‘Good day to you,’ he said. ‘My name is Pickering. I live here.’ His narrow face was imperious, with a hooked nose and a thin-lipped mouth that made him look like a very elderly eagle. ‘Did I hear correctly? That you’re looking for Henry Bellamy?’
‘Yes sir, we are,’ Abby said.
Pickering looked at her and his eyes softened. Good-looking young gel, he thought. He prided himself that he had an eye for a good-looking girl.
‘I’m afraid I have to disappoint you, then,’ he said. ‘Henry Bellamy is dead.’
‘Oh,’ Abby said.
‘Do you know when he died, sir?’ O’Hanlon asked.
‘Matter of fact, I do,’ Pickering said. ‘But see here, we can’t stand on the stoop talkin’. Come inside and have some tea. Dawkins, bring us some tea.’
‘Very good, sir,’ Dawkins said, with another jaundiced look at O’Hanlon’s suit. They followed Pickering into an elegant sitting room, lined on one side with bookcases from floor to ceiling. The furniture was good, solid stuff that looked old and valuable. There was a fine marble fireplace with a glowing coal fire. A ginger cat lay stretched out on the rug.
They told Pickering their names and, as Dawkins poured the tea, he told them about Henry Bellamy’s mysterious death.
‘Great tragedy, y’know,’ Pickering said, ‘Terrible thing. Shot himself, right here in this very room!’
Henry and Abigail Bellamy were members of a literary circle known as the Belles Lettres Club. They contributed regularly to some of the short-lived literary journals of their day, the Literary Repository, the American Review, and others, he told them. They were both involved in De Witt Clinton’s Free School Society and often attended literary evenings at the New York Society Library on Nassau Street.
‘Oh, they’ve all been here,’ he said proudly. ‘Washington Irving, Noah Webster, Philip Freneau, Charles Brockden Brown. The Bellamys knew everyone.’
He knew only a little about their background, he said. He had been told that they were descended from an old English family, Devon or somewhere like that.
‘I imagine there was a lot about Bellamy’s death in the papers?’ Abby said.
‘I rather think not,’ Pickering said. ‘There was a firm of lawyers involved. Hushed it all up, nasty scandal, y’know.’
‘Scandal?’ O’Hanlon said, casting a wistful glance at the decanter on the roll-top desk.
‘Well, I mean,’ Pickering said. ‘The sister had killed herself just a week or two earlier. Found her in the river, I heard. Then Henry Bellamy shoots himself. Very strange. It was about a year or so after it happened that I bought the house. They couldn’t sell it, you know. People knew about what had happened. Said the place was unlucky. Tish and tosh. I’ve been here years, nothing happened. Lovely house.’
‘It certainly is,’ O’Hanlon said. ‘From whom did you buy it, Mr. Pickering?’
‘The lawyer fellows I told you about, the ones who kept Henry Bellamy’s death quiet,’ Pickering said. ‘You want their address?’
‘If you would be so kind.’
‘Price, Clark & Gray,’ Pickering said. ‘I’ll write you a note to the senior partner, if you like.’
Armed with the old man’s note, they walked across to Broadway, and inside an hour were closeted in the office of the senior partner, Linden Gray. He listened without speaking as Abby told her story, then nodded as if coming to a decision, when she told him how she had been found in St John’s Park that snowy night, years before. He got up, smoothing back his hair. It was as black and shiny as patent leather. I wonder what he puts on it, Abby thought irrationally.
‘On the day that Henry Bellamy killed himself,’ Linden Gray said slowly, ‘he wrote me a letter. In it he told me things he said must never be divulged to a living soul. He said that he was going to take his life. By the time that I received the letter he had already done so.’
‘And the letter?’ Abby whispered.
‘Yes, I still have it,’ Gray said. ‘I warn you, though, Mrs. Strong, that its contents would gravely distress you.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Abby said firmly, ‘if you will permit me to see it, I want to.’
‘Very well,’ Gray said. He picked up a small bell that lay on his desk and rang it. The glass-paned door opened and a young man came in. He was wearing a dark, tightly-fitting suit and a boiled collar with a tie whose knot looked about as big as a full stop. Gray told him what he wanted and the clerk hurried away. Then the lawyer got up and walked around the desk.
