The Furies (58 page)

Another man tried. He almost had his hands on her before she blew away half his face.

That sent the attackers fleeing back into the hall, out of the line of fire.

The bells clanged louder. Hoofs rattled on concrete.

Iron-tired wheels screeched. Under the portico, someone yelled:
“Police—!”

There were panicked cries, the sound of pounding feet, a last crash of glass from somewhere at the rear of the house—

Amanda held on to the mantel with all her strength. The left side of her dress was soaked red from breast to hip—

I killed Stovall,
she thought, gazing down at the blood.
And what did Jephtha say?

Without blood there is no remission of sin
—

Her blurring eyes moved to the wall clock.

Fifteen until ten.

Fifteen minutes more and the steamer would put out from North River bound for Canada—

She almost smiled.

She let go of the mantel and the Colt revolver at the same time, unconscious before she struck the carpet.

A
MANDA KENT DE LA GURA LIVED
seventeen days after the attack on her home. She lay in her bedroom on the second floor, conscious for short periods, and in relatively little pain at first. During one of the brief periods of wakefulness, Michael Boyle told her eight men had been caught and arrested by the police; the rest had escaped. No connection between any of the eight prisoners and Isaiah Rynders could be established, he informed her somewhat cynically.

Occasionally Amanda heard unfamiliar voices, the faint rasp of saws on the first floor, the rap of hammers. Workmen had already begun repairing the damage, estimated at eighty thousand dollars.

In Amanda’s room, there was no evidence of the attack. The draperies had been replaced. The damaged furniture had been removed. The thugs had destroyed furnishings throughout the house, smashed great holes in the plaster, ripped up carpeting and defecated on the floors. But while Amanda slept, Michael supervised the quiet work of making it seem as though her bedchamber hadn’t been touched.

Sometime on the second or third day, a doctor bent over her. She didn’t recognize him. Since moving to New York City, neither she nor her son had ever required a doctor’s care. In fact she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been seriously ill.

Now, however, it was a different matter. The doctor told her the pistol ball had lodged in or near her left lung, and couldn’t be removed. She knew from his expression she was going to die.

“I’ve also been attending your son,” he said.

“Where”—at times, speaking even a few words was difficult—“where is—?”

“Mrs. Ludwig’s home. We’ll move him here as quickly as we can. Young Mr. Boyle got him to me in time. He suffered a wicked concussion but I believe he’ll pull through.”

She fell asleep weeping.

On the fourth day, Michael brought her a
Tribune
with the account of Hamilton Stovall’s funeral, and a letter postmarked in the nation’s capital. She could barely find strength to hold the envelope.

“I can’t read it, Michael. The hand seems familiar—”

“I opened it, Mrs. A. It’s from your cousin’s son.”

“Jephtha? He’s alive—?”

“In Washington. He doesn’t think he can go back to his family.”

“Is—is there an address?”

Michael pointed it out. “A Methodist parsonage.”

“Write him. Tell him—to come here. Shelter—”

“What, Mrs. A?” He bent close to her.

“Shelter him,”
she whispered as her eyes closed. “Help him—start again—”

On the sixth day, Theo Payne arrived from Boston in response to a telegraph message Michael had sent. Amanda smelled the whiskey on Payne’s breath the moment he entered the bedroom, turning his hat brim nervously in his hands.

He sat on a chair at the bedside, listening attentively.

“Downstairs—there’s a manuscript. I want—Kent’s to publish it. I want—you to stay on as—the editor.”

“Stay on?”

“Mr. Benbow—has approached the Stovall estate. They are—willing to sell. The executors have no—have no”—she struggled to get the words out—“objections to my politics, and—and my money is as good as—anyone’s. I want you to teach my son all you know, Theo. I want the firm to—to stand for something again.”

“You know my position. I am strongly in favor of abolitionism. I would even propose starting a newspaper similar to the one Kent and Son once published.” Eagerness livened his voice. “I’ve had experience in that line, you know—”

“If you do start a paper,” she whispered, “it must do more than—than support freedom for the slaves. It must—it must stand for that and—preserving the Union too—”

Payne looked downcast. “I’m not sure both can be done together—”

A moment later he leaned forward. “What did you say?”

