Bon Marche

by Chet Hagan

  “Yes.” He was surprised that Jackson knew even that much about him.

  Jackson swept a hand to indicate all of Bon Marché. “Dewey has done a marvelous job here.”

  “Yes, he has.” Although MacCallum had thought about what he wanted to say to him, the presence of the man kept him silent for a moment.

  “I was wondering, General,” Andrew started hesitantly, “what are your views on the election of James Madison?”

  “I would have preferred Monroe,” Jackson replied sternly. “Madison is … well, too much Jefferson’s altar boy for my tastes.”

  MacCallum just nodded, hoping that Jackson would go on.

  “Mr. Madison’s election merely continues the policy of allowing the English to do as they damned please on the high seas—harassing our ships, impressing our seamen!” Jackson’s ire had been quickly raised.

  Again, MacCallum merely nodded, as though agreeing.

  “Why, Madison has had the gall to interfere in the matter of denying General Wilkinson his rank,” Andy raced on. “Here we are, on the eve of war, and that traitor is still at the head of the army!”

  “You’re convinced that Wilkinson is a traitor?”

  “Could any intelligent man think otherwise?”

  “But his co-conspirator, Mr. Burr, has been acquitted.”

  Jackson shook his head sadly. “Burr was a fool, but I’m not certain he intended treason.” He shrugged. “It’s of little consequence now; Burr has left the country. He doesn’t matter any longer. What must continue to concern us, Mr. MacCallum, is that Madison will do nothing to restrain the English. Nothing! Our national honor is at stake, and Madison will be an image of Jefferson: too cowardly to resent a foreign outrage on our Republic!”

  “What would you have Madison do?”

  “I’d have him fight, sir!” Jackson permitted a slight smile to cross his angular face. “I pray that I will be given the opportunity to prove that real men, real patriots, can still fight!”

  An eavesdropper next to them applauded spontaneously. Jackson whirled to silence him with a glare.

  Turning back to MacCallum, embarrassment on his face, Jackson said, “Perhaps this isn’t the occasion for the discussion of such a heated subject.”

  Andrew laughed. “You’re right, of course, General. My apologies for precipitating it.”

  Jackson waved aside the apology, glancing about the room. “Perhaps I should seek out young Franklin. I have some advice I might give him about the sanctity of the marriage vows.”

  He strode off without another word. Only then did MacCallum notice that he wore a small formal sword. He wondered whether Andy also carried a pistol in his coat.

  II

  THE wedding ceremony was simple and dignified, conducted by the minister from the Presbyterian church in Nashville.

  When it was ended and the orchestra was playing, the guests were treated to a lavish buffet, with more than adequate liquid refreshments, including champagne.

  MacCallum strolled about, chatting with the Nashvillians he had already met, introducing himself to those he had not, impressed by the universal friendliness of the people. He came upon Charles.

  “You made a handsome best man,” Andrew said.

  “I thought so, too,” his friend laughed. “You know, I’m really happy for Franklin. Amantha is not the girl I would have chosen, but I believe she’s right for him.”

  “Mattie tells me they will honeymoon in New Orleans.”

  “Yes. Can you believe they plan a month there?” He sighed. “I can’t help but think about the quick honeymoon Mattie and I had—four days in the wilderness.” He grinned mischievously. “I’ll wager that Franklin and his bride won’t know the same passion—”

  “You’re an evil man.”

  “True.” Dewey tapped MacCallum’s arm. “See that lady over there?” He inclined his head toward a handsome woman chatting with Mattie.

  “The buxom one?”

  “You’ve noticed! You might have asked: ‘The woman standing with Mattie?’” Charles playfully slapped him on the back. “That’s Mercy Callison, a recent widow. Her late husband was a lawyer in Nashville.”

  Dewey propelled Andrew across the room.

  “Mrs. Callison,” he said, “I’d like to present my dear friend, Andrew MacCallum. You two should have a lot in common. Mr. MacCallum is a professor at the college in Princeton. And Mrs. Callison, Andrew, was a teacher somewhere in Pennsylvania…”

  “In York,” the woman prompted him.

