A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  Yours sincerely,

  Peter Hanrahan

  for Cunningham and Claypoole

  The heat on the station platform was explosive. The sun beat on the tin roof and glinted off engines, steel girders, and tracks. The train was a dirty little four-car local, with an engine that spewed soot and cinders into the face of anyone foolish enough to sit near a window. After we left Newark, it was practically empty. I gazed out at the rolling wooded hills and small rivers. The landscape reminded me of the countryside over which we had fled to Bantry Bay with Dan. I thought with dull pain that Michael would be buried without a single person to say a prayer for him except a priest, whose prayers were discounted in my bitter mind. In agony I relived Michael’s warnings against Dan, the times he had revealed his murderous mercenary’s soul to me, the way I had excused him, clung to him, lied to myself about him.

  “Is this Miss Stark?”

  I looked up at a tall man with a very American face—long and narrow, with thin lips, a strong aquiline nose and penetrating, intelligent eyes. It was still a young man’s face, though there was a patina of sadness or weariness that almost made me doubt his age. His hair was thick and gray—almost white—and swept carelessly back from his head. He had a rather ugly scar on his right cheek. I would soon learn it was from a Confederate bullet—and the white hair was also a product of the war’s terrible strain. He was dressed in a black suit, shiny from much wear, and a striped tie. He had a gray felt top hat in his hand. For some reason I felt intimidated by him. His eyes reminded me of the mournful unillusioned stare of Archbishop McCloskey. Perhaps it was my upward view of him, swaying there to the motion of the train, gazing down at me like a kind of god.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I thought so,” he said, “Since there’s no one else on the train. I’m Jonathan Stapleton. I was told you were coming. I had to go into Newark for an unexpected business meeting that lasted most of the night.”

  That sounded strange, but I said nothing. “May I sit down?” he said.

  “Certainly,” I said, moving over for him. “I have my letter of introduction here—”

  I fished my papers from my purse. He glanced through them perfunctorily. “Fine, fine,” he said. “Let me warn you in advance, my mother was rather opposed to hiring you because you were Irish. She seems to think only an Englishwoman can be a governess. But you Scotch-Irish are not like the rest of the tribe.”

  “We try not to be,” I said, almost choking on the words.

  “The important thing is, you’re young. Miss Hardy was too old to cope with Rawdon. Mother couldn’t see that.”

  Mother? By now I was thoroughly confused, but I pretended to be well informed. “I was told Miss Hardy left in great haste.”

  “Very,” he said in a dry way.

  “Perhaps you might tell me more about it, Mr. Stapleton, if it is not too delicate or personal,” I said in the formal English manner I had resolved to adopt.

  “I dismissed her. She tried to blame me for Rawdon’s behavior. She said I antagonized the boy. I called her a fool, and we parted.”

  “How old is Rawdon?”

  “Eleven.”

  “What is there about his behavior that disturbs you?”

  He frowned for a moment, his head lowered, as if he were trying to decide exactly what to say. “There are certain ideas that must be eliminated from Rawdon’s mind.”

  As he spoke his voice deepened in intensity and he lost his polite explanatory tone.

  “What might they be?” I asked.

  He paused for another moment and placed both his large but remarkably fragile hands on the seatback in front of us. “He must stop thinking of me as a murderer.”

  The train clanked and groaned as we rounded a curve. In the distance a large city sat atop a long narrow hill. A broad river wound along its base. Jonathan Stapleton gazed past me at the city, his face blank and haggard. I saw red streaks of sleeplessness in his eyes, grayish circles beneath them.

  “My family—my father, my mother, my wife—didn’t believe in the war. They thought we—and the whole state of New Jersey—should have remained neutral. I said that was impossible. The Union was too important—not just to this country but to the whole world. My father died of a broken heart not long after the war began. My younger brother Paul was killed at Nashville, one of the last battles—”

  “How—how terrible.”

