Bon Marche

by Chet Hagan

  “Sometimes, Charles Dewey, I can’t believe how naive you are!”

  “Naive?” His eyebrows shot up. “Oh, of course … Mercy Callison.”

  “Exactly.”

  Dewey grinned. “You really think so, huh?”

  “Would you like to make a wager on it?”

  “I’m a gambler, not a fool. Well, well … staid and proper Andrew.”

  “He’s a man,” Mattie said. “And Mercy is certainly a desirable woman.”

  “I admit that I’d like to see something develop there. For Andrew, of course, but also for purely selfish reasons. It would keep him here.”

  V

  THERE was a knock on the bedroom door. “Good mornin’, Miss Mercy,” Delilah called out. “Ah has breakfas’.”

  “That woman is an incurable romantic,” Mercy whispered to Andrew. She pulled the covers up to hide their nakedness. “Come!”

  The black woman tiptoed into the room. “Oh, Mistah MacCallum, suh, Ah didn’t knows ya was here!”

  Mercy shook her head in disbelief. “Then why have you brought two chocolates and two toasts?”

  Delilah dissolved into giggles.

  “Thank you, Delilah,” Andrew said.

  The servant placed the tray on a table by the bed, but remained standing there.

  “That will be all,” her mistress said.

  “Ya sure Ah caint git ya anythin’ else, Miss Mercy?” She looked at Andrew. “Mistah MacCallum?”

  “That will be all, Delilah,” Mrs. Callison said firmly.

  “Yas, ma’am.” She bowed her way to the door. “Ah sure do hopes ya enjoys th’ breakfas’.”

  “Delilah, please.”

  “Yas, ma’am.” She left the room, but the door stood ajar.

  “Delilah!” Mercy shouted.

  The servant’s head appeared in the room again. “Ma’am?”

  “The door!”

  “Oh, yas, ma’am. ‘Scuse me, ma’am.” She closed the door gently.

  They could hear her continuing giggles as she retreated to the pantry.

  Mercy sighed. “Lord—”

  “I think she’s very refreshing.” Andrew chuckled.

  They ate the simple breakfast in comparative silence.

  When they were finished, Andrew kissed her. “I suppose I ought to get back to Bon Marché.”

  “Must you?” Andrew could hear the disappointment in her voice.

  “Not immediately, of course.”

  Mercy got out of the bed and went to the window. Andrew watched her appreciatively, thinking again what a sensuous body she had. She peeked out through the curtains.

  “It’s a nice day,” she reported. “Sunny. Maybe we could go for a ride.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “After the noon meal, I was thinking. I’m sure Delilah is busy preparing it now.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t want to disappoint Delilah.”

  “A brisk ride in the country,” Mercy continued, “up along the Kentucky road. I know it’s January, and all that, but maybe you’d enjoy seeing that area.”

  “I imagine I would.”

  “We might take a picnic meal along … for dinner, you know.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She turned away from the window. “Do you have to go back at all today?”

  He reached for her. “You know what we’re doing again?”

  “Talking too much?”

  “Right.”

  Mercy went to him, snuggling down beside him. Slowly and comfortably they made love again. And they fell asleep again.

  When MacCallum awoke, he kissed her closed eyes. She opened one. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Andrew MacCallum.”

  “An interloper.”

  “No you’re not, Andrew, dear. You belong here—with me.”

  “I was thinking. Perhaps Delilah could take a note to Morgan, to deliver to Bon Marché.”

  “And what would you say in it?”

  “That I’m going to be delayed, that they’re not to concern themselves about me, that I’ve been detained in Nashville—”

  “On business?” She laughed heartily.

  “No, no. That I’m delayed in Nashville on a social engagement.”

  “For how long?”

  “I could tell them not to expect me for…” He looked at her questioningly.

  “How long can you put up with me?” she asked.

  “If that were the criterion, I’d never return to Bon Marché.”

  She dropped her bantering tone. “That sounds for all the world like a proposal of some sort, Andrew.”

  “It is.”

