His One Woman (7 page)

‘Oh, your duty again,' said Sophie glumly. ‘Do you always do it?'

‘Not always, I must admit—but on this occasion I have to. One does not insult one's hosts—particularly when Mr Welles has promised to write me a letter of recommendation to Mr John Ericsson in New York.'

‘Oh, how splendid,' exclaimed Marietta. ‘We don't want to lose you, but you cannot snub Mr Welles after being given such a remarkable opportunity.'

‘No, indeed,' agreed Jack. ‘I shall be sure to return to Washington when my time with him is over—but you must understand, Miss Sophie, that I cannot give you a firm date for that.'

‘The war, again, I suppose,' moaned Sophie. ‘But we shall expect to see you before you leave the States.'

‘That is one promise, above all others, which I shall keep,' he told them gravely. ‘Meantime, I suggest that we all meet tomorrow morning to go for the ride which we have been promising ourselves since we first met.'

Excited agreement followed from Sophie, with the
proviso that she be allowed to accompany them in the carriage.

‘I do not like horses, nor do they like me,' she declared. Marietta's pleasure was muted but was none the less sincere.

Later, while changing into his evening togs before visiting Willard's, it was Marietta's smile of pleasure for him when he had bowed his farewells which he recalled, not Sophie's.

Alan had been correct in saying that they would all have thick heads in the morning. The dinner had been informal and had included not only most of the men on the afternoon's committee but also outsiders like the British newspaper reporter Russell. He was the war correspondent of
The Times
, already famous—some said infamous—for his frank and fearless reporting of the Crimean War, which had enraged the British Government of the time.

He joined them in the hard drinking at the bar after the dinner was over. He knew Alan, and his big, bearded face shone with pleasure when he shook hands with him. He smiled knowledgeably at the dead men littering the table.

He had one of the backwoods Congressmen with him: a big red-faced fellow who stared hard at Alan's urbane splendour and said nastily, ‘Sparring at Clanton's gym this morning, were you—for so he told me—doing your diplomatic nonsense at the Hill this afternoon and drinking here tonight? What a busy old
English gentleman you are! What other talents do old English gentlemen possess?'

He had been drinking hard and his tone was insulting.

Alan looked quizzically at him. ‘As many as youngish Yankee gentlemen like yourself, I suppose.'

‘If you weren't an old man, Dilhorne, I'd test your talents in the ring myself.'

‘Not so old as all that, and if you wish to do so do not let my years deter you, Mr Whatever-your-name-is.'

‘Macdonald, Dilhorne. My ancestors were kings in Scotland when yours were Saxon peasants.'

‘Oh, do not dignify me, or yourself,' drawled Alan, who was beginning to feel the effects of heavy drinking, although no one would have guessed it. ‘My father was a transported felon—your ancestors were doubtless Viking pirates, so there's not a pin to choose between us. Your ancestors narrowly missed the block and mine the noose.'

He leaned forward and grasped Macdonald by the wrist.

‘Come, sir, what shall it be, arm-wrestling or the ring? I am ready for either. Not for honour, I dare swear, for if the truth were known, neither of us possesses any. When we are done, Mr Russell may well sell this story to
The Times
, and share the profits between us.'

Jack watched Alan and then caught Charles's eye on him. Charles had drunk little, and Jack not much
more. Charles's expression was curious: it was one of gleeful anticipation. Jack thought that there was more to this than met the eye. He knew that it was Alan's last semi-official appointment before he left for home.

A frontiersman Senator who was barely conscious leaned forward and clapped Alan on the back. ‘Beat him at the arm-wrestling, suh, and I'll take you on next. Lose, and you must guarantee to back the North when you reach home.'

‘And if I win, what do I get?' grinned Alan. ‘No, don't tell me, it might be an incentive for me to lose.'

‘So noted,' Charles murmured under his breath so that Jack could scarcely hear him.

‘Life was never like this in the House of Commons,' whispered Alan to Russell when Macdonald, his face eager, pulled out one of the tables and sat down on one side of it, waiting for Alan to join him on the other.

