Unholy Fire (42 page)

“You can't stay here,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

“Of course, I can,” she replied, as if it was her own home. “I've come all the way from Washington, and I'm not about to be put out in the middle of a blizzard because someone has a false sense of modesty.”

“You cannot stay here,” I protested again. If I had possessed the strength, I would have hauled myself out of the chair and herded her out the door.

“I will not be bullied, Uncle.”

George Cabot was carrying in a fresh supply of wood. After building a new fire, he began scuffing his boots back and forth on the study carpet, clearly anxious to be on his way. It being Christmas Eve, he wanted to be home with his family before the storm hit with full fury.

“Please wait here a moment, Mr. Cabot,” she said, going back into the kitchen to retrieve one of her bags.

Cabot leaned in close to me and said, “You're not going to believe this, but that lady crossed over from Port Clyde this morning in the teeth of a force five gale. Ed Barstow refused to come across on his regular run, so she paid one of the lobstermen over there to bring her out in an old twin-masted Hampton. She was sick the whole twelve miles.”

From the tone of his voice, it was clear he thought she was daft. Returning from the kitchen, she handed him fifty dollars, which on the island was a king's ransom. I'm sure it just confirmed to him that she was a lunatic. She saw him to the door, saying she would come by to make arrangements for our passage back to the mainland after the storm abated. When she came toward me again, I saw that her face was gray and sunken from vomiting.

“The little boat was leaping under our feet like a wild horse,” she said, with a ghastly smile, as if her brave words could somehow blot out the memory of the dangerous passage. “I've never been on a craft that was pitching and rolling at the same time.”

My dark mood must have registered plainly on my face because the next thing she said was, “It won't serve any good purpose for you to be angry with me. I am here, and here I will stay.”

She went to the fire and proceeded to rub the circulation back into her arms while standing with her back to the hearth.

“Why are you here, Nancy?” I demanded.

“You know why I'm here.”

“Then tell me.”

“Because you're dying,” she said without a pause.

“One of the island busybodies wrote you, I suppose. They have nothing better …”

“Dr. Boynton wired me three days ago,” she said, interrupting me. “He said that you had cancer, and that it had spread to your major organs.”

“You don't mince words, do you?” I said, glaring back at her.

“When was the last time you ate?” she asked.

“This morning,” I lied.

“That would be quite a feat considering there was no food in the cottage. I am making you dinner.”

I turned my head away in disgust.

“You might at least evidence some small sign of pleasure at the thought that I've come all this way to see you,” she said.

At that moment it was all I could do not to tell her that having one living relative was far too many as far as I was concerned. But I held my tongue as her eyes wandered toward the bookshelves that covered the opposite wall. A moment later she was across the room and poring over the books that were crammed into every inch of space.

“Don't you have anything published within the last two hundred years?” she asked, without turning around.

As it happened, the study library was devoted entirely to the ancients. I wasn't about to tell her that every other room was filled with books as well. Leafing through a French edition of Plutarch's
Parallel Lives,
she looked up and smiled.

“Books can make good friends sometimes, can't they?”

In truth, they were my only friends now.

“More than half of these are written in French,” she said next. “You must be very fluent.”

“I'm not,” I said abruptly.

With those words, I felt a hot stab of agonizing pain in the pit of my stomach. The attacks were coming more frequently now, sometimes striking like a sudden blow to the kidneys, other times like the cut of a serrated knife to the wall of my abdomen. I willed myself to remain seated in the chair, leaning forward slightly, breathing slowly in and out.

“How bad is the pain?” she said.

“What pain?”

“You're sweating like a coal passer,” she said, “and it happens to be freezing in here.”

I picked up the bottle of rum from the floor next to my chair and took another deep swallow.

“That's your medication?” she said.

“Better than most,” I declared. “Would you like some?”

“As a matter of fact, I would,” she said, reaching down to take the bottle out of my hands, and tipping it to her mouth.

“Thank you,” she said.

I watched the color come back into her cheeks.

“I brought a supply of morphine with me,” she said.

“I haven't enjoyed the use of opiates in sixty years,” I said, “and don't plan to start again now.”

That seemed to take her back a little.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No,” I said, truthfully.

“Well, I am,” she replied. “I haven't eaten since early this morning, and I gave that back to the sea.”

Through the kitchen door, I watched her carve a section of the fresh ham, putting a tidbit in her mouth now and then while she prepared the rest of the meal. Whatever other talents she might possess, she certainly knew her way around a kitchen.

I felt the pain begin to subside in my abdomen. Outside, the rising wind howled and groaned as it fought to penetrate every crack or fissure around the window frames. Although the cottage had been constructed from massive spruce logs at the turn of the eighteenth century, it had been exposed to constant buffeting from gales and hurricanes and creaked like an old ship.

While she prepared the meal, I limped up to my bedroom. It was all I could do to confront the wall mirror, but the result wasn't as bad as I expected. My color wasn't any better, but my eyes were clear, and my hand didn't shake while I shaved. I felt better after washing up and went back downstairs.

The food she had prepared smelled wonderful, and when she invited me to join her, I did so. We sat at the scarred old library table in the study and ate her meal, washing it down with half a bottle of wine. At one point I looked up to see her examining me with the same intensity that a research biologist might study an amoeba under the microscope.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I think you have a very distinguished face.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Thirty-seven,” she said.

“Do you have a husband?”

“I've had several,” she responded. “None at present.”

“I see,” I said.

“I doubt if you do. I made the mistake of marrying men who saw me as only an appendage, someone who was supposed to stand by their side looking up at them adoringly and batting my eyelashes as if each word they uttered was a pearl of wisdom.”

