Some of the people laughed, but many others did not. Creedmore frowned, and so did Benjamin Horace. In the hearts of the common people their cause was obviously not pure and worthy. The reporters started peppering the two men with all manner of questions, both technical and trivial. Looking bored, the redhaired woman stepped away from them, saw Kristin standing there, and approached her.
“And whose side are you on?” she asked, politely enough but without prelude.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Are you here as a spectator? Are you…?” She seemed to look at Kristin piercingly, as if she had seen her before, or knew something about her. “Are you in support of Horace and Creedmore, or…?”
“I am for the cause of Eric Starbane!” Kristin stated proudly, having determined that this woman was not.
An expression of veiled alarm showed on the other’s face, and she scrutinized Kristin, as if putting together pieces of information and reaching a conclusion. “May I ask who you are?”
Not wishing to use the name Rolfson, Kristin nevertheless saw no harm in offering her Christian name. “Kristin,” she said politely, “and you?”
“So. You are the one! I always wanted to have a look at you.”
“What? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
The woman was smiling coldly. “I always wanted to see exactly what it was in you, that would captivate a man like him.”
This woman must know Eric. Kristin was mystified, and even hurt. What dark things had taken place in Eric’s life that she did not know about?
“Why do you call him Starbane, though?” the woman asked. “He had some bizarre aversion to using that name.”
“You would understand if…who are you?”
“I am Joan Leeds Horace. Current wife of that dark-haired defendant over there, talking to the reporters. Also former…friend…of Mr. Starbane, as you call him.” Joan smiled darkly. “Once upon a time we were very good friends.”
She enjoyed the look of pain on Kristin’s face.
“Here come the plaintiffs!” yelled a schoolboy, who had somehow gotten on the portico roof.
“I’m sure it will be a sweet reunion for you,” Joan was saying, “or did you know he’s married now?”
But Kristin wasn’t listening anymore. She had no time for Joan’s words. Riding toward the courthouse on the middle one of the three roads that led to it, she saw a party of perhaps a half-dozen horsemen. She watched them coming, then turned back to the crowd. It was impossible! The area in front of the court house was jammed, and the wide steps, too. She held to her place at the pillar, looking about, trying to fit together in her mind a picture of the entire scene, trying to evaluate it utterly. If the assassin was here, then something, some tiny little detail, must be amiss. There was the biscuit girl, and the reporters…
“See him now?” Joan Leeds was saying sweetly, pointing at the horsemen. “And I do believe that black-haired girl riding beside him is—”
Kristin could see Eric now, as he and his friends rode slowly across the street in front of the courthouse. She saw the woman beside him, who looked shy and lovely and a little afraid.
Don’t think, there is no time to think. Look!
Whatever would happen had to happen very soon. Kristin was sure an assassin would not wait until Eric entered the courthouse. Even now he was making his way toward the hitching posts in front of the courthouse. He looked wonderful and strong! His head was high and he sat upon his horse like a…like a Viking god. Nothing and no one should strike him down. The girl beside him—oh, she was so young and vulnerable, though—kept scanning the crowd with her eyes, as if seeking among the people some singular terror she might have imagined on a black night.
All right, Kristin thought, we both love him. And what does that matter now?
She turned her eyes back to the crowd. Reporters, vendors, biscuit girl, all in their places. Union army veteran…
Not where he had been, on the steps with his petitions and his crutch.
Eric and his wife, side by side on their horses, were ready to dismount.
The assassin would not wait until they were down among the crowd. He would shoot now.
Kristin looked wildly about. And she saw him. Partially concealed by the pillar at the farthest end of the portico, he braced against the pillar, the crutch pressed into his shoulder. He was sighting down the length of the crutch, as if it were a weapon. And it was.
