by John Jakes
“Cooper, please don’t curse in front of your daughter,” Judith said.
“We’re ruined. We’ll be bankrupt in a year.” He remained in a rage up through the Tuesday night of the program.
Mrs. Allwick’s on Legare was ablaze with lamps and tapers. Chairs were set around the fusty parlor, and a double curtain of white gauze and calico hung at the end adjoining the dining room. Behind the curtain, giggling girls in ivy wreaths and bed-sheet togas rushed to position themselves around Sara Jane Oberdorf, who had been chosen for the role of Southern Womanhood.
Marie-Louise no longer cared. She was tingling with expectancy. If this wasn’t love, then it was something just as dizzying and delicious. She barely managed to stop chattering when Mrs. Allwick hissed for silence.
The curtain was pulled. Stiffly posed with the other girls, who represented Womanhood’s handmaidens, Marie-Louise searched the audience. She almost fainted again. What a precious little dummy she was! Overlooking the obvious, assuming something totally incorrect.
All the chairs were filled by parents and relatives in their finery. He’d been forced to stand at the back, by the window bay overlooking the street. Thanks to all the lamps moved in for the program, he fairly glittered in his Army blue and bright metal buttons. He wasn’t an ex-captain. He was a captain now.
And there in the second row sat her family, Papa visibly upset. His expression told her he knew he’d been defied. And over a Union Army officer. How would she ever explain?
She lost her balance, knocking Sara Jane off the box on which she stood. Southern Womanhood crashed into her handmaidens and spilled them like a bunch of circus tumblers. Children in the audience screamed with laughter, the tableau ended in chaos … and the night was only starting.
The program concluded with the young ladies performing an elaborate quadrille. At the conclusion, a few parents immediately jumped up to applaud. Soon they were all standing. The curtain opened again, and Mrs. Allwick’s pupils bowed to acknowledge the ovation. A couple of the girls giggled; because of her girth, Sara Jane had trouble bowing from the waist. While she attempted it, she shot murderous sideways looks at Marie-Louise. Cooper’s daughter saw only the young officer, who was applauding wildly.
As the audience broke up, Judith took hold of Cooper’s arm to get his attention. At the side of the parlor, wearing a white cravat and stockings and a dark green coatee and knee breeches, Des LaMotte stared at Cooper while mouthing thank-yous to the parents pushing up to congratulate him.
“Cooper, is that dancing master the one who—”
“Same,” he snapped. “Empty threats, I’ve decided.”
“I don’t know. He looks as though he’d like to crucify you.”
Cooper shot him a glance. LaMotte held it a moment, unintimidated. Then he switched his attention to his admirers, bowing and kissing hands.
“We’re leaving,” Cooper called to his daughter, who was struggling through a crowd of pupils and parents near the curtain. “Get your bonnet and shawl.”
“Please, Papa, I have to speak to someone.”
“I saw him. We’ll have nothing to do with any of Canby’s mercenaries.”
Judith said, “I think it’s unfair to refuse her a few minutes of harmless conversation.”
“I’ll decide what’s harmless and what isn’t.” Cooper seized his daughter’s wrist. “Where are your things?”
Marie-Louise turned red. She wanted to perish on the spot. Captain German was moving toward them. Through welling tears, she saw him stop suddenly. She pulled, but her father wouldn’t let go.
Judith gave up and hurried to find her daughter’s things. Moments later, Cooper pushed Marie-Louise out a side door to a passage that led to Legare Street. She was crying loudly.
41
A MAN OF SEVENTY-SIX is too old for this, Jasper Dills thought. His journey on the Baltimore & Ohio had been a sleepless nightmare of jerks, bumps, cinders, and filth. Even in a first-class car, he found himself packed in with the canaille. Sweaty peddlers, pushy mothers with weepy children, flash gentlemen hunting victims to fleece at cards. Horrible, not to be borne.
But he was bearing it, was he not? He’d obeyed the imperious summons the moment it arrived by telegraph. He’d purchased his ticket and packed his carpetbag, because he was fearful of the consequences if he didn’t.
