The Widow's War

by Mary Mackey

  “Did William say what he intended to do?”

  “Not in so many words. He said he’d grown disillusioned with the practice of medicine. He told me he’d been reading about new techniques a Hungarian physician named Semmelweis had tried out in the Vienna General Hospital Obstetric Clinic—something simple that mostly involved hand washing, soap and water, chlorinated lime solutions, things of that nature. Semmelweis appeared to have had remarkable success in reducing patient mortality, but his colleagues treated him with contempt.

  “William claimed this mistreatment of Semmelweis proved physicians, himself included, have no idea what they’re doing. The thought that he had failed to save your life as well as the life of your father was a torment to him. I got the impression he was going to Kansas to start over again.”

  “Was he planning to farm?”

  “Not that he mentioned.”

  Carrie runs her finger up the rivers and touches the crest of the western mountains. “He couldn’t have been intending to prospect for gold.”

  “No, there’s no gold in Kansas that I know of.”

  “I can’t imagine him keeping a store or running a boarding house.” Mr. Howard is silent. Carrie looks up and finds him staring at her as if he has something to say but isn’t sure he should say it. “You know something you’re not telling me, don’t you?”

  “Perhaps. I’m not sure. You see, I think—that is, I’m fairly sure he was planning to do something . . . dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Mrs. Presgrove, I wouldn’t tell anyone else this, but I feel you should know that it’s possible what he planned to do was illegal. When I asked him what he had in mind, he refused to tell me. I found that strange, since we’d always confided in one another. Still, I wouldn’t have made much of it except he said—in a very joking way, mind you—that if certain people found out what he was up to they’d hang him.”

  “Hang him?”

  “Those were his exact words.”

  “That’s impossible. William would never commit a crime. He’s the most honest man I’ve ever known.”

  “He is indeed. I’d trust him with my life. So you see, he must have been joking.” Removing the books from the corners of the map, Howard allows it to roll up again. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “No, thank you. You’ve been very helpful.” She pauses, then remembers she has bad news to deliver. “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to endow the Willa Saylor glasshouse after all.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs. Presgrove.”

  “My husband,“ Carrie nearly chokes on the word, “has made it impossible for me to access my funds.” Howard is giving her a look of pity. She’d like to tell him that revenge is more her style, but this has already been too intimate a conversation. “I’m sorry. It’s something I’d like to do, something I will do if I ever get access to my money again. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll take good care of the orchids I gave you. I brought them such a long way.”

  “Mrs. Presgrove, we will treasure them.”

  “Thank you.”

  Howard looks at her for a moment and then looks down at the map case. He slips in the map, picks up the leather top, and fits it on the end of the tube. “You’re going to go to Kansas, aren’t you?”

  For an instant she’s tempted to lie. But why? Whose reputation is she protecting? Deacon’s? “Yes,” she says, “not that it’s any of your business.”

  Howard snaps the catch closed and looks up. She’s surprised to see admiration in his eyes. “I apologize,” he says. “My question was overly direct, but you see last fall I lost my wife. I miss her as I imagine William misses you. When you find him, please tell him I send my affectionate regards.”

  “How can you be so sure I’ll find him?”

  “I believe you’d find anyone you loved, Mrs. Presgrove. You’re everything William said you were and more.” He holds the map case out to her. “I’d be obliged if you’d accept this as a small token of thanks for the orchids you’ve given us. I think you’ll find it useful.”

  As soon as she gets back to Georgetown, Carrie goes upstairs, walks into Matilda’s room, and throws the drapes aside, letting in light and air.

  “Mother Presgrove,” she says, “wake up!”

  The sick woman sits up, leans back against the headboard, and stares at Carrie blankly. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Carrie Vinton. William’s friend. You remember me, Mother Presgrove. I was here before.”

  Matilda runs her fingers through her hair and coughs. “I don’t remember anything.” Reaching out, she attempts to pick up the opium pipe, but her hand is nowhere near the night table. Carrie wants to snap the pipe in half and smash the medicine bottles so she can talk to the real Matilda, the one who has a mind and a memory.

