The Accursed (19 page)
F
OR HYSTERICAL MAIDENS
I
WOULD PRESCRIBE MARRIAGE,
FOR THEY ARE CURED BY PREGNANCY
.
—Hippocrates
I
pray for you, Josiah, as I have prayed for your sister—that you will not succumb to barbarism.”
In a voice scarcely raised above a whisper Winslow Slade spoke to his distraught grandson in the hours following the hideous public shame of the “abduction” from the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, in full view of more than two hundred invited guests.
As if, and not for the first time, the distinguished older man seemed to have the power to read another’s mind.
“If our enemies be evil, beware that they draw us into evil with them.”
So saying, Winslow Slade reached for his grandson’s hand; but Josiah was no boy, and his hands not a boy’s hands, to be placated in this wise Christian way, even by a beloved grandfather.
HE WOULD DO IT
, he vowed.
For hadn’t he the example of his (male) ancestors?—some of them very young men indeed, younger than he, who had been willing to surrender their lives in battle; others, their manhood challenged by an adversary’s careless insult, immediately responding with the challenge of a duel. There was thirty-two-year-old General Elias Slade who had signed the Declaration of Independence, and who had fought bravely during the Battle of Princeton, said to have been bayoneted seven times, by a cowardly cadre of British soldiers, and brought to die at the old Clark farm on the Princeton–New York Pike. There was Major Vreeland Slade, another of Washington’s aides, who had distinguished himself at the first Battle of Springfield; and Colonel Henry Lewis Slade, who had defied the demagogue Andrew Jackson; and Bingham Slade, who had died in a duel fought with a law school classmate at the University of Virginia as a consequence of their disagreement over a popular Democratic scheme of the 1850s, to annex Cuba and Central America for slavery! (For such were the dreams of our American democracy, in the middle years of the nineteenth century.) And there was Abraham Lewis Slade who had fought a duel, at the age of sixty-seven, to repair the honor of his very young third wife—an incident celebrated in the gutter press that had occurred in 1889 in Manhattan’s Central Park and was, as Josiah had gathered since boyhood, a source of both family embarrassment and family pride.
For Abraham Lewis Slade had, according to legend, calmly returned his adversary’s (missed) shot with a perfectly aimed shot of his own—that had penetrated the other’s forehead in a “ghastly, gaping” hole between the man’s astonished eyes.
Arrested by police officers on the spot, with a charge of murder, Abraham Lewis Slade did not spend more than an hour in police custody, being at once freed, and all charges against him dropped, by an act of the New York mayor, a political friend and confidant of certain wealthy friends of Abraham Slade, all members of the prestigious Century Club.
So far as Josiah’s Strachan relatives were concerned—(Josiah’s mother was a descendant of the Strachan family, originally of Bride’s Head, Rhode Island)—Josiah knew of fewer heroes, and fewer heroic deaths; yet from earliest boyhood he’d been intrigued by tales of Walton Strachan, from whom his mother was directly descended, who had at the age of eleven proved himself so capable a spy for General Edward Braddock, in western Pennsylvania, in a campaign against the French, that he was decorated by the general himself, in full view of hundreds of assembled troops. Only a few years later, Walton had distinguished himself as an officer in the Colonial army, in the Battle of the Monongahela River, in 1755; two decades later, Walton Strachan had died in a duel in Philadelphia, over a freed slave woman who had seemingly come under Strachan’s protection.
“Am I so courageous? Even with Mayte mocking me at every turn?”
By which Josiah meant, the memory of Axson Mayte taking hold of his sister Annabel in the doorway of the church, in full view of the assembled guests; the hellish image of Axson Mayte multiplied in Josiah’s imagination like a mirror-image multiplied to infinity.
Like any young man bent upon an honor revenge, Josiah feared that another man would exact justice before he could; in this case, Lieutenant Dabney Bayard, who had gone into hiding, it was said, soon after the incident in the church, when his newly wed bride had been stolen from him and cast him into the intolerable role of
cuckold
. For it might be presumed that the wrath of a betrayed husband and lover was more potent than the wrath of a brother.
