Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  Out of her party organization and procuring facilities, Mrs. Pleasant progressed to matchmaking. A beautiful young woman of her stable became engaged to, and later married, Thomas Bell. India Howard, who had been the chief ornament at Geneva Cottage, also married well. Another of Mammy Pleasant’s girls was Sarah Althea Hill, who took up residence in the Grand Hotel that was paid for by Senator Sharon. In the current trial of Sharon v. Sharon, Mrs. Pleasant is the chief witness for Miss Hill, or Mrs. Sharon, as the case may be.

  In the early ‘70s Mrs. Pleasant held San Francisco real estate of considerable value and, advised by Thomas Bell, had also prospered in mining stocks. These were lost in the crash of the Bank of California in 1875. Many considered William Sharon responsible for the Bank debacle and Ralston’s suicide. Mammy Pleasant may blame her financial downfall on Senator Sharon, and her active participation in Sarah Althea Hill’s claim on the Sharon fortune may be motivated by revenge.

  After the Bank crash Mrs. Pleasant moved into Thomas Bell’s mansion on Octavia Street as his “housekeeper” presumably under the direction of his wife, Teresa Bell, once one of the Geneva Cottage attractions.

  Bierce didn’t seem much interested in what I had collected, staring out the window frowning. Probably he was disappointed that I had found no Railroad connection. The fact was that the Big Four seemed not to have participated in any of the Geneva Cottage revels presided over by Mammy Pleasant but remained faithful to their wives and husbanded their money.

  “She knows who the Slasher is,” Bierce said. “But she does not see any ‘gain’ to helping us. But I will get it out of her!”

  And he took the occasion to deliver a lecture concerning the usage of “shall” and “will,” as though he could not pass on a piece of my writing without commentary.

  “In the first person a mere intention is indicated by ‘shall,’ ” he said. “I shall go. Whereas ‘will’ denotes some degree of compliance or determination. I will go‌—‌as if my going had been requested or forbidden. In the second and third person, ‘will’ merely forecasts, but ‘shall’ implies something of promise, permission or compulsion by the speaker.”

  “We shall track the Slasher down,” I said.

  “That is correct,” Bierce said.

  I sat with Amelia Brittain in the pergola behind the Brittain house. Squares of sunlight fell through the interstices of the laths of the roof onto the table, the pitcher of iced tea, our glasses, my hat and Amelia’s hand, fingers spread on the table before her. She wore light blue with tricky sewn ridges of material that made little epaulets on her shoulders. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the smooth flesh of her neck. Her pink lips smiled at me. She had greeted me as her hero, but she seemed sad today.

  Constable Riley, her day-guardian, sat on the stoop above us with his chair tilted back against the wall behind him, and his trousers stretched over his fat knees.

  “Do you remember the clock in Vanity Fair?” Amelia asked.

  I sipped iced tea. “Remind me.”

  “In the Osbornes’ house there was a clock decorated with a brass grouping depicting the sacrifice of Iphigenia.”

  “Sacrificed so the Greek fleet could set sail against Troy,” I said, to prove I knew my mythology.

  “The daughter of Agamemnon,” Amelia said. It was as though she was assisting me with answers to the questions of an examination. “Because the winds were blowing the wrong way, preventing the fleet from sailing.

  “In the novel the clock is tolling. Mr. Osborne is wearing a kind of military suiting, brass buttons and so on. Something is wrong. The daughters ask what is wrong. And one of them says, ‘The funds must be falling.’ ”

  I didn’t remember.

  “The winds were unfriendly,” Amelia said, watching me. “One of the daughters would have to be sacrificed.”

  I was irritated that she should have read more into Vanity Fair than I had.

  “Sacrificed?” I said.

  “To a marriage for economic reasons. A girl’s girlhood ended before she is ready for it, because the funds are falling.”

  She looked disappointed because I had had to be prompted.

  I could feel my heart beating. “And the funds are falling?”

  She plucked up her damp-glistening tumbler and cooled her cheek with it. She nodded.

