“Did he hurt you?” I called back.
“No!”
“Was it Beau?”
“No!”
I ran up the stairs into her embrace.
“Amelia!” her father shouted behind us. “What is this?”
“Tom saved my life!” she cried at him.
Then we were all inside in the light: Amelia, her father in a velvet jacket, her mother in a robe, hair covered by a scarf, the butler with his shirtsleeves gartered, a woman in a cook’s apron holding up a kerosene lamp.
“He had some kind of bandage on his face,” Amelia murmured. “His chin—”
Then they all stared at me, as though I was the Morton Street Slasher myself. Their eyes were fixed on my chest.
My vest had been severed neatly.
“He hurt you!” Amelia cried at me.
In my hero’s pride I was not pleased to seem to have been the Slasher’s victim. I denied that I was hurt but sat down while the cook and butler fussed over me, removing my coat and vest and investigating my intact shirt front. Amelia stood with her hands pressed together, elbows out, eyebrows elevated, mouth pursed into an inch-long line. She was shivering in long spasms.
Mr. Brittain had gone to find a policeman. Where had the constable been?
Police appeared, one, then two more, in their double-breasted tunics like John Daniel Pusey’s, that somehow made them look overburdened and disadvantaged, helmets underarm, stern faces. There were questions to answer, a constable moistening the point of his pencil with his tongue and scribbling in his notebook. Sgt. Nix came and stood with his arms folded, scowling at me.
“Where was the man who was supposed to be on duty here?” I demanded.
“He was down the street.” The fellow was the first policeman who had showed up, red-faced now as Nix flipped a thumb at him.
“So she was in danger,” I said.
“It’s not McNair. We’d pulled him in. His alibi for the last one was no good.”
“I think it’s terrible the way you try to blame that young man for everything!” Mrs. Brittain burst out.
“Well, he couldn’t’ve been this one, could he?” Sgt. Nix said. “He was in the pokey.”
I saw the gleam of relief on Amelia’s tear-stained face, for she had also thought the Slasher was Beaumont McNair.
18
LITIGATION, n. – A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
At this time, in Superior Court in City Hall, what was to become the sideshow of the decade was in progress: the Rose of Sharon. In Sharon v. Sharon, Sarah Althea Hill, claiming to be Mrs. Sharon, was suing the Senator and former King of the Comstock for divorce and a settlement, with the accusation of adultery because Sharon had admitted paternity to a child delivered of one Gertrude Dietz.
Miss Hill’s supporters in the case were an Australian journalist of a shadowy past, William N. Neilson, her lawyer, George Washington Tyler and Mammy Pleasant. Judge David S. Terry was her new legal adviser.
Allie Hill had been one of Mammy Pleasant’s young women.
Central to the case were several letters in which Sharon had addressed Miss Hill as “My Dear Wife,” and a marriage contract written by the lady and signed by William Sharon. Allie Hill had been Sharon’s mistress for some years. She lived in the Grand Hotel, across New Montgomery Street from the Palace, where Sharon kept a suite, and visited her aging lover or husband by means of the “Bridge of Sighs” passageway over the street.
“It is interesting,” Bierce said, “that a gentleman can have had any number of adulterous affairs and still be considered an honest and upright man, while one lover will turn a lady disreputable in all her concerns.”
“It is unfair,” I said.
“What seems crucial in this case is the marriage contract, composed and written by the lady, and signed by Sharon. Oddly his signature appears at the top of the reverse of the page. Any idiot knows not to sign a blank sheet of paper at the bottom.”
Miss Hill claimed that Senator Sharon had desired that their marriage be kept secret because Gertie Dietz would make trouble if he and Miss Hill were openly married. The scandal might interfere with his reelection.
A striking Fats Chubb cartoon in The Hornet showed the auburn-haired Sarah Althea Hill, her male supporters and a skinny black Mammy Pleasant jauntily carrying a basket filled with babies. This was a reference to Mammy Pleasant’s reputation as a baby-farmer.
Mammy Pleasant had admitted to having furnished the “sinews of war” for the suit, its financing, and daily accompanied Miss Hill to City Hall in a fancy hired barouche.
“What we have here,” Bierce went on, “is a confounding of the theory of oppositions. Because Senator Sharon is a bloodsucking, debauched monster does not mean that his enemy is not a perjurious harlot. The devil’s horns on one side of an equation does not guarantee a halo on the opposite.”
A very different Mammy Pleasant from the one we had encountered in the Bell mansion arrived at Bierce’s office. She wore a handsome green cloak and a deep poke bonnet and greeted Bierce and me with a seemingly genuine smile on her dark face. Bierce proceeded in his courtly way to see her seated and settled. When she noticed the skull, she crossed herself. Bierce sat down facing her.
“I have been thinking of the matter with which you are concerned, Mr. Bierce,” she said.
Bierce laid the palms of his hands together and propped his chin on the fingers.
“Mrs. McNair’s marriage, the child and the child’s paternity,” she continued.
It was interesting that Mammy Pleasant should be speaking of babies when a color cartoon in the current issue of The Hornet depicted her carrying a basket full of them.
“So much talk of babies and paternity these days,” Bierce said, smiling.
Mammy Pleasant nodded. “I have recalled that Senator Sharon was in Virginia City at the time of Mrs. McNair’s conception.”
“It seems that almost everyone in the world was in Virginia City at that time,” Bierce said. “Senator Sharon, Judge Terry, Mark Twain at the Territorial Enterprise, and so on.”
“Senator Sharon was a friend and counselor to Mr. McNair,” Mammy Pleasant said. “I have heard that in Virginia City a man prospered or failed at Senator Sharon’s favor. Mr. McNair prospered.”
“Mrs. Pleasant, is this to suggest that Senator Sharon’s favor extended so far as Mrs. McNair’s womb?”
“That is for you to consider, Mr. Bierce.”
“Could this visit, and this information, have anything to do with the proceedings presently taking place in Superior Court?”
She looked sour. “We would be pleased for your good opinion, Mr. Bierce. Yours is a voice that is listened to in the City.”
“I see.”
“When you called on me the other day, I thought: what have I to gain by assisting Mr. Bierce with the information he seeks? I could think of nothing to be gained.”
“You would think it inappropriate to furnish information without some quid pro quo?”
“I do not know Latin, Mr. Bierce, but I take your meaning. Yes, that is correct. That is the way I have learned to conduct my affairs in San Francisco.”
“And the information with which you hope to enlist my good opinion is the fact that Senator Sharon was in Virginia City at the time that Mrs. McNair conceived?”
“I believe you are looking for the true father of the young Mr. McNair, and I suggest you consider Senator Sharon, who was a close friend and business associate of Mr. and Mrs. McNairs’.”