Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  Bierce would give the prosecution of Jennings precedence over the Slashings because he was set like a locomotive on rails after the SP, and he considered Jennings his particular target.

  “How is that, Mr. Bierce?” Lady Caroline said.

  “Lady Caroline, it is a strength of your personality to have a power of persuasion over men. That is not an empty compliment. I ask you to persuade Elza Klosters to reveal the fact that Senator Jennings tried to hire him to murder Mrs. Hamon. Then I can promise you that the identity of the Slasher will be revealed.”

  Beau started to speak, but Lady Caroline halted him with a motion of her bare hand. She whispered, “You overestimate my powers, Mr. Bierce.”

  “I believe I do not.”

  “I would not be able to persuade Elza Klosters to such an action,” she said firmly.

  Bierce rose. “Very well, madam,” he said. “Good day, madam. Sirs. I believe we have nothing more to communicate here.”

  We left. I thought he would have his way, when they had had time to confer.

  “That is a remarkable woman,” Bierce said, in the tone in which he had spoken of Lillie Coit, Ada Claire and Adah Isaacs Mencken.

  We turned onto California Street, which slanted upward to Nob Hill, some traffic of wagons and carriages, two cable cars passing halfway up the slope. There was a shout, a cracking of hoofs, a screeching of scraped metal. Bierce grasped my arm and flung me against the brick wall behind us.

  A carriage careened toward us, a pair of horses with white-rimmed eyes, forelegs flashing, the muffled figure of the driver poised whip-swinging above them. I snatched Bierce’s revolver from my pocket, raised the muzzle and pressed the trigger. The shot exploded in my ear as the carriage spun away past us with its rear wheels grating and sparking on the pavement. Shouts of alarm and anger erupted further along. I held the revolver shakily aimed but did not fire again. The carriage raced away up California Street and turned at the second corner and was gone, leaving plug-hatted pedestrians staring in its wake, one shaking a cane after it. A man had leaped out of his buggy to calm his frightened horse. Smoke curled from the muzzle of the revolver.

  “Missed,” I said.

  Bierce said in a flat voice, “I read in one of the Penny Dreadfuls that Billy the Kid holds his forefinger along the barrel of his weapon and simply points the finger at his target.”

  I seemed to have become his bodyguard. I pocketed the revolver. The barrel was hot. “That was a response, not a threat,” I said. “Senator Jennings still has not heard from Klosters.”

  “No, that was for me,” Bierce said. “That was not intimidation, that was an attempt to shorten my life.” He sounded pleased.

  Mammy Pleasant came again to him in the office of the editor of The Hornet.

  She wore black bombazine that rustled like a forest when she seated herself. She had a black straw hat tied on her head with a black scarf and carried a black bag that would have contained a fair-sized infant. The gold hoop earrings glinted at her ears. She pointed her fierce, dark face at Bierce.

  “I’m glad to see you, Mrs. Pleasant,” Bierce said. “Why does it occur to me that your visit has to do with the return to San Francisco of Lady Caroline Stearns?”

  Mammy Pleasant looked down at her hands folded in her lap and said, in her manner that was both assertive and hesitating, “It is because that is your nature, Mr. Bierce.”

  Bierce stroked the fair sparrow-wings of his mustache.

  “And what do you have to say to me, Mrs. Pleasant?”

  She turned her white-rimmed eyes toward me. “I understand that information is being collected for a news article on aspects of my life in San Francisco,” she said.

  “That is correct,” Bierce said.

  “I have some information that may be of assistance to you, if you will guarantee that my history will not be made public at this time. It would be most inopportune for me, Mr. Bierce.”

  Bierce sat silently for a moment, studying her. “I believe you can tell me the identity of the Slasher.”

  A dark hand pulled her shawl more closely around her. She leaned forward with a show of teeth in her lean face, shaking her head.

  “Mr. Bierce, I believe I understand your way of thinking. You will be thinking because Mr. James Brittain forbade his daughter to marry Beau McNair that you have uncovered the truth. You have not uncovered the truth. You have only looked at half a picture.”