Frantic betting had already begun. The more sober and senior of the party, both so far as alcohol and status were concerned, looked disapprovingly on. One man said to Alan, ‘Do not humour him,' but Alan shook his head.

‘Dare I believe that you are actually agreeing to take part in this frontiersman's contest?' queried Russell of Alan, more amused than amazed.

‘Dare I not?' returned Alan. ‘I must strive for the honour of old England, or be shamed.'

He turned to Charles. ‘You will so note, Mr Stanton.'

‘So noted,' repeated Charles, adding, ‘Return from the contest like the old Spartan, waving your shield in triumph or being carried home on it dead.'

Jack privately thought that Macdonald had no chance of winning. He was soft and fat and Jack had seen his brother's strength and power in the ring that morning. If the man had been talking to Clanton, he was a fool to challenge Alan.

He was right. Alan rapidly forced Macdonald's arm down on to the table twice in succession, and no sooner had he done so than others were clamouring to have a go at him.

The frontiersman who had challenged him on the Hill that afternoon, and who was now wearing a coonskin cap, pushed the defeated Macdonald away and sat down opposite to Alan, grinning at him.

‘If you win, Englishman,' he said, ‘I promise you a free ride at Bella Dahlgren's house with her best girl.'

The more Puritan among the watchers closed their eyes at this, but the rest were cheering, and Russell knew that, despite what Alan had said earlier, this was one despatch which he would never write or send home, when Alan slowly defeated his new opponent after several straining minutes.

Well, it was plain that this was still a frontier society, for all its marble columns and stern Republican admonitions, thought Jack. It was not so long since Senator Charles Sumner had been brutally thrashed, without warning, in the sacred precincts of the Capitol itself, by a supposedly gentlemanly assailant.

‘Enough,' proclaimed Alan as others strove to get at him. ‘I have urgent duties to fulfil in the morning.'

A hand plucked at Jack's arm. ‘Are you your brother's equal, me lad?' A bearded face grinned at him.

Jack shook his head and refused the offered challenge. He had never seen the man before, and the room was alive with shouts and cheers and the frontiersman was demanding that Bella Dahlgren's should be the destination of them all.

Alan picked up a bottle and began to pour spirits into his glass. ‘Bourbon for me tonight,' he announced, drinking it down. His hearers were not to know that he rarely drank.

He saw Jack smiling at him. ‘Little brother,' he told him, ‘you may have my ticket to Bella Dahlgren's tonight. I'm too far gone.' He never patronised whorehouses, but that was another thing that he wasn't revealing.

By now the frontiersman, clutching his bottle, was on the floor, and cared little whether Alan was at Bella's or in bed at the Envoy's residence. The evening was not yet over, though, and before Jack and Charles manoeuvred Alan through the door he had treated them to his farewell oration, which brought the house down. Some of the spectators swore drunkenly that the cheering could be heard on the Hill.

Far gone though they both were, since even Charles had been compelled to drink to save the honour of England, Alan's two companions walked him home between them. Russell, staggering in their rear,
was carrying Alan's stove-pipe hat and drunkenly declaiming that, ‘The best despatches never get written—and he might have had the goodness to offer me his ride at Bella's!'

For the next few days the story of the night at Willard's and its ending ran round Washington. Those Yankees who had not been there were at first disbelieving, then amused and finally admiring, even though the joke was on them once all of the facts—some of them much embellished in the telling—came out.

‘For it seemed,' said one witness to it, ‘that this MP, this envoy, this fool of a Britisher, was as stiff and starched and pompous as only an aristocrat could be, with his Haw Haw speech and his formality, so that all that was left for a true Yankee was to despise him. He apparently had a friend and patron back home who was a cousin of the Queen, and by some means which baffled everyone who met him—for the man was such an effete ass for all his size—he had built up a business empire back home.

‘His other patrons, the Rothschilds, must have lost their wits for once to have anything to do with this fellow who had made every politician and every committee he had encountered privately fume with rage and indignation as he danced them about so politely, asking idiotic questions and making heavy weather of their attempts to answer him.

