The Widow's War (15 page)

Limping over to a straight-backed wooden chair, he sweeps up a pile of books and papers and deposits them on his desk. “I apologize for the mess. We have so few lady visitors, and I can’t have anyone clean this room for fear something will be lost or damaged.”

Carrie makes a gesture that indicates she’s accustomed to such chaos.
For God’s sake, stop talking about housecleaning and tell me about William
! she thinks.

“As the daughter of Canan Vinton,” Howard continues with maddeningly slow cordiality, “I am sure you know how fragile herbarium sheets are.”

Resisting an urge to beg him to get to the point, Carrie yields to the necessity of preliminary small talk. “Yes,” she says. “I used to remove the specimens my father had collected from the plant presses and sew them onto special sheets of paper he ordered from London. I spent many hours helping him preserve what he had gone to so much trouble to obtain, but of course, I was not always successful. We were often living in the jungle, and insects were a constant concern. What we could not dry, I sketched.”

“Indeed?” He makes his way back to his desk, sits down, and props his cane against the nearest cabinet. “If you have no objection, I would like to ask you a question. The specimen sheets that come to us from collectors who work in the tropics often show insect damage, but your father’s were an exception. How did he keep so many from being consumed?”

“Camphor.”

His face falls. “We also use camphor. I was hoping your father had discovered a tropical plant that contained a superior insecticide. We have just experienced an alarming incursion of beetles due perhaps to the heavy rains, which . . .”

He pauses. “I’m sorry for running on like this. As everyone who knows me can attest, I am a monomaniac when it comes to preserving herbarium sheets, and frankly I am somewhat in awe of you, Mrs. Presgrove. Canan Vinton was one of my heroes, and it is not every day I get to meet one of his daughters.”

“I am his only daughter.”

His smile disappears. “Of course—his only living daughter. I learned of your sister’s death from smallpox. What a grief her passing must have been to you and your father. Or did your father predecease her? I regret to say I cannot remember the exact sequence of events. But still, such a young woman, a budding flower taken before it had fully blossomed—”

“Mr. Howard, I don’t understand. Who are you talking about?”

“Your late sister, Mrs. Presgrove. I hope I do not add to your grief by mentioning her, but I heard so much about her beauty and intelligence and good nature that I have come to feel her loss as if I had known her.”

“Mr. Howard, my only sister died at birth. I have no other sister.”

Howard looks at her in confusion. “But you are Canan Vinton’s daughter, are you not? That is to say, you were born a Miss Vinton?”

“Indeed I was, Mr. Howard. I am the only Miss Vinton.”

He blinks, opens his mouth, and closes it without speaking.

“Excuse me, sir, but you are staring at me as if I were a ghost. Could you please tell me what is going on and what this line of questioning has to do with my late fiancé, William Saylor? I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m growing more confused by the minute.”

“As am I.” He clears his throat. “Mrs. Presgrove, I realize this is an impertinent question, but could you please tell me your Christian name?”

“Before I married Mr. Presgrove I was Carolyn Josephine Vinton.”

He sits back and looks at her with disbelief. “Impossible.”

“Why ‘impossible?’ Do you doubt I am who I say I am?”

“No, Mrs. Presgrove. I’m sorry if I gave that impression, but this is quite a shock. William Saylor and I are old friends. We went to school together. When he came to visit me in April, he told me you were dead. He showed me a Brazilian newspaper that contained your obituary. He was a changed man, thin and pale from a recent illness and quite undone. I have rarely seen a man so grief-stricken.”

“William came here in
April
?” Carrie rises to her feet, collides with the pile of books on Howard’s desk, and sends them crashing to the floor. “Two months ago? My God! I thought he was dead!”

“Mrs. Presgrove, are you going to faint?”

“Faint? No, Mr. Howard, I . . . in April, you say? William’s alive then? You’re sure he’s alive?”

“Yes, Mrs. Presgrove. As sure as I am sitting here.”

“Where is he? I must see him at once. I believe I have—that is, I believe we both have—been the victims of a terrible misunderstanding.”

