The Tarleton Murders

by Breck England

  CHARLESTON

  Chapter 26

  The Cotillion of the St. Cecilia Society was held in a lovely Greek revival building called the Hibernian Hall (the name was a mystery to me, as there wasn’t an Irishman in sight). Although the night was murky and bitter, the Hall blazed like a gas inferno. Outside, the street was wedged full of motionless carriages, their black drivers hunched over in the biting cold, their dark faces invisible in the shadows.

  On approaching, one could hear the chattering of a hundred Southern belles all at the same time, a sound like no other I can describe. On the islands I once heard the scooping yelps of a horde of seabirds caught in an Atlantic squall—it was somewhat similar.

  I hesitated before going in. A doorman erect in formal dress examined my invitation and bowed me into the hall, where I was announced by another equally vertical fellow, while yet another occupied himself with my hat and coat.

  I entered. Bound up tight in diamond bodices and brandishing their silken bustles, the ladies of Charleston were hailing each other in a sort of panic, as if each feared that she would not be noticed and remarked upon. The men looked excruciating in their cutaway coats and collars, for with fires raging in the fireplaces the interior was as hot as the exterior was cold.

  I noticed the presence of other clergy—indeed, the Bishop of Charleston was there, looking like a rumpled old bear, his heavy silver cross propped up on his paunch and his eyeglasses slipping from his sweating nose. He met me with enthusiasm; he seemed positively delighted to see me, as if I were his oldest friend. In fact, he had taken so little notice of me before I wasn’t sure he would know me again. In lieu of asking “who the devil are you and how did you get in here?” it was, “Ah! Father Grosjean. What a pleasure!” And then he was off toward the punch bowl.

  I stood wondering what to do and why I was there in the first place when two men in sophisticated suiting converged on me. They too greeted me as if I were an old friend, and I realized that I had met them before—at the victory party at the city hall only months before.

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Tillman, wasn’t it?” I asked the younger of the two, who looked like a bulldog slowly strangling in his white collar.

  “It is, and this, if you’ll recall, is my good friend General Martin Witherspoon Gary. He is the state senator from Edgefield County.” With his white Napoleon III mustaches and tiny pointed beard, the general was almost a caricature of a Southern gentleman. Both men carried themselves with the imperious air of the back-country planter.

  “Shall we have a drink together?” Tillman suggested, and we partook of the Society punch—a bizarre, sweetish concoction of brandy and pineapple juice. I immediately thought of my threat letter: You shall drink the shame of it sweet.

  “It’s very good,” I lied, to which Tillman replied, “Not enough sugar.”

  General Gary proposed a toast in a high voice accustomed to command: “Let us drink to the noble and ancient Roman Catholic Church, of which our friend Father Grosjean is such an able representative.”

  “I thank you,” I said, sipping again as little as possible. It recalled to mind the vile sweet tea from my school days.

  “I have always honored the Roman Catholic Church,” Gary intoned as if giving a public speech. “I was with President Jefferson Davis the day he retreated from the hell-hound Yankees. I led his honor guard after the surrender. His good lady is a devout Catholic, and he himself aspires to become one. I know this, for I saw him with my own eyes kissing his St. Benedict medal.” He bowed his head with a choking sigh and took another swallow of the sugary stuff.

  “I am pleased to hear it,” was my banal reply.

  “Did you know that the blessed Pope himself honored Jefferson Davis with his autographed picture? And even sent him a crown of thorns woven by his own hands?” Gary went on. “He addressed him as ‘the illustrious and honorable president of the Confederate States of America.’ That was a noble act, suh. A noble act.” He choked again, then licked at his cup and mustaches, and we all took another ceremonious sip. The punch was actually making me thirsty.

  “I, um, I was not aware of that,” I said. “The late Pope of blessed memory was a thoughtful man.”

  The General said, “His successor seems different, but perhaps even more sagacious. You are aware of course, Father Grosjean, of the Pope’s encyclical of this week.” This was a statement, not a question.

