All Other Nights

by Dara Horn

  “Of course,” he lied. To his surprise, the lie was easy to tell. He knew he had saved her, and that was enough.

  “Oh, Jacob, thank you!” she cried, and threw her arms around him. Her soft cheek against his was enough to erase his doubts.

  “And this is what they gave me,” Jacob said, and presented her with his snuff box. It was the one that Phoebe had carved for him, “from Jeannie.”

  Jeannie took it in her hands, knowing immediately what Jacob meant. She opened the lid, dipped a finger in to push the snuff aside, and carefully lifted the floor of the box until she could reach the secret compartment. Out of it she withdrew a single bill, folded into a tiny rectangle. It was still moist from the bakery roll from which Jacob had extracted it that afternoon, but when she unfolded it, it was legible enough.

  “A hundred dollars?” she asked.

  “Quite deserved,” Jacob replied. But his stomach fluttered. The currency, he knew, was depreciating by the day; should there have been more?

  He watched as Jeannie shook her head. “This is much more than they ever gave us before. Twenty at a time, maybe. Never this much.”

  Jacob had simply thought of it as Rebel money, which was worthless as far as he was concerned. But no one in Virginia saw it that way then, not yet. And now he was worried.

  “Did they mention anything about it when they gave it to you?” she asked.

  Jacob maintained his actor’s face: straight, candid. “No, nothing in particular,” he said.

  “How odd,” she said, running a finger over the box’s carved lid. She gave the box back to Jacob as she examined the bill in her other hand. “When William paid us, there was never more than—”

  Suddenly she stopped speaking and looked up, eyeing Jacob. Jacob watched as she screwed her face into a sneer. “What a fool I’ve been,” she announced.

  Now it was over. In another instant Jacob would have fallen at her feet, begging her to save his life. But just as he was about to open his mouth, she said, “William must have been keeping the rest for himself all this time. Papa was right. He was pure scum.” Then she smiled. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  Jacob sucked in his breath, trying to hold back a gasp of relief. “I only did what you asked of me,” he said. The lie was harder this time, but still not painful. The jealous triumph over William made him unaccountably proud, though Philip deserved the credit. And Jacob knew what he had really done for her, even if she never would.

  “Jacob, you don’t know how good you are,” Jeannie said with a sigh. She tucked the money into her dress, and enfolded him in her arms.

  If he were a better person, he would have turned away, excused himself, told her he couldn’t hold her now, that it would have to be another time, or another life; he would have vanished from the world entirely, poisoned forever with dirt and shame. But instead he started kissing her, and soon he found himself reaching up under her dress. He had every right. He had paid in full.

  6.

  PHILIP LOOKED BETTER THE SECOND TIME JACOB SAW HIM. IT was just over two weeks since Jacob had decided not to turn in his evidence when he was finally granted permission to return to the jail for another visit. This time he was brought to a different room, one with a table and stools instead of benches, and a chair along the wall for the guard. It was the same guard from his first visit, the old drunk. But this time he was awake, if inattentive, yawning over a copy of the New Babylon Intelligencer. And someone—Philip’s lawyer?—must have alerted the jail to the bad impression Philip’s cell had made, because instead of showing Jacob to Philip’s cell, the warden brought Philip directly into the room where Jacob was waiting. Philip was still shackled, but he seemed to wear his chains more lightly now. When he first saw Jacob, he almost smiled.

  They spoke for a time with a merciful lack of passion. Philip told him what the lawyer had said about his chances with the judge, which the lawyer apparently did not find as dire as Jeannie had predicted, though Jacob suspected that Philip was merely making the picture rosier for his sake. And Jacob in turn briefed him carefully about the business, lying even more than usual. He saw no reason to damage Philip’s good mood. Things were practically jovial between them until Philip suddenly leaned his shackled hands across the table toward Jacob and frowned.

  “Jacob, I have a favor to ask of you. A large one,” he said.

  Jacob glanced at the guard, who was lighting a pipe. It must be something about the lawyer, he guessed. With the guard ten feet away, there was a limit to what else Philip could possibly ask. “You know I would do anything for you,” he said.