“I fear you can’t see him without making a long journey, Mrs. Presgrove. He’s emigrated to Kansas.”

“To Kansas?”

“Yes.”

“Where in Kansas?”

“I’m afraid he didn’t say exactly.”

The room suddenly twists sideways and the specimen cabinets begin to move back and forth in a wavelike motion that is sickening. Carrie falls back into her chair. Her ears ring and black spots swim in front of her eyes.

“Mrs. Presgrove, are you sure you’re not going to faint?” Howard’s voice comes to her as from a great distance like the buzzing of an insect. She has an urge to laugh and cry and rage all at the same time. Gradually she comes to her senses. When she lifts her head, she finds Howard standing over her with a glass of water. She swallows and takes a gasp of camphor-scented air.

“Could you please open a window?”

He goes to the windows and throws them open. The smell of camphor is replaced by the steamy odor of the swamp Washington is built on. Carrie sits silently for a moment, trying to calm the beating of her heart. When at last she speaks, she manages to sound coherent. “I am sorry if I alarmed you, Mr. Howard. It appears we have both given each other a shock this morning.”

“You were his fiancée?” Howard says, offering her the glass of water again. Carrie accepts it, takes a sip, and nods. The water tastes muddy, as if it had been dipped out of the river.

“And you and William each thought the other was dead?”

She nods again.

“Mrs. Presgrove, I am so sorry.”

The sympathy in his voice nearly sends her into tears, but she manages to control her emotions. She has almost fainted on Howard’s floor, and she does not want to break down completely in front of him even if he is an old friend of William’s. She needs to gather her wits.

“Do you still have the newspaper William showed you? The one with my obituary in it?”

“No, Mrs. Presgrove. William took it with him. He said he was going to show it to his mother. He told me she was old and ill and was having trouble remembering things. He thought seeing the news of your death in print might help her understand what a grave blow losing you was, and why he had decided to leave instead of staying in Washington where he would be closer to her.”

“Mr. Howard, I examined every mortality list in Rio when I was searching for William, and I never found my name on any of them. I can’t understand this, because I always checked to see if my father’s name was there, and it always was. Since at the time I also bore the last name ‘Vinton,’ I should have been listed just below him. Did William say how he came by my death notice?”

“He told me that a relative mailed it to him from Brazil.”

“Do you recall the date on the newspaper, Mr. Howard?”

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid I have no idea of the exact date, but as I recall, the list of names was short because most of the dead had already been identified. I think it might have been published in late November or perhaps early December.”

“Did William say which relative mailed the notice of my death to him?”

“I think he said his stepbrother sent it to him, to confirm—”

“To confirm what his stepbrother had already told him: that I was dead?”

“Yes.”

Carrie stands and grips the back of the chair. For a moment she sways, her skirts brush against the cabinets, and she knocks a small paper label off one of the drawers. The label floats through the air and lands on Mr. Howard’s desk upside down. She steadies herself, picks up the label, and hands it to Howard. She is almost too angry to speak. It’s a different kind of anger than she has ever felt before.

Late November and early December—exactly when Deacon began courting her. Had he looked up her bank balance before he appeared in her parlor with that black band on his arm? Did he know his lie would kill any hope she had of being happy? Did he feel guilty when he saw how she was suffering, or did he light a cigar and congratulate himself on a job well done?

“Do you have—” Her voice breaks. She stops, takes a breath and begins again. “Do you have a map of the Kansas Territory that I might consult?”

“Certainly.” Howard goes over to a cabinet, opens it, and takes out a leather map case. Moving everything off his desk, he removes the map from the case and spreads it out, anchoring the corners with books. It’s a new map, published in New York only a few months ago by J. H. Colton & Co.: expensive, hand-colored, handsomely drawn; decorated with images of elk, bears, buffalo, wagon trains, and dancing Indians, so large that it covers the entire desk, yet no matter how hard Carrie studies it, it tells her nothing, because except for the border near Missouri, the territory has not yet been properly surveyed.

