The Whiskey Rebels (37 page)

I
had considered it a possibility that I might see her—not a realistic possibility, but within the realm of the conceivable. Yet, upon seeing her, I could not imagine a response other than to stand frozen, staring, then to look away, then to stare. Her gown, sky blue with swirling yellow designs, revealed her still-marvelous figure to advantage, having a low neckline and sleeves to just above her elbows, exposing her fine white skin. Her pale blond hair was piled high in the fashion, and atop it rested a prim little cap with yellow feathers stretching upward, a blue ribbon, which matched the gown itself, billowing down.

I had seen her in fine dresses before, of course, though when she had been younger they had been less stiff, less formal; they had been the simple if elegant dresses of a lovely girl, not complex fabric cages of European origin. Then she’d been a soft and charming young lady, a foot still planted in girlhood, but now she had turned into a woman, stony and commanding in her beauty.

Lavien walked toward them, came within ten feet, and then turned back to me. “I’ll not speak to him here,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It cannot be done here. For now, it is enough that he is returned. If he were in hiding, he would not have come to this house. Pearson is back, and that is all that matters. If you will excuse me.” Lavien hurried off, careful, it seemed to me, to avoid being seen by the Pearsons. Across the room, he approached Hamilton and whispered in his ear.

This could not long hold my attention, not while Cynthia was in the room. She did not see me. Jacob Pearson, however, did. He looked up and met my gaze, and turned, most desirous of speaking to his wife. It had been many years since I’d seen him, but I had no difficulty in recognizing him. He was perhaps six or seven years older than myself, though the years had been more unkind to him than I flatter myself they had been to me. His hair had turned white, and lines had exploded around his eyes. Deep crevices had formed in his cheeks, and his teeth were yellow—those he still had. For all that, he retained some of the rugged handsomeness he had possessed a decade earlier, and though he was clearly Cynthia’s senior, the two of them together did not have the comical aspect of some couples in which the husband is significantly older than the wife.

Pearson looked at me, and there was something cloudy in his brown eyes, bloodshot and tired-looking. I watched while he pretended not to have noticed me and reached out with his hand—thick with veins and unusually large—to grasp Cynthia’s arm, digging into her flesh with his yellow fingernails. I saw her white flesh turn whiter and then red. She blanched, closed her eyes for a moment, and then nodded very briefly.

I was too far away to hear what he said, but I could see from the cruel shape of his lips that he said terrible things. I knew too that his soul was tainted with a blackness that frightened me. It is easy to look at the man who has married the woman you love and see only evil, but this was not simple prejudice. I knew what I looked at, and I hated it.

I was stepping up before I knew it, and I understood at once that had I not caught myself, had I not reestablished communication with my own mind, I would have strode forward and pushed him down. For an instant I imagined the room full of politicians and dignitaries would delight in seeing this man fall to humiliating injury, yet I realized at once that to find pleasure in this scene a man would have to know that Pearson was a fiend. To the uninformed, it might appear as though I simply delighted in knocking men over, and in such circumstances the world would no doubt turn against me.

Before either of them saw me approaching, I turned away. I grabbed a glass of wine from a passing servant and drank it down angrily. Then I went to do what I did best: I would set things in motion.

T
hink you it is easy to get a well-known and beautiful woman alone, away from her husband, at so public a gathering? Think you that, in the company of dozens of guests and nearly as many gossipy servants, a man can just pull such a woman aside into a private closet? It would not be easy for any ordinary man—at least I suspect it would not. I cannot say how ordinary men go about their business.

Here is how I went about mine: I had Leonidas request one of Mrs. Bingham’s servants to inform Mrs. Pearson that the lady was needed most urgently in the library. It would work, I thought. All would be protected by a buffer of supposed Negro ignorance, each servant claiming to believe that he or she had only passed along what was believed to be true.

I sent the message and went to the library to await the arrival of the lady. I stood by the fire, leafing through a volume on the late war, until the doors opened and a troubled-looking Cynthia Pearson rushed inside.

