North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  “Southern officers are the cream of the Army, don’t forget.”

  “Aye,” Orry said, nodding. “And carrying out their orders will be a lot of tough farmers who can fight like the very devil, even though they never heard of Mahan or Jomini or, ironically, owned a single slave. But what are they up against? Your numbers. Your millions and millions of clerks and mechanics. Your infernal factories.” The next was barely audible. “A new kind of war—”

  Orry was silent a moment. Finally he went on, “Regardless of how it comes out—regardless of which side dictates the terms and which side accepts them—we’ll all be the losers. We abdicated, George. We let the lunatics reign.”

  He flung his head back and poured the rest of the whiskey down his throat with a single gesture. After a moment he closed his eyes and shuddered. Slowly and with great care, George replaced the meteorite on the table and stared at it.

  Orry opened his eyes. He thought he heard a distant tumult. George stirred. “Yes, the lunatics reign. But what could we have done?”

  “I’m not sure. Cooper was always cautioning us with Burke.” He struggled to remember and quote correctly. “‘When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall one by one—’”

  On his feet suddenly, he reached for the whiskey. “I don’t know what the hell we could have done, but I know we didn’t ask the question soon enough or forcefully enough. Or often enough.”

  He poured, drank two-thirds of a glass. George pondered what his friend had said. Then he too shook his head. “That’s such a simple answer. Maybe too simple. The problem’s incomprehensibly tangled. Sometimes I think one man is such a puny thing. How can he change anything when there are great forces stirring? Forces he doesn’t understand or even recognize?”

  Orry’s reply was the same depressing truth he had admitted a few moments earlier. “I’m not sure. But if great forces and events aren’t entirely accidental, they must be created and shaped by men. Created and shaped by positive action and by lack of it, too. I think we had a chance. I think we threw it away.”

  Inexplicably, his voice broke on the last words. He felt tears in his eyes. Tears of pain, of failure, frustration, and despair—he was damned if he knew all their wellsprings. For one blinding moment the friends stared at each other, stripped of every emotion save their realization of culpability and the fear it generated now that the slogan-chanting mobs were abroad in the North and the South. Abroad and marching steadfastly toward Mahan’s new apocalypse—

  Mob. The word, and certain noises, shattered Orry’s dark reverie. He turned toward a window. He heard voices outside. Not a large crowd, but a ferocious one.

  George frowned. “Sounds like a bunch of town roughnecks. What do you suppose they want?”

  He reached for the velvet curtains. The sudden crash of the door spun him around.

  “Virgilia!”

  The moment Orry saw her, he knew why the mob had come.

  67

  OUTSIDE, THE TUMULT INCREASED. George pointed to the window, his voice mingling shock and rage. “Are you responsible for that, Virgilia?”

  Her smile was sufficient answer.

  “How the hell did they get here?” he demanded.

  A rock smashed one of the windows. The heavy drapes kept the glass from flying, though it tinkled loudly on the floor beneath the curtain’s gold fringe. Orry thought he heard someone shout the word traitor. He brushed his hand across his mouth.

  “I sent one of the servants to the hotel.” Virgilia looked at Orry. “Right after I saw him step through the front door.”

  “In the name of God—why?”

  Orry could have answered George’s question. And he was barely able to contain the revulsion the sight of Virgilia produced. She was only a few years his senior, but she looked twenty years older than that. Her print dress, faded from many washings, fit too tightly; she had gained at least fifteen pounds. But the weight was only one sign of a continuing deterioration. Her complexion was pasty, her eyes sunken. Wisps of hair straggled to her shoulders, and when she turned to answer her brother, Orry saw dirt on her neck.

  “Because he’s a traitor,” she whispered. “A Southerner and a traitor. He murdered Grady.”

  “He had nothing to do with Grady’s death. You’ve taken leave of your—”

  “Murdered him,” she repeated, her eyes on Orry again. Those eyes glowed with a hatred so intense, it was almost a physical force. “You did it, you and your kind.”

