Dragonwyck

by Anya Seton

  Then there was the mill the patroon had built for them. It stood on a corner of the Manor House land. He'd never let them use that free now any more, nor spread their nets for shad on his section of the river.

  Mrs. Gebhard sighed and her fat cheeks quivered. Never the sweet without the bitter. She must be more strong-minded like Hans. No price was too high to pay for freedom, for the right to own the bit of land where the Gebhards had borned and labored and died for two hundred years.

  17

  IT WAS ON THIS SAME SAINT NICHOLAS' DAY THAT a troopship from New Orleans docked in New York. It landed a hundred wounded men, and caskets containing those who could no longer feel their wounds.

  Jeff Turner was amongst those in the first category and still too much shattered to be thankful that he was not in the second. A Mexican bullet had ripped upward through his left arm and collar bone, laid open his cheek, and plowed a groove through the side of his skull before it vanished into the bright tropical sky.

  Though all the wounds had promptly begun to fester, Jeff's sturdy frame could have withstood that and the disablement of his arm and shoulder. He would have directed the cautery and splinting himself, and then have proceeded enthusiastically with his division under General Worth to Saltillo. But the head wound was another matter. He had been unconscious for days.

  He had been dumped on a gun carriage in Monterrey and dragged back to General Taylor's base at Cerralvo. Here he had received hurried treatment in a hospital tent, and as he still declined either to regain consciousness or to die, he had been bundled into an empty supply wagon with a score of others and eventually reached the Texan coast, where a sloop conveyed them to New Orleans. The good Sisters at the Charité cared for him there while the skull fracture healed enough to permit him to travel home.

  Jeff had intended going up-river to Hudson at once, but as he lurched off the gangplank onto the pier he knew that he must have rest first. It was still a struggle to stand for long. He was subject to sharp attacks of dizziness. There were crowds of anxious relatives on the dock but none for him. He grasped his dilapidated carpetbag with his good hand and strode through the press, praying that he might not keel over and make a scene. A few sympathetic glances were directed at the scar on his cheek and the dangling left coat sleeve. Though the arm had healed, the collar bone was slower and still needed the support of a sling.

  One lady in bombazine, seeing the pallor of his face, the gauntness of his body in the ill-fitting blue uniform, cried, 'Oh, the poor young lieutenant!' But otherwise no one noticed him, for which he was grateful. He had the usual masculine horror of being conspicuous.

  When he reached the sidewalk, the city noises banged on his sensitive nerves like thunder; houses, drays, and hurrying people merged crazily, swimming around him in slow spirals.

  Damn, thought Jeff, gritting his teeth. He rumbled into a hack, muttered, 'Hotel—cheap one, anywhere,' and shut his eyes.

  The driver took him at his word, trotted his horse two blocks along South Street, and decanted Jeff at Schmidt's Tavern, where he found himself established in a bare, dismal room priced at fifty cents a day. It was clean, however, and it had a bed upon which Jeff flung himself after getting rid of Mrs. Schmidt, the landlady, who showed a sentimental German disposition to cluck and yearn over him.

  He lay for two hours in a semi-stupor, until the throbbing in his collar bone roused him. He sat up and ran his fingers impatiently over a lump on his shoulder. Another pocket of pus had formed on the surface of the partly healed wound. He scowled at it as he screwed his head around trying to see it. There was no mirror in the room. A quick cut of the scalpel it needed, and a wet dressing. His bag of instruments was left behind at Cerralvo amongst the cactus and yuccas.

  He made a sudden resolution, scribbled a note, and shouting for the landlady told her to have it delivered. Then he tottered back to the bed.

  It was dusk when he heard heavy footsteps ascending the stairs and a knock on his door. Doctor John Francis walked in.

  'Well, so ye're back again, my fine young hero,' he said, chuckling, and extending his hand as casually as though they'd met yesterday. His wise eyes missed nothing of Jeffs condition, but he would no more have expressed his sympathy than Jeff would have welcomed it.

  'Been makin' love to a cannon ball?' he inquired genially, plumping his black bag on the floor and sitting on the bed. 'Could you not find something warmer and softer to embrace down there?—No, don't sit up; do as I tell you, you young squirt. Lie still; you think you know it all, I'll be bound, but you're not as good a medico as I am yet. Yes, yes —I see it, d'ye take me for a mole?'

  While he kept up an affectionate grumbling, his gnarled fingers were busy palpating the arm wound, the abscess on the collar bone, the healed scar on the cheek, the depression in the scalp.

