Lawless (48 page)

Eleanor crept to the front door, made a noise and went inside as if she’d just arrived. Her heart was breaking but she didn’t let it show. She seemed to have an ability to put on whatever kind of face she chose. But upstairs, in bed, her self-control melted and she wept into her pillow, wishing the Christmas season would bring just one gift to the household.

Peace.

Love is supposed to make people happy,
she thought.
Poems say that. The preacher says it in church. Men and women who fall in love are supposed to be the happiest of all. It must be a lie. Love hurts people. I’ve seen it for months. I saw it through the window again tonight. Love
hurts
people. I’ll never let it hurt me.

A seed had fallen in fertile ground, and from that night on it began to grow.

Not quite two years later—September 20, 1873—Julia lay in the bed she’d shared with Gideon on the night they first made love. The bed and the one in which her son was sleeping were the only pieces of furniture left in her mansion. All the other furnishings had been moved out and auctioned for a fraction of their value.

Tomorrow morning she and Carter would move out as well. Then the property would be on the market officially. If she were lucky, a buyer could be found who would pay approximately what she was asking, one hundred and ten thousand dollars. From the proceeds of the sale she and Carter could live and carry on her work for years to come, although in a far less affluent manner.

A day after the panic had started, Gideon had telegraphed to say that his money, handled for him by the Rothman Bank of Boston, was safe. He said he’d provide Julia with whatever cash she needed, and would do it for as long as she required help. She blessed him for making the offer even though she could never accept. No matter how bad her circumstances, she meant to be self-sufficient.

Gideon had been doing well. He’d progressed from the dock of the newspaper through the composing and press rooms to the editorial department, joining two unions en route. A year ago he’d written his first piece of copy—an obituary—then rewritten it three times until the editor, Payne, said he was satisfied. Gideon’s name was now on the masthead as the
Union’s
publisher. Payne remained editor.

Of late Gideon had been trying his hand at editorials and devoting himself to the business side of the enterprise. He’d raised salaries and shortened working hours, thereby attracting better writing talent. His last letter before the start of the panic had been a long and jubilant one. He’d reported that the
Union
had pulled to within two thousand of the
Sun’s
daily circulation. On the strength of that, he had boosted the advertising rate to fifty cents an agate line—or ten cents more than the
Sun
charged. He and Payne had worked for a week on a three-paragraph front-page editorial stating that the
Union
could command a premium because it had a quality readership—men and women who liked the paper and were loyal to it, and would therefore be more receptive to its advertisements. Of course, Gideon pointed out to Julia with a touch of amusement, the same could be said by any paper with a body of loyal readers. The point was, no one had said it before. The strategy had worked, and in one week the
Union’s
advertising linage had nearly doubled.

Then came the fourth of September.

The panic began with the closing of the doors of Jay Cooke and Company at fifteen past noon. Before the day was over, thirty-seven other New York banks and stock brokerage firms had also closed, and the governors of the Stock Exchange had suspended trading indefinitely.

Cooke’s was bankrupt, they said. The nation’s most solid and reputable financial establishment
bankrupt!
A representative of the house immediately traveled to Chicago to see Julia. It was not Mr. Robbins. He too had lost everything and had put a pistol to his head. The representative had come to do Julia the courtesy of explaining her position. Actually, she had none. She was wiped out.

She didn’t understand the representative’s roster of reasons for the collapse of Cooke’s. He cited railroads expanding too fast in Europe. Currency values inflated there and in America. Overproduction. Feverish industrial growth and subsequent overproduction. Skyrocketing prices for everything, which encouraged investment in highly speculative enterprises such as the Northern Pacific. And lastly, plummeting public confidence in government and business, brought to a climax earlier in the year by revelations that the Credit Mobilier had used gifts of its own, highly lucrative stock to elicit favors from members of Congress.

The representative seemed to comprehend all the interlocking aspects of the disaster. She didn’t. But she did understand when he said a depression lay ahead. She understood it even more completely tonight, because tomorrow, she and Carter would be moving to a boarding-house on the rebuilt West Side.