  George shouted at her. “The Federal troops killed Grady!” But she was beyond the reach of reason, and it was then Orry knew what it was that she had brought into the room. It was more than the odor of stale clothes or unclean flesh. It was the stink of death.

  “I sent for those men,” she said to him. “I hope they kill you.”

  Suddenly, like a bolting animal, she ran at the draperies hiding the broken window. “He’s in here!” she screamed. George leaped after her, grabbed her arm, and flung her backward.

  She fell, landing hard on hands and knees. Without warning, she began to sob, great, mindless bellows of pain. Her unpinned hair hung like a curtain on both sides of her drooping head. Mercifully, it hid her madwoman’s face.

  George eyed the drapes she had almost reached and opened. He pitched his voice low. “There is a local freight eastbound at eleven o’clock. I think it would be advisable for your own safety—”

  “I agree,” Orry cut in. “I’ll go now. I don’t want to endanger your family. I’ll slip out the back way.”

  “The hell you will. They probably have someone watching there. You leave this to me.”

  George started toward the hall. Virgilia struggled to her feet. George turned back to look at her. “Virgilia—”

  He was too overcome to continue. But he didn’t need words. His eyes and his reddening face conveyed his feelings. She backed away from him, and he strode on to the front hall.

  There, Constance, the two children, and half a dozen servants were anxiously watching the main door. Firelight shimmered on the fanlight above. The men outside had torches. Orry saw the door handle shake, but someone inside had been alert enough to shoot the bolt when the mob arrived.

  “Who are those men?” Constance asked her husband. “What are they doing here?”

  “They want Orry. It’s Virgilia’s doing. Take the children upstairs.”

  “Virgilia? Oh, dear God, George—”

  “Take them upstairs! The rest of you, clear the hall.” To Orry: “Wait here a moment.” As the servants scattered and Constance hurried the youngsters away, George disappeared into a wardrobe closet beneath the staircase.

  He reappeared, struggling into his coat. On the lapel Orry noticed a patriotic rosette, smaller and much neater than his own. Over George’s arm hung a military-issue gun belt. From the holster he plucked an 1847-model Colt repeater.

  He flung the belt on a chair and quickly examined the gun. “I keep it loaded and handy in that closet because I’ve had a few surprise callers—employees I’ve discharged, that sort of thing—”

  He twirled the cylinder, then turned toward the front door. A stone crashed through the fanlight, spilling glass over a wide area. “Dishonorable sons of bitches,” George growled. “Follow me.”

  His short, stocky legs carried him straight toward the door, which he unlocked with no hesitation. Orry was right behind, frightened yet oddly delighted, too. The years had rolled away, and they were in battle again—George in the lead, as usual.

  George flung the door open with what Orry thought was calculated bravado. It had no effect on the mob that surged up the steps of Belvedere, shouting and cursing. Orry counted twelve to fifteen men armed with rocks and cudgels. “There’s the damned Southerner,” one screamed as Orry followed George onto the porch. “There’s the traitor.”

  Another man shook a smoking torch. “We want him.”

  George’s shoulders were thrown back. He looked pugnacious and powerful as he raised the Colt repe
ater and extended his arm. With the muzzle pointed at the forehead of the man who had just spoken, he thumb-cocked the gun.

  “Take him. I guarantee you and a few others won’t survive the attempt.”

  Orry stepped to the left of his friend, within a couple of feet of the men crowding the steps. He thought he recognized two of the loungers from the hotel.

  “Let’s rush him,” someone else yelled.

  George pointed the Colt at the shouter. “Come on. It’s an old military axiom. The One who gives the order leads the charge.”

  “Damn it, Hazard,” another man exclaimed, “he’s a Southron. A palmetto-state man. All we want to do is show him what we think of disunionists—traitors.”

  “This gentleman’s no traitor. We, graduated in the same West Point class, then went all the way to Mexico City with General Scott. My friend fought for this country just as hard as I did, and that empty sleeve shows you the reward he got. I know most of you. I don’t want the death of a single one of you on my hands. But if you mean to harm an honorable man like this, you’ll have to remove me first.”

