Wild Wind Westward

by Vanessa Royall

  “I go,” said Gustav, hoping to humiliate her, “to find willingly and skillfully given pleasure I cannot know here at home.”

  “I have always thought,” she said calmly in her turn, “that you took a great liking to Lord Soames’s brand of depravity.”

  Gustav’s face purpled, and not only with anger. He averted his eyes as well, and Kristin suspected that she had guessed right. Yet, what did it matter? He could find pleasure with whomsoever he wished. She was leaving and would never come back.

  “You’ll pay for your smart mouth one day,” he promised, storming out of the house and slamming the great door behind him.

  Kristin laughed bitterly. She had paid enough already.

  “Haakon and I are spending the night at the Van Santens’,” she told the servants, ordering up the carriage and bidding that a few pieces of her luggage be packed. She could not take more; the suspicions of the servants would surely be aroused. Kristin herself dressed the little boy, and held his hand as he toddled toward the door, and toward the coach waiting at curbside.

  Ellison, the butler, handed her an envelope just as she was about to leave the house.

  “What is this?”

  “Just delivered, madam. It arrived with the latest ship from Oslo.”

  Kristin glanced at the envelope. Old Adolphus wrote frequently, communicating to his son new strategies of skullduggery, new twists to the fine art of chicanery he practiced. But the handwriting on the envelope—it was addressed to both herself and Gustav—was not the old man’s. She did not wish to delay her departure because of a letter.

  “Thank you, Ellison,” she said, and helped Haakon down the steps to the carriage.

  “And when will you be returning?” Ellison asked.

  For a moment Kristin thought he might have become suspicious. She looked into his eyes. No, he was merely inquiring so that the house would be in order when she got back.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said lightly. “You know how Mrs. Van Santen is always planning entertainments.”

  “Indeed,” Ellison replied, and helped her and Haakon into the coach.

  When the whip cracked and the horses began to move, Kristin tore open the envelope. Glancing first to the bottom of the page, she saw that the letter had been written by Thorsen, once solicitor in her home village of Lesja, now factotum to the Rolfsons in Oslo. A willingness to corruption had won him the prize he sought, although it had not won him Kristin’s hand or body. But why was he writing? Her eyes flew over the page.

  …took sick suddenly…high fever…struggled for three nights with the ague…minister summoned…profound grief…last words were “More, more, give me more.”

  Adolphus Rolfson was dead.

  For a moment Kristin was undecided as to what course of action to pursue. She felt neither glee nor pity at the old man’s demise; his death meant, however, that her family was immeasurably safer. But if she stopped the carriage and ordered that the letter be delivered now to Gustav, her own plans would almost certainly be ruined. She could not afford that. In any event, given the time it took for a ship to cross the Atlantic, Adolphus had been dead for a long time already. She would leave the letter with Isabel, giving instructions that it be carried to Gustav the following week, with no excess of haste.

  Isabel had seen to it that Hector was not at home, and so when Kristin arrived at the Van Santens’, all was in readiness.

  ‘I’m sending Sean and Bridget with you,” Isabel said, giving Kristin a quick hug as the two servants got into the carriage. “They’re excited about the trip, and they’re both very reliable. Keep them as long as you like, and telegraph if you need anything. Anything,” she repeated.

  “I will. But things will be fine now. I know it.”

  “Oh, I hope so. No one has waited longer than you for happiness.”

  ‘I’m sure many have. The dangerous thing is…” She had almost spoken of the assassination.

  “What?”

  “The important thing is happiness, in the end,” Kristin said. She handed Isabel the letter. “Would you see that this is sent to Gustav? But not until next week.”

  “Bad news or good?” asked Isabel, glancing at the letter.

  “Just inevitable. Gustav should have it, but there is no need that he have it soon.”

  “I understand.”

  The servants, Bridget and Sean, were in the carriage. Haakon was crawling all over the maid’s lap.

  “God be with you,” said Isabel, her eyes tearing. The two women embraced.

  “Yes,” replied Kristin, “and with all of us.”