The move should have disturbed her. As evidence of worsening economic conditions, it did. But after she’d gotten over her brief and stormy anger—a vestige of the past, in which she’d expected her life to be perpetual tranquility—she’d begun to view the change as something to which she must and would adjust. She had her son. She had her lover whom she managed to see four or five times every year. And she had her work. She needed nothing else except a little food and a roof to shelter her—and never mind the size or location of that roof.

Odd, the way her role and Gideon’s had reversed, she thought as she visualized his face in the darkness. The house was dark throughout, and silent. All the servants had been released twenty-four hours earlier.

When she and Gideon had found one another in the aftermath of the fire, she’d been living in an affluent way while he and his family lived very modestly. Now the publisher of the New York
Union
occupied a splendid new mansion on upper Fifth Avenue—a move undertaken to placate his wife, and one which had not fulfilled its purpose. He said Margaret’s behavior was growing more hostile and erratic because of heavy drinking she now hardly bothered to conceal.

Most of Gideon’s wealth had been converted to gold bars over a year ago. The Rothman Bank had foreseen a financial crisis on a worldwide scale. Most of Julia’s assets had been on paper, and were gone. In two years, nearly everything in her life and his had changed.

Except the most important thing of all: their steadfast and steadily maturing love for one another. He said it was all that sustained him in the increasingly difficult relationship with his wife. And it was all that sustained Julia through the long periods when she was traveling, and facing increasingly hostile audiences, and thinking of Gideon as she lay in lonely beds in towns whose names sometimes blurred together until she could no longer remember where she was, or in what place she’d last been spat on or stoned.

She heard a peculiar noise from the State Street side of the house. She rose and drew her emerald-colored robe around her. It was shabby now. Out of fashion. But she couldn’t afford to discard it.

She walked quietly down the second-floor corridor to French windows at the front. The windows opened onto a small balcony. Outside, the September moon was brilliant. She clearly saw a band of eight or ten men skulking along the street. They paused in front of her driveway. One pointed. He’d noticed the deserted look of the house. All the windows were bare, the draperies gone.

She ran to her room. Breathing fast, she opened the trunk in which she’d packed the only clothes she planned to keep. She snatched out a small revolver purchased a few days ago on the advice of one of the departing servants who said looters were operating after dark.

She dashed back down the hall and opened the French windows just as three of the men started up the drive. They were unemployed, she suspected. Perhaps discharged from plants that had already shut down, as thousands were shutting down in every state.

She pointed the revolver upward and fired a shot. “Not this place!” one of the men yelled. He turned and fled. The others followed.

Carter came racing from his bedroom. “Ma, why did you use the gun?”

“Nothing to worry about, dear. Some vagrants were prowling around the house. They’re gone.”

Carter surveyed the empty driveway below. “You should have let me shoot. I’d have nailed one of them.”

There was no great conceit in the statement, just an assertion of fact. Carter Kent was only eleven but he was already half a head taller than his mother. His jet black eyes and hair—so like his father’s, yet so different—were turning him into a handsome young man.

For a moment, though, his confidence deserted him.

“Why is all this happening, Ma? I don’t like it much.”

She ruffled his hair. “I don’t either. But nothing remains the same for long. Change is one of the few constants in life, and you’ll discover that as you grow older. Bad times have come to the country, Carter. Come very suddenly and unexpectedly—”

“Bad times for us too, aren’t they? I won’t ever get another taste of cook’s pecan pie.”

She smiled. “You’ll survive. So will I.” She kissed his forehead. “As long as I have you.”

“And Gideon?”

Softly: “Yes, Carter. And Gideon.”

After the first time, she’d never again entertained him in her bedroom. They met discreetly, in other cities. But now and then Carter saw arriving mail which included a letter with Gideon’s name on it. Once he’d been bold enough to ask whether Gideon was some kind of special friend. That much she had admitted. Probably her son had guessed a good deal more from the way she spoke and looked as she answered. She made it a point not to act embarrassed or ashamed when Gideon’s name came up in conversation. She didn’t flaunt him to Carter, but neither did she deny his importance.

