Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  Bierce waved me over to them.

  “Listen to this,” he said to me. “About Beau McNair,” he said to Lillie Coit.

  “He isn’t Nat’s son,” she said. She had a lisping way of talking, with an earnest set to her round face. “I was a sweet young thing myself at the time and didn’t pay much attention. I’m sure Carrie was carrying child when she married Nat. He adopted Beau.”

  “If he was not the father, who was?” I asked. Jimmy Fairleigh had told me this, and I did not see what it could have to do with the Morton Street slashings.

  She shrugged. “Old mysteries!”

  “So she bore Beau in the City?” Bierce said.

  “Mammy Pleasant would know.”

  “Mammy Pleasant!”

  “I think that woman had to do with just about every birth on Rincon Hill or South Park at that time,” Lillie Coit said. “I’d bet a dollar she midwifed Carrie.”

  Mammy Pleasant was a quadroon woman, very light complected, who had worked for many of the “instant aristocrats” of the City, recruiting colored servants for them, who, it was rumored, then became her informants in a blackmail scheme. She had been a procuress and the proprietor of notorious houses of assignation. She was also rumored to deal with unwanted children, and to supply children to couples who were barren. Mammy Pleasant was often to be seen about the City, a tall, upright figure in black with gold hoop earrings and a big bonnet or a black straw hat tied on her head with a scarf. She was reputed to be rich.

  I had the sense of the Morton Street murders swelling and expanding to involve the whole City of San Francisco.

  Bierce and Lillie Coit discussed when Bierce would next visit St. Helena, and I moved out of hearing range again. Then Bierce was assisting Lillie onto her horse. She bade him farewell and walked the bay over toward me, bending down.

  “Brosey says you were a firefighter.”

  “Up until last year,” I said.

  “What company?”

  I told her.

  “A fine outfit! I’d be pleased if you’d come visit me at Larkmead.” It was an invitation. She raised her eyebrows interrogatively.

  “Well, I—” I was shocked to the core. I focused on the Knickerbocker #5 pin on her bosom.

  Lillie Coit laughed, waved her riding crop at Bierce, and the bay trotted out of the glade.

  Bierce and I walked back down the trail together.

  “Did she invite you to Larkmead?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “She takes what she likes from life,” he said. “I admire that woman.”

  “I saw that you do.”

  “When falling into a woman’s arms be sure not to fall into her hands,” he said.

  I was still shocked at the frankness of Lillie Coit’s invitation.

  “She is a true aristocrat from an old Southern family, not one of our instant dukes or duchesses,” he went on. “Nor is she one of the female slaves who enslave their masters. She is one of the few women I know who transcends her gender.”

  Descending the trail to the house it was as though, stride by stride, Bierce’s face returned to its usual coldness, the failings and demands of the female gender the subject. He indicated the steeple of the church, visible through the treetops, with his stick.

  “The femininnies will bore themselves to insensibility every Sunday morning on the chance of getting into the ‘Upper House’ for eternity,” he said.

  “My mother likes the sociability,” I said. “She sees her friends and has a chat with the priest.”

  “The church is the warden of the institution of marriage, in which the monogamous female seeks to imprison the polygamous male,” Bierce went on, pompously.

  I was afraid he was going to confide in me the unhappiness of his own marriage, but he was no more able to reveal his personal problems than he was to play catch with his sons.

  “Throughout her marriage the bride continues to demand of her captive husband the same ardor he was able to summon up during the days of their courtship,” he said, slashing his stick at the weeds along the path. “She will insist on the childish inanities that were the language of their betrothal. But her lover died on the wedding night.”

  Bierce was lecturing on the defects of marriage and the female nature at a moment when I considered Amelia Brittain the brightest star of her sex, and her gender itself the glory of creation.

  The churchgoers were already at home, and dinner was presently served. Today the argument was over the Elite Directory of San Francisco, a social listing in which the names of Mr. and Mrs. Bierce appeared. Bierce was contemptuous of such a list, but Mrs. Day insisted that he and Mollie Bierce take advantage of their social prominence.