Upon seeing me, she was struck still and silent. Then she opened her mouth and would no doubt have called out her surprise, but recalled the doors were open. Instead of saying something, she closed the doors. I believe it was good that she did so. It gave her time to think, or perhaps it gave her time to cease thinking and allow her heart, and the memory of past emotions, to, if not eclipse, then at least take the stage along with other more reptilian designs.

“My dear God,” she said.

With the door closed, she took three or four purposeful steps toward me but stopped well short of the usual conversational distance. She folded her hands before me, as though she were about to sing an Italian aria. “I was told I was required for an urgent matter.”

“You have been told the truth,” I said.

Cynthia’s blue eyes flashed something meaningful, though I knew not what, and she turned away from me. She strode purposefully toward the doors. Before pulling them open, she turned back to me. “I asked you not to contact me. I begged you not to. You cannot have been invited to this house. Anne would never have asked you without informing me. You must go.”

“What does it matter? All centered upon your husband’s unexplained absence, but he is absent no more.”

“He returned last night and would say nothing of where he’d been—only that he had traveled on business. I tried to tell him that the government man, Lavien, was looking for him and that others had come, told me terrible things—”

“The men who warned you not to speak with me?”

She nodded. “I don’t know what transpires with my husband. I don’t know who it is that threatens me, but I know my duty, even when it is to those who do not deserve it. Why have you called me here like this, in so improper a manner? What is it you want of me?”

“Cynthia, you asked for my help. That you have been threatened into retracting your request does not relieve me of my duty.”

“Have you been asked to speak to me in these familiar terms?”

“No,” I admitted. “That was entirely my idea.”

She shook her head. “What is it you hope to accomplish, Captain Saunders?”

What indeed? I hardly even knew. Did I want an apology or an explanation or a return to those days when I was young and had so much before me? I said, “I want to know why you married him.”

She turned quite pink and her mouth formed a delicate O. I cannot say what she was expecting, but it had not been this. I watched as she took a deep breath to collect herself. She glanced about the library and her eyes fell upon a decanter of wine. She poured herself a glass and then, to my surprise, poured one for me. “It was more than ten years ago. You are not a child. Can you not put it behind you?”

“Is it the mark of maturity that one sets love aside?” I took the glass with much gratitude.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

She said it with such venom that I felt foolish and ashamed to have put her in so difficult a position, and I was prepared to tell her so. I knew not why I was there—in that house, in that city. I knew not why I had not been able to live my life since the close of the war, but I would not be so base as to drag this lady, this stranger, into my sadness.

When I looked at her, prepared to offer some tepid apology, I saw that something had changed with her—softened, perhaps broken. Her chin was lowered toward her chest, a hand raised to her face. She was crying. Tears ran down her face in slow, thick globes. She wiped at one eye with a delicate hand. “You were gone, Ethan. You left, and I knew why you left. You could not bear for your shame to taint me. I don’t know if that was noble or selfish, or if those things can even be distinguished, but I was alone. You were gone and my father was dead. Jacob was kind to me, he wanted nothing from me, and he was—he was like a father to me. He was so much older that I did not even notice when his interest became something other than fatherly, and I was already so used to depending upon him that marriage, when he proposed it, seemed inevitable.”

I ought not to have said it, but I was full of drink and had no will to control myself. “He does not seem to me paternal but cruel.”

She turned away. “You embarrass me.”

“I am sorry,” I said.

“No, don’t be sorry. You must never be sorry after what you’ve endured. My God, Ethan, what have you done to yourself? You did not have to let the blame attach itself to you.”

“You know the reason. I could not bear the cost of extricating myself.”

“I could have. You tell yourself it was the right thing, the glorious thing, to do, to sacrifice yourself for a great cause, but did you stop to think of those it would hurt? Did you think of what your nobility would cost
me
?”

I took a step closer to her. “You must leave him, Cynthia, before it is too late.”

