A Song Across the Sea (24 page)

She found out that she wouldn’t get that chance, however. She spent the day applying for work at one vaudeville theater after another, crisscrossing the district in a vain search for work. Muldoon’s network of “thugs” had been very efficient in spreading the word. She even visited the booking agents who sent performers out on the “circuits” to distant cities. Surely Muldoon’s influence couldn’t extend to Omaha, or Philadelphia, or Atlanta—could it? Ultimately, she could tell by vague replies about there being “no openings at present,” by the way they averted their eyes nervously when they talked to her that the agents, too, had been warned. She was poison. Blacklisted. Her success to date at pleasing audiences meant little to theater owners and booking agents worried about becoming the target of an arsonist. She was turned away again and again.

Evening descended. Hungry and too dispirited to think of a way around her troubles, she wearily trudged home to the boarding house.

Delores met her at the door, looking haggard beyond her years. Her pleasantly lined, matronly face was severely etched with wrinkles, and her eyelids were swollen from crying.

“Tara, I—” Delores choked on sobs.

Tara rushed forward. “What is it, Delores? What’s happened?”

“Some men came today… Everyone was gone off to work. They told us to throw you out. Make you leave. Hap said… Hap said, no one was going to tell him what to do. He tried…tried to order them out and…they hurt him, Tara. They beat him senseless!”

My God! Was there no limit to what Muldoon would do to exact vengeance on her?

She gripped Delores’ arms urgently. “Where is he, Delores? Where is Hap? D’ya want me to go for a doctor?”

Delores took a deep breath and tried to collect himself. “The doctor’s been and gone. He took stitches. Said Hap will need a lot of rest.”

“May I see him?”

The vestibule of the boarding house showed signs of the upheaval that had taken place there. A portion of the sturdy wooden banister lining the stairs leading to the second floor was broken off, with its splintered wood gaping sharply upward. A chair lay on the floor, two of its legs at a wobbly angle. From the shattered glass in the framed picture hanging over it, it was clear that someone had smashed the chair against the wall.

Delores ushered Tara into Hap’s bedroom and tactfully withdrew. Tara crept to the side of the bed and looked down at him. His face was a battered roadmap of pain. One eye was completely shut, the pulpy skin around it already darkening into a bruise. An angry red slash reached across his cheek to his ear, its raised edges drawn together by uneven stitches of black thread that the doctor had taken. A crisp square of white bandage covered what must be another gash on his forehead, close to his hairline. One side of his mouth was a ruined mess, bulging out of shape. When he stirred, opened his eyes and spoke to her, she could see that several teeth were missing.

“Tara? Thank God you’re home.”

“Oh, Hap, Hap.” She bent low over him, her warm tears trickling onto his shirt. “I’m so sorry I brought this trouble to your house.”

“That’s enough of that crying,” he said gruffly. “You’re worse than Delores. I got banged up more’n this in barroom brawls in my younger days, and I got over it just fine.” He tried to smile, but the effort hurt his mouth and he winced. “You didn’t know me then. I wasn’t so respectable as I am today.”

“I never thought he’d…he’d do anything like this.”

Hap studied her with his one good eye. “Who, Tara? Who’s after you? What kind of trouble are you in?”

“I met an awful man once, back in Ireland. Seamus Muldoon. One night he tried to…” She couldn’t finish the sentence and Hap didn’t ask her to. “After all this time, I’d almost forgotten about him. Turns out he came to America, too—to New York City, of all places, and he’s been busy since he got here, according to the police. A criminal boss is what he is. He found out that I was performing at the theater. I guess that’s not so hard, since my name is on the playbill and my picture sometimes on the wall of the lobby. So Muldoon came to see me backstage last night. I started to send him away but then Reece and Miriam stopped in, and I let them think that I was friendly with him, because I couldn’t stand to see Reece and Miriam together.”

Hap was silent for a moment. “So that’s the way it is.”

“I love Reece,” she said simply, rather surprised to hear the words out loud, after all this time. “I can’t help myself. I love him so much it hurts. Don’t tell me it’s a mistake. I know that. I’ve made enough mistakes already to last a lifetime. When I left the theater, Muldoon was waiting for me outside. He tried to force himself on me—”

Hap was furious. “The bastard!”

