‘A pleasure, ma’am, an honor,’ Jonah said, throwing caution to the winds. ‘I’ve heard a great deal about the beauties of Mexico, but until now I had thought them all to be architectural.’
Maria, Gonzales smiled at his extravagance, her eyes merry. Jed did not fail to notice the way Varga’s nephew glowered possessively as Jonah paid the girl the fulsome compliment.
‘The gallantry of American cavalry officers is renowned, lieutenant,’ Maria said. ‘I am pleased to discover that it is not exaggerated.’
A servant in a white coat brought sherry in the tapered copitas; it tasted dry and light on the tongue. They talked of small things at first, the weather, the affairs of the town, trade. After a while Maria Gonzales asked about the running fight with El Gato.
‘We gave the scoundrel a drubbing today and no mistake!’ Jonah said, perhaps a little vaingloriously. He was peacocking for the girl and Jed smiled, knowing it. Hell, he supposed he was doing the same thing himself: his way was just a little different to Jonah’s, that was all.
‘I understand that Colonel Gallehawk and his Texas Rangers played a small part in your success, Teniente,’ Rodolfo Lopez y Hoya said, his word lightly coated with a venom which Jed noticed and Jonah did not. His boyish desire to impress the girl drowned his awareness of the Mexican’s hostility.
‘I’d say it was their day, not ours,’ Jed interposed. To give the Rangers the success was also to rob Lopez of the opportunity of using them as a stiletto. The dark, smoldering eyes turned to meet his, with a naked animosity. Jed felt as if the man had struck him a physical blow.
‘You are too modest,’ Lopez murmured.
‘He certainly is!’ Jonah said. ‘We gave that “cat” a turpentining out there.’
‘I understand he’s dead,’ Wilkes said. ‘El Gato. That right?’
‘Yes,’ Jed said, once more seeing the great hole appear in El Gato’s side as the gun boomed. He had shown it to Harvey after the fight. Harvey reckoned it threw a .65 slug at least. No wonder it had done so much damage.
‘Of course,’ Lopez y Hoya said, ‘fighting rabble of that kind is somewhat different from facing trained troops, Teniente.’
Jed saw the unease in the eyes of the other guests as they sensed Lopez y Hoya’s hostility. His questions were a gauntlet thrown down to invite a duel fought with insults.
‘If anything, I’d say it was harder,’ Jed said. ‘Irregulars don’t have any rules.’
‘Ah, I see,’ the Mexican replied. ‘You kill them by the rules.’
‘They were bandits, sir,’ Jed said. ‘They plundered your villages and killed your people as well as mine. Yet you sound as if you disapprove of our killing them.’
‘Not at all,’ Lopez y Hoya said. ‘Someone has to do it, I suppose.’
‘Now, just a damned minute, Coronel!’ Jonah Harvey retorted hotly. Anger stained his cheeks. He looked at Jed, his chin coming up. No, Jonah, Jed told him with his eyes. Jonah took in a long, long breath and let it out slowly. Lopez y Hoya saw it and smiled, victorious.
‘Well,’ Sam Wilkes said, a shade too heartily. ‘I imagine you gentlemen will be heading back north presently?’
‘We’ll leave at sunup tomorrow, Mr. Wilkes,’ Jed said, glad to be offered a way of lowering the temperature. ‘Plenty of work waiting for us back at San Antone.’
‘Pacifying the Indians, no doubt,’ Lopez y Hoya said, silkily. ‘I am told your cavalry spends a great deal of its time policing these ferocious Indians of ours.’
‘To use your own words, Coronet,’ Jed said, ‘someone has to do it. There isn’t any other army worth the name in this part of the world.’
It was a well-aimed shaft and it went straight to its target. A dull scarlet flush stained Lopez y Hoya’s face. He blinked slowly, like a lizard, and again the perverse pleasure flooded his eyes, like a swordsman who discovers he is matched with a worthy opponent. He wants to keep at this, Jed thought, and impatience swelled in him. He had no time any more for stupidity and wrongheadedness of the Maxwell variety and he wished he could say so. He turned away from the man and towards Maria Gonzales.
‘Did someone say that you are from San Antonio, señorita?’ he asked her.
