There were shadows around his dark eyes and his nostrils were pinched. But he was immaculately shaved and dressed, and obviously he intended to make no parade of the emotions which must torment him as he saw too closely his country lurch from the oratory of war to the reality of it.

  The hotel dining room was full, mainly of men, several army officers among them, but there were a considerable number of women, more than there would have been in a similar establishment in England. Hester noticed with surprise that several of the men had long, flowing hair, which they wore loose, resting over their collars. Very few were clean-shaven.

  Trace leaned forward a little, speaking softly.

  “I’ve already made a few enquiries. The army left two days ago, on the sixteenth, going south towards Manassas.” His voice cracked a little; he could not keep the pain from it. “General Beauregard is camped near there with the Confederate forces, and MacDowell has gone to meet him.” A shadow covered his eyes. “I expect they have Breeland’s guns with them. Or I suppose I should say Mr. Alberton’s guns.” His food sat on his plate ignored. He did not say whether he had held any hope of stopping the arms from reaching the Union forces. Hester thought him blind to reality if he had, but sometimes one cannot bear to look, and blindness is a necessity, for a while.

  All around them the dining room hummed with the babble of talk, now and then rising in excitement or anger. The air was clouded with tobacco smoke and, even at half-past eight in the morning, clammily hot.

  “We can’t stop that.” Monk spoke with calm practicality. “We are here to find Merrit Alberton and take her home.” There was surprising compassion in his voice. “But if you wish to leave us and join your own people, no one will ask you to remain here. It may even be dangerous for you.”

  Trace shrugged very slightly. “There are still plenty of Southerners about. Probably every man you see here with long hair comes from the South, the ‘slave states’ as they refer to them.” There was bitterness in him now. “It’s a fashion the North doesn’t follow.”

  Hester liked him, but she had wondered many times during the journey how he could espouse something she considered an abomination, by any standards an offense against natural justice. She did not wish to know his answer, in case she despised him for it, so she had not asked. She heard the suppressed anger in him now as he gave it regardless.

  “Most of them have never even seen a plantation, let alone thought about how it worked. I haven’t seen many myself.” He gave a harsh little laugh, jerky, as if he had caught his breath. “Most of us in the South are small farmers, working our own land. You can go for dozens of miles and that’s all you’ll see. But it’s the cotton and the tobacco that we live on. That’s what we sell to the North and it’s what they work in their factories and ship abroad.”

  He stopped suddenly, lowering his head and pushing his hand across his brow, forcing his hair back so hard it must have hurt. “I don’t really know what this war is all about, why we have to be at each other’s throats. Why can’t they just leave us alone? Of course there are bad slave owners, men who beat their field slaves, and their house slaves, and nothing happens to them even if they kill them. But there’s poverty in the North as well, and nobody fights about that! Some of the industrial cities are full of starving, shivering men and women—and children—with nobody to take them in or feed them. No one gives a damn! At least a plantation owner cares for his slaves, for economic reasons if not common decency.”

  Neither Monk nor Hester interrupted him. They glanced at each other, but it was understood Trace was speaking as much to himself as to them. He was a man overwhelmed by circumstances he could neither understand nor control. He was no longer even sure what he believed in, only that he was losing what he loved and it was rapidly growing too late to have any effect on the horror that was increasing in pace from hour to hour.

  Hester was passionately sorry for him. In the two weeks she had known him, on the ship and the train to Washington, she had observed him in moments of solitude when there seemed a loneliness which wrapped around him like a blanket, and at other times when he had had a quick empathy with other passengers, also facing the unknown and trying to find the courage to do it with grace, and not frighten or burden their families even further by adding to their fears.

  Aboard ship, there had been one gaunt-faced Irishwoman with four children who struggled to comfort them and behave as if she knew exactly what she would do when they landed in a strange country without friends or a place to live. And alone, staring over the endless expanse of water, her face had shown her terror naked. It was Trace who had gone and stood silently with his arm around her thin shoulders, not offering platitudes, simply sharing the moment and its understanding.

  Now Hester could think of nothing to say to him as he faced the ruin of his country and tried to put it into words for two English people who had come on a single, and possibly futile, mission but who could return to peace and safety afterwards, even if they had to explain failure to Judith Alberton.

  “We can’t know what we’re doing,” Trace said slowly, now looking up at Monk. “There has to be a better way! Legislation might take years, but the legacy of war will never go away.”