  I could hardly say it. “Beau McNair?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Poppa will not have that.”

  “What does he have against Beau?”

  “Beau reminds him of my uncle. My Father has a twin brother who is always off somewhere writing back for money. He’s a rake and a drunkard and charming. He’s in the Hawaiian Islands now. I don’t think Beau is like him at all.”

  I didn’t care what her father had against Beau, but I cared that her face had been naked with relief when she had realized it could not have been Beau who attacked her on the porch, because he was in jail. I cared that she cared for Beau.

  “Did you want to marry Beau?”

  She smiled at me. “I was not ready for my girlhood to be ended.” She looked down at her hands spread on the tabletop, striped with sunlight.

  “Who will you be required to marry, then?” I asked. I couldn’t believe that I was having this conversation with my True Love.

  “Someone very wealthy. I don’t know yet.”

  My jaws ached. “It is terrible,” I said. “It is medieval. It’s like the Middle Ages. It is a terrible thing to do to a‌—‌lovely young woman.”

  “Oh, I think it is a comedy. Except when it happens to you it is not so comical.”

  “Will you run away with me?”

  She shook her head, smiling still. “Thank you, Tom.”

  I made a business of picking up my own tumbler, and examining the contents and sipping the sweet tea. On the stoop Constable Riley sat sweating in the sun, gazing into the distance.

  “Do you love me?” she whispered.

  I closed my eyes. “I thought you were my True Love. I’ve never—” I stopped myself.

  “It’s not the way it should be,” she said. “You saved me from the Minotaur, so the king should give you my hand. But the funds are falling.”

  My anger had risen to choke me. “It is‌—‌terrible!” was all I could say.

  “I am quite lucky,” she said, shaking her head. “If I had no social standing, no resources, no family, my fate could very well be like that of Miss Hill.”

  “What’s the difference?” I said.

  “There is all the difference in the world! As a married woman when my husband passes on I will be a woman of independent means. Miss Hill, who has no husband, has no such bulwark.”

  I did not wish to argue with her about the Rose of Sharon.

  “I will never forget you,” she said in her cool voice. “Perhaps you will never forget me. We will go our separate ways, but it will have been‌—‌something. That will be important all our lives. That will become a part of our lives and our characters, and our being. It is something I have already written pages in my diary about. That I will write poems about.”

  “This is America!” I said helplessly. The Democracy! I felt sick with anger. And despite myself my anger focused on Amelia, who would let herself be sold like a Negro slave because it was part of some society comedy that amused her. For her character and being!

  My own father and mother suddenly seemed paragons, and I felt a swell of righteousness at being poor and honest, and free. My father who might have been a silver king if the foxes and sheep had been differently arrayed. Thank the Good Lord that they had not!

  I stood up. The patterns of sunlit squares swam in my eyes.

  “I don’t want it to be like this,” Amelia said.

  “I guess you don’t have any say in it, do you?” I hadn’t wanted to say that.

  “My offer remains,” I said. I knew my offer was as silly as she must know it. What did I have to offer her?

  “Thank you, my hero,” she whispered.

  Her
hand stretched across the table where I could have taken it, but I turned away from her. I didn’t want her to see my face.

  I tramped up the back steps past Constable Riley, who made a saluting gesture as I passed, and strode through the dark hallway and out onto the veranda, where the broken railing had now been repaired, and down the steps to Taylor Street.

  It was too early in the day to visit Annie Dunker.

  25

  BIRTH, n. – The first and direst of all disasters.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  When I had reported my conversation with Amelia Brittain to Bierce, keeping my feelings to myself, he came out of his chair, clapping his hat on his head and beckoning me along with him. Mr. Brittain’s rejection of Beau McNair had caught his interest.

  We hailed a hack to take us to Taylor Street. I had sworn I would never return there, but at least Amelia and Mrs. Brittain were not in evidence. The butler ushered us into Mr. Brittain’s study where his roll-topped desk was strewn with documents, and the glass-topped cases of gold nuggets gleamed in the afternoon light. I gritted my teeth to think of him selling his daughter into slavery because of the falling funds.

