A Passionate Girl (52 page)

Abner promptly obeyed. Jonathan sat there, his arms contemptuously folded. “Mr. McCaffrey,” he said. “You're in a desperate state of mind. I'll give you a chance to reconsider this act of folly. All of us combined don't have more than three hundred dollars on our persons. Don't ruin your life for three hundred dollars.”

“I'm not thinkin' about three hundred dollars, General. I'm thinkin' about three hundred thousand dollars. That's what you're goin' to pay, if you want to get young Rawdon here back alive.”

Dan laughed exultantly. “You think you're so goddamn smart, General. Hell, we've been plannin' this for a long time. You know who's sittin' beside you there, lookin' like a schoolteacher? That's Bess Fitzmaurice, the Fenian girl. She's the coolest, slickest operator in the Fenian army. She shot that landlord Rodney Gort dead in Ireland. She bedded half the politicians in Washington—Fernando Wood, Bobby Johnson, Bill Seward—to get us across the Canadian border.”

Jonathan was looking at me, first astonishment, then hatred suffusing his face. “It's not true,” I said. “He's lying. The whole thing is a lie except for the truth about my name.”

I was wasting my words, wasting my breath, my tears.

“You—you—Irish scum,” Jonathan said.

“Come on, Bess,” Dan said. “I told you there was no point in tryin' to soften him up. His kind don't soften. They only understand one thing—this.”

He cocked his pistol. “Now get out of that carriage, General. You, One-arm, get down and turn them horses around.”

Glaring defiance, Jonathan and Abner Littlepage obeyed. Dan tied his horse to the rear of the carriage and took the reins of the two-horse team. “Don't follow us, General. If you do, the kid gets killed. We'll send you a message about where and when to deliver the money.”

He gave a rebel yell, and the team sprang forward. Within minutes Jonathan and Abner Littlepage were small, impotent figures in the distance. Not until we reached a crossroads north of Long Branch did Dan pause to study a map and turn to warn us against calling for help or trying to jump out and escape. I was too demoralized to do or think anything. My ruin was too total for any state of mind but disbelief, numbness.

You Irish scum,
Jonathan had said.
Irish
scum. The words came to his lips as naturally as a curse. They were like a nitroglycerin bomb, blasting away all pretensions, facades, the fake stage scenery that I had been building in my naive mind to enhance my self-created drama of love and devotion. My winter world of theatrical make-believe was a heap of sticks, a hole in the ground, in the face of the truth that the summer had brought. I saw the gulf between us, as wide as the ocean. What a fool I was to think my arms could bridge it. What a fool I was to think that I could escape my fate, which was written out for me the moment that Dan McCaffrey strode through my father's door.

“Where are we going?” Rawdon asked.

His baffled, frightened young face drew me back to reality. “I don't know,” I said.

“Is he going to kill me?”

“No. No hurt will come to you, my darling. I promise you.”

“But you really are the Fenian girl?”

“Yes.”

A terrible hopelessness overwhelmed me. I saw myself doomed. What judge, what jury, what newspaper, would believe anything but the story Dan had told Jonathan, the story that had drawn those terrible words from his lips? What choice had I now but to join Dan McCaffrey, this man whom I saw as nothing less than a monster, to flee with him as a fugitive and wander the world like Cain's wife? He had come with all the power of the past around him and claimed me. There was a crude justice in it. That was the most terrible part of it. I had betrayed the love I once felt for him, out of pride, out of anger. The reasons all seemed trivial now. In return he had betrayed me. Crude justice. Crude, blind justice.

The crossroads enabled Dan to circle Long Branch to the west and bring us down upon the bank of some tidal river. There, tied at a dock, a small sloop waited, manned by a dirty, swarthy fellow about as talkative as a clam. We cast off and caught the tide, which swiftly carried us onto the ocean. We stood south before a hard breeze, and as night fell we bore up off a shore on which white waves were breaking. The pilot put the helm over and aimed for a dark mouth in the wave line. In a few minutes we were gliding up another tidal river. We eased to a stop beside a sagging dock, and Dan ordered us out of the boat. We followed him up a steep bank into the deeper darkness of a stand of pine trees. Within the trees there was a one-room shack into which our boatman led us. It stank of fish and was devoid of furniture, except for two small woodstoves. Roaches and mice scampered for cover as Dan lit an oil lamp. In one corner was a box of tinned food.

By now I was beginning, however dimly, to think about what was happening. It was more and more clear that Dan had not acted on impulse. Asking for a job, his anger, had all been sham. He had been waiting for the moment to execute this plan.

“How long have you been hanging about, watching for a chance to do this?” I said.

He laughed. “A good month,” he said.

“How did you find me?”

“I got Red Mike drunk in England before he blew himself to hell. He told me. It was pretty easy to get his brother to tell the rest.”

“There's no hope for us, do you know that? You're dealing with a man who will hunt you down, and me, too, no matter where we run.”

