Lawless (78 page)

Too late, she remembered there was no exit at the end of the corridor toward which she was running. She tried to check her forward momentum. Making a kind of mewing noise, she extended her hands toward the nearest wall. Then she stumbled. She saw a looming reflection of her own gaping mouth, immense eyes, unkempt hair in the glass of the tall window.

She fell against the window, and through it, and down. It was only a fall of a single story, but the lawn was hard despite its mat of trimmed grass. Had she fallen at a slightly different angle, she might have sustained only a broken bone or a few bruises. But she was howling and flailing, and her head rolled under her body just before the impact. Her neck broke and she died.

Within fifteen minutes the house was quiet again. Only the weeping of one of the servant girls broke the silence. She staggered half-naked through the downstairs, repeatedly wiping parts of her body with a piece of towel. One of the men had assaulted her in an unspeakable way, and her voice was like some battered wind instrument wailing a distorted tune.

On the floor of the darkened parlor, Eleanor roused from the half-conscious state into which she’d let herself escape after the men had used her. She lifted her head. Pushed with her hands. Retched when she grew aware of the wetness between her legs.

Finally she gained her feet and stayed upright by seizing the mantel and holding on. Her left hand accidentally knocked against the tea bottle. As it started to tip over the edge, she gasped and caught it. She was shaking as she set it back in place.

“Miss Eleanor? Where are you?”

It was Samuel. Frantically she tugged her skirt down over the tatters of underclothing. She covered her bare breasts with her forearms and turned sideways to the door as his shadow filled it.

“I’m”—
speak louder or he’ll suspect
—“I’m in here, Samuel.”

She edged toward the periphery of the gaslight. “Would you find a blanket for me, please? They tore my dress.”

Blood shone in the hair above his left ear. “Is that all they did, Miss Eleanor?”

She almost told the truth. It would have been comforting to share the anguish. She couldn’t.

Don’t let anyone see what’s been done to you. The filthy, humiliating thing that’s fouled your body forever.

“Miss Eleanor?”

Bascom said you were an actress. ACT!

“Yes, Mills, that’s all. I used the old Lafayette sword and frightened them off.”

“Oh, that’s a blessing. I’ll fetch a blanket. Be right back.”

His angular shadow followed him. Eleanor leaned her forehead against the mantel. Now she knew what men and women did together. It was hurtful, horrible, and it only strengthened her convictions about the pain love could cause.

Somewhere in the downstairs, the weeping of the serving girl went on and on. So did the silent screaming in Eleanor’s head.

T
HE SANCTUARY WAS
an airless oven. Gideon’s tightly bandaged wound throbbed under the hot layers of his singlet, shirt, waistcoat and suit of mourning broadcloth. It was Monday afternoon, a full week after the invasion of the house.

The pastor was the one who’d taken over the pulpit of St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church following Jephtha’s death. He moved down to the closed coffin. Elaborately scrolled and finished with an imitation silver patina, the coffin lay on trestles hidden by huge arrangements of roses and lilies. The heat had already wilted most of the flowers.

The pastor clasped his hands and began to pray for the soul of the departed, Margaret Marble Kent.

Gideon bowed his head. He closed his eye and used his right hand to conceal the upper part of his face. The grief grew steadily stronger.

The devastating news had reached him in the hospital in Pittsburgh. Since then, the strike violence had flickered out in the East, only to erupt elsewhere. The worst outbreaks had occurred in Chicago and St. Louis. Others on the
Union
would report what had happened. He’d put most of it out of his mind.

Most, but not all. He could never forget the men in the yellow bandannas. Or the words growled just before the gun blew a red hole in his left side.

He’d been wounded late on Saturday, over a week ago. He’d finally come back to his senses the following Monday afternoon. A doctor was waiting to say the bullet had been removed with no difficulty—and to hand him a telegraph message. Twenty minutes after he’d read the unbelievable words sent by Theo Payne, he was dressed and on his way out of the hospital.

He was pale and weak. Three doctors tried to stop him, using everything short of physical force. They said he was risking collapse if he left without at least a week’s rest.

