Death in Saratoga Springs
Page 27
“You won’t find blood, Pamela. I cleaned the blade.” Virgil gently took the sword from her hands and slid it back into the cane. He motioned her into his parlor. “We’ll talk better here,” he said, while studying her face, reading her mind.
“I see you have concluded that I killed Captain Crake. I do regret that Miss Ricci spent a month in prison. That was not in the plan. She would never have gone to trial.”
“Don’t be concerned, Virgil. She has recovered and has actually gained from the experience.”
“I have no regret for Rob Shaw’s life term in prison. British authorities want to hang him for a murder in South Africa, so he’s fortunate to be in Dannemora. We are all better off for having one less parasite in our midst. Rachel Crake was rightly convicted of conspiring with him to kill her husband. Six years in Mount Pleasant might improve her character.”
“So, why was Crake killed?”
“Certain crimes cry out to Heaven for righteous vengeance. Crake’s reached that level. In such cases, when the civil authorities fail to act or, worse yet, are complicit, then the duty falls to anyone who is able to perform it.”
“Private vengeance is risky, Virgil. The state calls it criminal and prescribes a severe punishment.”
“True, there is that risk.” His tone was sardonic. “But it’s lessened by our country’s long tradition of popular or vigilante justice. As we speak, a black man is probably being lynched somewhere, and not only in the South.”
Pamela flinched at his bitter irony. “How did it happen, Virgil?”
“When Rachel Crake left the concert to gamble at the casino, I knew that Crake would be alone and drugged. I slipped into his room and stabbed him. As fate would have it, while I was wiping his blood from my blade, I heard someone at the door. I hid in a cabinet. Rob Shaw stole into the room in a chambermaid’s bonnet and apron, dagger drawn. The light was low. He crept close to Crake on the sofa and raised the weapon. Suddenly, he saw that the man was already dead. Cursing God, he fled from the room.”
“Were Edith and James involved in the killing in any way?”
“No, not at all. I told them only after the fact. Edith was pleased with what I had done. James refused to pass judgment. We are still best friends.”
“Have you felt any remorse?”
“Yes, I feel soiled and unsatisfied, all the more because my deed was unnecessary. Shaw would have done it.” Tears pooled in his eyes. He gazed at her with yearning. “Do you think less of me now?”
She shook her head. “I surely do not judge you, Virgil. I feel only compassion. I believe that even righteous vengeance takes a terrible toll of one’s humanity, and you are suffering. I’m not obliged to report to anyone what you’ve told me. I hope you find peace.” She caressed his cheek. “Shall we join the others in the sitting room?”
Choked up, he gazed at her for a moment, then returned the cane to the rack. They waited while he grew calm. Then he said, “Thank you, Pamela, I’ll check on things in the kitchen.”
Back in the sitting room, Pamela asked Prescott, “Shall we thank our hosts and leave now?”
“Yes, they seem reconciled with each other and with their past.”
Author’s Notes
For a readable account of Saratoga Springs in the Gilded Age, go to George Waller’s Saratoga: Saga of an Impious Era (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966). On the social background of Saratoga Springs, see Thomas A. Chambers’s Drinking the Waters: Creating an American Leisure Class at Nineteenth-Century Mineral Springs (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, Washington, DC, 2002). Chambers compares and contrasts Saratoga Springs and White Sulphur Springs, Virginia. For racial issues in Saratoga Springs, consult Myra B. Young Armstead’s “Lord, Please Don’t Take Me in August”: African-Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870–1930 (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 1999). Edward Hotaling tells the Gilded Age story of the Saratoga Springs thoroughbred racing track in They’re Off! Horse Racing at Saratoga (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 1995). For images and text describing the city’s remarkable Gilded Age buildings, see Stephen S. Prokopoff and Joan C. Siegfried Prokopoff’s The Nineteenth-Century Architecture of Saratoga Springs: Architecture Worth Saving in New York State (New York State Council on the Arts, New York, 1970).
In 1894, the Grand Union Hotel was at its peak among the world’s greatest hotels. Its six floors occupied almost an entire city block and could accommodate 2,000 guests. It had hot and cold running water in every guest room, as well as indoor plumbing and electricity throughout the building and an elevator to the upper floors. Its furnishings and cuisine were luxurious. In the rear courtyard was a large park, shaded by tall elm trees and illuminated by gaslight. Concerts were regularly held there. In the twentieth century, the hotel’s fortunes declined and it was demolished in the 1950s. Canfield’s Casino, however, has survived to become a splendid witness to the Gilded Age and the site of the Historical Society of Saratoga Springs.
For the Gilded Age’s memory of Sherman’s March to the Sea, consult Wesley Moody’s Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History (University of Missouri, Columbus, MO, 2011). Concerning the atrocities blamed on Sherman’s army, read Lee B. Kennett’s Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians During Sherman’s Campaign (Harper Perennial, New York, 1995) for a careful analysis of accusations of rape of white women by Union soldiers. He concludes that it happened, as in the fictional case at the Crawford plantation, but it was contrary to military law and Sherman’s orders, and doesn’t appear to have been widespread. James Marten, in his Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), describes how white, chiefly Northern veterans coped with civilian life and how their pension demands were ambivalently regarded by the larger society. For a detailed, readable account of Sherman’s campaign, including the Ninth Pennsylvania Cavalry’s foraging south of Savannah, consult Noah A. Trudeau’s Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea (Harper Perennial, New York, 2008).
For dependable information on NYPD police inspector “Clubber” Williams (1839–1917) and the reform of policing in late-nineteenth-century New York City, consult James F. Richardson’s The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (Oxford University Press, New York, 1970).
Conditions in Crake’s meatpacking plants on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan resemble those in the much larger Union Stockyard in Chicago, as depicted in Upton Sinclair’s influential muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906; ed. by C.V. Eby, NY, 2003).
Popular music in the Gilded Age was sometimes imported. “Funiculì, Funiculà” was composed in Naples in 1880 by Luigi Denza. In 1888, the lyrics were freely translated by the English songwriter and librettist Edward Oxenford. Ben Jonson’s “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” came from his poem “Song to Celia,” in 1616, and has been a favorite for centuries.
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Copyright © 2014 Charles O’Brien
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ISBN: 978-0-7582-8638-3
eISBN-13: 978-0-7582-8639-0
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First Kensington Electronic Edition: June 2014
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