  “You can’t change it,” Monk replied simply, but his face showed the complexity of his feelings, and Trace saw it and smiled very slightly.

  “I know. I would be better employed addressing what we came for,” he acknowledged. “I’ll say it before you do. We must find Breeland’s family. They’ll still be here, and Merrit Alberton will be with them.” He did not add “if she is still alive,” but the thought was in the quick pulling down of his lips, and it was easy to read because it was in Hester’s mind as well, and she knew it was in Monk’s.

  “Where do we begin?” Monk asked. He glanced around
the huge dining room, where all the tables were full. Crowds of people had been coming and going all the time they had been there. “We must be discreet. If they hear that English people are asking for them, they may leave, or at worst, get rid of Merrit.”

  Trace’s expression tightened. “I know,” he said quietly. “That’s why I propose to do the asking myself. It’s what I came for. At least it’s part of it. You’ll also need help leaving here with her. We may be able to go north, but maybe not. I can guide you south through Richmond and Charleston. It will depend upon what happens in the next few days.”

  Monk hated being dependent on someone else, and Hester read it in his face. But there was no alternative, and to refuse would be childish, and risk even less chance of success.

  Perhaps Trace was aware of that too. Again the ghost of a smile lit his expression. “Learn what you can about the army,” he suggested. “Movements, equipment, numbers, morale. The more we know, the better we can judge which way to go when we have Merrit … and Breeland, if possible. There will be plenty of war correspondents from British newspapers. No one will think it odd.” He shrugged minutely and a shred of humor filled his eyes. “In this war you are neutral, at least in theory.”

  “In fact,” Monk added, “I may wish to see Breeland hang from the nearest tree, but I don’t tar the entire Union with the same brush.”

  “Or the slave owners of the South?” Trace’s eyes were wide.

  “Or them either.” Monk smiled back and rose to his feet, the last of his breakfast unfinished. “Come on,” he said to Hester. “We are going to research a brilliant and perceptive article for the Illustrated London News.”

  They spent the rest of the day moving from one place in the city to another, listening to people, observing those in the streets and in the foyer of the hotel, seeing their anxiety, sensing the frenzy in the air. A few were openly afraid, as if they expected the Confederate armies to invade Washington itself, but the vast majority seemed certain of victory and had hardly any perception of what the cost would be, even if they won every battle.

  Monk listened to complaints about the overwhelming presence of the army everywhere, the upheaval to the city, and especially the offensive odor of the drains, which could not cope with the sudden influx of people. And overriding everything there were the political arguments about how the issue of slavery had changed into the issue of preserving the Union itself.

  Hester saw the men and women in the street, especially the women, who had sent their sons and husbands and brothers to the battlefront imagining glory, and with only the faintest notion of what their injuries could be, what horror they would be part of which would change who they were forever. The amputated limbs, the scarred faces and bodies would be only the outward wounds. The inner ones they would not have the words to share, and would be too confused and ashamed to try. She had seen it before in the Crimea. It was one of the universals of war that it bound friend and foe together, and set them apart from all those who had not experienced it, however deep the loyalties that tied them.

  Twice she spoke to women in the hotel and tried to tell them how much linen they would need for bandages, which simple things for keeping injured men clean, like lye and vinegar and rough wine. But they did not understand the scale of it, the sheer number of men who would be wounded, or how quickly someone can bleed to death from a shattered limb.

  Once she tried to say something about disease, the way typhoid, cholera and dysentery can spread through the closely packed men in an army camp like fire through a dry forest. But she met only incomprehension, and in one case deep offense. They were good people, honest, compassionate and utterly blind. It had been the same in England. The agonizing frustration was not new to her, or the rage of helplessness. She did not know why it should hurt more the second time, thousands of miles from home among a people who were in many ways so different from her own and whose pain she would not stay to see. Perhaps it was because the first time she had been ignorant herself, not seeing ahead, not even imagining what was to come. This time she knew; the reality had already bruised her once, and she was still tender from it, still raw in places she could not reach to heal.

  By evening Trace had already managed to find Breeland’s parents and contrived that he and Hester and Monk should dine in the same place. It was forced, but by ten o’clock they were in a small group talking and by five minutes past they were introduced.