  The noise level dropped. Orry saw eyes shift from George’s gun to other parts of the porch. Some in the crowd were estimating how they might flank the pair and thus overcome them. A couple of men slipped away from the back of the mob, but George quickly covered them.

  “The first to move will be the first to fall.”

  The two men held still. Five seconds became ten. Fifteen—

  “We can take them” a voice growled. But there was no response. Orry’s heart was pounding. It could go either way—

  “Hell,” someone said. “It ain’t worth gettin’ killed.”

  “That shows good sense,” George said, still with a feisty tone. “If that’s the attitude of the rest of you, you’re free to move. Just make sure you move away from the porch, down the hill and off my property.” He paused, then stunned them by shouting in his best West Point voice, “Get going!”

  They responded to the command and the threat of the Colt. By ones and twos they shuffled away, leaving only a few oaths in their wake.

  A minute went by. Another. Orry and George stayed on the porch, alert in case the mob’s mood changed again. Finally George lowered the Colt and slumped against a pillar.

  “Close,” he said softly. “But we’re not out of the woods yet. Fetch your valise while I send someone for the buggy. The sooner we get you on a train, the better.”

  Orry didn’t argue.

  One servant drove, another rode astride the buggy horse. Each man carried a gun, as did George: He had already started a search for the servant who had taken Virgilia’s message to the mob. The man would be sent packing.

  George and Orry were still shaken by the confrontation: George sat in preoccupied silence as the buggy bumped its way down the hill. Presently Orry said, “What are you thinking about?”

  “These foul times. We might have prevented all this if we’d responded with the best that’s in us. Instead, we seem to have responded with the worst. I wonder if we’re capable of anything else.”

  Silence again. Orry tried to lighten the moment by telling his friend what he’d had no chance to tell him before—that Madeline was with him at last and would remain. When the future was a little less cloudy, they planned to consult a lawyer and obtain a divorce for her.

  “That’s fine, splendid,” George murmured as the buggy passed some outlying houses. His eyes, ceaselessly moving, swept shadowed stoops, yellow-lit windows, then the street. Abruptly he leaned forward. Ahead, silhouetted against the lamps of the hotel and depot, four men had stepped into the street to await the buggy.

  “Look sharp, you two,” George called to his men.

  Panting, Virgilia ran along the path that led over the hill behind Belvedere. She didn’t dare flee into town; George had gone in that direction.

  Brambles snagged her skirt and slashed her hands, which were clasped tightly around the handle of a huge, bulging carpetbag. She was a strong woman, but even so she could barely carry the bag, which gave off clanking sounds each time it bumped her leg.

  She had returned to the mansion once too often. She knew that now. Never again would she set foot in Lehigh Station.

  And why should she? She hated the whole family. Pompous little George and priggish Stanley, their wives, their precious white-skinned children. They understood nothing of the struggle taking place in the world. They pretended to be in sympathy with it, but they had no real appreciation of its hardships and cruelties. They were pampered hypocrites, the lot of them.

  Her loud, rapid breathing sounded like sobbing. Suddenly she stumbled, fell. But she never once let go of the carpetbag.

  She regained her feet and hurried on. No one was pursuing her, but she labored up the steep hillside as if the opposite was true. When George had looked at her, too overcome to speak, she had known she must run.

  Her shoulders and upper arms already ached horribly. She had stuffed too many things into the carpetbag before leaving the house: candlesticks, silver, garments from Constance’s wardrobe, and several of her most valuable pieces of jewelry—items Virgilia could readily sell to obtain money to live.

  She didn’t consider it stealing, only payment of what was rightfully hers. George and Stanley had always demeaned her because she was a woman. Their scorn had grown worse when she took a black lover. One day, she vowed as she panted her way to the hilltop, she’d pay them. She’d pay them all.