  MacCallum bowed awkwardly, taking in the woman’s pleasant face, flawless complexion, and intense dark eyes.

  “Mattie was just mentioning you, Mr. MacCallum,” she said easily. “As a matter of fact, she was about to escort me across the room to meet you.”

  “A pleasure,” Andrew muttered, wondering why he felt so ill-at-ease.

  Mattie spoke: “You’ll both excuse us, I’m sure. We have other guests to greet.” She tugged at Charles’s arm, leading him away.

  Mrs. Callison was amused. “It seems we have been thrown together to see what might happen.”

  Her candor was refreshing, but Andrew wasn’t quite sure what he ought to say.

  The dark eyes studied him. “If I may be bold, may I suggest that we not stand on formality. I’m Mercy. And you? Andy, perhaps?”

  “No, please. I was never cursed with a nickname. Andrew will be just fine.” He coughed nervously. “Charles tells me you’re a widow.”

  “And Mattie tells me you’re a bachelor.”

  Andrew relaxed a bit. “May I get you a drink, Mercy? Sherry? Champagne, perhaps?”

  She wrinkled up her nose. Delightfully. “I’d much prefer a whiskey.”

  “Ah, a woman after my own heart.”

  Mercy Callison’s tinkling laugh turned heads their way. “I believe, Andrew, that that’s exactly what our friends had in mind.”

  III

  IMMENSE gray clouds, roiling and churning in a stiff wind, approximating wads of filthy cotton, hung over the Nashville Inn. The dark early evening was suddenly turned into midday by a jagged slash of lightning, followed by a roaring boom of thunder that seemed to shake the hostelry.

  MacCallum raised his eyebrows. “A thunderstorm in January?”

  “Out here,” Mercy explained, “there are no seasons to the weather. As a matter of fact, our weather is fairly consistent. Most of it bad.”

  They were seated in the dining room of the inn. It was the last Saturday in January and, for the third time since Franklin’s wedding, MacCallum was entertaining the attractive widow. They always dined at the Nashville Inn; the town offered few such accommodations for a lady and gentleman to dine.

  Andrew had learned a great deal about Mercy Callison in the few weeks he had known her. For one thing, she had been a mathematics instructor at a girls’ academy in York, Pennsylvania—somewhat of a rarity among women teachers. For another, she had married a promising young lawyer, Calvin Callison, in York, where his father was a judge.

  “The Callisons were an important family in York,” Mercy had told him. “And Calvin was quite handsome—the catch of the season, I think, is the proper phrase. At the risk of sounding overly romantic, Cal swept me off my feet. We were married a month to the day after we met. That was considered somewhat scandalous.

  “But we had a good life: a socially prominent young attorney and his pretty…” She giggled at that. “… wife. Cal, though, was restless. He wanted to go west, to seek new opportunities. And I, as a dutiful wife, came with him. Truthfully, I would have preferred to stay in Pennsylvania, but wives don’t have the luxury, I’m afraid, of making such independent decisions.”

  She frowned at the memory. “Let’s just say it didn’t go well. We were in Knoxville for a time. Then in Kentucky, at Lexington. Then in some god-awful outpost in the Northwest that didn’t even have a name—somewhere near Lake Michigan—where Cal hoped to make his own fortune. Then back to Lexington. And finally, here to Nashville. Cal
died last February of pleurisy. He was just forty-two.”

  Mercy had told him that much. A biographical outline only, with no details and no emotion. It was plain that Calvin Callison had been a failure, but Andrew didn’t know why. He had asked about children, a question that turned her bitter for the first time.

  “Cal,” she had said, “didn’t have time for that.”

  Now, as they sat at dinner in the Nashville Inn, huge drops of rain began to splatter against the windows. The lightning and thunder continued unabated for nearly a half-hour. When it did abate, the rain continued—hard sheets of rain, driven horizontally by the high winds.

  Andrew and Mercy decided to wait out the storm, ordering another whiskey after finishing their meal. The winds finally ended, but the rain persisted. Harder than before, it seemed.

  “I fear it’s going to continue all night,” Mercy said.