‘That is correct, Teniente’, she said. Her smile was warm with promise. He could smell her perfume and it aroused him. ‘Sit beside me at dinner, and I will tell you about my family.’
‘I’d like that,’ he said, trying with the words to tell her what he would really like, which was to be alone with her. Flickering pictures of her locked in his naked embrace dashed past the windows of his imagination.
They went in to dinner shortly afterwards and Maria told him about her father, a general in the Mexican Army who had been wounded at the battle of Cerro Gordo. Retired now, he spent his days on his estate outside San Antonio, where he grew peaches, plums and sugar cane.
‘But come, Teniente,’ she said. ‘This is dull stuff. Will you not tell us about your own family?’
‘That would be dull indeed, señorita,’ Jed smiled. ‘And besides, I get so much pleasure from listening to the sound of your voice.’ It was only the truth: he had been openly admiring the soft, smooth roundness of her arms and bosom, the animation in her eyes, the proud way she held her head. He could see the Mexican colonel watching him with eyes that were liquid with dislike. But he gave the man no opportunity to resume their feud of words and Lopez y Hoya sat silently for the rest of the evening, his face sullen.
The conversation gradually became more general and more relaxed. They talked of affairs up North, the long arguments over the rights of slave and free states which were now taking on the dimensions of firm conviction.
‘It’s the same for us civilians as it is for you soldiers,’ Wilkes said. ‘Soldier’s got to know where he stands. So have we. When the moment comes, we won’t need to be told where our dooty lies. No, sir, by George!’
‘You say Texas will secede, Mr. Wilkes?’
‘Texas will be among the first, Mr. Harvey!’ Wilkes replied. ‘Among the very first!’
‘You are from Virginia, Teniente,’ Lopez y Varga said, softly. ‘Yet you wear the uniform of the Federal Army. You have a terrible choice before you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Jed said. ‘I believe I have.’
‘You would fight to defend slavery?’ Lopez y Hoya said, seeing a chance to resume his warfare of sneer and innuendo.
‘Slavery exists, Coronet,’ Jed answered. ‘It is foolish to pretend otherwise. We can either tolerate it where it now exists, and allow it to spread no further – or go to war to ensure its extinction.’
‘There will be war, then?’ Maria Gonzales asked, softly.
‘I fear there must be.’
‘I am sad to think of all the fine young men of your country who will die in it,’ she said. Her words revealed much of the woman and Jed was aware again that in her he had met someone totally different to all the rest. So it was that later, as they were riding back to their encampment, he found himself totally dumbfounded by what Harvey told him about her.
‘You didn’t hear what Mrs. Wilkes was saying?’ Jonah said.
‘I expect I was talking to someone else,’ Jed said.
‘Yes, Maria of the dark eyes, I saw you. You hardly took your eyes off her all night. ‘
‘She was worth looking at.’
‘Well, forget her, Teniente,’ Jonah said, putting the same sneer into the word the Mexican officer had done. ‘She’s engaged. To that snake-eyed bastard Lopez y Hoya!’
Stunned, Jed said no more. He hated the idea of that fine and lovely woman being wasted on someone as slimy and sly as Lopez y Hoya. It was impossible, he told himself, knowing that it was not. In Mexico, as in Old Spain, hidalgo marriages were arranged by older and nominally wiser heads and not by the bride and groom-to-be.
Well, what does it matter to me? Jed asked himself, a shade angrily. And knew the answer.
Four – The Story of Andrew Strong
1860
&nb
sp; ‘My father likes thee very much, Andrew,’ Ruth Chalfont said. ‘He speaks very highly of thee.’
‘I like him too, Ruth,’ Andrew said. ‘Very much.’
‘He is not like thy father.’
‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘Maybe that’s why.’
He grinned as he said it, to take any sting out of the words. He loved his father, fondly and warmly, but he did not want to be like him. He had never found in David the lead he was looking for, the trait he wished to emulate. Jacob Chalfont was a different matter. For all his kind and gentle Quaker ways, Jacob was a decisive man. He knew what he wanted and he knew how to go about getting it: in life and in business.
‘Thee will learn, Andrew,’ he said, ‘that the best direction is forward. One of my superstitions has always been never to turn back, once committed to a destination, nor to stop until that destination is reached. It’s a silly thing, but I find that, generally speaking, I tend to get where I planned to go.’