  The buggy rolled on toward the waiting men. They remained in the middle of the street. George touched the driver’s arm.

  “Don’t stop, and don’t go around them. Hand me your gun.”

  The driver gave George his Colt. The only sounds for about half a minute were the clopping of hooves and the faint squeak of a rear axle. George held his breath and raised the two guns so that they could be clearly seen.

  When the muzzle of the horse was within a yard of the silent men, they stepped aside.

  In the dim light, Orry recognized two who had been in the mob at Belvedere. One of them spat on the street while staring straight at him. But Orry was past all anger, too spent to react. The buggy rolled on.

  “Made it!” George exclaimed with a tense smile.

  They waited almost an hour inside the depot, with the two servants on watch outside. Nothing further was seen of the troublemakers.

  George now seemed as exhausted as his friend. Their conversation was fitful. Orry brought up Elkanah Bent, but George immediately dismissed the subject with a weary wave. Now that war had come, he said, there were far worse things to fear than one deranged officer. Billy had been warned, George intended to put Bent out of mind permanently, and that was that.

  Silence ensued. Like George, Orry too wondered how they had come to such a point of crisis in the country. Where had they failed? What had they left undone? Some solutions had been proposed but never seriously considered. The plan of compensated emancipation put forth by Emerson and others. Resettlement of freed slaves in Liberia so as not to flood the industrial North with cheap labor. Had there been even a faint hope of those ideas being implemented? Would Garrison and Virgilia have consented? Or Calhoun and Ashton’s husband? He didn’t know. He never would.

  The rails lit up as the locomotive loomed. The station agent had flagged the freight. George accompanied Orry to the spot on the platform where the caboose was likely to stop.

  “Special passenger,” George explained to a pair of puzzled brakemen. He pressed money into their hands. He was about to bid his friend good-bye when his eye lit on Orry’s crudely made rosette. “Just a minute.”

  He unfastened the rosette and tossed it away. Then he took off his own and pinned it on Orry’s lapel.

  “You might as well wear one that looks genuine. I’ll be damned if I want to be responsible for them lynching you in Maryland.”

  They embraced. Orry boarded the train.

  68

  ORRY REACHED PHILADELPHIA THE next morning. He left fo
r Washington at four in the afternoon. A hard rain was falling. He sat with his forehead against the wet window, almost like a man in a trance. One memory, one image, sustained him now: Madeline.

  Presently, after darkness fell, the train jerked to a halt. Lamps burned on a rickety platform. By their light he saw a northbound train standing on the other track. Passengers were crowding the platform, taking the opportunity to escape the smoky cars for a little while. Those around Orry got up to do the same. He felt no inclination to move.

  “Where are we?” he asked a conductor.

  “Relay House.”

  “Why are both trains stopped?”

  “To pick up passengers from a local from the east shore. There’ll be some people going north, some going south.”

  “That’s fitting,” Orry said. The conductor looked at him as if he were unbalanced.

  Staring into the rain, Orry suddenly spied familiar faces. He jumped up, took three long strides down the aisle. Then, abruptly, he halted.

  Bending to peer through another window, he studied his sister and her husband. Would he compromise the young couple or create danger for them if he spoke to them? Billy was in uniform.

  He let out an oath. For a second he had started to think like the mob: If you’re a Southerner, you’re a traitor. He walked quickly to the head of the car.

  Rain struck his face as he worked his way across the platform. “Brett? Billy?”

  Surprise and confusion registered on the faces of the young couple when they recognized him. A few people gave him suspicious looks, but his rosette reassured them.

  “What in the world are you doing here?” Brett exclaimed.

  “Going home. I paid a visit to Lehigh Station. George said he was expecting you any time.”

  “I’m on leave,” Billy said. “After that, everything’s pretty uncertain.”

  “How’s your arm?”

  “Fine. No permanent damage.” He circled Brett’s waist and held her. “Those two or three hours after the wedding seem more like a bad dream than anything else. To this day I’m not sure why all of it happened.”