by John Jakes
He knocked again. An elderly servant with reddened eye sockets answered. Before he could speak, the visitor blurted, “I am Colonel Elkanah Bent. I must see Mr. Starkwether. It’s urgent.”
“I’m very sorry, Colonel, but it’s impossible. This afternoon, Mr. Starkwether was unexpectedly—” the old man had trouble saying it—“stricken.”
“Do you mean a paralytic seizure?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But he’s all right, isn’t he?”
“The seizure was fatal, sir.”
Bent walked back to the hack, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, wondering how to save himself now that he’d lost his father.
8
“HE’S COMING HERE? WITH that Catholic bitch who lords it over us as if she’s royalty? Stanley, you imbecile! How could you allow it?”
“Isabel,” he began in a faint voice as she flounced toward the parlor windows overlooking Sixth Street. She showed him the back of the drab gray hoop skirt and matching jacket she wore for everyday. She groaned, so loudly you might have thought some man was ravishing her. Damn slim chance of her permitting that, Stanley thought pettishly.
His wife kicked her hoops to permit a quick turn, another confrontation. “Why in the name of God didn’t you speak against the idea?”
“I did! But Cameron wants him.”
“For what possible reason?”
Stanley offered a few of Cameron’s explanatory phrases, as best he could remember them. Just the anticipation of this quarrel had exhausted him. He’d spent most of the day rehearsing what he’d say and completely forgotten it when the moment arrived. Sprawled in a chair, he finished with a lame “There’s a strong possibility that he won’t come.”
“I wish we hadn’t either. I detest this cursed town.”
He sat silent as she strode around the parlor three times, working off some of her rage. He knew she didn’t mean that last remark. She loved being in Washington because she loved power and associating with those who controlled it.
Their current circumstances weren’t ideal, of course. With decent quarters hard to find, they’d been forced to rent this dusty old suite in the cavernous National Hotel, a hangout of the secesh crowd. Stanley wished they could move. Quite apart from politics, a hotel was the wrong place in which to raise two headstrong adolescent sons. Sometimes Laban and Levi disappeared in the mazy corridors for hours. God knew what lascivious lessons they learned, listening at closed doors. When Stanley had gotten here at seven, Isabel reported that she’d found Laban giggling in a familiar way with one of the young maids. Stanley had lectured his son—torture for him and boring for the defiant boy. He had then ordered the twins to study Latin verbs for an hour and locked their bedroom door. Mercifully, all sounds of fist-fighting had now stopped; he presumed they were asleep. Small wonder religious Americans considered Washington an immoral place; the first evidence cited was the town’s teeming hotel life.
Isabel completed her last circuit of the room and stopped, folding her arms over her small bosom and challenging him with her eyes. Two years older than Stanley, she had grown increasingly forbidding as she aged.
In response to her glare, he said, “Isabel, try to understand. I did object, but—”
“Not strongly. You never do anything strongly.”
His back stiffened as he stood. “That’s unfair. I didn’t want to harm my good standing with Simon. I had the impression you considered it an asset.”
Isabel Hazard was an expert manipulator of people, most especially her husband. She saw she’d pushed too hard. The understanding damped her anger. “I do. I’m sorry for what I said. It’s just that I despise George and Constance for all the humiliation they’ve heaped on you.”
The truce established, he moved to her side. “And you.”
“Yes. I’d like to repay them for that.” She cocked her head, smiling. “If they did come here, perhaps I could find a way. We know important people. You have some influence now.”
“We might do it at that.” He hoped his lack of enthusiasm didn’t show. Sometimes he truly hated his brother, but he had also been frightened of him since they were boys. He slipped his arm around her shoulder. “Let me have a whiskey while I tell you some good news.”
Isabel allowed him to guide her to a sideboard where fine glass decanters held the best brands of spirits. “What is it? A promotion?”
“No, no—I guess news is the wrong word. It’s a suggestion from Simon, a boon to soothe my objections about George.” He described the meeting with the contractor and the subsequent conversation with Cameron. Isabel saw the potential instantly. She clapped her hands.