‘May I ask whether you are a relative?’ he said to O’Hanlon.
‘Just a friend,’ O’Hanlon said. ‘Why?’
‘I think it may be better if Mrs. Strong does what she has to do in privacy,’ Gray said suavely. ‘Don’t you agree?’ O’Hanlon looked at Abby; she said nothing.
‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘Sure.’
‘You can wait outside,’ Gray said. ‘I’ll get you some tea.’
‘No, thanks all the same,’ O’Hanlon said hastily. ‘I’ll take a walk.’
By the time you read this I shall be dead by my own hand. Be assured that it is my earnest wish no longer to live, and forgive me for burdening you with the consequences of my decision. You know that my sister, Abigail, killed herself a fortnight ago. Now I must tell you why, so that perhaps one day redress for what we have done can be made. Abigail had a child, a little girl who was born in the last week of November. We managed to conceal that, but of course, it was impossible for us even to consider keeping the child. By the same token, we could not take her to the usual agencies. So Abigail wrapped her in her warmest clothes and left her on a bench in St John’s Park. We went back next morning. She was gone. We hope to a good home. However, it was not that act alone which drove my darling Abigail to her death, but a sin far greater, a sin for which I am doomed to pay in Hell for all eternity. Linden, the child was mine! Abigail and I were lovers. Now she is gone and I cannot bear the thought of life without her. She was the sunlight in the garden of my life for as long as I can remember. There is no reason any longer to live. Good-bye, old friend. Take care of my affairs and do what you can to keep it from becoming messy. As for the money, give it to whatever charity you choose. Good-bye.
Henry
‘My God!’ Abby whispered. ‘Oh, my God!’
She sat, stunned, staring at the letter in her hand. She heard Linden Gray speaking, but the words meant nothing. After a few minutes she began to listen to his quiet voice. He had settled the estate and given the money to charity, he said. All there was left was the deed box, which held some photographs and birth certificates. She took them in her nerveless hands and put them into her pocketbook. Burn them, she thought, I’ll burn them and nobody will ever know.
‘I’ll burn them,’ she said to the lawyer.
‘Just as you wish, Mrs. Strong,’ he said softly. ‘Would you care for anything? A glass of tea, perhaps?’
‘No,’ Abby said. ‘I’m all right. It’s all right.’
No one must ever know, she kept thinking. In her mind seethed a word written in letters of fire that nothing would ever extinguish. Incest, she thought, in utter misery. I am the child of incest.
Well, enough of that, Abby told herself. She wasn’t one to sit fretting over things fretting wouldn’t cure. There were some secrets just too deep and too dark and too damning to bring out into the open. Some things people just didn’t want to have to face. If you brought them out anyway, all you did was to flay the other person’s soul. Where was the good in that? She looked across the room at Sam again. Darling Sam. Suppose she told him about Abigail and Henry Bellamy. About Sean Flynn. What good would it do? It would break him.
I’ll never tell, Abby thought. I can live with what I know. I have to. She let her eyes flicker over towards the mahogany box. Henry Bellamy’s letter was in it: she had never been able to bring herself to destroy that one tenuous link to her parents that she possessed. Hidden in plain sight, she thought. Sam respected her privacies; he would n
ever dream of going through her things.
‘Well, Sam Strong,’ she said, in mock anger. ‘Are you going to sit in that corner with your books all night, pray? Or are you coming to bed?’
He looked up, frowning at her over his spectacles. Abby gave him a grin.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Fruity, are you?’
‘That’s for me to know,’ she said, getting up. ‘And you to find out.’ She went up the stairs to the bedroom, smiling as she heard him bolt the front door and blow out the lamp in the hall. She looked at her body in the mirror beside the bed. Not bad for an old woman, she thought. A bit on the flabby side, maybe: kids did that to you. What a mystery we all are. She thought of the men who had touched this body, caressed it, invaded it. The door opened and Sam came into the room.
‘Well, well,’ he growled. ‘You’re already, I see.’
‘Willing, too,’ she said, going to him.
