His One Woman

by Paula Marshall

  ‘I do not like horses, nor do they like me,’ she declared. Marietta’s pleasure was muted but was none the less sincere.

  Later, while changing into his evening togs before visiting Willard’s, it was Marietta’s smile of pleasure for him when he had bowed his farewells which he recalled, not Sophie’s.

  Alan had been correct in saying that they would all have thick heads in the morning. The dinner had been informal and had included not only most of the men on the afternoon’s committee but also outsiders like the British newspaper reporter Russell. He was the war correspondent of The Times, already famous—some said infamous—for his frank and fearless reporting of the Crimean War, which had enraged the British Government of the time.

  He joined them in the hard drinking at the bar after the dinner was over. He knew Alan, and his big, bearded face shone with pleasure when he shook hands with him. He smiled knowledgeably at the dead men littering the table.

  He had one of the backwoods Congressmen with him: a big red-faced fellow who stared hard at Alan’s urbane splendour and said nastily, ‘Sparring at Clanton’s gym this morning, were you—for so he told me—doing your diplomatic nonsense at the Hill this afternoon and drinking here tonight? What a busy old English gentleman you are! What other talents do old English gentlemen possess?’

  He had been drinking hard and his tone was insulting.

  Alan looked quizzically at him. ‘As many as youngish Yankee gentlemen like yourself, I suppose.’

  ‘If you weren’t an old man, Dilhorne, I’d test your talents in the ring myself.’

  ‘Not so old as all that, and if you wish to do so do not let my years deter you, Mr Whatever-your-name-is.’

  ‘Macdonald, Dilhorne. My ancestors were kings in Scotland when yours were Saxon peasants.’

  ‘Oh, do not dignify me, or yourself,’ drawled Alan, who was beginning to feel the effects of heavy drinking, although no one would have guessed it. ‘My father was a transported felon—your ancestors were doubtless Viking pirates, so there’s not a pin to choose between us. Your ancestors narrowly missed the block and mine the noose.’

  He leaned forward and grasped Macdonald by the wrist.

  ‘Come, sir, what shall it be, arm-wrestling or the ring? I am ready for either. Not for honour, I dare swear, for if the truth were known, neither of us possesses any. When we are done, Mr Russell may well sell this story to The Times, and share the profits between us.’

  Jack watched Alan and then caught Charles’s eye on him. Charles had drunk little, and Jack not much more. Charles’s expression was curious: it was one of gleeful anticipation. Jack thought that there was more to this than met the eye. He knew that it was Alan’s last semi-official appointment before he left for home.

  A frontiersman Senator who was barely conscious leaned forward and clapped Alan on the back. ‘Beat him at the arm-wrestling, suh, and I’ll take you on next. Lose, and you must guarantee to back the North when you reach home.’

  ‘And if I win, what do I get?’ grinned Alan. ‘No, don’t tell me, it might be an incentive for me to lose.’

  ‘So noted,’ Charles murmured under his breath so that Jack could scarcely hear him.

  ‘Life was never like this in the House of Commons,’ whispered Alan to Russell when Macdonald, his face eager, pulled out one of the tables and sat down on one side of it, waiting for Alan to join him on the other.

  Frantic betting had already begun. The more sober and senior of the party, both so far as alcohol and status were concerned, looked disapprovingly on. One man said to Alan, ‘Do not humour him,’ but Alan shook his head.

  ‘Dare I believe that you are actually agreeing to take part in this frontiersman’s contest?’ queried Russell of Alan, more amused than amazed.

  ‘Dare I not?’ returned Alan. ‘I must strive for the honour of old England, or be shamed.’

  He turned to Charles. ‘You will so note, Mr Stanton.’

  ‘So noted,’ repeated Charles, adding, ‘Return from the contest like the old Spartan, waving your shield in triumph or being carried home on it dead.’

  Jack privately thought that Macdonald had no chance of winning. He was soft and fat and Jack had seen his brother’s strength and power in the ring that morning. If the man had been talking to Clanton, he was a fool to challenge Alan.

