Heaven and Hell: The North and South Trilogy Read online

  “You look like a whore to me.” He reached for her.

  Ashton jabbed the point of the parasol into his groin, hard. His eyes practically crossed as he reeled back, clutching himself. A couple of better-dressed gentlemen stepped between Ashton and the derelict.

  “Thank you kindly,” she said in her sweetest voice. They tipped their derbies while restraining the drunk, and she swept on by, bound for the Van Buren Street bridge. No doubt she was late, and she dared not be late on this important, not to say fateful, day.

  Hurrying, she reflected on the clumsy assault. It was at least proof that at age thirty-one, she hadn’t lost her looks. If anything, she believed, the passage of time was improving them. It wasn’t improving much else. She detested the near-penniless life she led. Often, she couldn’t believe how far she and the sometimes curmudgeonly old man had gone as partners. Santa Fe to San Francisco, to Virginia City and then Chicago.

  So much scheming, so much struggle. And so much of the future riding on those drawings of a piano that Will had made, and made over, scores of times, strewing their squalid room with tracing paper as his pencil flew, sometimes until three or four in the morning, as he searched his own experience, and obscure German and French books containing manufacturing diagrams, for ways to cut a dime here, another dime there.

  It was all culminating today. Everything. The money brought from Virginia City, slightly over one hundred thousand dollars, carried in a satchel. The two loans negotiated locally to pay rent and the wages of Will’s four workmen and the salesman he’d hired away from Hochstein’s. To get one of the loans, Ashton had been required to spend the night with a banker, a dreadful man with a hog’s belly who heaved on top of her for hours and never once managed to get it up.

  After his first fifteen minutes of effort she had decided she didn’t want one of the banker’s trouser buttons for her box. For most of the night she lay staring past his head into the dark. She envisioned herself richly dressed, wealthy and powerful, thanks to Will’s success. She saw herself returning to Mont Royal and confronting the arrogant Madeline with any number of choices, each designed to hurt her and drive her from the family land that was Ashton’s by right.

  Oh, she’d done a lot for Will Fenway and for their scheme, and almost being crushed to death by the fat, sweaty banker was only part of it. First, she’d seduced a records clerk in San Francisco. Not so bad; he was homely but virile. It took her only a week to pry from him a forged certificate of marriage, showing that she had wed Mr. Lamar Powell on February 1, 1864.

  Although she now went by the name Mrs. Willard P. Fenway for convenience, she was actually married to a man who was, so far as she knew, still in Virginia City, Nevada. Ezra Learning was a red-faced, white-haired, sad-eyed widower with no family. He was shy, and a clod around women. Ashton had to arrange a seemingly accidental meeting—a little fainting spell on the street—and pretend to be shy herself, and destitute over the death of Mr. Powell. She did most of the courting, filling Mr. Learning with one full bottle of Mumm’s to induce him to propose.

  In bed, Learning proved a reasonably lively husband. Much more lively than good old Will, who had tried just once, in San Francisco, and at the end of a half hour sighed, “That does it. I like to sleep with you to keep warm, if you don’t mind, but I reckon I’m too old for the other part. We’ll keep it at partners. What do you say?”

  From Ezra Learning she purloined a fly button. He made fairly frequent use of her charms during the eight months of their marriage. He was chief of the local claims office, and naturally happy to assist his own dear wife in establishing her clear title to the Mexican Mine, her late husband’s property. She had her marriage certificate, didn’t she?

  Ashton hired men to reopen the mine, which at first looked highly promising. The silver-bearing ore reduced to the equivalent of one hundred three thousand dollars before the vein ran out. She quietly withdrew the money from her bank account and late one night while Ezra Learning snored, she decamped on the stage with Will Fenway, who had been hiding out in a cheap room, impatiently sketching pianos.

  Oh, yes, a complex, labyrinthine path to Chicago, all right. With many confusions and irritations. She posed as Mrs. Fenway but was still Mrs. Learning. She dared not show her beauty to posterity by means of a photograph. Will was adamant about that. When he first mentioned it, a day after they arrived in the city, Ashton threw a shoe at him. Next morning, to get back at him, she marched to Field, Leitner and Co., a fine department store on State Street. There, with money from their bank account—money reserved for the piano company—she bought the scarlet outfit, including the bustle.

