When This Cruel War Is Over (27 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over
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Within minutes, Paul saw this was exactly what Janet was doing. She was no longer the woman who had surrendered in his arms at high noon beside the gleaming Ohio River. Whether it was willed or unwilled, he sensed a determination to enjoy him without the gift of herself that he needed and wanted to reassure him that he was still in control of their lives.
Why wasn't it happening? In this gigantic hotel, stripped even of their surnames, they were primary selves, simply Paul and Janet. Family and history should be vanishing in a gathering ritual of gift and acceptance,
wish and desire, hope and faith. But the Janet he was kissing and caressing remained Janet
Todd
. Was there something even more irreducible beyond that formidable family name:
Confederate agent?
“Now Janet, now,” Paul whispered as he entered her. “Give yourself to me as I'm giving myself to you. Tell me how much you love me. Say it.”
She would not or could not say it. Instead she tried to give him her physical self, the inner flesh that accepted his manhood, the breasts and thighs and tongue and lips that created this terrific wanting in his body.
You can have all of this, Paul, but not the other thing, not Janet without Todd.
The clatter and cries of Broadway's voices and vehicles drifted into the room. They evoked memories of the Confederate moneyman's dry amorality and Fernando Wood's lecherous greed and Gertrude McAfee's commercial sensuality. The August heat bathed Paul in sweat as he struggled to annihilate these enemies of love.
But he could not overcome Janet's refusal to abandon
Todd.
Suddenly he was Blondin, falling from his wire into a cataract of wish and desire that was a sort of death. He refused to accept it and simultaneously in his deepest self accepted it as he had accepted that other death at Gettysburg. It was too real, too huge, to escape. It was his fate.
“I love you,” he whispered as he cradled her in his arms.
She answered him with a kiss. But the words he wanted to hear remained unspoken.
They slept.
JANET TODD AWOKE WITH A start in the hot humid room in the Astor House. Thick beams of morning sunlight filled the windows. Below on Broadway a policeman's whistle shrilled again and again. It sounded vaguely ominous.
Beside her Paul was lying awake, staring at the ceiling. His chest was bare. The Antietam wound was like an evil purplish stain, only inches from her eyes. His expression was mournful. Janet struggled to convince herself she had done the right thing last night. He would have to wait until the western confederacy declared the war was over and victory was proclaimed in Indianapolis or Chicago. Then he would have all of her, body and soul.
Abruptly Janet was back ten hours, sitting opposite Gertrude McAfee, Fernando Wood's girlfriend. Janet watched him scoop that daub of chocolate mousse from her breast. She saw the cool sensuality in McAfee's eyes. Was she becoming one of those women? She only knew she liked the word that defined her:
adventuress.
She lay there, savoring the idea of rescuing the South from defeat, of changing the course of history. She wanted that triumph as much as she wanted Paul Stapleton. She wanted it so much she was ready to risk becoming a woman like Gertrude McAfee. A woman who did not care what respectable people thought of her. A woman who ultimately did not care what Paul Stapleton thought of her.
No. That possibility stirred pain. But it was an endurable
pain. She was not selling herself for new dresses, to see her name in cheap newspapers. It was for the South's tormented cause. For her father's violated honor. For their sacred dead. There was a difference, a vast moral difference, in her version of the adventuress role.
For another moment Janet studied Paul's brooding face. She still saw the same troubling mixture of innocence and maturity there. She understood the maturity now—it was the pride, the courage, the devotion to the ideal of soldierly honor that had twice returned him to the war in spite of his wounds. She exulted in her power over this man. She loved him but she also loved the power. She had
captured
him. She had overcome his loyalty to his homicidal Republican brother; she had forced him to admit that duty honor country were meaningless in a nation on the brink of dissolution—no matter how much the loss of those ideals wounded his spirit. She had persuaded him to commit treason for her sake—and the sake of her cause.
Knuckles rapped on the door. “Who is it?” Janet asked.
“Bart Mason,” said a gruff voice.
