Bold Sons of Erin

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  I began to expect a lengthy ordeal, with Mrs. Schutzengel translating between us. Thus, I was taken aback when the woman spoke to me directly for the first time. In English worthy of the strictest schoolmistress.

  “Please, Major Jones,” she said. “Do sit down.” She gestured toward her cot, which was neatly made up. “I trust you will forgive the indignities of my situation?”

  I sat me down on the little bed, while Mrs. Schutzengel possessed herself of a wooden chair kept for company. I believe the legs and spindles cracked at the strain.

  Twas then I noticed the tear about to break from the corner of the old woman’s eye.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said, looking away almost girlishly. She reached into her dress and produced a lace-trimmed handkerchief washed to transparency.

  “Es war mir eine Neuigkeit, dass Sie verwandt waren,” Mrs. Schutzengel said in a comforting voice. “Ich bitte . . .”

  The old woman straightened herself, as a soldier will in the wake of a moment’s self-doubt.

  “You must forgive my loss of decorum, Major Jones,” she told me. “My dear friend has brought me unexpected—and sadly unwelcome—tidings. Which, I do believe, she first had of you.”

  She smiled and, had she not been of the milder gender, I would have thought her a lifelong devotee of tobacco. Perhaps it was medicine or such like that whittled at her teeth. But they did seem to be her own, which is ever admirable in those of a certain age.

  She extended a hand toward me, letting the fingers trail down.

  “But I have forgotten myself, my dear major! I am the Baroness von Zachen und Lann.”

  I rose as good manners required and gave the hand she offered a friendly shake.

  “Ah, les americaines . . .” she said, with a cat’s smile, to Mrs. Schutzengel.

  “Pleased to meet you, mum,” I told her, sitting myself back down.

  “You see, Major Jones . . . I am not unacquainted with the late General Stone. In fact, we were cousins, although I was the elder.” She smiled, all sadness. “I hear a great deal still. My friends are kind enough to bring me news. But word of . . . of Carl’s loss had not yet reached me. Dear Hilda did not know of his altered name. We must all be discreet, you understand.” She cocked one eyebrow. “But it’s definite? He’s gone from us?”

  “Yes, mum. I’d afraid it is true. If we speak of the same person.”

  She reinforced herself with a deep breath. “And shall I understand that agents of the tsar have been the instruments of our loss?”

  “That is not for me to say, mum. Not until I have finished my—”

  “Yes, of course. That’s why you’re here, after all.”

  The woman seemed all composure to the inattentive eye. But the hands held in the folds of her lap clutched one another, as men and women do when deep in grief. No more tears escaped her eyes, but her fingers wrestled in sorrow.

  “My comrade is convinced that you may be trusted, Major Jones,” the woman continued. “And given that Carl has been murdered, it would seem not only that I should bring no harm upon him by telling you something of his life, but that I might help identify those responsible for his death.”

  “It likely would be a help, mum.”

  She had to pause again, to collect her manners from the debris of grief.

  After looking from me to Mrs. Schutzengel, then back again, the baroness began to tell her tale.

  “He was a child of unsettling beauty . . . a true enfant d’or. Born Carl von Steinbrock, eldest son of Count Friedrich von Steinbrock, in Estland. A subject of His Imperial Majesty, the Tsar of all the Russias, you see. Although Carl’s blood was of the purest Baltic German lineage. The Steinbrocks had been ennobled at a time when the Prussians were rude pagans, living in huts. In the old chronicles, you may read of Otto von Steinbrouck, who extended his hand all the way into Karelia.” She smiled, this time at herself. “But I must not bore you. Suffice to say that, although such families ultimately saw their lands conquered by the Russians, they soon were recognized as indispensible. Without his Germans, the tsar’s administration would be even more grotesquely inadequate than it is, his courtiers even less civilized, his armies less adept. Examine the annual list of honors and you shall find more than a mere seasoning of German names.” She canted her head, amused at the quirks of history. “Borders may change, Major Jones, and new allegiances may be demanded . . . but lineage endures. Why, breeding even has value to the revolution.”

