North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  Powell ran across Orry’s line of vision. Orry scrambled back, almost losing his balance as Powell shouted, “Put the lanterns out.”

  The vertical slits of yellow turned black. Orry lunged up and ran toward the field, bent low. A door rolled back. He heard voices outside the implement building, Powell’s the loudest.

  “Wilbur? We need you. We’ve been spied on.”

  Orry’s chest already hurt from running. Halfway across the field, he heard a horse galloping up the dirt road to the buildings, loud voices again, a confusion of questions and orders. The rider turned into the field, firing a shot.

  The bullet slashed through weeds two feet left of Orry. His boot caught the moist earth, and he lost his balance. The shot frightened his own horse, who neighed. Orry slid on his knees, then pushed up so hard he felt a spasm in a muscle in his arm. He ran on, reaching his horse and mounting as his pursuer passed the field’s midpoint.

  He booted his mount down the lane by which he had approached. Low branches whipped his cheeks and forehead. The man behind him fired a second round. It missed. Orry galloped into the wider main road that curved away from the James. Pulling away from his pursuer and topping a slight rise, he saw the sky glow that identified Richmond.

  He breathed deeply of the wind rushing against his face. He was riding away from shock and peril—but toward an inevitable meeting with his conscience. It took place about midnight. Madeline sat on the edge of their bed, arms folded over the bosom of her nightdress, while he paced one way, then other, lumps of mud falling from his boots.

  After he told her everything, the first thing she said was: “How in heaven’s name did she become involved?”

  “Right away I decided it was because of James. But I’m not so sure. Something bothers me about that explanation, though I haven’t figured out what it is. Anyway, explanations hardly matter at this point. I’m the one person with knowledge of a direct threat to the President’s life. Other lives, too—”

  He seized the bedpost. “I must go to Seddon with the information. And Winder. The provost can pick up the conspirators quietly—It’s the first time I’ve ever been thankful Stephens failed in his congressional crusade.” In February, despite the politicking of the vice president, suspension of habeas corpus had been reenacted.

  “All the conspirators?” Madeline asked. “Does that include your sister?”

  “She’s one of them. Why does she deserve special consideration?”

  “You know, Orry. I don’t like her any better than you do. But she’s family.”

  “Family! I’d sooner have Beast Butler for a relative. Madeline, my sister tried to have Billy Hazard murdered.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. It doesn’t change what I just said. I know you dislike hearing it, but it’s true. There’s also this: No crime has been committed as yet.”

  “The very most I could do—and I’m damned if I think she deserves it—is refrain from mentioning her name or the fact that I saw her.”

  “You would have to do the same for James.”

  “I owe him nothing.”

  “He’s Ashton’s husband.”

  A long silence. Then a disgusted sigh. “All right. But that’s as far as I’ll compromise for either of them. I’ll identify Powell and no one else. If he implicates Huntoon or my sister, so be it.”

  “We’re discovered—we’ll be arrested—what in God’s name are we to do, Lamar?”

  Huntoon’s wail sickened Ashton. Outside the implement building, with the others crowding around, Powell shot out his hand, twisting Huntoon’s collar. “The one thing we will not do is cry like infants.” He shoved Huntoon away as the sentry, Wilbur, came trotting back across the field to report.

  “Lost him.”

  “But you got a look at him—”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Damn you.” Powell turned his back on Wilbur, who tugged his farmer’s hat down over his eyes and sat silently.

  Powell rubbed his knuckles against the point of his chin, thinking.

  Another of the conspirators cleared his throat. “They’ll be out here by morning, won’t they?”

  Huntoon spoke up. “Perhaps not. Suppose it was just some nigger boy hunting chickens to steal.” He was trying to reassure himself.

  “It was a white man. I seen that much,” Wilbur said.

  “But maybe he meant us no harm—”

  “Are you an imbecile?” Powell said. “He approached by stealth. He observed us through one of the cracks in that wall. But setting that aside, do you seriously imagine I’d sit and wait to find out whether he’s harmless?”