  However, he wrung my hand as his daughter’s savior and greeted Bierce amiably, a tall, thin man with a Virginia City limp and financial difficulties.

  When we were settled in chairs, Bierce said, “Mr. Brittain, we are trying to get to the bottom of these murderous slashings of prostitutes. Apparently the same fellow attacked your daughter.”

  “Young Redmond was the hero in that encounter!” Mr. Brittain had not seated himself but moved among his cases with his hands clasped behind his back, his lined face solemn. He wore pince-nez spectacles that glinted in the sunlight through the window.

  “There is a connection of playing cards to events in Virginia City twenty some years ago,” Bierce said.

  Brittain halted to stare at him. ‘The Jack of Spades Mine.”

  “Ah!”

  “Had William Sharon any connection to the Jack of Spades, or Caroline LaPlante?”

  Mr. Brittain’s features contracted into a startlingly ugly expression. “She detested him! She was not often treated as a low woman, but Sharon had done so. He engineered an enterprise she felt was below her, and he enjoyed her discomfiture.”

  I saw Bierce digesting that. Mr. Brittain must mean the Lady Godiva ride through Virginia City. Or something else?

  “You were a mining engineer there, sir,” Bierce said.

  Brittain dipped his head in acknowledgment. There was no point of sitting in his chair hating him. These people were different from other people. Money made them different.

  “You were employed by the late Nathaniel McNair?” Bierce asked.

  “That is correct.”

  “A pile-driver of a man, I should imagine.”

  “A difficult man,” Brittain said. He paced, hands clasped behind his back. “It was his practice to make his associates feel small. He had an ability to estrange his friends while still binding them to him by various means.”

  “Such as the invention of belittling nicknames,” Bierce said smoothly. “ ‘The Englishman’ in your case. And ‘English.’ ”

  Mr. Brittain looked startled. “Now how would you know that, Mr. Bierce?”

  “Tom, relate to Mr. Brittain the use of that name you encountered in the Washoe.”

  I said, “It had to do with a scandal that took place at the Consolidated-Ohio. There was a complication of a claim being salted that was called ‘the English shuffle.’ Devers told me the term referred to someone of that name who devised a particular practice.”

  Brittain backed away to seat himself in a leather chair. He removed his glasses from his nose with a good deal of process, folded them and slipped them into his breast pocket. His cheeks had reddened in unhealthy-looking stripes.

  “It was a practice I had nothing to do with. It was a joke of Nat’s. A cruel joke. My reputation—” he started and stopped.

  “Your good reputation is well known, sir,” Bierce said.

  “Nat McNair was not an honest man,” Brittain said. “He was a true disciple of Will Sharon’s. He put out a great deal of rumor about drifting into a high-grade orebody. Then the rumor that the assay had been salted. These were cynical maneuvers, a dishonest, conniving business, and very effective. Mining stocks were extraordinarily volatile just then. The stock bottomed out and Nat was able to buy it up very cheaply.”

  “There was a Bonanza after all?”

  “Yes,” Brittain said.

  “And your part?”

  “I had been able to advise him that it looked like a considerable orebody.” He held his hands to his cheeks for a moment. “May I ask the purpose of these questions, Mr. Bierce?”

  “Mr. Brittain, these murders seem to be the result of a vast degree of hatred and old rage. There is a plan and purpose to them we are as yet unable to discern.”

  I could hear Mr. Brittain’s harsh breathing. “Why my daughter, Mr. Bierce?”

  “I think it is not a connection with you, sir. But with Beau McNair and ultimately his mother.”

  Brittain took his glasses from his pocket and began polishing the lenses with a bit of yellow cloth. “I am not proud of my connection with Nat McNair,” he said.

  “What of your connection with Mrs. McNair?”

  I watched Brittain’s hands halt in their employment.

  “What connection can you mean, Mr. Bierce?”

  “You have compelled your daughter to dissolve her engagement to Beau McNair.”