  He was right. Alan rapidly forced Macdonald’s arm down on to the table twice in succession, and no sooner had he done so than others were clamouring to have a go at him.

  The frontiersman who had challenged him on the Hill that afternoon, and who was now wearing a coonskin cap, pushed the defeated Macdonald away and sat down opposite to Alan, grinning at him.

  ‘If you win, Englishman,’ he said, ‘I promise you a free ride at Bella Dahlgren’s house with her best girl.’

  The more Puritan among the watchers closed their eyes at this, but the rest were cheering, and Russell knew that, despite what Alan had said earlier, this was one despatch which he would never write or send home, when Alan slowly defeated his new opponent after several straining minutes.

  Well, it was plain that this was still a frontier society, for all its marble columns and stern Republican admonitions, thought Jack. It was not so long since Senator Charles Sumner had been brutally thrashed, without warning, in the sacred precincts of the Capitol itself, by a supposedly gentlemanly assailant.

  ‘Enough,’ proclaimed Alan as others strove to get at him. ‘I have urgent duties to fulfil in the morning.’

  A hand plucked at Jack’s arm. ‘Are you your brother’s equal, me lad?’ A bearded face grinned at him.

  Jack shook his head and refused the offered challenge. He had never seen the man before, and the room was alive with shouts and cheers and the frontiersman was demanding that Bella Dahlgren’s should be the destination of them all.

  Alan picked up a bottle and began to pour spirits into his glass. ‘Bourbon for me tonight,’ he announced, drinking it down. His hearers were not to know that he rarely drank.

  He saw Jack smiling at him. ‘Little brother,’ he told him, ‘you may have my ticket to Bella Dahlgren’s tonight. I’m too far gone.’ He never patronised whorehouses, but that was another thing that he wasn’t revealing.

  By now the frontiersman, clutching his bottle, was on the floor, and cared little whether Alan was at Bella’s or in bed at the Envoy’s residence. The evening was not yet over, though, and before Jack and Charles manoeuvred Alan through the door he had treated them to his farewell oration, which brought the house down. Some of the spectators swore drunkenly that the cheering could be heard on the Hill.

  Far gone though they both were, since even Charles had been compelled to drink to save the honour of England, Alan’s two companions walked him home between them. Russell, staggering in their rear, was carrying Alan’s stove-pipe hat and drunkenly declaiming that, ‘The best despatches never get written—and he might have had the goodness to offer me his ride at Bella’s!’

  For the next few days the story of the night at Willard’s and its ending ran round Washington. Those Yankees who had not been there were at first disbelieving, then amused and finally admiring, even though the joke was on them once all of the facts—some of them much embellished in the telling—came out.

  ‘For it seemed,’ said one witness to it, ‘that this MP, this envoy, this fool of a Britisher, was as stiff and starched and pompous as only an aristocrat could be, with his Haw Haw speech and his formality, so that all that was left for a true Yankee was to despise him. He apparently had a friend and patron back home who was a cousin of the Queen, and by some means which baffled everyone who met him—for the man was such an effete ass for all his size—he had built up a business empire back home.

  ‘His other patrons, the Rothschilds, must have lost their wits for once to have anything to do with this fellow who had made every politician and every committee he had encountered privately fume with rage and indignation as he danced them about so politely, asking idiotic questions and ma
king heavy weather of their attempts to answer him.

  ‘Oh, yes, he was very polite, and great on protocol, too…’ and the speaker usually ran out of breath at this point and needed a few moments to recover himself before continuing with his remarkable tale.

  ‘He spent his time expressing blank incomprehension when confronted by any form of good American speech which differed from his own and consequently needed to have everything carefully explained to him several times so that discussions with him went round and round…

  ‘Well, on his last official day in these United States a number of Senators, Congressmen and their aides had banded together to take him to Willard’s and get him royally, nay, Republicanly, drunk for his pains and in the doing gouge out of the fool what concessions to the Northern cause they could.