“For that idea, I’d let ten George Hazards come to town. We wouldn’t be dependent on the factory—or your brother’s whims—for our principal income. Just imagine the money we could make with a guaranteed contract—”
“Simon offered no guarantees,” Stanley cautioned. “You don’t dare state such things explicitly. But I’m sure it’s what he meant. The department operates that way. Right now, for instance, I’m working on a plan to save the government money when it transports soldiers from New York to Washington. The present cost is six dollars a head. By rerouting the troops on the Northern Central through Harrisburg, we can cut that to four.”
“But the Northern Central is Cameron’s line.”
Feeling better with whiskey in him, Stanley winked. “We don’t generally advertise that.”
Isabel was already planning. “We must travel to New England immediately. Simon will give you time off, won’t he?”
“Oh, yes. But, as I told him, I don’t know a thing about shoe manufacturing.”
“We will learn. Together.”
“Give me back my pillow, you little son of a bitch.”
The sudden shout from behind the door of the smaller bedroom was followed by more cursing and sounds of struggle.
“Stanley, go stop those boys this instant.”
The general had spoken; the subaltern knew better than to argue. He set his drink aside and reluctantly marched off to the sibling wars.
9
NEXT DAY, IN PENNSYLVANIA, Billy’s wife, Brett, left Belvedere to do an errand. A servant could have gone down to Lehigh Station instead, but she wanted to escape the mansion’s overheated sewing room and the volunteer work being done there by the ladies of the house. The work for the Union boys bothered her conscience.
Belvedere, an L-shaped stone mansion of Italianate design, stood beside a second residence on the terraced summit of a hill overlooking the river, the town, and the Hazard ironworks. The other residence was twice as large—forty rooms. It belonged to Stanley Hazard and his dreadful wife, who had left a caretaker behind when they went to Washington.
Brett waited on Belvedere’s shady veranda until a groom brought the buggy around. Her thank you was perfunctory, and she practically snatched the whip from his hand. She pushed the whip into the dash socket, then off she went in a cloud of dust, mad at herself for her unwarranted surliness.
Brett was twenty-three, an inheritor of the dark hair and eyes common in the Main family. She was attractive but in a fresher, plainer way than her older sister, Ashton, whom everyone, including Ashton, considered a beauty. Ashton’s loveliness was suited to evening, to sweet scent and bare shoulders under candlelight. Brett was a child of daylight and the out of doors, most at home in homely surroundings. People introduced to her for the first time quickly sensed that from her manner and especially from her smile. There was nothing of coquetry in it. Instead, it conveyed a kindness, an openness, often lacking in young women her age.
But that seemed to be changing here in her husband’s hometown. People knew she came from South Carolina and sometimes treated her with the care given some wilting exotic flower. Not a few, she supposed, considered her a traitor at heart. That annoyed her, and so did the infernal heat of the afternoon. Her sticky white muslin dress clung to her, and the humidity seemed even worse than that of her native low country.
>
The longer Billy stayed away—the longer the dread uncertainties of this war continued—the more isolated and unhappy she became. She tried not to show those feelings to George and his wife, Constance, with whom she’d been living since Billy returned to duty. But she was far from perfect, and she knew it. So the groom had taken the brunt, just as one of the servant girls had yesterday.
Perspiration quickly soaked through the palms of her net mittens. Why had she worn them? The buggy horse required sharp tugs of the reins to keep him in the center of the high-crowned, bumpy road that wound down the hillside past the factory. The huge Hazard works generated smoke and noise twenty-four hours a day, rolling out rails and plate for the Union war effort. Lately the company had acquired a contract to cast cannon as well.
Above her, the factory’s three stone furnaces dominated the laurel-covered mountain nearest the mansions. Below spread the three levels of the expanding town—solid brick or frame homes the highest, then commercial buildings, and finally shanties on the flats near the railroad line and the bed of the abandoned canal next to the river.