  Her head drifted from side to side, remembering. “I recall him in vignettes, you see. As if memory begins with a watercolor sketch. Riding his first pony, waving a wooden sword at all of us. And telling the poor peasants he intended to slaughter them the moment he came of age. Later, he was almost fatally striking in his Corps of Pages uniform. The ladies of St. Petersburg adored him. A bit too much, I fear.”

  A grimace shadowed her face, then fled. “We assumed Carl would elect the cavalry as his arm, since he rode with such a passion. All of the Guards regiments competed for him, and he gave us all a start when he joined a regiment of foot. If quite a good one. Perhaps it was the lovely uniforms that drew him, who knows? Oh, but his family had high hopes for him! Nor did he embarrass his father excessively. I do not recall more than minor debts at cards and a mesalliance or two. And we ladies of the court heard everything, Major Jones. I was quite close to the tsarevna in those days. An unpleasant character, and petty. But useful to my family, of course. I do believe she took some interest in Carl herself.”

  The alertness that had filled her eyes was gone, replaced by the soft light of revery. Even the abrupt cries of a woman down the corridor could not penetrate her remembrance. Of course, she must have grown used to such dreadful sounds.

  “His family . . . my own family . . . held only the highest hopes for Carl. And those hopes might have been realized, had it not been for the events of 1848. Of 1849, really, if we speak of the incident that changed everything.” Astonishment reborn illumined her features. “We none of us perceived anything of the kind in Carl. Oh, there were stories told afterward, of course, a report of a Polish seamstress with whom he had fallen in love . . . we are to believe that she was the one who introduced him to notions of social justice.” The baroness tutted over the past. “I may tell you now that the rumor of the seamstress was true. At the time, it was an annoyance to the ladies of the court, who had sought Carl’s attentions for themselves. And I will tell you that a dozen of his fellow officers tracked down the young seamstress in question—after the incident, I mean—and raped her in turn. I am told they were drinking claret, but I suspect it was something more potent. They seem to have done other, still more brutal things to her person—most of the officers were, after all, of Russian families—before they shot her. They hung her body, disrobed, from a lantern on Nevsky Prospekt. I do believe that may be why Carl never married.”

  “But the ‘incident,’ mum?”

  “Yes,” she said, voice cooling as if filtered through ice and snow. “No one could have foreseen it. Not even Carl himself. When our armies marched into Hungary to put down the revolution on Vienna’s behalf—the Habsburgs do seem to delight in military incompetence—I fear our Russian soldiery misbehaved. Rather badly. Beginning with the generals. If report is to be trusted, the incident began with the extermination of every living creature in a Hungarian village from which a shot had been fired. The killing was carried out by Carl’s regiment, on the order of their colonel. We are told that Carl, though barely a lieutenant, argued that a Russian straggler had fired the shot, not one of the villagers. But colonels in the Russian army will not be contradicted by lieutenants. I do not suppose colonels are contradicted in any army, unless by a general. And this colonel was a relation of Prince Gortshakoff’s. The Guards, you know.”

  She spoke with a wryness that mocked a world abandoned. “Ah, but the colonel was a true Russian. A jumped-up peasant, sly. I knew him, slightly, at the court. He had porcine eyes and a nose that would not do. I do no
t believe he ever liked Carl, though he made a false pet of him. He had that jealousy that lies at the heart of the Russian soul, especially of anyone with German blood in his veins. But he was devious, and patient—beware the Russian lifted into power. He didn’t arrest Carl on the spot. Instead, he agreed to spare a single villager. He ordered Carl to find the prettiest girl and bring her to his, the colonel’s, tent. In the morning, he would release her.”

  The screams down the hallway had broken into sobs. They echoed.

  “Carl did precisely as ordered. He delivered a lovely girl to his colonel. The tale has been embellished to render her one of those amber blonds who so unsettle the gentlemen of Budapest. And that night, when his fellow officers were contentedly drunk and snoring, Carl disarmed the sentry before the colonel’s tent—a word would have done it, of course—stepped under the flap, and shot his colonel through the forehead. We are told that the girl begged Carl to shoot her, too, but that he dragged her off wrapped in a greatcoat.”