  She gathered up her bag and rose and, a hunched figure, hurried out.

  Bierce and I stared at each other. “What does that sibylline utterance mean, please?”

  I shook my head helplessly.

  “Is our solution to Beau’s parentage brought to question? Brittain did admit to it.”

  I said I didn’t know what to think.

  27

  EDUCATION, n. – That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  Sgt. Nix arrived at The Hornet with the latest news from Old City Hall.

  “Bos Curtis come in the station like a wagonload of wildcats,” he said. “There was fur flying in the Captain’s office.”

  “Is it a fact that Pusey has a witness to Rachel LeVigne’s murder?” Bierce asked.

  “Fellow named Horswill. Showed him the photograph and he said it was Beau McNair, all right. And Mr. R. Buckle had sworn false that Beau was with him.”

  “Pusey was waiting to broach that to Lady Caroline?”

  Nix managed to shrug and nod at the same time.

  Bierce said, “I imagine Curtis told Pusey what he would do to Edith Pruitt, and this Horswill, on the witness stand‌—‌as identifiers of photographs. Not to speak of why the Captain chose to show Beau McNair’s photograph in the first place.”

  I wondered aloud if police were stationed at the McNair mansion.

  “The lady don’t want anybody there,” Nix said. “I understand the place is forted up pretty good from back when those Sandlotters would mob up on Nob Hill and raise the dickens. Your pal Klosters has been there,” he added.

  “Tom and I have been invited to call upon Lady Caroline after supper tonight,” Bierce said.

  “Wouldn’t it be better for you to go alone?” I asked, when Nix had departed.

  “I want you to observe. You will be listening, to her and to me, in order to inform me later of anything I may have missed.”

  At nine o’clock we rolled up California Street in a hack, jolted when the horse’s hoofs slipped on the paving stones, the hackie cursing and using his whip. We came out among the edifices of the Big Four, passing the Crocker mansion with its scrollwork facade and its tower, and the loom of the spite-fence beyond it. A fog bank blocked out the lights of the western part of the City.

  I said, “It must have been frightening for the Nobs when the Workingmen were rallying up here.”

  “Denis Kearney versus Charles Crocker,” Bierce said. “Property rights versus workingman’s rights. Think of the rights that have been abused in struggles over rights! Wars are caused by rights. The rights of the Negro, the rights of slaveholders. The Fugitive Slave Law! How could our legislative chambers have given birth to such a monstrosity? I say down with rights!”

  The hack clattered on. “What you come to,” Bierce said gloomily, “is finally that nothing matters. Nothing. The passing scene is to be watched, and ridiculed, but it is not to be felt, for there is nothing worth feeling. We are as flies to wanton boys, et cetera.”

  It seemed to be the theory of social comedy that Amelia had enunciated, but with despair instead of irony. I felt a continuing smothering anger over what she had called her responsibility. I regarded that feeling as important, even though it made me miserable.

  “I hold that there are emotions worth feeling,” I said.

  “Just what moves the sleeping lion in your heart?”

  I said I had been informed by Amelia Brittain that she was required to marry a wealthy man because of her fa
ther’s financial situation, and the sensations were painful but honorably felt.

  “My dear fellow, what did you expect?” Bierce said kindly. “You have read too many novels. They reinforce the preposterous view of the happy ending.”

  “If nothing matters, why is it important to find out who murdered three whores?” I asked.

  “It is not important, it is only interesting,” Bierce said. “It is a puzzle to be solved.”

  “Why is it important to confound the Railroad?”

  “It is not important, it is only gratifying,” Bierce said.

  “Well,” I said. “Gratification is something felt.”

  Bierce laughed. “I am sorry about Miss Brittain. She is a charming young woman, and no femininny if she knows her fate.”

  “Her happy ending,” I said, bitterly.