Paul gestured to the door, seized his nightrobe and stepped into the closet. Janet shrugged into a nightrobe and peered through the half-opened door. The bewhiskered Englishman gazed sardonically at her. “We're looking for Major Stapleton,” he said. “We can't seem to wake him up.”
The smirk on the face of his Irish henchman made it clear that they knew where Major Stapleton was. “He's an early riser. He must have gone out for a walk,” Janet said.
The Irishman and Mason exchanged sly smiles. “We'll wait in the lobby,” Mason replied. “We want to leave for Jersey City within the hour. We need to finish the business with the guns today so we can start shipping them.”
“I'm sure Major Stapleton will be back directly.” Adventuress, echoed in Janet's head as she slammed the door. To Mason and his friends she was no different from Gertrude McAfee. Janet told herself she did not care. “You can come out. They're gone,” she said.
Paul emerged from the closet looking truculent. “What the devil are they doing, barging up here?”
“They want to start shipping the guns.”
“I bet they do. I think those fellows are like Fernando Wood. More interested in making a quick buck than in helping the cause.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Intuition, mostly. Little things, like Mason refusing to tell me where the guns came from.”
Why was he always so critical of Southerners and southern sympathizers? For a moment suspicion flared in Janet's mind. Was Paul an immensely clever double agent? Had Gentry sent him across the Ohio to confuse and demoralize them—and incidentally to enjoy Janet Todd? No, it was impossible.
Downstairs, they invited Mason and his friend to join them for breakfast in the Merchants Room. Mason demurred. They could save time by having coffee and rolls on the ferryboat. Outside the Astor House he hailed a hack, and they clopped rapidly downtown to the Battery, where they boarded a Baltimore and Ohio ferryboat. At a table in the dining salon, they gulped hot coffee and fresh rolls.
Mason asked them how things had gone with Fernando Wood. “We agreed on terms,” Janet said. “We gave him the money.”
“Does he always come equipped with women like Gertrude McAfee?” Paul asked.
“I have no idea,” Mason said. “It's none of my business. Or yours.”
“He practically admitted a lot of our cash would be traveling around New York on her back,” Paul said.
Mason exchanged a sour look with his Irish friend and said nothing. In Jersey City they walked through the ferry terminal into the railyards beyond it. Never had Janet seen so many boxcars. There must have been 5,000 of them. The ground was covered with black cinders that seemed to redouble the heat of the blazing August sun. Around them steam engines chugged and hooted, moving cars from one siding to another.
They saw no one but a few trackmen and the engineers and firemen in the steam engines. Several waved greetings to Mason and the Irishman. Finally they reached a siding at least a mile from the terminal. The Irishman slid back the doors of a red boxcar and Paul climbed inside. He stood in the doorway and helped Janet up. It was well over a hundred degrees in the car. Around them were dozens of boxes marked: CONTENTS: BOOKS.
The Irishman boosted Mason into the car and stayed outside to make sure no one interrupted them. Mason produced a screwdriver and pried open one of the boxes. There were at least two dozen guns inside. They looked murderous to Janet. Their long black barrels, their dark brown stocks gleamed in the dim light. They seemed to be in good condition. She wondered if this hot wearisome trip to Jersey City had been necessary.
Paul picked up one of the guns and hefted it. He walked to the open door of the car and peered down the barrel. He studied the firing mechanism and clicked the trigger several times. “You got these from Mexico, didn't you,” he said.
“I told you not to worry about where we got them,” Mason snapped.
“They're not rifled. They're muskets the Mexican army used until the French took over the country two years ago. They brought rifles and the Mexicans started selling these old guns all over South America—and North America, it now appears.”
“What the hell's the difference?” Mason growled.
“Rifled or smooth, it still spits out a bullet that can kill a man.”
“The rifle does that at three hundred yards and these things do it at eighty. It's like sending a man into a fight with one hand tied behind his back.”
“Who the hell gave you the authority to pass these judgments?” Mason said.
