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Authors: John Jakes

Tags: #United States, #Historical, #General, #Romance, #Historical fiction, #Fiction, #United States - History - 1865-1898

Heaven and Hell

BOOK: Heaven and Hell
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After four terrible years the Civil

War is over. In the next turbulent decade

the victorious North must heal the

nation's wounds and unite the South once

more with the rest of the Union. But it is

a new and difficult world for the Hazards

of Pennsylvania and the Mains of South

Carolina.

In the battered and embittered South the

Negroes are now free, but the plantation

economy is in ruins and Northern loan

sharks are moving in to exploit and

subvert the new hunger for wealth and

possession. It is a volatile atmosphere for

Madeline Main, bravely withstanding

attacks by Southern bigots because of her

mixed blood, to establish a multiracial

school at the family home of Mont Royal.

The prejudice of dispossessed planters

whose fortunes were based on slavery is

matched by the viciousness of the North:

Madeline's cousin-in-law Charles is a

victim of the vengeful Union army and

forced to desert. The only future for him

lies in the West, where trading with

Cheyenne Indians for horses can lead to

enormous profits - and violent death. He

is initiated into the mysteries of Indian

law - and love - and finds his respect for

the tribes grows as his familiarity with

them increases.

In Washington Andrew Johnson's

government is the most corrupt

administration the nation has ever known.

n Pennsylvania George Hazard's ironworks prosper with the expansion of the railroads westwards - but his

dejection at the destruction caused by the

war deepens.

(Continued on back flap)

L

10 pounds 95 pencenet

(Continued from front pap)

Page 1

New evils - like the Ku Klux Klan threaten

the entire nation with tragedy on

a greater, darker scale. These are troubled

times, impeccably researched and vividly

realized in this magnificent saga. At the

conclusion, scars remain and there is still

much to be achieved, but for the Hazards

and the Mains, as for the nation, a note of

hope, however distant, can be heard. Heaven and Hell is a triumphant sequel to North and South and Love and War - a

thrilling, moving and unforgettable

chronicle of a nation striving for peace and

unity.

John Jakes was born in Chicago,

graduated from De Pauw University, and

gained his MA in Literature at Ohio

State. He worked for fifteen years at

various creative posts in advertising

before deciding to write full time.

John Jakes is the author of novels, short

stories and plays and is well known for his Kent Family Chronicles, a series of eight novels published between 1974 and 1980.

By 1980 when the eighth and last volume

appeared, more than thirty million copies

of the Kent books had been sold.

Heaven and Hell is the last volume in John

Jakes' ambitious and brilliantly researched North and South trilogy, set around the American Civil War. North and South and Love and War, the first two volumes in the trilogy, are both international

bestsellers and have both been made into

highly successful TV miniseries.

ISBN 0 00 223145 X

Author photograph by Bud Dunn

Collins

By the same author

Page 2

NORTH AND SOUTH

LOVE AND WAR

The Kent Family Chronicles

THE BASTARD

THE REBELS

THE SEEKERS

THE FURIES

THE TITANS

THE WARRIORS

THE LAWLESS

THE AMERICANS

John Jakes

HEAVEN

AND

HELL

??

C Oldham ???? Libraries ?

£ ALS Number h"1 411 5 06 3

C Classification

COLLINS

8 Grafton Street, London Wl

1987

William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.

London Glasgow ¦ Sydney Auckland

Toronto Johannesburg

Page 3

First published in Great Britain 1987

Copyright © John Jakes 1987

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Jakes, John

Heaven and Hell.

I. Title

813'. 54 [F] PS3560. A37

ISBN 000 223145 X

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Robert Hartnoll (1985) Ltd., Bodmin, Cornwall

For

all my friends

atHBJ

With the exception of historical figures,

all characters in this novel are fictitious,

and any resemblance to living persons,

present or past, is coincidental.

The loss of heaven

is the greatest

pain in hell.

calder6n de la barca

HEAVEN

AND

Page 4

HELL

PROLOGUE:

THE GRAND REVIEW

1865

. . . saying, Peace, peace;

when there is no peace.

jeremiah 6:14, 8:11

Rain fell on Washington through the night. Shortly before daybreak

. on May twenty-third, a Tuesday, George Hazard woke in his suite at Willard's Hotel. He rested a hand on the warm shoulder of his wife, Constance. He listened.

No more rain.

That absence of sound was a good omen for this day of celebration.

A new era began this morning, an era of peace, with the Union saved.

Why, then, did he feel a sense of impending misfortune?

George slipped out of bed. His flannel nightshirt bobbed around his hairy calves as he stole from the room. George was forty-one now, a stocky, strong-shouldered man whose West Point classmates had nicknamed him Stump because of his build and his less-than-average height.

Gray slashed his dark hair and the neat beard he'd kept, as many had, to show he had served in the army.

He padded into the parlor, which was strewn with newspapers and periodicals he'd been too tired to pick up last night. He began to gather them and put them in a pile, taking care to be as quiet as possible. In the second and third bedrooms, his children were asleep. William Hazard III had turned sixteen in January. Patricia would be that age by the end of the year. George's younger brother, Billy, and his wife, Brett,

occupied a fourth bedroom. Billy would march in today's parade, but he'd gotten permission to spend the night away from the engineers'

camp at Fort Berry.

