Dragonwyck (37 page)

The maid hesitated, but it could do no harm to tell now that everything must be fine. ''Tis late you are in feeling it, mum, with you going into your seventh month. I've been watching you and waiting these six weeks.' She did not add that she had fortified her own considerable knowledge of midwifery by anxious consultations with Mrs. MacNab, the housekeeper.

Miranda, protected both by ignorance and this new bliss, laughed placidly. 'Well, perhaps he's a very plump baby and was too lazy to move sooner.'

Peggy laughed too. But as she pulled the curtains and placed the screen before the dying fire, she draught, The Holy Blessed Mother grant that she's right, and that it isn't that the poor mite was too feeble to make himself known.

A stormy November full of sleet and hail became a cold snowy December. It was after all unnecessary for Nicholas to make overt resistance to change on his manor, for as yet the new laws had not been passed, nor the new Governor taken hold. It was in fact to be eight years before the last of the litigation and state suits against landlords for the trying of titles finally simmered inro peace.

In the meantime the tenants, having won their point and certain of eventual victory, settled down again more equably than they had for years.

On December sixth, the Manor House was again thrown open for the Saint Nicholas Day feast to the children. This year none of the neighboring river families' children were invited. Nicholas had no intention of risking refusals. Had it not been for Miranda's condition, he would before this have concentrated his will on the subduing of these families who dared hold aloof. He would have invited important guests from New York, enlisted the aid of old Martin Van Buren, and given a ball of such dazzling brilliance that the countryside would have come out of curiosity if nothing else.

As it was this must wait until spring, when Miranda had recovered and there would be an heir to Dragonwyck.

The children of the tenantry, however, flocked to the party—nearly a hundred of them. Their parents were no more averse than the rest of the world to getting something for nothing, and many of them had sadly missed this festivity last year when the Manor had been shut. There was no denying the patroon did them well. Cunningly hidden in the gilded sabots there were gifts and candies for each child. There were showers of marzipan bon-bons in the muslin sheet suspended from the ceiling which Nicholas ripped open for them with the traditional crook. There were unlimited supplies of gingerbread and olykoeks fried to a succulent crispness, there were flagons of beer and rum punch.

After the ceremony, Nicholas moved amongst his people exerting his magnetism upon each one, flattering them with personal inquiries, expressing his pleasure at seeing them. By not the slightest word or gesture did he indicate knowledge that many of these had been his bitter enemies, and had spent the past two years in violent struggle to escape from his hold.

His attitude of benevolent interest was precisely as it had always been during the ten years of his patroonship, precisely that of his father and grandfathers back to the first patroon in 1640.

When the last crowded wagon left, its runners gliding swiftly through the new snow, Hans Gebhard's fat wife looked down at her three happy children. They snuggled in the straw like puppies, their hands clutching the fine gifts they had received—a doll, a singing top, even a pair of skates. On their tongues still lingered the reminiscent delights of cake and candy.

'The patroon's naught so bad, Hans,' said Mrs. Gebhard to her husband thoughtfully.

'Don't you dass to call him the patroon, now that we're quit of him!' Hans turned his sour face angrily on his wife. 'Have ye forgot Klaas, woman? Will a few sweets and baubees wipe Klaas from your noddle and how the Van Ryn used him?' He spat morosely in the snow.

Aye, thought Mrs. Gebhard, poor Klaas that had cut his wrists and died when the patroon turned him off the farm two years back on rent-day. Hans' own cousin Klaas had been, and the whole business mighty bad.

'Still and all 'tis done with now forever,' she said. The manor rum punch filled her stomach with a pleasing warmth. She was tired of ill-will and recrimination. There would be no more rent-days; come July they'd likely own their own farm at last. No more kermiss neither! The thought struck her like a blow. That had been something to look forward to all spring—the Fourth-of-July Kermiss; the games and the feasting, the rivers of cold, delicious beer.

She cast a nervous glance at Hans, afraid he might somehow guess her traitorous repining. Once having started she could not stop the disquieting thoughts. You couldn't but own the patroon had saved them a good bit of worry. There was the shipping of crops to New York. For that he'd made all arrangements, sending the stuff from the farms in one lot. They'd have to manage for themselves now, each farm as best it could.

Then there was the mill the patroon had built for them. It stood on a corner of the Manor House land. He'd never let them use that free now any more, nor spread their nets for shad on his section of the river.