“Leave him? How am I to leave him? Am I to take my children and flee penniless into the street? And to what? Shall I come live with you, Ethan, in your boardinghouse, and be a fallen woman?”

“Cynthia,” I said.

She stopped. “I am sorry. I have no business venting my rage on you, but I am trapped, and I rage like a trapped creature. I cannot go, so I must stay.”

I had no heart to tell her that her husband, whose money alone now offered her solace, was likely ruined.

“You cannot think I am content to abandon you to that devil,” I said at last.

“I have been with that devil since I was a girl. You are too late to rescue me. You are impulsive, but there is nothing for you to do.”

“I am not prepared to leave you, Cynthia.”

“You must leave. Only…” She looked away.

“Only what?”

“Only, you must see me again.” She set down her empty glass and left the library.

B
ack at the gathering, I tried to make sense of our conversation. What did Cynthia want from me? Perhaps even she did not know. I hardly knew what I wanted from her. A dalliance? I could not ask her to compromise her position so. She was not some pretty housewife of an obscure gentleman farmer or merchant. She was a prominent lady, close friends with the most known and beloved woman in the city. Because of her friendship with Anne Bingham, if not on her own account, eyes were upon her, and the risk to her would be too great.

Not so far from where I stood, Cynthia’s radiant face showed no sign that she had wept. Indeed, she now laughed most heartily in a small circle of people, including her brute of a husband. He hung upon Cynthia’s arm—no signs of cruelty now—and smiled at this comment or that, occasionally dared a rasping laugh that sounded like dry leaves rubbing against one another.

I saw no sign of Lavien—or Hamilton, for that matter—which was just as well. I strode about the room, trying hard not to take another glass of wine. I think I would have surrendered to temptation, but I looked up and saw a familiar-looking man, plump and red-faced, and knew him at once, though I could not say how. I continued to study him, his little eyes and blunt nose—all so porcine—and perhaps would still not have known him if it had not been for the girl next to him. She was equally porcine, though younger and less plump, and with a mass of yellow hair. She was the girl in my stolen timepiece and he the owner.

I walked over to him, bowed, and held out the watch. “Sir,” I said, “I believe I saw you drop this in the street several days ago. I attempted to run after you to return it, but my way was blocked. I have carried it upon my person ever since in the hope of finding its owner.”

He took the watch from me, his fat fingers moving with surprising gentleness. “Why, I never thought to see it again. I must ask your name, sir, that I may know who to thank.”

I bowed again. “Ethan Saunders, at your service.”

“What? The traitor?” He must have regretted his words, for his red complexion now purpled.

I bowed again. “I am not he. That man and I merely share the same name.”

He wished to make more conversation, but I demurred and excused myself to wander more. There, standing by himself, looking morosely at a portrait upon the wall, was Jacob Pearson. With little to lose, I approached him, probably with more boldness than clarity.

“Why, ’tis Jacob Pearson!” I cried. “Good heavens, man, it has been years.”

He turned to me and smiled reflexively. In an instant his smile faded and then returned, this time quite false. “Sir, I am afraid you have me at a disadvantage. You look to me familiar, but I cannot place your name.”

It was a well-executed lie, I will grant him that. “It is Ethan Saunders. We knew each other during the war.”

Pearson glanced across the room until he found Cynthia, locked in conversation with her friend, Mrs. Bingham, and another woman, also quite striking, whom I did not know. They did a passable job, I thought, of pretending not to observe me and Pearson together.

“Yes, of course.” He let go of my hand. “I heard you were dead. Or was it disgraced?”

“Disgraced,” I said. “But enough of
my
ignominy. Tell me, Mr. Pearson, where have
you
been this last week?”

“Why does everyone wish to know? Not ten minutes ago Hamilton himself was troubling me with his questions. I see not why it is the world’s concern. You do not like my saying so? It is rather bad for you, then, for it is my custom to speak as I like. For what does a man rise to consequence if he must guard his own tongue?”

“I can think of no reason.”