“Eric!” shrieked Kristin. “Eric, look out!” She did not remember starting to run. All she knew was that she was pushing through the people, trying to reach the soldier with the weapon. She saw his finger tense on a piece of the crutch—it was the trigger and he was firing—and, still running, her head turned toward the street, almost as if she were trying to follow the flight of the bullet. There was a sharp crack, and an explosive aftershock. Kristin saw, magnified a hundred times in her sight and a thousand times in her memory, the fearful, startled eyes of Eric’s lovely wife. She saw how Elaine’s gaze moved across the courthouse steps, taking in Kristin, moving beyond Kristin to the man behind the pillar and the weapon he held. Kristin would remember to the end of her days the look of instantaneous decision on Elaine’s face. And Kristin would remember into eternity how Elaine threw her body sideways from her saddle, flew through the air, interposing her being between Eric and the bullet of a gun.
At a distance the sudden blood between Elaine’s breasts seemed a crimson flower pinned to her dress magically, by a magic hand.
Part Four
Minnesota,
1865–1872
I
“We’ll go west,” Eric had decided, in the awful aftermath of Harrisburg. “We’ll go west again, as once we came west from Norway, and have a new life. This time nothing will go wrong.”
Heartbreak had visited him, and he no longer wanted a part of the Pennsylvania hills. Heartbreak had called, but victory had trailed in its wake. Still, the earth that held Elaine, the earth made sacred by her sacrifice, was not the place for the new life he and Kristin sought. The east was haunted for them after the funeral and the trial; the west was open and wild and free.
“We’ll go west,” Eric had decided.
Elaine died in Eric’s arms.
“She took the bullet in the heart,” Eric told Kristin that night, “just as she took life. There wasn’t time for a word. One shot,” he said, helpless, angry and incredibly sad, “one deadly shot”
There might have been more. Propelled by desperation, knowing Elaine was shot, seeing the assassin tense to squeeze off another round, Kristin hurled herself at him. His second bullet flew off harmlessly into the air, and she was upon him, there on the stone steps, screaming and pummeling. Not at all crippled, he was also strong, and threw her off with no more than a jerk of his arm, scrambling to his feet. Kristin was on her knees, trying to get up and grab him again, if she could. But when she looked up she saw a small black hole had suddenly appeared between the assassin’s eyes. His eyes crossed. Then he crumpled to the stone. Kristin whirled to find Joan Leeds Horace standing there, holding a tiny derringer, its barrel still smoking, and in her other hand the open purse in which the pistol had been concealed.
Her quick decision and impeccable marksmanship, whatever future deaths they might have averted, were nonetheless disastrous to the fortunes of Creedmore and Horace. True, the assassin was dead, and could do no more harm, but his killing of Elaine exacerbated public temper. Obviously he had been trying to kill Eric. And, just as obviously, had been trying to forestall a fair trial and to intimidate the people on whose land oil had been found.
Who would stand to gain by such a sorry act?
Benjamin Horace and Angus Creedmore.
And so—many reasoned, debated, argued, concluded—Horace’s wife had killed her own hired assassin in order to silence him.
“It’s not that way at all,” Kristin explained to Eric that night. They were talking quietly in the parlor of her hotel suite. Haakon was asleep in a
bedroom, with Bridget tending him, and Sean was at his post outside the door, armed with a revolver and a knife. Elaine’s body lay in a coffin at the Zapp Funeral Home nearby, awaiting transport to a final resting place in Gettysburg, next to her father’s grave. Kristin and Eric were both tired to the marrow of their souls, but this was the first time all day that they had had a chance to talk. There was much to, talk about “It wasn’t Horace who ordered the assassination at all,” Kristin explained. “It was Gustav.”
Fatigued as he was, Eric leaped up from the couch. “Are you sure of this?” he demanded.
“I heard the arrangements made. A man came to our house in New York. Gustav spoke with him in the library. Money changed hands…”
“The stinking scrap of excrement!” Eric cried, striking open palm with balled fist. ‘I’ll—”
“Sir, you may not enter!” they heard Sean warn someone outside the door.
“I jolly well will, by God,” a man shot back, “and next time I see Hector Van Santen I’ll have your nether parts in a frying pan!”
Eric squared himself and faced the door. Kristin came to his side, and grasped his arm. The door flew open and Gustav Rolfson stormed in.
“So there you are,” he said smugly. “I might have known. Get away from that…that commoner scum.”
