Wild Wind Westward

by Vanessa Royall

  “Beggin’ yer pardon, but no you can’t.”

  “What?”

  “Rockefeller’s gone and signed an agreement with Pennsy Road. He agrees to ship only with them, when he’s ready to ship, and they give him a freight rebate for the business.”

  Gustav slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. The Pennsy was the only road into this backwater, and this was where the oil was. That young son of a horse thief had the deal all locked up, nailed down, shut tight, and he wasn’t even in business yet. He must have used what meager funds he had in bargaining for the leases and the railroad agreement. Well, there was one end of the enterprise he could not have had the cash to secure.

  “What is the rush?” Kristin asked, when Gustav came dashing into the inn.

  “We’re going back to Cleveland right away,” he told her. “I’m going to buy that piece of land along the dock for my refinery, cash on the barrelhead, as they say in these regions. If I control the refinery, I control the oil business. Simple as that.”

  The train clattered back into Cleveland, and a buggy bounced them over to a waterfront shanty, on which a sign read:

  CLEM A. TUGWELL

  LOTS, HOMES, AND HOMESTEADS

  Clem, a massive man liberally spattered with tobacco juice and gravy stains, was very helpful. He judged Kristin and saw class; he measured Gustav and saw money. Fast, easy money. He also saw that Gustav was in a hurry. Best kind of person to sell to.

  “That big stretch of land by the docks, eh? What you want it for?”

  “I’m going to put up an oil refinery,” declared Gustav proudly.

  “Is that right? Is that right? Can’t put ’er there, though.”

  “I can’t? Why not? Is there some kind of zoning restriction? Perhaps we could get it changed, or work our way around it. That place is absolutely perfect for a refinery. We could load the product and ship it right out…”

  “Yeah, I know,” agreed Clem, “but I can’t let you have it. Not for five years, anyway.”

  “Five years!” wailed Gustav. “In five years the oil business will have advanced to a point we cannot even dream! But why can’t I…?”

  “Because just last month I sold an option to buy that land. It’s tied up until then, unless you can persuade the man to relinquish his option.”

  “That’s it,” brightened Gustav. “That’s what I’ll do! Where can I find him?”

  “In the produce warehouse, no more’n half a mile from here. Young guy, but sharp. Rockefeller’s his name. John D.”

  “Turn your head slightly more to the right, Mrs. Rolfson,” said Percy Phipps, sighting with his brush. “There. The light strikes just so…Now, lift your chin a little, no, that’s too much, no, yes, yes!”

  Delighted, he bent to his canvas again.

  “How did you find the western regions?” asked Isabel Van Santen.

  Kristin had come to sit for Phipps in the Van Santen mansion on Fifth Avenue. It was a solid, blocky palace of white marble, with massive portico, a turret, and a row of bleak dormers upthrusting from the slate roof. But while the façade was forbidding, the large rooms within were cheered by bright rugs, large, comfortable furniture, and sunlight pouring through the tall windows and skylights.

  “It is a raw country, but very vibrant. I have never seen anything like it. You would think a race with a country like this would have too much work to do to fight”

  “Oh, that awful war. I dread to hear it mentioned, even obliquely,” said Isabel, stirring sugar into her cup of tea. It was mid-June now. Vicksburg had fallen to General Grant but the Confederacy still held Richmond, and the papers were full of news that General Robert E. Lee was on the move into the Shenandoah Valley. And that was the road to Pennsylvania!

  Where Eric said he would be!

  Kristin did not want to think of the war. Too many other things were on her mind. Since their return to New York from Cleveland, Gustav had hired men to be with her at all times. They drove her carriage; they waited outside the stores in which she shopped; one of them waited now outside the Van Santen house. It was maddening.

  “Hector,” said Isabel brightly, introducing a new subject, “is very curious to know how your husband fared in his dealings with Rockefeller.”

  Kristin could not hold back a short, derisory laugh.

  “Please now, Mrs. Rolfson, lift the chin. That’s it. How can I make you famous if you do not keep your chin up?”

  “Famous? I do not wish to be famous.”

  The painter merely smiled.