  The train arrived in Philadelphia shortly after twilight. Kristin had arranged to stop at the Hotel Constitution, but when she entered the grand lobby there, with its precious wainscoting, three-story windows, and glittering chandeliers, dozens of heads turned her way. The people who stopped at the Constitution were generally knowledgeable and well traveled. They had seen her portrait, or the Brady photos.

  “There. Look. Is that not the woman who…?”

  “Yes, by Lord, I believe you are right.”

  “It is that Norwegian woman, whose portrait was—”

  Kristin, carrying Haakon, fled upstairs to her designated rooms, leaving Isabel’s Sean and Bridget to handle details of baggage and registration.

  “Oh, missus, what…?” cried the maid, when she came into the suite minutes later.

  “I am tired of people staring at me!” announced Kristin, truthfully.

  There she stood, in front of the mirror. She had cut short her lovely hair, worn long since she had been a small child. Now, if she tucked the rest of it up under her hat, she would look quite different.

  “Oh, but missus, your pretty hair—”

  “Don’t fret, Bridget. It will grow back. It always does. How would you like to be stared at all the time?”

  “I don’t think I should mind,” said Bridget, who would never be stared at anyway.

  “It’s for the best,” concluded Kristin. She remembered how Phipps had vowed to make her known by her picture. “Now, Haakon must be fed, bathed, and put to bed. The train ride seems only to have excited him and kept him awake.”

  On the ride from the train station to the Harrisburg hotel Kristin bade the driver take her past the courthouse, a formidable domed building of red brick and gilt. Once at the hotel she bade Sean to call on all hotels and rooming houses in the city, asking after Eric Gunnarson. He returned, hours later, without news of such a man.

  So Eric must be planning on arriving in the city Monday morning.

  Was the assassin already here in Harrisburg, waiting?

  Accepted by all? Beyond suspicion?

  What manner of man was he?

  XIII

  Elaine woke up screaming, just before dawn.

  “What is it? What is it?” cried Eric, holding her close to him. Her shrieks had awakened him from an uneasy sleep. The long, early-morning ride to Harrisburg lay before them, and all night he had dreamed they were riding toward the city for the trial. But though they rode as fast and hard as possible, the hour grew later and later, and the city did not appear on the horizon.

  Baby Elizabeth, startled, too, by her mother’s cries, began to squall in her crib. Phil Phettle poked his head over the railing of the loft. “Everything all right?” he asked. He had been staying down on the farm, preparing Eric’s neighbors for the ordeal of the trial to come.

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” said Elaine. “It was just a dream.”

  But still she shivered in Eric’s arms.

  “I had a vision,” she told him. “Elizabeth and I were walking through the cemetery at Gettysburg—”

  “You needn’t speak of it.”

  “But I must Elizabeth and I were walking there, and I saw my father seated upon a distant tombstone. He beckoned for us to come to him. I hurried toward him, pulling Elizabeth after me, but as I drew nearer, I saw that it was not my father at all, but President Lincoln who beckoned me. I stopped in alar
m, but he seemed to want me to come on, so I proceeded. Elizabeth could not keep up with me—in the dream she could walk, but just barely—and started to cry. I looked down to pick her up. We were very near the tombstone now. But when I lifted her and looked again—”

  Her voice broke, and she clung to Eric, held him fast.

  “—when I looked again, Eric, it was you seated on that tombstone!”

  Elaine shuddered in Eric’s arms, and he suppressed a shiver himself.

  “It’s nothing. It’s only a dream. Things get all mixed up.”

  “Oh, darling, I hope so. But it was startlingly clear for just a dream. Father, and Gettysburg cemetery, and Lincoln and the tombstone, and—”

  “Me?” he finished. He forced a smile. The vision was uncanny in its dark simplicity. “I’m very much alive.”

  She held him a while more, and said nothing. Finally they rose and washed and dressed. Phil Phettle joined them at the table for coffee, oatmeal, and fried slabs of salt pork.

