American Blood (29 page)

"But they called him a traitor, and I don't think treason was one of his crimes. He was just fighting for what he believed in. And rebellion is, after all, very American."

"Well, at least the killing has stopped," said Bledsoe. "And you and my son are safe. What of Hugh Falconer?"

"He is well. He saved my life on more than one occasion."

"Extraordinary man. Extraordinary."

Delgado related how he and Falconer had been the only two to have escaped Turley's Mill alive. Jacob Bledsoe was visibly impressed by the courage Delgado had displayed by riding to warn the Americans, even though Delgado played down his role in the affair. Sarah, on the other hand, appeared shaken by the realization of how close she had come to losing the man of her dreams.

"Don't worry, Sarah," said Delgado, trying to lighten the mood. "I don't intend to get caught in the middle of any more insurrections."

"I hope this damnable war is over soon," growled Bledsoe with a sidelong glance at his son, Jeremy. "Unfortunately, we've invaded Mexico. Generals Taylor and Wool are moving south from the Rio Grande, and General Scott will soon strike westward for Mexico City from either Tampico or Vera Cruz." He shook his head dolefully. "It is a mistake to press the issue. A ghastly mistake, I tell you. We have California now, and that is what President Polk really wanted all along. Who knows how much more American blood will be spilled. And to what end? Should we take the better part of Mexico proper, we shall never be able
to hold on to it. The North would never let that happen."

He began to cough again, his whole body racked with the violence of the seizure. Clarisse materialized with a cup of hot honey tea and bade him drink. The tea seemed to help.

Delgado glanced at Sarah. She nodded, and Delgado, trying to dislodge the lump in his throat, stepped forward.

"Mr. Bledsoe, there is something of great importance I want to discuss with you."

"Oh?" Bledsoe also glanced at Sarah. "I wonder what that might be?"

"I have asked your daughter to marry me, and she has made me the happiest man in the world by consenting to do so. I . . . we . . . would like to have your blessing."

"My blessing. Not my permission? If you had waited a few weeks, I would be in my grave, and you wouldn't have to worry about my blessing."

"Father!" exclaimed Sarah. "What a horrible thing to say!"

Bledsoe relented. "My apologies to you both. Of course you have my blessing. I am a sick and crabby old man, so please make allowances. You see, I am very afraid. Afraid of dying." He stared pensively into the fire. "But to know that my daughter's happiness—not to mention her security—is assured is a great comfort to me." He looked up at Delgado and smiled. "Do you intend to live here in St. Louis?"

"I'm not sure, sir. Whatever Sarah wishes to do."

Bledsoe nodded. "Perhaps in keeping a home and raising a family my daughter will discover that she has little or no time to pursue her cru
sades—abolitionism and all those other troublesome notions."

"Don't count on that, Father," said Sarah.

"Naturally, I leave my business to Jeremy, although he is not in the least interested. However, my daughter's dowry is nothing to sneeze at, I can promise you. Oh, I realize you are a quite well-to-do young man, Del, and you will have no difficulty in maintaining Sarah in the style to which she is accustomed, but you understand that a father feels a duty to do what he can to secure his daughter's future."

"Yes, sir."

Bledsoe sipped at his tea. "There is one other matter. Well, two, actually." He looked at Clarisse. "I want Clarisse to stay with Sarah. But I suppose I should manumit her, and leave that decision up to her, as well."

"Oh, Father, that would be wonderful," said Sarah, delighted. She went to Clarisse and gave her a hug. "You'll be free, Clarisse. I have long prayed for this moment."

Delgado thought Clarisse was taking her emancipation rather somberly.

"You're more than welcome to stay with us, naturally," he told her. "But the choice is yours. Perhaps you have something else in mind." He was thinking of the man, Stephen Maitland, at the St. Louis
Enquirer
.

"This child," said Clarisse, referring to Sarah, "is like a daughter to me. I had my own flesh-and-blood girl once. She die of the yellow fever down New Orleans way. Then I come here, and watch Sarah grow up into a fine young woman, and I think sometime I would have wanted my own daughter to be just like Sarah, had she lived."

"I love you so, Clarisse," said Sarah and kissed the Creole Negress on the cheek.

"I go where you go, child."

"That's settled, then," said Bledsoe. "Last but not least, Del, there is the matter of Brent Horan."