Mrs. Gebhard sighed and her fat cheeks quivered. Never the sweet without the bitter. She must be more strong-minded like Hans. No price was too high to pay for freedom, for the right to own the bit of land where the Gebhards had borned and labored and died for two hundred years.

IT WAS ON THIS SAME SAINT NICHOLAS' DAY THAT a troopship from New Orleans docked in New York. It landed a hundred wounded men, and caskets containing those who could no longer feel their wounds.

Jeff Turner was amongst those in the first category and still too much shattered to be thankful that he was not in the second. A Mexican bullet had ripped upward through his left arm and collar bone, laid open his cheek, and plowed a groove through the side of his skull before it vanished into the bright tropical sky.

Though all the wounds had promptly begun to fester, Jeff's sturdy frame could have withstood that and the disablement of his arm and shoulder. He would have directed the cautery and splinting himself, and then have proceeded enthusiastically with his division under General Worth to Saltillo. But the head wound was another matter. He had been unconscious for days.

He had been dumped on a gun carriage in Monterrey and dragged back to General Taylor's base at Cerralvo. Here he had received hurried treatment in a hospital tent, and as he still declined either to regain consciousness or to die, he had been bundled into an empty supply wagon with a score of others and eventually reached the Texan coast, where a sloop conveyed them to New Orleans. The good Sisters at the Charité cared for him there while the skull fracture healed enough to permit him to travel home.

Jeff had intended going up-river to Hudson at once, but as he lurched off the gangplank onto the pier he knew that he must have rest first. It was still a struggle to stand for long. He was subject to sharp attacks of dizziness. There were crowds of anxious relatives on the dock but none for him. He grasped his dilapidated carpetbag with his good hand and strode through the press, praying that he might not keel over and make a scene. A few sympathetic glances were directed at the scar on his cheek and the dangling left coat sleeve. Though the arm had healed, the collar bone was slower and still needed the support of a sling.

One lady in bombazine, seeing the pallor of his face, the gauntness of his body in the ill-fitting blue uniform, cried, 'Oh, the poor young lieutenant!' But otherwise no one noticed him, for which he was grateful. He had the usual masculine horror of being conspicuous.

When he reached the sidewalk, the city noises banged on his sensitive nerves like thunder; houses, drays, and hurrying people merged crazily, swimming around him in slow spirals.

Damn, thought Jeff, gritting his teeth. He rumbled into a hack, muttered, 'Hotel—cheap one, anywhere,' and shut his eyes.

The driver took him at his word, trotted his horse two blocks along South Street, and decanted Jeff at Schmidt's Tavern, where he found himself established in a bare, dismal room priced at fifty cents a day. It was clean, however, and it had a bed upon which Jeff flung himself after getting rid of Mrs. Schmidt, the landlady, who showed a sentimental German disposition to cluck and yearn over him.

He lay for two hours in a semi-stupor, until the throbbing in his collar bone roused him. He sat up and ran his fingers impatiently over a lump on his shoulder. Another pocket of pus had formed on the surface of the partly healed wound. He scowled at it as he screwed his head around trying to see it. There was no mirror in the room. A quick cut of the scalpel it needed, and a wet dressing. His bag of instruments was left behind at Cerralvo amongst the cactus and yuccas.

He made a sudden resolution, scribbled a note, and shouting for the landlady told her to have it delivered. Then he tottered back to the bed.

It was dusk when he heard heavy footsteps ascending the stairs and a knock on his door. Doctor John Francis walked in.

'Well, so ye're back again, my fine young hero,' he said, chuckling, and extending his hand as casually as though they'd met yesterday. His wise eyes missed nothing of Jeffs condition, but he would no more have expressed his sympathy than Jeff would have welcomed it.

'Been makin' love to a cannon ball?' he inquired genially, plumping his black bag on the floor and sitting on the bed. 'Could you not find something warmer and softer to embrace down there?—No, don't sit up; do as I tell you, you young squirt. Lie still; you think you know it all, I'll be bound, but you're not as good a medico as I am yet. Yes, yes —I see it, d'ye take me for a mole?'

While he kept up an affectionate grumbling, his gnarled fingers were busy palpating the arm wound, the abscess on the collar bone, the healed scar on the cheek, the depression in the scalp.

