Love and War

by John Jakes

  “Evening, Brandt. Where?”

  The man glanced at the ceiling. “Room 4. He’s got two in bed tonight. Assorted colors.”

  Bent’s heart was racing now, a combination of anxiety and a sensation close to arousal. Mrs. Devore walked over to speak to the harpist, and from there took notice of the bulge on Bent’s right hip, something she had overlooked at the front door.

  “You handle things down here, Brandt. Nobody leaves till I’ve got him.” Brandt nodded. “Come on,” Bent said to the other operative. They headed for the stairs.

  Alarm brightened Mrs. Devore’s eyes. “Gentlemen, where are you—?”

  “Keep quiet,” Bent said, turning over his lapel to show his badge. “We’re from the National Detective Bureau. We want one of your customers. Don’t interfere.” The satanic detective produced a pistol to insure compliance.

  Lumbering upstairs, Bent threw back his coat and pulled his revolver, a mint-new LeMat .40-caliber, Belgian-made. Used mostly by the rebs, it was a potent gun.

  In the upper hall, dim gaslights burned against royal purple wallpaper. Strong perfume could not quite mask the odor of a disinfectant. Bent’s boots thumped the carpet as he passed closed doors; behind one, a woman groaned in rhythmic bursts. His groin quivered.

  At Room 4, the detectives poised themselves on either side of the door. Bent twisted the knob with his left hand and plunged in. “Eamon Randolph?”

  A middle-aged man with weak features lay naked in the canopied bed, a pretty black girl astride his loins, an older white woman behind his head, her breasts bobbing a few inches from his nose. “Who in hell are you?” the man exclaimed as the whores scrambled off.

  Bent flipped his lapel again. “National Detective Bureau. I have an order for your detention signed by Colonel Lafayette Baker.”

  “Oh-oh,” Randolph said, sitting up with a pugnacious expression. “Am I to be put away like Dennis Mahoney, then?” Mahoney, a Dubuque journalist who held opinions much like Randolph’s, had been entertained in Old Capitol Prison for three months last year.

  “Something like that,” Bent said. The white whore groped for her wrapper. The young black girl, less frightened, watched from a spot near an open window. “The charge is disloyal practices.”

  “Of course it is,” Randolph shot back in a high voice, which Bent instantly loathed. The reporter’s receding chin and pop eyes created a false impression of weakness. Instead of cringing, he swung his legs off the bed almost jauntily.

  “Ladies, please excuse me. I must dress and accompany these thugs. But you’re free to go.”

  Shooting a look at the black whore, Bent brandished the LeMat. “Everyone stays. You’re all getting in the van.”

  “Oh, God,” the white woman said, covering her eyes. The black girl slipped into a gown of ivory-colored silk, then hunched forward, looking like a cornered cat.

  “He’s bluffing, girls,” Randolph said. “Leave.”

  “Bad advice,” Bent countered. “I call your attention to the nature of this weapon. It is what some call a grapeshot revolver. I have merely to move the hammer nose like this and the lower barrel will fire. It is loaded with shotgun pellets. I presume you appreciate what they would do to any face I chose for a target—?”

  “You won’t shoot,” Randolph said, bouncing on his bare feet. “You government boys are all yellow dogs. As for that detention order you say you’re carrying, toss it in the same fire in which you and Baker and Stanton burned your copies of the first amendment. Now stand aside and permit me to put on my—”

  “Guard the door,” Bent growled to his helper. He hauled the LeMat up and across to his left shoulder and slashed down. Unprepared, Randolph took the blow’s full force on the right side of his face. His skin opened; blood ran and dripped into white hair on his chest.

  The white woman sobbed melodramatically. There were footfalls, oaths, questions from the corridor. Bent jabbed the LeMat into Randolph’s bare belly, then struck his head again, and his neck twice after that. Eyes bulging, Randolph pitched onto the bed, bloodying the sheets as he coughed and clutched his middle.

  Grabbing Bent’s sleeve, the other detective said, “Hold off, Dayton. We don’t want to kill him.”

  Bent jabbed his left arm backward, throwing off the detective’s hand. “Shut up. I’m in charge here. As for you, you seditious scum—” He brained Randolph with the butt of his revolver. “You’re going to be fresh fish for Old Capitol Prison. We have a special room reserved for—Watch her!”

