‘What do you think I’m doing here? I heard about you from Mr Hang.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I forgot you were so friendly with the Chinese. Well, how are you?’
‘I’m well. I’m off to Washington next week. But what about you?’
‘Me?’ asked Sarah vaguely. ‘Well, my dear, I’m all right. I’m very well. I shall be better later, of course, when Mr Hang has given me his little treat.’
Collis took her arm. ‘Sarah,’ he said, ‘this has got to stop.’
‘Stop? Why should it have to stop? Don’t you think I look better now than ever? Don’t you think I’m the Princess of San Francisco?’
‘I don’t know what’s happened to you,’ said Collis, and his voice was uneven with emotion. ‘You look desperately sick.’
‘Sick?’ she said, tugging her arm away. ‘Of course I’m sick. I’m always sick until I visit Mr Hang. Aren’t I, Mr Hang?’
Hang Far shrugged non-committally.
‘Sarah,’ said Collis, ‘the first time I ever saw you, you were coming out on to the balcony of the theatre, in your yellow dress, and you looked like the kind of woman that men could go mad for. You were beautiful. You were graceful. You were everything a young woman should be.’
Sarah reached out for an armchair and unsteadily sat down. ‘Yes,’ she said, with an odd little-girl sigh. ‘Yes, I suppose I was. Francis always used to tell me that. “Sarah,” he used to say, “you are the dictionary definition of ecstasy, made flesh.” ’
‘You loved him very much, didn’t you?’
Sarah absent-mindedly reached up and touched the feathers in her hat. ‘I loved him totally. But that was all a long time ago.’
‘What would he say if he could see you now?’
‘Oh – I expect that he’d be very annoyed. He doesn’t like the Chinese, you know. He was always complaining about their heathen ways. But what does it matter? He’s off with someone else now. It’s all past history.’
‘So why do you persist in taking these tinctures?’ asked Collis. ‘Can’t you see what they’ve done to you?’
‘They make me feel well,’ said Sarah. ‘I feel cold, and they keep me warm.’
Collis knelt down on the German rug and took her hand. He could feel the bones of her fingers through the white cotton. And in spite of her overdress and her petticoats, he could see that she was savagely thin, and that her figure had been reduced to that of a starving seamstress.
‘I want you to leave with me, now,’ said Collis. ‘I’m going to take you to Dr Cooper, and together we’re going to get you well again.’
‘I want my tincture first,’ said Sarah stiffly.
‘No,’ said Collis. ‘From now on, you’re going to survive without it.’
‘What’s making you so concerned?’ Sarah asked him. ‘You weren’t so concerned when you took those pictures of me, were you? You weren’t so concerned when you drugged me with tinctures then?’
‘I’m concerned now because I wasn’t concerned then,’ said Collis. ‘I didn’t realise what effect that tincture would have – I didn’t know about you and Mr Harte.’
Mr Hang walked over to his desk, opened it, and took out a small glass bottle. ‘Would you like this?’ he asked Sarah.
‘Mr Hang,’ Collis said with ire, ‘I want you to put that away.’
‘Mr Edmonds,’ said Hang Far, ‘I allowed you to come here unwillingly, and only for observation. You were not to come here to interfere in my legitimate business.’
Collis stood up. ‘You call that stuff legitimate business? Have you seen what you’ve done to her?’
‘It is her own choice,’ said Hang Far.
Collis snatched the bottle from Hang Far’s hand, unstoppered it, and turned it upside down. The laudanum splashed on to the desk and the rug and left spots of wet on Hang Far’s discarded newspaper.
‘Well, you white people are certainly fond of dramatic gestures,’ said Hang Far equably. ‘But there is plenty more tincture where that bottle came from.’
‘Miss Melford’s not having any of it,’ said Collis. ‘Come on, Sarah – we’re leaving.’
‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘Don’t you think you’ve interfered in my life enough already?’
Collis seized Sarah by the wrist, pulled her out of her chair, and swung her around so that she was facing the mirror on the library wall.
‘Look at yourself!’ he shouted. ‘Look at what you’ve done!’
