Lawless (51 page)

“I’m the target, not the Association or its program.”

“Our lecturers have encountered hostility before—”

“Not so continuously.”

Finally Lucy said, “You’re right. That was my reluctant conclusion after an analysis of the newspaper articles. Go on.”

“I angered a very important businessman in Chicago. I angered him so badly, I think he’s hired men to create disturbances wherever I speak. I’m doing the movement more harm than good. When a lecture’s disrupted, no one takes a message away from it. I feel I should resign so the Association’s work won’t be hampered because of something personal.”

“Who is this blackguard in Chicago?” Lucy demanded.

She hesitated, but saw no harm in naming him. “Thomas Courtleigh. He’s president of a trunk railroad out there.”

The older woman shook her head. “The name isn’t familiar. Does Mr. Courtleigh object to your views on womanhood, or is it something else?”

“A bit of both.”

“Are you in any serious danger?”

Again Julia paused before answering. “I don’t believe so.”

“And I don’t believe that,” the older woman responded with a peppery shake of her head. “Your resignation is refused.”

“But, Lucy—”

“Come, my dear, you know as well as I—most women are too poorly educated, or too cowed, to realize they’re as cruelly enslaved as the blacks once were. They
need
the Association’s message. I won’t drive one of our best speakers off the platform by any act of mine.” She put her fork down. “However, I do think this might be a good time to broach an idea I’ve been pondering. We need someone to do a western tour. Nebraska, Colorado—the mountain and plains states. Such a trip might get you out of this Courtleigh’s reach for a while.”

“That’s a wonderful idea!” Then Julia’s face grew pensive. “I’ll go anywhere except Wyoming.”

“What do you have against Wyoming?”

She didn’t want to admit it was the home of a man she never wanted to face again. She would forever regret the way she’d behaved with Michael Boyle when Louis was still alive. In ’61 she’d flirted with Boyle without really caring for him. Anger and frustration had driven him to a sexual assault—something she’d wantonly enjoyed after her initial fright passed.

She was afraid the act had shamed him. For that, she blamed herself. Gideon had told her Boyle was married now. She didn’t want to risk embarrassing him.

“It’s really only Cheyenne I want to avoid,” she said. She smiled and stretched the truth. “An old love affair. He lives there.”

“Well, you can be spared. Wyoming’s the one place we don’t need to carry the gospel.”

In fact the Territory of Wyoming represented the movement’s sole victory in the campaign to extend the franchise. Wyoming women had been given the vote almost as soon as the territory was organized in 1869. Wyoming was also proof that, contrary to predictions from assorted platforms and pulpits, the social order didn’t collapse the moment women were admitted to polling places.

“I take it you wouldn’t object to going anywhere else, then?” Lucy concluded.

“Of course not.”

“We have one letter at headquarters that came all the way from California. Two married women asked us to send someone to address a small group in a new gold camp. Would you undertake that kind of chore?”

A western junket meant a long separation from Carter and Gideon. But it also meant a respite from harassment. “With pleasure.”

“Some of those camps are very rough places, Julia—”

“I couldn’t possibly run into anything worse than what I’ve encountered lately,” she said, not realizing she was quite wrong.

“Splendid. We’ll sketch out an itinerary tomorrow. If this junket is successful, perhaps we can make it an annual affair. Two or three months each time—the West is fertile territory, and you can cultivate it more effectively than anyone else who travels for us. Now, where’s that benighted blarney thrower who waits on us? I’ve gotten so excited, I’ve worked up a fiendish appetite.”

Julia scandalized the waiter by requesting a glass of Moselle with her fish. Dennis acted as if she’d violated an eleventh Commandment. When he served the wine, he muttered something that included the word “disgraceful.”

By now the young man’s attitudes had become less than amusing. With a sweet smile Lucy told him he was a blithering ass. He stomped off. Unconcerned, she launched into an account of her conversion to abolitionism during her college days at Oberlin. In no time at all they’d finished the delicious food, and then it was seven-thirty.

“Good heavens,” Lucy exclaimed. “We’ll be late to the Howes’. And we must pick up Henry and Alice on the way.”

