Hail columbia, p.23
Hail, Columbia!, page 23
“Now, Mr. Gould, no more of this foolishness. You are to do exactly what President Grant requests in times of economic strain. In addition, I am adding my own condition: that you no longer employ illegal acts of violence in your pursuit of money. If you fail the President, the telegram concerning Mr. Stokes will be made very, very public. And if you are found to be engaged in felonious practices, I believe I will let Miss Duval have her way with you. Do we have an agreement?”
Gould looked at his former employee, who smiled at him. Shivering, he replied, “Yes.”
Clay nodded. “One final thing. We will require your copy of the options contract you had with Mrs. Grant.”
“I, ah, do not have it here.”
Clay’s eyes glittered dangerously. “Please, Mr. Gould, no games. You would keep it close, so it could be used immediately in time of need. Did you put it in a private safe? Most mansions of this sort have one. Though, I rather think you did not. Safecracking is becoming a common crime, and you would not want to take such a chance. Certainly you would not place such a document in your office.”
Clay scanned the volumes that lined the walls of Gould’s library. “Quite a collection you have here. I also appreciate books.” He walked over to one section, seemingly devoted to fiction, carefully alphabetized; after a moment, he snatched out a volume and examined it closely. “Edgar A. Poe. And well worn; obviously read it a number of times.”
“So?” responded Gould shakily.
“It is just that I recall one of his stories, “The Purloined Letter,” where a disreputable man needed to hide an important document where even a careful search would never find it.” Clay restored the book to its place, and then walked over to Gould’s desk. He examined the cluttered papers on the desk; then noted one covered with figures that seemed to deal with tradesmen’s bills. “In that story, Poe’s character hid the document in plain sight, by writing mundane household details on its back, and leaving it exposed for all to see.” Clay turned over the paper, and saw that the reverse was a copy of an options contract. Folding it carefully, and placing it into an inner coat pocket, Clay said, “We will be taking this with us.”
He then offered Duval his arm, and led her to the door of the library. There they stopped. Duval turned, smiled sweetly at Gould, and said, “You may consider this my two week notice.” Then the pair glided out of the room. Gould collapsed into his desk chair, and buried his face in his hands, shaking uncontrollably.
After they had gained the street and were walking toward a busier thoroughfare, where a cab could be found at this late hour, Clay glanced at Duval and asked, “I am curious; what would you have done if the offer from Gould for my life had been $100,000 instead of $50,000?”
Duval laughed her silvery, chilling laugh, and took Clay’s arm possessively. “I suppose we will never know, will we?”
Around eight in the morning, Teresa Duval was suddenly awakened by a spasm of nausea that hit her like a sledgehammer. “Alphonso,” she moaned, but there was no reply. Naked, she staggered from the bed she had been sharing with Clay to the hotel suite’s water closet, and violently vomited. When the wave of nausea had finally passed, she looked at herself in the mirror, and was shocked at how haggard she appeared. I must take the extract of Pennyroyal flower soon, she thought. The longer I wait, the more dangerous it becomes. But first I must talk to Alphonso.
She gingerly re-entered the suite, and noticed that the clothespress was open, and that a carpetbag and most of Clay’s things were missing. She was seized by panic, a very uncharacteristic emotion for her. Then she remembered that Ambrose Bierce occupied a room down the hall; the young writer might know what had become of her lover. Dressing hurriedly, she strode quickly down the hall to Bierce’s room. She was about to knock when she noticed that the door was slightly ajar. Pushing the door fully open and entering the room, she found Bierce fully dressed, and in the act of stuffing some articles of clothing into an already bulging carpetbag.
“Where are you going, Ambrose?” she asked. Bierce started violently and turned to face her; he had not heard her enter the room. Recovering quickly from his surprise, he smiled ironically and clicked his heels.
“Good morning, Miss Duval. I intended to pay my respects before I actually left. I received a telegram from my employer late last night, demanding my immediate return. I cannot continue to live on Clay’s charity, so I must comply. It is a good thing the transcontinental railway is finally complete. I can be in San Francisco in less than a week.”
