“How much does the Railroad pay Senator Jennings to front up the Girtcrest Corridor Bill?”
“But that is to the benefit of this great state!”
“It is to the benefit of Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Collis Huntington. Will you tell me Senator Jennings is trying to make the Nation great?”
“Son, son,” my father said and swung around to guffaw at the latest sally from the jokester on the stage. This one wore a hat too small for him and a long necktie, the end of which hung out of his trouser cuff. There was laughter also from the stalls where the madams had arrayed their girls.
The show of prostitutes at the Bella Union was not what I wanted to be watching when my heart was broken.
When the Gent turned back, he said, “Jennings had this painting in his office at the legislature. Lady didn’t just have bare arms, she was bare all over. Horseback lady. My, she was a pure vision!”
I felt the hairs at the back of my neck prickle. “Lady Godiva,” I said.
“Lady Godiva was what she was outfitted as! He had so many complaints from his constituents he had to take her down.”
Constituents who didn’t object to Jennings in the pay of the Railroad but did object to bare female flesh in his offices.
“What did he do with the painting?”
“Got rid of it, I guess,” the Gent said, frowning. “He’d bought it from the Bucket of Blood there in Virginia City that had commissioned it.”
“It was Highgrade Carrie, wasn’t it?”
I thought he hadn’t heard me, in another burst of laughter around us. But after a moment he looked back at me solemnly. “Yes, it was, Son.”
I had not yet presented the information on the painting of High-grade Carrie as Lady Godiva to Bierce.
“Set up by Senator Sharon, as I understand it.”
“It seems you have learned a good deal about Virginia City twenty years ago, Son.”
“I’ve learned that Senator Jennings is a murderer,” I said. “Bierce is going to prove it.”
The Gent did not respond to that, looking troubled. The slashes of white in his whiskers caught the light. I swigged the sour Pisco Punch.
A troupe of dancers had come onstage, waving flags in a flurry of red and white stripes, and prancing with plump legs in tights to the beat and horns of the overly enthusiastic band of music. There was a great deal of whistling.
I said, looking my father straight in the face, “Maybe when you are young you are more concerned with right and wrong. Do you still think about right and wrong?”
“Maybe I have got a more comprehensive view of what it is, Son. Mr. Bierce has got it screwed up so tight it strictures him bad, it seems to me.”
“Do you think it is right for Senator Jennings to murder Judge Hamon’s widow?”
His face slumped. After a long moment, he said, “No, I don’t.”
I thought I had spoiled his evening at the Bella Union, and I was not enjoying the show either. Amelia admitting she was for sale like any one of these painted women had screwed my insides so tight as to stricture me badly.
“Pa,” I said. “Why did men change their names on the Washoe?”
“Same reason they changed their name when they came West. Forty-niners changed their names too. Change their life. Change their luck. Trouble with the law. Trouble at home. Complications with women.”
I couldn’t bring myself to ask which had been his reason.
“Did you know Highgrade Carrie well?”
“Not so well,” he said. “Admired her till she and Nat and Will got together for the euchre. But I expect that was Nat’s doing. I will admit there’ve been some hard feelings.” He chuckled unhappily. “Well, she brought some mementoes of the Washoe to that wedding.”
The word snapped in my head like a cap pistol.
“Momentoes,” I said shakily. “How would you spell that?”
“How would you spell it, Son? You are the educated fellow here.”
I spelled m-o-m-e-n-t-o.
“That’d be it,” he said. “Why?”
“No reason,” I said.
We stuck it through to the flag-waving end. When we left through the barroom I saw a familiar face. It was Beau with his fair-bearded cheeks and a gray muffler around his neck. I thought he had seen me, but he made no sign of recognition. The muffler and the ill-fitting jacket must be his disguise for the “researches” Amelia had mentioned.
“Who was that fellow?” the Gent wanted to know, when we had come out onto the street.
“That is the British gentleman Beaumont McNair,” I said. “The son of Lady Caroline Stearns.”
I thought for a moment he was going to insist on going back to introduce himself.
26
MUSTANG, n. – An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
Bierce returned from St. Helena on Monday. Tuesday morning he was summoned to the offices of Bosworth Curtis in the Monkey Block. He took me along. Curtis, Bakewell & Stewart was on the second floor above Malvolio’s Restaurant, with fine leather furniture in a sitting room with windows looking out over Montgomery Street, and a typewriter at a little table with her black Remington machine before her. When she swiveled ninety degrees she presided over a reception desk from which she asked Bierce and me to have a seat. A neat little person in a tan skirt and shirtwaist, she rose and left the room to tell Lawyer Curtis we were on hand.
She showed us into another big room with windows that looked out on the Customs House. Curtis was seated behind a desk the size of a Faro layout, with two people before him. One was Beau McNair, back in fancy tailoring today. The other was a lady in a shiny black hat with a veil covering her face, and gray and black layers of cloaks and jackets and skirts of materials expensive-looking just in their texture, black gloves and polished black boots, one of which twitched with a rhythm of impatience. It was Lady Caroline Stearns, though I couldn’t make out her face inside the black veil. I had a sense of Bierce stiffening to military attention beside me.
Beau McNair rose. Curtis was already on his feet, an ugly little terrier of a man with his pink, shiny-skinned face and white hair brushed straight back. He didn’t come around his desk to shake hands with Bierce or me.
“Mr. Bierce, I believe,” he said in his bark of a voice. “Lady Caroline, this is the journalist of whom we have spoken. Lady Caroline Stearns. Mister Beaumont McNair. And this young gentleman?”
“My assistant,” Bierce said. “Mister Thomas Redmond.”
“We have met,” I said to Beau, whom I had seen at the City Jail with Curtis and Rudolph Buckle, in the park with Amelia Brittain and at the Bella Union last night.
Beau glanced toward me solemnly, nodding. I thought it just as well not to give him the wink. He was a handsome young fellow, no doubt about it. Amelia’s half brother. I could see no resemblance. I wondered if I would ever be in a situation to afford a jacket like that. It looked like he spread it on instead of arming into it like lesser beings.
“How do you do, Mr. Bierce,” Lady Caroline said. Her boot had stopped twitching. Her voice was low, pleasant, with a trace of British accent. The former Highgrade Carrie of Virginia City.
“How do you do, Lady Caroline.”
There was a motion of her head, possibly a nod to me.
“We have a mutual acquaintance in Miss Brittain, Redmond,” Beau said to me.