He left anyway. He telegraphed the grim news to Julia—she was lecturing in Macon, Georgia—then went to the burned-out shell of the Union Depot to catch a passenger train east.

In New York he’d gone neither to the
Union
nor to the hotel where he’d been living for the past year. He’d caught a hack directly to the house. When he arrived, he was astonished to see Eleanor out in front, shooing a carriage-load of gawkers away from the curb. Mills was hammering boards over broken windows.

Eleanor turned toward him just as he stepped unsteadily from the hack. It was early Wednesday morning, a cool, crisp day. Unusual weather for July. His daughter wore a black armband. Except for a small bruise on the left side of her jaw, she showed no aftereffects of the terror that had swept through the house the preceding Sunday night.

No, that wasn’t quite correct, he realized a moment later. In her dark, oval eyes he detected a terrible anguish.

“Hello, Father.”

That was all she said. She turned and preceded him into the house. There was no inquiry about his wound; nothing except that lifeless greeting. But contempt animated her face when Will ran across the paint-smeared foyer and threw himself into Gideon’s arms.

Despite the pain Will inadvertently caused, Gideon hugged his son and was hugged in return. Dry-eyed, Eleanor marched up the staircase and disappeared.

Since that homecoming, Gideon’s conversations with his daughter had been few and brief. On her part they were terse to the point of rudeness. But one exchange yielded a tantalizing fact pertaining to the invasion of the house.

Gideon’s first theory about the invasion was that it was simply a spontaneous reaction to Payne’s front-page statement in the Sunday extra. A second suspicion presented itself when Eleanor said one of the thugs had spoken a name: Hubble. No indication of how you spelled it.

Eleanor thought Hubble had given the men instructions about where to go and what to do. She couldn’t recall exactly when the name had been used—she glanced away as she said that, and Gideon knew she was lying—but she’d swear on her grave it was spoken during the attack.

The resulting suspicion was far-fetched. Yet the moment it popped into his mind, he knew he couldn’t rest until he proved or disproved it. An attack on a man was one thing, an attack on women and children quite another. The serving girl who’d been assaulted in such a foul way had been taken to her parents’ home. Gideon had sent doctors to attend her. They reported the girl was out of her mind with shock and shame. She might never recover.

And Margaret was dead.

If Thomas Courtleigh was responsible for all those things—

The rage Gideon felt at the mere suspicion was so powerful, it left him shaken for an hour or more. He telegraphed the
Union’s
Western correspondent, Salathiel Brown, who was already in Chicago. He asked Brown to look into whether the Wisconsin and Prairie had anyone named Hubble on its payroll.

During the days of preparation for the funeral, Eleanor continued to concern him. She insisted she’d only been roughed up by the men who stormed the mansion. Her dress and chemise had been torn, and one of the men had hit her, but she claimed that was the extent of it.

Gideon found it illogical that the thugs would rape a serving girl and leave a mistress of the house untouched, particularly since it was quite clear from inscriptions painted on the walls that the Kent family had been the target of the attack. Eleanor refused to change her story, even though something flickering in her eyes from time to time hinted that there
was
another one.

On the same Wednesday night of Gideon’s return, Dana Hughes had located Matt in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he was drunkenly playing the outfield in a baseball game between two volunteer fire companies. The editor had sobered him up and put him aboard a southbound express the next day. On Saturday morning, Julia and Carter had arrived from the South. Carter’s school was out for the summer and he was accompanying his mother on the lecture circuit.

Julia and her son paid a courtesy call at the house late that day. From the moment they walked in, Will was fascinated by the fifteen-year-old boy who had the same last name he did. Carter had shot up over six feet, and was astonishingly handsome—the one person in all the family who looked as if he had Latin blood, which he did.

Julia chose to stay at a downtown hotel. But she brought Carter back to the mansion on Sunday, to see whether she could help with arrangements for the memorial service next day. Again Gideon’s eight-year-old son followed the older boy everywhere. Carter didn’t seem to mind. He appeared to enjoy the adulation, in fact.