Sarah looked, and then turned towards Collis. ‘You have many talents, my dear,’ she said calmly. ‘You have determination, and you have style. But you will never be a saviour of souls. Your ambition is too destructive. Now, I’d appreciate it if you left. What I do here with Mr Hang is my own business.’
‘I shall tell your father,’ said Collis.
‘I doubt if my father will believe you. I doubt if he will even listen to you, after you blackmailed him with those pictures.’
‘Sarah,’ said Collis, ‘for the love of God.’
Sarah lifted her veil. Her face had the whiteness and the texture of chalk.
‘You may kiss me, Collis,’ she said, with arid dignity.
Collis stayed where he was. On the other side of the desk, Hang Far smiled at him like a friendly restaurant proprietor. After a moment or two, Collis turned and said: ‘Come on, Kwang Lee, we have to go.’
Outside, on Jackson Street, he tugged on his gloves and looked up at the sky as the first few spots of a spring rainshower spattered on to the sidewalk.
‘You are going to leave Miss Melford like that? You are going to do nothing?’ asked Kwang Lee.
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he said bitterly.
They arrived in Washington on the last day of May, 1862. They had seen very little evidence of the war on their journey, since the Union Navy was far stronger at sea than the Confederacy; the paddle-steamer Ulysses, on which they travelled from Aspinwall, was cautiously approached off the Florida coast by an armour-plated Rebel ship, which eventually did nothing but signal them bon voyage. They also approached close enough to Charleston harbour for Collis and Kwang Lee to see the Union blockage ships on the horizon.
Washington itself had become a teeming military encampment. It was still as mucky and untidy and unfinished as before; and the Washington Monument was still an unhappy stump in the middle of a patch of waste ground. But these days the city had 150,000 soldiers to house, as well as its politicians, and most of the parks had been taken over for camps and temporary barracks, and trees had been chopped down to build huts and fences. Locomotives and railroad cars were shunted along Maryland Avenue, and ordnance carriages churned up the muddy streets even more deeply than the hansoms and broughams of prewar days.
Not that the city’s social life had abated. Although public transportation was almost non-existent, and most of the streets were only occasionally lit, there was still a furious round of parties and soirées every night, and the Washington Star complained that many of the gambling houses were crowded during the day by officers in uniform. The President had cut down on his social calendar after the death of his son in February, but White House receptions were still popular, and always so crowded that local pickpockets made a very respectable living.
Collis had been unable to book a hotel room, but Theo found him a suite of rooms on Connecticut Avenue, on the second floor of the abandoned home of Senator Irwin Teasdale, of Arkansas. The first floor was occupied by Colonel Merritt ‘Bones’ Bonham, of the newly-formed Army Balloon Corps, although from what Collis could hear going on downstairs, Bones did very little ballooning and a very great deal of drinking, not to mention the horseplay that went on with a number of fat women with loud voices. Kwang Lee occupied a small room at the back of Collis’s apartments, where he set up his wok and his tea kettle, and where he unaccountably pinned up a theatre poster for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Theo had put on weight, and had acquired the pallor of men who spend all their days in the cloakrooms of Congress and in the c
offee-houses of Pennsylvania Avenue. He seemed to have ambivalent feelings about Collis’s arrival – relieved, because he needed the support of someone enthusiastic and hard-headed; but wary, too, because he had learned to play the political game the Washington way, and he was afraid that Collis might trample on his carefully-nurtured connections.
He came around to visit Collis the afternoon after their arrival. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep, and his beard was tangled. He paced around the upstairs drawing-room in his dishevelled, soup-stained suit, and seemed to be vague and preoccupied.
Collis, dressed in severe grey, sat still in his armchair and watched him.
‘We seem so near to a charter, and yet there are so many sticking points,’ said Theo. ‘Just when the committee appears to be ready to approve the Sierra Pacific, somebody comes up with an objection, or a question, or an alternative.’
‘Are you sure you’re pushing them hard enough?’ asked Collis.
‘I’m not pushing them. If I pushed them, they’d dig in their heels even deeper. I’m trying to cajole them.