  As Randolph writhed, the detective leaped for the black girl. But she already had one bare leg over the sill and quickly vanished. Bent heard a sharp cry as she landed.

  Fists beat on the door. The other detective stuck his head out the window. “Harkness! One’s getting away.”

  “Let her go. She’s just nigger trash,” Bent said. He gave Randolph’s shoulder a hard dig with the gun. “Get dressed.”

  Five minutes later, he and his helper dragged the groggy journalist downstairs. They threw his blanket-bundled body into the back of the van. “You hit him too hard,” the other detective said.

  “I told you to shut up.” Bent was breathing loudly; he felt as if he had just had a woman. “I did the job. That’s all Colonel Baker cares about.”

  Brandt climbed into the van with them. Detective Harkness sat beside the driver. “The coon got away, Dayton,” he said. Bent grunted, calming down. On the floor, the prisoner made mewling noises. Bent began to fret; had he really hit him too hard?

  Ridiculous to worry. Far worse took place during many of Baker’s interrogations. He would be forgiven. He had done the job.

  “Let’s go or we’ll have the metropolitan police on our necks,” he yelled. The driver shook the reins; the van lurched forward.

  Take the case of the Slaves on American plantations. I dare say they are worked hard. I dare say they don’t altogether like it. I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but, they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence.

  Wonderingly, Brett reread the remarks of Mr. Harold Skimpole of Bleak House. The author of the novel, which she was enjoying, had toured America, had he not? If he had traveled in the South, however, and if he had found the slaves merely a form of decoration, his understanding had failed him in that instance. Dickens was supposed to be a liberal thinker. Surely he understood what the Negroes really were—human beings converted to parts of an aging, failing machine. Perhaps the views of the elfin, carefree Skimpole weren’t really those of the author. She hoped they weren’t.

  Tired of reading and a little put off by her reaction to Mr. Skimpole, she laid the novel on top of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, which Scipio Brown had given her. The book, the most famous of the many in the escaped-slave genre, had been published a good eighteen years ago. But she had never seen a copy of it, or any work like it, in South Carolina. She was alternating Dickens with Douglass, and in the latter finding not only vestigial guilt but sympathy for the narrator and anger over his travail.

  Brett lay in her camisole. Hot yellow twilight filled her room this twenty-ninth of June. She was exhausted from helping Mrs. Czorna scrub floors all day. Coming back to Belvedere, she had deliberately avoided Stanley and Isabel and their obnoxious sons, who were playing lawn bowls on the grass between the two houses.

  It still surprised her that she was reading—well—differently from before. It was another result of long and frequent conversations with Brown. She resented the way he constantly thrust the issue of Negro liberty at her, but she was beginning to grasp why he did; why he must. She was also beginning to feel herself in the grip of uncomfortable personal changes.

  One of the maids tapped on her door, announcing supper in a half hour. She rose reluctantly, splashing water on her face and bare arms. The yellow sun, growing red, sank in the west.

  She hated to see sunset come. Fears about
Billy, and her need of him, affected her most at night. In the last two weeks, coincident with Stanley’s unexpected and still-unexplained arrival, Brett’s fears had sharpened because of the military threat to the state. For days now, government workers and private citizens had been packing papers and valuables and leaving Harrisburg by rail, horse, or shank’s mare. Last Friday, Governor Curtain had issued a plea for sixty thousand men to muster arms and defend Pennsylvania for three months. On Saturday, the invasion had been confirmed. Terrified officials surrendered the town of York to Jubal Early, and Lee’s host was sighted at Chambersburg. The whole lower border was afire with panic and rumor, and the smoke blew to every part of the state.

  A few minutes later, dressed and sweltering, Brett stepped onto the front veranda. No air was stirring.

  “Brett? Hallo! Important news here.”

  The thickened voice belonged to stuffy Stanley. In shirt sleeves, he brandished a newspaper on the porch of his own residence. She wanted to be rude but couldn’t do it. The supper bell would ring soon; she supposed she could put up with him till then.

  In the molten light spilling from the west, she walked next door, her shadow three times her size on the brass-colored lawn. “What is it?” she said from the foot of the steps. She smelled gin on him and noticed his glassy look. She could hear the twins cursing and quarreling somewhere upstairs.