No vacillation there; no wondering whether the other fellow didn’t also have a point of view. Jacob was a hard bargainer and a shrewd businessman, although he was generous to a fault in his charitable work. Pragmatic, generous, loved by his wife and his only daughter, Jacob Chalfont was Andrew’s very image of a happy man. It shaped his own ambition: that’s what I’d like to be, too, he decided.
He did not really notice Ruth at first. She seemed a nice, shy, unexceptionable girl, pretty in a china-shepherdess sort of way. He met her first at the Chalfont house in Washington and saw her from time to time when she visited the offices on 15th Street. The very first inkling he had of her as a woman, a consciousness of her physical presence, came one day when, because of a sudden thunderstorm, they shared a hansom to her home. Ruth was wearing a pretty, stone-colored dress, and they ran laughing across the sidewalk and piled into the cab, panting and smiling. The cab driver gigged the horse into motion and they rattled through the rain-drenched streets. The windows steamed up; it was as if they were lost in space, separated from reality. For the first time Andrew noticed the bright light of intelligence that shone from Ruth Chalfont’s eyes, the little laughter lines at the corner of her lips.
‘Thee ... is staring, Andrew,’ she murmured, and she blushed.
‘I know,’ he said, as if the words had been written on his mind for years, waiting to be uttered. ‘I think you are very lovely.’
‘Oh,’ Ruth said, looking flustered.
‘Please,’ Andrew said, laying a hand on her forearm. ‘Forgive me. I should not have said that.’
The cab lurched to a stop and the window flew up.
‘Twenny-seven Eighteenth Street, sah,’ the driver called. Ruth opened the door and ran fleetly across the sidewalk, not looking back. Andrew told the driver to take him to his lodgings, leaning back in the seat and realizing that, had the journey taken but a few minutes more, he would have kissed her. From then on, he was obsessed.
He found a dozen reasons to call at the house. If his stumbling excuses for coming amused Eleanor Chalfont she never showed it. After he had exhausted his small talk and asked the one question he had come to ask, casually, as though it were of no import, she would call Ruth and leave them alone. And as he had been obsessed with thoughts of what he would tell her when they were finally alone together, Andrew found that he was addle-brained and tongue-tied in her presence.
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he would ask. If she wanted shoelaces, he promised to get them. If a length of ribbon she had bought was not quite the correct shade, he would gallantly offer to exchange it at the store. If she planned to visit a friend, Andrew volunteered to take her there and wait for her so that he could bring her back. As for his own life, it had but two sides. Things that he did when Ruth was there, and things that he did when she was not. A party with old friends visiting from Culpeper was a boring duty to be suffered, as Ruth knew none of them. A short walk along the embankment at Alexandria on a Sunday was an all-too short stay in Paradise because she had come. The fact that her parents were also present and that he could not convey his adoration by more than a sigh, a glance or a nominally helping hand, made not the slightest difference. If she was not there, he had no recollection of what he had done, said, seen. If she was present, he saw nothing, nobody else. He wrote her letters, poems, sonnets; and threw them all away.
Ruth was a wise girl; she would have had to be a foolish one not to realize what was happening, but she was too much the daughter of her father and mother to allow her emotions to dominate her thinking.
‘What does thy heart tell thee?’ Eleanor asked her. ‘About this young man?’
‘That he is kind and gentle,’ Ruth said, wishing she could lie about her feelings and knowing she would never do so. ‘And that when he is with me, I feel … happy. Excited, almost, as if by some anticipation of a happiness to come.’
‘I see,’ Eleanor said. ‘And thee has searched thy heart for the Truth?’
‘Oh, yes, Mother,’ Ruth said. ‘Many, many times.’
‘So be it,’ Eleanor said. ‘Be still a while from thy own thoughts, child. Stay thy mind upon God.’
‘I will, Mother,’ Ruth responded, hoping that she could do it, wondering whether she wanted to. I think I love him, she thought. But I don’t know how to know it.
And then, one sunlit summer’s day, they went out alone on a picnic, and in the shadowed leafy silence of the woods he kissed her and she knew. She felt the surge of her heart, the lift of her soul, and knew, knew. She was a good daughter, a dutiful one, and she wanted to heed the words of counsel her mother had spoken to her, but surely, there could be nothing bad about something which made you feel so good?