Jeremy shot out of his chair. "I hope for his sake he has not insulted my sister again during my absence," he snapped, truculent.

"Calm down, Jeremy. Calm down. He has done nothing of the kind. Nothing at all. If the truth be known, Brent has had his hands full with other things. Daniel Horan passed away a few weeks after you two boys left for Santa Fe."

"Passed away?" scoffed Jeremy. "Murdered, you mean, by slow poison."

"There is no evidence of that," said Bledsoe sternly. "In fact, whatever the mysterious ailment was that finally took Daniel, it must be congenital, for now it seems that his son suffers the same affliction."

"What?" Jeremy was incredulous.

Bledsoe nodded. "Brent Horan is dying by inches."

"But why," asked Delgado, "especially if he is dying, is Brent Horan a matter of concern to me?"

"Sarah didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

"The day after you and Jeremy left, a Mr. William Darcy called. He said he was representing Brent Horan in an affair of honor. Darcy is a notorious character. A riverboat gambler by trade, and a duelist of some note, besides. He had come to make arrangements for a duel. It is to be done on Bloody Island."

Delgado shook his head. "That was six months
ago. Surely Horan's temper has had ample time to cool."

"Brent was very much in love with my daughter before she went away to the academy. In fact, that was one of the reasons I sent her away. She was sixteen then, and much too immature to marry, in my opinion."

"Marry?" echoed Delgado. He looked querulously at Sarah.

"He was a handsome, dashing cavalier," she said. "Or so I thought of him that way. Perhaps I'd read too much Walter Scott. I was foolish, and flattered by his attentions. It was just a childish infatuation on my part, Del. I didn't know the kind of man he was."

"I should hope not." Delgado remembered that day on the levee when he had watched Brent Horan in the process of purchasing the pretty octoroon—what had she been called? He couldn't recollect her name. But she had obviously been destined to become the object of Horan's pleasure.

"Please don't be upset with me, Del."

"I'm not. Believe me, Sarah, I'm not. It's just that I had hoped, by now, that this business with Horan would be water under the bridge."

"It may very well be," said Bledsoe. "But I think we should resolve this right away. Put it behind us, once and for all."

Delgado stared at him. He had a pretty good idea what Jacob Bledsoe meant.
"Right away" means before I marry his daughter. He doesn't want Sarah to become a widow
.

"Then maybe I should pay Brent Horan a visit," he said, knowing that was what Jacob Bledsoe wanted to hear.

Bledsoe nodded, pleased.

"I'll go to Blackwood with you," said Jeremy.

"That's not a good idea," said Bledsoe.

"No, it isn't," agreed Delgado. He put a hand on the scowling Jeremy's shoulder. "The idea is to make peace."

"You can't mend fences with a man like Brent Horan."

"You
can't. Perhaps I can. I'm certainly willing to try."

"There is a risk," said Sarah. "He could have forgotten what happened before, but seeing you might make him remember. He might challenge you."

"I doubt that he's forgotten, because you were involved, and you're not easy to forget, Sarah. No, I'll go." He turned to Jacob Bledsoe. "I will send my card to Blackwood tomorrow and await his earliest convenience."

3

Early the next morning, Delgado went to the livery where he had purchased the four-stockinged bay the night he'd left St. Louis, the horse who had carried him down the Santa Fe Trail only to die—valiantly, he liked to think—running a gauntlet of insurgents in ambush at the Arroyo Hondo. He hired the owner's son, a twelve-year-old boy, to deliver his card to Blackwood, promising the eager lad a dollar when he brought Horan's answer back to the Bledsoe house. Delgado had written
At Your Earliest Convenience
on the back of the card. That was all. He was sure it would be enough.

The eternal optimist, he hoped that Brent Hor
an's ardor to see him dead would have cooled in six months' time. If not, so be it. Delgado had no intention of fighting a duel, and nothing would make him change his mind. No matter how hard Horan hated him, the man still considered himself a gentleman. He would not dream of shooting Delgado down in cold blood. So there was no harm in taking Jacob Bledsoe's suggestion and going to Blackwood, while there was a chance the whole matter might actually be amicably resolved. It was the least Delgado could do for Bledsoe; Sarah's father deserved a little peace of mind.