  Bierce had more to say on the subject of gender and institutions on the train and ferry back to San Francisco.

  And he said, “I know I am a bitter man, Tom. And I know I shock you. What is there to blame? The fact that I saw too much of the nature of man in a war that had no meaning, only a resolution, and men I helped to slaughter were as good and as bad as men who were slaughtered at my side? It has affected my nature, I know. I will never be a happy man. I can only hope to be an effective one.”

  “You know you are that,” I said.

  “That remains to be seen,” Bierce said.

  12.

  ROPE, n. – An obsolescent appliance for reminding assassins that they too are mortal.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  Monday I was turned away from 913 Taylor Street again, after standing on the porch outside the closed door feeling snubbed and foolish. This time I wrote Amelia a note that I had been told twice now that she was not at home, giving the day and hour. And I said I must know about her “shadow.”

  By Tuesday it had been over a week without another playing card murder, whose continuation was so grimly suggested by the progression of the suit of spades. It was as though the counterfeit murder of Mrs. Hamon, like a backfire, had halted the main conflagration.

  Bierce and I met with Sgt. Nix in a saloon up Kearny Street from police headquarters at Old City Hall, in a pleasant stench of beer, with the cold food layout on the bar, iron-legged chairs grating on the brick floor, and the ubiquitous sign in front advertising PRETTY WAITER GIRLS, although there were no pretty waiter girls in evidence at this time of day.

  “Jennings was in Sacramento on Wednesday‌—‌that’s the day the house was burned,” Nix said, leaning on the table.

  “But he was surely in town the night of the murder. He and his wife live on Jones Street. He belongs to the Pacific Club. A State Senator is pretty big game for the Captain to lock horns with.”

  Bierce sat with his fingers knitted together looking at Nix down his nose. “But Captain Pusey has something to go on.”

  “Maybe,” Nix said. “He don’t just show his cards around the table.”

  “Specific information,” Bierce said. “All I have so far are implications and intimations, and a personal conviction.”

  This didn’t take us any further toward the identity of the Slasher. Bierce’s concentration on Jennings and the Railroad galled me.

  Nix said, “There was a lawyer in Tulare who collected evidence for the Mussel Slough farmers. Jennings threw it all out of court, and something shut this lawyer up. Ran him out of the district.”

  “I think the man Tom saw in Santa Cruz was Klosters,” Bierce said.

  “Might be the captain has a photograph of this Klosters,” Nix said.

  “I’ve wired the editor of the Virginia Sentinel offering him two hundred dollars for the tintype of the Spades he told Tom about,” Bierce said. “Tom is writing a piece recalling Mussel Slough,” he added. “There will be a response.”

  “From the Railroad, you mean?” Sgt. Nix said. “If they even bother.”

  “Yes,” Bierce said sourly. “So far they are as intact as the Prelapsarian apple.”

  Bierce had written in Tattle, responding to a letter from a reader:

  To P.D.‌—‌In assumin
g that we have abandoned the “fight against the railroad people” you are in error. In the natural course of comment‌—‌verbal and graphic‌—‌upon public matters, we have often found occasion to censure the piratical methods of the Railrogues, and on similar occasions shall do so again, as you will presently observe.

  For instance, our Mr. Huntington has remarked that if the Railroad’s profits continue to decline, he will have to resort to reducing wages. He is the largest employer in the state, and if Mr. Huntington is not permitted to earn two millions a year on an original investment of a suspender button and a postage stamp, no mechanic shall earn more than a dollar a day if he can help it.

  Mr. Huntington has announced himself opposed to politics. In the purity of his motives, as compared to Mr. £eland $tanford’s, he will turn the offices at Fourth and Townsend into a Sunday School and appoint the faithful Aaron Jennings chaplain of both branches of the State Legislature. If we rightly understand him, Mr. Huntington, whose claim it is that “every man has his price,” promises to renounce the sinful practice of paying money to the legislators, and substitute the saintly habit of taking up a collection, in which operation we recommend that he consult the most successful operator in that field, the Reverend Stottlemyer of the Washington Street Church.