Eight – The Story of David Strong
July 1861
A man named Shifterly brought the first taste of war to Washington Farm. A fat man in a check suit and a plug hat, accompanied by two militiamen, he rode sweating into the turning circle before the house, and got down, boots crunching on the yellow gravel, to announce flatly to David Strong that he had come to buy all his horses.
‘Name’s Shifterly, Mr. Strong,’ he said. ‘Tobias Shifterly. I come up from Richmond, specially to visit folks such as yourself, horse-breeders and the like. ‘
He had a florid face and the bloodshot eyes of a heavy drinker. His boots were cheap and cracked and his loud-checked suit was mantled with dust. David did not begin to like the look of the man, nor the two scrawny fellows he had brought with him, dressed in hand-me-down uniforms that fitted them where they touched. Shifterly looked like one of the jumped-up crackers who were crawling all over Richmond these days, picking up whatever deals they could wheel, maggots feeding on the flesh of the newborn Confederacy.
‘I don’t do business at the door, Shifterly,’ David said, deliberately offering the man no title. ‘Nor with anybody whose credit I haven’t checked.’
‘You don’t need to check my credit, Mr. Strong,’ Shifterly said heartily. ‘Why, surely my warrant, signed by President Jefferson Davis himself, is guarantee enough of my bona fides?’ He reached into his pocket and brought out a folded document. It was creased and worn from much handling, and stained as though by spilled coffee. David made no move to take it from the man, who held it outstretched for a long moment before frowning and putting it back into his pocket.
‘Well, sir, the way of it is like this,’ he said, the heavily jocular manner failing to conceal the glint of insult taken in the piggy eyes. ‘I’m empowered to buy good horseflesh at a fair price, and I’d like to buy from you.’
‘And what’s your fair price?’ David asked.
‘Ten dollars a head,’ Shifterly said. ‘And I’ll take every animal you’ve got.’
‘You must be crazy. I wouldn’t sell you a dead horse for ten dollars!’ David snapped. ‘If that’s the kind of “fair price” Jeff Davis is offering, you might as well go back and tell him to come and steal the damned horses!’
‘Now, now, Mr. Strong, sir,’ Shifterly said. ‘I don’t think you quite understand the situation. We don’t have to bargain. Ten dollars a head is the set price and there’s no room to argue.’
‘You want any horses off of me,’ David said. ‘You’ll pay me what they’re worth.’
‘I better warn you, Mr. Strong,’ Shifterly said, ‘that if you don’t sell me the horses I want, I’m empowered by this warrant here to confiscate them so as to prevent their falling into enemy hands.’
He made a signal with his hand, and the two militiamen lifted their rifles so that they were pointing in David’s general direction. Shifterly grinned, showing bad teeth.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’re going to be reasonable about this.’
‘Excuse me, Mr. Strong,’ said another voice. ‘You mind telling me what “confiscate” means?’
The speaker was David’s overseer, Nathan Steele, a tall, thin man with a prominent Adam’s apple who had come up silently behind Shifterly and the two militiamen. In his hands, Nathan held a double-barreled shotgun. Beside him stood Cyrus Kendall, the stable manager, and four of the farm-hands, all armed. Shifterly swung around, startled by the unexpected question. His jaw sagged when he saw that he and his militiamen were the center of a ring of fire from which they could not possibly hope to escape.
‘It’s a new word they got, Nathan,’ David said flatly. ‘So they don’t have to call it stealing.’
‘Now see here, Mr. Strong!’ Shifterly blustered. ‘You’re interferin’ with an officer in the execution of his dooty! That’s a mighty serious thing to do in times of war! I’m warnin’ you, sir, not to do anything you may regret!’
‘Shifterly,’ David said. ‘If you and these – scavengers – aren’t off my land in two minutes flat, I am going to give my men permission to start shooting pieces off you! And as for regret, I figure the only thing I’m liable to regret is giving you two minutes instead of one. However, I expect I’ll manage to live with that.’
‘Now just a damned minute, here!’ Shifterly began. Ignoring the man’s protest, David took his watch from his fob pocket. Shifterly looked at him and then bitterly at the ring of guns around him.