She paid the bill and they went to claim their wraps. Julia had never met the woman who had penned the lyric for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” after waking in Washington one morning during the war and seeing Federal troops drilling on the misty street outside her hotel. On the few occasions when she had visited the Association’s office, Julia Ward Howe had been elsewhere. Tonight Mrs. Howe and her husband Samuel had invited Julia as well as Lucy, Mr. Blackwell and their adolescent daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, to spend an evening at their home. Mrs. Howe wanted to discuss some new ideas for
The Woman’s Journal,
the newspaper which the Association published. Like so many activities of the organization, the paper continually lost money.

The two women stepped into the chilly air outside the Oyster House. The doorman sent a boy for Lucy’s carriage. Just as Julia started to speak, movement on the dark sidewalk to her left caught her attention. She blinked.

“Lucy!”

The warning cry was hardly out of her mouth before she pushed the older woman, tumbling her to the plank walk. A big, sharp-cornered brick landed where they’d been standing.

“Jaysus and Mary,” the doorman cried.

Down the way, a man whose features were hidden in darkness shouted at them, “Stay out of Scollay Square, ye godless whores. Take yer perverted ideas somewhere else!”

Julia protected Lucy’s body with her own as a second brick came flying at them. It struck hard, splintering a plank.

The doorman grew cross as he helped them to their feet. “You ladies shouldn’t come here unescorted. The manager’s told you that time an’ again.”

“See here, Martin,” Lucy snapped as she brushed her skirt. “Are you blaming
us
for the actions of some”—she turned toward the place from which the bricks had been hurled; the man was gone—“some gutter thug?”

“That’s right. I am. Women don’t belong out after dark by themselves, not unless they want to be taken for a certain class of female, if you get my meaning.”

“I get it and I don’t care for it,” Lucy retorted.

“I’m sorry indeed, but that’s the way it is, Miss Black—Mrs. Stone—ah, who the hell knows what a creature like you’s to be called?” He went inside, neglecting his duty when the carriage arrived from the nearby vehicle park.

Julia opened the door for them. Lucy tipped the boy who’d done the running. He bit the coin and pocketed it as Julia followed the older woman inside.

When the carriage was moving, Lucy said, “That really was astonishing. People here have always been reasonably tolerant of the movement. This town’s bred and nurtured idealists and eccentrics for decades. If tolerance should flourish anywhere, it ought to flourish in Boston. Of course I’ve had complaints from the Oyster House about going in alone, but no trouble like that we just—”

“The man threw bricks because of me,” Julia broke in.

“You mean he was sent by that fellow who dislikes you?”

“If I gambled, I’d put money on it,” she answered with a feeling of despair. Evidently there was no place that offered her an escape from Courtleigh. That meant no place offered it to Gideon, either. “What if one of those bricks had hit you, Lucy? You could have been seriously injured—even killed because of me.”

The older woman sensed Julia’s distraught state and tried to soothe her. “No need to be all that melodramatic, my dear. I could also stroll down India Wharf tomorrow morning and be killed by an accidental avalanche of whale oil barrels, or by a spar falling from a tea ship. But it hasn’t happened. The bricks missed.”

“But you just saw one of the reasons I feel I should resign—”

“Julia Sedgwick, I will not hear more.” She grasped the younger woman’s hand and squeezed it. “The matter’s settled. We’re going to pick up Henry and Alice and go on to the Howes’. Then you’re going out west for us. In fact you’re going to remain with the Association for as long as you believe in it and the treasury contains money to pay your travel stipend. As for this fellow conspiring against you, we’ll both outlast him. We’ll outlast any man who tries to stuff us in a corner with a saucepan in one hand and a baby in the other. The puniest woman is stronger than any man yet born.”

Julia laughed, but she only wished banishing the problem of Tom Courtleigh were that easy.

O
N A BRIGHT
April afternoon in 1876, a Concord stagecoach drawn by a four-horse hitch headed toward the narrow, mile-long defile leading to the new placer mining camps in Deadwood Gulch. The coach, which was operated by the J. S. McClintock line, led a procession of eleven raffish riders who straggled out behind.

