“Mammy Pleasant would know.”
“Mammy Pleasant!”
“I think that woman had to do with just about every birth on Rincon Hill or South Park at that time,” Lillie Coit said. “I’d bet a dollar she midwifed Carrie.”
Mammy Pleasant was a quadroon woman, very light complected, who had worked for many of the “instant aristocrats” of the City, recruiting colored servants for them, who, it was rumored, then became her informants in a blackmail scheme. She had been a procuress and the proprietor of notorious houses of assignation. She was also rumored to deal with unwanted children, and to supply children to couples who were barren. Mammy Pleasant was often to be seen about the City, a tall, upright figure in black with gold hoop earrings and a big bonnet or a black straw hat tied on her head with a scarf. She was reputed to be rich.
I had the sense of the Morton Street murders swelling and expanding to involve the whole City of San Francisco.
Bierce and Lillie Coit discussed when Bierce would next visit St. Helena, and I moved out of hearing range again. Then Bierce was assisting Lillie onto her horse. She bade him farewell and walked the bay over toward me, bending down.
“Brosey says you were a firefighter.”
“Up until last year,” I said.
“What company?”
I told her.
“A fine outfit! I’d be pleased if you’d come visit me at Larkmead.” It was an invitation. She raised her eyebrows interrogatively.
“Well, I—” I was shocked to the core. I focused on the Knickerbocker #5 pin on her bosom.
Lillie Coit laughed, waved her riding crop at Bierce, and the bay trotted out of the glade.
Bierce and I walked back down the trail together.
“Did she invite you to Larkmead?” he asked.
I nodded.
“She takes what she likes from life,” he said. “I admire that woman.”
“I saw that you do.”
“When falling into a woman’s arms be sure not to fall into her hands,” he said.
I was still shocked at the frankness of Lillie Coit’s invitation.
“She is a true aristocrat from an old Southern family, not one of our instant dukes or duchesses,” he went on. “Nor is she one of the female slaves who enslave their masters. She is one of the few women I know who transcends her gender.”
Descending the trail to the house it was as though, stride by stride, Bierce’s face returned to its usual coldness, the failings and demands of the female gender the subject. He indicated the steeple of the church, visible through the treetops, with his stick.
“The femininnies will bore themselves to insensibility every Sunday morning on the chance of getting into the ‘Upper House’ for eternity,” he said.
“My mother likes the sociability,” I said. “She sees her friends and has a chat with the priest.”
“The church is the warden of the institution of marriage, in which the monogamous female seeks to imprison the polygamous male,” Bierce went on, pompously.
I was afraid he was going to confide in me the unhappiness of his own marriage, but he was no more able to reveal his personal problems than he was to play catch with his sons.
“Throughout her marriage the bride continues to demand of her captive husband the same ardor he was able to summon up during the days of their courtship,” he said, slashing his stick at the weeds along the path. “She will insist on the childish inanities that were the language of their betrothal. But her lover died on the wedding night.”
Bierce was lecturing on the defects of marriage and the female nature at a moment when I considered Amelia Brittain the brightest star of her sex, and her gender itself the glory of creation.
The churchgoers were already at home, and dinner was presently served. Today the argument was over the Elite Directory of San Francisco, a social listing in which the names of Mr. and Mrs. Bierce appeared. Bierce was contemptuous of such a list, but Mrs. Day insisted that he and Mollie Bierce take advantage of their social prominence.
Bierce had more to say on the subject of gender and institutions on the train and ferry back to San Francisco.
And he said, “I know I am a bitter man, Tom. And I know I shock you. What is there to blame? The fact that I saw too much of the nature of man in a war that had no meaning, only a resolution, and men I helped to slaughter were as good and as bad as men who were slaughtered at my side? It has affected my nature, I know. I will never be a happy man. I can only hope to be an effective one.”
“You know you are that,” I said.
“That remains to be seen,” Bierce said.
12.
ROPE, n. – An obsolescent appliance for reminding assassins that they too are mortal.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
Monday I was turned away from 913 Taylor Street again, after standing on the porch outside the closed door feeling snubbed and foolish. This time I wrote Amelia a note that I had been told twice now that she was not at home, giving the day and hour. And I said I must know about her “shadow.”
By Tuesday it had been over a week without another playing card murder, whose continuation was so grimly suggested by the progression of the suit of spades. It was as though the counterfeit murder of Mrs. Hamon, like a backfire, had halted the main conflagration.
Bierce and I met with Sgt. Nix in a saloon up Kearny Street from police headquarters at Old City Hall, in a pleasant stench of beer, with the cold food layout on the bar, iron-legged chairs grating on the brick floor, and the ubiquitous sign in front advertising PRETTY WAITER GIRLS, although there were no pretty waiter girls in evidence at this time of day.
“Jennings was in Sacramento on Wednesday—that’s the day the house was burned,” Nix said, leaning on the table.
“But he was surely in town the night of the murder. He and his wife live on Jones Street. He belongs to the Pacific Club. A State Senator is pretty big game for the Captain to lock horns with.”
Bierce sat with his fingers knitted together looking at Nix down his nose. “But Captain Pusey has something to go on.”
“Maybe,” Nix said. “He don’t just show his cards around the table.”
“Specific information,” Bierce said. “All I have so far are implications and intimations, and a personal conviction.”
This didn’t take us any further toward the identity of the Slasher. Bierce’s concentration on Jennings and the Railroad galled me.
Nix said, “There was a lawyer in Tulare who collected evidence for the Mussel Slough farmers. Jennings threw it all out of court, and something shut this lawyer up. Ran him out of the district.”
“I think the man Tom saw in Santa Cruz was Klosters,” Bierce said.
“Might be the captain has a photograph of this Klosters,” Nix said.
“I’ve wired the editor of the Virginia Sentinel offering him two hundred dollars for the tintype of the Spades he told Tom about,” Bierce said. “Tom is writing a piece recalling Mussel Slough,” he added. “There will be a response.”
“From the Railroad, you mean?” Sgt. Nix said. “If they even bother.”
“Yes,” Bierce said sourly. “So far they are as intact as the Prelapsarian apple.”
Bierce had written in Tattle, responding to a letter from a reader:
To P.D.—In assuming that we have abandoned the “fight against the railroad people” you are in error. In the natural course of comment—verbal and graphic—upon public matters, we have often found occasion to censure the piratical methods of the Railrogues, and on similar occasions shall do so again, as you will presently observe.