Silently, her lips formed two words:
“Must be.”

After several minutes had passed, he assumed she wasn’t going to waken again soon. He began to tiptoe out.

“Theo—”

He started, unnerved by the unexpected loudness of her voice. He turned back. Her eyes were open, clear and alert.

“Theo,” she said, “clean the sign.”

“The sign? Oh—the one in front of the firm—”

“Better still, have—a new one painted. It’s a goddamn disgrace.”

He watched her eyes close again, then continued to the door, vaguely ashamed because he wanted to whoop with joy.

Rose visited on the seventh day. It was a tiring experience for Amanda, because Rose seemed all bluster and profanity.

“Damn it, Amanda, you’ve got to—to get out of that bed—I don’t have—another friend who’ll tolerate my cigars or—or go out with me in public wearing—trousers—Jesus Christ, how horridly I’m behaving! I can’t help it.
I can’t help it
—”

She hid her face with both hands.

On the ninth day, summoned at Amanda’s request, William Benbow, Junior, arrived from Boston. With the door of the bedroom closed, the attorney showed her the papers transferring legal guardianship of Louis Kent de la Gura to Michael Boyle.

“Only one—mistake,” she said. “Scratch out—de la Gura. His name is Louis—Kent.”

Old Benbow helped guide her hand so she could write her signature. It was all but illegible.

On the eleventh day, Amanda felt sufficiently alert to hold another short conversation with Michael. She wore a lavender bed gown that Brigid had helped her put on. Her hair, unpinned, lay fanned on the pillow, so nearly white that it was almost indistinguishable from the linen. From time to time, her wrinkled face constricted with pain.

“Michael—?”

“I’m here.”

She clutched his extended hand, treasuring its warmth.

“Louis is—?”

“Perfectly fine, though still sleeping a good deal.”

“I wish I could see him.”

“Why, you will, Mrs. A. You’ll be up and ab—”

“No, I”—she coughed—“won’t and you know it. I think I—forgot to ask before. Did anyone—find Tunworth—?”

“The night of the attack? No. I expect he was safely in the Astor House when it took place. He’s gone home minus one nigger.”

“About Jephtha—”

“I wrote him. I invited him here to live.”

“Good. Remember, all the Ophir money—is his—along with the profits of the issues I bought with part of that money—”

“I’ll see he gets every penny.”

“You—mustn’t—say that word again, either.”

“What word?”

“Nigger. I—don’t like it. You’re not a slum boy any longer, Michael. You’re—part of my family now. You are all I have to depend on—the only one who—can take Louis in hand—see that he grows up to be—straight and decent—and learns the business under Theo Payne—”

“I won’t say the word again, Mrs. A,” Michael whispered. “I don’t think I’m fit for the responsibility you’ve laid on me. But I’ll try to be worthy of it.”

She sighed, a faint, reedy sound. “I did so much that was wrong—”

“And so much that was right.”

“But”—she seemed not to hear—“at least Kent’s will be back in the family.”

“Yes. Benbow says all’s proceeding smoothly.”

“Michael—” Frantic pressure from her feeble fingers. “You must promise me—”

“What?”

“Never tell—Louis how—Stovall died.”

“I had already decided I wouldn’t. One of the mobsters was found dead with a pistol on his body. A copper whacked the fellow too hard with his stick. So the story is, the dead chap’s the one who shot Mr. Stovall. The press has already printed it that way. The ball from your Colt was of much larger caliber. But the police over-looked that. I—I’m afraid I bribed them to do so. There’s little point in them prosecuting a woman who—”

He stopped abruptly.

“Who is going to die?”

A long silence.

“Michael—?”

“Yes?”

“When you put up a headstone—in Watertown—”

“Oh, Mrs. A, what’s this morbid talk of headstones?”

“Listen to me. Along with my husband’s name, I want the name Kent on it. Amanda Kent de la Gura—” She began to drift off, murmuring it over and over, “Kent. Kent—”

Crying silently, Michael Boyle held her hand long after she was unconscious.

One the fifteenth day, she thought she had begun to hallucinate. She saw a familiar face, gray eyes, hair whiter than she remembered it—

“Bart?”

“Yes, sweet, it’s me.”