So, from acquaintance they moved together towards love, and after that to friendship, and began learning about each other. He told her how, when he had been growing up at Washington Farm, he had envied his brother, Jed.
‘He was always so confident, so sure,’ he said. ‘I thought, “I could never be like that”, although I wanted to, more than anything in the world.’
‘Yet now thee are so confident, Andrew!’ she said. ‘So good.’
‘It’s a trick,’ he confided. ‘Something I learned when I was at West Point. I acted as if I knew what to do, even when I didn’t. I found that if you acted boldly enough, the other cadets assumed you knew what you were up to and followed you. It’s a useful technique to know.’
He had applied it throughout his years at the Academy, he told her. The other cadets responded with a respect which amused and sometimes irritated him.
‘It made me realize that most people, even the ones who were training to be leaders, were in fact followers,’ he said. ‘People want to be led.’
The other thing you had to learn at West Point was survival: how to avoid the officers in the Tactical Department, always on the lookout for offences to mark in their demerit books. And most of all, how to retain some sense of your own individuality within a system that tried to reduce everything to a simple common denominator.
Andrew graduated in 1857, throwing his cap into the air with the other cadets while the superintendent confided to one of his staff that it had not been a vintage year. He applied for a commission with the cavalry and asked for a posting to Fort Riley in Kansas, where his older brother, Jed, was stationed. In the time-honored army fashion, he was offered a commission in the 3rd Artillery and accepted it. After a brief leave to visit the farm and say good-bye to his father, he proceeded west to the newly-established Fort Walla Walla in Washington Territory.
‘Thee never told me,’ Ruth said, ‘exactly why it was thee left the army.’
‘I don’t care much to speak of it,’ Andrew said.
‘It was … did something bad happen?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Something bad happened.’
He arrived at Fort Walla Walla just too late to accompany a punitive expedition which had been mounted by Colonel Edward Steptoe, commanding, to catch and hang some Pelouse Indians who had killed two miners
. It was apparent to Andrew that Steptoe saw the killing of the miners as an insult directed at the United States Army in general and himself in particular. His decision to take a hundred and sixty men and two mountain howitzers out into the field to look for a few ill-armed Indians seemed to Andrew at best ill-advised, and at worst, stupid.
Just how ill-advised it had been became evident three weeks later, when the column crawled back to the fort. It had been cut to pieces and Steptoe had lost over half of his men and both howitzers, not to mention God alone knew how many mules and horses. In addition, the Indians now believed themselves invincible and proceeded to play merry Hell with the settlers and miners filtering into the area.
The following August, a second expedition was mounted. This time it was led by Colonel George Wright, a thick-set, gray-haired man with gimlet blue eyes and a mouth as uncompromising as a bear-trap. With him to the fort he brought two companies of the 9th Infantry, of which regiment he was the commander. To these were added five companies of the 1st Dragoons and five more of Andrew’s regiment, the 3rd Artillery, armed with the new Model 1855 Springfield carbine. Two twelve-pound howitzers and two six-pounders were taken along; each man was issued with a hundred rounds of ammunition. Colonel Wright called all the officers together and professed it his intention to go among the goddamned Indians and teach the goddamned bastards a goddamned lesson that they would god-damned-well never forget, even if he had to chase them all the way to the goddamned Arctic Circle.
‘You don’t want to hear all this, Ruth,’ Andrew said. ‘It wouldn’t interest you.’
‘Don’t tell me if thou do not wish.’
‘It’s not that. It’s just …’
‘Go ahead, dear Andrew,’ Ruth said softly. ‘Perhaps thou need to tell someone.’
Andrew nodded. Maybe I do at that, he thought. He hadn’t discussed his reasons for leaving the army at any length, not with Jed, nor with David. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t understand; more that he was not yet ready to talk about it, let the bitterness and anger spill out. Perhaps, if the trouble with the Maxwell boys hadn’t happened, there would have been an opportunity, he thought. Instead, the duel had created a strange tension; as if no one wanted to admit that it had actually happened. Andrew still did not know how his father felt about it. Does he think I am a coward? he wondered. Or does he understand I could not, would not kill? How could he understand, without knowing what had happened that bloody day on the Spokane plains?
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