He wasn’t in his office, and the breakfast she’d left out for him was untouched. Beck told her, “He left before daylight this morning. Some kind of strategy meeting for the party. He says some of the men are worried the Irish and German immigrants are going to try to stuff the ballot boxes against the Know Nothings.” Beck looked up from the type he was cleaning. “Something wrong, Addie?”
“Sort of,” Adriane said with a frown. “I needed to tell him something.”
“Bad news?”
“He’ll think so.” Adriane sighed. “I sent Stanley Jimson a letter telling him I can’t marry him.”
Beck didn’t smile, but a few of the lines around his eyes eased out. “Good,” he said before he turned back to his type.
“Father won’t think so.” Adriane stared down at the type and put a couple of letters back in order before she said, “And I’m not sure what Stan will think.”
“You worried about him coming around here?” Beck looked up at her again. “I can always send him packing.”
“No, I’ll have to talk to him. I owe him that much.”
“You don’t owe him a thing, Addie. You changed your mind, and that’s the end of it.”
“I rather doubt he’ll agree. I’m not exactly sure why, but he did seem bound and determined to marry me.” Adriane paused before she went on thoughtfully. “He may not want to take no for an answer.”
“I can fix that.” Beck wiped his hands on his grimy printer’s apron and went back to his room just off the pressroom. He came back carrying an ancient-looking pistol and laid it on the table next to the trays of type.
Adriane stared at the gun. “I don’t want to shoot him.”
“It don’t hurt to be ready for whatever might happen,” Beck said.
“I didn’t even know you had a gun, Beck.”
“I ain’t never found much cause to bring it out. A man like me tends to look for the peaceful way.” Beck went back to cleaning type as though the gun there beside him was nothing out of the ordinary. “But I carry it on occasion.”
“What occasions?”
“One like today.” Beck looked up at her. “You can be sure there won’t be a man on the street today without a gun or a knife in his pocket.”
A tremble raced through Adriane at Beck’s words. It was a day primed for violence. “You’re scaring me, Beck,” she said.
“It’s a day to be scared, Addie. To maybe send up some extra prayers for our town, but you don’t have to worry about young Jimson. If he’s fool enough to come by and try to give you any kind of trouble, we’ll just use this to persuade him to go back out the door.” Beck tapped the gun with an ink-stained finger. “There ain’t nothing in the Good Book that says a man can’t protect hisself. Or herself.”
As the sun came up and began pushing its heat through the dirty windows into the pressroom, Adriane did her best to ignore the gun on Beck’s table. But she couldn’t. Its very presence in the pressroom signaled unease, the same unease that seemed to be settling over the city as reports began coming in. Early on, Duff brought in the news that armed Know Nothing party men were standing guard at the polls all over the city.
“They ain’t letting none of the Germans or the Irish vote,” Duff told Adriane and Beck. He was still panting a little from his run through the streets back to the offices.
“They can’t keep qualified voters from voting,” Adriane said.
“A gun in your face is a pretty powerful discourager,” Beck said with a glance at his own gun.
“Some of the men ain’t being scared into giving up so easy,” Duff said. “They’re lining up in front of the polls to wait. One of me sister’s friends told me he’d wait all day to cast his vote if he had to. That he was entitled. He said he didn’t care how hot the sun got, and it is hot.” Duff wiped the sweat off his face.
“Where are the police?” Adriane asked.
“I didn’t see none,” Duff said. “You can’t hardly be blaming them. There’s an ugly feel out there on the streets.”
“Any fights yet?” Beck asked him.
“Some pushing and a lot of yelling, but it could be things might get worse before long.” Duff looked out the window. “That sun could burn the patience out of a saint.”
“Did you see my father?” Adriane asked.
“No. He’s probably down at the Know Nothing headquarters on Jefferson Street. I’m hearing that they’re running everything from there.” Duff headed for the door, his eyes alive with excitement. “I’ll be back.”