  “You’re certain Elaine should attend the trial?” Eric asked the lawyer. He was not worried about leaving little Elizabeth with Bonnie Wenthistle. He was more concerned lest Elaine become excessively agitated by the wear and tear of the trial, which promised to be acrimonious. She had barely recovered from a difficult childbirth, and the constant talk of oil, business plans, and the trial itself vexed and puzzled her.

  “I wish I could say no, but I can’t,” Phil Phettle explained. “You are bringing suit together, and it is her farm, by right of inheritance. What would a jury think if…”

  “It’s all right,” Elaine said. “There are some things I don’t understand, but my place is beside my husband.”

  Eric touched her hand, and they ate quickly, in silence. Bonnie Wenthistle arrived, yawning, to take care of the baby. Elaine hugged the little girl tightly, for a long time, then gathered her shawl and stood at the door. Eric kissed the baby, too; she looked up at him with her striking eyes, which seemed to understand him and all that he did. Then they went outside to join Phil Phettle, who was sitting on horseback with the farmers who had gathered there, Ordway, Fensterwald, Cleanland, and Renner. They were ready, but unenthusiastic. Months earlier Eric and Phil Phettle had been able to stir in them an indignation against Horace and Creedmore, and such indignation had caused them to lend their names to the legal suit. But now, with the time of the actual court case drawn nigh, they regretted their boldness. They were country people, suspicious of legal machinery, resentful now of what they felt Eric was forcing them to do, but too tightly held by the compunctions of their own private sense of honor to renege upon a promise.

  “Let’s ride and get this thing the hell over with,” Ordway grunted.

  Eric swung up on his horse, touched its flanks lightly with spurs, and they all galloped off to the north.

  Kristin barely slept all night, and awoke long before dawn. Her life, it seemed, had reached a sudden, unexpected climax, the nature of which she could not yet perceive, but whose emotional effect was profound. She felt intensely alive, totally prepared; yet she did not know what is was that she anticipated with such steadfast resolve.

  Kristin walked to the window of her suite, and looked out over Harrisburg. Somewhere out there was the man who had been sent to kill Eric. In the newspaper, she had read news of the oil rights trial that was to begin at eleven o’clock that very morning. “…Eric Gunnarson, former Union army officer and now a farmer in Adams County, is contesting…”

  Kristin crossed her arms and hugged herself; it could not have been written in the stars that she and Eric should come all this way, across the ocean, across time and the years, be separated for so long with such pain, only to suffer disaster now.

  Kristin breakfasted with Haakon and Bridget in the suite. Sean was solicitous. “Do you wish me to go around to the hotels again, Mrs. Rolfson, and ask after that Gunnarson fellow?’

  “Please, Sean, if you would be so kind.”

  He returned about an hour later. “No luck, I’m sorry to say. I checked all the hotels, and stopped at the courthouse. They are preparing for the trial now, and a bailiff told me Gunnarson was expected to ride up from his farm this morning.”

  Kristin felt a sudden flash of fear. All along she had imagined the attempted killing would take place in town. What if the assassin lay in ambush along a country road? Then her trip here was all for naught.

  “Gunnarson is a popular man,” Sean was saying.

  “Yes?”

  “Several hotel clerks told me other men have been asking for him.”

  “Other men?”

  “At one hotel a man with an eyepatch had inquired. At another it was a fellow with long red sideburns and a stovepipe hat. And at the Penn Inn, it was some dandy with a cape and silver-headed cane.”

  Kristin was mystified Was there more than one assassin? She clearly remembered the stranger in her home telling Gustav that his men always made a point to blend in with the surroundings, so as not to appear distinctive. The men described by Sean were definitely distinctive. Disguises?

  “Anything wrong, Mrs. Rolfson?” Sean asked, noting the worried look on her face.

  “No,” she lied. “Sean, I must go out. I’d like you to remain outside the door, in the hotel corridor, and look after Bridget and Haakon.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Rolfson.”