  “I fear I haven’t read it.” In truth, I didn’t know there had been an encyclical that week, and General Gary inferred it from my face.

  “Your reverend bishop showed it to us. Shall I read a few passages for you?” He extricated a newspaper sheet from inside his coat and held it at arm’s length.

  I was in the incongruous position of listening to this old planter declaiming the words of the pope at full voice just as the orchestra struck up a rather jovial waltz.

  “Date of December 28th, 1878. Quod Apostolicky mooneris!” he announced, then in an aside said, “According to the bishop, that means ‘from our apostolic office.’ The rest of it is in English.” Then he took it up in an even louder voice:

  “A deadly plague is creepin’ into the very fibers of human society and leadin’ it on to the verge of destruction… .

  “We speak of that sect of men who, under various and almost barbarous names, are called socialists, communists, or nihilists, spreadin’ all over the world.

  “They leave nothin’ untouched or whole which by both human and divine laws has been wisely decreed for the health and beauty of life. They refuse obedience to the higher powers, to whom, according to the admonition of the Apostle, every soul ought to be subject, and who derive the right of governin’ from God; and they proclaim the absolute equality of all men in rights and duties!

  “These men of the lowest class, weary of their wretched home or workshop, are eager to attack the homes and fortunes of the rich… .

  “The inequality of rights and of power proceeds from the very Author of nature… . He appointed that there should be various orders in civil society, differin’ in dignity, rights, and power!”

  He lowered the paper and gave me a triumphant frown.

  “There it is, suh. From his mouth to your ears. There ain’t an equality of men in rights. The inequality of rights proceeds from the very Author of nature!”

  Unsure of Gary’s purpose in catechizing me in this way, I simply said, “His Holiness is most eloquent, is he not?”

  “Confound it!” the General exclaimed. “I’m pitchin’ but you ain’t catchin’. Here your own Church teaches that the black man is inferior to the white man and needs to get back in his place!”

  Asking to see the paper, I pretended to study it—and to be more ingenuous than I was. “With respect, I am not entirely sure that message is intended here. As the context is economics, it appears to me that the Holy Father is speaking of inequalities of economic rather than racial circumstances… .”

  Gary lapsed into his gurgling cough, so Tillman spoke up. “We disagree, Reverend sir. The Church clearly damns those who proclaim the equality of men in dignity, rights, and power. We Christians must come together in damning those who seek to substitute the rule of the African for that of the Caucasian in South Carolina!”

  Looking into Tillman’s face, I realized that these gentlemen were trying to persuade me to their point of view—to what end, I didn’t know.

  “But should that mean putting the African, as you say, ‘back in his place’?” I asked. “Dr. Newman has taught that enslaving other people is a horrible sin. Pope Gregory XVI taught that no Christian should reduce another to bondage, and specifically condemned black servitude. In fact, he said that anyone involved in that inhuman traffic was ‘unworthy of the Christian name.’” I added, “That was in, I believe, 1839. In Supremo Apostolatus.”

  The two men regarded me with iron in their eyes. But then, the General relaxed and choke
d out a laugh. “It is more than presumptuous of us lowly and ill-educated men of the soil to pretend to, as we say, teach the stallion how to trot. You are, naturally, better informed on the credos of your own church than we are. We must, of course, defer to your greater understanding.” He offered me another drink of the shameful punch, which I accepted.

  “Ah, here are the young ladies,” he said, between a sip and a fit of coughing.

  The debutante parade began. Dozens of white-gowned girls looked as though they would combust spontaneously as they filed into the fiery ballroom one after another on the hands of their fathers. They took their places for the cotillion, which turned out to be a sort of quadrille as I had seen danced in England.

  Hoping this spectacle would distract my two interlocutors, I tried to slip away from them, but they stuck with me. General Gary looked me up and down and asked, “I hope your inquiry on behalf of your religious friend has borne fruit?”

  Stunned a little by the question, I pretended to have forgotten about it. “Inquiry?”

  “Into the death of those boys at Gettysburg? Your friend from the convent was, if I remember, somewhat agitated about it?”