The train arrived at the depot at dusk. A mild spring dusk, with flowers and trees blooming all along his route to the east side of town. God, it was horrible to be pulled away from Washington at this moment, when the curtain was about to rise on the last act of the high drama of Johnson and the Radicals—the Senate trial of the chief executive on the eleven articles of impeachment. Never before in the history of the republic had there been an opportunity to witness the dethroning of a sitting president.
Still, that drama was remote, while this one, if you cared to call it a drama, was immediate, touching his life and livelihood. All the way across the mountainous darkness of West Virginia, he had tried to imagine other reasons for the summons besides the one he feared.
The sweet scents of Ohio springtime did little to mask the city’s noxious odors. Even here, in a quiet east-side district of fiercely steep streets and huge old houses, many decaying, the air smelled of the river, and the German breweries and slaughterhouses. Detraining at the depot, Dills had nearly choked on the odor of hogs and more hogs. A European traveler had called Cincinnati “a monster piggery,” and nicknamed it Porkopolis. In the Tribune, old Greeley hailed it as “the queen city of the West.” Which only confirmed that Greeley was unbalanced. When Mr. Dickens made his American tour in 1842, what could he possibly have found here that was worth seeing?
The hackney labored to the crest of a hill and turned into a circular cul-de-sac, where it stopped. Dominating the sullen sky between the cul-de-sac and the river was an immense Gothic Revival house, forbidding as a castle, which it resembled because of three adjoining octagonal towers on the river side. The rough stonework was dirtied by time and overgrown with untended ivy, much of it dead. Many of the ground-floor windows were planked over; others showed numerous breaks in small panes of stained glass.
Behind a rusting iron fence, the weedy yard sloped up to a recessed entrance. There Dills discerned a figure hovering in the shadows. Not the same damned caretaker after twenty-five years, he wondered, climbing out with his carpetbag. He paid the driver, adding a handsome tip with well-concealed regret.
“Come back for me in an hour and I’ll double that,” he said. It was outrageous to spend so much, but he was terrified by the thought of being isolated out here without transportation. He heard bird song in the distance, but near the great Gothic house not a bird warbled or flew. He couldn’t help thinking he was in a place of the dead.
“Right, sir,” the driver said. “Didn’t know anybody still lived in this old dump.” And away the hackney went down the hill, its side lamps dwindling and dimming, leaving him by the rusted fence in the lowering dark.
He heard the shuffling step of the old man coming down the walk. It was indeed the same caretaker, still fetching and doing for the resident of the house. He was crudely dressed, stooped, his age impossible to guess because he was albino, with red-tinged eyes and skin nearly as white as his hair.
His broken nails showed as he reached to open the gate. Rusty hinges squealed. From under a soiled cap, his red eyes watched the visitor as he pulled the gate wide. Dills stepped through, and then the caretaker slammed the gate again, a sound like a chord of wrong notes.
Halfway up the walk—roots and weeds had broken through the stairstep blocks, shattering them—Dills started violently when the caretaker spoke from behind him:
“She found you out.”
He felt frail and vulnerable then. His heart fluttered and raced. He tried to summon the resentment he’d felt during most of the long, dirty journey. He needed every bit of it to endure what was to come.
Her room was at the very top of the tallest octagonal to
wer. Dills reached it by struggling up a creaky stair and stepping through a doorway with the shape of a classic Gothic arch. He was out of breath and feeling more unclean every moment. At least there was some air stirring up here. He could feel it, damp and fetid, as he shuffled across the stone floor toward the figure seated in a huge high-backed carved chair.
The chair was the only piece of furniture aside from a broken spinning wheel lying on its side amid skeins of yarn that had long ago rotted. In bowls and saucers set around the floor, fat homemade candles burned, a dozen of them, relieving some of the gloom and enabling him to see the chair’s occupant. Behind her, two smashed-out windows afforded a commanding view of the Ohio River and the hilly dark blue shore of Kentucky. In the river, like boats on the Styx, barges moved slowly, their lanterns gleaming.
