The Warriors (60 page)

“Your sister’s awake, then?”

“Yes, sir.” The boy thumped the door, then pushed it open.

“Hannah? Guess who’s here.”

Klaus stood aside as Michael climbed the three creaking steps, grateful to be out of the wind and damp. He stepped into an immaculate but crowded room dominated by a massive iron stove. Curtains partially concealed two beds in alcoves. Unfinished shelves held jars and boxes of staples. In the center of the pegged floor stood a large table that had seen hard use. On the table were a flickering lamp, ledgers, scribbled slips of paper, and an open Bible.

Hannah had been seated with her back toward the porch. She rose as Klaus shut the door from outside. Her joyous smile reached deep into her blue-gray eyes.

“Michael!”

He noticed she was wearing a faded gingham dress. It flattered her figure. “Hello, Hannah. I imagine you’re surprised to see me.”

“No, I’ve been expecting you, though I wasn’t certain when.”

He caught the clean soap fragrance of her skin. “I can’t believe that.”

Still smiling, she walked to a shelf and drew down a milk glass jar containing something dark. She set the jar on the table.

“See for yourself.”

He lifted the lid. Inhaled the aroma of pipe tobacco.

“I’m afraid it’s dry, but it’s all we had in the store. I’ve ordered more.”

He laughed. “My God. You do have cheek!”

“Faith.”

His weariness started to slough away. Gazing into her eyes, he experienced an unfamiliar and wondrous sense of calm.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Ravenous!”

“Before I fix you some food, I must say something. I know you have that other woman to think about. I won’t blame you if you do. For a while,” she added, teasing just a little. “I plan to keep you too busy, and too happy, to bother with her for very long. Now what would you like to eat?”

“Coffee will be enough—but not yet. I want to say something as well. I have a bit of money I didn’t mention before—”

A
bit
of money! God above, that insulted Amanda’s memory, and Jephtha’s goodness. He’d never be able to overcome a sense of guilt at having taken the inheritance from its rightful possessor. But circumstance and Jephtha Kent had dictated that he have it. He wondered how he’d tell Hannah he’d probably be rich as Croesus before he died.

Conscience-stricken, he realized why he wasn’t telling her now.

She was waiting for him to finish. “Um,” he said, collecting himself, “the money. I believe I can draw on it. I thought—I thought it might help buy goods. Put the place in order.” His smile had grown almost shy.

“That’s wonderful, Michael. In Kearney I saw a piece of property ideal for a store. We needn’t limit ourselves to just one.”

We?

The audacity! He burst out laughing again.

“I don’t know why you’re so amused,” Hannah said in a cheerfully tart way. “You look wretched. Sit down. Rest. We’ll discuss the store later.”

“Hannah—”

“Coffee will be here in just—”

“Hannah.”

She turned.

“I must be fair to you. I must warn you.”

“My, that sounds forbidding.” She hurried on to the stove.

“Please listen! I’ve resigned from Casement’s crew. I’ve come back. But the thing is—”

Exhaling, he thumped the bundle on a chair.

“I don’t know if—ah,
damn!”

He faced away from her.

“Are you trying to tell me you’re uncertain about whether you’ll stay?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

She walked back from the stove with a soft rustling of underskirts. He peeked over his shoulder. Her hair and eyes glowed in the lamplight, but it was that astonishing smile which truly illuminated her face.

“I just don’t know, Hannah.”

She picked up the jar of tobacco and set it close to the Bible. Lord, what a lovely sight she was! How peaceful it seemed in this plain room—

“I do,” she said, and put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

B
E CAREFUL, LOUIS KENT
thought as he poured brandy for himself and his guest. Forget the man’s nautical pretensions and his air of butcher-boy innocence. Remember his reputation. He could be baiting a pretty trap.

Louis stoppered the decanter. His swarthy hand was steady. Only his black eyes betrayed his tension, shifting to the left to see what his visitor was doing.

The man’s fat legs straddled the hearth. His stubby pink fingers were locked behind his back, exactly as if he were on the bridge of one of those steamships he fancied. He was studying the objects above the marble fireplace of Kentland’s overheated library. A servant had kindled the fire while Louis and his three guests had dined on boned squab.

