My anger had risen to choke me. “It is—terrible!” was all I could say.
“I am quite lucky,” she said, shaking her head. “If I had no social standing, no resources, no family, my fate could very well be like that of Miss Hill.”
“What’s the difference?” I said.
“There is all the difference in the world! As a married woman when my husband passes on I will be a woman of independent means. Miss Hill, who has no husband, has no such bulwark.”
I did not wish to argue with her about the Rose of Sharon.
“I will never forget you,” she said in her cool voice. “Perhaps you will never forget me. We will go our separate ways, but it will have been—something. That will be important all our lives. That will become a part of our lives and our characters, and our being. It is something I have already written pages in my diary about. That I will write poems about.”
“This is America!” I said helplessly. The Democracy! I felt sick with anger. And despite myself my anger focused on Amelia, who would let herself be sold like a Negro slave because it was part of some society comedy that amused her. For her character and being!
My own father and mother suddenly seemed paragons, and I felt a swell of righteousness at being poor and honest, and free. My father who might have been a silver king if the foxes and sheep had been differently arrayed. Thank the Good Lord that they had not!
I stood up. The patterns of sunlit squares swam in my eyes.
“I don’t want it to be like this,” Amelia said.
“I guess you don’t have any say in it, do you?” I hadn’t wanted to say that.
“My offer remains,” I said. I knew my offer was as silly as she must know it. What did I have to offer her?
“Thank you, my hero,” she whispered.
Her hand stretched across the table where I could have taken it, but I turned away from her. I didn’t want her to see my face.
I tramped up the back steps past Constable Riley, who made a saluting gesture as I passed, and strode through the dark hallway and out onto the veranda, where the broken railing had now been repaired, and down the steps to Taylor Street.
It was too early in the day to visit Annie Dunker.
25
BIRTH, n. – The first and direst of all disasters.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
When I had reported my conversation with Amelia Brittain to Bierce, keeping my feelings to myself, he came out of his chair, clapping his hat on his head and beckoning me along with him. Mr. Brittain’s rejection of Beau McNair had caught his interest.
We hailed a hack to take us to Taylor Street. I had sworn I would never return there, but at least Amelia and Mrs. Brittain were not in evidence. The butler ushered us into Mr. Brittain’s study where his roll-topped desk was strewn with documents, and the glass-topped cases of gold nuggets gleamed in the afternoon light. I gritted my teeth to think of him selling his daughter into slavery because of the falling funds.
However, he wrung my hand as his daughter’s savior and greeted Bierce amiably, a tall, thin man with a Virginia City limp and financial difficulties.
When we were settled in chairs, Bierce said, “Mr. Brittain, we are trying to get to the bottom of these murderous slashings of prostitutes. Apparently the same fellow attacked your daughter.”
“Young Redmond was the hero in that encounter!” Mr. Brittain had not seated himself but moved among his cases with his hands clasped behind his back, his lined face solemn. He wore pince-nez spectacles that glinted in the sunlight through the window.
“There is a connection of playing cards to events in Virginia City twenty some years ago,” Bierce said.
Brittain halted to stare at him. ‘The Jack of Spades Mine.”
“Ah!”
“Had William Sharon any connection to the Jack of Spades, or Caroline LaPlante?”
Mr. Brittain’s features contracted into a startlingly ugly expression. “She detested him! She was not often treated as a low woman, but Sharon had done so. He engineered an enterprise she felt was below her, and he enjoyed her discomfiture.”
I saw Bierce digesting that. Mr. Brittain must mean the Lady Godiva ride through Virginia City. Or something else?
“You were a mining engineer there, sir,” Bierce said.
Brittain dipped his head in acknowledgment. There was no point of sitting in his chair hating him. These people were different from other people. Money made them different.
“You were employed by the late Nathaniel McNair?” Bierce asked.
“That is correct.”
“A pile-driver of a man, I should imagine.”
“A difficult man,” Brittain said. He paced, hands clasped behind his back. “It was his practice to make his associates feel small. He had an ability to estrange his friends while still binding them to him by various means.”
“Such as the invention of belittling nicknames,” Bierce said smoothly. “ ‘The Englishman’ in your case. And ‘English.’ ”
Mr. Brittain looked startled. “Now how would you know that, Mr. Bierce?”
“Tom, relate to Mr. Brittain the use of that name you encountered in the Washoe.”
I said, “It had to do with a scandal that took place at the Consolidated-Ohio. There was a complication of a claim being salted that was called ‘the English shuffle.’ Devers told me the term referred to someone of that name who devised a particular practice.”
Brittain backed away to seat himself in a leather chair. He removed his glasses from his nose with a good deal of process, folded them and slipped them into his breast pocket. His cheeks had reddened in unhealthy-looking stripes.
“It was a practice I had nothing to do with. It was a joke of Nat’s. A cruel joke. My reputation—” he started and stopped.
“Your good reputation is well known, sir,” Bierce said.
“Nat McNair was not an honest man,” Brittain said. “He was a true disciple of Will Sharon’s. He put out a great deal of rumor about drifting into a high-grade orebody. Then the rumor that the assay had been salted. These were cynical maneuvers, a dishonest, conniving business, and very effective. Mining stocks were extraordinarily volatile just then. The stock bottomed out and Nat was able to buy it up very cheaply.”
“There was a Bonanza after all?”
“Yes,” Brittain said.
“And your part?”
“I had been able to advise him that it looked like a considerable orebody.” He held his hands to his cheeks for a moment. “May I ask the purpose of these questions, Mr. Bierce?”
“Mr. Brittain, these murders seem to be the result of a vast degree of hatred and old rage. There is a plan and purpose to them we are as yet unable to discern.”
I could hear Mr. Brittain’s harsh breathing. “Why my daughter, Mr. Bierce?”
“I think it is not a connection with you, sir. But with Beau McNair and ultimately his mother.”
Brittain took his glasses from his pocket and began polishing the lenses with a bit of yellow cloth. “I am not proud of my connection with Nat McNair,” he said.
“What of your connection with Mrs. McNair?”
I watched Brittain’s hands halt in their employment.
“What connection can you mean, Mr. Bierce?”
“You have compelled your daughter to dissolve her engagement to Beau McNair.”
Brittain’s eyes swung toward me. He moistened his lips. “I believe the match would not be a happy one.”
Bierce’s voice was gentle. “I think your objection is because your daughter and Beau McNair are half brother and sister.”