“I wish you well in your career,” replied Duval, not caring one way or the other about what happened to Ambrose Bierce. “But before you take leave, perhaps you can help me on another matter. By the time I awoke, Alphonso was gone, along with his clothes and travelling bag. Do you have any idea where he has gone?”
The ironic smile deserted Bierce’s face. “I did see him this morning, but he did not see fit to tell me his destination when I asked. He did request that I give this to you.” He handed her an envelope. She tore it open, expecting to find some sort of letter, some kind of explanation. All the envelope contained was a check for $50,000 made out in her name.
There had been a time when she would have been ecstatic at receiving such a check. Yet, to her own amazement, all she felt was hollowness, and a sense of terrible loss. Bierce noted the expression on her face, and did something very uncharacteristic for him; he offered her consolation.
“Teresa, I am truly sorry. He is gone, and you will not be seeing him again. Take the money, and try to forget him. It would not have worked in the long run. You know as well as I that there is something … inhuman about him.”
She looked into Bierce’s eyes. “Where has he gone?” she said in a voice that pleaded rather than threatened.
Bierce hesitated a long moment before replying. “He did not tell me, but I know. You know, too, if you only think upon it.” He grabbed his carpetbag, then impulsively leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek. Then he was gone.
The devastated Duval stood still as a statue for nearly a minute, then suddenly cursed aloud. The check fell from her hands and fluttered to the carpet; she did not seem to notice.
“Granda, tell me another story,” said the girl tucked under the comforter of her small bed. “Tell me one about the War.”
“Now pumpkin, stories about the War are not what good little girls should hear just before they go to sleep,” answered Nathan Bedford Forrest, looking down with adoration at his granddaughter.
“I am not little!” she announced with charming petulance. “I have just turned ten.”
“Have you now?” he announced with mock severity. “All the more reason to follow orders like a good little soldier. Go to sleep tonight without any fuss, and I will tell you a war story tomorrow morning.”
“All right, Granda,” she said grudgingly, eyelids already heavy with sleep.
Forrest leaned forward to kiss the child’s forehead. As he drew away, he saw that she was already asleep. With a melancholy smile, he departed the room to go down to the library to take care of estate paperwork. He preferred to do such work late at night, with his granddaughter and the servants in their rooms, like now. His semi-literacy caused him to sometimes struggle over the simplest matters, and he did not wish them to witness that struggle. Quietly, he descended the stairs and entered the library, sighing at the sight of the pile of unanswered business correspondence.
“Mr. Forrest, I have waited years for this interview.”
Forrest whirled to face the voice, instantly regretting that he had ceased to carry a pistol while inside his own home. In a leather wingchair in a far corner of the room, he spotted the intruder; a small man dressed in a black frockcoat, with straight blonde hair falling to his shoulders, blue eyes shining weirdly behind wire-rimmed spectacles. In the darkness, Forrest did not recognize Clay.
“Sir, what are you doing in my home,” snarled Forrest, genuinely unafraid of the intruder.
Alphonso Clay stood up. “There must be a reckoning, sir. I have come to see that reckoning is made.”
Forrest misunderstood Clay. “I am not ashamed in the slightest for having given the nightriders over to the blue-bellies. It is one thing to kill carpetbaggers and scalawags; I would do that with joy. But the thing was getting out of hand. I won’t have the blood of women and children on my hands. Even nigger women and children.”
There was a long pause, and then Clay spoke, almost unwillingly. “That is to your credit sir, although you must still bear the guilt of getting the Klan started in the first place. In any event, the reckoning to which I refer has nothing to do with your actions in the Klan, or even in the War.”
“What then?” the old Rebel demanded.
“Just as the War was breaking out, you made some final transactions in human flesh, some final dispositions of black human beings.”
“And what of it?” countered Forrest. “Slaving was legal, and I, and others like me, provided the service that kept the plantation system going.”