  Swaying from side to side, Stanley held out a copy of the Ledger-Union. “Paper’s got a telegraph dispatch from Washington. On Saturday”—his slurred speech injected a sh sound—“Pres’dent Lincoln relieved Gen’ral Hooker. Gen’ral Me’s now in command.”

  “General who?”

  “Me. M-e-a-d-e. Me.”

  Drunk, she thought. At the other house, she had overheard some servants’ gossip about Stanley’s new habit. She said to him, “I’m afraid I don’t know either of those men or anything about their qualifications.”

  “Gen’ral Me is solid. ’F anyone can stop the reb invasion, he can.” A nervous glance southward. “By God, wish we’d settle all this.”

  He struck his leg with the paper. The sudden movement threw him off balance. He prevented a fall by clutching one of the porch posts. For a moment, Brett pitied him. She said, “You don’t wish it any more fervently than I.”

  He blinked, then pulled at his fine linen shirt where it stuck to his armpit. “Know you’d like to see Billy home. So would I. ’Course—family loyalty isn’t the only reason I want this blasted war over. Have some political ones, too. Nothing pers’nal, now”—a smarmy grin—“but we Republicans are going to change ol’ Dixie Land forever.”

  She fanned herself with a handkerchief, irked again by his alcoholic smugness, yet curious. “Oh, you are? How is that?”

  He put his finger over his lips to signal secrecy, then whispered, “Simple. ’Publican party will pretend to be the friend of all the freed niggers down there. Ignorant lot, niggers. ’F we give ‘em the franchise, they’ll vote any way we tell ’em. With the niggers voting, our party’ll be the majority party before you can say that.”

  With a broad, almost violent gesture, he managed to snap his fingers. Once more his balance was threatened. Brett caught his arm and steadied him until he lowered his heavy rear into a bentwood rocker, which sagged and creaked loudly.

  “Stanley, that’s a very cold-blooded scheme you described. You’re not making it up?”

  The smarmy smile broadened. “Would I lie to my own rel’tive? Plan’s been drawn up a long time. By a certain—inner group.” He rolled his eyes. “Better not say any more.”

  Outraged, Brett retorted, “You said quite enough. You’re going to exploit the very people you purport to champion—?”

  “Pur-port.” He dragged it out, savoring the sound. “Purrr-port. Perrr-fect word.” He snickered at his own humor. “Niggers wouldn’t understand it, an’ they won’t understand that we’re using ’em, either,”

  “That’s utterly unscrupulous.”

  “No, jus’ politics. I—”

  “You’ll excuse me,” she said, her tolerance exhausted. “I must go to supper.”

  He started to say something else, but a sound much like the bleat of a billy goat came from an upstairs window. Someone had hit someone else. One of the twins screamed, “Get out of my things, you thieving shit.”

  Sickened by Stanley’s drunken statements, Brett walked rapidly back to Belvedere. Though she considered Billy’s older brother stupid and venal, she feared that the plan he had described could very well work. The blacks, except for a few of the well-educated ones like Scipio Brown, would logically put their trust in the Republicans. And if they were given the right to vote, they could indeed elect whomever their benefactors chose. Brett had no great liking for the Yankee President, but she couldn’t imagine him being party to such a vile scheme.

  Hot and angry, she ate supper alone. Maude, one of the serving girls, worked up nerve to say, “Everyone’s talking of a great battle. Will they come this far to fight?”

  “I don’t know,” Brett answered. “No one’s sure of the whereabouts of either army.”

  In darkness reddened by the light of Hazard’s, Brett walked into the hills, hoping to find cooler air. Where was Billy? She had had no letters for nearly three weeks. He was fighting for what he believed while Stanley cowered in Lehigh Station, sipping gin and boasting of his political plans.

  She wandered higher, through the laurel that lay thick and dim on the heights. There was no wind to stir the deep green leaves, and in the hazy night the stars had a red cast.

  By chance, her walk took her past the spot where a meteorite had struck one of the slopes. She and Billy had discovered the smoking crater only hours before his departure for Washington in the spring of ’61. The crater had seemed to be a warning, and what it had warned of had come to pass. By the light of Hazard’s furnaces and chimneys, she saw that the crater was shallower than before. New dirt had washed into its bottom, and the chunk of what Billy called star-iron was no longer visible.