(According to Bayard relatives, it was believed that the betrayed husband was on the track of Annabel and her “abductor”; now that a week had passed, and now twelve days, it became known to the Bayards that their disgraced Dabney had been involved in “drunken altercations” in public houses in Trenton, Washington Crossing, and New Hope, across the state border in Pennsylvania; that it was being whispered, in West End Princeton circles, that Lieutenant Bayard was “going to the dogs” and that, in a fit of temper, fueled by shame, the distraught young man had “severed all communications” with the Slade family, who should have been his allies.)
Josiah, who had not been a friend of Dabney Bayard, and would not have wished to be an ally, except under duress, was relieved by this; for he intended to find his sister by himself, and to exact a just sort of revenge upon Axson Mayte, no matter the consequences to himself. He had read, as a student at the Princeton Academy for Boys, translations of both Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey;
he had read those romantic-action novels listed previously in this chronicle, in which the exploits of courageous men and boys were honored, by Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, Owen Wister; stubbornly he had wished to interpret, in Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn,
those passages in which the Hatfields and the McCoys make war upon one another, and barbarously kill one another, as exalted by Twain, and not instead deplored. As Josiah traveled from one Jersey town to another, in pursuit of the missing couple, he found himself in the wake of the enraged husband Dabney Bayard, who preceded him, at times, by merely hours; and wondered that, if Dabney were in one of his drunken tempers, and spoiling for revenge, declaring his intentions to any and all who would listen in public houses, Dabney might be reported as saying things insulting to Josiah’s sister’s honor, necessitating that Josiah must fight
him
. To Winslow Slade he felt obliged to speak in this way, as he could not have spoken to his own parents: “If the ‘wronged husband’ insults the ‘unfaithful wife,’ if he so much as hints at his displeasure with Annabel, you know, Grandfather, what I must do. I will have no
choice
.”
And Winslow Slade said quietly: “No, Josiah. You will have a choice, as we all do. Even as she did—our lost Annabel.”
IT SOON BECAME EVIDENT
to Josiah, with the intolerable passage of days, and finally weeks, that there were unique problems involving the search for Annabel and the demonic Axson Mayte: for not only had the illicit couple disappeared from the church on Nassau Street, in a dignified old brougham pulled by four matched horses, “as if into thin air along the Old King’s Highway” (now Route 27), but, in the aftermath of the scandal, very few persons could account for Axson Mayte during the weeks of his residence in Princeton.
It was true, Mayte had been entertained at several of the most distinguished old Princeton houses, and had been a visitor at Crosswicks Manse; he had been a guest for several days at Prospect, the president’s house at Princeton University; everyone in the West End seemed to have met him, and to have shaken his hand which was recalled by some as “strong, vigorous, hot” and others as “limp, chill as a dead fish, boneless.” Yet, Josiah had great difficulty piecing together information about the man. His grandfather Winslow had not been very helpful, saying only that Axson Mayte, a Virginian associated with the Presbyterian Church, had virtually invited himself, to speak with Winslow in his library—“On a theological matter, of no interest to the lay person”; the meeting had been brief, not two hours; but Axson Mayte had not left town, turning up elsewhere, at others’ homes, and at Prospect, to shake the hand of Woodrow Wilson. Why had he come to Princeton in the first place; where, indeed, had he come from—(by this time the Presbyterian-Virginia background had been proven false); was he a man of the law, as Woodrow Wilson believed, an “ethicist” and an “educator”; was he a wealthy man, as others believed, or was he a gambler and card shark, as others claimed; how had he become associated with Winslow Slade’s sheltered granddaughter Annabel; and, most mysteriously,
what precisely did Axson Mayte look like
?
No two persons seemed to agree. Josiah himself remembered with a vivid sort of revulsion—the squat man’s toad-features, and ditch-water eyes; a sly, sensual, insinuating smile, of wormy lips. Yet others whose opinion Josiah valued, like Horace Burr, insisted that Axson Mayte looked “altogether ordinary: neither tall nor short, thin or stout, attractive or ugly”; several of the women, including Johanna van Dyck and Florence Chambers, claimed to have found Mayte “handsome, in an arrogant-Southerner way” but “soft-spoken, courteous.” No one could agree: did Mayte have “coarse, dark hair”—or “fair, thinning hair”; or was he in fact bald? Professor Pearce van Dyck, still ailing with a mysterious infection of the lungs, could speak in only a hoarse voice, insisting that Axson Mayte was “a kind of golem”—(a golem being a creature out of Hebrew tradition, a humanoid creature fashioned of clay and lacking a soul). Of West End Princeton residents not one would confess to having brought together Axson Mayte and Annabel Slade: indeed, no one could recall having glimpsed the two together at the same gathering, beneath the same roof.