Kansas is simply a huge, rose-colored oblong that stretches over six hundred miles from the Missouri border to the crest of the Rocky Mountains. Within that oblong, the mapmakers have not indicated any towns unless you count Council Grove and Big Springs where the wagon trains assemble. Here and there, the names of forts appear, most established to keep the Indians in check and protect wagon trains traveling the Oregon and Santa Fe trails.

There is a huge area labeled
Catholic Missions
on a river the mapmakers have not bothered to name. Other rivers, and sometimes creeks, are marked in ways that makes Carrie wonder if anyone has really traveled along them: the Kaw, the Big Blue, the Arkansas, the Smoky Hill, the Cimarron, the unpronounceable Shawacaskah. Except for rivers, missions, and forts, the rest of the territory is a blank, which might as well bear the warning “Here Be Dragons.”

She leans closer and sees there are more labels, equally unhelpful since they merely indicate where the various Indian tribes were settled when Kansas was still part of the Indian Territories: Potawatomie, Kickapoo, Iowa, Cherokee, Wyandot, and Kansas in the east; Arap aho and Cheyenne in the far west.

Some of these Indians emigrated to Kansas in the 1830s when all tribes east of the Mississippi underwent forced relocation. Now they and the others are being forced to moved again to make way for settlers. For a moment, Carrie contemplates the cruel irony of the Indians being pushed out to make way for abolitionist homesteaders who plan to make sure Kansas enters the Union as a free state. If she could do something about this, she would, but since she can’t vote and has no influence on anyone who can, the chances of her being able to help are next to nonexistent, so she returns to the map and her own problem, namely:
Where in the 126,000 square miles of the Kansas Territory is William?

Mr. Howard said he left in April before the territory was legally opened to settlement and just before, or possibly just after, the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company was formed. Logic dictates that since there were no established towns, he must have headed for one of the forts—probably Fort Leavenworth, where his services as a doctor would have been in demand. But there is another possibility, one that almost makes her despair when she allows herself to contemplate it.

In the summer of 1849, after quarreling with his father over slavery, William left Kentucky for the gold fields of California, joining a wagon train traveling west via the Oregon Trail. For eleven months he served as the train’s doctor and, when all three guides came down with cholera, he became its leader.

That wagon train mostly carried families with no idea of the hardships that lay ahead of them and men so greedy for gold they forced the wagons to leave Salt Lake City in mid-April. It was a miracle any of them survived. In fact, if it hadn’t been a mild winter, if William hadn’t managed to save the life of one of the guides, and if they hadn’t been rescued by another wagon train, they would have all died in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. William had come close to freezing to death when he tried to snowshoe out to get help, but of course he didn’t die. Instead, he lived, came to Brazil, and made love to her in her father’s house, and together they made Willa.

Still, if he joined one wagon train, might he not join another? She runs the tip of her finger across Kansas into the Rocky Mountains and over to Utah where the map ends in a burst of blue. Her search for him will almost surely fail if he has ridden off the map.

She straightens up to find Mr. Howard looking at her. “Mrs. Presgrove, he could be anywhere.”

“I’ll find him,” she says stubbornly. She goes back to studying the map. “I understand the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company plans to found an abolitionist town somewhere in the territory. Do you have any idea where it’s going to be located?”

Mr. Howard shakes his head. “No, I’m afraid the site hasn’t been chosen yet.”

“Did William say what he intended to do?”

“Not in so many words. He said he’d grown disillusioned with the practice of medicine. He told me he’d been reading about new techniques a Hungarian physician named Semmelweis had tried out in the Vienna General Hospital Obstetric Clinic—something simple that mostly involved hand washing, soap and water, chlorinated lime solutions, things of that nature. Semmelweis appeared to have had remarkable success in reducing patient mortality, but his colleagues treated him with contempt.

“William claimed this mistreatment of Semmelweis proved physicians, himself included, have no idea what they’re doing. The thought that he had failed to save your life as well as the life of your father was a torment to him. I got the impression he was going to Kansas to start over again.”