  Then, after pinning up her hair and tucking it under her hat, she put on her cape and went out. If Eric was not already here in Harrisburg, he would have to be arriving by eleven o’clock, at which time, according to the newspaper, the trial was to begin. If he were coming by horseback, what approach would he use to the courthouse? Three different roadways led to its main entrance, a convergence of streets already crowded in early morning. By midday the space in front of the courthouse would be a teeming mass of horseflesh, upholstery, leather, haberdashery, humanity. Then Kristin had another thought: Did the assassin know what Eric looked like? Certainly, he would have attempted to learn this, but how could he know for sure? She felt a faint surge of optimism. In a sense the assassin might be walking blind, so to speak, until the final moments before he struck. He would be trying to pick Eric out of the crowd, and to do this he would have to get very close, and wait. Kristin determined to get very close to Eric as well. Perhaps she should get a gun…but in a crowded area her lack of skill might prove more dangerous than helpful.

  Not knowing how or where Eric would arrive in town, Kristin decided to go over to the courthouse. It was not especially large, but constructed in a quasi-Roman, quasi-Greek manner, with pillars and domes and arches scattered about in inappropriate profusion. There was enough marble to give it a formal air, and enough brick to render it American. A few inquiries revealed that the “oil trial” would take place in courtroom three, on the second floor. The courthouse was crowded this morning. Kristin studied everyone, hoping to find behind whiskers, or beneath hat, or even concealed within skirts, the hint of someone who had come here today to kill. But she had no luck, no luck at all, and so, calculating that the assassin would not strike inside the building, she went outside onto the broad steps. Taking a position next to one of the big pillars supporting an insubstantial but pretentious portico, she watched and waited. Scores of people milled about, going up and down the stairs, into the courthouse and out again. Kristin studied every face. Watch for a disguise that does not look like a disguise, she told herself, study the women as well as the men.

  But there were so many people to keep track of! The lawyers were easy enough to spot, generally well-fed men with good clothes and watch chains drooping over swelling girths. The crowd was swelled, too, by citizens trying to get seats in the courtroom for the sheer entertainment of watching a trial. It would be something to talk about, something to have been in on. Then there were the reporters, not only from Harrisburg, but Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, too. The outcome of Gunnarson et al. versus Horace and Creedmore would affect the future of the commonwealth for a long time to come, in ways yet i
ncalculable. Kristin recognized the reporters by their notepads and cynical talk. Vendors walked among the crowd, peddling coffee and sandwiches, sausages and chocolates, buttermilk and cheese. A young girl sold fresh biscuits from a basket, and a Union army veteran in uniform, his crutch beside him, sat on the courthouse steps requesting signatures on a petition for pension increases.

  Everything seemed perfectly normal.

  That was the dangerous thing. The assassin wanted everything to be “perfectly normal.”

  Then a large carriage pulled to a stop in front of the courthouse steps, and Kristin felt the enhanced excitement of the crowd.

  “It’s Horace and Creedmore,” someone called, and reporters pushed through the crowd to press these luminaries with questions. From her place beside the pillar Kristin saw a fleshy man emerge from the carriage, saw the vehicle bounce several times, as if relieved of his weight.

  “Tell us, Congressman Creedmore,” a reporter demanded, “what is your view of the outcome of the trial?”

  “We shall win!” he boomed pompously, throwing up his fat jaw and hooking his thumbs in his galluses.

  Emerging from the carriage after Creedmore was a tall dark-haired man with a rude, peremptory gaze. Horace Kristin surmised. The man turned to help down one of the loveliest women Kristin had ever seen, a silky redhead with a perfect oval face and cunning green eyes. The woman seemed very calm and sure of herself, yet Kristin’s intuition sensed a subdued but constant hunger in the redhead, a grasping need that would never be satisfied, not with men, not with money, not with any of the pleasures of the earth.

  The three made their way up the steps through the milling people, with the reporters pushing and darting after them like sparrows attendant upon great hawks. Vexed, Creedmore stopped.

  “All right,” he said, “clear a little space here, and I’ll answer a few questions. There’s still time before the trial begins, and I understand the plowboys aren’t here anyway. Maybe they got scared off, or maybe they haven’t scraped the barnyard off their boots yet.”