  The laurel grew all around the crater, to the very edge. But none grew within the crater itself. Curious, Brett leaned down for a pinch of loose earth from the crater well. It had a gritty, sandy feel. A strange, sour smell.

  Was it somehow poisoned, like the nation was poisoned? Poisoned by hatreds, by loss of lives, by the punishment the land deserved because some of its people had chained up so many others for so many years?

  Why, they would take a whip to you down on the Ashley if they knew you harbored such thoughts. Yet she wasn’t ashamed of them, only surprised. She had changed. She preferred the friendship and respect of a Scipio Brown over that of a Stanley Hazard.

  Absently, she broke off a sprig of laurel. She remembered Billy likening the laurel to their love. He said both would survive these awful times. But would they?

  Where was her husband tonight? Where were the armies? Could Harrisburg be burning and they not know it in this peaceful valley? Shivering under the red stars, she gazed away to the darkness in the southwest, imagining the unseen armies sniffing the hot night for scent of each other.

  Upset and frightened, she flung the sprig away and hurried down the hill past the poisoned crater. She didn’t fall asleep until the first light of morning.

  84

  LEE HAD DISAPPEARED INTO enemy country. A city, a government, a land held its breath in hope of good news.

  There was none from the West, Orry told Madeline. Rosecrans was astir in Tennessee, and Grant’s hand crushed Vicksburg more tightly by the hour. Orry’s work was a blur of conferences, memorandums, constant arguments with Winder and his wardens over the increasing number of deaths among the war prisoners.

  In the evenings, he and Madeline read aloud to each other. Now and then they indulged in sad speculations about their inability to conceive a child. “Perhaps Justin wasn’t wholly wrong to blame me,” she said once.

  They studied and responded to occasional letters from Philemon Meek. And they entertained Augusta B
arclay one day, enjoying her company while recognizing how anxious she was about Cousin Charles. She said she had traveled all the way to the capital to find some dress muslin, but she really wanted to inquire about him. She had received no letter in two months and feared he’d been wounded or killed in the cavalry clash at Brandy Station.

  Orry assured her that he watched the casualty rolls, and so far the name of Major Charles Main had not appeared. Gus knew nothing of the field promotion. She said she was pleased, but she sounded unenthusiastic.

  She accepted their invitation to supper. During the meal, they speculated on Charles’s whereabouts. Orry knew that Hampton’s horse had gone into Pennsylvania with Lee, but beyond that, he could provide no information. They said good-bye after ten, Gus intending to travel all night on lonely roads with only young Boz to guard her. Just before she left, she again expressed gratitude to the Mains for sheltering her during the Chancellorsville fighting and said she wanted to repay the kindness if ever she could. Madeline thanked her, and the women embraced; they had formed a liking for each other.

  After Gus was gone, Madeline said, “Something’s wrong between her and Charles, though I’m not sure what it is.”

  Orry agreed. Like his wife, he had detected a certain sadness in the visitor’s eyes.

  Something was wrong with Cooper, too. Orry saw his brother occasionally around Capitol Square. Cooper was abrupt in conversation and refused further invitations to dinner with a curt “Too busy right now.”

  “He’s become a stranger to me,” Orry told Madeline. “And not a very sane-looking one, at that.”

  For some months, Orry had known that Beauchamp’s Oyster House on Main Street was a postbox for illegal mail to the North. In late June he wrote a long letter to George, addressing it in care of Hazard’s of Lehigh Station. He asked how Constance was faring, and Billy and Brett, told of his marriage to Madeline, and mentioned Charles’s service with the Iron Scouts. He also described, briefly and somewhat bitterly, his work for Seddon, and his constant conflicts with Winder and the prison wardens. On a sultry evening, wearing the one civilian suit he had brought from Mont Royal, he nervously entered Beauchamp’s and handed the wax-sealed envelope to a barman, together with forty dollars of inflated Confederate money. There was no guarantee the letter would get any farther than some trash bin. Still, Orry missed his old friend, and saying it on paper made him feel better. The June heat continued. And the waiting.