“How—how is it possible?”

“Why, the story of the mob’s attack has been telegraphed to papers all over the country. Along with the account of how you probably helped a nigra girl escape to Canada. You should hear them cuss you in Charleston! That’s where I read about it—”

“Charleston! I—tried to write you in London—”

He shook his head. “I went home. Damned if I can altogether explain why—unless it was the feeling of starting to grow old among people I didn’t know very well. The folk in Britain are marvelous. Polite. Hospitable—and the Royal Sceptre captaincy paid far better than I’d expected, once I added in the primage. But after I lost you, somehow I came to feel I—I didn’t have anything. Not even a home. If a man doesn’t have a woman—and I swore I’d never fuss with another until I met you—I suppose he should at least have a home. I never figured I’d do it, but one day I gave notice to Royal Sceptre and walked out. I confess I damn near bawled when the steamer sailed in past Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie and I saw the Battery in Charleston again. I’m running a little cotton packet up and down the coast—”

She tried to laugh; it came out as a faint rasp. “You—took sides after all.”

“Guess I did, in a way.”

“So did I—” An image of Jared’s medallion drifted into her mind. “You were right, no—no one can stay out of it.”

“Listen, you’ll never get me to a political meeting, sweet! I’m content to savor the southern climate as is—I stay far away from platforms where Yancey and Rhett and some of the other secessionist fire-eaters puff out their sulfurous rhetoric—”

“There’s—so much hate on both sides now—”

“Yes, there is.” He looked at her with forlorn eyes. “It’ll tear this country apart.”

“The Union has to survive. The
country
has to survive—”

“Not certain it can, sweet.”

“There’s too much that’s good at stake. Too much that was hard-won—”

“But it’s a matter of principle on both sides. And the voices keep getting louder—”

“There are other voices. Kent’s will be one soon. Against slavery—”

“Well, there you go!”

“But against bloodshed too—”

“Amanda,” he said, “it’s an impossible problem. The north will never countenance slavery, and the south will never give it up. Each wants its own way. That always leads to but one conclusion. ‘Perish with—’ ”

Abruptly, he cut off the sentence, realizing it had a closer and more painful meaning.

She recognized his discomfort. “You were right about that too. Stovall’s dead. I shot him. He attacked Louis—might have killed him—”

“Yes, the Irish lad informed me.”

After a moment, she said, “Bart—I wish you’d bend down and kiss me. That—that’s a frightful thing for an old lady to ask, isn’t it?”

He put his face near hers.

“No.”

“I expect I should have married you—”

“I know you should have, sweet.”

“I did what I had to do. But I love you.”

“Yes, I love you too. More than I can begin to tell y—”

Silence.

“Amanda? Did you hear—?”

In panic, he felt for her pulse—

Thin. But it was there. She was only sleeping.

On the morning of the seventeenth day, with the draperies open to admit the sun of another bright winter morning, she felt unusually lethargic. Breathing was difficult. She was struck by the certainty that she wouldn’t live much longer.

One hand rested on a blue-covered legal document. The agreement of the Stovall estate to sell Kent and Son. It had arrived by messenger from Boston late the preceding night. Michael had brought it up and laid it at her bedside so she saw it the first thing when she awoke.

She wished she could have spoken to Louis. But he was still recuperating, still sleeping a good deal, Michael said.

All at once she heard a faraway melody.

The piano. The piano in the music room, the piano no one had ever played—

And now familiar, melancholy notes rose upward through the house—

Bart. The Chopin piece.

Somehow the music soothed her. Seemed not melancholy but full of sweet promise and healing. She let her mind range peacefully back across all the years, from the tepee of the young Sioux, Plenty Coups, to her marriage to Jaimie de la Gura—the turmoil in Texas—Cordoba and the birth of her son—Bart in California—

And the end of her life here in New York.

It was time for an accounting.

On the credit side, she’d preserved the family. Put it in trustworthy hands. With Joshua Rothman and old Benbow and Theo Payne to assist him, Michael Boyle—a Kent in spirit now, if not in name—would serve well until Louis achieved his majority. She only prayed she hadn’t warped her son’s character too severely, prayed Michael would be able to mold him into an honorable man. At least there was a hope of it—