“—and when I fought him off, he said I’d be sorry. Said I’d pay for the way I’d treated him. He set the theater on fire last night but the police have no proof, so they can’t put him in jail. I lost my job, and no other theater will hire me now. Hap, you must believe me: I never dreamed he’d come after you!”

He reached out and rubbed the top of her head, as if she were a child. “Don’t you worry about me, Tara. I’m a tough old bird. In a couple of days, I’ll be up and around again.”

“But Delores said…the men told you I had to leave.”

“Nobody tells me who I can or cannot have as a tenant. You’re staying right here. You’ll be safe. We’ll straighten this mess out, by God we will! This Muldoon character is not going to get away with it.” Despite his energetic declarations—or maybe because of them—Hap looked suddenly fatigued. He slumped back against his pillows, breathing heavily. “The doctor gave me something to make me sleep,” he said apologetically.

“Then you should rest.” She leaned down and kissed him gently on his uninjured cheek. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured quietly.

“Put it out of your head. Don’t worry about a thing. You have friends, Tara. I just need a little sleep, is all. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Sure, Hap. Good night.” She closed the door softly behind her, knowing that she’d probably never see him again.

R
eece Waldron’s great-great-grandfather, Arsѐne du Louvois, could never have imagined the time of horseless carriages and flying machines in which his descendants would live.

An aristocrat who was jailed during the French Revolution and scheduled for an appointment with the guillotine, he bribed a drunken guard into helping him escape prison disguised in the somber robes of a monk. He wisely—and quickly—decided to leave France and cast his lot with those adventurers and opportunists headed toward the New World.

He sailed into Charleston Harbor in the early 1800s, forced himself to become quickly fluent in the barbaric English language so prevalent on this side of the Atlantic and parlayed the family gold and jewels he’d whisked out of France with him into a fortune in rich, cotton-bearing land, eventually owning nearly 3,000 acres and 120 slaves. He married well, for Charleston’s gentry eagerly embraced this charming representative of European nobility, and built a splendid turreted French chateau in South Carolina’s low country. He named the estate Arcadia, for the region in ancient Greece famed for its pastoral beauty.

Du Louvois died long before the War Between the States ravaged his beloved adopted region. It was left to his grandson, Julian, to ride home from the war and steer what remained of the estate through the financially perilous years of Reconstruction that followed.

Julian’s third child, Adrienne, had made her appearance in the world in the dawn of the conflict. Her first strident cries echoed the farther-reaching reverberations of the guns that had sounded over Ft. Sumter only days earlier. Her mother, exhausted from childbirth, lay back on her Venetian, silk-canopied bed and wondered—while being ministered to by the family’s physician and a gaggle of female relatives—what strange, uncertain times lay ahead for her new daughter.

With her father and uncles off to serve in the Confederate Army and her mother preoccupied with the unaccustomed responsibility of managing the estate, Adrienne’s early years were marked by a freedom that would have been unknown to a Southern girl of good family born ten years earlier. While her mother tried to oversee cotton production and cope with shortages in everything from tea, rice, bacon and shoes—shortages imposed on them by the hated Yankees, with their damnable blockade—Adrienne spent most of her time unsupervised, ranging freely over the vast plantation, playing with the children of her family’s slaves, who were, themselves, slaves. She was agile and fearless in all things physical, swimming in the mill pond by the age of four, riding horses at five.

The independent spirit rooted in early childhood proved impossible to rehabilitate when the war ended and her father returned home to impose some semblance of normalcy on the family. As Adrienne grew older, she acquired more learning than was seemly in a girl and displayed an unnaturally strong interest in business affairs, especially those concerning horses.

Her father, left without unpaid slave labor by Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, sold off parcels of the estate’s acreage and turned his attention to less labor-intensive enterprises: distilling whiskey and breeding fine racehorses. Adrienne’s skill with horses drew her quickly and inevitably to the latter concern. Her father found himself turning to her more and more for advice on breeding combinations and training techniques.