  “Percy has plans for you, my dear,” Isabel said. “Now, why the laugh a moment ago?”

  By now the two women were friends and had talked several times, at length, about their respective situations. Isabel was deeply devoted to her husband, Hector, an affection he reciprocated. As a woman in love she could tell that Kristin was not happy with Gustav, but she did not yet know the entire story. She knew there was another man somewhere, far more important to Kristin than Gustav would ever be. And she knew that Kristin was exceedingly watchful and astute. Lately, too, she had grown quite pale of complexion, in spite of the approaching summer, and Isabel thought something might have occurred during the western trip to account for her new friend’s malaise.

  “My husband is very anxious just now. I believe he has met a nemesis in Cleveland. He struck a deal there, he says. In my own appraisal I think it is more accurate to say that he was struck by a deal.”

  She herself had read the letters of agreement drawn up and signed by Gustav and young Rockefeller.

  “You seem to know quite a lot about business,” Isabel commented. “Me, I am such a goose in those things.”

  “I had a hard early lesson in Norway,” Kristin replied. “There my husband and his father maneuvered the citizens of my village out of their rightful title to lands that might have made them rich.”

  “And in Cleveland?” Isabel prompted.

  “In Cleveland there is a petard. And who shall be hoist upon it in the end, Rockefeller or Gustav, is yet a question.”

  “But I sense beneath your words a feeling that it is your husband who shall be hoist one day.”

  Kristin nodded, but said no more. That cold icy snake of a produce clerk in Cleveland possessed mind and jaw like steel traps, and his appetite was insatiable. Perhaps, had Gustav not been so angered at Rockefeller’s skill, the business prescience that had led Rockefeller to acquire the basic step-by-step elements to an enterprise before he had the enterprise itself, perhaps if Gustav had not been so outflanked, he would not have signed the letters of agreement.

  Those letters were dangerous.

  For Gustav had agreed to loan Rockefeller millions—the millions loaned to Gustav by Lord Anthony Soames, the collateral for which was Lesja, and the minerals of the Rauma Range in Norway. In her mind Kristin imagined a house of gigantic cards, and Gustav within that house. If a wind should shiver it, if a storm should come, if the very earth should quiver and quake, ah, then…

  Who knew the future?

  Gustav thought he did. “I have the limp-handed little Godster now,” Gustav had told her, studying drafts of the agreements in their Cleveland hotel. “The land on which the refinery stands will be his, but I shall build the refinery and it will be mine. I have learned from my experience with your unhappy neighbors in Norway that it is not the land itself that matters, but the valuables in it or on it. According to this agreement if he is unable to repay my loan in its entirety by 1868, I give him a two-year extension, but automatically the land is mine. If he is able to repay prior to 1868, and that’s only five years away, title to the refinery goes to him.”

  “Do you think you ought to agree to something as indefinite as that?” Kristin had asked.

  “What do you know about it? There is no way in the world that oil, in five years time, will afford that much profit. Ten years, yes. Fifteen years, certainly. But, no, the weak-spined—albeit arrogant—little clerk must leaven greed with a hard knowledge of how the wor
ld works.”

  Kristin said no more, that night. In her judgment John D. Rockefeller needed no instruction in how the world worked.

  The refinery was to be Gustav’s beachhead in the oil industry, the sine qua non of the entire process, from which he would expand and by which he would eventually control everything done with oil and its by-products. After this Cleveland refinery—which would be built with Soames’s money—there would be more, and more. In due course. One step at a time, as the Americans said.

  But, upon their return to New York—at which time they moved into an apartment in the luxurious, modern Federal Hotel—Gustav took time to skim over business news that had emerged during his western trip. The headlines moved him to acute mental anguish.

  SHIPOWNERS SEE MOVE TO OIL:

  FUEL OF FUTURE ALREADY

  HERE FOR USE

  The news story accompanying the headline was long and enthusiastic, mentioning that, in only a few years, whale oil as lamp fuel had dropped eighty-eight percent in sales, and other areas in which animal fats had served as fuel likewise had registered sharp declines. Oil, “black gold,” was the lodestone of a future undreamed.