  Will was furious. He cursed her as she’d never heard him curse before. Ashton realized then that she’d met a man whose strength matched hers. Old and stooped and red-eyed as he was from all the worry and night work, he was neither intimidated by her beauty and haughty airs nor upset when she retaliated for his cursing with screams, saying she’d leave him.

  Pushed past his limit, he slapped her. Just once, but hard enough to tumble her onto their mussed bed. Then he showed her his fist.

  “You go ahead. I’ve put my whole soul and all your money into this scheme. If you don’t care any more, if you don’t want to go back to South Carolina the way you’re always saying, you just walk out that door. I’ll bank all the money we make, and then I’ll find myself another woman.”

  Ashton was thunderstruck. She pleaded, begged, cried, humbled herself until he agreed to make up. She had not crossed him or defied him since.

  This was the reason for her haste as she turned west on Van Buren to the wooden bridge over the south branch of the Chicago River. When strangers eyed the tight red silk on her bodice and the provocative bounce of her bustle, she tossed her head and glared. Her heart belonged to Will and what he was about to reveal today. Her heart was wrapped up in him, and so was her money, not to mention her unshakable determination to return to Mont Royal someday and make them pay—Madeline, Little Miss Goody Brett, Charles—every damn one of them.

  West of the river, Chicago became an unlovely near-slum crowded with saloons, lumberyards, woodworking mills, boat jetties on the water, and the bleak, cheap residences of a lot of Irish and Swedes and Bohemians. Here, on Canal Street, a dark stairway led up past a crude depiction of a hand pointing to FENWAY’S PIANO COMPANY.

  She dashed up, breathless, and into the loft, which was piled with iron frames, spools of different grades of piano wire, unassembled cases from Schoenbaum’s in New Jersey, crates of actions from Seaverns’s in Massachusetts. Nothing in the piano was Will Fenway’s creation except the design.

  “Will, do forgive me—” She rushed to him, contrite. The four young men in leather aprons and portly, pie-faced Norvil Watless, the salesman, smiled and offered greetings as she flung her arms around Will’s neck and kissed him. “There was all sorts of wagon traffic on the bridge. I couldn’t cross for ten whole minutes.”

  “Well, I waited,” he said, sounding edgy as he tapped fingers on the sheeted object that was the center of attention. “Guess we’re all here. Let’s take a look.”

  She noticed the tremor of his hand as he grasped the sheet. She also noticed the red rims at the bottom of his eyes; he needed spectacles and wouldn’t buy them. But his shoulders squared as he paused for effect, then whipped off the sheet.

  The workmen clapped. “Godamighty, what a beauty,” Norvil Watless wheezed. Even Ashton gasped.

  The piano was an upright, a style made popular because it fit nicely in those small, new-style Parisian dwellings, appartements, that were all the rage. The case was a lustrous blackish wood with broad streaks in the grain the color of rust. Centered above the keyboard in a gold-leaf wreath, Fenway appeared in Old English script.

  “That’s a gorgeous rosewood case—” Watless began.

  “Brazilian jacaranda,” Will corrected. “Cheaper. But call it rosewood anyway.”

  He stroked the sleek, shiny top, his tiredness seeming to fall a
way as he explained to Ashton, “I can’t build a better one for the money. She’s got a full iron frame, overstrung scale—”

  “French action,” Watless exclaimed. Ashton had learned that a Paris-made upright action was synonymous with fine quality.

  “No. I bought the action in the U.S.,” Will said. “But the selling sheet says it’s French-style, so be sure you get across the idea that it’s from Paris. After all, you won’t be calling on the most honest customers in the world.”

  Ashton wanted to say something to please him. “You should be proud, Will.”

  “I may be proud and bankrupt, too, if she doesn’t sell. By the way, it is a she—I named this model the Ashton.”

  She squealed in surprise, then actually felt touched. She hugged him again, and was aware of the weary sag of his body momentarily resting against hers. He waved. ‘Try her out, Norvil.”