“No,” she said.
“I am your husband and the father of your child. You obey me, or it will go hard with you, and that I vow.”
Eric did not step forward to menace Gustav. He only seemed to. “Sit down, Rolfson,” he ordered.
Gustav looked at him. The nature of power is a mysterious thing, its sources often indeterminate and constantly changing. Eric glared into Gustav’s eyes, and Gustav glared back just as determinedly. In one sense the conflict between them was as malevolent as it had ever been. But in another way it had changed. If one was not ascendant over the other, now they were evenly matched. That in itself was a vast change, and it meant a shift in the equation of power.
Gustav sat down.
“We are going to have a talk now,” Eric said quietly, sitting down in the couch opposite the chair Gustav had taken. Kristin sat down beside him, still holding his arm. “We are going to talk, and you had better listen. Why did you come here?”
“Why…why, the evening papers in New York had the news of the…the altercation here. I am in the oil business, as you know. This trial might affect me. I ordered up a private railroad car, and came posthaste. Terrible thing,” he added, momentarily dropping his vulpine eyes. “About your poor wife, I mean.”
“More terrible since you are the cause of it,” Kristin said.
His eyes flickered toward her, moved away, came back again, and held. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me,” she said.
“And you,” he accused, trying to change the subject, “you have run away like a slut in the night, with my child. I shall—”
“You shall nothing,” Eric told him. “Anyway, Haakon is my son. Mine and Kristin’s.”
Gustav’s eyes flew open wide. It was perhaps the most telling blow he had ever taken in his life. He had no choice but to disbelieve.
“What kind of putrid fabrication is this?” he raved.
“None whatever,” said Kristin. “With you, I always used a contraceptive. You never even knew. Do you recall that early time in New York, when Eric was in the coach at the Madison Hotel? That was the day it happened.”
“No,” he said, breaking into a sweat. “You are only saying this to deceive me!”
“And for more than a month afterward,” Kristin went on, “you were too busy with business worries to come to me, weren’t you? Never once on that long trip to Cleveland did you lay a hand on me. And then, when we were back in New York, the fear that Rockefeller had outdealt you in the matter of the refinery served to make you impotent”
“I was not impotent!’’ Gustav railed.
“You hire a man to kill for you,” Eric told him, “so why is it not also possible that a man should make love where you cannot?”
Gustav lurched to his feet. Eric stood up to meet him, and shot a fist into Gustav’s stomach. The businessman slammed back down into his chair, doubled up, gasped for breath.
“Listen,” Eric told him, still in that quiet, implacable voice, “I shall do you a great favor. Once you let me live, and I lived, suffering. I could kill you now, if I wanted. We know that you hired the man who killed my wife, meaning to kill me. But I have already spoken to Phil Phettle, my lawyer, and there is no way we can prove it. Yet what would it mean if I could? You would be hanged. Too short, too sweet for a man like you. So I shall permit you to live.”
Gustav gave him a look of fearful inquiry.
“Kristin has always been mine,” Eric told him, “and she will be with me from now on. Haakon is our son, and he is going to be with us. And as for you…”
Gustav sat there, enraged and desperate, waiting for the blow to fall.
“Eric is going to ruin you,” Kristin said quietly.
“Never. He can’t do that. He hasn’t got the…”
“Power? Oh, yes I have. Phettle has asked for a postponement of the trial, until Elaine is laid to rest. If Horace and Creedmore still have a taste for the contest after the funeral, let it be. My neighbors and I shall win. And do you know what we are going to do?”
Gustav shook his head.
“Mr. Rockefeller is right. He has the keys to refining, transportation, and the markets, there in the north. We cannot compete in all those areas. So we are going to combine and lease our oil rights to him. He will be immensely rich, and we will be rich, and you will be…”
Eric did not have to finish. Rockefeller’s situation would improve immediately, immensely. He would be able to pay back Gustav’s loans before they were due, taking permanent control of the refinery as a part of the transaction. Gustav would have enough to meet the notes held by Lord Soames in England, but not much more. Soames would hardly be pleased. He had counted on making huge profits in America. As it was, he would wind up even. It is defeat for a businessman to wind up even. Gustav was defeated, too. He had lost five years, and now he was—figuratively speaking—back in Norway, trying to decide how to found a business empire on the value of the minerals in the Rauma Range.
