The Furies (39 page)

Slowly, Amanda started toward the third floor. The darkness depressed her. She thought of Bart McGill, longed for him—for the simple physical presence of someone she cared about. A son could never satisfy that need in quite the same way—

Her knees ached as she climbed the stairs. Age. Time was running out for her. Thinking of that, she almost regretted refusing Bart’s proposal—

Why was she troubled by regrets so keenly now? The matters she had set in motion early in the summer were moving toward completion. Through the Benbow law firm, Joshua Rothman had made his first tentative offer on Kent’s. The sum had been rejected by Stovall’s New York attorneys, but the door was left open for further negotiations at a higher price.

And the Wheelers had succumbed when Benbow increased his offer on the house to sixty-seven thousand dollars. The Wheelers had removed the last of their belongings only this morning, transferring them to a new residence in Cambridge.

In California too the future looked promising. Amanda had received a letter from Israel Hope the last of August. The letter said the Ophir Mineralogical Combine was generating ten thousand dollars in gold per week, and on the basis of this, Francis Pelham was purchasing equipment for a prospecting trip into the Sierras.

Despite all the favorable developments, she was still depressed. Louis’ behavior was one reason. He was surly with the tutor she’d engaged to instruct the boy in their hotel suite. Louis did his lessons in a perfunctory way, or not at all—it depended on how he felt that particular day. He bowed to Amanda’s discipline, but with the greatest reluctance. She hoped the waywardness was merely the effect of adolescence, and that it would pass. Soon.

But you can’t blame the boy for the way you’re feeling,
she thought as she climbed on toward the narrow landing outside the attic door.
The blame’s yours. You rejected Bart. You decreed that you had to go your own way. Alone
—

Sometimes she questioned the worth of the effort.

And even wished she didn’t feel such a strong family obligation.

With a sigh, she approached the attic door. She pulled back the latch, then walked into the musty, cluttered interior. True to their bargain, the Wheelers had left any number of old crates scattered about the attic.

Amanda set the whale oil lamp on the floor. She tried loosening the slats on the side of one crate. The wood was thin, and so old she could break it bare-handed.

She opened the crate, coughing as dust clouded from feminine garments that smelled of mold. Old clothing of her mother’s? Or the possessions of the people who had owned the house before the Wheelers? Impossible to tell.

She walked around the lamp and started to insert her fingers between two slats of another crate. Something standing against the back of the crate caught her attention. She swept off the tattered muslin cover—

A framed painting. A large oil. She pulled it into the light—

A dark-haired, almost truculent man gazed at her from the canvas. In her mind’s eye, she saw the stern face in its proper setting—the wall of the library downstairs.

Philip Kent’s painted eyes stared at the cobwebbed attic and the woman who wept with happiness as she attacked the slats of the second crate.

“Louis? Louis, come see—!”

At the open front door, the boy turned. Amanda came rushing down the darkened stairs, grime on her cheeks and fingers, her gray hair festooned with cobwebs. On the Common, the mob yelled and waved torches.

As Amanda hurried to her son’s side, she noticed a figure above the crowd on the far side. A man storming back and forth across an improvised platform, waving a piece of paper—

“Louis, I found them!” She gripped her son’s shoulder. “Your great-grandfather Kent’s portrait—the sword, the rifle, the bottle of tea—all packed away in the attic. Come see them!”

The boy shook his head, pointed at the scene on the Common. “I want to watch this. A man who went by told me the fellow speaking is Mr. Garrison. He’s going to set fire to a copy of the Constitution.”

Disappointed, Amanda said, “I really feel you should show an interest—”

“I want to watch!” Louis declared, turning and dashing out on the stoop.

Someone passed a torch to the platform.

“Look, Mother—he’s going to do it!”

Just as the boy uttered the last word, the mob howled and the paper in the hand of the distant figure burst alight. The roar died gradually as the man with the burning paper gestured for silence. Amanda heard him shout: “—so perish all compromises with tyranny! Let all the people say amen!”

The mob roared,
“Amen!”
Garrison flung down the charring document and stamped on it.

“We must go to hear him speak sometime,” Louis said. “It takes a lot of nerve to burn the country’s constitution—”

The boy turned, a smile on his handsome face.