‘One and a half minutes,’ David said, not looking up. With a curse, Shifterly swung up into the saddle and jerked the horse’s head around. Kicking it into a run, he clattered up the curving drive towards the turnpike, the militiamen close behind him. David watched them go, his face grim. Shifterly was the first, he thought. It was quite certain he would not be the last.
After the fall of Fort Sumter he had known there was no doubt but that Virginia would join the secession. The name of every voter was registered, the votes cast. David knew that many who might have voted against secession stayed away from the polls, fearing reprisals. Others, like himself, knowing that separation was a fait accompli, cast no vote at all. According to Dan Holmes, several counties did not even make a return. From all of those who did, it transpired that less than a hundred and twenty-six thousand voters wanted Virginia to join the Confederacy, and less than twenty-one thousand preferred to remain part of the Union. The white population of the state was well over a million. Virginia went to war on the will of one person in eight.
Which leaves me with a problem I can’t figure, David thought. He took his dilemma to the only person he felt he could talk it over with: his son, Andrew. It meant going to Washington, but in many ways David was glad to get away. War fever was running high; a company of militia was being raised at Culpeper court house. Damned fools, David thought. A hundred men with only fifty muskets between them and no ammunition at all. What did they think they were going to do: throw stones at the Federal soldiers?
The journey north was a gloomy one. The train was crowded with soldiers and it was delayed many times to allow troop trains priority passage. Crazy, crazy, David thought. North preparing to make war on South, while the citizens of each move freely between the warring capitals!
‘The hotheads want war at any cost,’ he told his son. ‘Damned jackasses! Don’t they see the ruin they’re going to bring down on all of us?’
‘I don’t think they do, Pa,’ Andrew said. ‘They’ve all got patriotism so bad, only fighting will cure it.’
‘They’ll get their fighting,’ David said grimly. ‘You heard about that business in Alexandria?’
Virginia voted for secession on May 23. Before dawn the next day Union troops crossed the Potomac and occupied Arlington Heights and Alexandria. In the latter township, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth of the 11th New York Fire Zouaves espied a Confederate flag flying above the Marshall House. Ellsworth, who had worked in Lincoln’s Illinois law office and come to Washington with the new president, was six weeks past his twenty-fourth birthday and eager to strike a blow for the Union. He dashed into the hotel and up the st
airs with two of his Zouaves, cutting the halyards with his sword and wrapping the flag around his body.
‘Come on, lads!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll send this rebel rag to Old Abe!’
He turned and ran down the stairs ahead of his men, but as he reached the second-floor landing, a door burst open and Jesse Jackson, the owner of the hotel, stepped out, a double-barreled shotgun in his hand.
‘I’ll send you to Hell first!’ he shouted and pulled both triggers. The gun went off with a stuttering boom and the force of the shot picked up the transfixed Ellsworth and flung him backwards in a tattered heap, his uniform smoldering.
Jackson turned to flee but got no further than the angle of the stairs. One of Ellsworth’s Zouaves came through the furling gunsmoke and put a bayonet into Jackson’s chest. He shouted with pain as the slicing triangle of steel skewered him to the wall. The soldier, whose name was Francis Brownell, pulled the trigger of his musket and blew a hole the size of a dinner plate in Jackson’s body.
‘They had to take the heights, Pa,’ Andrew explained. ‘If the rebels had gotten mortars up there …’ He did not need to finish the sentence. From the windows of his house on Dent Place, the old Custis mansion on Arlington Heights was clearly visible, no more than a few miles from the Capitol itself.
‘You saw Jed?’ David asked his son. They had eaten a light luncheon. The early July sunlight made the cool dining room seem dark. Once in a while they heard a carriage rattle past on 34th Street. It was impossible to believe they were sitting in a house in the embattled capital of a nation at war with itself, yet it was so.
‘He’s gone south with Lee, Pa,’ Andrew said. He watched his father’s face as he said it, and saw the reaction: pride and anger in about equal parts.
‘I wish he’d come to see me first,’ David said.
‘There was just no time,’ Andrew told him. ‘He was recalled from Texas early in March. When he got here, he was offered a captaincy. He asked them to let him think it over. He wanted to see what Colonel Lee would do. He worships that man. Says he’s the best soldier in the United States Army.’
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