Gustav saw it all, and his face paled. The scar stood out upon it, mark of sin and desolation. He had no qualms about abandoning his pride, however.
“Perhaps we might make a deal.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “You and I against Rockefeller, eh? What about it, Gunnarson, eh?”
“Call him Starbane,” Kristin said.
Gustav bridled, then seemed prepared to speak the ancient name.
“No,” Eric said. “Not yet.”
“But Eric, you have land now, oil, riches…”
“The land was Elaine’s. It is mine only by chance and disaster. I am not ready yet. In any case,” he said to Gustav, “I will not deal with you. Captain Dubin, master of the Anandale, upon which I came to America, always encouraged me to make deals. But I have since learned that there are good deals and bad deals. Your offer is a bad one. Moreover, I do not need it. Get out, Rolfson.”
There was a long silence. Knowing he was beaten, Gustav turned peevishly bitter. “I’ll never give you a divorce, Kristin,” he said. “Don’t even bother to ask for one.”
“Where we’re bound, we won’t need one,” Eric told him. “We’ll never see you again. It won’t matter.”
Rolfson grinned horribly. “Don’t count on that. Don’t erase me yet. I’ll have my son back, and my wife, too, in due course. Father and I will recoup our fortunes, just you wait.”
“By the by,” interjected Kristin, “did Isabel Van Santen send over that letter?”
“What letter is that?” asked Gustav, turning to her.
“The one from Thorsen that gives news of your father’s recent death,” she said.
Gustav sat there for a moment, in stunned disbelief.
&nb
sp; “Not now,” he muttered. “Not now. It’s not fair.”
“We have had to bear a death this day,” said Eric, very quietly, “so it seems passing fair that you bear one, too.”
Gustav stood up unsteadily and shambled to the door, all poise lost, all resolve flown.
“But we will meet again,” he told them, in a hollow voice, making ready to depart “Oh, we will, we will.”
Then he was gone.
“If I ever meet up with him again, I shall kill him,” said Eric, still quietly, but with a ferocity that frightened Kristin.
“No, darling,” she told him, touching his face. “Don’t be like him. Never be like him. That kind of life destroys one, can’t you see?”
And so they left Pennsylvania, and headed west. Left Elaine in her grave, and Phil Phettle in supervisory control of the oil leases John D. Rockefeller had purchased. Left with Haakon and little Elizabeth and five million dollars that was Eric’s share. Taking the railroad from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, Eric engaged cabins on the Ohio steamer Victura, and aboard her the new family made a slow, stately progress westward, past Cincinnati and Louisville, and on toward Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio poured into the mighty Mississippi.
“When we reach Cairo, I’ll decide where to go,” Eric said. He was in no hurry for decision, nor was Kristin. So much had to be talked about, thought about, settled. The children were no problem. Blond, rambunctious Haakon took to Eric right away. For a few weeks he occasionally wanted to know, “Where’s Papa? Where did Papa go?”
“I’m your papa now,” Eric told him.
Haakon seemed mildly puzzled at first, but gave no sign whatever of missing the severe, fearsome father-man with the scar on his face. Little Elizabeth, for her part, was of N a sweet nature, and too young to take notice of much other than faces, bottle, crib, and toys. She regarded everything with calm eyes of depthless blue—Elaine’s peerless eyes. Kristin fell in love with her, even as Haakon and his new father grew close.
The war was over now, and as the Victura passed down the powerful, slow-moving Ohio, the country itself seemed reborn. On both hanks of the river, north and south, country and town alike, agriculture and industry were flourishing. Endless fields were being planted, forests shrieked beneath crosscut saws, buildings were rising in the cities. And river traffic—barges, freighters, passenger craft—plied between the high, solemn banks of the Ohio.
Wild Wind Westward Page 39