The papers and periodicals seemed to taunt George for his sense

°f foreboding. The New York Times, the Tribune, the Washington Star, the most recent issue of
Page 5

the Army and Navy Journal all sounded the

riant noie. /\s uv ^i^t»^^ ;d up:

wugh our gigantic war is but a few days over, we have already he disbandment of the great Army of the Union . . .

ley crushed the Rebellion, saved the Union, and won for them and for us, a country . . .

he War Department has ordered to be printed six hundred thou ank

discharges on parchment paper . . .

'ur self-reliant republic disbands its armies, sends home its faith liers,

closes its recruiting tents, stops its contracts for material, spares to abandon the gloomy path of war for the broad and shin hway

of peace . . .

and tomorrow were to be celebrations of that: a Grand Rerant's Army of the Potomac and Uncle Billy Sherman's

Army of the West. Grant's men would march today; Sherser, tougher troops, tomorrow. Sherman's Westerners sneered Easterners as "paper collars." Perhaps the Westerners would cows and goats, mules and fighting cocks they'd brought to s along the Potomac.

ill of the men who went to war would march. Some would hidden from loved ones, like George's dearest friend, Orry.

d Orry had met as plebes at West Point in 1842. They had together in Mexico, and had preserved their friendship even Sumter surrendered and their separate loyalties took them to iides in the conflict. But then, in the closing days, Orry met etersburg. Not in battle; he fell victim to the stupid, needless, sullet of a wounded Union soldier he was trying to help.

Page 6

e of the young men made old by the war still tramped the he South, going home to poverty and a land wasted by hunger res of conquering battalions. Some still rode northbound trains, in body and spirit by their time in the sinks that passed for

;ons. Some from the Confederacy had vanished into Mexico, irmy of the khedive of Egypt, or to the West, trying to forget ble wounds they bore. Orry's young cousin Charles had chosen path.

lers had ended the war steeped in ignominy. Chief among them Davis, run to ejtfth near Irwinville, Georgia. Many Northern lid he'd tried to elude capture by wearing a dress. Whatever the r certain elements in the North prison wasn't enough for Davis, inted a hang rope.

orge lit one of his expensive Cuban cigars and crossed to the s overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. The suite offered a fine ing stand directly across from the President's. With care, he raised a window.

The sky was cloudless. He leaned out to let the cigar smoke blow away and noticed all the patriotic bunting on the three- and four-story buildings fronting the avenue. Brighter decorations were at last replacing the funeral crepe that had hung everywhere after Lincoln's murder.

A scarlet band of light above the Potomac River basin marked the horizon. Vehicles, horsemen, a'nd pedestrians were beginning to move on the muddy avenue below. George watched a black family--parents, five children--hurry in the direction of President's Park. They had more than the end of the war to celebrate. They had the Thirteenth Amendment, forever abolishing slavery; the states had only to ratify it to make it law.

A clearing sky, a display of red, white, and blue, no more rain--

with such favorable portents, why did his feeling of foreboding persist?

It was the families, he decided, the Mains and the Hazards. They had survived the war, but they were'mangled. Virgilia, his sister, was lost to the rest of the family, self-exiled by her own extremism. It was particularly saddening because Virgilia was right here in Washington, although George didn't know where she lived.

Page 7

Then there was his older brother, Stanley, an incompetent man who had piled up an unconscionable amount of money through war profiteering. Despite his success--or perhaps because of it--Stanley was a drunkard.

Matters were no better for the Mains. Orry's sister Ashton had vanished out in the West after being involved in an unsuccessful plot to overthrow and replace the Davis government with one that was more extreme. Orry's brother, Cooper, who had worked in Liverpool for the Confederate Navy Department, had lost his only son, Judah, when their homebound ship was sunk off Fort Fisher by a Uniort blockade squad, ron.

¦

And there was his best friend's widow, Madeline, facing the struggle to rebuild her life and her burned-out plantation on the Ashley River, near Charleston. George had given her a letter of credit for forty thousand dollars, drawn on the bank in which he owned a majority interest.

He'd hoped she would ask for more; most of the initial sum was needed for interest on two mortgages and to pay federal taxes and prevent confiscation of the property by Treasury agents already invading the South.

But Madeline had not asked, and it worried him.

Even at this early hour, the horse-and-wagon traffic on the avenue was heavy. It was a momentous day and, if he could believe the sky and the soft breeze, it would be a beautiful one.

Then why, even after

mpending trouble?

lazards ate a quick breakfast. Brett looked particularly happy I, George thought with a certain envy. In a few weeks, Billy resign his commission. Then the two of them would board a in Francisco. They'd never seen California, but descriptions late, the country, and its opportunities attracted them. Billy start his own civil engineering firm. Like his friend Charles 1 whom he'd attended West Point--both inspired by the exieorge and Orry--he wanted to go far from the scarred fields erican had fought American.

couple needed to travel soon. Brett was carrying their first y had told this to George privately; decency dictated that a never be discussed, even by family members. When a woman term and her stomach bulged, people pretended not to notice.

i child arrived, parents often told their first-born that the doc it the baby in a bottle. George and Constance observed most
Page 8

Drieties, even many that were silly, but they had never stooped

:le story.

family reached the special reviewing section by eight-fifteen.

: seats among reporters, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, ny and navy officers. To their left, the avenue jogged around lry Building at Fifteenth Street; the jog hid the long rise of the to the Capitol.

heir right, for blocks into the distance, people jammed behind

, hung from windows and roof peaks, sat on sagging tree limbs, pposite stood the covered pavilion for President Johnson's party, iuld include Generals Grant and Sheridan and Stanley Hazard's

BOOK: Heaven and Hell
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