“Dead men don't hunt nobody,” Dan said.

The words sent a chill of dread through me in spite of the summer heat. I saw what he planned to do. I did not want to believe it.

“I'm hungry,” Rawdon said.

“Me, too, kid,” Dan said. “Open some of them tins, Bess, and get us some grub.”

The box contained tins of meat that tasted vaguely like ham, some salted fish, some pale consommé soup with a chicken flavor, some stale bread, and a bottle of bourbon. I heated the soup in the house's single pot, and we ate a silent nauseating supper. We washed it down with bitter coffee and condensed milk, equally sickening. After letting Rawdon answer a call of nature, Dan bound him hand and foot. Then he sat down with his sinister boatman beside him and composed a letter for Jonathan Stapleton.

The boatman—whose name, I eventually learned, was Pakenham—nodded as Dan explained his part in the plan. At dawn tomorrow he would be off to Kemble Manor. He would by then have placed the letter in a bottle. He was to halloo until he got someone's attention, then fling the letter toward the shore and let the tide carry it to the beach. The letter directed Jonathan Stapleton to board the sloop with three hundred thousand dollars in a bag and return with Pakenham to our hideaway. There, Rawdon would be handed over to him. If Pakenham did not return in thirty-six hours, Rawdon would be killed.

Pakenham departed on his errand. Dan and I faced each other in the yellow lamplight. “So it's come to this,” I said. “All the grand hopes and glorious words.”

“They were your specialty,” he said.

“Let the boy go now. I'll go away with you. I'll do anything you ask.”

“Why the hell should I do that?” Dan said. “You got to go away with me anyhow. And you're goin' to do anything I ask, startin' tonight.”

“Never,” I said. “You'll never touch me again. I'll die first.”

“I feel sick,” Rawdon said. He began to retch and abruptly vomited. Tied as he was, he could not prevent the mess from spilling on himself as well as the floor. With a curse, Dan strode across the room and kicked the lad in the side.

“Stupid little shit,” he snarled. “We gotta sleep in here tonight.”

Rawdon writhed in agony. With a scream of pure rage I sprang at Dan and raked my nails across his face. I sank my teeth into his neck, I kicked and smashed at him. I was a mother defending her young. He stopped me with a terrific slap in the face that sent me crashing against the far wall. “You—goddamn—bitch,” he said, striding after me.

He whipped a long, gleaming knife from his belt. His other hand rubbed blood from his gashed cheek. “I could kill you now,” he said. “And Sonny Boy, too. I don't have to keep you alive. I got a foolproof plan. Twelve hours after I get that money, Pakenham'll have me in Philadelphia. I'll be on a train to Chicago.”

“As long as there's life in me, I won't let you hurt that lad. I love him as my own son.”

The word “love” was a mistake. It aroused the darkest, vilest rage in Dan's soul. “Love him,” he said. “Ain't that sweet. Let's see how much you love him.”

He strode back to Rawdon, picked him up by the back of his coat, and held the knife at his throat. “You gonna do what I want tonight?”

“Yes,” I said, my head bowed, avoiding Rawdon's eyes.

He flung Rawdon back to the floor. “Okay,” he said. “Get outside and take off your clothes.”

I obeyed. I was now certain that he was ready to kill me as well as Rawdon and Jonathan. In a way I almost welcomed it. It was a bitter consolation, to imagine Jonathan seeing my dead body, knowing that I, too, was a victim, that I had not deceived him in our winter months of midnight love. I swayed on the edge of abandoning all hope, of welcoming oblivion.

Dan emerged from the house and stood there, a bulky blur in the darkness. I heard the gurgle of the bourbon bottle. “You bitch, Bess,” he said. “Whenever I reach for you, you're always someplace else.”

His voice was heavy with anger and another emotion—perhaps regret.

“What do you mean?”

“Can't you see I done this for you? To give you somethin' besides a life drudgin' for them swells? What's the difference between killin' that sour-faced Yankee general and his little rich bastard in there and gunnin' down Lord Gort with his daughter screamin' in our faces?”

I said nothing. I did not know what to say. He drank more bourbon.

“You were fuckin' him, weren't you? I could tell from the way he looked at you.”

I love him
. The words were alive in my throat, but some deep instinct for survival stopped me from saying them. I sensed that he would kill me within seconds after I spoke them. They would be my last words. That knife would lay my throat open and I would writhe out my life here in this dark pine-scented grove like an ancient sacrifice to a devouring god.

Instead I said their opposite. I played the prostitute he thought I had become. “I didn't know what to do, Dan. I was all alone. He gave me money. I thought you'd forgotten me. I wasn't even sure you were alive.”

“Neither was I for a while,” he said bitterly. “I was on the run in England for two months. Finally got out as a seaman on a freighter from Glasgow.”