  Soberly, she studied his face. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I suggest, Mr. MacCallum, that you write that damned note before you change your mind.” Mercy called out: “Delilah!”

  “Yas, ma’am,” the voice answered from the pantry.

  “Go find Morgan! He’s to deliver a message to Bon Marché!”

  “Yas, ma’am. Righ’ ’way, ma’am!”

  Her happy giggles filled the small house.

  V

  ON Wednesday afternoon—four days after the rainy-night dinner at the Nashville Inn—Andrew MacCallum rode up the lane toward the Bon Marché mansion. Riding beside him, daringly astride, not using a lady’s saddle, was Mercy Callison.

  Charles, who was lunging a horse in a paddock adjacent to the lane, waved at them excitedly. Turning the horse over to a black, he ran to greet them.

  “Where in the devil have you been, you old dog?”

  “Didn’t you get my note on Sunday?” Andrew asked.

  “Sunday? Are you sure?” Dewey seemed mystified.

  “Yes, of course. It was Sunday.”

  “Well, about noon on Monday a boy from the livery stable … uh?…”

  “Morgan,” MacCallum prompted.

  “Yes—Morgan. He came riding in here—considerably drunk, according to Horace—with your message. He didn’t say anything. He just gave the note to Horace and left.”

  Mercy smoldered. “Damn him!”

  “We hadn’t heard anything from you Saturday night,” Charles went on, “and again on Sunday. By Monday, then, we were somewhat concerned. You’ll have to admit, Andrew, that the note you sent was hardly filled with detail.” He chuckled. “At least, we knew you were alive…” A knowing glance at Mercy. “… and well.”

  “I’m sorry if you were worried,” his friend said.

  “Would you like to volunteer some more information?” Dewey’s curiosity was gnawing at him.

  “There isn’t much to report,” MacCallum replied with studied nonchalance. “Unless, of course, you would be interested in the fact that we’ve been married.”

  Charles was stunned, his mouth gaping open. He sputtered. “Married! But when? Where?”

  Andrew gestured to Mercy, deferring to her.

  “Yesterday,” she said. “At the Court House. Judge Overton performed the ceremony.” She laughed. “We decided that we weren’t very good at living in sin.”

  “Dear, I thought we were reasonably good at it,” he corrected her, smirking devilishly. To Charles: “It’s just that we believed our friends would be more satisfied if we took the proper legal steps.”

  “Come! Mattie must hear this!”

  Charles raced ahead of them to the mansion, calling for his wife.

  “He seems more delighted than we are,” Mercy commented.

  “He couldn’t be more delighted than I am.” He reached over to squeeze her hand.

  In the mansion, as Charles poured toasts for the couple, Mattie excitedly drew the whole story from them.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, Charles?”

  “Marvelous! Just marvelous!” He pumped Andrew’s hand for perhaps the fourth time. “Just think—Dewey and MacCallum together at Bon Marché!”

  “Oh…” Andrew showed doubt.

  “What?”

  “We haven’t decided yet what we are going to do. For the moment, tho
ugh, we’ll live at Mercy’s house in Nashville. We rode out here so that I could collect my clothes.”

  Mattie added: “Surely you’ll stay now, Andrew?”

  “It’s one of the possibilities we’ll consider, obviously.” The answer implied no commitment.

  “Whatever you need, Andrew,” Dewey said, “you shall have. I told you once just to name your price. That offer still stands.”

  MacCallum smiled, trying to put aside the pressure from the Deweys. “I hope you’ll allow us time for a honeymoon.”

  “Of course! Of course! We’ll discuss it later.”

  “Yes—later.”

  31

  “GENTLEMEN, we are about to start,” George Dewey shouted. “The terms of the sale will be for cash only. And since you have been afforded ample opportunity to inspect the animals, each will be sold as is. From what I remember of my Latin, I believe the proper phrase is caveat emptor, gentlemen—let the buyer beware.”

  He looked around, smiling broadly, enjoying himself.

  “When you have a winning bid, please go promptly to that table…” He pointed to where Mercy Callison MacCallum presided over a ledger. “Pay that handsome young woman. I caution you, sirs, that she is newly married!”

