Heaven and Hell (43 page)

feel very isolated, very useless caring for one elderly woman who will never improve."

"Do you have contact with your family?"

Virgilia avoided his eye. "No. I'm afraid they--they wouldn't welcome it." Sometimes, late at night, she longed for it so deeply it brought tears. That too was probably the result of aging, of softening, and growing away from the entrapments of unbridled emotion.

"Well, my dear, I asked you here not only to see you, but also to discuss a possible change of employment. A position you might find
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more satisfying because you would be helping the most innocent victims of those damned rebels. Children."

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For the second time, he'd stunned her. "What children do you mean?"

"Let me show you. Are you busy tomorrow?"

"No. I'm allowed Sundays to myself." A melancholy smile. "I usually have nothing to do."

"Can you be ready at two? Good. My driver and I will call for you in Georgetown."

At the end of a rutted lane off Tenth Street in the ramshackle Negro Hill section, Stevens and Virgilia came to a white house that showed good care. Two or three large rooms at one side looked like a recent addition; not all of the siding was painted as yet.

When the carriage stopped, Stevens didn't immediately open the door. "What you're looking at is an orphanage for homeless Negro children. The children are sheltered and given basic education until they can be placed with foster parents. A man named Scipio Brown founded the orphanage. He ran it personally until he joined a colored regiment.

After his discharge he came back and found more waifs than ever before, chiefly the children of contrabands who fled north and somehow got separated from their youngsters. Last month Brown's assistant, a white girl responsible for teaching the children, left him to marry and move to the West--" He broke off. She wanted to speak.

"Thad, I know Scipio Brown."

"Indeed! I thought it a possibility--"

She nodded. "I met him at Belvedere during the war. My brother George and his wife were operating a branch of Brown's orphanage there. They took in all the children he couldn't handle here in Washington."

"Then

you're quite familiar with his work. Good. Are you interested in the vacancy?"

"Perhaps."

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"Hardly an enthusiastic answer."

"I'-m sorry. It's an honest one." How could she explain that because Stout had abandoned her and she was estranged from her family, she felt little enthusiasm for anything?

He opened the carriage door. "Well, a brief visit will do no harm."

Walking slowly with the aid of his cane, he led her inside. He introduced her to the Dentons, a middle-aged black couple who lived at

'he orphanage, cooking and cleaning for the twenty-two children presently in residence.

Seven of the youngsters, a clamorous, cheerful lot, were adoles, ents. The others ranged all the way down to four. Stevens knew each name. "Hello, Micah. Hello, Mary Todd--Liberty--Jenny--Joseph."

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He clucked and fussed among them, touching hands, kissing cheeks, embracing them as if they were his grandchildren. Again Virgilia realized that Thad Stevens was not one of those Radicals who promoted equality for political reasons.

"Here's a handsome friend of mine." Stevens's clubfoot turned awkwardly as he picked up a laughing light brown boy of six. The boy wore a clean, patched shirt and overalls.

"Tad for tadpole. Or Tad Lincoln. Or a tad of trouble. He's a little of each." Stevens hugged and kissed the boy. "Tad, this is my friend Miss Hazard. Can you shake hands?"

Solemn, wary of her, Tad thrust his hand out. Virgilia felt unexpected tears.

"How do you do, Miss Hazard?" Tad said, very properly.

"I--" Dear God, she was stricken silent. The resemblance wasn't exact, yet close enough to bring exquisite pain. He could have been a child of her slain lover, Grady. It took a huge effort to master her shock and say, "I'm very fine, thank you. I hope you are too."

The boy grinned and nodded. Stevens patted him again and put him down. He scurried off. With a sniff, the congressman took note of the pleasing odor drifting from the kitchen. "What's that on the stove, Mrs. Denton?"

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"Okra gumbo for supper, Congressman."

They turned at the sound of the front door. A tall, amber-colored man came in, shaking rain off his hat. His shoulders were broad as a stevedore's, his waist small as a girl's. Virgilia guessed him to be around thirty-five now. He immediately gave her his hand.

"How do you do, Miss Hazard? It's very good to see you again."

"Mr. Brown." She smiled, remembering that she'd been attracted by his lean good looks before. He was still handsome, but he'd matured; he charmed her with an easy cordiality:

"I regret we met but once in Lehigh Station. I heard of you often afterward."

"Not in a complimentary way, I imagine."

"Why, I wouldn't say that." He smiled at her. "The congressman told me you might be interested in helping to teach these children."

"Well--"

"Is that gumbo, Mrs. Denton? I missed my noon meal. Will you join me, Miss Hazard? Thad?"

"It's damp outside, and okra gumbo always warms me up," Stevens said. "I'll have a spoonful or two. You, Virgilia?"

She didn't know how to refuse, and she found she didn't want to.