As they watched Duff lope off down the street, Adriane said, “I wish I could see what’s happening for myself.”
Beck frowned at her. “You ain’t stepping foot out of this house, Addie. You understand?” There was no give in his voice.
Adriane sighed. “I understand, but I don’t have to like it. I wish I were a man.”
Beck laughed. “It ain’t the first time you’ve wished that. You recollect the time you chopped off your hair and wanted to be called Jim. What were you? Ten? Eleven?”
“Eleven,” Adriane said.
Beck chuckled as he turned back to his work. “You were a sight.”
Adriane didn’t laugh. Even now all these years later, the memory of that time was cold and hard inside her. Her father had raged at her, then at Henrietta, who took to her bed after telling Adriane’s father no one could control Adriane. She’d moaned over and over that his wayward daughter would be the death of her.
A month later, the poor woman had stirred two weeks’ worth of sleeping powders and some arsenic into a glass of milk and gone to sleep for the last time. Adriane was consumed by guilt. So much so that she was sometimes drawn to the hated closet under the stairs where she stared at the door while Henrietta’s words echoed in her head. The good Lord doesn’t listen to bad little girls’ prayers.
Adriane wasn’t sure which had frightened her most in the days after Henrietta died—that Henrietta was right and the Lord didn’t hear Adriane’s prayers, or that Henrietta was wrong and he did. Hadn’t she prayed often enough to be rescued from Henrietta and her dark closets? Perhaps she had been the death of Henrietta. It wasn’t until years later that Adriane could completely believe the woman’s death had more to do with the baby she’d lost six months earlier than with anything Adriane had ever done or prayed.
The loss of that last baby had been the reason for Adriane’s rebellion against being female as well. Henrietta had carried that child months longer than any of her other poor lost babies. Hope had brought new life to her face, and she’d even attempted to be nice to Adriane. Then the tiny boy baby had been born dead after a difficult confinement.
Afterward, any time Adriane was alone with her, Henrietta would fix a piercing stare on the girl and tell her that someday she’d suffer the same fate. That babies brought their mothers nothing but grief. Hadn’t Adriane’s own mother died giving her life? And wouldn’t it have been better if one of Henrietta’s sweet babies had drawn breath rather than Adriane? But God had preordained all women be punished for the sin of Eve. No woman could escape that punishment. It was written so in the first book of the Bible.
Henrietta would open her Bible to Genesis and point at the page. “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,” she’d say without looking at the words. Then her eyes would burn into Adriane as she said, “We’re all Eves. All of us.”
After a while Adriane decided not to be an Eve but an Adam. It was a matter of a few snips of the scissors to chop off her waist-length hair. A boy down the street gave her an old pair of trousers, and Adriane happily discarded her petticoats.
That night when her father came home, she’d actually run to meet him, sure he’d be glad to have a son instead of a daughter. He wanted a son to carry on the Tribune someday. She’d heard him say as much often enough.
But he was not glad. Instead he had banished her from his sight. He not only stopped taking her to the newspaper offices, he ordered her to stay in her room whenever he was in the hou
se until her hair was a respectable length again. As the days dragged by and her hair showed no sign of growing, her room began to shrink around her and changed from a once welcome haven to a room of confinement almost as bad as the punishment closet.
Then, Henrietta, lost in her own darkness, drank her poison, and hours later, Adriane tried to wake her and could not. In the days that followed, the length of Adriane’s hair became less and less important until it was as if she’d never cut her hair at all. Of course some of the newsboys had called her Jim long after her hair grew back out, but only when her father wasn’t around to hear.
Now as Adriane looked up each time the door opened, half hoping and half dreading to see her father, she feared his rage over her decision not to marry Stanley might match that rage of long ago. He wouldn’t understand. He’d already dismissed her doubts as so much romantic nonsense. He was in thicker with Coleman Jimson every day as the man’s election and the purposes of the Know Nothing party consumed him and the Tribune. He would not forgive Adriane’s rebellion easily or soon.
