Belle Cora: A Novel (94 page)

I decided to try Robert. I must use Robert to get to Baker. It would be unpleasant for both of us, since he had hoped not to see me again for years, perhaps ever.

The sun shone brightly the next day, bringing out the color in the striped window awnings along the streets. The East River was as placid as a pond, so that the ships all had long, pale wakes, and the air was so still that smoke from chimneys went straight up but smoke from steamboats slanted back toward their sterns. A ferry took me to Brooklyn, and a hack took me up over a few steep hills to the home Robert shared with Amanda and their children and three servants. The housekeeper recognized me from my previous visit. She let me in, and I played hide-and-seek with the children until Amanda came home. We had a pleasant meal on the veranda with a view of the harbor, ships, factories, wharves, fisheries, and warehouses. The water turned from quicksilver to slate as clouds moved in from the east, and at last over New York City these same clouds were stretched out wide and pressed down hard until they bled.

I discussed my problem with Amanda. At first, with those red, white, and blue ribbons in her hair, she counseled me to be brave. I asked her if Robert was planning to go. With eyes cast downward, she admitted that she was preventing him. After a few quiet minutes, she warned me that Robert did not like pulling strings to make exceptions for his friends, and would not like doing what I proposed; she began advising me of the best way to get around him.

“Put me alone with him,” I told her. “I know what to say.”

Wheels crunched the gravel, the door-knocker rapped, and we watched
from the landing of the stairs while my brother gave his black stovepipe hat and his black frock coat to the maid. He looked in the mirror, running a hand over his thinning hair, while the servant spoke to him. I saw his back straighten—he had been told I was here. He had thought he would not have to go through this again for years. And what could I have been saying to Amanda all this time, what might I have revealed? When he looked into the house, the first thing he saw was that we were both watching him. He made himself smile—“Arabella! Again!”—and went halfway up the stairs, while I went halfway down. We reached our arms out and gripped each other’s elbows.

He took me into a study which was full of dark carved furniture gleaming from the maid’s attentions, and high shelves of multi-volume
Complete Works
with gilt lettering on the binding, the kind of books in which the author’s picture is protected by a flap of gauzy transparent paper (my mother’s diaries were up there, too, but I didn’t learn that until many years later, after Edward had inherited them). Its windows faced east, so the room was already dark, and as we entered he turned up the gaslights; I noticed two battered high-backed chairs and a rolltop desk, all in much worse condition than the room’s other furniture, and which I recognized instantly while Robert watched. I walked toward them and ran my hands over a row of brass knobs that covered the back of a red leather chair—it had been reupholstered, but the exposed wooden parts bore remembered nicks and scars, including one that I used to think resembled the profile of a man in a sailor’s cap.

With my hand on the chair back, I looked up at Robert. “You remember Sally, Robert? Sally came after Anna, and before Christina. Christina was the last one. I sat in this chair while Grandfather commended me for my part in getting Sally dismissed.”

He stood stiffly. To say the names of our last three servants was to evoke the time of my mother’s worsening sickness and our father’s sudden death, the jagged crack that ran across our lives; it was to remind him of what we had once been to each other. After a while, he nodded.

“She had talked to me while she was packing. She said that she was going to buy a nasty dress and go on the town. And she said that there was something wrong in our house, there had to be to explain why we could afford only one servant, and it must have to do with Father. Years later, I found out that she was right.”

I gathered my skirts and sat. He took the other chair, first moving it a little closer to mine.

“What do you want from us, Arabella?”

“I want you to save a man’s life,” I said. “But let me tell you what I discovered about Father.”

“You’re going to say something unpleasant.”

“So I am, and it’s because I’m a coarse, corrupt woman that I can say such things. But you can take it, can’t you? You have to. You’re a man. You must be without illusions, so that you can protect Amanda and the children. They can stay pure if you face the ugly truth.”

I told him what I had learned while sitting on the lap of a rubber importer named Harold. Our father had jumped off the roof of our grandfather’s warehouse, not out of grief over our mother’s death—or at least not solely—but out of grief over a whore calling herself Frances. “Her real name we do not know; such women use false names. I’ve known so many girls like her that I almost feel as if I’ve known her, too.”