Slender and erect, Louis lifted the crystal snifters and swirled the brandy. The huge neo-Gothic house he’d built to indulge his unlamented former wife was utterly still this January evening in 1868. All the help had retired to their quarters on his instructions. Just after arriving, Louis’ male guest had whispered that sending the servants away might be advisable. Once business was disposed of, the gentlemen could then enjoy themselves in privacy.

Upstairs, one of the women laughed. Louis was startled by his body’s sudden and pronounced reaction. The little ballerina brought along for him was equally as vapid as Mr. Fisk’s inamorata, an actress named Josie Mansfield. Neither woman had uttered an intelligent sentence during dinner.

Intelligence was not a quality Louis Kent demanded or even found desirable in a woman, however. Fortunately most women lacked it. He knew from experience that pretenses in that direction merely led to trouble.

Still, the companions of Mr. James Fisk, Junior, were particularly witless. Fisk didn’t seem to mind. During the meal he’d repeatedly tickled Josie Mansfield’s chin, which sent the other girl into convulsive laughter. The dark-haired, pale-skinned, and voluptuous Miss Josie saw nothing improper about tickling Fisk right back—in front of a relative stranger. She’d also kissed Fisk’s cheek several times, and called him Sardines, which nearly forced Louis to retire and throw up.

Now the ladies had gone upstairs to bathe. Quite against his will, Louis found himself vividly recalling the little blond dancer whose “professional” name—Nedda Chetwynd—was almost as ludicrous as her lack of social graces. Miss Chetwynd had clearly been brought along as a bribe. He had no intention of availing himself of the gift until he spied the trap or, if there was none, struck a bargain.

Yet the trill of feminine laughter had aroused him. Annoyingly, he found himself perspiring. His olive forehead glistened as he continued warming the snifters.

There’d been a January thaw. Fog drifted past the stained-glass windows at the end of the long, rectangular library. No lights showed outside. Kentland stood on the bluffs of the Hudson near Tarrytown, well separated from neighboring estates. The isolation was appropriate for a chat involving polite treachery.

He had to be wary. A mistake, even a wrong inflection, might cost him everything. The stakes which had brought Mr. Fisk to Kentland were immense.

Fisk fingered his yellow curls and smacked his lips as he surveyed the various articles on display. A scabbarded French sword hung above the mantel. Immediately below was a polished Kentucky rifle.

On a bookshelf to the left of the hearth stood a small green bottle containing a thin layer of tea leaves which would soon be a century old. A stylized version of the bottle still appeared on the masthead of Louis Kent’s lucrative newspaper, the New York
Union,
and served as the colophon of the Boston printing house to which he no longer devoted much attention.

In a corresponding nook on the other side, the gaslights glared on the glass front of a display case with wooden ends. Inside the case, a slotted velvet pedestal held a tarnished fob medallion. In front of the pedestal lay a small circle of tarred rope.

The sword, rifle, and bottle had all been accumulated by the founder of the family, Philip Kent. Philip’s second son Gilbert—begetter of Louis’ mother, Amanda Kent—had struck the medallion, incorporating the tea bottle symbol and adding a pretentious Latin motto,
Cape locum et fac vestigium.
Gilbert had given the medallion to Amanda’s cousin Jared, who had also acquired the little bracelet. It dated from the 1812 war. The tarred cordage had come from the frigate popularly known as
Old Ironsides,
on which Jared had served.

With another smack of his lips, the man the press liked to call Jubilee Jim completed his survey. He was a red-cheeked New Englander with a sizable paunch that Louis found reprehensible in one so young. Fisk was thirty-three, two years older than his crony, the melancholy Mr. Gould of the Wall Street brokerage firm of Smith, Gould, and Martin.

At thirty, Louis Kent was trim, handsome, and urbane. His father’s Spanish blood showed in his coloring and the Latin cast of his features. Two more dissimilar conspirators could hardly have been found; Mr. Fisk looked deceptively soft and jocular. He enhanced his aura of good-humored innocence with his wardrobe—tonight dark blue trousers and a sea captain’s jacket aglow with brass buttons and dripping with gold frogging.

It seemed improbable that this man who had once hawked tinware in the Green Mountains and shoveled up manure in Van Amburgh’s Circus was a power in the American financial community. Outwardly, Fisk deserved the opprobrius description uttered by the influential minister, Harry Ward Beecher: “The supreme mountebank of fortune.” But Louis Kent wasn’t deceived by catchphrases. He knew that behind the clown demeanor there lurked something far more substantial than a mind bemused by ballerinas and braid. Men who allowed themselves to be lulled by Fisk’s facade usually paid dearly.