  He shoved the humiliated Huntoon aside and strode along the weedy strip of ground beside the implement shed. He scanned the bluff, the field, the other buildings. “What we require are sound tactics for meeting the situation. If we think them out carefully and keep our heads, we’ll come through this unscathed.”

  Badly scared, Ashton clung to her faith in Powell’s brains and courage. But it was shaken when he returned to them, smiling, and she heard him say, “The first thing we must do is enlist the aid of Mr. Edgar Poe. My favorite author. How many of you know his tale of the purloined letter?”

  “You’re the one who’s an imbecile,” Huntoon ranted, “talking of cheap hack writers at a time like this.”

  For once Ashton silently sided with her husband. Her lover didn’t say a word to explain himself, merely gave Huntoon another insulting push and walked past him, laughing.

  At daylight, Orry marched up the high stoop of Secretary Seddon’s residence and used the knocker so loudly he was sure he woke the whole neighborhood. Within minutes, grumpy Winder was summoned. When he arrived, he resisted for half an hour—Orry was not, after all, one of his most trusted colleagues—but gave in under pressure from Seddon. He would send investigators to Wilton’s Bluff before noon.

  “I’ll go immediately to the President,” the secretary said. He was by now largely recovered from the shock of Orry’s news. “All cabinet members will be warned. Meanwhile, Colonel Main, yours is the privilege of casting the net for the biggest fish.”

  “I’ll do it with pleasure, sir.”

  A few minutes past ten, a curtained van raced to Church Hill and wheeled into Franklin Street. Orry jumped out and led an armed squad up the front steps. A second squad, dropped off a block away, had already deployed in the garden. Orry quickly found himself reacting as Seddon had when he first heard the story.

  The front door offered no resistance. Dumbfounded, he said to his men, “It’s been left unlocked.”

  Inside, the household furnishings remained, but no clothes or personal belongings.

  Lamar Powell had disappeared.

  That evening, a second shock. It came in Winder’s sanctum, delivered by the man with the long nose, weedy black clothes, and vaguely clerical air.

  “I found nothing. No signs of habitation. And, most especially, no trace of those crated weapons you reported, Colonel. In my opinion, no one’s been at that farm for months. The neighbors I questioned agree.”

  Orry jumped up. “That can’t be.”

  Antagonized, the other man said, “Is that so? Well, then—” a gesture to the door, derisive “—question the two operatives I took with me. You’ve heard my report, and I stand by it. If you don’t like it, ride back there and make your own.”

  “By God, I will,” Orry said, as Israel Quincy stepped to the window and gazed at the sunset.

  Evening’s dark red glinted on the river, lighting Orry’s stricken face. He had searched the implement building and found what Quincy and his colleagues predicted: nothing. He had left the building a moment ago, closing its door on the dirt floor, straw-littered and unmarked by any boot prints save those of men. Some were his. Some surely belonged to Winders operatives—and Powell’s crowd. Or did they? Orry hadn’t discovered a single imprint of a woman’s shoe.

  He felt angry, humiliated, baffled. He walked away from the bluff and searched the farmhouse. H
e found only dust and nesting rats. He searched the barn and chicken coop. Again nothing. By then night had come. He mounted and took a shortcut toward the main road, walking his horse across the same field he had crossed last night. The black of the plowed earth matched his mood exactly.

  His meager supper of rice and corn bread untasted, Orry said to Madeline, “Quincy’s been bought. Winder, too, for all I know. Mrs. Halloran inadvertently stumbled on a conspiracy that must reach very high. I intend to find out just how high.”

  “But the President is safe now, isn’t he? He’s been warned—”

  “Yes, but I still have to know! At this moment, I wouldn’t be surprised if Seddon and his wife were speculating on my mental condition. Am I a drunkard? Do I take opium? Did I see visions at the farm? I swear to you”—he went to her around the table—“I did not.”

  “I believe you, dearest. But what can you do? It appears they’ve opened and closed the case all in the same day.”