  We will have more to say of the senator from Southern Pacific presently. There is the matter of an arson in Santa Cruz that destroyed the papers of former Circuit Court Judge Hiram Hamon, which were concerned with corruption in the judiciary in general and the purchase of then Judge Jennings in particular, and with the murder in Morton Street of Judge Hamon’s widow, which, as we have written, was ineptly arranged to seem to be the third of the “placing card” murders.

  The column included some of his usual targets, dogs as “leakers, reekers, smilers and defilers,” the Spring Valley Water Company as “the hydrants of Infamy, the springs of felony,” and reflections on the politics of the Hawaiian Islands: “This bald-faced land-grab by mizzle-spouting missionaries and sugar landlords.”

  I was proud that Bierce had run my piece on Mussel Slough on the page opposite Tattle:

  During the ‘70s the Railroad advertised in the East and Midwest for farmers to buy and settle Railroad-grant lands in the San Joaquin Valley. Thousands of farmers came on the Railroad’s promise to sell them their land at $2.50 to $5.00 per acre.

  The Railroad laid out the towns of Goshen, Tulare, Tipton and Hanford in the Tulare Basin, which came to be known as Starvation Valley from the farmers’ struggle to make a living there.

  In 1877, when the lands were prospering, the Railroad broke its promise. Instead of being reconveyed to the settlers at the low figures, lands that had already been settled would be sold to the highest bidders at prices ranging from $25 to $40 per acre.

  The farmers sued but lost in several cases in San Francisco Circuit Court, presided over by Judge (now Senator) Aaron Jennings.

  The Railroad began foreclosures on farmers who would not pay the higher price, and sent to Hanford two armed men, who had been offered free farms if they could wrest them from the settlers. These men, named Hartt and Crow, in their capacity as gunmen arrived in a buggy laden with firearms. They were met by a dozen armed farmers led by James Harris, who sought to disarm the strangers. Crow discharged his shotgun into Harris’s face, and shot six other farmers. Hartt was killed in the first exchange, and Crow escaped briefly, to be shot down as he was taking aim at another farmer.

  The Railroad telegraph was the only means for the news of the gun battle to be disseminated, and the Railroad shut down the line after an announcement of an “armed insurrection.” The public thus knew nothing of the farmers’ side of the dispute. The embattled farmers were taken into custody by Sheriffs deputies commanded by a Railroad employee named Elza Klosters, and were brought to trial in Circuit Court in San Francisco under Judge Jennings. Evidence favorable to their cause was thrown out of court. They were found guilty of resisting officers of the law in performance of their duties and sentenced to prison terms.

  Information supporting the cause of the settlers has over the years become available to the public, and facts of the Mussel Slough Tragedy and the trial of the farmers may have furnished the motive for the murder last week of Judge Hamon’s widow, and the arson that burned her Santa Cruz bungalow, including her husband’s papers.

  This time Bierce made only one comment, warning me on the selection of words, in particular Hartt and Crow’s “capacity” as gunmen. “Capacity is receptive,” he said. “Ability is potential. A sponge has a capacity for water; a hand, the ability to squeeze it out.”

  My next assignment was to gather material for a piece on Senator Jennings.

  Seated in the parlor of Mrs. Johnson’s house, Annie Dunker clasped her hands with the tips of her fingers beneath her chin and rocked.

  “He’s a very nice young man, Tommy,” she said. “He takes her to the opera and sends her things. He sends her flowers! The other girls are jealous because Rachel is treated so special.”

  “I wondered if he beat her or hurt her, or anything like that‌—‌when he’s with her.”

  “There’s nothing like that my cousin knows about. Tommy.”