  “Yes, um, no,” I stammered. “It … it remains a mystery, I’m afraid.”

  “Too bad. When you asked about it at the victory reception, I was impressed by your solicitude on behalf of your friend. I’m sorry we could not be of help.”

  Then it struck me. How could I have been so thick-headed? I saw the reception again in my mind, the small ring of men round me—yes, there was Gary, the odious Tillman, governors and mayors who seemed utterly bored, and—a man in Confederate uniform whose name I thought was Buford. I had misheard—it was Beaufort! General Abraham Beaufort! The man I thought I had seen before when I met him again at the Tarleton place. Surely Beaufort authored that menacing poem … .

  I decided to bowl the ball back at Gary. “General Beaufort did send me an interesting letter on the subject, but I found it unhelpful.”

  “That’s a pity. It’s usually wise to pay heed to General Beaufort.” He paused to cough into his handkerchief. “May I show you an interesting feature of this hall, Father?”

  He and Tillman led me to the portrait of a Confederate officer hanging on the wall. The subject was nearly submerged in beard.

  “This is Major General Jeb Stuart,” Gary explained, “one of the most gallant soldiers I ever knew. He took a Yankee bullet in the spine in the last year of the war, but as he died, he made a most precious bequest to the wife of Robert E. Lee—his beautiful handmade golden spurs.”

  “Indeed.” I hoped they didn’t notice my sudden gulp of air. “Golden spurs, you say?”

  “Yes. Jeb Stuart was called ‘the Knight of the Golden Spurs.’ We loved him. We loved the cause for which he gave his life. Father Grosjean, we are not stupid men. I myself am a graduate of Harvard University. Jeb Stuart was at the top of his class at the Military Academy, as was Jefferson Davis. Mr. Tillman here excelled at the University of South Carolina. I find you to be at least our equal in intelligence. I foresee a luminous future for you here in Charleston … but only if our cause becomes your cause.”

  “I confess I don’t entirely follow your meaning,” I lied, “but as a servant of our Lord, I must of course put His cause above all others. I’m sure you will understand.”

  “Naturally, we believe our cause is the Lord’s cause,” Tillman interjected.

  “Men generally do,” I tried to be ambiguous. “As to your cause, the Apostle wrote that the Lord ‘hath made of one blood all mankind.’ I believe that verse of the Bible would apply to a humble black sharecropper as well as a lordly gentleman planter.”

  “But your own Church …” Tillman began to say when Gary interrupted him. In a final sort of tone he said, “Let us not quibble. A man is entitled to his beliefs.”

  The quadrille had ended and the assembly were applauding the debutantes, making that strange, rain-like sound of people clapping gloved hands.

  Frightened and tired of hiding it, I wanted to bring this interview to an end and get back to the sanctuary of my church. “Gentlemen,” I said, “my day has been very full, and I had hoped only to show my gratitude to the hosts for inviting me here tonight and then return to my duties. Perhaps you could point the way to them … ?”

  “Mr. Tillman and I invited you.”

  Nervously, I swallowed the last of my punch, which had warmed to a slightly bitter taste, and bowed. “Then I am most honored by your kindness and will take my leave.”

  “You will consider our interchange of this evenin’.” It was not a question.

  Sighing, I said, “General Gary, it seems to me that the destinies of war and the hand of God have already foreclosed your cause. And at this late date, reason militates against it. ”

  Gary gave me a menacing smile. “Are you familiar with that old philosopher Pascal and his maxim ‘The heart has reasons that reason knows not of’?”

  “Yes, it is a well-known saying.”

  He took me by the arm and walked me toward another painting hanging on the wall.

  “This picture was a gift to the city by Tillman and myself and a group of our fellow philanthropists. Striking, isn’t it?” A mass of writhing peasants were depicted about to cut the throat of a Medieval knight.

  “It portrays the Battle of the Golden Spurs,” he said. “You know the story, of course.”

  “I have vaguely heard of it. It was an incident in the war between the French and the Flemish, was it not?”