Adriane tried without much luck to push it all out of her mind as she fixed the workers sandwiches and wrote down the reports pouring in from the streets. A little after one o’clock, Duff reported the German and Irish men were finally beginning to give up and leave the polls.
“The sun’s too hot,” he said before gulping down a glass of water. “And the crowds of Know Nothings blocking the polls keeps growing. When somebody they aim to let cast a vote shows up, they just lift him up over their heads and pass him inside.”
Duff grabbed a sandwich and was gone again almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth. When the door banged open again minutes later, she and Beck both looked up expecting to see Duff back with some bit of news he’d forgotten to tell them, but it wasn’t Duff. It was Stanley.
He’d lost his hat, and a few strands of pale blond hair looped down over his forehead. His face was flushed and damp with perspiration. Even the knot of his cravat was a bit off center.
“What is this?” His voice was high and strained as he rushed across the room toward Adriane, wildly waving the letter in front of him.
Adriane stood to meet him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Beck easing over to the composing table where the gun lay.
“I believe the letter is self-explanatory,” she said.
“This is a breach of promise, Adriane.” Stan shook the letter in her face.
“Calm down, Stanley,” Adriane said.
“Calm down?” Stan’s voice went up to a squeak. “Calm down? What are people going to say when they hear I’ve been spurned by Wade Darcy’s daughter? Wade Darcy who doesn’t have a nickel to his name. Wade Darcy who would have lost the Tribune months ago if he hadn’t been riding on my father’s coattails.”
Adriane squared her shoulders and stared straight at Stan. “I daresay they will say you’ve made a lucky escape if Wade Darcy’s daughter is so very unsuitable.”
Stanley leaned toward Adriane until his face was inches from hers. So close that she felt the moisture of his words when he spoke. “Unsuitable or not, I intend to have you for my wife. This letter means nothing.”
Adriane didn’t give ground to him as she pushed out her voice strong and sure. “That letter means just what it says. I will not marry you, Stanley. If it will save your injured pride, I am perfectly willing to have you say you broke the engagement. Wade Darcy’s daughter surely has little pride in any case.”
He grabbed her and shook her as he shouted, “You have no right to end our agreement. I won’t allow it.”
“Take your hands off the girl.” Beck’s voice was cold as he poked the gun against Stanley’s ribs. “I’d rather not pull the trigger, sir, but I will if I have to.”
Stanley’s eyes flicked over to Beck’s face and then down to the gun. Very deliberately he turned loose of Adriane and backed up. “You, my dear man, will live to regret this.”
“I doubt it,” Beck said. “Now I advise you to get out of here.”
Stanley looked back at Adriane again, and there was something chilling in his eyes. “You have been promised to me, Adriane. A few words on a sheet of paper cannot change that. You’re mine.”
Adriane found her voice. “They have already changed it, Stanley. Now please do as Beck says and leave. I have nothing more to say to you.”
“And your father? Will he have nothing more to say to me or my father either?” Stanley spoke calmly enough now, but somehow he sounded even more threatening than he had when he was shouting.
“I will not marry you,” Adriane said firmly. “That is my decision to make, and I have made it.”
Stan surprised Adriane by laughing suddenly. “Women. You’re such foolish creatures and so easily controlled.”
“Was your sister so easily controlled? Or your mother?”
He looked puzzled for a moment before comprehension dawned in his eyes. “So you did overhear my conversation with Margaret in the garden. Pauline said you looked a bit discomfited when you rushed away that night.” He looked at her, his wide smile anything but pleasant as he smoothed his hair back into place and straightened his collar and cravat. “That’s good. You need to know the lengths I will go to get what I want. And I want you, Adriane.” His eyes swept down her body.
Beck waved the gun at Stanley menacingly. “If you don’t get out of here, mister, you ain’t never going to get anything you want again unless’n you want to be dead.”