  She curled her lips in the parody of a smile. “We are wise to suspect such romantic details. Had Carl and the girl been seen, how might they have escaped? We cannot know what the poor sentry reported, since he was executed the next morning. But the evident facts were that the colonel lay dead, and that Carl had shot him. An official version of the event was put about in St. Petersburg, claiming that a crazed Hungarian gypsy had crept into the colonel’s tent and killed him. And I knew one officer who could never quite believe that Carl had shot his own colonel. He insisted that the girl herself must have done it, and that Carl, foolishly, had taken pity on her. That was all nonsense, of course. Carl fled. And, from that day on, every nobleman in the empire of His Imperial Majesty, the Tsar, has yearned for his death. The Russians out of a spirit of vengeance, the Baltic Germans because he played into the hands of the Russians, who are forever warning the Romanoffs of German disloyalty.”

  She paused for a moment, letting some bitter memory pass. “The family was ruined, of course. They could not show their faces at court. In fact, they were confined to their ancestral estate for . . . I believe it was five years. Lands were seized, the daughter was unmarriageable, doubt was cast on the younger son’s inheritance of the title . . .”

  Of a sudden, she laughed. Not as a baroness should, but like a fishwife. “Oh, it served them right, you know. Every one of them. They treated their peasants worse than cattle. They were impossibly arrogant, as only Germans lording it over Slavs can be. The Baltic nobility claimed the old count died of a broken heart, but the truth is he had been drinking himself to death and whoring himself sick for years.” She leaned toward me, face set anew. “Oh, yes, I can remember the privileges, the beauty of my youth. But ‘Good riddance,’ I say. When the revolution comes, all of them, all of the aristocrats, must be exterminated. Nam nuzhno chistit novoe obshestvo. The coarseness of the Russian tongue expresses it rather well, I think. Such a massacre is the only way. Otherwise, they will come back. They always do, you see. The French were much too indecisive, when they had their chance. And the vultures came back to roost.”

  “But . . . Carl Stone did not come back.”

  She chuckled delightedly. “But that’s just it, you see! He did come back. He grew a beard, put blacking in his hair, and returned to St. Petersburg. And when he learned what his brother officers had done to that Polish girl, Carl bided his time until they suspected nothing. Then he and his revolutionary acquaintances set a bomb in the officers’ mess of his old regiment. Five were killed, as I recall—not counting the servants and orderlies—and several more were crippled or had their precious faces marred.” She smiled at me. “Flying glass and bits of wood do not make so straight and handsome a scar as you wear on your own cheek, Major Jones—a light saber, I presume? Ah, but the officers, even those from the minor families, were outraged. Or, when I consider the matter, perhaps those from the humbler families were the most demonstrably outraged.”

  She smirked, in grim satisfaction. “Even then, Carl didn’t leave Pieter. Not until the arrests began and his comrades begged him to go, to show himself somewhere else, in Berlin or Paris or Rome, anywhere that might attract the attention of the secret police and draw them off the students and conspirators of St. Petersburg—Russians do prefer the conspiracy to its consummation, you understand.” She sighed. “So Carl went to Paris, argued with Monsieur Lassalle, robbed a bank in Geneva, conspired in Italy, harbored members of Young Ireland who were in flight after their little cabbage-patch rebellion, even—”

  “Please, mum. Forgive me. But you said something of ‘Young Ireland’ just now?”

  That very instant I recalled old Donnelly’s words in the tavern up in Heckschersville, to the effect that no man among the Irish had killed General Stone and, had they wished to kill them a general, he would not have been the one chosen. Had the fellow been known to them? Were there more conspiracies at work than anyone imagined?

  From her vantage point in the madhouse, the baroness was dismissive. “Oh, I believe he helped several of the Young Ireland exiles. When they were badly in need of help. Out of money, with London onto their scent. That was in Aix or Toulouse, I’m uncertain now. And, later, in Milano. I remember that part. Of course, it was no more than an act of charity. The Irish are hopeless as revolutionaries, my dear major. There’s always an informer in their midst.”

