American Gothic (8 page)

Pickett could carry the day. He would do it because he could. He would do it because Lee ordered him to do it, and his men always did what
Massah
Lee asked of them.

That was it, then.

Lee stood up, his legs and back stiff, and nodded his noble, bearded head. The matter was decided. Tomorrow, Pickett would lead a massed charge into the Union lines at Gettysburg that would win the battle for the South and turn the tide of the war decisively in the Confederacy’s favor. Lincoln would be suing for peace before the summer ended.

Smiling, Peregrine turned away from Lee and began to return the way he had come.

The vampire knew every inch of the Union lines—the officers, the troops, their ammunition supplies, their morale, even the quality of their forage, provisions, and drinking water. And more important than all of that, he had walked the ridge himself and examined the tactical position. It was never a good idea to attack an entrenched enemy when you had to run uphill to do it, especially not when the defender’s line ran in a way that made it possible to rake the attackers with a withering enfilade of rifle fire and grapeshot fired from close-in artillery.

There wasn’t a prayer in heaven that the rebels could carry the Union line, not even with the dashing Pickett leading the way. When the sun came up and the charge was mounted, the soldiers in blue would slaughter rebels by the thousands.

The thought of so much Confederate carnage filled Peregrine with an unfamiliar emotion that he’d almost forgotten existed. For the first time since marauding rebel guerrillas murdered his family more than a year earlier, Nathaniel Peregrine felt happy.

12

Lost

I
T WAS AN hour before dawn when Peregrine returned to the hotel in the Pennsylvania town. A thunderstorm was racing in from the west, slashing the night’s starless blackness with jagged silver lightning and the diffused glow of bolts trapped within the low, roiling clouds.

No one would be awake at that hour, so Peregrine put up the horse himself. The approaching storm made the animals in the stables nervous. The beasts looked about with frightened eyes with each volley, pawing the ground, afraid to be confined within their stalls with weather coming in. Peregrine spoke to the animals in a soothing voice, and the creatures were quiet.

The first raindrops fell on Peregrine as he crossed to the hotel, each raising a tiny puff of dust from the bone-dry dirt street. The front doors had been left open to let in the cool of the summer night air, a single hurricane lamp burning on the reception desk beside the stairs. The wind was coming up, and it ruffled the pages of a newspaper left on the big square table surrounded by a collection of comfortable chairs in the middle of the room.

Peregrine came into the hotel and stopped, tasting death in the air.

One corner of the newspaper lifted and turned as if by a phantom hand. Outside in the distance, a door banged with the next gust, the wind moving across the night unseen, uncontrolled, uncontrollable. He was like that now. Order and reason were no longer part of his world. A vampire, Peregrine thought, lives in the swirling chaos, a creature outside the law.

The rain started to fall in earnest with a sudden rush of sound. The wind picked up as the thunderstorm arrived and began to howl. There was a brilliant flash of light and the almost simultaneous splintering crack of a tree torn in two before the cannon roar of the thunder. The newspaper blew up from the table as if thrown in the air and flew madly about the room like the fluttering ghosts of those who died afraid and too quickly to ask for their redemption.

Peregrine went up the stairs, narrowing his eyes against the acrid vibration of violence and murder hanging like a poisonous fog in the air. The doors to the rooms on the second floor were open or ajar, several smashed to splinters. Corpses lay in doorways, were flung across beds, or crumpled in corners, as if cowering against an inexorable force of horror.

The wind whooped and moaned around the hotel, rattling windowpanes and shaking shutters, driving sheets of rain against the slat-wood siding. The night reminded Peregrine of the night he’d walked down the second-floor hallway lined with doors in the house on Chestnut Street. Then he had been in jeopardy. Now he
was
the jeopardy, the walking pestilence, the threat that waits in the darkness. The thunder roared, and it seemed to be speaking to him, telling him to take refuge in sudden violence, in whose all-encompassing passion there remained no room for the pain of being a man.

Peregrine had the best room in the hotel, at the front of the building, overlooking the town square. He turned the latch and went in.

“Hello, darling.”