  Philip looked at him. “I’d like you to buy Caleb. Bill my account.”

  At first Jacob had no idea what he meant. His initial thought was that this was some elaborate delusion about the business; perhaps Philip’s time in the jail was driving him mad. Jacob spoke slowly, as if to an imbecile, and asked, “You’d like me to buy what?”

  “Caleb, my cellmate. If you give the warden seven hundred dollars, he’s yours.”

  Now Jacob was certain that Philip had gone mad. “Why? What for?”

  “I know it sounds like a lot, but trust me, he’s a bargain,” Philip said loudly, in response to no question Jacob had asked. “At auction he would be over a thousand dollars. But this is a foreclosure sale. It would make an excellent investment.” Philip paused, and watched Jacob.

  Now Jacob saw that Philip was speaking for the benefit of the guard. “I mentioned him to you last time,” Philip said, emphasizing each word. “Do you remember?”

  Suddenly Jacob understood, though he found it almost impossible to believe. “Yes, I remember,” he said slowly. “I shall consider it.”

  “Don’t consider it,” Philip told him. “Come back with the money and do it. As soon as possible. Today or tomorrow, if you can.” His voice was even, but urgent. “Use my account. This is a business opportunity that you must not miss.”

  The guard had actually been listening, it seemed. He chuckled, a snorting sound, and as Jacob looked at him, he looked away and shook his head. “Always money, money, money,” he muttered, ostensibly to himself. “Even in jail, they still tryin’ to make a buck.”

  Philip blinked twice, then glanced at the guard. The guard was still grinning, but now he was pretending to ignore them, looking down at his newspaper and deliberately rustling its pages. Then Philip turned back to Jacob, and smiled.

  He raised his shackled wrists and wiped his eyes, awkwardly moving one thumb and then one wrist along the edge of the other wrist’s shirt cuff. Then he rubbed at his shirt cuff a bit more, wiping his eye with his other fingers. Jacob almost offered to help him, but before he could decide whether Philip would appreciate his help or be ashamed of it, Philip lowered his hands back to the table, the irons clanging on the wood. A second later he clutched Jacob’s hand firmly and quickly let go. Jacob felt something small and light, a tiny bit of cloth, folded into his fist.

  Jacob nearly unfolded his fingers to look, before he thought better of it. Instead he slipped whatever it was into his pocket. Then he looked up at Philip again, and he saw for the first time that his smile was strikingly, beautifully familiar. Jacob couldn’t help but laugh. Apparently Jeannie had inherited her talent for sleight of hand.

  “That’s the sort of thing the baker would appreciate,” Philip said as Jacob laughed.

  “The baker?” Jacob nearly swallowed the words.

  “Jacob, don’t be tiresome,” Philip said. “I’ve known Achilles for years, though he has never respected me much.”

  How much did Philip know? Jacob was still speechless when Philip finally spoke again. “Of course, by now I hope you know that respect isn’t in the cards for us,” he said. “But you can make your way through life without it. All you can hope for is a bit of honor now and then—private honor. No one will ever give it to you, no one will ever congratulate you for it, no one will ever even know you have it, but you earn it, and it’s yours.”

  The last time Jacob h
ad heard this was from the mouth of the Confederate Secretary of State, as he stood behind a latrine in a swamp. Now he was hearing it from a man in chains, and this time he already knew it was true. He could say nothing; there was nothing left to say.

  “Are the girls all right?” Philip asked.

  Jacob started to ramble about Rose and Phoebe ignoring the boarders, and about Lottie knitting socks for the troops, but Philip drummed his fingers once on the table and glared. Jacob knew what he really wanted to know. “I’m keeping Eugenia under control,” he finally said.

  “I am depending on you,” Philip said softly. “Please protect her. I know you have the ability to protect her.” The voices of the officers echoed through Jacob’s mind: We know we may depend on you. With no exceptions. “It will be very dangerous for her. And for you, too. If she doesn’t turn around, she’ll be shot in the back.”

  Jacob didn’t know whether or not this was a metaphor, and he didn’t care to find out. But now he was torn, and terrified. “I am already doing more than I can,” he said, almost pleading. “What else can I possibly do?”

