Brittain closed his eyes.
“Am I correct in this assumption, sir?”
Brittain nodded tiredly. “Can this revelation go no further, gentlemen?”
“If that proves possible,” Bierce said.
Brittain looked at me and I nodded, dazed, thinking of Beau engaged to Amelia.
“She was pregnant by you, but she married Nat McNair.”
“She wished to be married, but I was not prepared to marry her,” Brittain said. “My family is a very proud and prominent one in New Hampshire, Mr. Bierce. It would not have done. I was tortured upon a rack.”
I thought of my offer to Amelia, which she had rejected knowing it was meaningless and impossible.
“She had been frightened by the murder of another woman in Virginia City,” I said.
Brittain nodded. “Julia Bulette. Yes.”
“But she thought you would marry her,” Bierce said.
“Yes, she thought that.”
“What did she do?”
Brittain replaced his glasses again. “She was determined to have the child, but it would not have done for her to appear pregnant, you see. Her position in Virginia City was such... she disappeared. I believe she went to Sacramento where there was a relative. I don’t know how Nat came into the picture. No doubt he had declared himself to her. She could have had any man she wished to choose, except for the one who failed her. It must have been that in her mood she chose the man of her acquaintance who seemed most likely to make a fortune, and one could foresee that Nat would be successful. He was lucky, he was clever, he was ruthless, and he was utterly determined.”
“And he took your son as his own.”
“Yes.”
Brittain’s face convulsed as though he were weeping without tears. His expression reminded me of Amelia; her father who would sacrifice her to the falling funds, but not to her half brother. Who remembered so passionately the painting of Highgrade Carrie as Lady Godiva.
Bierce sat thinking, the filtered sunlight silvering the curls of his graying fair hair. I could follow him so far. An English shuffle meant falsification of assay samples in conjunction with spreading dishonest rumors for the purpose of devaluing mining shares. Such a shuffle had given Nathaniel McNair control of the Consolidated-Ohio. I wondered how involved Mr. Brittain had actually been in the procedure.
He and Highgrade Carrie had been good friends, Amelia had said, but were friends no longer. He was uncomfortable with her return to San Francisco. A woman who had been the mother of his child.
“Lady Caroline Stearns is in danger,” Bierce said.
Brittain stared at Bierce. His face was graven with deep lines.
“And my daughter?”
“I think her danger is past. Now that she is no longer engaged to be married to young McNair, she is of no more interest to the Slasher.”
“So I have unwittingly removed Amelia from danger.”
“I think so,” Bierce said. He questioned Brittain about the mechanics by which Jennings and Macomber—my father—had been cheated of their interest in the Jack of Spades, but Brittain became monosyllabic and off the point, as though he was genuinely forgetful, or maybe merely distressed. It was as though he could not wait for us to be gone, and so we departed.
“He was in a panic,” Bierce said. “I wonder just how innocent this well regarded mining engineer was in the original shuffle, and I wonder if that could be a part of his disaffection with Carrie, that his daughter mentioned to you.”
“He refused to marry her,” I said. “And she made a better match.”
“A more lucrative slavery,” Bierce said.
Saturday evening when I came home my father was lounging in the Barnacles’ parlor in discussion with Jonas Barnacle. Belinda was seated primly in a straight chair beside the door, her polished shoes set side by side and her hands folded in her lap. She watched me enter with solemn eyes. Mrs. B., aproned, a blue scarf tied over her hair, glanced in from the next room.
My father wore a dark suit, boots and a florid tie with a diamond pin. Still jawing at Jonas Barnacle, he rose and put a possessive hand on my shoulder. The hand felt heavy as a sad-iron. He marched me outside.
“Tommy,” he said. “We are heading for the Bella Union Saturday night parade. I have tickets!”
We entered the Bella Union through a large barroom packed with men and were seated at a table on the lower level of the pretty little theater, below a stage with a garishly painted drop curtain. Behind and above us were curtained stalls like a receding wall of pigeonholes. We ordered Piscos and watched a madam enter leading her bevy of handsome girls in their finery, with bright mouths and bold eyes glancing right and left while the men clapped and catcalled. The madam herself was stout, with an imperial manner of directing her flock into their stall. These were not the middle-class young ladies of “the line” who had so impressed Amelia, but they were striking women with perfect toilettes also.
It was the regular Saturday night parade where the madams showed off their girls.
“I do fancy these flaunting doves,” my father confessed. “There is nothing like them in Sacramento. Women will simply not show bare arms in Sacramento.”
There was whistling from the barroom as a second madam led in her charges, this one tall with feathers nodding from her hat. Her girls were indeed bare-armed, and proud in their paint and vivid fabrics, their boots crackling on the wooden floor. They were accompanied by more whistling from the barroom. The second group disappeared into their stall as a third group appeared. My father clapped for the feather-boaed madam with her blazing smile for the men appreciating her girls.
I thought of Caroline LaPlante as a madam in Virginia City, whose beauty and style had captured the town, and whose own heart had been captured by a man whose station would not allow him to marry a low woman.
And Amelia’s responsibility was to marry a wealthy man. Aristocrats!
More whores passed in a cloud of perfumery, giggling, rustling fabrics, noisy boots. The gaslights gleamed on the flesh of their necks and arms.
“Other places,” the Gent said, “the fancy women dress like the society women. In San Francisco it’s the other way round.”
Including Sibyl Sanderson, who preferred to dress like a Parisian demimondaine. I could inform Amelia that I was aware of the ironies of my father’s views compared to her own, if I were ever to see her again.
Another bouquet of women made its entrance.
“I believe it does a man good to watch pretty women in their little boots,” my father said.
The curtain was raised to reveal a half-circle of male and female performers. The women’s outfits were as skimpy as those of the whores were lush. There was laughter and applause.
I could feel the heat from the gaslamps that illuminated the stage. A fat comedian told jokes with gestures I found distasteful.
The Gent leaned toward me. His expression was one of more sorrow than anger. “I heard you had some trouble, Son,” he said.
“I would be sorry to learn you sent those ruffians after me, Pa.”
He leaned toward me with a hand cupped to his ear, for the band had struck up a din of music, “What were you doing at a meeting like that anyhow? True Blue Democrats! The Boss and Sam Rainey are common malefactors, my boy!”
“Well, you work for uncommon ones.”
“Tommy, those fine gents make our livings along with theirs. They make the state a better place! The railroad is like a mess of arteries that brings the blood to the organs and members, to the fingers and the head and the John Thomas. Without it you have just got nothing at all!
“Look at these folks you think you like! They have got their fingers in every till. Look at this business with the school board! Your Chris Buckley, the Blind Boss! He is not so blind as not to know the color of greenback dollars. How much do those dummies pay Buckley to be on the school board and pick the public’s pocket? The Water Board? The mayor!”