Lawless (60 page)

“When is it supposed to happen?”

He shrugged. “No one knows. This year. Next. Courtleigh might be involved, though most of the rumors have originated here in Pennsylvania.” He took a bite of fish. “In any case, Courtleigh hasn’t made good on his earlier threats, so it’s pointless to worry about him. I just wish I could remember what struck me wrong this morning.”

“How do you mean, wrong?”

“Something was out of place when I saw him. Something in the way he looked. I haven’t been able to—” Abruptly, he drew in a breath. “Now I remember. He was with a party of well-dressed men and women. But his wife was missing. It wasn’t the presence of something that threw me off—it was the absence.”

“Oh dear,” Julia murmured. “I meant to tell you and in all the excitement, I quite forgot.”

“Tell me what?”

“Courtleigh’s wife died six weeks ago.”

Gideon’s palms turned cold. “Are you positive?”

She nodded. “It was in all the Chicago papers. The
Tribune
got hold of it first, and evidently Courtleigh didn’t act in time to quash the story.”

She was confusing him. “Julia, people don’t conceal the death of a spouse.”

“No, certainly not the death itself. I’m referring to the circumstances. At the time Gwen Courtleigh passed away, she was a patient in a private asylum in Lake County. The same one to which her parents sent her after you visited the ball in her honor. She’d been locked up there for more than a year, hopelessly insane, and apparently showed no signs of ever recovering—
Gideon.”
Her hand closed over his. “You mustn’t look that way. I know Courtleigh made foolish accusations about your responsibility for her condition five years ago, but they were just that. Foolish. Don’t start believing them now.”

Gideon’s blue eye was grim. “It doesn’t matter a damn whether I believe them. It only matters whether he does.”

Stricken silent, Julia waited for him to continue.

“In the past, I did a lot of thinking about Tom Courtleigh’s motives, and how his mind must work to permit him to behave as he does. I believe I understand him. Look at life from his point of view. He has money, and power, and those two things will give him almost anything he wants—with little or no opposition. They also provide virtually complete protection against the buffetings of everyday life. The Courtleighs of this world live a sequestered, unreal existence. Ordinary people are more accustomed to bad luck. To blind chance interfering with their affairs. Courtleigh avoids that sort of thing year after year after year. Then comes something like his wife’s insanity. He can’t order it to heal itself. He can’t write a draft and pay some flunky to make it vanish. I’m not trying to be clever when I say he probably found her condition maddening. Trying to undo it, he might come close to going mad himself. And when he discovered he couldn’t undo it, I’m sure his anger would demand something on which to place the blame.”

She whispered, “Don’t you mean someone?”

Slowly, he nodded. “I think that’s what I saw in his eyes this morning. He remembers he’s never carried out his promise to punish me. And now he has greater reason than ever to do it.”

A
FTER A NIGHT’S
sleep, Gideon felt he’d been an alarmist. He and Julia returned to the Exhibition next day, turned Carter loose, met him again at sunset and had an altogether marvelous time. Gideon saw no sign of Thomas Courtleigh.

He’d sent only a relatively short dispatch to the
Union
the preceding evening. Out of the day’s notes he prepared a longer piece, and started for the telegraph office just after ten o’clock. Julia was tired, but she’d promised to meet him in his room when he returned.

He was only a few steps from the hotel on still-busy Walnut Street when someone called his name.

He paused and looked across the street. A man waved. “Over here, Mr. Kent!” He was a small, nondescript fellow. Gideon didn’t recognize him. “I’ve a message for you.”

Suspicious, Gideon hesitated at the edge of the plank sidewalk. He didn’t dare waste too much time before sending his dispatch. And he absolutely didn’t know the man, who was hanging back near one of the darkened shops as if to avoid the gaslights of a restaurant entrance close by.

A carriage clattered past at a fast clip, momentarily concealing tne man as he shouted, “Please, Mr. Kent, it’s most urgent.”

Curiosity overcame Gideon’s wariness. He glanced at the hotel doorman who’d been watching the exchange, shrugged and stepped down into the street. He was a third of the way across when a hack drawn by two lathered horses came plunging onto Walnut from the cross street to his left. The horses and the hack rushed at him like a juggernaut.

The hotel doorman cried, “Watch yourself, sir!” Gideon flung up his left arm and hurled himself backward. As he fell, he had a distorted view of the bobbing, wild-eyed heads of the horses, and of the slouch-hatted driver whipping them. The street shook.