You've not much improved your beauty,' he observed with a twinkle, kicking his bag over to the bed and bending with a grunt to extract a scalpel. 'How'd it happen?'

'Just one bullet,' confessed Jeff ruefully. He indicated its upward path with a quick motion of his thumb.

'Was the greaser in a hole, then, or were you maybe skulking in a tree?' inquired the old doctor, and while he spoke he jabbed the scalpel deep.

'Ouch!' said Jeff. 'No, I wasn't in a tree, but I
was
on a roof.—What are you dousing on that compress, sir? I never saw stuff like that. Plain water'll do—or maybe you should cauterize again?'

'Deliver me—' retorted the old man with a terrible frown, 'from treating another doctor, especially a young know-it-all. Mind your business, my boy, and let me mind mine. You called me in, didn't you? You want this dod-gasted mess of a shoulder to heal, don't you?'

'Yes, sir,' said Jeff, smiling. 'But what's that brown stuff? It burns like a red-hot poker.'

'It's seaweed and alcohol made for me by an old Chinee on Pell Street. And I don't
know
why it ofttimes keeps a wound from festering, so don't ask me. The Chinamen know a lot about medicine and I'm not too proud to try their drugs. No more should you be.' He tied up the sling. You'll do now, my lad. Couple months from now you'll be good as new, barring that scar on your cheek, though doubtless the ladies'll consider it highly ro-man-tic. If you rest a lot and act like a sensible human being, the dizzy spells'll pass too.' He dumped his scalpel, bandages, and the brown bottle pell-mell into his bag, which he snapped shut. He lit himself a black and foul-smelling cigar, settled his massive body on the one rickety chair, and turned a look of anticipation on Jeff.

'Now, what in blazes were ye doing on a rooftop in Monterrey?'

At first Jeff searched for words, struggling against the universal reluctance to talk of battle to those who know nothing of it. But gradually the old man's eager interest had its effect. Jeff forgot the four musty walls about him; they expanded into desert and dust, into brown adobe and the blinding gleam of white plaster under the Mexican sun.

Old Rough and Ready Taylor had made shrewd plans for the capture of Monterrey. He had sent General Worth with eighteen hundred men—of whom Jeff was one—on a circuitous route to the other side of the city, while Taylor created a diversion on the eastern side to cover their march. On September twentieth, Worth had arrived at his position and the city of Monterrey lay between the pincers which inexorably narrowed down on it. One after another the Mexican forts fell; Federación, Independencia, and the Bishop's Palace on the west; Tenería and Libertad on the east.

On the morning of the twenty-third the Americans advanced into the bewildered city from both sides. But instead of risking life in the streets, which were raked by artillery fire and covered by snipers from shuttered windows, the American soldiers were ordered into the houses, where they tunneled their way through the interior walls, progressing through a cloud of plaster and falling rubble toward the grand plaza.

Jeff paused, remembering the excitement of that march through the homes. Like a lot of terriers after a rabbit they'd been. Burrowing, knocking down, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, rushing headlong through lovely flower-filled patios. They were all drunk with the ease of conquest, and the childish joy of destruction. He as drunk as any of them.

It was only now that he remembered the terrified faces of black-clad women, cowering in corners of their ravished homes watching the shouting, exultant soldiers break their furniture, shatter the statues of the saints, rip rugs and draperies to shreds.

By sunset both halves of the army had reached to within one block of the plaza. Here the Mexican troops were huddled awaiting orders from their leader, Ampudia, whose efficiency did not match his courage.

General Worth called for volunteers to plant a small mortar on an exposed rooftop which would command the square.

'And I suppose ye jumped up like a jack-in-the-box,' growled Doctor Francis, 'when ye should have been back at the base caring for the wounded.'

Jeff reddened, then laughed sheepishly. 'Well, we hauled up that mortar and stuck it where it did a lot of good. The hot shells'd mow down a dozen of them at a clip. But they didn't let us enjoy ourselves long.' Jeff paused again. 'It's curious,' he said thoughtfully, 'but I saw my bullet coming. He was a handsome Mexican, had a fine face. I saw him squinting up along the barrel of his gun, down there on the street. For a second we looked right at each other, and I had a crazy feeling of liking him. Then I ducked, but not fast enough.' He grinned. 'That's all I know first hand of our capture of Monterrey, for I didn't rightly come to from the blackness and the haze until they dumped me in the Charité in New Orleans.'