  The salesman pulled up a stool, flexed his fingers, then launched a tentative “Camptown Races.”

  “Louder, Norvil,” Will said.

  Norvil played louder.

  “Faster.” Norvil picked up the tempo. The music seemed to push out through the piano’s closed front with a clangorous, slightly metallic sound. Norvil segued into “Marching Through Georgia.” You could practically hear the bugles and tramping feet.

  One of the workmen did a little jig. “By damn, that’s an upright!”

  “That’s right,” Will agreed. “You don’t give a damn about sweet, mellow tones in a sporting house. You want noise. Noise, Norvil!”

  Norvil obligingly gave them Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus.” Ashton clapped her little red gloves together, delighted. Will gave her a strange, grave, sideways look, then said, “I can make as many as you sell, Norvil, but if you don’t sell any, you can visit me at the poor farm, provided the suppliers haven’t beat me to death. Well, guess we’d better open the bottle of sour mash, hadn’t we?”

  Ashton had never seen a celebration announced with such a lack of zest. It made her a little grave too, reminding her of what would happen if the Ashton upright piano failed.

  When Norvil and the workmen finished the bottle, Will closed up the loft, giving them the rest of the day free. He dropped the empty bottle in a trash barrel. “The cards are all dealt, Ashton. We might as well spend our last dollar on a venison steak at the café on the corner.”

  She agreed. Neither said much until they were seated amid pots of wilting ferns, layers of cigar smoke, and an otherwise all-male clientele, most of whom goggled at her spectacular looks.

  Her red-gloved hand clasped his. “Will, what’s giving you the glooms?”

  He avoided her eye. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do.” She pouted prettily. “Yes!”

  His weary red-rimmed eyes fastened on her. “I’ve never said this to you, because I was never sure we’d get this far. It eats on me, Ashton.”

  “What?” Now her pretty pout looked forced, nervous. “What?”

  “Santa Fe.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What keeps bothering me is Santa Fe. That man Luis you shot when you needn’t have.” Anger reddened her face. He gripped her wrist, and she felt the strength hidden in his dilapidated old body. “Let me finish. I have nightmares about that man. Bad ones. God knows I’m no pillar of virtue. And I like you, I really do. I like your pertness, your looks, your grit, the ambition you don’t cover up with a lot of mealymouthed lies. But there’s a certain streak in you that your daddy should have whipped out of you with a willow wand. A mean streak. It made you shoot down a defenseless man. Whether Fenway pianos are a disaster or the mother lode, either way—” The next came after a rush of breath, as if a burden were lifting. “I’ve resolved that if you ever do something that low again, we’re quits. No, don’t argue. No excuses. You murdered him.” His voice was quiet, so no one could eavesdrop. But she heard it like a roaring wind, cold as January.

  He extricated his hand. “Do anything like that again, we’re quits, understand?”

  Her immediate reaction was renewed rage. Once, Huntoon had said something similar, and she’d jeered, then tongue-lashed him. Now she opened her moist red mouth to do it to Will—and couldn’t.

  She shivered. Hastily, she examined her choices. She bowed her head.

  “I understand.”

  He smiled. Tiredly, but he smiled. He patted her hand. “All right. I feel better. Let’s order up. In fact, let’s ruin the whole blasted day and get drunk. It’s either all over or just starting. I gave it everything. So did you.”

  Their eyes met in a strange, tranquil moment of understanding. Why did she admire this frail old man? Because he had pure steel in him? Because he could deliver an edict and make her take it? Unexpectedly, her eyes misted.

  “Yes, we did. Let’s drink like lords and then let’s go to bed.”

  “I’ll probably do nothin’ but fall asleep.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll keep you warm.”

  It perked him up, and he actually showed some jocularity as he snapped his fingers for the waiter. “Well, why not? It’s all up to Norvil now. Norvil and the whorehouse owners of these great United States.”

  32

  SOMEONE TOUCHED HIS FOOT.

  Awake instantly, Charles flipped his black hat off his face while his right hand jumped to his Colt. The revolver cleared leather and he recognized Corporal Magee, his dark face patterned by sun falling through parched cottonwood leaves.