  The rig rolled on among the mansions that loomed like ancient monsters frozen in an ice age. There was some traffic of buggies and other hacks with their lamps burning, an occasional spark from metal rims on paving stones. The fog bank surged up toward us, but the sensation was of the world turning slowly to deposit us in that gray, damp maw.

  The McNair mansion was one of the lesser beasts, first and second floor windows alight in the fog, misty reflected gleams dancing off the fence against a dense darkness of shrubbery. The hackie turned in under the lights of the porte cochere, where we were let off.

  The heavyset butler with patent-leather hair bowed us inside. He showed us up a curving flight of stairs as broad as Morton Street, which we mounted under the glowering eyes of the portrait of Nathaniel McNair, and into a room brilliant with glowing balls of light. The butler directed Bierce to a noble overstuffed chair, and me to a divan of fat pillows. Then he poured port from a cut-glass decanter. I saw that one glass had already been filled, resting on a low table beside a chaise longue across the room.

  We hurried to our feet as Lady Caroline Stearns entered.

  She wore a long gown embroidered in gilt and silver, high necked, long sleeved. Within the stiff fabric there was a sense of her body in motion independent of the material that covered her. She crossed to us to greet Bierce, with a welcoming motion of her hand to me. Her hair was brushed up into a burnished knot at the back of her head above a slender neck. Her complexion was pale, no doubt with powders, her mouth tinted, her eyes a calm blue surveying us. She was no longer young, but she was very beautiful.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Bierce, Mr. Redmond.” She swept on across the parquet to recline on the chaise longue. I felt in her presence a queer diminution of Bierce’s force, almost a shyness.

  There was a moment of silence, each of us with a glass of port raised as though in a toast.

  “It is time to talk about Virginia City,” Bierce said.

  She inclined her neat chin in what must be assent.

  “You were greatly loved there, madam.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Yet there has been a continuing hatred. I assume that is because of the manipulations of ownership of the Jack of Spades Mine.”

  “There were investors who had cause to feel they had been cheated,” Lady Caroline said. The elegant folds of her heavy gown made me conscious of her reclining body and reminded me of Annie Dunker in her shift.

  “Adolphus Jackson, Albert Gorton, and a man named Macomber,” Bierce said. “Of these, E. O. Macomber seems to have disappeared. Detective Sergeant Nix has made some efforts to find him, with no result. Albert Gorton is apparently dead. The latter, who was an accessory to the Jack of Spades ‘shuffle,’ may have been murdered because he became an embarrassment to your late husband.”

  “That is an unfounded assumption, Mr. Bierce.”

  “It is not even an assumption.”

  “Mr. Bierce, I cannot believe that any of these men are so consumed with old wrongs that they would begin the conspiracy of revenge against me of which you seem convinced.”

  “Will you accept the fact that there has indeed been a conspiracy?”

  “I suppose I must.”

  “That you are in danger?”

  She inclined her coiffed head silently.

  “There is another matter than the Jack of Spades Mine, madam,” Bierce said. “It is the paternity of your son.”

  She lifted a hand to a bell that hung from a braided rope. The butler appeared. “Cigars, if you please, Marvins.”

  The butler brought a silver-chased humidor from a sideboard and offered it to Bierce and to me. Bierce took one, I declined. Marvins returned the humidor and carried to Lady Caroline a small box of Egyptian cigarettes. She chose one, and he lighted it for her with a flourish, then came to light Bierce’s cigar. The smoke from the cigarette was a paler hue than that of the cigar, coiling upward from the tan tube between her fingers.

  I thought the distribution of smokes had given Lady Caroline time to prepare herself.

  “Mr. Brittain is convinced that he was the father,” Bierce said. “But I have had a communication to the effect that that may not be the case.”

  “May I ask from whom this communication was received?” Lady Caroline asked. She braced an elbow on the chaise in order to raise her hand to hold the cigarette six inches from her lips.

  “That is unimportant,” Bierce said. “But I hope you will be forthcoming in the matter.”