  “I am greatly fatigued,” he told Kristin. “You may retire without me. I shall see you in the morning.”

  “As you wish, husband,” Kristin had replied. Something had happened to her, and she did not think she would be able to bear his touch, ever again.

  Now, seated in Isabel Van Santen’s house, posing for Percy Phipps, she wondered how to proceed.

  “You seem unusually pensive today,” Isabel was saying.

  Percy Phipps had noticed the same thing: a mood of introspection in his subject more pronounced than he had sensed during previous sittings. Her color was also weak. This was not the day to proceed further.

  “I think we shall call it quits for now,” he suggested gently, putting down his palette.

  Kristin did not protest.

  When the little painter had departed, Isabel poured tea for her friend, and bade her rest on the sitting room couch.

  “Is something troubling you? That I can help with?”

  Kristin did not say anything for many minutes, just sipped her sweet tea and looked out at the garden in back of the Van San ten house.

  “I am pregnant,” she said quietly.

  Isabel did not say anything for a moment, trying to read Kristin’s mood, expression. It seemed that Kristin was not unhappy with her condition, nor did she appear to be entirely content with it. Perhaps this eventuality had not been desired, or planned.

  “This sort of thing does happen,” she said, brightly, “and I trust you are both pleased.”

  “Gustav doesn’t know about it yet.”

  Isabel pursed her lips, thinking. Yes, there was something amiss here. She guessed, but waited for Kristin to tell her.

  “The baby isn’t Gustav’s.”

  Isabel made a further surmise. “The man you were telling me about?”

  Convinced of Isabel’s sympathy and discretion, Kristin let her story pour out. The agony of parting with Eric in Norway. The empty years intervening. The passionate reunion here in New York. And now—

  “And now,” Isabel finished, “you’re carrying his child, and Gustav doesn’t know it. What does Eric think?”

  “Eric doesn’t know it, either.”

  She told about that, too: the awful scene in front of the Madison Hotel, and Eric having to flee. “He has not been able to come back, or even send a message. I hope he is all right. In any case, I don’t know where he is.”

  Isabel got up from her chair, came over, and sat down next to Kristin, patting her hand. “Come, now, this isn’t as complicated as it might seem,” she said soothingly, thinking that it was certainly complicated enough. “First tell me, is there any chance Gustav will think the child is his own?”

  “By the time the baby is born, I hope to be far from Gustav.”

  “But let us say that things do not develop as you wish. Such is sometimes the way things go in life.”

  Kristin smiled. Isabel had spoken the truth. “It is possible my husband will not guess, unless he remembers and counts days. Lately he has been extremely preoccupied with business. I only wish…”

  “Wish what?”

  “That there were some way I could get in touch with Eric.”

  “Have no fear,” cried Isabel, warming to the challenge. “You just leave it to me.”

  “Why? What will you do?”

  “On my own, I shall engage the Pinkerton detective agency. I shall tell them I wish to trace a man for reasons of my own. The Pinkertons are the best in the business, and if I manage the affair, there is no need for Gustav ever to know.”

  “What about Hector?”

  “If Hector discovers what I am about, I shall tell him the truth. Or part of it. I shall say you must find someone from your homeland, as you have a message for him. I am helping you do it, since, being pregnant, you have neither the time nor the energy.”

  She smiled, delighted with her inventiveness. Her lovely red hair caught the sun, showing russet and gold. She was a beautiful woman, and also a good one.

  “I am lucky to have found you, Isabel.”

  “Luck had nothing to do with it. Put your faith in the stars. Now, you must tell me everything about Eric: his appearance, his habits, his proclivities. Everything. So I can pass that information along to the Pinkertons.”

  Summer came, and dragged along. Percy Phipps worked on Kristin’s portrait, and completed it early in July. Kristin told Gustav she was expecting a baby—she did not say his baby—and he was ecstatic. “A future prince,” he raved, “someone to train for ascendancy, exactly as my father trained me!” Good Lord, Kristin thought. And the war, like the summer, dragged on as well.