  “Matilda, Mrs. Presgrove, Mrs. Saylor—”

  William’s mother smiles at the name Saylor, and Carrie realizes she has made a lucky hit. “Mrs. Saylor, it’s me. Carrie Vinton. William and I played together when we were children.”

  Matilda’s face softens. She turns away from the opium pipe and reaches toward Carrie. “Carrie, dear, come closer and let me touch you. I want to make sure you’re not a dream.”

  “I’m real.” Carrie draws close to the bed. Matilda leans forward, reaches up, and runs her fingers over Carrie’s face. She strokes Carrie’s hair and twists one of Carrie’s curls around her finger.

  “Such pretty hair. So very pretty. Like spun gold. That’s what William said. But you’re dead, Carrie. That’s too bad. I remember now that William said you and he were going to be married, but you died. He came to me and told me all about it and cried and I tried to comfort him, but . . . “ She grows confused. “I couldn’t.” She lets go of Carrie’s hair, coughs, and struggles for breath. “I always liked you, Carrie.”

  “I know,” Carrie whispers. “I always liked you, too. I loved you, Mrs. Saylor.” Scooping the sick woman up in her arms, she holds her close. Matilda is so light, Carrie can hardly feel the weight of her. “Mrs. Saylor, what’s wrong with you?”

  “They won’t let me out in the garden.” Damn Deacon and his father. No one ever loved flowers more than Matilda Saylor unless it was Carrie’s own father and mother.

  “No, Mrs. Saylor. I mean, do you know what sickness you have?”

  “I don’t know what it’s called, but Deacon and Bennett say it is a very fashionable disease. Poor dead Carrie, I’ll be dead soon, too, and then we can walk in the garden together. You always knew the names of the flowers. Do you see different flowers now or are the flowers of the dead the same as ours?”

  “The same,” Carrie whispers. “The same.” She had meant to ask Matilda about William, but Matilda is so far out of reach there is no way to talk to her, and this conversation is heart-breaking.

  For a few minutes longer, she holds Matilda. Then she gently puts her back down on the pillows. “Mrs. Saylor,” she whispers, “I’m with child by Deacon. Deacon doesn’t know, but I want you to know, because you are about to become a grandmother.”

  Matilda gives her a puzzled look. Does she understand? It’s impossible to tell. Leaning down, Carrie kisses her on the forehead. “Good-bye,” she whispers.

  A very handsome piece of work,” the pawnshop owner says as he inspects Deacon’s gold cigar case. “How much do you want for it, ma’am?”

  “How much will you give me?” Carrie asks him.

  He flips the cigar case upside down and squints at the proof mark on the bottom. “It’s gold, alright, made right here in Washington.” He turns the case back over, inserts his fingernail into the catch, and opens the lid. “Hmm,” he says, “I think thirty dollars is the best I can do for you.”

  “So little?”

  “You can take it around to other shops if you like, but I doubt you’ll get a better offer. It’s the inscription, you see. Lowers the price. No one likes to buy a cigar case inscribed to someone else.”

  “What inscription?�
��

  The pawnshop owner looks at Carrie suspiciously. “Who did you say this cigar case belongs to?”

  “My husband.”

  The pawnshop owner snaps the lid shut. “Never mind,” he says. “Let’s say thirty-five dollars? How does that sit?”

  Carrie reaches out, takes the cigar case from him, and opens it. On the inside of the lid she finds an inscription, which reads: From Nettie to Deacon with love.

  An hour after discovering Nettie Wiggins’s love note inscribed inside Deacon’s cigar case, Carrie confronts him at Mrs. Springer’s, pulls out her father’s pistol, and aims it at his heart. “I’m leaving you,” she tells him, “and if you try to follow me or threaten me or set the law on me or make any attempt to drag me back, I’ll defend myself.”

  Clutching his glass of whiskey, Deacon backs up against the fireplace, opens his mouth, and begins to speak, but she doesn’t hear him out. She’s finished listening to his lies.