He was quiet, and I did not know what he was thinking, until he said, “I never despised you, Arabella. My concern has always been for the family name. I’ll never understand the kind of life you’ve lived. I don’t think you realize how changed you are. But I still feel our kinship, and I trust the Arabella I used to know is still somewhere within you, and I wish you well in anything that does not bring harm to other people.”

“Good. Then you can help me for my own sake, and not for the sake of Amanda or your children.”

When we came out of the study some twenty or thirty minutes later, Robert told Amanda that I would be staying the night. She was delighted: we would become such good friends! She was even happier a few hours later, when she received word, by telegraph and special army messenger, that Colonel Baker was coming to dinner the next day.

The dinner that followed was interesting for her and dramatic for the rest of us. Baker realized for the first time that Belle Cora, who also called herself Arabella Godwin, was the sister of his new friend Robert Godwin; and he learned that Robert knew this but Amanda did not, and that we must keep the truth from her. In her innocence, Amanda brought up the subject of the Cora defense, in which Baker had made one of his most famous speeches, printed in all the newspapers here. She urged him to
repeat it; he was too modest; she recited some of it for him. “ ‘Devotion to the last,’ ” crooned my brother’s wife, possibly remembering better than Baker, who did not reprise his roles—“ ‘amid all the dangers of the dungeon and all the terrors of the scaffold … a tie which
angels
might not blush to approve.’ Oh, Colonel—forgive me, you see it still affects me, it was so beautiful, it was your best.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.

The children had eaten separately and been put to bed, and only the servants, wearing their best for the colonel, and removing dishes and refilling wine and water glasses, were a witness to our party. Amanda drank nothing alcoholic, so if her face had grown blotchy it must have been what happened when she was in the grip of high emotion; it must have been for the sake of Belle Cora. Noticing that I, too, was moved, she said, “I suppose we women feel it more—you were there at the time, Arabella.”

I nodded, and croaked, “Yes,” not trusting myself to say more, because her sympathy, and the new life she had given to Baker’s magical incantation, had broken through my defenses. The words were hogwash, yes, but they had been spoken on
my
behalf; I, whose voice would never be heard among the matronage of the land. How astonishing that those words had reached the heart of a good Christian woman a continent away, persuading her to give her approval to the madam of the best house in San Francisco.

“What a remarkable woman she must have been,” said Amanda. “Forgive me. What happened to her, Colonel, after … after her gambler met his unfortunate end?”

Baker hesitated, glancing quickly at me, and I spoke: “Oh, everyone in San Francisco knows that.” I heard Robert’s chair scrape the floor, and he cleared his throat noisily, but I pretended not to notice and continued: “She shut up her house. She dismissed all the girls, giving each of them enough money so they could start a new life, and one or two may have done so, but I’m afraid most of them simply went to live in other houses of ill fame. She lives with a few servants in her house on Pike Street, which is now a respectable house, though the street it is on is still disreputable. She lives, they say, very simply and dresses only in black; she goes to church regularly, and gives openhandedly to many charities, and she
goes quite often to the Mission Dolores”—I made my voice softer—“to put flowers on the grave of Charles Cora. So I have heard.”

“How beautiful,” said Amanda. “Is that what you have heard, too, Colonel?”

Baker had no choice but to agree, and Robert asked him what he thought of the situation in Maryland.

TWO DAYS AFTER THAT, I WAS ADMITTED
into Fort Schuyler, a note from Baker speeding my way, and with his informal assurance that if Jeptha was willing he would find him, on some technicality, ineligible for service.

The fort was a colossal medieval star-shaped monster. Lawns around it, receiving heavier wear than usual, were torn by hooves and wagons. Some fellows were driving bayonets into a straw mattress. A couple of stone-faced officers led me into a five-sided courtyard full of men and horses and guns and wagons. I saw Jeptha walking to me, and I was about to embrace him, but then I saw that the officer meant to leave us here, and I began to argue with him, showing him Baker’s letter. “We’re supposed to be alone! I’m his sweetheart; we can’t talk here. It may be the last time I ever see him. Have some pity—have some decency. Put us in a room for a few minutes or Colonel Baker will hear of it. I am a personal friend of Colonel Baker,” and so on, while Jeptha watched with restrained amusement. We were taken to a room dimly lit by windows and skylights, and full of barrels and shelves and blue shirts and blue trousers.