  There was general laughter, joined by Mercy.

  The late July day was cool and without the summer sultriness that usually plagued the Nashville area. Charles called the ideal weather “Bon Marché luck.”

  Several hundred people, most of them horsemen, were milling about in the oak grove on the front lawn of the plantation, brought together by the auctioning of sixty-eight of Bon Marché’s untried racehorses: yearlings and two-year-olds.

  As Mattie had predicted more than a year earlier when she first proposed the sale, buyers had come not only from Tennessee, but from Kentucky and the Carolinas and Virginia. There were even two from New York.

  It had been a total family operation in the planning. Charles and Franklin had selected the horses to be offered; they had also researched the pedigrees. Lee had designed the catalog—it had been his idea to print up the list of the horses—and had devised the numbering of the thoroughbreds, painting the numbers on their hips with calsomine. The younger children, Alma May and Thomas, distributed the booklets to those attending. Corrine, Louise, and Amantha were the hostesses—moving about the lawn, making certain that Bon Marché bourbon was readily available to all.

  Andrew MacCallum had volunteered to join overseer Abner Lower in showing the animals prior to the start of the sale. Mercy, in light of her mathematics background, was keeping the financial records. And Charles and Mattie strolled among the prospective buyers, greeting them, jollying them, talking up the merits of the Bon Marché breeding program.

  George, glib and extroverted, was the natural choice to be the auctioneer.

  “Gentlemen, let’s begin!” he bellowed again. “If you will refer to your catalogs: number one will be a yearling filly by Premier Etoile, out of a good racing mare by Medley. For those of you unfamiliar with the stallion, Premier Etoile is a winning son of Skullduggery, unraced because of an accident at birth, but himself a son of the great Yorick. May I hear the first bid, please?”

  “Fifty dollars,” a voice cried.

  George feigned distress, then laughed. “Well, it’s a beginning anyway…”

  The bidding quickly went to a hundred dollars, then two hundred, then three, then four. It halted for a moment and George, thoroughly enjoying himself, coaxed the bidding to five hundred fifty dollars.

  “I have five hundred fifty dollars for this fine filly. Am I offered more?” He glanced about. “Very well, the filly is sold for five hundred fifty to that gentleman down there with the fine straw hat. May we know who you are, sir?”

  “The name is Flanders,” the man answered.

  “And you are from—”

  “Lexington, Kentucky.”

  “There you are!” George said, clapping his hands together enthusiastically. “Those Kentucky horsemen have a good eye for thoroughbreds. I recommend to the rest of you that you follow Mr. Flanders’s lead.”

  Charles, frowning, whispered to Mattie: “I hope they don’t follow that fellow’s lead. That filly should have brought more.”

  “Patience. It has only started, dear.”

  George, also realizing that the filly had been sold cheaply, suggested an opening bid on the next offering. “Number two, gentlemen: a well-muscled yearling colt by Predator, a tough, competitive son of Shark, out of a highly qualified Virginia mare with eleven wins to her credit. Let’s start the bidding at a reasonable four hundred. Do I hear five, five?”

  The colt brought twenty-one hundred dollars. Dewey smiled. “That’s more like it,” he said to Mattie.

  After that, the selling went quickly. Astonishingly so, in that there had never been a sale like it before in Tennessee, and no one—the sellers or the buyers—knew quite what to expect. It was fast-paced, and no other yearling of the thirty-five offered sold for as little as the initial filly.

  There was money in the crowd; no doubt of that. When the first of thirty-three two-year-olds was offered—a handsome, gleaming colt by Cranium—the bidding rapidly reached five thousand dollars.

  Prior to the sale, Charles and Franklin had tried to estimate what each horse would bring. They had agreed that number forty-seven, a two-year-old son of Arrangement, by Medley, should garner the top dollar. Disappointingly, it sold for forty-three hundred.

  It was a smallish two-year-old colt by New York, a son of Messenger, that drew the most attention. Dewey had never liked the Messenger blood and was amazed when the bids swiftly exceeded five thousand dollars. Then six thousand.