Everywhere, she saw evidence of the war. She passed some boys drilling in a vacant lot to the beat of spoons on a pail; not one of the strutting little soldiers was over ten. The front of the Station House, the good hotel, displayed a great amount of red, white, and blue bunting; George was speaking at a patriotic rally inside the hotel this afternoon. And at the intersection where Valley Street met Canal to form a T, hammers and shouts accompanied construction of a plank platform for the coming celebration on Independence Day.
She drove up to Herbert’s General Merchandise and tied the horse to one of the six iron posts in front. As she crossed the walk, she noticed two men watching her from a shaded bench outside the lager-beer saloon two doors down. Their muscular arms and drab clothes told her they probably worked at Hazard’s.
Watching her, one man said something to the other, who laughed so hard he nearly spilled his tin growler. Despite the heat, Brett shivered.
The General Merchandise smelled of licorice and rye flour and other items sold by Mr. Pinckney Herbert. The proprietor was a small-boned, bright-eyed man who reminded Brett of a rabbi she’d met once in Charleston. Herbert had been raised in Virginia, where his family had lived since before the Revolution. His conscience had driven him to Pennsylvania when he was twenty; all that he’d brought from the South were his loathing for slavery and the name Pinckney, which he admired and adopted in preference to his real name, Pincus.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Hazard. How may I serve you today?”
“With some heavy white thread, Pinckney. White. Constance and Patricia and I have been sewing havelocks.”
“Havelocks. Well, well.” He avoided her eyes, which was a second comment on the novelty of a Southern girl fashioning protective flaps for the hats of Union soldiers. When George’s wife and daughter began—Constance said most of the women in town were doing similar work—Brett joined in because it didn’t seem a partisan act to help another human being protect his neck from rain or sunburn. Why, then, did a subterranean sense of disloyalty persist while she sewed?
She paid for the half-dozen spools and left the store. At the sound of a plank creaking, she turned sharply to her left and wished she hadn’t. There stood the two idlers, sloshing beer round and round in their tin cans.
“What d’ya hear from Jeff Davis, lady?”
She wanted to call him an idiot but decided it was safer to ignore the remark. She headed for the buggy, alarmed to notice only one other person in sight: a bonneted matron who vanished around a corner. From the Station House came faint cheering; the rally and the afternoon heat had emptied the streets.
She hurried past her horse, heartbeat quickening. She heard sounds behind her—harsh breathing, boots on the hard-packed dirt—and felt the man near a moment before he grabbed her shoulder and yanked her around.
It was the one who’d taunted her. His beard, bushy red with white mingled in, held flecks of beer foam. She smelled the dirt on his clothes and the fumes from his drinking.
“Bet you pray Old Abe will get a seizure some night and fall down dead, huh?” The bearded man’s companion found that so funny, he brayed. It caught the attention of two men walking on the other side of the street. When they saw who was being bothered, they went right on.
Slurry of speech, the first man said, “Still own some niggers back home in Carolina?”
“You drunken jackass,” Brett said. “Take your hands off me.”
The second man giggled. “That’s the ole reb spirit, ain’t it, Lute?”
The first man dug his fingers into Brett’s sleeve. Her face contorted. “Somethin’s wrong with your eyesight, woman. I’m a white man. You cain’t talk to me like I was one of your damn slaves. Get that in your bonnet, an’ this, too. We don’t want any secesh traitors paradin’ around this town.” He shook her. “Hear me?”
“Fessenden, let her go, and right now.”
Pinckney Herbert had emerged from his store. The second man ran at him. “Get back inside, you old Jew.” One hard punch doubled up the merchant and knocked him back through the door. He tried to rise, while Fessenden dropped his growler and grasped Brett’s shoulders, shaking and twisting them so as to hurt her and, perhaps, touch her breasts with his forearms, too.