  “War is a terrible business,” he said. “Rawdon conceives of me as the murderer of my father—and Paul. He was very fond of them.”

  Jonathan Stapleton. The name roved teasingly through my mind for a moment. I suddenly remembered the major general in Secretary of War Stanton’s office in Washington. It was hard to believe that proud, erect warrior and this hunched, brooding man beside me were the same person.

  “But has he no pride in you, his father, who came home with the victors? Surely your wife takes your part with him.”

  “My wife is dead.”

  He said it flatly, matter-of-factly, as a man might say, “It looks like rain.”

  “She died two years ago, giving birth to my second son, George. Rawdon must not be allowed to corrupt that boy. He must not be allowed to spread his damnable opinion—”

  “Has he actually said this to you?”

  “No, but I’ve overheard him—saying it. He implies it, hints it, in his constant opposition to me, his open dislike of me—”

  Something struck me as wrong, profoundly wrong, in this account. Whether he was consciously lying to me or lying to himself I could not tell, but it was clear that he wanted me as an ally. I doubted his story of going to Newark on business. I suspected he had arranged to meet me this way. For my part, I was more than ready to offer my assistance—I could hardly refuse and hope to keep the position. But I could not understand why the previous governess had failed to side with him.

  “Surely Miss Hardy must have done her best to dissuade Rawdon.”

  “She didn’t understand the situation. She was a fool. She thought the war was a case of simple black and white, the South wrong, the North right.”

  I had an inkling of what he meant, but I had to pretend ignorance. “As a newcomer, I know nothing of such matters,” I said.

  “Precisely why I thought you were the right person for the task. You can acquire a correct understanding of the matter—with my help. Not that I have a wish to control your opinion in any way, of course, but simply with a view to composing the difference, healing the breach between me and Rawdon—you can see with some degree of objectivity my side of the quarrel.”

  “It sounds to me more like a misunderstanding than a quarrel,” I said.

  “No,” he said with a harshness, a grimness, that filled me with foreboding, “It’s a quarrel.”

  By now we were crossing the broad river and clanking to a stop in the station. Beyond it was another glinting steel world of tracks and locomotives and boxcars. This city, too, was a terminus. It was also an industrial center. Factories belched smoke, creating a noxious haze in the thick, hot summer air. Jonathan Stapleton insisted on taking my carpetbag and shook his head sympathetically when I told him about my vanished trunk.

  “I’ll be glad to advance you money to buy anything you need in the local stores,” he said.

  Outside the station, he led me toward a handsome cream-colored coach drawn by a matched pair of fine black horses, with a coachman and a man-on-the-box beside him. The man jumped down and said cheerfully, “Good afternoon, General. It’s a hot day, isn’t it now?” He was a short, husky Irishman. The coachman had a face that suggested a similar ancestry.

  Jonathan Stapleton nodded his assent and assisted me into the interior of the coach, which was upholstered in gleaming leather, with polished brass fittings. I was a little surprised by this display of affluence. While I was sure Jonathan Stapleton was well-off, I thought I read a very moderate sort of wealth in his worn business suit, a country-squire level of living, where land might be held in abundan
ce but cash was often short. This was common in Ireland and England, and I thought a prominent man in the American provinces would be similar, while the lords of wealth and power predominated in New York, like the hereditary lords in London.

  We rode through the industrial fumes beside the railroad track and were soon in some of the worst slums I had seen anywhere. Great pools of stagnant water lay in fields off the road. The ground all about was marshy in the extreme, and a number of rickety three-story tenements tipped at a dangerous angle, their foundations obviously slipping into the muck. Cows and pigs and goats wandered beside the road. There was an incredible profusion of saloons. Nearly all the faces were Irish, and great numbers of them were idle men. They stood outside the saloons, staring glumly at the coach.

  “I shudder to think of what we’ll be paying this year in poor relief,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Disbanding the armies has produced a glut of laborers like we haven’t seen since the panic of 1857. We hired as many as possible on the railroad, but half our cars are idle. The factories are producing at half speed.”

