Not Quite Dead (20 page)

“The president is a Whig. I’ll hold that he is overdue for it.”

“Be sensible, man. Such an action would come down very hard on the Irish, something so bold and bald. Churches would burn in the Catholic wards everywhere, and there would be lynching for certain. Such a thing is hard to countenance just for one’s own satisfaction.
It might even serve the opposite purpose by making a martyr of the very man you despise.”

This produced a thoughtful silence, which relieved the lieutenant somewhat.

“You could kidnap him,” said Sister Genoux.

Supper being an afterthought after an afternoon of fighting, O’Reilly had overlooked the presence of Sister Genoux. Had he kept her in mind, he would not have allowed the conversation to proceed so far in this direction, since the woman could stir up Devlin’s radical passion like her pot of mutton stew.

“Kidnap him?” asked Devlin, and met her gaze with his beautiful blue eyes.

Petite, dark, solemn, with a doll-like regularity of features, Sister Genoux was the youngest of the Women of the Wilderness. Though she had to be at least a decade older than the Irishmen, she retained the form and complexion of a marriageable woman. O’Reilly knew from Devlin that she had learned cigarette-rolling from her father, against the objections of her mother, who smoked a pipe.

The lieutenant was about to quiet the sister with a retort, then thought better of it. Though he distrusted her influence on Devlin, O’Reilly was a practical man, prepared to accept wisdom from any source, and he knew instantly that her notion had merit.

To kidnap Dickens under the flag of the Irish Brotherhood. Surely there would be a goodly amount of ned to be made by such a gesture, perhaps a profit not unadjacent to fifty thousand dollars.

A pretty thing indeed.

“What do you think?” asked Devlin, sensing interest in the lieutenant’s hesitation. The sister too observed carefully, in the way that one might evaluate two horses up for auction.

“I think the notion bears thinking over. D’you wonder how much he might be worth? With the threat of war what it is, one side might pay as well as the other, to avoid a bad business.”

“That is possible,” replied Devlin, “but it cannot be simply a matter of making ned. There is a message we must carry to the people.”

“Quite so,” replied the lieutenant, keeping his thoughts to himself. Lighting his cheroot, he gazed at the puff of smoke like an idea made visible.

Continued Devlin, “Once he is in captivity we might persuade him
to put his name to any manifesto at all. And the papers will print it for certain.”

Out of O’Reilly’s line of sight, the sister nodded agreement. “It is a wonderful thing,” she said quietly, “the eloquence of a terrified man.”

Having struck an accord over the thrust of the matter, the two partners lapsed into their separate brooding silences, and ate their stew like men who had not taken food since breakfast. Soon after that, the lieutenant made for his bed, leaving Devlin and the sister alone together.

“Take him for ransom is
très bon”
she said, as she fired a twig in the stove and lit a cigarette. “But I am thinking that you have something else in mind. Cut off his head, yes, that would cause a fuss, in America and Britain
aussi
. Is that what you are thinking?”

“Aye, Sister Genoux. That is what I am thinking. Whatever the ransom, Mr. Dickens will never comb a gray hair.”

“You are just like my father,” she said, with a bitter laugh and an outpouring of smoke.

A MASSACRE OUT OF SHAKESPEARE
Astor Place Riot Claims up to 40 Lives
by Harlen C. Penny,
The New York Tribune

NEW YORK
——As Britain and the United States edge ever closer to war over the Oregon border dispute, anti-British sentiment erupted in a frightful riot at the Astor Place Opera House yesterday, where as many as forty lives have been lost following a performance of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
by the British actor Charles Macready.

As the angry crowd roiled, one window after another cracked, pieces of bricks and paving stones rained onto the terraces and lobbies, so that the Opera House resembled a fortress besieged by an invading army rather than a place meant for the peaceful amusement of a civilized community.

The death toll to date stands at 31 civilians dead, some 30 or 40 wounded from gunfire, and more than 100 soldiers, police, and civilians injured by paving stones, clubs, and other weapons.

