by John Jakes
“I did too much for you,” Isabel screamed, charging at him, fists flying. She was slight; no match for him, flabby as he was. Stanley didn’t mean to hurl her away so hard. She struck her shoulder against an empty stall and cried out, then sat down. Bewildered, she gazed at her twisted skirt. She’d gotten manure all over it.
The young black groom dashed into the wide doorway and checked there, a silhouette against the sunlit mist. Stanley was startled by the strength of his own voice:
“Nothing wrong, Peter. Go about your work.”
“I was too good to you,” Isabel said, leaning her head against the stall and weeping. “Too good.”
Blinking, Stanley said, “Yes, I would have to agree, even though I don’t imagine it was intentional on your part. And when you were too good to me, you made a grave mistake, Isabel.” He smiled. “Please be out of the house in twenty-four hours or I’ll be forced to lock you out. I must excuse myself now. I’m thirsty.”
He marched away into the mist, leaving her to stare at the filth on her skirt.
65
RICHARD MORRIS HUNT DESIGNED the mansion. It occupied the entire block between Nineteenth and Twentieth on South State Street. To lure so fashionable an architect to Chicago had been a great feat. As with most everything else, Will Fenway found that overpaying by a third got him what he wanted.
The extravagance didn’t concern him. It was impossible to spend his money as fast as he made it. The Fenway factory had expanded three times, the firm was ten months behind with orders, and, late in ’68, Will’s sales director, LeGrand Villers, had added three more company travelers, based in London, Paris, and Berlin. Will was beginning to think there were more whorehouses in the world by far than decent Christian homes.
Will Fenway was already sixty-eight when he engaged Hunt. He knew he wouldn’t live more than a decade or so, and he wanted to enjoy himself. He asked Hunt to build him the largest, most ostentatious house possible. Mr. Hunt had studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and was the foremost apostle of French Second Empire architecture, considered by people of taste to be no mere revival of an old style, but the essence of modernity.
Hunt designed a granite castle of forty-seven rooms with mansard roofs on its three wings, and a spendthrift use of marble columns, marble floors, and marble mantels throughout. Will’s billiard room was large enough to hold a small cottage; Ashton’s ballroom would have accommodated three. Only one incident marred construction of the house. At the top of each mansard slope was a cast-iron cresting. Ashton one day discovered that Hunt had ordered these manufactured from his design by Hazard’s of Pittsburgh. She flew into a rage and sent a letter discharging Hunt. In reply, her husband received an angry telegram from the architect. Will was forced to leave the factory, where he usually worked a minimum of twelve hours Monday through Saturday, and jump on a train for the East. He begged for several hours to get Hunt to overlook the insulting letter.
The crisis passed, and the Fenways moved into the mansion early in the summer. They spent many pleasant hours discussing and selecting a name for the house. Every important residence had a name. He wanted to call it Château Willard; Willard was a miserable man’s name, but somehow it had an impressive ring when connected to a house. In choosing the name he suspected that he lacked taste, but he figured his money compensated for it, and people would therefore excuse his lapses, so he might as well go ahead with whatever pleased him. “Château Willard,” he declared.
Ashton rebelled. Instead of nestling sexlessly in his arms that night, she moved into her own three-room suite. She stayed four days and nights, until he came tapping at her door to apologize. She let him in on the condition that they modify the name to Château Villard, with the accent on the second syllable. He seemed relieved, and agreed.
The year 1869 brought a riot of prosperity to the owners of Château Villard. Will couldn’t believe the sums flowing in, or the number of Fenway uprights shipped out. A magnificent Fenway grand piano was already in the design stage, and there were orders in hand for the unbuilt instrument. Given all this, Ashton realized she was finally in a position to explore ways to revenge herself on her family. As a first step, she asked Will for a personal bank account. After some consultation with the Fenway Piano Company’s bookkeepers, he established it with an opening balance of two hundred thousand dollars. In February Ashton decided she’d pay a visit to South Carolina as soon as weather and her schedule permitted. She had no definite idea of how she would proceed against her brother and Orry’s widow; she merely wanted to search for possibilities.