  You've not much improved your beauty,' he observed with a twinkle, kicking his bag over to the bed and bending with a grunt to extract a scalpel. 'How'd it happen?'

  'Just one bullet,' confessed Jeff ruefully. He indicated its upward path with a quick motion of his thumb.

  'Was the greaser in a hole, then, or were you maybe skulking in a tree?' inquired the old doctor, and while he spoke he jabbed the scalpel deep.

  'Ouch!' said Jeff. 'No, I wasn't in a tree, but I was on a roof.—What are you dousing on that compress, sir? I never saw stuff like that. Plain water'll do—or maybe you should cauterize again?'

  'Deliver me—' retorted the old man with a terrible frown, 'from treating another doctor, especially a young know-it-all. Mind your business, my boy, and let me mind mine. You called me in, didn't you? You want this dod-gasted mess of a shoulder to heal, don't you?'

  'Yes, sir,' said Jeff, smiling. 'But what's that brown stuff? It burns like a red-hot poker.'

  'It's seaweed and alcohol made for me by an old Chinee on Pell Street. And I don't know why it ofttimes keeps a wound from festering, so don't ask me. The Chinamen know a lot about medicine and I'm not too proud to try their drugs. No more should you be.' He tied up the sling. You'll do now, my lad. Couple months from now you'll be good as new, barring that scar on your cheek, though doubtless the ladies'll consider it highly ro-man-tic. If you rest a lot and act like a sensible human being, the dizzy spells'll pass too.' He dumped his scalpel, bandages, and the brown bottle pell-mell into his bag, which he snapped shut. He lit himself a black and foul-smelling cigar, settled his massive body on the one rickety chair, and turned a look of anticipation on Jeff.

  'Now, what in blazes were ye doing on a rooftop in Monterrey?'

  At first Jeff searched for words, struggling against the universal reluctance to talk of battle to those who know nothing of it. But gradually the old man's eager interest had its effect. Jeff forgot the four musty walls about him; they expanded into desert and dust, into brown adobe and the blinding gleam of white plaster under the Mexican sun.

  Old Rough and Ready Taylor had made shrewd plans for the capture of Monterrey. He had sent General Worth with eighteen hundred men—of whom Jeff was one—on a circuitous route to the other side of the city, while Taylor created a diversion on the eastern side to cover their march. On September twentieth, Worth had arrived at his position and the city of Monterrey lay between the pincers which inexorably narrowed down on it. One after another the Mexican forts fell; Federación, Independencia, and the Bishop's Palace on the west; Tenería and Libertad on the east.

  On the morning of the twenty-third the Americans advanced into the bewildered city from both sides. But instead of risking life in the streets, which were raked by artillery fire and covered by snipers from shuttered windows, the American soldiers were ordered into the houses, where they tunneled their way through the interior walls, progressing through a cloud of plaster and falling rubble toward the grand plaza.

  Jeff paused, remembering the excitement of that march through the homes. Like a lot of terriers after a rabbit they'd been. Burrowing, knocking down, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, rushing headlong through
lovely flower-filled patios. They were all drunk with the ease of conquest, and the childish joy of destruction. He as drunk as any of them.

  It was only now that he remembered the terrified faces of black-clad women, cowering in corners of their ravished homes watching the shouting, exultant soldiers break their furniture, shatter the statues of the saints, rip rugs and draperies to shreds.

  By sunset both halves of the army had reached to within one block of the plaza. Here the Mexican troops were huddled awaiting orders from their leader, Ampudia, whose efficiency did not match his courage.

  General Worth called for volunteers to plant a small mortar on an exposed rooftop which would command the square.

  'And I suppose ye jumped up like a jack-in-the-box,' growled Doctor Francis, 'when ye should have been back at the base caring for the wounded.'

  Jeff reddened, then laughed sheepishly. 'Well, we hauled up that mortar and stuck it where it did a lot of good. The hot shells'd mow down a dozen of them at a clip. But they didn't let us enjoy ourselves long.' Jeff paused again. 'It's curious,' he said thoughtfully, 'but I saw my bullet coming. He was a handsome Mexican, had a fine face. I saw him squinting up along the barrel of his gun, down there on the street. For a second we looked right at each other, and I had a crazy feeling of liking him. Then I ducked, but not fast enough.' He grinned. 'That's all I know first hand of our capture of Monterrey, for I didn't rightly come to from the blackness and the haze until they dumped me in the Charité in New Orleans.'