Responsibility for the disaster points to a group of Nativist agitators led by the writer Edward Z. C. Judson, who goes under the pen
name Ned Buntline. In print and in speech, Judson portrayed the rivalry between British MacReady and the American actor Edwin Forrest as a test of American vigor against a lingering imperial presence.

Officials are not questioning the wisdom of proceeding with the much-publicized Charles Dickens tour, under such incendiary conditions …

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

Baltimore

Sir:

Our mutual acquaintance is in terrible distress. I shall have accommodations reserved for you at the Swan in Norfolk. My coachman will collect you there. It is imperative that I see you
.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Elmira Shelton (née Royster)

A
s you might imagine, it was not out of concern for Poe’s welfare that I so eagerly booked the 4
A.M.
steamer to Richmond, having secured a temporary replacement at Washington College Hospital.

This latter arrangement proved an easy matter. I was no more popular with my peers than ever, nor would my few patients object, being for the most part semiconscious. Even Nurse Slatin made no protest over my abrupt departure, for in my sleepless condition I had become downright dangerous.

The side-wheeler, part of the Old Bay Line, shuddered its way out of Baltimore Harbor and down Chesapeake Bay in the first light of morning. Soon we were chugging past the oyster boats and skipjacks (like plumed herons with their sharp, elongated prows), and gradually the odor of dead fish and sewage surrendered to an air that would cure the lungs of any ailment. As I leaned over the railing, suddenly a bluefish surfaced just below me; for a second my customary urge to jump overboard left me and I rejoiced at the sight, a sensation that settled into a mild exhilaration over the simple act of breathing.

There could be no doubt Elmira Royster had been the cause of my sleeplessness, and my unfamiliar enthusiasm for life. Poe’s distress be damned: for the first time in years I looked to the future without becoming tired.

Soon thereafter, seasickness came over me and I found myself leaning
over the railing for another reason entirely. I was miserable for the next eight hours, and it came as a relief when the stink of dead fish and sewage returned, indicating that we were nearing the James River and Richmond. It seemed almost worth the misery of the voyage, that first step on dry land, the sheer luxury of treading a surface that did not move underfoot.

The Swan Tavern, despite its prestigious location near the capital building, was nothing more than a glorified boardinghouse. A once-elaborate hotel in the latter stages of decay, it looked like a cake left out in the rain, or a setting in one of Eddie’s tales. It seemed obvious that Elmira Royster had chosen the Swan because it was Eddie’s customary lodging—being perpetually short of funds, and no doubt looking to her for a temporary infusion of cash.

The carriage that collected me had likewise seen better days, as had the two horses with swollen hock joints and visible ribs, and the white-haired Negro at the reins, whose livery consisted of a long, ash-colored duster coat and a tattered straw hat.

Inside, the carriage exuded the stale sweetness of mildew. The seat sagged, and had been worn right through in places so that the coarse hosshair cushioning poked through like stubble. Yet it was comfortable enough, and as the carriage clattered up Broad Street toward Church Hill I was treated to a short window tour of the city in which I grew up. How it had changed! The cholera outbreak of the previous summer having abated, the hustle and commotion of city life had returned to the hills overlooking the bright islands of the James River where I had wandered as a boy. As well, the city had acquired a new dignity—or pretentiousness, depending on your point of view—thanks to the new courthouse, built on what was once Town Back Creek, where once we would fish brookies. Predictably, the edifice was vaguely Greek, with a dome so white in the sunlight as to strain the eyes.

Like most American cities, in Richmond the transition between urban and rural was a matter of blocks, not miles. Soon the road narrowed to a gutterway, as we overtook a gang of manacled slaves, recently purchased, on the march across the mountains to the Ohio River. A short time later we were trotting amid plantations of tobacco, flax, and corn, tended by brown, bent figures with sacks tied around the waist.

Just as the faulty springs of my vehicle had become all but
unbearable for the coccyx, the carriage abruptly turned down a gauntlet of enormous chestnut trees, whose branches all but met overhead. It is a characteristic of chestnuts that in autumn their leaves do not fall immediately, but remain on the branch for some time; the leaves above and beside me resembled little brown hands, rubbing in the wind, making a dry rattling sound, a sort of ghostly applause.