“I do not have a chair for you, Mr. Dills.” Her tone suggested it was punishment.
“That’s perfectly all right. I came as soon as I received your message.”
“I shouldn’t wonder. I shouldn’t wonder you came—to protect your ill-gotten stipend.”
She reached under the chair. He heard glass clink. Then something rattled. “You deceived me. Now and again my houseman fetches a local paper. He discovered this. You deceived me, Mr. Dills.”
“Relative to that, please let me say—”
“You said Elkanah was in Texas. You said he was a wealthy and respected cotton farmer. I have paid you, trusted you for years on the basis of such information. And this is your gratitude? All those letters concealing the truth?”
Blinking, feeling the frail heart in his breast racing faster, Dills dropped his carpetbag. “Might I see that?”
“You already know what it says.” Thick blue veins bulged from the back of the hand she extended. He took the paper. There, in the general news column on the front page, he saw a paragraph under the heading BIZARRE PENNSYLVANIA MURDER.
He scanned the paragraph until, without surprise, he came upon the name Elkanah Bent. He stopped reading and returned the paper with a trembling hand.
The woman held it a moment, then flung it away. Rationally, Dills knew he had little to fear from someone so old. And yet he was frightened.
It was partly the room—the candles in greasy pools of hot melted tallow—and partly the woman. Scarcely a hundred pounds, if that, and so ravaged by age and the unguessable emotions that had rioted in her sick mind all these years, she hardly looked human. She was more like a wax figure, a ghastly museum exhibit with a queer resemblance to her albino caretaker. She powdered her face, she powdered her hair, she powdered her hands, a thick layer of white dust. It formed a kind of crust beneath her livid old yellow eyes.
Time had worn away her eyebrows. The bony ridges pressed against her almost transparent skin, as if the skull sought a way into the light. Her hair, turned gray years ago, was whitened by the powder, which sifted down from her high-piled coiffure whenever she moved suddenly, as when she discarded the paper.
Far down on the river, a boat’s bell tolled. Dills’s attempt to summon resentment had altogether failed. The yellow eyes, unblinking, like the eyes of some armored lizard, reminded him of her mental condition. That he knew the history of nervous disorder running through her family did not make her any less intimidating. He wanted to flee.
“My son committed a hideous murder. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Dills lied. “I don’t know his connection with the victim. Probably an accidental choice.” What was the point of trying to explain the vendetta against Hazard and Main? Dills had never been able to explain it to himself in any reasonable terms.
He licked his parched lips. A breeze passed over twisted lead strips that had once held stained glass and fluttered the candles. Somewhere under his feet, Dills heard the scurry of rats.
“You told me Elkanah was in Texas. I have letter after letter—”
“Madam, I wanted to spare you the painful truth.”
Dry lips parted to reveal yellowed teeth. “You wanted to spare yourself loss of the stipend.”
“No, no, that was not—” Dills gave it up. The mad old eyes, inquisitor’s eyes, saw through his attempted deception. “Yes. I did.”
She sighed, seeming to grow even smaller inside her heavy gray-silver dress. Patches of green mold showed on the lace hem, much of which had crumbled from rot. The low bodice hung out from her emaciated, heavily powdered breastbone.
With a quiver of her lips and a lift of one hairless brow, she said, “That is perhaps your first honest statement of the evening. You have cruelly deceived me, Dills. It was a condition of the stipend that you watch over Elkanah with utmost care.”
The resentment burst out at last. “Which I did, until he made it impossible with his—” He choked back the word crazy. “His erratic behavior.”
“But it was a primary condition of our arrangement.”
“I would appreciate it if you would speak a little less unkindly,” he said, testy. “I responded to your telegraph message out of consideration for you, and—”
“Out of fear,” she spat. “Out of some imbecilic hope that you might keep the stipend.” He stepped back; her yellow teeth were fully visible, like an enraged dog’s. “Well, it’s gone. The news article said my poor Elkanah killed some wretched woman, but no one knows why, or where he might be found, because he disappeared years ago. You knew that.”