  “I haven’t. And I know someone who was at the farm. She’s still in Richmond—I verified that before I came home tonight. I intend to start some detective work on my sister first thing tomorrow.”

  But his vow went unfulfilled. In life’s strange way of piling one crisis on another when it was least needed, the street bell rang at half past ten. Orry ran downstairs. It had to be for him; the landlady never received callers this late.

  Covered with dirt, his head a mountain peak above clouds of cigar smoke, there stood Charles.

  “Your letter took a detour to Atlee’s Station, but I finally got it. I’m here to do something about Billy.”

  100

  STEPHEN MALLORY ARRIVED IN Charleston that same night, after a hard trip in one of the dirty, unheated cars of the decaying Southern rail system. A telegraph message from Lucius Chickering had summoned him.

  Cooper didn’t know that. Following the incident on Meeting Street, soldiers of the local provost had borne him home, none too gently, and since then he had been in bed, not moving, not speaking, not touching any of the food Judith brought. The pattern with the trays was unvarying: each was left an hour, then removed.

  Cooper did rouse a little—turn his head toward the door—when Judith opened it after knocking softly.

  “Darling? You have a visitor. Your friend Stephen. The secretary.”

  He said nothing. He lay beneath blankets layered too deeply for the mild weather. Everything within the dark, sweat-tainted room had a blurred quality. So did sounds from outside—birds in the garden, home guards quickstepping along Tradd Street to the accompaniment of a fife and a snare drum beating time.

  “Might I see him alone for a moment, Judith?”

  She glanced at her husband. His eyes were round and vacant. As they were every day. She was careful to hide her pain from the visitor.

  “Of course. If you need me, there’s a small hand bell on that table. Can you see it?”

  Mallory nodded and pulled a chair to the bedside. Judith glanced sadly at the bell, which Cooper hadn’t used once since being carried home. Mallory sat down. Judith shut the door.

  The secretary stared at his assistant. Cooper’s eyes fixed on the ceiling. Mallory spoke with the abruptness of a gunshot.

  “They say your nerves are gone. Is it true?”

  His voice lacked the treacle of conventional sickroom conversation. Cooper acknowledged that by blinking once. But he didn’t move or reply.

  “See here, Cooper. If you can hear me, have the courtesy to look me in the eye. I didn’t ride the train all the way from Richmond to converse with a corpse.”

  Slowly, Cooper’s head tilted over toward the visitor, cheek resting on the feather pillow, graying hair spread above, fine and thin. But the eyes remained empty.

  Mallory persisted. “That was a scandalous thing you did. Scandalous—no other word for it. The enemy already considers us a nation of barbarians—regrettably, not without some justification. But for a government official to behave like a demented prison warden, and in public—” He shook his head. “There may be a few brutish Southerners who would condone your behavior, but not many. I’ll not pretend, Cooper. You damaged our cause, and you damaged yourself, gravely.”

  Those words finally produced reaction of a sort: rapid movement of Cooper’s eyelids and a compression of his lips. Mallory’s face looked nearly as gray as that of the man in bed.

  “I couldn’t sleep on that wretched train, so I sat up trying to devise some polite way to request your immediate resignation. There is none. Therefore—”

  “They killed my son.”

  The sudden words jerked Mallory like a puppet. “What’s that? The prisoners you attacked and fought? Nonsense.”

  Cooper’s hands twitched on the counterpane, aimless white spiders without webs to spin. He blinked rapidly again, said in a hoarse voice, “The profiteers killed my son. The war killed him.”

  “And it was grievous and tragic; I’ll not deny that. But in these times, if you except Judah’s extreme youth, neither was it special.”

  Cooper’s head lifted. Anger flooded the holes of his eyes. Mallory pushed him down gently.

  “Not special to any but you and your family. Do you know nothing of the figures? How many sons lost to how many fathers? It runs into the hundreds of thousands, all over the South. All over the North, too, for that matter. After a suitable period of mourning, most of those fathers manage to function again. They don’t lie abed and weep.”