“Provided the service,” echoed Clay with wonder. “In any event, I am not here to discuss the general, but the specific.” Clay stepped fully into the light; Forrest recognized him with a shock. “My father was Cicero Clay. He asked a service of you in the last days of peace.”
Forrest looked thoughtful for a moment. “Yes, I remember. Some nigger wench he wanted sold south …”
“DO NOT SPEAK OF HER IN THAT WAY!” thundered Clay in that impossibly deep, resonating voice, so different from his normal, cultivated speech. He took several steps forward, and Forrest could now see him even more clearly. Or, he thought, not so clearly; Clay seemed to be trembling all over and his body appeared to expand and retract in the most impossible of ways. An uneasy Forrest decided that this was an illusion caused by a badly flickering fire.
Clay seemed to make a supreme effort to calm himself; the odd distortions of his figure were now no longer apparent. “Her name was Arabella Lot, and she was a lady of cultivation and education. You were told to place her with a family that would respect that. Instead, you placed her with a family that hounded and abused her until she took her own life!”
Forrest shrugged. “That was nothing to do with me. The Devereaux family seemed decent enough.” Suddenly his eyes narrowed. “I remember. You’re the one who massacred the Devereaux family. You did that over a nigger woman? Good God, you must have loved her. Have you no shame, mixing white with black blood?”
Clay shot forward and grabbed the old cavalryman around the throat; his deceptively small yet powerful hands instantly cut off air to the lungs, blood to the brain. As Forrest felt consciousness slipping away, he clawed ineffectively at Clay’s hands.
“Stop hurting my granda!”
With shock, Clay glanced at the open library door, and saw a girl of about ten, dressed in a frilly nightshirt, eyes wide with horror. Reflexively, Clay released his hold on Forrest’s throat; the semiconscious old cavalryman slipped to the floor, gagging for air. His gagging became loud coughs, wet and rasping. After an especially vicious cough, Forrest spat bloody phlegm onto the elegant carpet. The girl screamed and ran over to her grandfather. Cradling the old man’s head in her arms, she shouted at Clay, “What have you done to granda, you … you mean man?”
Through the library’s open window Teresa Duval vaulted effortlessly. Landing on the balls of her feet, a small Remington derringer appeared in her right hand. She took in the scene in a moment, including Clay’s look of utter astonishment, an expression she had hardly ever seen. Clay spoke first.
“How did you know where to find me?”
“Stop thinking I’m a stupid woman. You left me a check for the value Gould placed on your life. That meant you were about to throw your life away; that could only mean you intended to kill Forrest.”
“But how did you get here so soon?”
“I was one train behind you. While you took your time and waited for night to fall, I got off the train at sunset, rented a horse, and about killed the nag galloping out here.” She glanced down at Forrest, who was still coughing and who gagged up another wad of bloody phlegm, to the horror of his granddaughter. “There is no point, Alphonso. The man is dying by inches. If you killed him, you would hang, unless all the witnesses were gone.” Her small pistol swiveled toward the child, who in terror buried her face in her grandfather’s shoulder. Forrest looked at Duval with white-hot fury and tried to surge to his feet, only to be seized by another horrific fit of coughing, which left him weak and helpless on the carpet. Duval laughed heartily, heartlessly, and looked at Clay, a questioning expression on her face.
“No,” said Clay quietly. “I find now I could not do it in front of his granddaughter, even if Forrest were in good health.” He looked down at his hands as if he had never seen them before, and continued to himself. “It would not make any difference, would it? He would never understand what he did was wrong.” Clay then looked at the coughing Forrest and said, “My apologies for interrupting your evening, sir. I will not be bothering you again.” He then went to the door of the library, passed into the short hallway, and was out the front door.
Duval looked at Forrest; his coughing spasm was over for the time being. The old Rebel looked daggers of hatred at her. Duval smiled, blew him a kiss, and followed Clay out into the night.