The staff of Château Villard expanded from three persons to twelve, including two stable hands, during the first three months of what was to become the 1869 spending spree. Ashton bought paintings, sculpture, and books by the crate. A two-thousand-dollar red morocco set of the works of Dickens excited Will’s admiration—he touched and smelled the books reverently when they were delivered—but he remained an unpretentious man, and only read such things as Alger’s stories of plucky and enterprising young fellows who succeeded, or the coarse frontier humor of Petroleum B. Nasby, or nickel novels like Spitfire Saul, King of the Rustlers. Although Will had seen the reality of the West, he seemed fonder of the falsification of it.
Ashton tried to get acquainted with the occupants of the mansions above and below Château Villard. To the north lived Hiram Buttworthy, a harness millionaire, a Baptist, a man who kept a spittoon in every corner of every room and had a wife so ugly she looked like she belonged in one of his harnesses. Mrs. Buttworthy, a society leader, didn’t approve of the flamboyant Southerner who obviously had not married her husband for his youth, his looks, or his prospects for a long life.
To the south of Château Villard, apparently without a spouse, lived a suffragist named Sedgwick, whose outspoken views and tart tongue reminded Ashton of her sister—which was enough to engender permanent dislike at their first, and only, meeting. Ashton wasn’t discouraged by her inability to get along with her neighbors. The fault was theirs. Isolation from jealous inferiors, she had long ago decided, was one of the prices of great physical beauty.
Will bought a summer cottage at Long Branch, New Jersey. He bought it sight unseen. If the seaside resort suited President and Mrs. Grant, it was good enough for him. He bought a sixty-foot lake sailer, a splendid gleaming yacht with an auxiliary steam plant, which he anchored in a costly slip near the mouth of the Chicago River. Ashton was asked to name the yacht. She christened it Euterpe after finding the muse of music depicted in one of the seldom-opened books in their large library. Reading the book for nearly an hour made her cross and gave her a headache. She was thirty-three, but her interests had changed little since girlhood. She valued her appearance, and men, and power and money, and found everything else both extraneous and annoying.
Will’s money gained them certain entrées but not others. A choice table among the palm fronds in the Palmer House dining room was always available, no matter how many people were ahead of them. Yet older women of better background happily accepted Ashton’s donations to charities such as the Chicago Foundling Center but they politely ignored her expressions of interest in joining the menu committee for the annual dinner. Ashton’s application for membership in the Colonial Dames was denied.
Her husband had simpler aspirations. He found a convivial group of friends in his lodge, the International Order of Odd Fellows. He hated organizations such as the Knights of Labor and the Patrons of Husbandry, collectives that threatened the capitalist—that is, him.
Ashton’s planned visit to South Carolina was delayed by an inspection trip to the furnished cottage at the Jersey shore. She found the parlor walls decorated with gaudy chromos of the Rockies and the California coast. Will greatly admired the cheap art, and said this was his kind of place.
But they were too early for the summer season, so Ashton pouted and wheedled until he took her to New York, where they saw Bryant’s Minstrels, Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes, and Mr. Booth’s
production of Romeo and Juliet. Tickets for this last were in such demand, Will had to pay a scalper one hundred twenty-five dollars for each. Then he fell asleep in the second act, and snored.
Ashton bought three trunks of new clothes. City streets were in such deplorable shape, a lady’s skirt got soiled and water-stained within a few weeks of the first wearing. Ashton never bothered to have such garments cleaned; she threw them out. Occasionally, she saw them later on her servants, retrieved from the rag bin.
Will didn’t mind. He admired his wife’s opulent figure and loved to see her smartly dressed. She was welcome to all the cash he would have spent on a large wardrobe for himself. He got by on a few stiff white collars, two pairs of bright checked trousers, a favorite floral waistcoat, and a solid gold watch chain and enormous gold nugget cufflinks. In an assembly of these, and without a coat, he felt supremely fashionable. The hell with what anyone thought.