  “How do you do,” Hester replied, first to Hedley Breeland, an imposing man with stiff white hair and a gaze so direct it was almost discomfiting, then to his wife, a woman of warmer demeanor, but who stood close to him and regarded him with obvious pride.

  “Happy to meet you, ma’am,” Hedley Breeland said courteously. “You’ve come at an unfortunate time. They say the weather is always oppressive in Washington in midsummer, and right now we have problems which I daresay you’ve heard of even over in England.”

  She was not sure if some of that was intended as a criticism of their choice of time; there was nothing in his face to mitigate the brusqueness of it.

  Mrs. Breeland stepped in. “We just wish we could make you more welcome, but all our attentions are taken up with the fighting. Lord knows, we’ve done everything we could to avoid it, but there’s no accommodating slavery. It’s just plain wrong.” She smiled at Hester apologetically.

  “It’s not just about slavery,” her husband corrected. “It’s about the Union. You can’t expect foreigners to understand that, but we must be truthful.”

  A flicker of annoyance crossed Mrs. Breeland’s face and vanished immediately. Hester could not help wondering what her true feelings were, what emotions filled her life, of which perhaps her husband had no idea.

  “Our son has just become engaged to marry an English girl,” Mrs. Breeland went on. “And very charming she is. All the courage in the world to just pack up and come out here with him, all alone, because her father was against it.”

  Hester felt a surge of relief that Merrit was here and apparently had come willingly. The girl could not possibly know the truth.

  Hester felt Monk stiffen beside her, and tightened her hand on his arm warningly.

  “She knew a fine man when she saw him,” Hedley Breeland said with a lift of his chin. “She couldn’t do better for herself in any country on God’s green earth, and she had the sense to know it! Fine girl.”

  “Is your son here?” Hester asked disingenuously “I should be delighted to meet this girl. I do admire courage so much. We can lose all we value in life without it.”

  Breeland stared at her as if he had become aware of her existence for the first time but was now uncertain whether it pleased him or not.

  She realized she had said something he considered vaguely unseemly. Perhaps Breeland did not think women should express opinions on such a subject. She had to force herself to think of Judith Alberton and bite her tongue not to tell him what she felt about the quiet courage of women the world over who bore pain, oppression and unhappiness without complaint. She could not contain herself entirely.

  “Not all courage is obvious, Mr. Breeland,” she said in a small, tight voice. “Very often it consists of hiding a wound rather than showing it.”

  “I can’t say I understand you, ma’am,” he said dismissively. “I’m afraid my son is at the battlefront, where all good soldiers belong at a time like this.”

  “How brave,” Monk said in an unreadable voice, but Hester knew it was his coldest irony, and that he was thinking of the grotesque bodies shot to death in the Tooley Street warehouse yard.

  There was music, laughter and the clink of glasses around them. Women with bare shoulders drifted by, magnolia blossoms caught up in their gowns and wafting a sweet perfume. It seemed to be the fashion to wear real flowers.

  “Surely his fiancée is here with you?” Hester said quickly, she hoped before Breeland would wonder about Monk’s remark.

  “Of course,” Breeland replied, turning to her. “But she is very keen t
o do her duty also. You should be proud of her, ma’am. She has a clear vision of right and wrong and a hunger to fight for freedom for all men. I admire that greatly. All men are brothers and should treat each other so.” He made it a statement, and looked to Monk as if he expected to be challenged on it.

  A wave of panic passed through Hester, burning her cheeks as she thought of all the answers Monk might make to that—most of them with razor-cruel sarcasm.

  But instead Monk smiled, perhaps a trifle wolfishly. “Of course they should,” he said softly. “And I can see that you are doing everything within your power to make sure that they do.”

  “That’s right, sir!” Breeland agreed. “Ah! There’s Merrit! Miss Alberton, my son’s fiancée.” He turned, and they could see Merrit coming towards them. She was dressed in wide skirts pinched into a tiny waist, and a softly draped bodice decorated with gardenias. She looked flushed with excitement and quite lovely.

  “Brothers?” Hester said very softly to Monk. “Hypocrites!”

  “Cain and Abel,” he replied under his breath.

  Hester swallowed her snort of abrupt laughter and turned it into a cough just as Merrit saw them and stopped. For an instant her face registered only shock. There was a brief moment while she struggled to remember from where she recognized them. Then it came, and she walked forward, her smile uncertain but her head high.