  In early July the newspapers were filled with accounts of a great battle that had taken place at a small Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg. Studying the maps printed in the papers, Kristin noted how near Gettysburg was to Harrisburg, the city Eric had intended to go to, and she felt a hot ball of fear form deep within her, curling where the baby grew. The battle, by all reports, had been horror, and mayhem, and death triumphant. The South had lost the battle, but Lee’s army, although badly savaged, had managed to escape intact.

  And that meant the war would go on.

  One hot afternoon in late July, Isabel called upon Kristin at the Rolfson apartment.

  “Gustav is not in?”

  “No, he has gone down to Philadelphia for a few days, to discuss some dreadful banking affair. He has left me with the usual watchdogs, however. What is it?”

  Isabel appeared very intense. “I have come with a man I think you should meet,” she said. “He is outside in the coach. Shall I call him up?”

  Eric! thought Kristin, her heart pounding with joy.

  But the man who entered the room was not Eric. Isabel introduced him as one Padraic O’Keefe, Pinkerton agent. A short, powerfully built man with reddish hair and a broad reddish face, he came right to the point.

  “You the one wanted a report on a Gunnarson, Eric?”

  Kristin nodded, not trusting her voice.

  “Well, here goes. Subject left New York on April twenty-eighth of this year, after enlisting in the twenty-seventh regiment of the New York Regulars. He signed on as a substitute for a Mr. Robert Lapin, which indicates that Gunnarson either likes to fight a lot, or that he needed money badly. And which, in my opinion, indicates that young Lapin prefers others to fight battles for him. But that’s beside the point. Gunnarson departed from New York and, with the detachment of trainees, took his military instruction at Fort Belvoir, in Maryland. He was under the command of Colonel Scott Randolph, of Boston. Gunnarson did extraordinarily well in training, by the way. He was designated an officer, second lieutenant, and was also able to win citizenship, under a rule whereby officers, upon appointment, must also pass citizenship hearings. Were you aware that Gunnarson had not been a citizen of the United States?”
>
  Kristin shook her head briefly, as if the matter were of no import. But inwardly she thrilled. The killing of Subsheriff Johanson in Lesja had always stood in the way of Eric’s chances for legitimacy in America. Now that obstacle was cleared. The future looked brighter by the minute, even if Eric had to spend time in the Union army.

  “Gunnarson spent six weeks in Maryland,” Paddy O’Keefe went on, studying his notes, “and was then assigned as a company commander with the Army of the Potomac, which was, at the time of the big battle, under the command of General Meade…”

  “What big battle?” Isabel asked.

  “I’m getting to that. Randolph, and with him Gunnarson, moved west with the Army of the Potomac, shadowing the movement of General Robert E. Lee, who shifted northward into Pennsylvania during the latter weeks of June…”

  The child stirred within Kristin’s belly, and she felt momentarily nauseous. It passed.

  “…No one knew at first how large an army Lee commanded, but by June twenty-seventh the Union knew it was in for a big showdown. Jeb Stuart was there, and Ewell, and Jubal Early, too. It was not a foray; it was going to be a wingding, and everybody knew it by then…”

  “Gettysburg,” said Isabel, in a hollow voice.

  “Gettysburg,” corroborated O’Keefe, with a frown and a nod, “and that got around to starting up on July first.” He glanced at both of the women. The red-haired one who had hired him did not seem as intensely concerned about Gunnarson as did the blonde. The blonde was obviously with child, early on, true, but showing. Could Gunnarson be her husband? Hardly seemed likely. Somebody who had to hire on as a draft substitute would not live in a place like this. Well, they were paying him to tell them what he had learned, and so he would.

  “On the evening of July second,” he said, “the forces of Confederate General Early broke the Union line at Cemetery Ridge. The battle went on for a long time. Early almost won, but his reinforcements didn’t appear—”

  “Not to be impertinent, Mr. O’Keefe,” Kristin said, “but what does this have to do with—”

  “With Eric Gunnarson? Everything. I will now read you the notes of my interview with Colonel Scott Randolph, who told me what he knows when I interviewed him in the federal hospital in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was Gunnarson’s commander, as you know.”