Louis didn’t intend to find himself suddenly included in that group—no matter what sort of trap Jubilee Jim was baiting.

“Fascinating collection of trinkets,” Fisk declared. A pudgy hand rose to twist the points of his Napoleon III mustache. “Have some significance in the family, do they?”

“They did at one time.” Louis handed him the brandy. “I should have gotten rid of them long ago. The sword, the rifle, and that tea come from my great-grandfather.”

“The mean-looking fellow whose portrait’s in the drawing room?”

Louis nodded. “He collected them before or during the Revolution. Apparently he found some inspiration in them that I fail to perceive.”

To begin convincing Fisk that he was the right sort, he added, “I’ll stand with Sam Adams.”

Fisk gulped the brandy as if it were water. “What’d he have to say?”

“That there wasn’t a democracy in the history of the world that had not eventually committed suicide. I assume he meant common people were uniformly venal and gullible. I agree. I don’t noise it about, though. I prefer to take advantage of it while stump speakers divert the rabble with fairy stories about the goodness of democracy and humankind.”

Fisk waddled to a chair. “Careful, now. In the Congressional elections a year ago last fall, you were a pretty hot stump speaker yourself.”

Louis flicked a bead of sweat from his lip. The man was beginning to test him.

“God forbid that you should ever find me standing on a stump, Mr. Fisk.”

The visitor didn’t smile. “You addressed certain dinner parties. Quite a few, Jay reminded me.”

A deliberate thrust, Louis decided.
Jay
was a name men feared. It was vital he not seem intimidated.

“Certainly,” he snapped. He sat down opposite the fat man. “I waved the bloody shirt just as all good Republicans did. The objective was to pack the Congress, and we achieved it. This fall we’ll get that drunken tailor out of the White House and elect someone more amenable to friendship with business. General Grant, I hope.”

Fisk meditated. “Andy may be out sooner than the fall. All I hear from Washington is talk of impeaching him. Thad Stevens and his Congressional crowd want his scalp.”

“Johnson was a fool to defy the Tenure of Office Act by trying to remove Secretary Stanton from the War Department.”

“Still can’t see why old Thad’s so hell bent on impeachment, though. Andy was whipped last year when the military reconstruction bills put the Cork in Lincoln’s bottle of sweet forgiveness. The five military districts down South will soon be filled with twenty thousand Federal soldiers. Including some nigger militia, I’m told. I s’pose you’re in favor?”

Louis smiled and ignored the obvious bait. “Mr. Fisk, I don’t give a goddamn what happens down South unless it helps national elections come out the right way.”

“Helps the industrial and financial sector?”

“Exactly.”

“You aren’t all wild to promote nigger freedom?”

“Only when it serves the purpose I mentioned.”

“You aren’t thumping to get ’em treated just like white men?”

“Absolutely not. They aren’t.”

Louis drank too much brandy then. It scalded his throat. He was having a devil of a time convincing Fisk. The inquisition irritated him. He supposed it was the price of gaining the man’s confidence.

He hadn’t done so yet.

“Don’t mean to doubt you, Mr. Kent. Just trying to establish where you stand. You
have
been pretty closely identified with the Radical Republicans. You were quoted all over the East Coast before the sixty-six elections—”

Fisk leaned back and closed his eyes in a drowsy way. “‘Every unregenerate rebel calls himself a Democrat.’”

Louis’ hand constricted on the snifter. The foxy bastard knew his speech by heart!

“‘Every man who murdered Union prisoners—who invented dangerous compounds to burn steamboats and trains—who contrived hellish schemes to introduce yellow fever into Northern cities—calls himself a Democrat. In short’”—Fisk’s eyes popped open; his lips curved into a cupid’s bow smile—“‘the Democratic Party may be described as a common sewer and loathsome receptacle.’” Fisk sipped. “You were quoted, Mr. Kent.”

Louis gave it right back. “I arranged it, Mr. Fisk. For public consumption. Hell”—he waggled the snifter—“I stole most of those words from Oliver Morton of Indiana. I think it’s intelligent to be on the right side at the right time. But I never permit politics—or what the public perceives as my politics—to interfere with business. I chatted with Mr. Gould at that dinner for major shareholders—”