For the trip up from the town of Custer some forty miles south, Julia had been given the place of honor—the seat next to the driver—the better to see the wild, beautiful scenery of the Bad Lands: the majestic rock formations; the immense conifers with patches of unmelted snow surrounding their trunks; the clear, rushing streams that had yielded up traces of gold. The gold was bringing new arrivals into this part of the Dakota Territory every day.

The stage driver, a garrulous old fellow named Fowler, was able to invite Julia to sit beside him because there was no shotgun messenger on the trip. Usually only the outbound coaches were held up, Fowler had informed her. Inbound coaches carried the hopeful, not the rich.

This particular McClintock coach was only four months old, but it already showed signs of wear; this was harsh country. It was one of the vehicles made by the Abbot-Downing firm of Concord, New Hampshire. Julia was quite familiar with travel in Concords. On her two previous trips west, she’d ridden in dozens of them. She’d learned that each stage line decorated its coaches according to its own taste. The McClintock taste ran to dark blue on the graceful body, vivid yellow on wheel hubs, spokes, and trim, and sentimentalized portraits of Columbia on the doors.

Julia had come to the Bad Lands on her third western journey. The initial one, in the spring of ’74, had taken her all the way to California, and from there back to New York by steamship. Her second a year later had included a monthlong swing across Texas. She’d grown accustomed to rough rides on muddy roads, greasy food snatched in railway depots, and hard beds in noisy frontier hotels. But from the first, she’d fallen in love with the grandeur of the West. Lucy Stone never had to ask twice to have her return.

Oh, she ran into the usual rowdy, sarcastic men. But never were they as vicious as those who’d harassed her in the East. In fact, after the ’74 excursion, there were no violent disturbances at any of her lectures, anywhere. Gideon too reported that Courtleigh seemed to have forgotten him. He’d either tired of tormenting them, or was too busy for it. Welcome as the respite was, Julia suspected it wouldn’t last indefinitely.

The coach rolling toward Deadwood Gulch was packed. Inside, men jammed the forward, rear and middle seats. Three more men sat on top, clinging to the low guard rails. All the way up from Custer Julia had endured masculine jokes about her foolishness in coming to this godforsaken part of the country. She’d also been forced to parry quotations from scripture with which she was tiresomely familiar. Fowler was the best of the lot as a Bible quoter.

“You
know
what it says plain as day in Genesis three, ma’am. ‘And thy desire shall be thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.’ Now just what have you got to say about that?”

“Three things, Mr. Fowler. I’ve heard it at least five hundred times. Even the Devil can quote scripture to suit his needs. Tend to your driving.”

At least he chuckled. The men on top guffawed.

The sky was cloudless, with a warm, dry wind blowing. A chinook, Fowler called it. The caravan of mounted travelers who’d been with the coach since Custer started to move up near the vehicle. That was fine with the passengers. They hadn’t gotten their fill of goggling at the most celebrated member of the party, the famous scout, law officer, dime novel hero and sometime actor Wild Bill.

It was Bill Hickok who was leading the party of gold-hunters to the new diggings. Julia didn’t think much of the gunman. She had no admiration for anyone whose reputation was based solely on the number of people he’d shot to death.

And that reputation was showing signs of age, she thought, like the man himself. In this year of the nation’s centennial, Julia was thirty-six. She judged Hickok to be three or four years older. He still wore his hair long, and dressed like a dandy, but twice she’d noticed his hands closing around his reins with arthritic slowness. And sometimes he squinted. If he wore spectacles, he hadn’t put them on even once during the trip.

This was not Julia’s first look at Hickok. She’d seen him after her trip in ’74—across the New York footlights. Gideon had taken her to Niblo’s Garden at Broadway and Prince Street. There they’d watched Buffalo Bill Cody perform in a new version of a play called
Scouts of the Plains.

The three-act drama had originally been created to give the famous scout a vehicle for his stage debut. His self-appointed publicist, Ned Buntline, bragged that the show had been written in four hours. The critics said that fact was obvious. Julia agreed with their opinions, the most charitable of which called the play “very poor slop.” But audiences overlooked its flaws and responded enthusiastically to everything from the yelps and barks of the Indian supernumeraries in war paint and stylish short pants to the histrionics of Mademoiselle Morlacchi, the ingénue who played the Indian girl Dove Eyes—with an Italian accent.