“Don't kill the boy. You can do what you want to the general. I really am fond of the boy.” I went through the dark and put my arms around him. “I'm still half mad from grief over Michael,” I said. “That's why I refused you. But now that I see your regret—”

“I had to do that, Bess,” he said.

“He's long dead now. Perhaps well dead,” I said. “Touching you now, thinking of what you want to do with me now, is making me melt—making me remember Ireland and the nights on the
Manhattan
—”

He began kissing me with all his old wild hunger. I let him have me on the cold hard bed of dry pine needles, the earth pressing into my back, the way the ancient women of Ireland may have loved their warriors. But I cast off those banshees forever with that last meeting. Somehow the deception I was practicing broke open my mind to an inrush of reality, identity, of present time. I saw myself precisely for what I was, and I faced the past for what it was, a blind procession of false hopes and deceptions that somehow justified this deception because I was able to tell myself that if it succeeded it would be the last deception. I would live the rest of my days, whether they were short or long, without lies.

“O my Donal Ogue,” I whispered when he was through. “You haven't changed. You make me love you still.”

He began to tell me his dream of what we could do, where we could go with the money. Peru, Mexico. Places where money could buy a kingdom and we could live like royalty. There were gold mines for sale in Peru; there were ranches in Mexico where a man could ride to the far horizon without leaving his property. Mexico, a country where a soldier could become anything—president, emperor.

There was a pathetic, almost childish quality to his dream. It was heartbreaking because he saw me as a part of it. I thought of the lines from “Donal Ogue”:

I embraced him as if I shared his greedy rapture. “Ah Dan, it sounds wonderful,” I said, “but you must change your plan if you hope to win that dream. Take my advice, go away with the money and me but let the general and the boy live. The more I think of it, the more sure I am that he won't pursue us. I'm your insurance, don't you see? He'd never want me in a courtroom, testifying to what we did nights. The money means nothing to him. He's worth ten times that. But his reputation is everything. He talked of marrying me, you know, but he couldn't bring himself to take an Irish wife.”

That was so close to the truth as I saw it now that my breath grew short. Before I could continue he was answering me with a growling no. “I want the pleasure of killing the son of a bitch. Didn't you say he was the sort of bastard that would never quit chasin' us?”

“That was before I thought this all through. Before I—I found my love for you again. He's an important man, Dan. Killing him will arouse the whole nation. Think of the cry that could be raised against you. Southern officer kills a Union general.”

“Maybe you're right. But I'd still like to kill the son of a bitch.”

We went back into the house and found that Rawdon had vomited again. He was a sobbing, almost hysterical mess. I persuaded Dan to undo his ropes and brought up water from the river to clean him.

“Did he hurt you?” he asked as I fussed over him.

“No,” I said.

“I'll never forget what you did for me,” he said with tears in his eyes.

I kissed him. “Hush now and try to sleep,” I said.

Dan insisted on tying him up again. He turned off the light and propped himself against the only door, where he planned to doze. No one could pass without waking him. It was not exactly a statement of confidence in me. I spent most of the night staring into the darkness, listening to him snore.

Morning dawned hot and clear. Dan flung open the windows and ordered me to make coffee. He ate some more of the nauseating food, which Rawdon and I declined. “It's a lot better'n I ate the last six months of the war,” Dan said.

I drank some coffee and gave a little to Rawdon. The hours dribbled slowly away. Dan grew more and more tense. He swigged the bourbon to calm himself. A half dozen times he went down to the dock to look downriver for Pakenham's sloop. Dan had found this fellow in a tavern in Shrewsbury. He lived farther south on the shore and made his living by smuggling and preying on wrecks along the coast. He would do anything for money, but he thought small. I was cautioned to say nothing about the size of the ransom. Dan was paying him only five thousand dollars.

Blackflies swarmed through the open windows after the bits of food in the discarded tins. They assaulted Rawdon, too, and I spent most of my time brushing them from his face and hands. Sitting there, I caught a different rhythm in Dan's stride as he returned from the dock for the sixth time. He burst in the door and said; “He's comin'. And the old boy's on the boat. On the prow, money in hand.”

He drew his pistol and checked the cylinder, a sight that made me grow faint. Five minutes later, we heard the rattle of the sail coming down, the creaking thud of the sloop against the old dock. We waited again in the heat and humming flies until the stamp of Jonathan Stapleton's footsteps sounded dully on the pine needles, more sharply on the steps. Then he was at the door, hatless, wearing a black silk suit and white shirt and black tie. He had a small carpetbag in his hand. He glared at me with concentrated hatred.

Dan pointed the pistol at him, the hammer cocked. “Hello, General,” he said. “Have a nice trip?”

“I'm not here as a general any more than you're here as a Southern officer,” Jonathan said. “I'm here as a father, and you and your whore are here as pieces of scum.”

“General,” Dan said, “I would love to put a bullet in you. I sort of agreed with this girl last night that it might be better to let you live. You're startin' to change my mind.”