  “Remember that I wasn’t raised like other women. You may have my money, but you don’t own my soul. Don’t underestimate me, Deacon. I’ve shot plant specimens out of trees since I was nine. Remember: I never miss.”

  PART 3

  The California Road

  Chapter Fourteen

  Missouri, September 1854

  Carrie sits at the main table in the ladies’ lounge of the Magnolia Queen, poring over her map of the Kansas Territory. Thanks to Mordecai de Gelder’s insatiable appetite for orchids, she has five thousand dollars, and thanks to Professor Asa Gray of Harvard, she has a job. Once again the name Vinton has worked miracles. Professor Gray has overlooked the fact that she is a woman and has commissioned her to collect specimens of the plants of the Kansas Territory, which she is to dry and mount in the proper fashion and send to him as often as possible. He is also paying her to paint botanical portraits of each plant.

  “Canan Vinton’s daughter!” he said when she introduced herself. “You are a godsend! I am in the throes of assembling material for another volume of Genera of the Plants of the United States, and my collector in the Kansas Territory recently fell victim to smallpox. I trust you will not succumb to the same disease, Miss Vinton.”

  “If I were going to die of smallpox, I would already be dead,” she told him, but she did not mention the plague in Rio or William, because there were questions Professor Gray was sure to ask that she did not wish to answer. Nor did she tell him she was married, pregnant, and leaving her husband to search for her lover.

  Smoothing out the map, she weighs down each corner with the stones she collected the last time the steamer ran aground on a sand-bar. Around her, sleeping women and children occupy the floor jammed so closely together that it’s almost impossible to walk across the room without stepping on someone. Old women are snoring, babies are crying, and more than one New England matron is having dreams that have set her moaning and thrashing about. Add to this the thumping of the steam engine that powers the paddlewheel and the racket a party of drunken land speculators is making as they stand at the stern firing off their pistols for sport, and it’s a wonder anyone can sleep at all; or perhaps not such a wonder, because by this point in the journey almost everyone aboard the Magnolia Queen is exhausted enough to sleep through anything short of a boiler explosion.

  When it sought incorporation from the Massachusetts Legislature, the Emigrant Aid Company stated that the Kansas Territory was “accessible in five days continuous travel from Boston,” but you could not prove it by the women and children in the ladies’ lounge, most of whom have been traveling so long that clean sheets and hot food are already distant memories.

  Carrie stares at the map and thinks about the real route to Kansas, the one ordinary people take that wanders west, north, south, west, and north for days by train and boat. When the Magnolia Queen finally reaches the Kansas Landing near Westport, most of the free-soilers on board are going to be loading their possessions into wagons and heading across forty miles of open prairie to the new abolitionist settlement of Lawrence. Should she go with them or stay on board and go up to Fort Leavenworth to see if William is there?

  Lawrence is probably her best choice. It’s the kind of place William would be attracted to. The first settlers pitched their tents beside the Kaw River only six weeks ago. They’ve already built a boardinghouse where emigrants can stay until they get settled. The next wave of settlers is not simply bringing ploughs, seed, and spades with them. They intend to build an entire New England village from scratch, so they’re bringing gristmills, steam-powered sawmills, forges, chisels for shaping prairie limestone into building blocks, bells for their churches, Bibles, printing presses, even patent apple peelers, although it will be years before the orchards will bear enough apples for pies. And they’re bringing guns, a great many guns, because the pro-slavers would like nothing better than to see Lawrence burned to the ground and every man, woman, and child driven out of the Kansas Territory or massacred.

  She returns to the map, puts her finger over the blank spot where Lawrence is, and again considers her options. Is William there? She has asked everyone if they have seen him: land speculators, soldiers being posted to Fort Leavenworth, the clerks who sell train tickets, a mountain man in buckskins who has waist-length hair and a beard like a rat’s nest, a Canadian trader, a Mexican cattle baron in silver-tooled chaps and a sombrero who told her he had ridden all the way from Matamoros to St. Louis, the captain of the Magnolia Queen, the women in the ladies’ lounge, the men who are presently sleeping on the floor of the main salon.