They sat down with bowls of the savory soup. While she chatted with Brown and Stevens, her eyes strayed often to the small, merry boy who Banditti 277

reminded her so much of Grady. The sight of his innocent face, untouched as yet by the cruelties his color would inspire, pushed her near to tears again. And then to a sudden, startling thought. Sam was gone.

Even at the start of their affair, she had known she probably couldn't hold him forever. Perhaps it was time to put the rancor and grief behind her. Time to care for someone who could benefit from love, as old Miss Tiverton could not.

She saw, like an apparition, the dead Southern soldier in the field hospital. She stared at her hands. Others could not see blood on them, but she could. The blood would never wash away. But she might begin

to atone for it.

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Finishing his soup, Stevens said he had a late afternoon meeting with members of the Committee of Fifteen. Scipio Brown didn't press

Virgilia for an answer, but he expressed his interest in having her at the orphanage and shook her hand strongly to say good bye. He had a direct way about him, and no small amount of pride in his eyes and his bearing.

She liked him.

In the carriage lurching south toward the center of the city, Stevens rested his hands on the knob of his cane. She thought of a lion.

An old lion, but one still driven by blood instinct.

"I fall in love anew whenever I visit those waifs, Virgilia."

"I can understand. They're very appealing."

"How do you look on the opportunity there?"

She gazed at passing hovels built of scrap lumber and canvas.

From muddy lanes and windows without windowpanes or shutters, dark brown faces turned toward the fine carriage. A woman of seventy or more squatted in the drizzle, smoking a corncob pipe and trying to cook bits of food on the top of a tin can set in smoldering wood chips. Rain dripped from the woman's nose and chin. The smoke from her pipe was thin as thread. She was motionless on her haunches; only her eyes moved with the carriage. Eyes that had probably seen shackles, sun-scorched

fields, filthy cabins, loved ones torn away and sold--

"Virgilia? How--"

"Favorably, Thad. Quite favorably."

The old man squeezed her hand. "You would be good for them. I think they would be good for you. I know you cared for Sam. But he belongs to the past, I think."

Weeping at last, Virgilia could only nod and turn away. The old haunted eyes of the squatting woman were lost in the gray murk.

In Georgetown that evening, she gave Miss Tiverton's nephew polile but final notice.

31

Ashton stepped into the June sunshine like a queen emerging from her x\ palace. The building she quitted was not that, but a frame boardinghouse on Jackson Street, right on the edge of one of Chicago's roughest areas, a warren of hovels called Conley's Patch. For months, Ashton
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had been caged there in a single large, grimy room, together with Will Fenway and his mountains of construction drawings, cost estimates, supplier bids, loan papers. She hated it.

Even more than that, she hated the anonymity Will had imposed on her since leaving Santa Fe. She wanted a photograph of them together; he refused. There must be no pictures of her, ever, he said.

What if the seriora in Santa Fe still had the authorities hunting for the killer of her brother-in-law? Whenever Will mentioned that, a strange glint came into his watery blue eyes; a look Ashton didn't understand.

This morning, as she stood letting the pleasant sunshine bathe and warm her, she did resemble, if not a queen, then a woman of high station and good income. Her dress and matching hat were bright red silk; there were twelve yards of material in the gored skirt alone. Beneath it, supported by a canvas belt around her waist, a bustle formed by six springlike wires gave a provocative lift to the rear of the skirt.

The bustle was a new fashion; very modish. It was hell's torture to put on and wear, but she certainly liked the way it enhanced her sexual appeal.

Unfortunately, on the fringes of Conley's Patch, she appealed to the wrong sorts. A seedy, bleary-eyed roughneck came weaving toward her from a lane between packing-box shanties.

"Hello, lovely." He blocked the plank walk, stinking like a whiskey works. His bloodshot eyes roved over her breasts. "I reckon from that dress you're a working girl. How much?"

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Ashton's lips compressed. One delicate red-gloved hand whipped 10 her red parasol and laid it hard on his cheek. She shoved her other elove under his nose. The outline of a huge square wedding diamond showed through the fabric.

"You dirty, illiterate wretch. I'm a respectable married woman."

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

Ashton jabbed the point of the parasol into his groin, hard. His eves 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
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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

"ill'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

¦tight with a banker, a dreadful man with a hog's belly who heaved on

°P 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 ant one of the banker's trouser buttons for her box. For most of the 8nt she lay staring past his head into the dark. She envisioned herself

.JJv dressed, wealthy and powerful, thanks to Will's success. She saw

"TJfclf returning to Mont Royal and confronting the arrogant Madeline 01 any number of choices, each designed to hurt her and drive her

the family land that was Ashton's by right.

Oh, she'd done a lot for Will Fenway and for their scheme, and 280 HEAVEN AND HELL

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 I, 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
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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?