“Mr. Garrison’s a lot like you. He does exactly as he pleases and no one dares to stop him.”

One bright eye caught the torch glare as Louis waited for her to respond to what he fancied was a compliment. Cold clear through, Amanda started to speak.

She couldn’t. She turned and walked slowly back into the darkness, leaving her son staring after her, first with confusion, then outright anger.

T
HE STREET TO WHICH THE CARRIAGE
brought Amanda several weeks later testified to the parsimony of the firm’s owner. Kent and Son had been relocated in a dingy district of warehouses and chandler’s shops near the North End piers. Despite the October sunlight and the brisk, salty smell of the air, Amanda was in a cheerless mood when she alighted from the carriage, paid the driver and told him to return in an hour.

As the hired rig clattered off, a scrofulous man in a blue jacket limped from a nearby doorway. A grubby blue bandana was wrapped around the man’s forehead, hiding his eyes. Amanda noticed him sidestep a rotting fish carcass.

The man extended a dirty hand. “Penny for a Mexican veteran, ma’am?”

Furious over the appearance of the frame building that housed Kent’s, she whipped up her closed parasol and whacked the beggar in the side of the head.

“Jesus Christ! Have you no charity, woman?”

“I’m as charitable as you are blind, my friend. Go cheat someone else. But first I suggest you pull that bandana down more snugly. I can see your eyes move.”

Muttering, the man hobbled away. The limp vanished after he’d taken a few steps. And he did adjust the bandana before he slipped down an alley, cursing her.

Well, his anger wasn’t any stronger than hers. The building was a disgrace. Its warped, split clapboards were layered with grime. So was the signboard swaying from an iron fixture over the door. The board’s gilt lettering was blurred by accumulated dirt. The lower half of the “e” in Kent had flaked away, and the “o” in Son was totally gone. The tea bottle design was barely discernible. She swung up the parasol and gave the sign a smack to set it swinging. Then she headed for the door.

While Joshua Rothman continued to negotiate with Stovall’s attorneys, she had deliberately avoided driving by the firm. Now she decided that had been a mistake. She should have prepared herself gradually for the sorry state of the company.

Finally Rothman had given grudging consent to the visit. She had set out from the American House this morning with great enthusiasm. That enthusiasm was already destroyed.

At the door, she stopped, recalling the banker’s caution about behaving with restraint. Rothman believed the seller’s lawyers might well approve the current offer. She didn’t want any actions of hers to upset that—nor did he.

She got her anger under control. But it took her almost two full minutes to do it.

Sunlight from the open door spilled over the stained floor. The light seemed to stir the resentment of the five decrepit men bent at desks covered with untidy piles of paper. They blinked like animals roused in a cave.

The front office area was badly lighted. Only two oil lamps hung from ceiling fixtures. The management evidently relied on daylight through a pair of plate glass windows flanking the door. The smallness of the windows—each was less than a yard on a side—was another indication of Stovall’s niggardly ways. On a gloomy day, Amanda imagined the office would be Stygian. It wasn’t much better now.

The five men watched her from their desks. Not a one of them looked younger than fifty. All had a dispirited air. Three went back to work as she slammed the door, cutting off the sunlight.

The floor vibrated. The presses—located in the basement, she guessed—had a slow, ponderous sound, as of someone laboring for breath.

“Who is in charge here?” she asked, advancing toward a rail that separated the desks from the small waiting area. Her voice made one of the employees start. The gutta-percha cane leaning against the back of his chair toppled over and clanged on a spittoon. The floor around the spittoon showed that the spitter missed frequently.

One of the human wrecks shuffled to the rail.

“Mr. Payne is chief editor and general manager, madam. He’s busy.”

“Where’s his office?”

“There—” A veined hand fluttered toward two partitions walling off the back part of the room on either side of a corridor. “But I tell you he’s occupied. Conferring with one of our authors.”

“Who are you?”

“Mr. Drew. Office manager. May I ask your business? Are you a bookseller interested in the Kent line?”

“If I were, one look at this place would convince me the Kent line is probably as outdated as—never mind.”