  Brittain’s eyes swung toward me. He moistened his lips. “I believe the match would not be a happy one.”

  Bierce’s voice was gentle. “I think your objection is because your daughter and Beau McNair are half brother and sister.”

  Brittain closed his eyes.

  “Am I correct in this assumption, sir?”

  Brittain nodded tiredly. “Can this revelation go no further, gentlemen?”

  “If that proves possible,” Bierce said.

  Brittain looked at me and I nodded, dazed, thinking of Beau engaged to Amelia.

  “She was pregnant by you, but she married Nat McNair.”

  “She wished to be married, but I was not prepared to marry her,” Brittain said. “My family is a very proud and prominent one in New Hampshire, Mr. Bierce. It would not have done. I was tortured upon a rack.”

  I thought of my offer to Amelia, which she had rejected knowing it was meaningless and impossible.

  “She had been frightened by the murder of another woman in Virginia City,” I said.

  Brittain nodded. “Julia Bulette. Yes.”

  “But she thought you would marry her,” Bierce said.

  “Yes, she thought that.”

  “What did she do?”

  Brittain replaced his glasses again. “She was determined to have the child, but it would not have done for her to appear pregnant, you see. Her position in Virginia City was such... she disappeared. I believe she went to Sacramento where there was a relative. I don’t know how Nat came into the picture. No doubt he had declared himself to her. She could have had any man she wished to choose, except for the one who failed her. It must have been that in her mood she chose the man of her acquaintance who seemed most likely to make a fortune, and one could foresee that Nat would be successful. He was lucky, he was clever, he was ruthless, and he was utterly determined.”

  “And he took your son as his own.”

  “Yes.”

  Brittain’s face convulsed as though he were weeping without tears. His expression reminded me of Amelia; her father who would sacrifice her to the falling funds, but not to her half brother. Who remembered so passionately the painting of Highgrade Carrie as Lady Godiva.

  Bierce sat thinking, the filtered sunlight silvering the curls of his graying fair hair. I could follow him so far. An English shuffle meant falsification of assay samples in conjunction with spreading dishonest rumors for the purpose of devaluing minin
g shares. Such a shuffle had given Nathaniel McNair control of the Consolidated-Ohio. I wondered how involved Mr. Brittain had actually been in the procedure.

  He and Highgrade Carrie had been good friends, Amelia had said, but were friends no longer. He was uncomfortable with her return to San Francisco. A woman who had been the mother of his child.

  “Lady Caroline Stearns is in danger,” Bierce said.

  Brittain stared at Bierce. His face was graven with deep lines.

  “And my daughter?”

  “I think her danger is past. Now that she is no longer engaged to be married to young McNair, she is of no more interest to the Slasher.”

  “So I have unwittingly removed Amelia from danger.”

  “I think so,” Bierce said. He questioned Brittain about the mechanics by which Jennings and Macomber‌—‌my father‌—‌had been cheated of their interest in the Jack of Spades, but Brittain became monosyllabic and off the point, as though he was genuinely forgetful, or maybe merely distressed. It was as though he could not wait for us to be gone, and so we departed.

  “He was in a panic,” Bierce said. “I wonder just how innocent this well regarded mining engineer was in the original shuffle, and I wonder if that could be a part of his disaffection with Carrie, that his daughter mentioned to you.”

  “He refused to marry her,” I said. “And she made a better match.”

  “A more lucrative slavery,” Bierce said.

  Saturday evening when I came home my father was lounging in the Barnacles’ parlor in discussion with Jonas Barnacle. Belinda was seated primly in a straight chair beside the door, her polished shoes set side by side and her hands folded in her lap. She watched me enter with solemn eyes. Mrs. B., aproned, a blue scarf tied over her hair, glanced in from the next room.

  My father wore a dark suit, boots and a florid tie with a diamond pin. Still jawing at Jonas Barnacle, he rose and put a possessive hand on my shoulder. The hand felt heavy as a sad-iron. He marched me outside.

  “Tommy,” he said. “We are heading for the Bella Union Saturday night parade. I have tickets!”