  “Buy Caleb,” Philip said.

  Then the warden came in, and took Philip away.

  JACOB LEFT THE JAILHOUSE and made his way toward the office. The day soon grew long, deadened with sorting through fruitless accounting, correspondence about canceled plans, and the growing pile of notices of debt. After too many hours of watching him pretend to work, Jacob even sent the secretary home, wondering how soon he might have to let him go. Alone at last, he pulled the rag of paper out of his pocket.

  It was a little square of cotton cloth that must have been cut from a shirt, covered with words written out in block letters. The words were written in an odd, brownish-looking ink. Only after quite some time did Jacob realize it must have been blood. It read:

  HOME MORNING RIGHT MOVING FOR VENUS EIGHT TO GLORY LOVE HILLCREST MILO ASHTON MARS LIZA TOMORROW TRUTH.

  As soon as Jacob saw the word HOME, he froze in Philip’s chair. Could it possibly be?

  He wouldn’t, couldn’t believe it until he tried. He took out a piece of paper and a charcoal pencil and set to work.

  The word HOME meant four columns with four words in each, routed from bottom to top in odd-numbered columns and top to bottom in even-numbered ones. He reassembled the words after HOME according to the route, in a way that had become commonplace to him from deciphering the command’s messages during the past few months:

  1

  2

  3

  4

  FOR

  VENUS

  ASHTON

  MARS

  MOVING

  EIGHT

  MILO

  LIZA

  RIGHT

  TO

  HILLCREST

  TOMORROW

  MORNING

  GLORY

  LOVE

  TRUTH

  Now, reading horizontally from left to right, some sense emerged. VENUS was a code word for “Colonel,” MARS was General Longstreet, MILO meant “thousand,” LIZA meant “troops,” and RIGHT meant “east”—this much Jacob had already filed in his memory. The last three words, GLORY, LOVE, and TRUTH, were column-fillers. As he had long suspected, they meant nothing at all. Which left:

  FOR COLONEL ASHTON. LONGSTREET MOVING EIGHT THOUSAND TROOPS EAST TO HILLCREST TOMORROW MORNING.

  This was almost unfathomable. Jacob sat rereading the words for a long time, unable to understand. How on earth could Philip’s cellmate have known any of it? Perhaps it was a ruse, but it was difficult to imagine what incentive the slave would have to lie. No, Jacob was confident it was true; the slave had gotten the information legitimately, even if the information itself was somehow fraudulent or imprecise. But how had he found out? Hadn’t he been sitting in jail? If Philip had hardly been allowed any visitors, surely a slave wouldn’t have had any at all. Through what magic had he done it? Still pondering, Jacob read it again, until the last two words jumped out at him. He stopped thinking, pocketed the bloodstained scrap again, along with a few coins, and ran to the bakery as fast as he could. Once he had slipped the message into the baker’s fat hand, he ran back to the office to see what more could be done.

  He consulted the account books and went to the safe, where he removed seven hundred dollars in Rebel cash for the following day’s purchase. He would have gone back to do it that day, if it weren’t already so late. The investment, he saw, was worthwhile; there was no time to waste. He was nearly frantic as he walked back to the Levy house, wondering how he would ever be able to face the sisters that night. Then on his way home, he remembered something else, and bought a newspaper.

  He scanned the headlines, but there was nothing but the regular carnage and body counts, and the lists of casualties by name on the inside pages, as usual. One blessing of living in New Babylon was that the newspapers did not report the names of casualties for the Union. If everyone Jacob knew had already been killed, he did not want to know. But despite the ordinariness that had bled itself out of what used to be horror, that day’s paper was something strange indeed.

  He flipped back to the front page, reading the headlines again, and looked once more at the date, calculating in his head. Exactly two weeks and one day had passed since Lottie’s rendezvous with Major Stoughton. Yet even when he read through the entire paper, and bought every other paper available, Jacob could not find a single word about the Federal navy increasing its force at Norfolk.

  7.