  “That’s wrong, that’s wrong,” he muttered, making for the tree stump from which George was operating.

  By the time he got there, his son had sold the thoroughbred for seven thousand!

  “I want to say something, son,” Charles said. George relinquished the stump to him.

  “I’m sorry, gentlemen, to interrupt.” He looked out at the faces below him. “I didn’t see who made that winning bid.”

  A hand went up. “I did, Squire Dewey,” a German-accented voice said. “August Schimmel.”

  “Oh, of course. Our winning bidder,” he announced to the others, “is the gentleman who printed our catalogs. A recent arrival in Nashville, and we’re most pleased to have him. Uh … I believe, quite honestly, that the bid of seven thousand dollars is excessive—too much for any untried thoroughbred.”

  A murmur of surprise ran through the grove.

  “Perhaps the seller of horses shouldn’t make such an admission, but I’ve always prided myself on being an honest man. I don’t see how we can undo this sale and start over, so perhaps, Mr. Schimmel, you’ll allow me to halve your risk by taking back fifty percent of the colt. That is, if you wouldn’t mind being a partner with me.”

  “I’d be honored, sir.”

  “Good! We’ll work out the details when this is over.” Dewey jumped down from the stump, George going back to work, concluding the sale.

  At the end, Mercy MacCallum totaled her ledger and held it up for Charles to read the sum: $181,500.

  The figure stunned Charles for a moment. He made a quick mental calculation. Sixty-eight animals—an average of more than twenty-six hundred dollars apiece. That was fully eight hundred dollars over the average Dewey had anticipated.

  He turned to Mattie, kissing her hard. “Mrs. Dewey,” he said soberly, “you were born of genius.”

  She laughed merrily. “It has taken you a long time to realize it.”

  II

  IT was late—nearly midnight—when the successful day finally came to a close. Charles and Andrew sat alone in the drawing room, sipping sherry.

  “Like old times, eh?” Charles suggested.

  “Yes, it is.” MacCallum gestured with his wineglass. “There seems to be something ritualistic about this, doesn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh. You know, Andrew, I don
’t know when I’ve been more proud than I am now. Of Mattie. Of all the children. Of Bon Marché. I think of it in that context because this plantation has become a flesh and blood thing to me.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  A brief lull.

  “Did you notice George,” Dewey asked, “making off in his carriage with that blond young lady just after the sale?”

  “That’s what I love about George—the model of consistency.”

  “I hope her father isn’t too worried about her whereabouts. He’s one of those men who came in from South Carolina, I believe.”

  “If I were her father,” Andrew chuckled, “I’d be showing some concern. Of course, he’s probably not fully cognizant of our George’s reputation.” The chuckle turned to a full-throated laugh. “Maybe, though, her eyes won’t mist over.”

  “What?”

  MacCallum waved the question away. “Just a bit of expertise that George and I have shared.”

  “I see—another secret kept from your old friend.”

  “Men of the world, Charles, must maintain some secrets.”.

  Dewey shrugged. “It seems to me that all that needs to be done now, Andrew, is to reach agreement on an arrangement for you at Bon Marché. It certainly was evident today that you—and Mercy—could have a significant role here.”

  “Yes, well…” A hesitation. “As a matter of fact, Mercy and I had decided that we’d take advantage of this occasion to discuss it with you. We thought that tomorrow we’d sit down and—”

  “That’s wonderful!” Charles interrupted. “Simply wonderful!”

  Shock showed on MacCallum’s face. “Oh, Lord!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t suppose I can delay this until tomorrow.” He sighed weakly. “The decision we have made, my dear friend, is that we can’t stay. We’ll be returning to Princeton within the month.”

  Dewey stared at him. Wordlessly. Disbelieving.

  “The college has been after me, Charles, to return. I’m to be the dean. And Mercy … well, she’d rather return to the East as well. Perhaps to teach again.”

  Wearily, Charles pushed himself to his feet, moving to the fireplace, staring down into it, although there was no fire there to see. Without warning, he raised his arm and hurled the sherry glass into it. It shattered noisily, causing Andrew to flinch.