  ‘While they were doing this and he was obliging them by saying yes to everything—even in those places where he ought rightly to have been saying no—that low-life ass, Macdonald, popped up and insulted him. Before you could say Haw Haw twice, my fine English gentleman accepted his foolish challenge and set about laying everyone low at arm-wrestling, no less—and offering to take them all on in the ring into the bargain. And that was no joke, either, as Clanton later testified, and a good thing no one took up his offer.

  ‘To cap it all, at the end of the evening…’ and the speaker was usually near exhaustion by now, between amusement and indignation ‘…at the end of the evening, when he had drunk most of the party under the table, and he was sitting there, still conscious, but only just, Macdonald rose and proposed a toast to him. Everyone shouted “Speech! Speech!” so he got up—no one knew how—and gave them the sort of grin a Plains Indian gives you just before he takes your scalp.

  ‘After that, he favoured them with a wickedly accurate impersonation of Mr Lincoln and half the politicians he had met, being particularly good when imitating the frontiersman, who by now was lying unconscious in the corner and who was bitter the next day about having missed this part of the fun.

  ‘So much for his not being able to understand what everyone had been saying to him! At the end he had reverted to his normal voice—if he has one, that is—which was quite unlike that of the man whose plummy tones had bamboozled Washington for the past three weeks. “Finally, fellow legislators and honest Americans,” he said, “This imitation of an aristocrat invites you all to a similar evening in London where I promise to wine and dine you as royally as you have feasted me tonight. I also promise to gouge as many concessions out of you as you have tried to wrench from me. What old English gentleman could say more? Mr Stanton, you will so note.”

  ‘Mad, drunken cheering followed. “Come back and settle here—you’re wasted in the old country,” Macdonald bawled at him. Half the company could have killed him for tricking them and the other half wanted to hire him so that he could do his tricks for them.’

  This was what Russell did not send back to London and The Times. After Jack and Charles had struggled Alan into his bed, Jack asked, ‘What did all that mean? What were you “so noting” all evening, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Oh, that’s your brother’s shorthand, a parody of a businessman ordering a clerk to take notes, only he means you to be aware that he’s about to do something wicked and you’re not to show surprise and give him away.’

  ‘He’s our father’s worst,’ said Jack, shaking his head, ‘and I don’t envy him his head tomorrow morning, and I don’t much fancy mine, either. Did you see their faces at the end—particularly when he took off the coonskin-hatted gentleman?’

  ‘Yes, and whatever will the British Envoy make of it?’ Charles grinned. ‘He’s driven him and all his officials mad, too. The Envoy couldn’t imagine why they’d sent out such an ass. Now he knows why. Alan has given nothing away and he’s promised them nothing while learning as much as he could of what they didn’t want him to know!

  ‘What’s more, he’s signed off in such a fashion that they’re aware that they’ve been fooled, and that we can be as hard as they are—and so he’s ensured mutual respect. “It’s a frontier society,” he told me on the boat over, “and I’m giving a great deal of thought to how to deal with it. The diplomacy of the European monarchic states will be of no use in Washington, that’s for sure.”

  ‘In the end he played them at their own game—and that they understand. I think that only Senator Hope had an inkling of what lay behind all the flimflam. Beneath all the charm he’s a hard man, and no mistake.’

  Jack nodded. He’d seen little of his brother since he’d become a man himself, but he was shrewd enough to know that what Charles had told him was true. He wondered whether he possessed his share of the Dilhornes’ cunning and decided ruefully that he did.

  The three of them woke up the next morning with the thickest of thick heads—Alan’s being the worst. None the less, they all honoured their promise to ride with Marietta after breakfast.

  Alan groaned at the mere idea. ‘I don’t recover from these sessions so quickly as I used to. You young things—’ and he gestured at Jack and Charles ‘—have the advantage of me now.’

  Jack thought that Marietta looked superb in her bottle-green riding habit and her saucy little black hat with its high crown and silver buckle on its scarlet band. Its severity suited her and she controlled her mount as though she had been born in the saddle.

  He and Charles galloped off with her, leaving Alan to trot gently beside Sophie’s carriage. He was gallantry itself, talking nonsense to her to divert her attention from the other three, particularly when, later on, they dismounted and walked their horses along, talking animatedly. She was pleasant enough to him, but the sight of Jack, Charles and Marietta together served only to increase her dislike for Marietta.