Madame Delphine Allard sat on the bed, her arm around the shoulders of the young woman who had served them supper in the hotel’s dining room before Peregrine rode off to inspect the Union line and then to go in search of Robert E. Lee. The girl was naked and trembling, her face streaked with tears. Peregrine’s nostrils flared as he took in a deep breath, gathering in that single motion the vibrations, scents, and sounds of the hotel, an island surrounded by rain and night. The girl was the only mortal left alive.

“I have been amusing myself while you were away,” Madame Allard said. She began to caress the girl with her free hand.

“I noticed,” Peregrine said.

The serving girl appeared to be a year or two older than Madame Allard, but that was an illusion. Delphine Allard was nearly two hundred years old. She had lived all over the world, but her base was the house on Chestnut Street, in the city where she’d dropped her mortality and become a vampire.

“So tell me,
chéri,
how does it feel, your revenge? Is it every bit as delicious as I promised?”

“It’s a beginning.”

“And the remembering? Has it freed you of that?”

Peregrine winced a fraction of a second before the hotel shook with a volley of thunder louder than a battery of nine-pounders firing in unison. From the stables came the scream of a horse crying out in fear. The poor terrified beasts, Peregrine thought.

“I saved her for you, my love,” Madame Allard said, and gave him a wicked smile. The girl was looking up at Peregrine, too, her eyes wordlessly begging for mercy. He slowly unbuttoned his cape and let it fall to the floor but made no move.

“If you cannot lose yourself in revenge, my love, then you must lose yourself in pleasure,” Madame Allard said.

Peregrine hesitated a moment longer, then moved toward the women on the bed.

PART TWO

HAITI

1914

13

House Calls

D
R. MICHAEL LAVALLE made his diagnosis standing in the doorway of the one-room hut. He pulled up an unfinished wooden chair, the home’s only seat, beside the bed, put his medical bag on the dirt floor, and opened it.

The naked child was listless in his mother’s arms, almost comatose. The little boy did not move when the cold stethoscope touched him except to roll his enormous eyes away from his mother’s face to look up at the physician.

“This lad has dysentery,” Lavalle said.

The mother nodded dully. There was hopeless acceptance in her face, as if it was a given that the boy, her one precious possession in the world, would be taken from her so that she could go back to having nothing. She was like most of the women Lavalle had met on that part of the coast: tall and stork thin, with large, clear eyes and skin as black as that of her forebears, who had been kidnapped and brought to the New World in the holds of slave ships. Lavalle was one of a handful of Europeans living on the island’s southern coast. The slave revolt a century earlier had killed or driven out most of the Europeans, and in the ensuing years there had been little white mischief to dilute the purebred African racial lines outside the capital.

“Do you know the causes of dysentery, madam?”

The child’s mother shook her head. Of course she did not. Since coming to the island Lavalle was reminded daily that a simple discourse in public education would extend the average life span far beyond the pathetic forty or so years that was typical. The government had funds for a luxurious presidential palace and elaborate official rituals—including a staff composer paid a salary to devise dance tunes to entertain the ruling family—but nothing for public health.

“Dysentery is caused by waterborne bacteria,” Lavalle said.

The woman gave him a blank look. The doctor sniffed. How sadly typical, he thought. He took out his silk handkerchief and wiped his nose.

“Your boy has been made sick by a germ, a tiny amoeba too small for the human eye to see, that lives in impure drinking water.” He held his fingers as close as he could without them touching. Judging from her reaction, Lavalle could tell that he was not educating but frightening the woman. The simple country people cowered in fear of invisible forces. In times of trouble, they appealed to a pantheon of absurd gods and goddesses to protect them from evil spirits. The poor woman could not read a word or write her name; how could she understand amoebic dysentery?

“Never mind,” Lavalle said, and smiled to show that he was not unhappy with her. “The little boy is dehydrated. He will be all right, but only if he drinks a lot of water. Do you understand?”

“Oui.”

“It is important that you boil water before he drinks it. He is sick from drinking dirty water. Dirty water bad. Understand?”

She nodded.

“You must bring the water to a rolling boil, then let it get nice and cool before letting him drink. Boiling the water will make it safe for the child to drink.”

He reached into his bag and came out with a small paper sack filled with a powder he mixed up by the barrel at the hospital.