  “It’s far worse in Ireland,” I said. “There people are starving by the road.”

  “These fellows manage to eat, through one thing and another,” he said, looking stonily at the idle men. “Poor relief, church aid. Stealing. There’s hardly a house that hasn’t had a burglary. We’ve had to triple the size of the police force in the past ten years. How do you deal with them in Ireland?”

  “Transportation to the penal colonies.”

  “That makes no sense. The man leaves his wife and children behind to be a permanent charge on the state.”

  “No. They starve to death soon enough. Forgive me if I sound extreme,” I added hastily, “but there are scenes in Ireland that would move anyone to sympathy, no matter what your religion.”

  “Perhaps you’re ready to join the Fenians. If so, Rawdon will induct you. Our Irish maids have made him a passionate supporter of that forlorn cause.” Then, with a delicacy for my possible feelings that stirred me, he added, “Perhaps I shouldn’t talk so casually of it. You may take it more seriously.”

  “You think it’s foolish?”

  “I’ve seen what wins wars, Miss Stark. Sheer weight of metal and men. A capacity for slaughter. The British have both.”

  “Yes,” I said, struggling to sound indifferent. “My former employer, Lord Fingall, had the same opinion.” I looked down a side street swarming with animals and children playing in pools of stagnant water. “What did you think of the Fenian attack on Canada?”

  “The politicians who encouraged them should be driven out of office. It was nothing but the cheapest, crudest sort of vote-chasing. But justice will not be done. Americans have lost interest in justice.”

  As he said these words in a bitter, dismal voice, we emerged from the Irish riverside slum and began ascending a long, gently curving grade that led to the crest of the city’s hill. There was a good view of the river, tumbling over some falls about a mile away, and the country between it, occupied by huge redbrick factories that made locomotives, Jonathan Stapleton told me in response to my question. Eventually we reached the crest and drove down a wide boulevard lined with magnificent elm trees. Streets with similar shade trees slanted down from it to the west, where the city sloped gently to another marsh formed by a branch of the river. These streets were clean and dry. Neatly dressed children rolled hoops and jumped rope. Women sat on broad porches, watching them.

  We jogged down the boulevard for a mile or two and turned in a gate that was crowned by gold-tipped spears. A huge shade tree stood in the center of a green lawn. A white gravel drive, oval shaped, perhaps a hundred yards long on both sides, led to an imposing redbrick mansion with white trim on the windows and a wide white front door with a graceful fan above it. “That’s Bowood,” General Stapleton said. “It’s named for the country estate of Lord Shelburne, the man who signed the peace treaty that ended our war for independence. He and my great-grandfather became friends after the war.”

  A stooped gray-haired Negro in livery opened the door and welcomed us to a wide center hall with a glistening parquet floor. The walls were covered with portraits and paintings of battles, seascapes, and country views. “This is Jackson, our butler,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Miss Stark, our new governess. Is Master Rawdon around?”

  “He’s in his room, sir, playing with his soldiers,” Jackson said, without a trace of a Southern accent. I was relieved that he was not an Englishman, who might have been able to ask me some embarrassing questions. I did not stop to think of the strangeness of a Negro butler in this Northern city.

  We passed ample rooms crowded with furniture and mounted a curving staircase to the second floor. Down a wide hall we went to a room at the rear. It was a playroom, full of toys, a small swing, a doll house. A boy was sprawled full length in the middle of the room, with hundreds of toy soldiers spread before him. He wore loose linen pantaloons and a gray shirt. He looked over his shoulder at us as we walked into the room. There was a quickness to the movement that reminded me of a forest animal or a hunted man. But he did not rise. He remained prone, gazing at us with a cool self-possession that struck me as remarkable.

  “Stand up when a lady comes into the room,” his father snarled. His voice was like a lash, and it was clear that it had the impact of a blow on the lad. He stood up slowly and gazed at me as if I were an accomplice in his unjust punishment.

