Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  “Mrs. McNair’s marriage, the child and the child’s paternity,” she continued.

  It was interesting that Mammy Pleasant should be speaking of babies when a color cartoon in the current issue of The Hornet depicted her carrying a basket full of them.

  “So much talk of babies and paternity these days,” Bierce said, smiling.

  Mammy Pleasant nodded. “I have recalled that Senator Sharon was in Virginia City at the time of Mrs. McNair’s conception.”

  “It seems that almost everyone in the world was in Virginia City at that time,” Bierce said. “Senator Sharon, Judge Terry, Mark Twain at the Territorial Enterprise, and so on.”

  “Senator Sharon was a friend and counselor to Mr. McNair,” Mammy Pleasant said. “I have heard that in Virginia City a man prospered or failed at Senator Sharon’s favor. Mr. McNair prospered.”

  “Mrs. Pleasant, is this to suggest that Senator Sharon’s favor extended so far as Mrs. McNair’s womb?”

  “That is for you to consider, Mr. Bierce.”

  “Could this visit, and this information, have anything to do with the proceedings presently taking place in Superior Court?”

  She looked sour. “We would be pleased for your good opinion, Mr. Bierce. Yours is a voice that is listened to in the City.”

  “I see.”

  “When you called on me the other day, I thought: what have I to gain by assisting Mr. Bierce with the information he seeks? I could think of nothing to be gained.”

  “You would think it inappropriate to furnish information without some quid pro quo?”

  “I do not know Latin, Mr. Bierce, but I take your meaning. Yes, that is correct. That is the way I have learned to conduct my affairs in San Francisco.”

  “And the information with which you hope to enlist my good opinion is the fact that Senator Sharon was in Virginia City at the time that Mrs. McNair conceived?”

  “I believe you are looking for the true father of the young Mr. McNair, and I suggest you consider Senator Sharon, who was a close friend and business associate of Mr. and Mrs. McNairs’.”

  “Thank you,” Bierce said. “I believe you would also find it helpful to the proceedings in Superior Court if Senator Sharon was revealed as having taken part in even more adulterous affairs, with issue, than he is now renowned for.”

  “You leap to conclusions, Mr. Bierce.”

  “A rather short leap, madam.”

  She smiled again from Bierce to me, gathered up her large handbag and departed.

  “Time cannot wither, nor custom stale, that essential malevolence,” Bierce sighed, when the sound of her steps had disappeared down the hall.

  “Jimmy Fairleigh mentioned Sharon,” I said.

  “We know that Sharon fathered Gertie Dietz’s child,” Bierce said. “Although fatherhood is not uncommon, as I understand it.”

  “No.”

  “What that woman carries in her very large handbag is a supply of red herrings,” Bierce said.

  I had attended one of the early court sessions. The courtroom was crowded because the case was a sensation, a high-ceilinged room with great windows pouring in western sunlight, and Judge Finn on the bench. Sarah Althea Hill’s lawyer, Mr. Tyler, was notable for his chestful of beard, and Sharon’s, a General Barnes, for mustaches which would cause him to have to pass through narrow doorways sideways. Sharon, a grizzled little man with a big head, sat grimly at one table. Miss Hill, in blue velvet faced with dark fur, and a blue hat with a veil that concealed her face, was a slim figure seated in a kind of galvanic stillness beside Mammy Pleasant.

  The proceedings that day had to do with a document in the case, which Miss Hill stood before the court to draw from her bosom.

  “Judge,” she said in a tremulous voice. “This paper is my honor. I cannot leave it out of my hands.”

  “Just show it to Mr. Barnes,” the Judge said.

  “If your honor will take the responsibility upon yourself and compel me to, I will deliver the document.”

  “I cannot take any responsibility,” the judge said. “Is the paper inside this envelope?”

  “I desire that neither Mr. Sharon nor Mr. Barnes should handle it. I consider it my honor and have regarded it as my honor for three long years. Mr. Sharon knows all about it.”

  General Barnes said pompously, “I object to this lady standing there and making these statements. Mr. Sharon knows nothing about it. It is a fraud and a forgery from end to end.”