  So far her search has not yielded any clues to William’s whereabouts. Most people have told her they have never heard of him, which makes sense since the majority are traveling to Kansas for the first time and thus not likely to know much about the Territory. But sometimes the answers she has received have been suspicious.

  For example, some of the ladies on the Magnolia Queen are Missourians traveling to Westport with their personal slaves. So far none of these ladies will admit to having seen or heard of a tall, lanky man with dark eyes and chestnut-colored hair named William Saylor. Are they telling the truth? When Carrie speaks to them, they look at one another in ways that suggest they harbor secrets. Do those secrets concern William or do they merely dislike her because she’s an abolitionist?

  The New Englanders have been sympathetic, but here, too, something seems amiss. Only yesterday a minister’s wife from Boston left a tin of oatmeal cookies in front of her stateroom door, but the minister himself will hardly speak to her, and whenever she mentions William’s name, he changes the subject.

  To avoid scandal she has told everyone William is her half-brother, so why are they being so reticent? Is it because they don’t know anything, or do they pity her? Has William done what he told his friend Charles Howard he was going to do—something illegal and dangerous that he could be hanged for? That seems ridiculous, but if he hasn’t, then why this conspiracy of silence? Maybe there is no conspiracy. Maybe she’s just imagining people know more about William than they’re willing to say.

  For a moment she allows herself to picture how shocked they’ll be when they see her kissing this “brother” of hers. That’s what she will do when she finds him: kiss him senseless. And she will find him. It’s simply a matter of persistence.

  Rolling up the map, she blows out the candle, and puts her head down on the table. She should go back to her stateroom and sleep in a real bed, but if she tries to get out of the ladies’ lounge, she will probably tread on someone’s hand or foot, or worse yet, face, and she is too tired to deal with the yelling and confusion.

  Closing her eyes, she forces herself to imagine sheep jumping over a fence. When that fails, she dismisses the sheep and begins to silently recite the Latin names of orchids. Gradually, the courage and stubbornness that have carried her through the day dissolve, and she finds herself thinking about the unthinkable.

  If I can’t find William, I will . . . what in God’s name will I do? For a long time she
is neither asleep nor awake, but trapped between the two. Then she must doze off because she sees tall grasses swaying in the wind and hears a voice that she recognizes as her own.

  If I can’t find William, I’ll buy land and settle in the Kansas Territory near Lawrence. I can get 160 acres for about $1.25 an acre. They say the soil is rich. I don’t know anything about farming, but I know more about plants than most people. Surely, I can raise enough food on 160 acres to feed myself and my child . . .

  She dreams of driving a wooden claim stake into the ground. As she does this, her anxiety dissolves, and she feels determined and self-sufficient, as if her life will turn out well no matter what happens. Then gradually the vision of the tall grasses fades. She opens her eyes and again feels loneliness and longing.

  What will I do if I can’t find William? How will I bear it? Reaching out in the darkness, she touches the rolled-up map, and begins to cry quietly so as not to awaken women who are on their way to join their husbands, and children whose fathers are waiting for them in Westport.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Limestone bluffs, gold and gray in the early morning light; wooded banks without a sign of human habitation; bottomlands filled with reeds that shine as they sway in the wind; mudflats, sandbars, unpredictable currents, the sound of the hull scraping something, the laboring of the engine. Smoke from the stacks drifting downriver like long gray scarves; more bluffs, more woods, more bottomlands, another steamer stuck fast in the mud.

  Soldiers stand on the deck of the beached ship and wave to the Magnolia Queen as it steams by, and Carrie and her fellow passengers wave back. She thinks of the times she has gone up the Amazon, how different this river looks, how much broader the sky is, how much bluer; how the water is a clean green instead of a muddy brown. Below the hull, large fish flit like dark shadows over the white skeletons of sunken trees. Instead of tropical frogs, locusts sing in the underbrush; instead of parrots and macaws, hawks and eagles soar overhead.