The boy gnawed his lower lip for a moment. “Ma?”

“What?”

“Would you like Gideon to marry you?”

“Very”—her voice broke slightly—“very much.”

“But he can’t ever do that, can he?”

“No.”

“That’s what I figured out. Since he’s already married, you’ll just be friends for the rest of your life.”

“Yes.” Her heart ached. “Friends.”

Something oppressive seemed to close in around her then—a fear whose source she couldn’t immediately locate. She packed Carter back to bed and returned to the front window, opening it and stepping onto the little balcony. She gazed north toward the central business district, where a miracle of rebuilding had taken place since the fire. The brilliant moonlight flooded down on Twentieth Street and Thomas Courtleigh’s mansion beyond.

Naturally Courtleigh had survived the panic. He was the sort who would. It was Courtleigh who was the cause of her fear, she realized. He’d harassed her relentlessly during the past two years. At least she assumed he was the one responsible for the almost constant verbal and physical abuse she took during her lectures these days. Fortunately none of the other speakers who worked for the Association had been harassed in similar fashion. If they had been, Julia would have quit.

For some reason, Gideon hadn’t been bothered since a brief flurry of trouble right after his return to New York late in ’71. Julia knew better than to think Courtleigh had forgotten her lover, or forgiven him.

Early in 1872 the railroad president had married Gwendolyn Strother. They’d taken a long European wedding trip. People continued to say Mrs. Courtleigh was—well, the charitable used the terms
high strung
or
excitable.
Julia’s servants as well as tradespeople who called at both houses employed stronger language. They said Mrs. Courtleigh was not quite right in the head.

In some accounts Julia had heard, Courtleigh’s wife was reputed to have been unstable since childhood. In others, it was Gideon’s visit that was said to be responsible for her condition. Julia doubted the latter story, though she supposed the melodramatic and by now notorious scene at the ball hadn’t exactly helped the young woman’s state of mind.

Julia had seen Courtleigh up close only once since his call in the solarium. Recent events had kept her too busy to think of the encounter, but it came to mind now as she stood in the moonlight and gazed north and then west across rooftops and treetops toward the Illinois prairie.

Just before the Fourth of July, she’d been supervising the trimming of some hedges along Twentieth. Courtleigh’s brougham had turned out of his coach yard, and he’d hailed her from the window. Warily, she’d stepped to the curb. He’d greeted her with a tip of his hat, though there was no cordiality in his hazel eyes.

“Good afternoon, Miss Sedgwick—or Mrs. Sedgwick? I always get so confused addressing a woman like you. Ah well. I’d like to remind you that I made certain promises—”

“I haven’t forgotten them,” she snapped back. “The thugs you send to every one of my lectures make that impossible.”

“Thugs?” He blinked. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” But of course he did, and mirth in his hazel eyes said so. “I wasn’t thinking of you so much as of your—friend.” The pause lent a lascivious quality to the last word. “Remind him that while I sometimes get very busy with other projects, and thus may seem to neglect promises, I do not in fact forget them. I eventually keep every one I make. Mr. Kent should ponder that each night before he goes to sleep. So should you. Good day.”

Remembering, she gripped the edge of the balcony rail. For the first time, her confidence in her ability to endure an uncertain future ebbed away.

“I mustn’t lose you, Gideon,” she whispered.
“I mustn’t.”

She shook her head. It did no good muttering to herself. She must write Gideon. Remind him of the ever-present threat Courtleigh represented.

A cloud passed across the face of the moon. The resulting darkness only worsened her fear. She was ashamed of that, yet the fear persisted. Back in her room, she couldn’t fall asleep. Wild thoughts went tumbling through her head.

Darkness falling on the land.

Men roaming the streets and roads.

Out of work.

Hungry.

Desperate enough to do anything for anyone who will pay them.