  'I kind of like that greaser of yours too,' remarked Doctor Francis grimly. 'You needed a bullet to knock some sense into you. Now you're here, you'll stay this time, my lad. Move into my office tomorrow, start learning the ropes. I'll not work ye too hard till your brains've got unaddled.'

  Jeff sent the old doctor a look of affection. He perfectly understood the little plan to give him rest at a salary. For a moment he was tempted. If he went in with Doctor Francis, it would mean a big society practice, the idea of which he loathed, but it would also mean money enough for research, and association with a man whom he deeply admired.

  But that was just the trouble. Jeff's fiercely independent soul wouldn't stomach the thought of being beholden to anyone, or of slipping easily into a ready-made practice. Besides, he was needed at home. He had been startled and touched at the dismay of his patients when he had enlisted.

  The old man read his face. Yes, there you go,' he grumbled. 'I see that mule look. Independent as a hog on ice. Go on back to your little jay town, kill yourself for a parcel of flea-bitten yokels.' He blew his nose stertorously. Jeff's second refusal was a grievous disappointment. Every man of achievement longs for a disciple, a younger edition of himself with whom to share the accumulated wisdom and experience of the past. That few men ever find this disciple, Doctor Francis well knew. And now having found him it was hard to be balked. Still he understood Jeff's reasons and honored him for them.

  Both men were companionably silent for a while. The old doctor wreathed himself in clouds of tobacco smoke, and the young one gazed absently at the ceiling.

  'Saw a friend of yours last summer, seemed mighty interested in you,' offered Francis suddenly.

  Jeff turned and looked his question.

  'Right pretty girl; married, though—so you needn't get all het up. Mrs. Nicholas Van Ryn, wife to that high mucky-muck what-you-may-call-him up on the Hudson.'

  Jeff expelled his breath and sat up. Where'd you meet Miranda?' he said sharply.

  The other raised his bushy eyebrows. 'So, it's Miranda, is it! I met her at the Poes' cottage and she made me a cup of tea with her own lily-white hands.'

  'How was she looking?'

  The old man snorted. 'Far as I remember she'd a pink satin dress and some darn fool feather in her bonnet; she'd a mighty trim ankle and a mighty trim waist—all right, all right,' he said in response to Jeffs ejaculation. 'She looked healthy enough, if that's what you want to know.'

  The old man gave him a satiric look and grinned. 'Waist's not so trim now, I'll be bound; she must be two months from term.'

  'What!' cried Jeff violently.

  Doctor Francis chuckled at Jeff's air of stupefaction. 'Anybody ever tell you about the stork, Jeff? Bird that's likely to come moseying along when a young couple's married? Or when they're not, for that matter.'

  Jeff made an impatient gesture. 'How do you know she's—she's pregnant?' He had managed to forget Miranda quite completely during his months in Mexico, had shut the memory of her away in an air-tight compartment and thought that any sentimental yearnings he had had for her were done with. He was therefore annoyed to discover how much he disliked the thought of her bearing a child to Nicholas.

  'I know,' answered Doctor Francis, 'because the great Mr. Van Ryn wrote me about it. He favored me with a request—more like a royal command at that—wanted me to move up to his manor and hang around for weeks until his lady takes a notion to produce this marvelous infant.'

  'Are you going?' asked Jeff slowly.

  'I am not! I told him most politely that I'd better use for my time than to fuss over one healthy girl, counting every pulse beat. He can find himself some other tame puppy. Plenty'd be glad enough to get the fee he offered. Come to think of it, you can do it yourself now; you'll be right handy.'

  'No!' said Jeff explosively.

  The old doctor leaned back and contemplated the young man. 'Little bit smitten with the lady's charms, aren't you?'

  'It's not that. But—well, Van Ryn wouldn't want me. I attended the death of his first wife.'

  Doctor Francis nodded. 'What'd she die of, anyway? Wasn't it kind of sudden?'

  'Acute indigestion. Very sudden,' Jeff answered curtly. The memory of his suspicions of Nicholas now shamed him. They must have sprung from unrecognized jealousy. His face grew hot when he thought of those bungling little experiments he had made on the tipsy cake.