The chestnuts soon gave way to enormous magnolia trees surrounding a family graveyard, to the right of the driveway and in front of the house—a single table-monument and four granite obelisks, surrounded by iron-lace fencing. In between these monuments stood a quantity of small children’s gravestones, scattered in the overgrown grass.

There was nothing grand or Gothic about the mansion itself, which resembled an institutional brick building—a small courthouse or library perhaps—with six deep-set windows and four plaster pillars in front, like sticks of dough, framing a set of front steps and a mounting block. Clearly the residence had not been created with the Virginia landscape in mind, but occupied the middle of the lawn as though dropped out of the sky. Behind the house and to the left stood a number of empty slave quarters made of brick, once whitewashed but now stained by water and fungus into a patchy green-gray.

From this evidence I concluded that another plantation-owner had leased or bought the fields, leaving the original family to crumble along with the buildings.

The elderly Negro who answered the door was easily as ancient as my driver. Along with the general condition of the house, this suggested an establishment on its uppers, in which the servants remained out of age and loyalty.

“Yessa, Dr. Chivahs,” he said in an extraordinarily resonant baritone, extending the welcome one affords a bill collector. “You is expected, sah.”

I followed the old gentleman’s surprisingly lithe frame down a wide hallway whose walls had been stenciled with abstract shapes. At the end of the hall we reached an almost empty drawing room, with two chairs and a tea table situated in the center of an oval Turkey carpet. There were no pictures on the walls, and the fireplace had evidently
been cold for months. I began to wonder if anyone lived here at all— or was it a stage setting, created especially for our meeting?

“Miz Royster will be with you in a moment. Would you care for a whiskey, Dr. Chivahs, sah?”

“No thank you, sir, I am a Son of Temperance.”

“As you wish, sah.” Nonetheless, he continued to hover about, as though expecting something further to develop, and rightly so.

“On second thought,” I said, for I could endure his stare no longer, “it has been a long day.”

“As you wish, sah.”

The butler indicated a chair by the table, there to await Elmira Royster (whom I still could not acknowledge as Mrs. Shelton for some reason). Nonetheless I chose to remain standing, for as with Neilson Poe at the Exchange Hotel, there is something about being discovered sitting down that reduces one to a subordinate level.

The butler returned with a glass of whiskey on a small silver tray and set it on the table. “Purely medicinal, I assure you,” I said to his retreating back, and wondered why I had felt the need to explain.

“It is the brand your friend was drinking when first we met,” said Elmira Royster from the doorway. “You were watching it evah so longingly, and I felt sorry for you.”

If erotic longing is a cause for pity, I must have made a pathetic sight as I gaped at the figure in the doorway—her skeptical eye, her lithe, supple form, her slightly aquiline nose, her quality of psychical distance contradicted by the rapid motion of her bosom.

“When last we met I was a Son of Temperance,” I replied, weakly. “Presumptuous of me to say it, I know.”

“In what way was it presumptuous, suh?” She wore a plain, thin cotton dress of the sort worn by Negro servants. The simplicity of it struck me as angelic and provocative at the same time.

“Presumptuous,” I replied, “to assume such dominion over oneself.”

“That is rightly true. We are all creatures of the flesh, and the flesh is weak.”

Beneath the dress, she did not appear to be wearing a corset. A silver mourning locket hung by a chain to a point between the swell of her breasts, each of which would have fitted into my hand.

“Do you know why I invited you, Dr. Chivahs? Do you know why you are here?”

With my mind in a fog of desire, I had no idea what to reply. This was perhaps not the time to mention that I did not care a fig about Eddie Poe, that he had given me nothing but trouble since he entered my life as a boy, that the thought of him in trouble filled my heart with inexpressible joy.

Nor was it the time to say that I had come because I needed to see her, to be in her presence, in the way that a dipsomaniac needs a drink. That I would leap like a trout at the opportunity to look at her face, let alone hear her voice, smell her violet scent. Had I expressed my thoughts outright, she would have been well advised to have me shot, if only as a precaution.