‘Our best hope is Lincoln,’ Theo continued. ‘He’s very much in favour of the Sierra Pacific-Union Pacific route. The only trouble is, he’s so involved with the war these days, it’s almost impossible to get near him.’
Collis stood up. ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked Theo. ‘You look as if you could use one.’
Theo rubbed his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I believe I could.’
Collis was just about to ring the bell for Kwang Lee when he heard a sharp knocking at the downstairs door. It was repeated almost immediately, and he heard Kwang Lee’s slippers shuffling on the staircase as he went down to answer it. A moment later, Kwang Lee came back, opened the sitting-room door, and handed Collis a visiting card.
Collis held the card up to the light. It read: ‘Please see me. Alice.’ He glanced at Theo, and then passed the card over so that he could read it, too.
‘Show the lady up,’ Collis said.
Alice Stride appeared in a long dark-blue cloak, with a hood. She was pale, and wide-eyed, as if she had recently suffered a fever. She came across the room slowly, with one hand clasped over the other and her elbows drawn in like an old woman feeling the cold.
‘Collis,’ she whispered.
Collis reached his hand out and took her arm. ‘My dear Alice,’ he said. ‘What’s happened? What are you doing here? You look so unwell.’
‘It was only the grippe,’ she said. ‘The winter was bad here, and medication was short, and it went around the whole city.’
‘Sit down – please,’ said Collis, and gently led her over to his armchair. ‘You must tell me what’s been going on. Kwang Lee – bring us some fresh tea.’
Alice loosened the cord of her cloak and brushed back her hair with her hand. ‘It’s father,’ she said. ‘He’s in desperate danger, and I don’t know what I can do to help him. When I heard that you’d arrived here on a visit – well, of course I came to see you.’
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Collis.
Alice said, ‘It was the war. We left Washington and moved to Richmond when Lincoln was elected. Father was one of the people who persuaded Alexander Stephens to stand as Vice-President of the Confederacy. Everything was fine, and we were all well, until November, when father insisted on going back to our house at Culpeper to rescue some of the paintings and the silverware. He said we would need them if the war became worse, and he didn’t want the bluebellies to have them.’
Collis drew up another chair and sat down. ‘Go on,’ he encouraged her.
‘It was inevitable, I suppose,’ said Alice. ‘Father was on his way back with a wagonload of valuables when a Union raiding party ambushed him and took him prisoner. When he told them who he was, and produced papers to prove it, they brought him back here to Washington and locked him up. They held him without trial for four months, although they were always threatening to charge him with conspiracy and espionage and all manner of trumped-up crimes.’
‘Where is he now?’ Collis asked.
‘He escaped. I came here to Washington myself in January, with the help of Senator Harris, of Philadelphia. I tried several times to have my father released legitimately, but I was told that he was an important hostage, and they would never let him go. But one day last month, without my knowledge, father persuaded the army to let him visit an old friend in Georgetown. They sent him with two armed men as an escort; but once in his friend’s house, he and his friend disarmed his escort, and shot them both. My father escaped, and now he’s hiding in Washington with a family of Southern sympathisers.’
Collis looked at Alice carefully. ‘What can I do?’ he asked. ‘I’m only a visiting railroad lobbyist, from California.’
‘You’re more than that,’ said Alice. ‘You’re clever, and you’re imaginative, and I’m sure you can think of a way to get my father out of Washington and back into Virginia.’
‘You’re asking a lot,’ said Collis. ‘Your father’s face is so well known, I don’t suppose there’s a single boy in the whole Union Army who wouldn’t recognise him on sight, and bayonet him, too. If he’s killed two of his guards, then that makes him a murderer, and you know what the penalty for assisting a murderer can be.’
‘Collis,’ said Alice. Her eyes glistened with tears. ‘I wouldn’t ask if you weren’t my last and my only hope.’
Collis thought for a while. Theo, who was agitated by Alice’s presence, stood by the window and drummed his fingertips on the pane. It was like the sound of rain, or distant horses.