  'Whyn't you get married, Jeff?' The old man put down his cigar and laid an affectionate hand on Jeff's good shoulder. 'Must be some tidy little woman around who pleases you. And if you're not so fond of her at first, you'll get to be once she's yours.' He chuckled. 'Lots of truth in what old Benjamin Franklin said, "All cats look gray at night." '

  Jeff smiled and thought of Faith Folger. On the day he had sailed down-river to join the army she had stood at the Hudson dock beside her mother. The black eyes had been full of tears. Til be waiting for thee, Jeff,' she had whispered, 'until thee comes back.'

  He had kissed her quickly while her mother pretended not to see. The kiss had meant little to him, for his mind had been full of Miranda, and in any case he had not really expected to come back. But now the thought of Faith was comforting.

  'I think I'll take your advice, sir,' he said to Doctor Francis, 'as soon as I have two whole arms and a steady head to offer a woman.'

  Hudson welcomed Jeff home with wild enthusiasm. Had he permitted it they would have made a hero of him, but as he refused to be lionized they contented themselves with flocking to his little house on Front Street and bringing gifts; calves'-foot jelly, pound cake, ducks and chickens already roasted. The old black Rillah had nothing to do but fuss over Jeff and serve the dainties which were provided.

  By New Year's Day, it seemed to Jeff that he had never been away at all. His left arm was stiff but had regained its usefulness, the spells of vertigo diminished in frequency, and he could ignore them enough to take on a restricted practice.

  He had not yet proposed to Faith. He did send her a New Year's present. 'The Golden Chalice—or Mental Draughts from Many Fountains'—a popular gift book that year, prettily bound in red leather tooled with gilt. Faith was encouraged. 'The Casket of Love' or 'The Wedding Guest' would have been more significant, to be sure, but any gift book was indicative of serious intentions, and she made her plans for a June wedding. Now that he was home again, she must on no account allow their relationship to slip back into the old half-teasing, flirtatious state. She wanted Jeff, and had turned down three fl
attering proposals for his sake. It was high time that he speak the decisive words.

  But January passed and Jeff remained unaccountably elusive. He refused invitations, pleading the need for rest. When Faith, growing desperate, invented a persistent headache and trudged through the snowy streets to consult him at his office, he received her warmly, even tenderly, but he didn't 'speak.' He told her to avoid fried foods for a while and take a dose of calomel, then sent her away again baffled but not quite disconsolate. For she knew men, and there had been a special note in his voice, an admission of intimacy in his manner, and besides she knew she had no rival. There was hardly a girl in Hudson who hadn't tried to interest Jeff, and he paid no attention to any of them.

  In fact Jeff intended to propose eventually, but he had a male reluctance to being stampeded or to committing himself irretrievably.

  He finally decided that on Saint Valentine's Day he would take the plunge. Send her one of those sugary, sentimental effusions which delight the girlish heart, follow it up by a formal call at her parents' house.

  But when the fourteenth of February came, poor Faith received no Valentine from Jeff. He was at Dragonwyck.

  During the first weeks after his return he had heard nothing of the Van Ryns. He had rejoiced to find that the manors were at last to be broken up and that his friend, little Boughton, was to be pardoned, but aside from this general news, the inhabitants of Dragonwyck might have been in Kamchatka for all one heard of them in Hudson. The shore road was blocked with snow as the river was blocked with ice.

  Jeff had again made up his mind to forget Miranda and succeeded quite well. An epidemic of grippe inflicted itself on Hudson, and in consequence he was too busy and too tired to think at all.

  Then he got a letter from Doctor Francis in New York. Following the usual greetings and inquiries it said:

  Don't be surprised if you're called to the Van Ryns' after all, for I've taken the liberty to write the Grand Seigneur heartily recommending your skill. He's got Brown there for his wife—Doctor William Brown from Gramercy Park. I know the man and he is able enough, but the trouble seems to be Van Ryn has got him terrified. Brown is in a funk, thinks matters aren't progressing just right and doesn't dare tell Van Ryn. He sneaked a letter out to me begging for advice, but I cannot make head nor tail of it. Sounds like a normal pregnancy to me. I wrote back to the poor numbskull—(my private opinion is that the size of his fee has addled his wits)—telling him not to worry, delivering babies is simple as rolling off a log. Dame Nature does it for you (though we can't let the laymen guess that), but I ended up by telling him to get in touch with you if he needs help. Then I got a letter from Van Ryn himself complaining about Brown and begging me to go up there after all. So I handed you to him too All this pother! The Grand Cham of Tartary would not make half the rumpus about an heir, I'll be bound.