“I’m going to miss you,” Villers said, drawing his hand slowly between Ashton’s legs.
“I won’t be gone that long, darling. A week or two—”
“Forty-eight hours without this has gotten to be too much for me.”
She laughed, took his hand, pressed the palm against her left breast, and wiggled pleasurably.
LeGrand Villers was a vigorous man with a thick head of curly dark blond hair. A Northerner, he had once dealt cards for a living on the Mississippi boats, and although he wasn’t much in the looks department, he was extremely masculine and had a persuasive way about him. In the two years since he’d wandered into the Fenway offices seeking temporary work to pay some gambling debts, he had risen from supply room clerk to salesman to manager of the sales force, and had seduced Ashton along the way. Villers was unequivocally the best-endowed lover Ashton had ever known. In token of this, he was represented in her Oriental box by two buttons.
Ashton’s belly and thighs were splashed with sun spilling through a porthole above the bunk. Euterpe swayed gently with the lap of the river in the slip. The main stateroom had a warm, private feel this June morning. The master and the mate never sobered up and came aboard until past noon, which made the yacht an ideal place of assignation.
“Well, I admit you drive me crazy too, LeGrand.” Powell had been handsomer, but not quite as virile.
“And you really don’t think Will knows about us after all these months?”
“He knows I have lovers, though we don’t discuss it. He understands that I’m a young woman with, ah, needs.”
“One of which seems to be a need to go to Carolina. I can’t imagine why. I visited Georgia once. Just a lot of darkies and air-headed girls and mush-mouthed whelps who mumble ‘yes, sir’ while thinking up ways to fleece you.”
“LeGrand, I ought to throw you out of my bed for that. I’m a Southerner.” She’d just demonstrated it with a heavy dose of the accent she had gradually suppressed during her years of residence in the North. She had gotten used to everything in the North but the howling white storms of the Chicago winter, which must be some kind of curse God had placed on Yankees.
“I want to see my family,” she added. Her eyes were like blue-black agates. “A friendly visit.”
“Friendly?” Villers toyed with her again. “I’ve never heard you say anything friendly about those people.”
She arranged her unbound hair on each shoulder and eyed the ticking clock nearby. Only a quarter to eleven. Fine.
“Why, I’ve changed, LeGrand. People do change.”
He snickered. “Learned to cover up how much you hate ’em, is that what you mean?”
Ashton stroked his blocky jaw. “I knew I liked you for something besides what’s in your trousers. Now don’t you tell my secret. Come on over here and do your duty.”
A dockhand passing on the pier five minutes later noticed Euterpe showing a slight roll in the water, which was unusual for such a calm day.
“The hack is here to take you to the depot, madam.”
“Load the luggage, Ramsey.”
The butler bowed and retired. Despite his clipped British speech—the reason Will had chosen him over other applicants—Ashton considered him just another slave. He was chained by wages instead of shackles, but that didn’t entitle him to any better treatment. Part of the joy of servants, and of the vanished peculiar institution, was having other human beings in fear of your every word.
Will strolled out of the billiard room. The gold nugget links were so large his cuffs sagged. Although he’d aged, he looked much healthier and sprier than he had when Ashton met him in Santa Fe. Success sat well on him.
His lively blue eyes admired his wife a moment. Then he patted her cheek, as if she were a favorite cat.
“Behave yourself.”
Ashton felt a little jolt. She saw nothing but warmth in his glance, but his remark reminded her of his warning after she shot the señora’s brother-in-law without good cause. No one but Will could inspire the same little thrill of fear she enjoyed inspiring in others.
“Yes, sweetheart. Always,” she said.
She registered at the Mills House as Mrs. W. P. Fenway, Chicago. The staff naturally took notice of an attractive woman traveling alone with eleven large pieces of luggage. But no one got a very clear look at her features; she was heavily veiled. There was nothing to reveal that she was a Main.