  “But how did he come to America?”

  She smiled, warmly now. “Carl always was a romantic, you see. Europe had grown too dreary for him. After 1848, all the fight went out of the people. The best men left. For America. I saw Carl not long before he took ship. That was in Brussels. He came to say goodbye, at great risk to himself. We had grown quite close in only a few years as hunted creatures. Although we had not much liked one another at home—he thought me humorless and anxious for prestige.” She smiled at that, too. “Carl was the happiest I ever had seen him, happier than he was as a child, on the back of his pony. He had quite talked himself into the idea of America, of building a new world then coming back to the old world again, to complete the revolution. It was all rather vague, of course. Carl was still more the dreamer than a theoretician. He was brave, but too impulsive. His thoughts lacked rigor. I believe he sailed from Cherbourg, but it may have been Oostende.”

  “And did you see him again, mum? In America?”

  “Oh, yes. When it could be managed. I had to leave Europe myself, you see. After an event of which your friend”—she glanced at Mrs. Schutzengel—“could speak more informatively than I might do. I saw Carl twice in St. Louis, once in Chicago. Then he visited me here, hardly a month ago.” Her smile broke down. “He told me about his plans to recruit workers and miners for the Union cause. He was convinced that the future of the entire world depends on the outcome of this war, Major Jones. Although, personally, I believe the world shall get on, in any case. The revolution is inevitable. It is only a matter of time.”

  “But . . . did he say anything about the Irish? Anything specific? About Irish miners?”

  “Why, yes, I believe he did. Yes. He felt they misunderstood the war—I fear he had almost lost his passion for revolution and fallen blindly in love with his new homeland, you see.” She laughed again. “What a lovely irony that he should have become a general, after all! As for the Irish, Carl was certain that, given his own history, he might be the one to convince them of the justice of the Northern cause, of the necessity of supporting the Union. I believe he went with a personal commission from General Meagher, a letter. To the Irish, explaining Carl’s . . . credentials. Meagher was a Young Irelander, you know. Although he and Carl only met here, in this country, through mutual friends. I believe Meagher was exiled to Australia and mounted some sort of colorful escape. I do believe the Irish are better at escaping from prisons than they are at staying out of them.”

  “So . . . General Stone went to persuade the Irish to enlist? Backed by General Meagher?”

  “Why, yes. I believe I’ve said that.”

  “Yes
, mum. But I can’t quite see . . .”

  “You may be certain it was the Russians who killed him, Major Jones. They have been trying to do so for thirteen years. In fact, Carl mentioned that he feared a Russian agent was onto his scent—isn’t that what one says in America? I do not doubt that the tsar’s hand reached out to strike Carl down. The tsar’s hand . . . or at least Prince Gortshakoff’s claw.”

  I could see it all, of course. I could see it clearly. Yet, I cannot explain why, but I still was not entirely convinced that the man had been killed by Russians. I wished to pursue another round of investigations where the bloody deed had been done. Or perhaps it was only that I longed, selfishly, to go home again. To see my darling wife. And my son. And Fanny. But, above all, to hold my wife to my breast. For though I had run away from the horrors I learned at that old man’s deathbed, I now yearned homeward, aching to clutch my loved ones in mine arms. And, I will admit to you, I wished to hear Mr. Evans’s will read out. For though it shames me, I will tell you: Even in that madhouse, talking to a fugitive baroness whose own past courses were as yet unexplained, my mind strayed to the will. I wondered if my wife would have her share passed to her honestly—and no portion, no matter how great, could be too much for what that foul man owed her—or if the fellow would have made a great share, or even all, of his fortune over to his paramour.

  We should not think about such things, or in such selfish terms. But we do.

  “I have trusted you,” the baroness said. Twas then, with a shock, that I realized she could not be as old as she appeared. Her story suggested that she could not be more than fifty, nor even so old. Life had, indeed, treated her harshly. For it was the wreckage of a woman that sat before me. Perhaps there even was a touch of madness. I could not say. For I was a-swirl with doubts within doubts behind doubts. I had not quite got all her tale in order, though I saw the logic in it.