  “This is your new governess, Miss Elizabeth Stark,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “You’re to obey her as if her commands came from me. If I hear of any defiance or disobedience, I’ll punish you. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Father,” the boy said.

  Rawdon had thick wavy black hair and dark green eyes beneath a high forehead remarkably like his father’s. But the rest of his face was more conventionally handsome than Jonathan Stapleton’s. In fact, Rawdon was one of the handsomest children I have ever seen—so handsome that he did not seem a child. He was tall for his age, and his cool, distant manner added to the impression of maturity. I found it hard to believe he was only eleven. He could easily have passed for fifteen or sixteen.

  “What’s this you’re doing?” Jonathan Stapleton said, walking past Rawdon to look down at the soldiers.

  “Nashville,” Rawdon said.

  “You have it all wrong,” Jonathan Stapleton said. His voice trembled slightly. He grew angry, perhaps because he, too, noticed the tremor. “If you’re going to play at war, do it right. General Thomas concentrated most of his army on the left flank the first day. Generals don’t spread their troops evenly. They mass their guns and men at one point to outnumber the enemy there.”

  Rawdon followed his father’s directing hand as it swung over his little battlefield. “Where did Uncle Paul die?” he asked.

  Jonathan Stapleton’s agitation was out of all proportion to the mildness of the boy’s question. “You’ve asked me that twice,” he snapped. “On the right flank. In the second day’s attack.”

  “Could we go there someday, Father? We would get there by train.”

  “I don’t want to go near the place. There’s no point in this—this glorifying the dead. Where’s your brother?

  “Grandmother took him to the cemetery.”

  Jonathan Stapleton literally flinched at the words. “Miss Stark,” he said, turning to me, “you might as well settle yourself in your room. It’s above us here, on the third floor. Jackson and his wife, Bertha, our cook, are the only servants who live in. The rest are local girls. Jackson will introduce you to them.”

  “Certainly, General,” said Jackson, who had been standing in the door of the nursery this while.

  “I’ll see you at dinner, Miss Stark. We’ve missed lunch, I’m afraid, but Bertha will be glad to fix you a plate. I’m going to try to get some sleep.”

  He went down the hall with long, swift strides and vanished into a room at the end of it. Jackson led me to the door of the nursery. It revealed a flight of stairs to t
he top floor. The heat beneath the roof was stifling, but my room was large and tasefully fuirnished, with a wide brass bed and several bureaus and chests. Jackson opened both windows, and a dull breeze stirred the chintz curtains.

  “You won’t get much sleep up here,” Jackson said. “It’s hotter than Mississippi. We should rightly be at the shore. But Madam won’t go, and the general ain’t got the courage to make her.”

  “Why won’t she?”

  “Too many memories of the dead,” Jackson said, in a voice that might have come from a sepulchre. He sighed heavily. “You’ve come to a troubled house. It’ll be hard for you to believe, but seven short years ago it was the happiest of places.”

  His face and his voice were so melancholy, my heart almost ceased beating. What could I bring to such a family but more grief, more melancholy? I was swept by new doubts about the wisdom of this deception, but I lacked the strength of will to end it.

  The sound of horse’s hooves on the drive drew us to the window. A tall gray-haired woman was being helped from another fine coach, this one dark brown, trimmed with gold, drawn by white horses. She was dressed entirely in black. She had a small blond boy with her, dressed in a sailor’s suit.

  “Is that Mrs. Stapleton—the general’s mother?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Jackson said with another sigh. “She goes to the cemetery every day. She took Master Rawdon with her till the general came home and put a stop to it. I suppose he thinks it can’t do much harm to little George. But I wonder.”

  Jackson turned his face away from the window, as if he found it hard to look at Mrs. Stapleton. “Dear God, how the general must regret the day he defied his mother and persuaded his father to let him go to war. We should have stayed quiet here and let the murdering madmen on both sides fight it out. We’d be a happy family still.”