  The secretary sagged a little then. The effort was a strain and, worse, unsuccessful. He pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his cheeks. He smelled a chamber pot under the bed. One last try.

  “You’ve served the Navy Department more than competently, Cooper. You have served imaginatively and, in the case of Hunley, with great bravery. If you’re the same man who endured foul air and fear of death at the bottom of Charleston harbor for two and a half hours, I still need your services. We are not yet done with this war. The soldiers and sailors are still fighting, and so am I. Therefore I’d be inclined to substitute a letter of censure for resignation. But, of course, in order to come back to work—” stern as a parent, he stood up “—you would have to get out of bed. Kindly send me word of your decision within seventy-two hours.”

  He took pains to shut the door more loudly than necessary.

  Downstairs with Judith, he mopped his sweating face again. “That is the hardest thing I’ve ever done—concealing my sympathy for that poor man. It breaks my heart to see him so lost.”

  “It’s been coming for a long time, Stephen. An accumulation of fatigue, frustration, grief—I have no way to bring him out of it. Kind words won’t do it; nor will angry ones. I decided some different kind of shock was needed. That’s why I begged you to speak as you did.”

  “I wasn’t entirely playacting. I have had demands for his resignation. Strong ones, from important men.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that.”

  “Our resources are depleted, our armies on the brink of starvation—” She wanted to say the civilian population soon would be, but she didn’t. “We have little left us but our honor, so a man who behaves as Cooper did isn’t easily forgiven.” Toying with the hat he picked up from a taboret, he added, “But I’ll happily shoulder the criticism and ignore the outcries if I can get him back to work.”

  She squeezed his hand in silent appreciation. “Would you like something to eat? A cup of coffee? I hit on a way to parch acorns, then roast them in a little bacon fat. It makes a passable substitute.”

  “Thank you, but I’d rather go back to the hotel and sleep an hour or so.”

  “I’m the one who owes thanks.” She kissed his cheek. Mallory blushed.

  “What I said was brutal—at least for me,” he said as he walked to the door. “I only hope it may do some good.”

  When he was gone, Judith looked toward the stairs, then realized she was famished. There was nothing in the house except leftover artificial oysters, fried up from a sticky batter
made of grated green corn, one precious egg, and a few other scarce ingredients. But they were less scarce than the oysters themselves, which the Yankees gathered or the greedy oystermen sold directly to civilian customers who would pay an exorbitant price. You couldn’t find oysters in the markets any longer. You couldn’t find much of anything.

  In the kitchen, she discovered her daughter listlessly trying to repair a plate she had broken while helping with the dishes. All they had for glue was a concoction of rice flour simmered in water. As Marie-Louise spread some on one of the broken edges, she gave her mother a dolorous look, as though protesting a sentence of hard labor. Judith’s reply was crisp and firm.

  “You’ve begun well. Please finish the same way, clean up, then go to your studies.”

  “All right, Mama.”

  Thank heaven their daughter caused them no serious problems, Judith thought, walking through the downstairs with a headache beginning to push at her temples. Cooper in bed day and night, depressed, silent—that was enough.

  She wrote a letter to Mont Royal, requesting some rice flour if it could be spared, and a note of congratulations to a cousin in Cheraw who had delivered her first baby last month. On the Mont Royal letter she put a ten-cent rose-colored stamp; on the second, a blue five and one of the older green ones. How tired she was of the face of the President on stamps of every denomination.

  She sat down at the pianoforte, her sense of failure deepening as she bent over the keyboard. A few white strands showed in her blond curls. Slowly, expertly, she began to play “The Vacant Chair.” Like so many of the war songs published in the North, it was popular on both sides. The lyric suited her mood. Soon she was singing in her fine soprano voice:

  “We shall meet, but we shall miss him,

  There will be one vacant chair—

  We shall linger to caress him,

  While we breathe our evening prayer.”

  A sound startled her. She played the wrong keys, jangly discord, and looked toward the ceiling. Had she imagined—?

  No. Faint but unmistakable, the little bell rang again.