‘Oh, yes, he was
very
polite, and great on protocol, too…' and the speaker usually ran out of breath at
this point and needed a few moments to recover himself before continuing with his remarkable tale.

‘He spent his time expressing blank incomprehension when confronted by any form of good American speech which differed from his own and consequently needed to have everything carefully explained to him several times so that discussions with him went round and round…

‘Well, on his last official day in these United States a number of Senators, Congressmen and their aides had banded together to take him to Willard's and get him royally, nay, Republicanly, drunk for his pains and in the doing gouge out of the fool what concessions to the Northern cause they could.

‘While they were doing this and he was obliging them by saying yes to everything—even in those places where he ought rightly to have been saying no—that low-life ass, Macdonald, popped up and insulted him. Before you could say Haw Haw twice, my fine English gentleman accepted his foolish challenge and set about laying everyone low at arm-wrestling, no less—and offering to take them all on in the ring into the bargain. And that was no joke, either, as Clanton later testified, and a good thing no one took up his offer.

‘To cap it all, at the end of the evening…' and the speaker was usually near exhaustion by now, between amusement and indignation ‘…at the end of the evening, when he had drunk most of the party under the table, and he was sitting there, still conscious, but only just, Macdonald rose and proposed
a toast to him. Everyone shouted “Speech! Speech!” so he got up—no one knew how—and gave them the sort of grin a Plains Indian gives you just before he takes your scalp.

‘After that, he favoured them with a wickedly accurate impersonation of Mr Lincoln and half the politicians he had met, being particularly good when imitating the frontiersman, who by now was lying unconscious in the corner and who was bitter the next day about having missed this part of the fun.

‘So much for his not being able to understand what everyone had been saying to him! At the end he had reverted to his normal voice—if he has one, that is—which was quite unlike that of the man whose plummy tones had bamboozled Washington for the past three weeks. “Finally, fellow legislators and honest Americans,” he said, “This imitation of an aristocrat invites you all to a similar evening in London where I promise to wine and dine you as royally as you have feasted me tonight. I also promise to gouge as many concessions out of you as you have tried to wrench from me. What old English gentleman could say more? Mr Stanton, you will so note.”

‘Mad, drunken cheering followed. “Come back and settle here—you're wasted in the old country,” Macdonald bawled at him. Half the company could have killed him for tricking them and the other half wanted to hire him so that he could do his tricks for them.'

This was what Russell did not send back to London and
The Times
. After Jack and Charles had strug
gled Alan into his bed, Jack asked, ‘What did all that mean? What were you “so noting” all evening, for God's sake?'

‘Oh, that's your brother's shorthand, a parody of a businessman ordering a clerk to take notes, only he means you to be aware that he's about to do something wicked and you're not to show surprise and give him away.'

‘He's our father's worst,' said Jack, shaking his head, ‘and I don't envy him his head tomorrow morning, and I don't much fancy mine, either. Did you see their faces at the end—particularly when he took off the coonskin-hatted gentleman?'

‘Yes, and whatever will the British Envoy make of it?' Charles grinned. ‘He's driven him and all his officials mad, too. The Envoy couldn't imagine why they'd sent out such an ass. Now he knows why. Alan has given nothing away and he's promised them nothing while learning as much as he could of what they didn't want him to know!

‘What's more, he's signed off in such a fashion that they're aware that they've been fooled, and that we can be as hard as they are—and so he's ensured mutual respect. “It's a frontier society,” he told me on the boat over, “and I'm giving a great deal of thought to how to deal with it. The diplomacy of the European monarchic states will be of no use in Washington, that's for sure.”

‘In the end he played them at their own game—and that they understand. I think that only Senator Hope had an inkling of what lay behind all the flim
flam. Beneath all the charm he's a hard man, and no mistake.'

Jack nodded. He'd seen little of his brother since he'd become a man himself, but he was shrewd enough to know that what Charles had told him was true. He wondered whether he possessed his share of the Dilhornes' cunning and decided ruefully that he did.