The barkeep at the Sign of the Hudibras on Fort Street, Trenton, recalled a “friendly Southern gentleman” while the hotel manager at the Nassau Inn exploded in an angry tirade against the uncouth guest who’d left evidence of his “bestiality and animalism” in his suite, for which he had neglected to pay; the hackney driver who’d taken Mr. Mayte’s luggage from the shuttle train claimed that he had never in his life carried such heavy suitcases—“Filled with rocks, like the graveyard, they were.” This same gentleman complained to Josiah that after having driven Mr. Mayte to the Nassau Inn, and helped him settle into his suite, the several dollars Mayte had given him had somehow “vanished” out of his pocket within the hour.
At the Coachman’s Inn in Brunswick, Mayte had been “brooding and secretive”; at the Nassau Inn, he had been “wonderfully animated,” and had shown respectful curiosity about the Inn and its history; he’d spoken with a “cultivated” Southern accent, or with a “clipped, British accent”; or in the flatter tones of Maryland, or South Jersey. He was above average in height, slender, and handsome; then again squat, and lumpish, and ill-featured, with slack sneering lips and “pink, pig-eyes.” Public house waitresses spoke guardedly of him to Josiah; other women, having learned of Mayte’s “abduction” of the Slade daughter, were anxious for Josiah and his family to know that they had been deceived in believing that Mayte was a gentleman, a “close, personal” friend of the former Reverend Winslow Slade.
As Josiah made inquiries after Mayte, his own initial impression was in danger of fading; eventually, Axson Mayte would lose all distinctive features, only the
demonic
remaining, like dark-tinctured skin and topaz eyes.
In desperation Josiah went to the Mercer County sheriff’s headquarters on Route 206 to inquire whether “Axson Mayte” had been questioned in the matter of the Spags murder and was informed that since the attack upon the child was clearly the work of a deranged beast, the sheriff’s deputies would hardly have questioned a gentleman about it.
Josiah asked how was Axson Mayte a
gentleman;
and the reply was, when Mayte’s name was first mentioned to sheriff’s deputies, Mayte had been a houseguest at Prospect, on the Princeton University campus—“A personal friend of the president of the university there, that could have nothing to do with the Spags family on the Princeton Pike.”
Hotly Josiah said, “Then you are fools. You are collaborators with the Devil. I will make my own way.”
AND NOW AT LAST.
The hour of reckoning has come.
The setting: the Raven Rock Inn of Raven Rock, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River north of New Hope; the time, a midsummer night near one o’clock in the morning, six weeks and two days following Annabel Slade’s disappearance.
Or, as poor Annabel was likely to be identified in the press,
Mrs. Annabel Bayard.
The other day was Josiah’s twenty-fifth birthday. By his own firm wish, the Slades did not insist upon celebrating it, at this somber time.
Nor would a birthday of Josiah’s be truly celebrated, without the presence of his sister Annabel.
And so Josiah, in the bloom of indignant and heedless youth, has driven in his brass-trimmed Winton motorcar into the Delaware Valley, through the sleepy villages of Hopewell and Lambertville, and so to New Hope; then north along the curving River Road, to the scenic crossroads Raven Rock, eleven miles away. Josiah has come to Raven Rock alone, on his mission of vengeance: to bring his (dishonored) sister back to her family, and to fight to the death, if necessary, with her seducer.
To this end he has brought with him in a kidskin case, lined in crimson velvet, two fine-wrought dueling pistols with carved mahogany grips, prize specimens from the workshop of Trinity Morris, Jr., the revered gunsmith of Philadelphia of the mid-1800s.
Josiah recalls his grandfather’s plea:
That you will not succumb to barbarism
.
Being a young man confirmed in the Presbyterian faith, in the very bedrock of Protestant Christian faith, Josiah understands that his behavior is reckless, and dangerous; it is surely not
Christian
. Yet, his Slade and Strachan ancestors would cheer for him, if they knew. For nothing is more precious than the honor of a family, even Christian redemption.
“If I am doomed to Hell for my behavior, then I must accept it. And if there is no Hell, except what men have fashioned for one another, then I will be spared. I will be
redeemed
.”