  Charles’s hammering heart slowed. “When I’m asleep, yell, don’t grab me. Else you’re liable to get a bullet.”

  “Sorry, sir. We got some smoke.”

  He pointed away southwest where the Smoky Hill River blazed in the noonday like a cutout of tin. A thin black pillar stood in the white sky. Charles scrambled up and ran to find his tracker.

  He and his ten-man detachment were patrolling out of Fort Harker along a twenty-five-mile stretch of the stage line south and west of the post. Here the Smoke Hill branch of the Kaw diverged from the surveyed right-of-way of the Union Pacific, Eastern Division. The soldiers had sought relief from the July heat among the river-bottom trees. They didn’t find much. The red bandanna around Charles’s throat felt like a wet rag. His bare chest shone with sweat.

  He found the tracker seated on the ground and rummaging among the bits of root, flints, arrowheads, spent bullets from his medicine bundle, a small drawstring bag traditionally holding a personal collection of articles selected to promote strength, ward off sickness and enemies, and remind the possessor of important aspects of his religion.

  The tracker was a Kiowa named Big Arm, assigned to Charles by the old man. He was a handsome Indian, and an expert horseman, but surly. Barnes said he came from a Kiowa band down in north Texas, and had committed the ultimate mistake on a buffalo hunt some years back. He’d gotten impatient, rushed in ahead of the other hunters, and stampeded the herd. No one got so much as one kill. Big Arm’s possessions were taken and broken to pieces and he was shunned. He withstood two winters of that, then spitefully deserted to the service of the whites—in this case a bunch of brunettes, or buffalo soldiers as the Plains Indians called them, reminded of the buffalo’s coat by the woolly hair of the black men. The troopers tended to like the term buffalo soldier, because the buffalo was revered.

  “What do you make of that?” Charles said to Big Arm, in a tone unconsciously goading. He genuinely disliked the Kiowa, who refused to talk with Charles or his men except when necessary.

  Big Arm answered with one of his laconic shrugs, then pulled a bright brass telescope from his belt. He started to snap it open. Charles knocked it down.

  “How many times do I have to tell you? That thing shines like a mirror. What’s burning? The next stage station?”

  Big Arm shook his head, sullen. “Too close for stage. Must be new farm. Not here last time I rode the river.” For him, that was practically an oration.

  Alarmed, Charles yelled, “Wallis. Boots and saddles.” />
  Having served out his sentence in the guardhouse, Shem Wallis had returned to duty and revealed some talent as a trumpeter. He blew the call with sharp, urgent notes. The black troopers heaved to their feet, complaining; it hadn’t taken them long to learn that little Army tradition. Charles detailed two to guard the supply wagon and raced for his picketed piebald.

  Despite the intense heat he lit a cigar. Nerves. Sweat poured down his chest and back as he trotted from the trees at the head of eight men in column of twos.

  The sod house was still standing. It was the shell of a farm wagon producing the smoke. Charles ordered his men into line, and they approached with rifles and pistols ready. The brim of Charles’s black hat threw a sharp shadow diagonally across his face. His eyes darted. Suddenly he smelled something foul. “What in hell’s that?”

  Evidently Big Arm knew. “Bad,” he said.

  The line halted at the edge of the trampled dooryard. From horseback, Charles read sign there and in the beaten-down grass at the edge of the homesteader’s small, dying vegetable patch. “I count eight ponies, maybe one more.” Big Arm’s grunt agreed.

  “How’s he know that?” one of his men muttered behind him. Charles preferred to keep them in awe of his plains craft; he never explained that Wooden Foot Jackson had taught him everything, and that hardly a day passed when he didn’t remember and use one lesson or another. They didn’t know it was that simple. When he had them whipped into shape he might take some of the mystery out of it, and begin to teach them. Not yet, though.

  He sent three two-man teams, dismounted, to search the ground in different locations. He led Magee, Big Arm, and another trooper around the square house, which was made of mud brick with a sodded roof. Tall grasses jutted from the sod, a weed patch against the hot sky.

  The stench grew worse. “Smells like cooked meat,” the trooper said. They turned the back corner and saw what remained of the white homesteader, staked out on the ground. Charles wiped his mouth.