  I had the blunt feeling that this whole line of investigation had been ill-conceived.

  “It just seems funny he don’t‌—‌set her up in her own place!” Annie said. “The way rich men will do sometimes. Why, they will even marry some of the girls. Isn’t he awful rich? It just seems like he wants her in the house there. That’s the only thing seems funny about it. He is very nice-spoken, my cousin says.”

  “Nothing wrong with him—” I gestured.

  “Oh, him! No!”

  “Did anybody know of someone that had that trouble I asked you about?”

  “I mentioned it to a couple of girls, but they hadn’t heard anything like that.”

  And that was all I was to learn about Beau McNair or the mister without a dingle from Annie Dunker.

  I had discovered that she was proud of being a parlorhouse girl. She had said of whoring that it was better than going blind in a sweatshop sewing, or twenty hours a day as a kitchen drudge or housemaid, with the old man and his sons laying for you in the hallways.

  Except for Slashers laying for you.

  Mammy Pleasant lived in the Octavia Street mansion belonging to the financier Thomas Bell, whom she had furnished with a wife from her stable of beautiful young females. Mammy Pleasant referred to herself as the “housekeeper” but her status did not seem to correspond to that title. It was rumored that she had collected so much information about Bell’s youthful malefactions in Scotland, and later ones in San Francisco, that he could never rid himself of her.

  A colored butler opened the door for Bierce and me and took Bierce’s card back inside. He returned to usher us into a parlor so curtained and lightless that we had to feel for chairs in which to seat ourselves. Mammy Pleasant was manifested as a faceless darkness between a white lace cap and a neckpiece that glowed phosphorescently in the murk.

  As my eyes became accustomed to the dark I could make out that she was seated in a straight chair with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for Bierce or me to speak.

  “Madam, we are interested in some ancient history that may affect current events, and I understand that you can assist us,” Bierce said with that degree of coolness that could make a person feel that he was exposed in his iniquities.

  “How may I assist you?” Mammy Pleasant said. She had a rather rasping voice that made me want to clear my throat.

  “When Caroline LaPlante married Nathaniel McNair, was she already pregnant with the child she named Beaumont McNair?”

  “How would I know that?” Mammy Pleasant said.

  “I have reason to believe you were the midwife at the birth.”

  “If I was professionally employed by Mrs. McNair I could not reveal such information without her consent.” She had a very precise and unaccented way of speaking, with a slight puf
f of a pause before each word, as though she considered it carefully beforehand.

  “Such information might assist the case of the young man, her son, who finds himself in some difficulties.”

  “Mr. Bierce, I have been employed by many different gentry in my years in San Francisco, and I owe them respect for their confidences.”

  This woman was by no means intimidated by Bierce. She said, “Even if I possessed the information you require, I could not supply it without the permission of Lady Caroline Stearns.”

  Bierce regarded her intently. “Mrs. Pleasant, you know who I am. This young man, Mr. Redmond, is a journalist with The Hornet. He writes occasional pieces on recent history, which are published opposite my column. Perhaps you have seen his most recent one. It is the tale of the Mussel Slough Tragedy and of certain corrupt actions and decisions on behalf of the Railroad. Mr. Redmond has asked to come along today because he also is interested in your career among the gentry in your several different capacities, and some mysteries that attend those functions.

  “What particularly interests us is the charge of baby-farming that has been laid at your door. The acquisition of wanted children and the disposal of unwanted ones.”

  Mammy Pleasant did not move a muscle. Her gold hoop earrings caught little dipping segments of light in that dim musty room.

  Bierce continued, “As to Mrs. McNair’s condition when she married Mr. McNair‌—‌or shall we say her marital situation when she gave birth to Beaumont McNair‌—‌those dates are available in the Hall of Records.”

  After a pause. Mammy Pleasant said, “Mrs. McNair was in a family way when she married Mr. McNair.”

  “How far along was she?”

  “About five months.”

  “Who was the father?” Bierce asked.