  “He knows every word in this paper, so help me God. He dictated it to me.”

  Mammy Pleasant was half-rising and subsiding in her chair, in anxiety or support.

  Senator Sharon climbed to his feet. “I tell the Court this is the damndest lie that was ever uttered on this earth!”

  “I do not like to offend Your Honor,” Miss Hill said with dignity. “But he has got his millions against me. I have been driven from my home. He has taken my money, and I have got no money to defend myself with.”

  There was a good deal more wrangling before Miss Hill surrendered the paper to the clerk who was ordered to have a copy made.

  I dug through files to look over Senator Sharon’s history. He had indeed been a presence in Virginia City during the ‘60s. William Ralston of the Bank of California was his benefactor, appointing him the bank’s agent on the Washoe. Sharon made his fortune there. Mineowners had exhausted capital and credit, and the quartz mills had been so hastily constructed that many of them were unworkable. So many claims were in litigation that the courts were paralyzed. Virginia City, at the time of Sharon’s arrival, was a bankrupt camp sitting on a billion-dollar orebody. With unlimited credit from the Bank of California, Sharon began purchasing shares in the most promising mines and mills by taking over their paper from the overburdened local banks, and issuing credit at reduced rates of interest. He foreclosed like a thunderclap on nonpayment. His instincts and intuition were almost perfect. With Ralston and Darius Mills he organized the Union Mill & Mining Company to take over properties foreclosed by the Bank. He built the railroad to Carson City and Reno, controlling the traffic to Mount Davidson, and thus became one of the West’s transportation magnates. He had spies to sniff out strikes that were made in competing mines, he engaged in titanic struggles for control through stock acquisitions, he boomed stocks so that their prices swooped up and down like swallows, he made secret deals between mills and mines to hide real value by spreading rumors of bonanza and borrasca. He was the most cynical manipulator of all the Comstock manipulators. At the zenith of his power and wealth he controlled the Union Mill & Mining Company and the railroad and owned seven producing silver mines, including the Ophir, which he had snatched away from Lucky Baldwin.

  He was known as the “King of the Comstock,” the “California Croesus,” and the “Bonanza Senator.” The Nevada legislature sent him to the senate in 1875.

  He profited hugely on the fall of his mentor, William Ralston, who drowned in a swimming accident or committed suicide when the Bank of California closed its doors in the panic of 1875. Sharon succeeded not only to the control of the reopened Bank, but to Ralston’s last great project, the Palace Hotel, and even to Ralston’s country estate at Belmont. Many blamed him for Ralston’s ruin. Ralston’s empire had collapsed, it was said, because his closest friends, Sharon and Darius Mills, had plotted his ruin.

  Sharon kept an apartment at the Palace, entertained lavishly at Belmont and indulged his taste for quoting Shakespeare and Lord Byron. He was a pale, chilly little man with a big head, overly neat, always tight-fisted, generally disliked. His daughter Flora married a genuine British aristocrat, Sir Thomas George Fermor-Hesketh, in a splendid affair at Belmont.

  His wife had died in 1874 after a marriage of trying to ignore her husband’s infidelities. While he was making his millions he found time for many adulterous affairs, and he was famous for his penchant for high-class prostitutes. He was often to be seen in the company of glittering young females. He kept a number of mistresses.<
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  The first salvo of the senator’s problems with his most troublesome mistress, Sarah Althea Hill, came at his daughter Flora’s wedding, when Miss Hill was physically barred from the grand event. Sarah Althea claimed she had a right to attend as a member of the family.

  In September of 1883 Sharon was arrested for adultery, out of which came two current court cases, Sharon v. Sharon in State Superior Court, in which Sarah Althea Hill sued for divorce, a division of property and alimony, and Sharon v. Hill in Federal Circuit Court, which had jurisdiction because Sharon was a citizen of Nevada, in which the senator sued to have the marriage contract declared false and fraudulent and to enjoin Miss Hill from claiming to be his wife. There were to be peripheral suits for perjury, forgery, slander, libel, conspiracy and embezzlement. Sharon v. Sharon and Sharon v. Hill would be fought in California courts for almost ten years.