  “I believe you’re right.” Andrew got to his feet. “Come, I’ll show you home, and then I’ll get a room here at the inn. I certainly don’t want to ride back to Bon Marché in that mess.”

  Mrs. Callison lived on the opposite side of the town from the inn, and they had gone only a hundred yards before their clothing was soaked through. At first it was uncomfortable, then disagreeable, and then it didn’t matter. The dirt street had been turned into a river of sticky red mud, making the going hazardous. But before they had gone halfway, they were laughing together like happy children. Getting to her home became a game.

  And when they reached the Callison home, Mercy found the door locked.

  “Stupid, damned—” she muttered under her breath, pounding on the door. “Delilah, open this door immediately!”

  A black servant girl opened the door, filling the frame with her ample body. “Ah sorry, Miss Mercy, but Morgan he done git fightin’ drunk agin an’ Ah lock so—”

  Mercy sighed disgustedly. “Delilah, just step aside and let us come in, please.” To Andrew: “Morgan is my Delilah’s paramour from the livery stable.” She started to laugh again at the absurdity of it all, with Andrew joining her.

  Mercy entered the one-story brick house. MacCallum entered, too, but stood dripping just inside the sill.

  “I’ll say good night here,” he announced. “I don’t want to track all of this mud into your house.”

  She stared at him for a moment, water running down her face from her rain-soaked hair. “Andrew, my dear,” she said with a note of annoyance, “don’t be so damned prudish. We’re both like drowned cats, and I’ll not see you tramp back through the mud and the rain to the inn. You’ll be ill by the time you get there.”

  Still he hesitated.

  Mercy closed the door firmly and set the bolt. “Delilah,” she ordered, “take Mr. MacCallum’s hat, and his coats, and his boots, and put them into the pantry to dry. And then stir up that fire.”

  “Yas, ma’am.”

  “Now, that’s settled,” the widow said. “Try to make yourself comfortable by the fire, Andrew. I’ll be right back.”

  Mercy disappeared into a room that Andrew guessed was a bedroom, and he heard her humming a silly little song. He stood with his back to the fireplace, but he knew he’d never get dry that way. Water dripped from his trousers and sizzled on the hearth.

  He stepped aside for a moment as Delilah stirred the glowing embers and added more wood. The fire roared up quickly.

  It was only a few minutes before Mercy, wearing a light robe and toweling her long black hair, returned. Andrew eyed her appreciatively; the robe showed off her good figure.

  “Your turn now,” she said gaily. “Go in there and get out of those wet clothes. I’ve laid out Cal’s old robe—it’s quite warm—and a towel.” She grinned. “And a set of underclothes.”

  “Oh, I don’t think—”

  Mercy groaned. “Andrew, please. You can’t stay in those wet clothes. Just go in there and do what I told you.”

  MacCallum entered the bedroom, closing the door behind him.

  “When Mr. MacCallum is finished in there,” Mrs. Callison said to the servant, “gather up all those wet clothes and hang them somewhere to dry.”

  “Yas, ma’am.”

  “And, Delilah—”

  “Ma’am?”

  “When you’re finished, I don’t want to see you again tonight.”

  “Yas, ma’am. Ah be in mah room, Miss Mercy, jest as quiet as—”

  “With the door closed,” her mistress interrupted.

  “Oh, yas, ma’am!”

  “Help me with this.” Mercy started to push a small settee from its position against the wall so that it faced the flames of the fire.

  “Miss Mercy?”

  “Yes.”

  “It nice to see a man in th’ house agin.”

  The widow laughed. “You’re a romantic devil, Delilah.”

  “Yas, ma’am.”

  When the settee was in place, Mercy sat down, arranging the wrapper tightly around her legs.

  Andrew came out of the bedroom, enfolded in the heavy robe. “Mr. Callison must have been a big man,” he commented. “This robe could go around me twice.”

  “In stature he was big,” she said lightly. “Join me here, Andrew, and get warm again.”

  He sat down on the settee, extending his bare feet toward the fire. “That does feel good.”