Stanley’s arm slashed out and slammed the gun out of Beck’s hand. He mashed his forearm tight against Beck’s neck and shoved him up against the wall. “Threaten me, old man, and you’ll be the one who ends up dead.”
Adriane grabbed the gun off the floor and leveled it straight at Stanley. “Let him go, Stanley.”
Stanley turned Beck loose and brushed himself off. When he had his jacket straightened once again, he looked from Adriane to the gun. “I doubt you even know how to use that, but it doesn’t matter. You seem to be in need of some time to come to your senses.”
“My mind is made up. Nothing can change that.”
“Nothing?” He raised his eyebrows at her. “My dearest Adriane, I’m sure there is something. Perhaps your father . . .” He let his final words trail off.
“No, Stanley, not even my father.”
He looked toward the window. “The streets are very dangerous today.” He turned his eyes back toward her and smiled as if they were talking about nothing more important than whether it might rain. “Anything could happen out there. Somebody might even get shot.”
“You wouldn’t hurt my father,” Adriane said.
“Of course, I wouldn’t.” Stanley looked wounded. “How could you even think such a thing, my dearest? But there are others on the street not as kind as I am, unfortunately.”
He stepped nearer her, paying no attention at all to the gun she kept pointed toward him, and laid his hand on her cheek. When she jerked away from his touch, he laughed and said, “Marriage to me will not be so horrendous. You’ll see.”
19
Stanley left calmly, even pausing at the door to smile back at Adriane as if he’d just brought her home after a social. “September 15th will be the happiest day of your life, my dearest Adriane,” he said. “You’ll be a beautiful bride. My beautiful bride.”
For several minutes after he went out, she kept the gun pointed toward the door. When she was sure he was not coming back, she slowly lowered her arm until the gun was pointing toward the floor. Then it was as if some vital bit of energy was draining through her and out the barrel of the gun and into the floorboards until she hardly had the strength to remain standing.
“I should’a shot him when I had the chance,” Beck growled as he glared at the door.
“You couldn’t shoot him just because he was yelling at me.” Adriane thought she preferred the yelling to the quiet threats. What had she done? More importantly, what was Stanley going to do?
“The Lord would’ve forgiv
e me.” Beck was still scowling at the door, but then he dropped his head down to stare at the floor. “I’m sorry, Addie. The man surprised me. Moving so fast like that. I always figured he was more talk than action.”
“You’re not the first person Stanley has fooled,” Adriane said softly. She had to pause a moment to gather the strength to go on. “He may be able to do it, you know. Why he wants to, heaven only knows, but he may find a way to force me to marry him.”
“How could he do that?” Beck looked up at her and forgot all about his question. “Whoa there, Addie, don’t you be fainting on me, and give me that gun before you shoot your foot off.” He took the gun out of her hand and pushed a chair up under her. “Now, don’t you worry about that blackguard. I’ll be ready for him next time. You can be sure of that.”
Adriane hardly heard his words. “Father will be every bit as angry as Stan,” she said.
“Your pa will understand.”
“Will he, Beck?” Adriane looked at the old man, who didn’t quite meet her eyes. “Even if it means losing the Tribune?”
Beck looked at the press, the table with its rows of type, and the stacks of blank newsprint waiting for their words. When he finally looked back at Adriane, his eyes were sad. “The boss the same as lost the Tribune some months back, Addie. Coleman Jimson owns it now in every way but name. You marrying Stanley Jimson couldn’t do nothing to change that.”
Adriane wanted to deny the truth of Beck’s words, but she knew he was right. “Even if that’s true, Stanley will still try to have his revenge on us. You heard him.”
“I heard him. But it was just talk.”
“No, he meant it.” Adriane had no doubt of that. She pulled in a deep breath as some of the strength began to come back into her arms and legs. “Father has to be warned.” Adriane stood up so quickly the chair fell back with a loud clatter.
“Hold it, Addie. You ain’t setting foot out on them streets.” Beck caught her arm as she moved toward the door.
Words Spoken True: A Novel Page 20