  THAT EVENING AND THE FOLLOWING MORNING, THE LEVY HOUSE seemed unusually tense. Instead of leaving Jacob alone with Jeannie after the boarders had gone out for the evening, Lottie, Phoebe, and Rose sat down in the front room with them as Jacob told them about his visit to Philip. The girls were eager for every last detail of how he seemed to be faring, and as he had after his first visit, Jacob continued to lie as much as possible. They didn’t hear a word about his cell, or the guard, or his shackles, or anything about the business proposition he had made to Jacob. Instead, Jacob talked about Philip’s happy mood, and how well he looked as they discussed some business matters. By the time Jacob was done, the sisters must have pictured the two of them having a meeting over a few fine cigars.

  Even after that conversation had exhausted itself, something about the way Lottie looked at Jacob still left him too embarrassed to retreat with Jeannie upstairs. Instead he remained in Philip’s old chair with Jeannie in the seat beside him, reading one of the newspapers he had bought on his way home. Rose was scribbling earnestly on a piece of paper, while Phoebe was whittling a new box; Lottie was knitting socks for the Rebel army. The clicking of knitting needles in the chair opposite Jacob’s made him unaccountably nervous. Jeannie was occupying herself with a needlepoint, and he couldn’t help but wonder why Jeannie hadn’t joined in Lottie’s knitting spree. Not long after Jacob had begun pretending to read the newspaper, Lottie put down her sock and looked right at him. For a while he gazed at his paper, trying to withstand her eyes, but soon he had to give in. When he finally looked up, she was grinning at him.

  “What’s the news today?” Lottie asked.

  “News?” Jacob asked stupidly.

  “Yes, the news,” she said, and laughed out loud. “You have about five newspapers there. Surely I wouldn’t be remiss to expect you to be well-informed this evening.”

  Jacob glanced at Jeannie, hoping for help. Jeannie barely looked up. The sisters had had some sort of fight, it seemed. “Oh, the news, of course,” he replied, and then improvised. “I was interested because the statehouse was supposed to pass a new tariff bill today. It could be good for the business, if it goes through. But it seems they postponed the vote.”

  “Star comedy by Democrats,” Rose remarked. Her sisters ignored her.

  “What about the front?” Lottie asked.

  “The usual murder and mayhem,” he said, with a theatrical sigh. “But one just has to accept that by now.”

  “One doesn’t have to accept anything,
” Lottie said icily.

  “Live not on evil!” Rose proclaimed.

  Jeannie suddenly stirred, putting a hand on Jacob’s arm. He looked at her and saw that she had just understood what Lottie was asking about. “Jacob, is there any news about the Federal navy?” she asked.

  “Federal navy,” Jacob mumbled, and began rustling the newspapers, just as he had seen the guard in the jailhouse rustle his when he went to visit Philip. “Federal navy,” he repeated, turning pages.

  “And fear Levy,” Rose announced.

  Ignoring Rose, he flipped more pages in the paper before returning Lottie’s glare. “No, nothing about the Federal Levy—I mean, the Federal navy,” he stammered. Rose giggled.

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” said Phoebe. “I’d heard a rumor that the Yankees were planning an attack.” Phoebe, he had noticed earlier, was the most honest of the sisters: the most loyal, and the worst liar. Lottie narrowed her eyes at her, but she simply kept whittling, with a growing smile on her face. “Thank goodness for that. I suppose anybody who was thinking about attacking us heard the Rebel yell, and turned back.”

  “Belly reel,” Rose said. “Won’t lovers revolt now?”

  Clearly, Phoebe thought the girls’ own Rebel yell had sent the forces away. Jacob wondered if perhaps he could convince Lottie and Jeannie of the same. While he thought of how best to try, he decided to change the subject. “Have you girls ever heard it?”

  “Heard what?” asked Phoebe.

  “A real Rebel yell,” he said.

  “William did it for me once,” Jeannie said, then blushed as Jacob turned to her. Hearing William’s name still enraged him, and she knew it. She took his hand. “He tried to teach me how, but I couldn’t ever do it myself. Of course, I couldn’t do a lot of things he wanted me to do.” She smiled. Jacob squeezed her fingers as they curled around his hand, and felt at home.