  Bierce wrote in Tattle, “The testimony this week in the Sharon trial must be of intense interest to the readers of dime-novels. The colossal nastiness of the events divulged is the most impressive feature. The thought of a delectable young person such as Miss Hill falling into the arms of a noxious old debauchee like Senator Sharon is as revolting as is the Christian religion in the hands of Washington Street evangelists.”

  Pusey approached along the hallway at his stately gait and turned into Bierce’s office to greet Bierce and me. He seated himself, his cap under his arm, and announced that that was a pretty scene in Superior Court. I was not summoned to join this conversation but observed it from my end of the office. I tried to set my face so as not to glower at Pusey across the office, though I didn’t mind touching my head where I had been whacked certainly on his order.

  “Never heard so many lies told quite so fast in all my life,” Pusey said.

  Bierce clicked his tongue. He wore the expression of extreme politeness that he assumed when there was a danger his feelings would show. He did not like Captain Pusey.

  “Whose lies, Captain?”

  “That Hill woman is one fast-talker. And temper! She’s telling lies and she’s got another young lady telling lies, and a young fellow, and two colored girls, all telling lies. I hear the Senator is paying a thousand dollars a day defending himself against those lies.”

  “No lies on his side?” Bierce said.

  “Too busy brushing them off himself to tell any lies.”

  “Seems to me there was a young fellow that got caught in some lies saying he had had a relation with Miss Hill.”

  Pusey clucked and patted his white mane. “The Senator is paying out good money trying to nail down those lies that woman’s suborned those people to tell about him.”

  “Paying money, is he?” Bierce said.

  Pusey nodded. “He’s got his lines out, he has. He didn’t make himself twenty millions laying down and letting people walk over him.”

  I thought Pusey might be one of the lines Senator Sharon had out.

  “He don’t like people calling him names the way some have done,” he said.

  “As I have done?” Bierce said.

  “That’s right,” Pusey said, displaying his splendid teeth. “Mr. Bierce, you get so many people stamping mad at you I can’t be responsible for what happens.”

  “I understand that Miss Hill has charged him with adultery with nine women,” Bierce said.

  “Now, you know that is lies. He is a little old chap, he is sixty-four years old!”

  “Five or six would be more accurate, you mean.”

  Pusey blew his breath out in irritation.

  “Mr. Bierce, she is going to lose this case and end up in the hoosegow for perjury. The Senator is going to win it, and he is going to remember who was a help to him and who wasn’t.”

  “Memory like an elephant, I understand,” Bierce said.

  Pusey scowled at him.

  “Now, Captain Pusey,” Bierce said. “Don’t I recollect that Senator Sharon has been one of the most active adulterers in this sinful city?”

  “Where it comes to nookie, I always say all bets are off,” Pusey said. He showed his teeth again. “You have done pretty well along those lines yourself, Mr. Bierce.”

  Bierce composed his face.

  “Now what do you know about the senator in Virginia City, Captain?” he said. “Wasn’t he scampering after loose women there also?”

  “Not my jurisdiction, Mr. Bierce, if you know what I mean.” Pusey brought his fat watch out of his pocket and scowled at it.

  “I understand Mammy Pleasant has been to call,” he said, switching the subject.

  “That is correct,” Bierce said.

  “You know this is all her put in. She has laid out the money, she has furnished her lawyer to represent the young woman. George Washington Tyler, that old shyster! And Judge Terry too! Senator Sharon is not going to forget that.”

  “He had better be careful.”

  “Now why is that, Mr. Bierce?”

  “I understand Mrs. Pleasant is a voodoo person. Charms, potions, sticking needles in dolls, tricks like that.”

  Pusey harrumphed at that, not knowing whether Bierce was serious or not.

  “You have been employed by the Senator, is that so?” Bierce asked.

  “I’m an employee of the City of San Francisco!” Pusey said indignantly.