Ashton deplored the condition of lovely Charleston, which still showed many ravages of war. Darkies lounged everywhere with an air of impertinence that would have gotten them horse-whipped when she was a child. There were still some Yankees in blue uniforms to be seen.
She hired a closed carriage for a tour. The Battery brought back memories of the exciting weeks when Sumter lay besieged. She stood by the harbor while her driver waited at a discreet distance. She looked seaward, a splendid figure of a woman with her waist whaleboned to sixteen inches. She wore velvet the color of fine Burgundy, yards and yards of it in her full flaring skirt with bustle. It was hellishly hot, but the effect was worth it. Strollers enjoying the summer air wondered about the expensively dressed, rather melancholy woman gazing across the water to the Atlantic. Were her thoughts romantic? Was she sweetly musing over some lost love?
I hate you, Billy Hazard. Everything might have been different if you’d loved me instead of my prissy little sister.
Ashton blamed not only Billy but also Orry, Cooper, and Madeline for her exile and her ghastly months of whoredom—and never mind that Lamar Powell had enchanted her with his plans for a new Confederacy of which she was to be first lady. As she considered all she’d lost because of the self-righteous behavior of her own family, she felt the old hatred renew itself. She sniffed and dabbed her eyes dry with her glove and returned to the carriage, ordering the driver to proceed slowly along East Bay.
There she surveyed the house where she’d lived with poor Huntoon. She felt no emotion except contempt.
On narrow Tradd Street, passing the gate of Cooper’s residence, she recoiled against the carriage cushions as a woman came out. Cooper’s plain-as-bread wife, older but still sharp-nosed and flat-bosomed. Ashton averted her face despite the veil. She called for the driver to go faster. There wasn’t a shred of doubt—she hated them all.
During the next few days she learned some surprising things. For one, Orry had never made it home from the war. After ordering Ashton and Huntoon out of Richmond for their role in the Powell conspiracy, he’d gone on duty on the Petersburg lines, where some Yankee had shot him.
Ashton briefly examined her reactions to that. She felt neither sorrow nor remorse, only more anger at her gaunt one-armed brother. His death cheated her of an important opportunity for reprisal, and she didn’t like it.
Madeline was living alone, prosperous but despised because of her scalawag ways. Ashton heard about the Klan outrage at Mont Royal and the new house under construction, and then, from a tipsy journalist with whom she flirted, she learned something else which truly excited her. Everyone in town knew it. Mont Royal was heavily mortgaged.
“A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Fenway,” said Leverett Dawkins, enthroned in his special office chair. “How might the Palmetto Bank be of service this morning?”
Ashton sat with perfect posture on the edge of his visitor’s chair. The careful way she drew her shoulders back emphasized the line of her full bosom, something the banker did not miss. She watched his eyes slide upward to her face—the poor fool obviously thought his attention had gone undetected—and she knew she had the advantage. She was familiar with Dawkins’s name but she had never met him; therefore he would never associate her with the Main family.
Outwardly composed but inwardly straining, she said, “I want to inquire about property in the district. I have old family ties in South Carolina. I treasure the Charleston area and I would like to have a home here.”
“I see. Go on, please.”
“When I was driving on the Ashley River road the day before yesterday, I saw a lovely plantation that captured my heart. I’ve been back twice since then to observe it, and my feeling remains the same. I hoped you would be able to tell me something about the property.”
“To which plantation do you refer, ma’am?”
“I was told the name of it is Mont Royal.”
“Ah, the Main plantation,” he said, leaning back. “The owner is Mr. Cooper Main of this city.”
Hearing her brother’s name startled and confused Ashton. Fortunately her heavy black veil hid her momentary disarray. She recovered, saying smoothly, “I thought a woman controlled the place—”
“You’re referring to the owner’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Orry Main.” Ashton noted a certain distaste when he said that. “Yes. She lives there by arrangement with Mr. Main. She’s a sort of resident manager, responsible for the operation of Mont Royal. But Mr. Main holds the title.”
Carefully: “Might the plantation be available for sale?”