  I could see her gown move with her breathing. “There was a murder,” she said. “A friend of mine was horribly murdered‌—‌not slashed, in case you should leap to a conclusion. It was a violent time, a violent place. All at once that violence quite overwhelmed me. I had had proposals of marriage. It seemed that a signal had been given that I had better accept one of them and end the life I had been leading before that life ended me.

  “James Brittain was the first choice,” she said. “Nat McNair the last.”

  I wondered who had been in between.

  “But I believe neither of them was actually the father of your child,” Bierce said.

  “Mr. Bierce, will you embarrass me into revealing the fact that I am uncertain?”

  “This determination may be essential to the solution of these murders, madam.”

  “I admit I informed James Brittain that he was the father. That was because I had decided to accept his proposal. He was a gentleman, a cultivated man. He proved to be a four-flusher, however.” She laughed lightly.

  I thought her ease and calm were pretense.

  “Was Senator Sharon one of the possibilities of fatherhood?”

  “In one regard I may be uncertain, but in the other I am very certain. No, he was not.”

  “Was he one of those offering proposals?”

  “Only a proposition,” she said. “It would have resulted in a relation very like the one in which the valiant Miss Sarah Althea Hill became dissatisfied. My inclination was for marriage.

  “Mr. Bierce, allow me to say this,” she continued. “It may be an excess of pride on my part, but I do not believe I am to blame for the Jack of Spades contrivances. It was Nat’s doing. It was the kind of proceeding that he became famous for. No doubt he learned it from William Sharon. I believe my role must be described as passive. Can it be that you should extend your researches beyond this little circle of five people?”

  “It is possible,” Bierce said, without, I thought, meaning it. “Is it possible that Macomber changed his name, as Jackson changed his?”

  I felt an invisible weight press on my shoulders. Lady Caroline sighed and shrugged in her gilt and silver casing.

  “What was Macomber like, Lady Caroline?” I asked.

  Her blue eyes shifted toward me, blinking as though she had difficulty changing their focus. “He was a pleasant young man, rather talkative. I don’t remember much more about him, Mr. Redmond.”

  “How did the five of you, who joined together to purchase the Jack of Spades, know each other?”

  She blew smoke before addressing my question. “We were friends.”

  Clients? Customers? “The woman who was m
urdered was Julia Bulette?”

  She looked suddenly wary. “Yes. She was a friend also, a business friend but a good friend, a good woman, a good, good friend.”

  “Might she have been included among the Spades?”

  “There was a blackball system. She had been blackballed.”

  “May I ask by whom?”

  She considered, her eyes slitted against the smoke. “It would have been my husband.”

  “Why would it have been, madam?” Bierce said.

  “Mr. Bierce, I will confess something to you. I wonder if it will even surprise you. Nat McNair was a cruel, dishonest, coldhearted, ungrateful monster who never forgave a slight or forgot to remember a favor.”

  “Why did you marry him, madam?”

  “I thought he would become the richest man in California.” She uttered a small laugh. “He did not quite achieve that goal, but his achievement was impressive. I earned my share of it.”

  I thought she did not mean by her part in the Jack of Spades contrivances.

  “Why was Will Sharon not an investor in the Jack of Spades?”

  “Why does this name continue to come up in our conversation? Senator Sharon was and is a detestable man. I hope Miss Hill wins her case and takes half of his millions away from him.”

  She leaned back in the chaise as though satisfied with her denunciation. Bierce inquired what her son might be blamed for.

  “As I have learned, he was adopted by Mr. McNair some months after he was born. He lived in San Francisco in circumstances of increasing wealth until he was ten or eleven‌—‌when he and James Brittain’s daughter were sweethearts.”

  Lady Caroline nodded, leaking smoke through her nostrils.

  “Did you approve of that connection?” Bierce asked.

  “Not particularly, Mr. Bierce. Not at all, in fact.”

  “Her father did not approve of it because he thought them brother and sister.”

  Lady Caroline sipped her port, her cigarette smoking between the fingers of her other hand. They seemed to me defensive devices, as her embroidered gown was a kind of cage of armor.