To make him look like a hundred thousand other men and give the enemy’s bullets a bright target, they had made him wear a forage cap with a sloping visor and a dark-blue sack coat over light-blue trousers. I hated every stitch of it. As soon as we were alone, I lifted the cap by its visor and tossed it into the straw with such an expression of disgust that he laughed. He sat on a barrel and took me on his knee, and I ruffled his hair and kissed him, while crying, saying, “What a fool you are, you’re a fool, a fool.” He kissed me on the eyes, and then I pulled away so that I could study him. He understood what I was about, and thinking, no doubt, that I had a right to memorize his face before it was carried away from me, possibly forever, he let me turn his head this way and that so it caught the spotty light from the windows set into the thick walls.

He was much changed since I have last described him to you, reader. He was still lean and strong, but his face, in leaving behind young manhood, had lost the beauty that used to make women catch their breath at the sight of him. Though it did not make me love him less, it hurt me a little to see the work of time in him. His hair was receding. His nose and ears were larger. It was a less handsome, less troubled, wiser face, halfway to genial grandfatherly old age. It was my duty to see that it got there—to see that, whether or not we had children, we could be grandmotherly and grandfatherly together one day. It was my right to have him by me at every stage of life.

“You can’t go, Jeptha,” I said at last. “I won’t let you.”

“Sweetheart, it’s done. It would be desertion for me to leave now.”

“No.” I waved my hand at the door and the windows. “For those men out there it would be desertion. They’re all prisoners now. You can walk out anytime.” I told him of my agreement with Baker.

He put his hand on his tall, receding brow. “You must have gone to a lot of trouble. You meant well. But you’ve wasted your time.”

“I hope not,” I said. “Listen to me, Jeptha.”

Perhaps the things I said then do not matter very much, since they did not change his mind, and if you have read this far you have pictured me in all my modes of persuasion: logic, poetry, pleading, lies, bribery, blackmail. I used every mode except the last two. I made every argument: that he was a thousand times more necessary to the people of San Francisco, the dear, helpless orphans of San Francisco, the fragrant drunkards of San Francisco, the reasonable Unitarians of San Francisco, than he was to the Union Army; that he was too old; that he should wait a year and see if soldiers were still needed then; that he was abandoning me a third time; that after what I had been through with Charley it was heartless that he should let it happen again.

We were sitting on two different barrels a few feet apart by that point. He rubbed one palm against the other, looking down at his hands. “How was it with Frank? Did you get them to change their minds?” I told him, and he said he was happy for me. “And how was it with Baker?” I told him how I had obtained Baker’s cooperation, and of my supper with Amanda and Robert and Baker.

Then I got off my barrel and stood. “What are you going to do, Jeptha?”

“You haven’t changed my mind,” he said—and watched in bewilderment as I hiked up my dress and took, from a pocket in my undergarments, a recently purchased product of Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company. I pointed it at him, which made him smile. “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”

“I can’t let you do this to me. Don’t move. If you move, I’ll shoot.”

My hands trembled, which made it serious for him. He stood up. “Belle, no!” he shouted. Well, I had warned him. Aiming for his foot, I pulled the trigger. The recoil hurt my hand. I aimed again, this time with two hands, but it was too late. We were struggling. I decided I must not have hit him; if I had hit him as I’d meant to, he’d be in far too much pain to fight for control of the pistol. I didn’t dare pull the trigger again until I was free of him.

He was strong, and soon he had the pistol. I was sobbing, and he was holding the pistol and kissing me, murmuring, “She loves me, oh, how she loves me. Well, it’s a fine thing to be loved this way. I only hope you don’t go to jail for it. Hush. Listen.” We listened. “Maybe no one will come. It’s not so unusual to hear a gunshot around here.”