“And they weren't?”

“My first husband was a banker who didn't like to lend anyone money. The last was a U.S. Senator from Delaware. He had no passion for any cause aside from his own reelection.”

I could see why men would find her attractive. She wasn't beautiful in the classic sense, being a very large woman with wide, child-bearing hips. But she projected a great life force inside her along with keen intelligence and an irrepressible vitality.

“What about children?” I asked.

Her face softened momentarily.

“I wasn't meant to have any, I'm afraid.”

With those words, I confess that my heart went out to her.

“I want you to come back with me to Washington,” she said, after a pause.

I was too shocked to react at first.

“You don't have to give me your answer now,” she said. “We can head back as soon as the storm moderates.”

“No,” I said, although it came out louder than I intended. “No,” I repeated more softly.

“You should know that I am a very wealthy woman,” she said, in a tone that implied she had earned every penny the hard way. “My estate in Georgetown is larger than this island. You would be far more comfortable there. Perhaps a fine surgeon …”

“I'm not going.”

She gave me a withering stare.

“According to Mr. Cabot, you haven't left this island for more than fifty years. It's simply incredible. You haven't witnessed a single miracle of the modern age. Why you have probably never seen an automobile, much less an airplane!”

She was right about that.

“You've never had a real adventure in your entire life, have you?”

I let that pass. Of course, young people readily assume when they look at someone my age that just because it is our curse to be housed in these ancient husks, we were never once like them.

“Are you afraid? Is it a fear of the world out there beyond the sea?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don't believe you,” she answered, her eyes boring into mine. “It's something else, isn't it? But what could possibly keep you here?”

“I live life the way I choose. Besides, I don't like Washington,” I said.

“When were you there last?”

“In … 1863,” I said, finally.

“Abraham Lincoln was president then,” she said, her voice tinged with admiration at her own mention of his name.

“Yes,” I replied. In my mind's eye I could see his mordant smile again, the good, homely face creased with wrinkles.

“I will be entirely truthful with you, Uncle,” Nancy was saying. “When my mother was dying some years ago, she expressed great concern about your welfare. I made a solemn vow to her that I would look after you in your …”

“Dotage? Well, I am very grateful for her concern, as well as yours, but I don't need your help.”

“The truth is I was too involved in my work to even think about you until I received the wire from Dr. Boynton three days ago.”

“Don't worry yourself about it. I'm sure you had more important things to think about.”

“I failed in my pledge to her miserably, and I do not intend to do so another day longer. You are my only living kin.”

“I do not need your help,” I repeated forcefully.

“But you'll die out here alone,” she said.

“I'll die the way I please,” I said.

“Then I will stay here with you,” she replied, with all the no-nonsense finality of the modern woman.

“You can't be serious,” I said, realizing how they had finally won the right to vote.

“You will see just how serious.”

“You wouldn't want to stay here, Nancy, and there are important reasons why I can't go with you back to Washington. I understand the pledge you made to your mother, but I release you from it.”

“What reasons?” she asked, the cast of her jawline set in granite.

“Good reasons.”

“Then tell me.”

“I cannot.”

“Why?”

“For one thing I swore an oath that I would never tell a living soul. It was a matter of some importance that took place when I was in the army. And there were innocent people involved.”

“When did you sign this oath?” she demanded.

“In January of … 1863.”

She burst out laughing.

“Then they are all dead,” she said. “And if one of them has managed to survive this long, I doubt he can remember what he had for breakfast this morning, much less what happened all those years ago.”

Another bolt of raw pain knifed through my stomach. It was as if a molten ball was growing inside me, larger with each passing day, twisting inside me like a demented fetus.

“You were speaking about an oath you took sixty years ago … in 1863, I believe you said.”

“Yes. Well, it is a long story.”

A blast of wind shook the timbers that anchored my cottage to the cliff. In the ensuing silence, windswept snow began pelting the windows.

“Neither one of us is going anywhere for a while,” she said.

That was when I surrendered. She was absolutely right, of course. Who was still alive to know or care? The written record of everything that happened may still be buried in some secret archive in Washington, but the reports were probably destroyed long ago by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. When it was over, he made me swear in a written oath that I would never reveal what had taken place. But after more than five decades, who would even care?

“Did you ever hear of a Civil War general named Joseph Hooker?” I asked, over the violence of the wind.

“Isn't he the one they named the red-light district in Washington after?” she said next.

“Yes,” I said. “He's the one.”

I looked at the clock on the mantlepiece. It was already approaching midnight.

“I guess it really began on the night of General Hooker's forty-eighth birthday party,” I said, about to start the tale with the discovery of Anya Hagel's body near the contraband camp. Before I had concluded another sentence, Nancy interrupted me and politely demanded to know how I came to serve in the army and whether I had actually seen a battle.

So I started all over again, this time with my enlistment in the Twentieth Massachusetts. I briefly mentioned that I had, in fact, witnessed a battle at Ball's Bluff. When I attempted to move on, she interrupted again, wanting to know everything about the battle and my part in it.

With Nancy, I discovered it was impossible to skip forward to the more important events without her constantly breaking in with new questions. So I finally ended up telling her everything that had happened to me, just as it had all occurred.

As the story unfolded, she sat gazing at me in rapt attention, periodically getting up to replenish the fire or to ask for another detail about something that piqued her interest. At one point she reluctantly suggested that I should probably go up to bed, but I shook my head. The truth is that sleeping for me had become no more than a one- or two-hour exercise, usually snatched in my study chair.