  “The French had utterly defeated the Flemish, occupied their lands, stolen their property, and denied them their rights. Then in 1302 a group of patriotic Flemings arose and murdered the scalawag French governor in the city of Bruges. Outraged, the French king descended on them with a great army of ten thousand soldiers and knights brave in golden spurs.

  “They were met by the Fleming militia, which was made up of poor farmers and indignant townsmen armed with the tools of their trades. The Flemings were utterly outmatched; but filled with the righteous fury of their cause and love of their land, they destroyed that French army. It was said that one French knight was worth ten militia, but that day the ratio was reversed! In triumph, the Flemish collected from the bodies of the French knights more than five hundred pairs of golden spurs and offered them up to the church in thanks to God.”

  “An extraordinary story.”

  “Isn’t it?” Gary was angry now. “Do you think the Flemings would have listened to appeals for reason? Do you think reason governed them?” Then, as if his throat shut tight, he coughed fiercely and fought for air. Tillman patted his back in useless panic. But just as abruptly, Gary recovered, put his hand on my shoulder, and repeated in my ear, “The heart has its reasons.”

  A group of tightly gowned ladies who looked as if they had been poured into tall, thin goblets approached us.

  “Sallie,” Gary said, greeting one of them. “May I present Father Grosjean. This is Mrs. Tillman, Father, and her charming friends.”

  The lady nodded at me and turned back to Gary. “Are you ill, General?”

  “Not at all, not at all. Tillman, isn’t it about time you squired your lady to the ball?”

  Tillman gave me a final look—his serpent’s mouth formed into a perfectly angular frown—and took “Sallie’s” arm. She wore a splendid cameo round her neck. Coaxed, reluctant, Gary took another lady’s arm, and they and the band waltzed into the beautiful blue Danube while I made my departure.

  As I walked anxiously up Meeting Street and then Calhoun Street, I watched for the luminous façade of St. Peter’s and would not feel secure again until I was inside its walls. For some reason, I kept muttering those last words of Gary’s—“The heart has its reasons … The heart has its reasons.”

  Then it came to me like a lightning strike to the brain. I shouted the name as I entered the c
hurch, and it echoed high in the nave lit only by the red altar lamp.

  “Pascal! Pascal! Pascal!”

  Chapter 27

  I couldn’t wait to get my hands back on that bizarre document that Katherine Wells gave me aboard ship. Without even taking off my coat and hat, I stumbled into my room, pulled the carefully folded paper out of safekeeping, and sat down with it under my desk lamp.

  “Pascal’s Triangle!” I triumphantly announced to the four walls of my cell. “It’s Pascal’s Triangle!” It was one of few things I remembered from my otherwise unmemorable mathematics tutor at Stonyhurst. I recalled playing with it for hours.

  Embedded within the rowel of the spur was the step pyramid Pascal used to illustrate the workings of the binomial theorem. I took another sheet of paper and inked out the triangle from memory.

  Then I started filling it in with numbers. It was easy to do. Put the numeral 1 in the top box, then continue so that each number is the sum of the numbers directly above it. I could do the figures in my head until I got to the eighth and last row, so it went quickly.

  Cheerful and satisfied with myself, I sat back to admire my work. Yes, it was the old Pascal Triangle which we had learned in third year at Stonyhurst as a guide to the coefficients of the binomial theorem. I remembered that it was an intriguing curiosity, but could not for the life of me recollect what it was good for.

  Undoubtedly, it was a key to the coded message in the Wells document.

  And then my triumph began to fade. I tried first this way then that to match the numbers in the Triangle to the numbers in the message, but I could arrive at no connection at all. I tried a hundred different ways and each time produced nothing but strings of numbers. I tried pairing them with letters of the alphabet: it was no use.

  In the end my lamp waned, and so did I. That night I dreamed of dancing ghosts in firelight, ghosts standing like statues in a forest, and two hard-faced men in evening clothes who were trying to warn me of something all through the night. The next thing I knew, someone was tapping at my door and it was morning.