Eventually, Collis said, ‘All right, Alice,’ and Theo at once stopped drumming, so that the silence in the sitting-room was quite complete.
‘Oh, Collis,’ said Alice. ‘Oh, Collis, thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me yet,’ said Collis. ‘It won’t be cheap, and it won’t be guaranteed.’
‘My father has plenty of money. I’ve managed to release most of his assets while I’ve been here. Just tell me how much you need.’
‘Collis,’ said Theo sharply. ‘Don’t you think we’ve bled Senator Stride enough?’
Collis lowered his head impatiently. ‘I’m not talking about bleeding, Theodore. I’m talking about helping. And in a time of war, helping the enemy, especially an enemy as wanted as Senator Stride – well, that can’t come at a bargain price.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Theo.
‘For anybody’s sake you like,’ Collis retorted. ‘The fact remains that the man is a murderer, and an escaped prisoner of war, and that to spirit him out of Washington and back to the South can’t possibly be effected for nothing.’
‘You wouldn’t even have the first idea how to do it,’ said Theo. ‘You’ve only been back in Washington for a day.’
Collis reached over and held both of Alice’s hands. ‘I’m going to get your father out, don’t you worry. All he has to do is wait for my instructions. If you pass this house again, and there’s a red-white-and-blue rosette nailed to the front door, then knock, and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.’
Kwang Lee came in with a tray of fragrant tea and set it down on the table. Theo looked at it, and then at Collis, and then stalked angrily out of the room.
In his gambling days in New York, Collis had learned that if a trick works once, it will invariably work again. That was why he paid two hundred dollars to the proprietors of the Columbia Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue for two hours’ use of a south-facing sitting-room; and that was why he talked during the next two days to Representative Harold Watkins, of Minnesota, and to a reticent gentleman who ran a small specialist store on Ninth Street. Then, the following Monday, he nailed a rosette to the door of Senator Teasdale’s house, and waited for Alice to call back.
The meeting at the Columbia Hotel was arranged for two-thirty on Wednesday afternoon. It was then, as only Collis and the reticent gentleman from Ninth Street knew, that the natural sunlight in the sitting-room was at its brightest, so that anyone who sat
by the window in one of two carefully-positioned armchairs was ideally lighted for a wet-plate collodion photograph. Representative Harold Watkins certainly didn’t know, as he stumped heftily up the hotel stairs in his green broadcloth suit, his face as purple as a blueberry. Neither did the man who stepped quickly down from a black private carriage outside, and crossed the sidewalk to the hotel entrance with his hand raised to shield his face and his hat tugged down over his eyes.
Collis was waiting by the door to greet Representative Watkins as he came puffing in. ‘You won’t be sorry you came,’ he said with a warm smile. ‘This is what I call the opportunity of a lifetime.’
Watkins circled the suite like a gasping hippopotamus, wiping his neck with a pocket handkerchief and saying over and over again: ‘Stairs. You didn’t tell me there were going to be stairs. I wouldn’t have come at all if I’d known about the stairs.’
He was just beginning to cool off when there was a quiet knock at the door and Senator Stride stepped in.
Considering how long Senator Stride had been imprisoned, and how much he had aged since Collis had last seen him, he was surprisingly fit, and composed. Only his deep-set eyes, already dark, seemed darker. He shook Collis by the hand, and then Representative Watkins, and at last Collis had his two subjects sitting in their allotted chairs by the window. Only Collis noticed the lens that protruded from the curtained-off doorway at the back of the room, and only Collis heard the click of the mechanism as the reticent gentleman from Ninth Street took his first picture.
‘Well, Senator,’ said Watkins. ‘I never thought I’d live to see you in such a difficult hole.’
‘I never thought I’d live to see this nation of ours torn in half by civil war,’ said Senator Stride. His voice was hoarser than before, from all of his months in prison, but it was still commanding, and deep.
‘Mr Edmonds tells me you need assistance to leave Washington undetected,’ said Representative Watkins.
‘That is just about the case,’ Senator Stride said and nodded. ‘I’m willing to pay, of course, as much as is necessary.’
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