By that weekend, just prior to the funeral service, the rail strike was all but over. Many newspapers had warned of continued, Communist-inspired rioting, even of revolution. But much of the hysteria had been unexpectedly dampened by an interview the
National Republican
obtained from none other than President Hayes. Only a day after the start of the Pittsburgh violence, the President said he didn’t consider the looting and bloodshed to be evidence of “the prevalence of a spirit of Communism, since the acts were not primarily directed against property in general, merely against that of the railroads with whom the strikers had had difficulties.”

The Marxist scare continued, of course. But the President’s calm statement had undermined it. Gideon was too wrung out to do more than take note.

So now it was Monday afternoon. Following the memorial service, he planned to travel to Massachusetts to see Margaret’s burial in the family plot in Watertown. Her remains were not actually in the coffin as yet. Because of the season and the problem of deterioration, the body lay on ice at the undertaker’s.

About two dozen mourners were scattered in the pews of the small church. They listened dutifully as the prayer droned on. Molly was seated on Gideon’s right, and Matt to her right. Gideon’s younger brother looked wretched, as if he’d been working too hard on the book, or imbibing too heavily, or both. Will leaned against his father’s left side. Just beyond, on the center aisle, sat Eleanor.

Gideon turned his head far enough to study her profile. She was staring at the minister, not even bothering to slit her eyes in a pretense of piety. He marveled that he and Margaret had brought such a lovely creature into the world.

But there was still a secret grief lurking in her gaze. It wasn’t merely his opinion. Matt had sensed it. And Julia, who was seated two rows back, with Carter. In private, she’d told Gideon she thought Eleanor was suffering from some deep inner wound about which she refused to speak. Was it Margaret’s death causing that? Julia wondered aloud. Gideon doubted it. What, then? He didn’t know.

Behind Julia sat a number of people from the
Union,
including Theo Payne and his tiny, kindly-looking wife. Most of the servants were back there, too. When the service finally ended a few minutes later, Gideon noticed a late arrival he hadn’t seen before—the impeccably dressed Joshua Rothman.

As the organ pealed the postlude, Eleanor left the pew without waiting for her father to usher her to the foyer. Gideon frowned, then took Will’s hand in his and started down the aisle. As they passed Julia’s pew, Will noticed Carter watching him, and immediately pulled his hand from Gideon’s.

Molly walked out holding Matt’s arm. Several steps ahead, Gideon went to Rothman in the foyer.

“It was good of you to come, Joshua.”

They shook hands. The banker was in his mid-fifties and growing portly. “I apologize for disturbing the service—”

“You didn’t.”

“But my train was late. Miriam wanted to come with me, but a”—he colored slightly—“a female complaint has kept her indisposed for the past month.”

“I hope she’ll be all right.”

“The doctor assures me she will. He says this is merely a painful phase all women pass through.” He laid a hand on Gideon’s shoulder. “You’re the one I’m concerned about at the moment. How are you bearing up?”

Gideon glanced toward the main doors; Eleanor had already gone out and down the steps to the line of waiting carriages. Her chin was raised and her back was stiff as a soldier’s.
There’s no love in her,
he thought suddenly.
Or if there is, she hides it. As if it somehow isn’t proper to display affection for anyone.

My God, have I caused that?

He realized Rothman was peering at him, awaiting an answer. Molly and Matt passed by. Molly clearly wanted to speak to the banker, but she walked on so as not to interrupt what had the look of a very private conversation.

“Bearing up? As well as can be expected, I suppose,” Gideon said. He felt himself growing cross. His bandage itched, and the wound hurt. The heat of the foyer was making him dizzy. His voice was sharp as he added, “Let’s go outside, shall we?”

At the door, there was the obligatory handshake and a murmur of condolences by the pastor. Three burly young men in cheap suits and derbies came up the steps and entered the sanctuary; they had come with the black-lacquered, glass-sided hearse which was standing near the corner at the head of the carriage line.

Gideon accompanied Rothman down the steps. A few spatters of rain dotted the wooden walk. Perhaps there’d be some relief from the heat. He found no relief from his bad temper when he glanced to his left and saw Eleanor smiling and chatting with Matt. With her own father, she was barely polite.