Precociousness was amusing in a child, but when Adrienne blossomed into a comely young woman, Julian despaired of finding a suitable husband for her. Her mischievous gold-speckled green eyes and delicate features and her fluid, well-proportioned figure drew young men from surrounding estates like moths to a candle-flame, but her sharp tongue and nimble wit just as quickly drove them away. Adrienne had no patience with fools and dullards, and she didn’t trouble herself with concealing this very unladylike quality from would-be suitors. Julian knew that beneath his daughter’s slender, lithe figure lay a will of steel.

“But, Papa,” she protested once, when he broached the subject of a husband. “Ah have no intention of gettin’ married. A married woman might as well be a slave.”

“Adrienne!”

“It’s true,” she insisted. “None of the men Ah’ve met so far could tempt me into such a dreary arrangement.”

He smiled knowingly. Like the superb thoroughbreds in his stables, this troublesome daughter of his was high-strung and difficult to handle. But, also like them, she had spirit. He would bide his time.

•  •  •

The tall, taciturn man from the Oklahoma territory arrived at Arcadia for a bit of horse dealing one morning in early September.

Julian, making his way out to the pasture to meet with Noah Waldron, drew cool air and the tangy, invigorating fragrance of pine needles into his lungs with pleasure. There was money to be made today. He could feel it. He mentally reviewed what he knew of Waldron, who’d been referred to him by an Atlanta business associate. Of obscure origins, the man had grown up on the frontier, the son of an impoverished Presbyterian minister or the son of a gunfighter-turned-saloonkeeper—depending upon which story one believed. Rumors abounded as to how Waldron had amassed his fortune. From a youth spent wrangling horses and trading with Indians he’d reportedly moved on to organizing wagon trains and dealing in cattle.

Some said he’d won part interest in a silver mine in Nevada one night at a poker table in Oklahoma City. Others, that he’d purchased coal mines at rock-bottom prices during the financial panic of 1873, waited for the economic turnaround, then invested the profits he made in newspapers, railroads and steel.

When Julian reached the paddock and shook hands with Waldron, he could hardly credit such rumors. Waldron looked to be no more than twenty-five years old. He certainly didn’t wear his wealth—however much it was—well. His clothing, in fact, marked him as a roughneck. His manner was too direct for a gentlemen, devoid of the elaborate courtesies that usually preceded business dealings in this part of the country. Furthermore, he introduced the Negro jockey he’d brought with him, Nathan Wellbourne, as if the man were Julian’s equal! To his astonishment, Julian found himself expected to shake hands with the Negro and utter the customary polite greeting, “A pleasure.” He did so, but with considerable reluctance, sighing inwardly the entire awkward moment. The people one had to deal with since the end of the War…

“Welcome to Arcadia, Mr. Waldron,” Julian said warmly. “I understand that you’ve developed an interest in racehorses.”

Waldron only nodded, gazing out at the horses sauntering through the pasture.

Julian was disappointed. He was hoping for more information, to verify his assumption that Waldron knew very little about racehorses and thus was ripe for the taking. Waldron was probably like others of the newly wealthy set: intrigued by the glamour and high stakes of horse racing and wanting in on this rich man’s sport. That they knew little or nothing about it never troubled most of them. Nor did it trouble Julian. Their ignorance and eagerness almost always translated into higher profits for him.

“What would you like to take a look at today, sir? Are you interested in starting your own stables? Or purely in racing? I’ll have a selection brought to the paddock, where you can take a closer look. What shall it be? Colts? Yearlings? Have you retained your own trainer? We have some fine studs and brood mares, from pedigrees that promise real—”

“Something fast.”

Julian smiled. This was going to be even easier than he’d anticipated.

A stable boy was summoned and a sampling of horses was led to the paddock. Julian and Waldron made their way over to it, with Julian barely able to keep up with the Oklahoman’s long strides.

Julian’s hopes for an easy sale soon evaporated, however. The questions Waldron asked about conformation and bloodlines, training and tendon injuries revealed much more than a casual knowledge of thoroughbred racing. He frequently conferred with his colored man, Nathan Wellbourne—a habit Julian found astounding.

“You ah ovahlookin’ the fastest beast in that paddock, sir.”