  ‘My father has asked me to invite you all to a dinner party on Saturday evening,’ Marietta was telling them. ‘He understands that Jack’s brother will be leaving for England soon and that Charles will be journeying South. Unfortunately, Sophie will not be able to be present. She is off tomorrow to stay for a short time with another of our cousins who has a summer home on the outskirts of the city.’

  Not unfortunate at all, was Charles’s inward response, while Jack, who had once seen Sophie as a pretty girl well worth cultivating, was only too happy that it was she who would be absent, and not Marietta, who fascinated him more every time he met her. Both he and Charles expressed their pleasure at the invitation since they had come to respect the Senator, not only for the pleasure of his company, but for his shrewdness, both in the political and the social sense.

  Alan, watching Sophie’s expression while she was jealously staring after the other three, was thoughtful when the party was reunited and they all rode back together. Part of him was thinking of his journey home to Eleanor and his children by way of New York and ‘the steep Atlantic stream’, as an old poet had it, and the other part was preoccupied by Jack’s relationship with the two Hope cousins and its possible consequences.

  Chapter Five

  Marietta dressed herself more carefully for the Senator’s dinner party than she usually did, putting on a low-necked velvet evening gown whose rich chestnut colour echoed that of her hair. Instead of her hair being pulled sharply back from her face it was softly disposed to frame it: she had remembered Jack’s determination to let it down. Emerald ear-rings, a matching bracelet, and a small gold band in her hair decorated with tiny emeralds and diamonds—all inherited from her mother—completed the ensemble.

  Its effect, of which she was not fully aware, was stunning. It proved that, properly presented, she possessed an austere beauty far removed from the current conventions of fashion.

  Seated opposite to her redoubtable father at table, with Aunt Percival and three handsome men to make up the company, she shone and glittered as much as her jewellery, and all four men wondered how anyone could ever have dubbed her plain.

  It was Jack’s doing, and Marietta knew that. Whether he felt anything for her or not, was not the point. The p
oint was that he was paying her all the attention which men usually paid to youthful beauties and at the same time was enjoying her informed conversation. It had been said of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, another clever and not conventionally handsome woman in the eighteenth century, that ‘to love her was a liberal education’. Whether or not Jack thought that of her, Marietta knew that to love him was a liberal education, and in the doing she had freed herself of the continuing disappointment of being ‘the plain Hope cousin’.

  She also thought that, if she had never met Jack, she might have fallen in love with his brother or with Charles Stanton. Alan, eating fruit at the end of the meal, was entertaining the Senator and Marietta who, by now, had heard of his performance at Willard’s.

  ‘You see, sir and madam,’ he explained to them, ‘like my brother Jack here, I am not truly an English gentleman, although back home I am accepted as one because of my marriage to the heiress of an old family in the north. Otherwise I am as big a buccaneer as Jack, or any of your self-made Yankees. My effete veneer deceived all whom I met because it was what was expected of me. Instead, I treated them to something of which my redoubtable father would have approved.’

  He began to talk in a droll, languid manner, pointing a lazy finger at Charles. ‘Now, haw, you see, haw, a dem’d fine specimen of an aristocrat, haw. Only he don’t choose to behave or, haw, talk like one. Dem’it, Chawles, what possesses you to let the side down. Hey? Hey? Do not laugh, Miss Marietta. If you ever come to England I assure you that you will find more in England like that, than like Chawles and me.’

  He finished in his normal voice. ‘Your hothouse peaches are excellent, sir,’ he said to the Senator. ‘Pray accept my compliments on them.’

  ‘You should have gone on the stage,’ Marietta told him. ‘When did you acquire such a power to mimic? Did you learn it, or was it inborn?’

  ‘Oh, inborn,’ he told her. ‘I inherited it from my father who was even more accomplished than I. Jack possesses it a little and our brother Thomas, I mean Fred, not at all. He’s too serious, you see.’