He landed on his side, his arm outflung. He jerked his arm back just in time to keep it from being trampled by sharp hoofs and crushed by heavy iron tires.

The doorman ran into the street, shaking his fist at the hack. “Slow down! No furious driving allowed in this district!”

The hack careened out of sight around a corner. The doorman rushed to help Gideon to his feet.

“Any serious damage, sir? Doesn’t appear to be—just some dirt on your clothes. Damn cabmen. No respect for the law.”

The two moved slowly toward the sidewalk. Gideon had twisted his left ankle, and limped slightly. But he’d already decided he mustn’t upset Julia by telling her of the incident.

A few onlookers resumed their strolls. The doorman was still fuming. “Don’t know why that idiot was traveling so fast. He had no fare.”

Gideon stopped. “You’re positive?”

“Yes, sir, the cab was empty. No passengers that I could see.” Suddenly the ruddy face puckered into a frown. “And where’s that bucko who was hollering at you?”

“Gone,” Gideon said, well before he turned to scan the far side of the street. He was right. There was no trace of the stranger.

The doorman shrugged. “Well, it’s the cabman I’m exercised about. Driving much too fast, without so much as a reprimand. Where are the police when you need them? Always somewhere else. You could have been badly injured—killed, even. Nobody cares about the law any longer. He whipped around that corner on two wheels and never saw you. Didn’t care who was in the street.”

“No, I’m sure he didn’t,” Gideon lied, thinking of Courtleigh’s eyes in Machinery Hall, and of his wife dying in an asylum. Did Courtleigh still see the bloodstained shirt landing at her feet? Did he still hear her terrified shrieking?

Gideon felt incredibly tired as he limped away toward the telegraph office. The armistice was over. The war was resuming.

Most newsmen agreed that they got some of their best ideas at unexpected moments. Julia had said much the same thing, and Gideon could verify it. Sometimes he solved a problem he was having with an editorial, or with a department of the paper, at the end of an uncomfortably sleepless night, or while he was stropping his razor, or even while he was sitting on the jakes with a bellyache. So it happened that night. He was on his way back from the telegraph office, still shaken, when he passed a book shop in whose window various souvenir and commemorative volumes were displayed against red, white and blue bunting.

SPECIAL CENTENNIAL EDITIONS
read a small hand-lettered placard. He wished Kent and Son were represented in that window even in a small way. But the family firm had produced no book in honor of the hundred years of—

Instantly, the whole idea was there.

A book called
100 Years
—an expensive book produced with the finest typography, paper, and binding. There’d be a minimum of text. He’d attempt to write it himself, but if he found he couldn’t do an adequate job, he’d hire someone better qualified. The real focus of the volume wouldn’t be the words anyway. It would be—he searched the window and saw nothing exactly like it—one hundred plates. One hundred wood engravings telling the story of the republic’s achievement since its founding in this very city a century ago.

The illustrations in the book wouldn’t be the hackwork people were accustomed to seeing in newspapers or magazines. They’d tell as story, right enough, but they’d be fine art. They’d be cut by the best wood engravers Kent and Son could find.

But they’d be based on a hundred sketches by his brother Matt.

If Matt could possibly be persuaded to undertake the project, he would easily complete a hundred of his quick freehand drawings in just a few months. Then a staff of craftsmen would transfer them to blocks of boxwood as faithfully as the medium allowed.

A further thought struck him. Perhaps from the best twenty or twenty-five sketches, Matt would prepare a limited edition of etchings. The whole thing was unbelievably exciting.

Now what about the book’s content? Historical subjects would be included, certainly. A battle or two. Breed’s Hill where his ancestor Philip had fought. The Alamo mission where Amanda Kent had nearly lost her life during the struggle for the independence of Texas. And there had to be a depiction of at least one engagement from the late war, so Americans would never forget the horror of fighting against their own. Perhaps the subject should be Gettysburg, when the South’s high tide had crested against a seawall of steel and fallen back.

But Gideon wanted more than war to be represented in
100 Years.
Much more. He wanted to create a panorama of the nation’s territorial expansion, and of its agriculture and industry. He wanted the sweep of a corn field dark with the shoulders of a sunburned harvesting crew. He wanted the crowded aisles of a textile factory; the contrast of white fiber and black men in a Carolina gin house; the bottom of an anthracite mine lit only by miners’ candles; the inside of a retail store with its wondrous array of goods and products; the crowded patterns of city telegraph wires crisscrossing an Eastern sky; and the isolation of a sod house jutting against a sky in the West—he wanted one great book that would capture the panoply of American life as it had developed in astounding variety since Philip Kent’s time.