  When he had gone, Bierce said, “That is a pair I would not like to give aid and comfort to.”

  “Senator Sharon and Captain Pusey.”

  “We may still gain some information from Mammy Pleasant,” he said. “But we can be certain we will have nothing from Pusey.”

  “What will we do about finding out if there is a connection between Sharon and Carrie LaPlante?”

  “We will just have to ask her,” Bierce said.

  19

  REPORTER, n. – A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  My stock had risen at 913 Taylor Street. Amelia insisted that I had saved her life from the Morton Street Slasher, or whoever her attacker had been, and she conducted herself with me with some familiarity before her parents.

  The broken railing of the veranda had been patched with pale pine boards, and the policeman on duty there was treated with more hospitality, the cook furnishing him lemonade and shortbread cookies.

  I escorted Amelia to the Roller Palace. Roller-skating was a sport with which she was unfamiliar. On the gleaming hardwood floor with the racket of metal wheels on wood, under the balloon ceiling with its central boss of jewel-flashing mirrors, I held an arm around her waist while she took her first rolling steps, her left hand clutching mine, giggling, high-colored, her voice rising an octave in her nervousness. But soon she was swooping along with the best, waving long arms for balance, graceful in her lanky awkwardness with her skirts sweeping in thick folds around her legs, her tight bodice with the two lovely symmetrical mounds of her bosom, her pretty head crowned in a velvet hat with a rolled brim, laughing and laughing in her pleasure. The roller-skating seemed to help her get over her fright at the Slasher’s attentions, though still I would see her eyes fill and she would become very quiet, as if the fact that someone would want to hurt her had swept over her again.

  In the steamy little tearoom over cups of Oolong she prattled about marriages of San Francisco young women to European aristocrats. Clara Huntington and Eva Mackay had married titles, Flora Sharon a baronet, Mary Ellen Donahue a baron, Mary Parrott a count, Virginia Bonynge a viscount and her sister Lord John Maxwell. The Holladay sisters had plighted troth with the Baron de Boussiere and the Comte de Pourtales.

  And the widow of the multimillionaire Nathaniel McNair had married Lord Hastings Stearns.

  “It is so charming!” she said. “The fathers of these women with brilliant careers were Irish saloonkeepers or hairy prospectors with their donkeys, and these European aristocrats are the descendants of crusty old warriors who chose the winning side in some war of succession. Their titles are for sa
le to charming females with great expectations!”

  I wondered if she was regretting her own failed engagement to the son of Lady Caroline, which had been nixed by her father.

  I said I didn’t think any of the heiresses of the brilliant careers were as good roller-skaters as she had proved to be.

  She laughed and said, “As to my own brilliant career, I’m afraid Poppa’s investments are failing him just now.”

  I digested that.

  “It is a comic spectacle, Tom,” she went on. “One must learn to view it as a spectator instead of a participant.”

  “But you are a participant!”

  “A spectator also. I insist on that!” She flattened the palms of her hands together with her chin balanced on her fingers, her eyes fixed on me.

  I said I thought the whole shameless business was an affront to a democratic nation.

  “It may be an affront to a Democrat, but it is fine comedy. Have you witnessed the Saturday afternoon procession on ‘the line’?”

  “The line” was the five blocks along Market from Powell to Kearny and up Kearny to Sutter. Saturday afternoons beautiful young women paraded along the line, for the delectation of the knots of young men watching from the open-front cigar stores on their route.

  “Their toilettes are perfect,” Amelia went on. “They are not ‘society,’ they are the daughters of shopkeepers and merchants and doctors. But they are as lovely young women as the heiress-brides of the European aristocracy. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  I didn’t know what she was getting at.

  “Tom, you must learn to appreciate ironies!” Amelia said. She seemed to be laughing at me. Then I saw her eyes mist again.

  When I watched her lips speaking of ironies all I could think of was kissing them. I said, “I wonder if it is such a blessing to be an offspring of Nob Hill aristocrats.”

  “There are responsibilities, of course,” Amelia said solemnly.

  “So yours cannot be a free spirit.”

  “Yes and no.”