Somehow, though still frightened of her, Dills was experiencing a relief. Perhaps his nerves had been strained too far, could bear no more. “I did. I understand your anger.”
“I loved him. I loved my son. I loved my poor Elkanah. Even when he was hundreds of miles from me, even when he was grown, and I had no idea of what he looked like, how his voice might sound—” She passed a hand in front of her face. Her fingers were almost hidden by dirt-encrusted rings of silver and gold, some with stones missing. It was a curious brushing motion, as if she were bothered by a cobweb he couldn’t see. There were cobwebs in plenty elsewhere. All over the smashed spinning wheel, and in a gauzy weave under her chair.
“Well,” the woman said, less rancorously, “I am glad of the truth at last. My son did not prosper in Texas, then.”
“No. Never.”
“Where is he hiding, Dills?”
Ah, a chance to wound her. Forcefully, he said, “I have not the slightest idea.”
“How long have you not known?”
“Since shortly before the end of the war. He left the Union Army in disgrace.” She flung back against the tall chair. “He deserted.”
“Oh, God. My poor boy. My poor Elkanah.”
She groped beneath her chair again, stirring cobwebs, which became attached to her fingers and hand. She drew into the light an old green wine bottle and a fine lead-glass goblet with a crack and a patina of dirt so thick that the goblet looked translucent. Into the glass she splashed some dark fluid, a port or sherry, perhaps, brown as coffee. He smelled only the rancid odor of spoiled wine.
She sipped without offering him any. Not that he would have touched the filthy stuff. “I should like to retire, madam. It was an exhausting trip.”
The yellow eyes slipped across his face, and beyond. The dark brown fluid in the glass leaked from a corner of her mouth, running down her chin like a muddy river through snow. “You have no idea how I cared for him. How badly I wanted a decent life for him. All the more because he had such a terrible start.”
What was she saying? The eyes sought his, almost pitiable in their sudden plea for understanding. “You know about my family, Mr. Dills.”
“A little. By reputation only.”
“There is a strain of mental instability. It runs back many generations, and has spread widely.”
Even to the Executive Mansion, he thought.
“It tainted my father. After my mother’s death, when Heyward Starkwether began to pay court to me, my father grew jealous. I was his favorite child. Heyward proposed. When I told my father that I wanted to accept, it drove him to incredible
rage. He had been drinking heavily. He was very powerful physically—”
Dills felt he was about to peer into some buried place, a place where something had been hidden, putrefying, for decades. He was gripped, perversely fascinated. Somewhere the rats shrieked, and there was another, lower sound, as of prey caught and hurt.
“Allow me to guess the rest, madam. Marriage was by then a necessity? You were already carrying Starkwether’s child, later named Bent after the farm people who raised him. You revealed your condition to your father, and he beat you.”
A vacant smile. Her right hand lolled over the carved chair arm. The filthy goblet slipped, fell, broke. She paid no attention. “Ah—ah. If it were only that simple. My father did use force the night I told him I wanted to marry. The rest of your chronology is out of order.” He didn’t understand. “Later, I wanted to do away with the unborn child. My father in one of his rages said he would kill me if I did. I was too terrified of him to attempt it. Together—his was the hand forcing mine, you see—we summoned Starkwether and convinced him of his responsibility. His guilt, if you will. I suspect he carried it until he died, poor wretched man.”
Dills’s hair crawled. Light was shining into the putrefying burial place.
“Are you saving you deceived Heyward Starkwether, madam?”
“Yes.”
“My late client—Elkanah Bent’s patron and declared father—had no connection with the boy?”
“Heyward supposed he was Elkanah’s father. We convinced him of it.”
“But he was not?”
“No.”
“In other words, all those years, my client was coerced into helping and supporting—?”
“Not coerced, Mr. Dills. Once he was convinced that Elkanah was his child, he helped him gladly, as any father would.”
“Who was Bent’s father, madam?”
The yellow eyes, moist and mad, reflected the candles around the tower.
“Why, Mr. Dills”—she giggled, a hideous coquetry—“surely you know. I said he used physical force.”