She found Clay standing beside the horse he had rented from a Memphis livery stable. As he absently stroked its mane in the dim light of the quarter moon, she could see that he was crying. Duval was not introspective, but she knew Clay well enough to know he felt the meaning had gone out of his life. He had lived for eight years on his white-hot hatred of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his determination to kill him, and now he had a vast emptiness inside himself. She knew he needed something to fill that emptiness. Impulsively, decisively, she made a decision on a matter she had been contemplating for some weeks. She walked up to Clay and took his arm.
“Alphonso, I am carrying your child. I know this is not your responsibility, and I do not expect you to …”
He had turned his face to her at her first words, and she trailed off at the look on that face. The normally expressionless Clay now indeed showed expression: surprise, wonder, utmost joy … love. He instantly took both of her hands in hers, and dropped to one knee.
“Miss Teresa Duval, will you consent to be my wife?”
All kinds of thoughts, schemes, plans buzzed around inside her brain, but for once in her life they did not control her words or actions. With no conscious thought, she said, “Of course I will, you stupid bastard!” Then she leaned down, and to her own amazement kissed him with the gentlest tenderness.
As the kiss broke off, Clay murmured, “Language, Teresa, language.”
Alphonso Clay paced the hall outside the master bedroom of his mansion at the family estate of Dignitas; the mellow sunlight of a Kentucky spring day slanting in through the windows, illuminating his features which now showed signs of tension and worry that had never before graced those features. He had spent much of the last few hours trying to work in the library, but not even the arrival of his commission as Lieutenant Colonel, complete with a personal note of congratulations from President Grant, could distract him or ease his worry. In the note Grant had mentioned that Gould and Hampton were doing as instructed, the former stabilizing the financial markets, the latter subtly restraining the worse bigotries of the die-hards in South Carolina.
No matter what he did to distract himself, his mind kept coming back to his wife’s difficult delivery. He kept telling himself that old Doctor West knew his business; he was the most famous doctor in this part of Kentucky, and certainly the most expensive. Still, Teresa had been in labor for over eight hours, and Clay knew that there was only so much that even the best of doctors could do.
Oddly enough, it was the silence behind the bedroom door that Clay found most disturbing. He understood that women always screamed with the pain of childbirth. Yet, despite the length of the delivery, Clay had heard no screaming, no crying—only the occasional grunt. Illogical as it might seem, Clay would have felt more assured if he had heard Teresa screaming in agony.
Suddenly the door was flung open, and one of Clay’s maids came rushing out with a basin filled with bloody water and bloodier towels. Clay’s heart leapt into his mouth at the sight of the servant’s eyes; round and staring, giving an impression of fright. The way that she ran past him without so much as a sketch of a curtsy caused Clay’s right hand to go to his throat and start pulling at his collar. Then Dr. West appeared at the door, iron-grey hair mussed, vest unbuttoned, walking unsteadily, like a man who had just received a tremendous shock. He looked at Clay and answered Clay’s unspoken question.
“Colonel Clay, Mrs. Clay will live, and so will the twins.”
“Twins?” asked Clay blankly.
“A healthy boy and a healthy girl. The … children are fine. I have left instructions on the care of all of them with your housekeeper, who is still with Mrs. Clay. The delivery or … something before the delivery has caused significant damage to Mrs. Clay. She must not attempt another pregnancy. Given the injuries she has suffered, another birth would almost certainly prove fatal.
“There is one further thing, Colonel Clay. I wish nothing further to do with you or your family. You will receive my bill for today’s services in the mail. Please go to another physician in the future.” The doctor bowed slightly, and turned to go.
Clay was utterly shocked by Dr. West’s statements, and felt rage building in his breast. Staying his temper, he realized that West was terrified, not of Clay but of something he had seen in the bedroom. As West rapidly retreated down the stairs and toward the front door, Clay entered the bedroom quietly.
In the room he saw his wife propped into a half-sitting position, her lustrous black hair damp with sweat, her beautiful face haggard from hours of suffering. Yet she was smiling; not the cynical, vaguely predatory smile she usually wore, but a smile of the purest joy. Her breasts were exposed, and at each one she held a tiny figure wrapped in swaddling clothes, each sucking greedily.