And he’d make sure not only the famous were portrayed, but the people who were the land’s real backbone: the common people.
100 Years.
It was the project for which he’d been searching—and the very thing he needed to take his mind off Courtleigh.

He could hardly wait to tell Julia. She was as excited as he, so excited she never noticed he was limping a little.

“It’s a magnificent idea, Gideon—especially having your brother create the illustrations. But a hundred of them?”

“Sketches, remember. He can do it. Before he was twenty, he used to turn out eight or ten a day. They were some of his best work. Brilliant art created around a kernel of realism. Of course there’ll be more to this than merely making the drawings. He’ll need to research the subjects. He’ll have to travel the whole country—the Pacific, the Canadian border, Texas—we’ll underwrite his expenses. He should jump at the challenge.”

Provided I can present it the right way.

Delighted to see him so happy and enthusiastic for a change, Julia hugged him.

“Darling, I think you’ve just turned into a book publisher without realizing it.”

A day after his return to New York, Gideon took the train to Boston. Dana Hughes of Kent and Son was enthusiastic about the idea. He promised to have a preliminary list of one hundred subjects ready within two weeks.

Down at the Jersey Shore, Molly was equally enthusiastic—although she recognized that thousands of dollars of capital might be ventured in financing Matt’s research, and none of it recouped if the book failed.

“After all, Gideon, by the time it’s on the market, the centennial will be over.”

“Have you looked at some of the souvenir books being sold right now? Junk. They’ll be forgotten by New Year’s Day. We’ll make
100 Years
such a fine book, the delay won’t make any difference. Why, with Matt doing the pictures, the damn thing will wind up in museums.”

“That’s a commendable goal,” Molly agreed. “I’m with you. Of course it matters to me if the book fails and we lose the investment. But it will matter far less than the fact that the Kents published it, and did everything in their power to make it succeed. Are we in agreement?”

“We are!” He gave her a hearty kiss on the cheek, and danced her around the parlor till she begged for mercy.

The fourth and final draft of his long letter to Matt concluded by saying:

I know you have no feelings for this country save a justifiable contempt for its venality. So I won’t cloak the project in a patriotic appeal. I present it to you instead as a creative challenge—for what American artist has dared to attempt so vast a labor? One which, simultaneously, wants to be the finest art, yet suited to the popular taste?

If you should consent to undertake it, I would only ask that you do so with an open mind. That is, I would not want you to approach the book from the standpoint of devastating caricature like Tom Nast’s. I would like to see representative Americans in the pages—the handsome along with the ugly—and contrary to what you might have come to believe since your exile, we do have a few handsome specimens around. Good God, you’re one yourself. But I expect you are honest enough to understand what I am saying—that our states are not peopled exclusively by greedy grotesques. (It merely seems that way sometimes!)

Finally, I see 100 Years as the potential salvation of the publishing house. I am not directly involved in the management of Kent and Son, but both of us draw income from it—or should—and therefore if your mind and heart aren’t stirred by the proposal, perhaps I can fall back on family loyalty and beg you to do this one thing for the sake of membership in the Kent clan. Kent and Son was once a proud imprint but it is third—no, tenth-rate now. Between us, we might alter that. Forgive me, but if the possibility of a reversal of its fortunes exists, I think duty compels us to make the attempt.

And although you’ll probably mock me for saying this, Matt, a well done book of the kind just proposed might also change a few of the conditions you find so deplorable. At least it might sweep away some of the fear and cynicism currently pervading America.

Can a mere book do that? Yes, I think so. I have immense faith in, and respect for, the printed word. Citizen Tom Paine, Gen’l. Washington’s propagandist, rallied an indifferent populace and turned apathetic men into zealots of liberty. Mrs. Stone’s novel, so detested in our part of the world, was nevertheless a watershed of social change.

We may not achieve such memorable results. But I believe the effort itself is worthy—though perhaps I have now ensnared myself, since I suspect such appeals are not compelling to you.

I cannot omit one final one which I confess also plays a part in my proposal. For years I have been trying to find a way to induce you to come home for a good, long visit. I hope I have at last discovered it.

I beg you to send me your answer quickly. I pray it will be a favorable one. I shall await it with great eagerness.

Meanwhile, I remain, as ever, your affectionate brother—