His next stop was the offices of the St. Louis
Enquirer
, which were located in a two-story brownstone on Market Street. This stretch of cobblestoned road between the levee and the square was the heart of the St. Louis business district. There were mercantiles, milliners, haberdashers, bootmakers, gunsmiths, land agents, doctors, dentists, and most of all lawyers; Delgado thought that there were more lawyers per capita in the United States than in any other country in the world. Every politician he could think of had started his professional life before the bar. He supposed this plethora of barristers was a perfectly natural byproduct of a democratic society where the people enjoyed the liberty to handle their own affairs without governmental interference. On the other side of every blessing lurked a curse.

Most of the ground floor of the
Enquirer's
building had been given over to the production of the city's foremost penny press. A pair of steam-operated printing presses were making a deafening racket, and Delgado had to shout at the top of his lungs to be heard by the ink-stained apprentice whom he asked about Stephen Maitland's
whereabouts. The boy pointed skyward, indicating the second floor, and Delgado ascended a steep, narrow flight of stairs, and found Maitland at his cluttered kneehole desk, scribbling furiously.

Maitland was a thin, gawky man in a rumpled tweed suit. A dour expression on his pale, angular face, he looked up at Delgado, with a pair of spectacles perched precariously on the tip of his nose; he was annoyed by the interruption. There was no heat in this big room filled with desks except that produced by a coal-burning stove at the far end; Maitland's grip was limp and cold as he took Delgado's proffered hand. He recognized Delgado's name immediately, and the annoyance turned into alarm as he looked about him like a conspirator who has just heard menacing footsteps behind him.

"What . . . what do you want, Mr. McKinn?"

"I wanted to thank you for your part in getting my letters to—"

Maitland put a finger to his lips, then crooked a finger, and Delgado leaned closer over the desk.

"No one here knows about this, Mr. McKinn, and I would very much like to keep it that way if you don't mind."

"I don't mind," said Delgado, mystified.

"You must realize that my . . . my relationship with Clarisse is . . . is a secret. Sterling was the only one who knew."

"I see. It might interest you to know that she will soon be a free person. Jacob Bledsoe has pledged to provide her with manumission papers."

Maitland stared at him, as though he had suddenly lost his ability to comprehend the English
language. "I . . . I think you must misconstrue me, sir."

"Perhaps I do."

"You see, our relationship is a clandestine one not because she is a bondwoman, but . . . but because I am . . . I am a married man."

"Ah," said Delgado. He didn't know what else to say.

Maitland folded his spectacles, stowed them away in a drawer, and got to his feet. "Please come with me, Mr. McKinn."

"Certainly."

Delgado followed him downstairs and out onto the crowded sidewalk. They started walking in the direction of the levee, where the smokestacks of dozens of riverboats resembled a forest of tree trunks in the city's haze. Now that he was away from the
Enquirer
, Maitland seemed much more relaxed.

"She's a wonderful woman, isn't she, Mr. McKinn?" He sighed.

"Clarisse? Why yes, I suppose she must be. I don't know her all that well, but . . ."

"She is very . . . very passionate. My . . . my wife is not. You might say Helen is just the opposite, if the truth be known."

"Ah," said Delgado again, suddenly wishing he was elsewhere. He wondered what Clarisse could possibly see in this nervous beanpole of a man. She was an exotic and attractive woman in her own right, and she could have had her pick of men—especially if she was content to play the role of mistress. He wondered, too, why Maitland was confiding in him, a total stranger. Perhaps because he had no one else to talk to.

"If it ever got out that I, that we . . ." Maitland
shuddered, and it wasn't the cold January wind that made him do so. "It's not that she is a Negress. No, not at all."

Maitland's tone of voice convinced Delgado that the man was lying; Clarisse's race was at least part of the problem. In this place, and in this day and age, Maitland would be ostracized if it became known that he had a black mistress. He might have gotten away with it in New Orleans, but then the Crescent City was very cosmopolitan.

Maitland came to an abrupt halt and clutched Delgado's arm. "I . . . I love her, you know. Have no doubt of that." He blushed and looked away. "The fact that Mr. Bledsoe intends to free her is not good news, actually. No, not good news by any means. She might decide to leave St. Louis now. She might go north. Dear God, I could lose her. I . . . I know it's terribly selfish of me to think that way, but . . . but I'd just as soon she remained a slave. I mean, it's not as though Mr. Bledsoe mistreats her."