“A lot of people. Janet's father, Colonel Todd. President Jefferson Davis.”
“I knew Jeff Davis before you were born,” Mason said. “He knows I wouldn't sell him a defective gun. Every one of these weapons is in perfect working order.”
“I'm sure they are. The Mexicans know how to take care of guns. They've been using them to shoot each other for the last forty years,” Paul said. “That's not the point. These are second-rate guns. The worst possible weapons to give amateur soldiers like the Sons of Liberty.”
Their strident voices brought the Irishman to the door of the boxcar. His face was not friendly.
“I talked you over with Miles McDonald last night,” Mason said. “We agreed someone named Stapleton was damned hard to trust. McDonald told us to take care of you if you tried to pull any tricks. I'm tempted to do it right now.”
The Irishman pulled a pistol from under his coat. It was a big gun, with a silver barrel and a bulging magazine.
“That isn't going to get you your money,” Paul said.
“I think maybe it will. I think maybe your lady friend here will want to keep the story of your visit to her room secret from Jeff Davis, her father, and a lot of other people.”
Paul laughed in his face. “Janet Todd isn't going to let you shoot me and then hand over two hundred thousand dollars to keep you quiet. She's a woman of honor. If I
visited her last night, it was because I love her—and she loves me.”
“We're not above shooting both of you,” Mason said. “The Confederates aren't going to win this war. It's every man for himself these days.”
“You're a real hero,” Paul said. “First you're going to shoot an unarmed man, then a defenseless woman.”
He strolled over to the open door. “Would a foine young fellow like you do such a thing?” he said, mimicking an Irish brogue.
Janet saw he was exactly like Adam Jameson. War had given him a kind of contempt for death. “Wait a moment,” she said. “There has to be a better answer to this.”
The Irishman's gaze shifted to Janet. In a motion so swift she saw only a black blur, Paul kicked him in the face and slammed the boxcar door shut. Spinning, he drove his fist into Mason's face, sending him crashing into a stack of boxes. Paul sprang on top of him and pulled a pistol from inside his coat.
“Open the door,” he said to Janet, crouching beside it.
She pulled back the door and Paul leaped into the opening, gun leveled. The Irishman was sprawled on his back, both hands clutching his bloody face; his gun was a good yard from his hand. Paul gestured with his pistol, and Mason hastily exited the boxcar.
“Give me his gun,” Paul said. Mason obeyed.
Paul shoved both pistols into inner pockets in his coat and helped Janet down from the boxcar. “We'll see what President Davis says when we tell him about this,” he said to the two gunrunners. Mason pressed a handkerchief to his bruised cheek and said nothing.
Back in New York, they headed for Miles McDonald's bookstore off Washington Square. The Irishman was behind the counter as usual. His smile vanished when Paul drew one of the guns and jammed it under
his chin. “Did you give Mason and his boyo permission to kill me—and Miss Todd—if we refused to buy those second-rate guns?”
“I swear to God I never said any such thing,” McDonald said, his eyes bulging with terror. “I don't deal in guns, just in intelligence. I never trusted the little limey bastard that much in the first place—”
“Can you communicate quickly with Richmond?”
McDonald shook his head. “It takes at least forty-eight hours. We can telegraph a safe house in Washington, but they have to take the message and the answer overland by courier.”
“Here's the message. It's for President Davis. ‘GUNS INFERIOR. BARTHOLMEW MASON UNTRUSTWORTHY. WISH FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.'”
McDonald wrote it down. “I can send this,” he said. “But I've got a better idea. I'll show it to Mason. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets you the best guns he can find.”
“It's worth a try,” Paul said.
Walking beside Paul into Washington Square Park, Janet felt bewildered. Her sense of power over him had vanished. More important, she no longer felt any need to control him. The doubting negativist had vanished. He had taken charge of their future in a new unassailable way. They sat down on a bench in the park and he took both her hands. “We're going to make this
work,
” he said. “Trust me.”

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