Herbert grasped the door frame and struggled to pull himself up. The second man hit him under the chin. Herbert crashed down on his back with an involuntary yell. Brett knew she could scream for help, but it ran against the grain. Abruptly, fright seemed to defeat her. She sagged in Fessenden’s grip, her eyes half shut.
“Please, please let me go!” Were any tears coming? “Oh, please—I’m just a poor female. Not strong like you—”
“Now that’s what I ’spect a little Southern girl ought to sound like.” Laughing, Fessenden slipped an arm around her waist, pushed her against the buggy wheel, bent near, his beard scraping her cheek. “Say pretty please an’ see what happens.”
Apparently she didn’t understand. “I’m not—big and burly like you—You must be kind—polite—Won’t you do that? Won’t you?” Small, desperate sighs and gulps fell between the quivering words of the plea.
“I’ll think on it, missy,” Fessenden promised. His other hand took hold of her skirt and the petticoats beneath and the leg beneath those. That left her hands free.
“You Yankee scum.” She raised the leg he wasn’t holding and drove it into his privates. While he screamed and turned red, she pushed him. He tumbled into the dust, Though Pinckney Herbert still looked hurt and pale in the doorway, he started laughing over the sudden revival of the wilted flower.
Fessenden clutched his crotch. His friend called Brett a bad name and started for her. She snatched the whip from the socket and laid it across his cheek.
He jumped back as if set on fire, then screamed as he fell over Fessenden behind him. He landed on his head, managing to kick Fessenden’s jaw at the same time.
Brett flung her sack of thread on the buggy floor, untied the horse, and clambered up lithely as a tomboy. As she gathered the reins in one mitten, the second bully, back on his feet, came at her once more. She snapped her right hand over her left arm and whipped his face a second time.
By then, two or three conscience-stricken citizens had appeared in doorways along the block, demanding an end to the bullying. A little too late, thank you. She raced the buggy away toward the hilltop road, yellow dust rising behind like the evil clouds that preceded summer storms. How I hate this town, this war—everything, she thought as fury gave way to despair.
10
ON THE TEMPORARY STAGE erected at one end of the main parlor of the Station House, George Hazard was being cruelly and unjustly tortured by heat, verbosity, and the hardest chair ever made by human hand. In front of him, moist faces, wagging paper and palm-leaf fans, flags and swags of bunting draping every wall.
Behind George and the other dignitaries hung a large lithographed drawing of th
e President. Mayor Blane, who worked at Hazard’s as an assistant night foreman, had risen from his customary daytime sleep to chair the rally. Blane pounded the rostrum.
“Our flag has been violated! Desecrated! Torn down by Davis and his treasonous mob of pseudoaristocrats! Such mistreatment of the sacred red, white, and blue can be met with but two replies: a volley of shot and a hang rope for those who dare rend the fabric of this nation and its dear old emblem!”
Godamighty, George thought. How long will he carry on? Blane was supposed only to introduce the two main speakers, of whom George was the reluctant first and a leading Republican from Bethlehem the second. The politician was raising a volunteer regiment in the valley.
The mayor marched on, pausing only to smile and acknowledge whistles, applause, or people jumping on chairs and shaking their fists to approve of some particularly pithy bit of warmongering. In the weeks since federal flags had been hauled down, spat on, and burned throughout the South, the North had experienced an epidemic of what the newspapers called star-spangled fever.
George didn’t have the disease. He would have preferred to be at his desk, supervising affairs at Hazard’s, or working on details of his application to start the Bank of Lehigh Station, the first in town.
Banking in Bethlehem had become too inconvenient for Hazard’s and most of its employees. George had faith in the usefulness and eventual profitability of a local bank. Conventional thinkers would have shied from such a venture just now—economic conditions were bad, confidence low—but George believed there was never great success without considerable risk.
The new bank would be organized under Pennsylvania’s revised Banking Act of 1824, with a twenty-year charter and thirteen directors, all of whom had to be United States citizens and shareholders. He and his local attorney, Jupiter Smith, had plenty to do to prepare all the papers required by the chartering body, the state legislature.