“Mix a tablespoon of this into each cup.”

The woman’s expression lightened markedly. Powders and potions were something she understood. She thought he was giving her magic dust, a concoction like one the local witchdoctor would whip up to make someone fall in love or to keep away the evil eye.

“It’s a combination of salts his body needs to replenish,” Lavalle said uselessly, knowing the woman would prefer to think of it as magic. What did it matter as long as it helped the child? “Boil me a pot of water,” Lavalle said. “I will show you.”

The doctor stayed until he was sure that the woman understood the simple treatment. He would come back the next day to check on the boy. If he wasn’t recovering, he would take him back to Hospital St. Jude in Cap Misère, where he would watch over the child himself. Dysentery was easily treated, but in the backward tropical countryside, it killed many.

The late afternoon clouds where gathering over the Massif de la Hotte Mountains by the time Lavalle got back onto his sturdy horse. Instead of returning to Cap Misère, he decided to allow himself a bit of diversion and headed out for tea at Fairweather House, where Lady Fairweather always made him welcome.

The road followed the curve of the horseshoe-shaped bay. Lavalle looked across the water to the white limestone cliffs rising dramatically to a gabled house. Maison de la Falaise—Cliff House—had been vacant since before Lavalle’s arrival, although its owner, a wealthy Belgian, somehow managed to keep the surrounding gardens and park in immaculate condition. Maison de la Falaise and its coca plantation had been on the market at a reasonable price, though life in such a remote and backward corner of the world appealed to few, so the property had remained vacant. Lavalle considered buying it himself once or twice, though he was far too busy running the hospital and helping the poor to properly manage such an operation.

Anchored beneath the house was a sleek black sailing yacht flying an American flag.

Perhaps Maison de la Falaise had finally been sold.

The prospect of a new neighbor—albeit a distant one—pleased Lavalle. Aside from Lady Fairweather, there were no other whites along the coast. Though his practice consumed him, there were times when Lavalle hungered for the company of someone with whom he had something in common. He had never realized how much he liked talking about books and ideas before coming to a country where almost no one could read.

Maybe the American liked to play chess, Lavalle thought. He had not had a game since getting off the ship in Port-au-Prince. The doctor rode on, entertaining himself with thoughts about opening gambits until he turned up the lane to Fairweather House.

A man carrying a machete walked toward him on the side of the sandy road, nodding to Lavalle as he trotted past. It was one of Helen’s servants. She had done a marvelous job of managing after Sir Graham’s death. The locals were not famous for their devotion to hard labor, but Lady Fairweather had gotten in her first coca crop as well as her husband ever had.

Something slammed into Lavalle’s back with such startling unexpectedness that the doctor’s first thought when he found himself looking up at the sky’s ragged black belly was that he had been shot. The doctor slowly sat up, looking down at himself, taking stock. Except for a slight concussion, he seemed uninjured. The man with the machete was coming toward him, holding Lavalle’s horse by its reins. He must have caught the animal after it bolted. The man no longer held the machete beside his leg at the end of a long, loose arm, but upward, in an attitude of self-defense.

Lavalle got to his feet, wondering what had happened. He wasn’t the world’s greatest horseman, but it had been a long time since he’d been thrown. His throbbing shoulder helped him remember the blow that had felled him.

“Did you see what hit me?”

The man nodded. Lavalle could see that he was afraid. He took the reins from the peasant and prodded him for more information. The man said “something” had come out of the scrub palms low and fast, flying from the bushes to knock Dr. Lavalle off his horse. Whatever it was, it did not stop but kept going.

“A man?”

“Je ne sais pas ce que c’était,”
the man said.
“Quelque type d’animal, un tigre peut-être.”

“There are no tigers in Haiti,” Lavalle said.

The man was already backing away. Whatever he’d seen, Lavalle would get no more out of him.

He climbed back on the horse and nudged it into a walk, still a little disoriented. A glass of brandy would brace him up. Fortunately, he was almost at Fairweather House. The lane turned to the right, opening dramatically for the last quarter mile to the white-pillared Palladian mansion.

A woman was lying athwart the road just beyond the curve, her throat torn out.

Even before Lavalle got off his horse, he knew she was dead.