Watch your tongue,
she thought as she pushed through the gate in the railing. But she was still angry.

“See here!” Drew snorted as she headed down the aisle toward the partitioned offices. “You have no right to thrust yourself—”

She wheeled around. “I certainly do, sir. I’m trying to buy this company. I’ve come to look it over.

He gaped. “You’re the one—?”

“Yes, and if I’m successful, I guarantee there’ll be some immediate changes!”

Sullen, Drew watched as she continued on, her cheeks scarlet.

The narrow corridor dividing the walled office space ran straight to the back of the building. At the extreme rear, Amanda glimpsed a dark stair leading to the upper floors. The first door on her left bore a small, tarnished metal plate reading
T. PAYNE
. The door was ajar.

She reached out to knock, only to be stopped by the weary sound of a man’s voice.

“Of course I don’t like the manuscript. But I don’t have to like your vaporish fantasies to publish them. I have instructions from Mr. Stovall! Drew will write your check before you leave the city.”

“Theo—”

Amanda blinked. The voice, deep and almost masculine, belonged to a woman.

“—I frankly get goddamned sick of your Harvard snobbery. You know how many, copies
A Frenchman’s Passion
sold.
Bartered Virtue
did twice as well. This manuscript will outstrip both of them put together.”

“The title makes me ill.”

“What’s wrong with
Convicted by Love
?”

“If you don’t understand, I can’t possibly explain. Will you stop puffing that disgusting weed in my face?”

Amanda’s mouth rounded. She’d assumed the unseen man was the source of the cigar fumes. In response to the complaint, the woman laughed—a rich, cynical laugh that somehow tickled Amanda.

“Indulge me, Theo. You have your habit. I have mine. And I can’t plunk myself down at Commodore Vanderbilt’s dinner table and smoke a cigar. I have a position to maintain in New York! That’s why I like coming to Boston to bring you a manuscript—and discuss the words dropped from
Bartered Virtue.
Here’s the list. Sixty-two adjectives, eighty-nine adverbs—”

“Good writing doesn’t need those crutches, Rose.”

“Who said my writing’s good, dear boy?”

“Not I, certainly.”

“Theo, were you drunk when you edited the manuscript?”

“That’s insulting.”

“Well, goddamn it, I corrected the proofs till my eyes watered! I put back every word you took out. And you ignored them!”

“Rose, please,” the man pleaded, sounding tired. “You know Mr. Stovall has given orders—expenses are to be kept to an absolute minimum. We can’t bear the burden of resetting once I’ve edited the copy.”

“You’d better
start
resetting, or I’ll take my next manuscript to Mr. Harper in New York. He’ll appreciate the value of my work! If it weren’t for the sales of my novels, you couldn’t afford to publish that dull literary drivel everyone praises and no one buys. I understand the book trade better than you do!”

“Then why don’t you take over my job? I happen to be thoroughly sick of it. God, I wish I’d never quit the newspaper!”

At that point, Amanda finally knocked and thrust the door open. “Excuse me—”

The man behind the cluttered desk was about thirty-five. He was small-boned, with pale skin, bloodshot hazel eyes and a thick pink nose. His neck cloth and silk shirt had seen better days. He smelled of whiskey.

“This is a private conference, madam! Deal with one of the gentlemen up front.”

She was amused rather than annoyed. The little man in the large chair resembled a small boy physically; his face, by contrast, suggested a hundred years of debauchery crammed into a third of that time.

The woman with him, exceptionally robust, was about Amanda’s age. She had a blunt chin, forthright blue eyes and white hair. Her crinoline skirt was wider than Amanda’s—and far more expensive. In one gloved hand she held a green-wrappered cigar, half smoked.

“I prefer to deal with you,” Amanda said, turning sideways and tilting the bell of her skirt to maneuver it through the door. “My name is Mrs. de la Gura. I hope to purchase Kent and Son.”

His reaction was similar to Drew’s:
“You
—
?”
He jumped up. The top of his head barely reached her shoulder. “I had no idea—that is, Mr. Stovall’s attorneys wrote that someone was interested, but no names were mentioned—”

“I’ve come to look over the premises.”