  Delilah scurried out of the bedroom, carrying the wet clothes.

  “Fetch a bottle, Delilah,” Mercy ordered.

  “Yas, ma’am.”

  In what seemed to be only seconds, the black woman was back with a bottle of bourbon and two glasses. Mercy took the bottle in one hand, the glasses in the other, and pulled the cork out with her teeth.

  “A little trick I learned from my husband,” she said, after she had poured a liberal portion of the amber liquid into each glass. “Calvin was adept with a whiskey bottle.”

  Andrew didn’t think it necessary to respond.

  “You must have wondered why we moved around so much.”

  “I did, yes.”

  She took a deep breath, exhaling it slowly. “Cal was a drunkard. There’s no way to put a good face on it. It was very sad. He was a man of ability—a fine lawyer. But he drank away every opportunity he ever had.” She paused. “I told you that he died of pleurisy. Well, that’s what I asked the doctor to say. In truth, the whiskey killed him.”

  “That is sad.”

  Mercy was pensive. “At least Cal taught me how to drink whiskey. But I guess that isn’t much to get out of a marriage, is it?”

  MacCallum patted her hand sympathetically. He couldn’t remember when he had been more at ease with a woman and less sure about how he should act. That it was an intimate moment there was no doubt. He left his hand on hers as they sat silently that way, the crackling of the fire and the tick of the large clock in the corner and the steady beating of the rain on the roof the only sounds.

  “Andrew?” she said softly.

  “Yes?”

  “I have a confession.”

  He chuckled. “Alexander Pope once suggested that a confession meant that one was wiser today than yesterday.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s that serious a confession. Certainly it has nothing to do with being wise.”

  “May I hear it?”

  “When we were hurrying from the inn,” she started hesitantly, “it ran through my mind that getting soaked by the rain, as we certainly did, would give me the opportunity to … well, keep you here. To set up an intimate situation with you, just as it has happened.”

  “But now you have second thoughts?” he suggested.

  “In a sense. Sitting here so quietly and comfortably, it has occurred to me that you might not want an intimate situation. That you would think me … unladylike. Even brazen.”

  “No such thought crossed my mind.”

  “What has, then?”

  “That I enjoy being with you. That I want to know more about you, the little things that may not seem significant to others. That I wan
t us to be close friends.”

  “No more than that?”

  His answer didn’t come immediately.

  “You didn’t think of making love to me?” Her question bordered on petulance.

  “Yes, I’ve thought of that.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t want to offend you by making an overture. You’ve become too dear to me to risk offense.”

  Mercy laughed ever so slightly. “You really are a gentle man—that’s meant to be two words—aren’t you?”

  “Perhaps a fool.”

  “No, not at all.” She leaned toward him, brushing her lips against his. “I wouldn’t be offended, Andrew.”

  He reached for her, taking her into his arms, kissing her with passion, feeling her body against him through the thin robe. And feeling good about it. Her eyes, he noticed, were misted over, just a bit. The laugh started inside him, and he tried to keep it there. He could not.

  It clearly annoyed her. “Andrew … what—?”

  “I’m so sorry,” he tried to apologize. But he was still laughing. “It’s just that young George Dewey, who imagines himself the world’s premier roué, confided in me recently that a sure sign of a woman’s desire could be found in the misting over of a woman’s eyes.”

  “And mine have?” she interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  “It seems that George’s theory has some merit.” She grew bolder. “I want you very much, Andrew.”

  “He also said that you could never believe a woman’s words in matters of intimacy.”

  Mercy feigned anger. “What would anyone so young know about it?”

  She got to her feet, Andrew’s hand firmly in her grasp. Tugging at him. “I think we’ve done entirely too much talking about this subject, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  The widow Callison guided him into the bedroom.

  IV

  CHARLES entered the dining room at Bon Marché, having completed his early-morning inspection of the horses, to find Mattie the only one at the breakfast table.

  “Andrew’s not down yet?” he asked.

  “Horace tells me he’s not in his room. Hasn’t been all night, as a matter of fact.”

  “We did have a bad storm last night. He probably stayed at the inn.”