“It is not important, it is only interesting,” Bierce said. “It is a puzzle to be solved.”
“Why is it important to confound the Railroad?”
“It is not important, it is only gratifying,” Bierce said.
“Well,” I said. “Gratification is something felt.”
Bierce laughed. “I am sorry about Miss Brittain. She is a charming young woman, and no femininny if she knows her fate.”
“Her happy ending,” I said, bitterly.
The rig rolled on among the mansions that loomed like ancient monsters frozen in an ice age. There was some traffic of buggies and other hacks with their lamps burning, an occasional spark from metal rims on paving stones. The fog bank surged up toward us, but the sensation was of the world turning slowly to deposit us in that gray, damp maw.
The McNair mansion was one of the lesser beasts, first and second floor windows alight in the fog, misty reflected gleams dancing off the fence against a dense darkness of shrubbery. The hackie turned in under the lights of the porte cochere, where we were let off.
The heavyset butler with patent-leather hair bowed us inside. He showed us up a curving flight of stairs as broad as Morton Street, which we mounted under the glowering eyes of the portrait of Nathaniel McNair, and into a room brilliant with glowing balls of light. The butler directed Bierce to a noble overstuffed chair, and me to a divan of fat pillows. Then he poured port from a cut-glass decanter. I saw that one glass had already been filled, resting on a low table beside a chaise longue across the room.
We hurried to our feet as Lady Caroline Stearns entered.
She wore a long gown embroidered in gilt and silver, high necked, long sleeved. Within the stiff fabric there was a sense of her body in motion independent of the material that covered her. She crossed to us to greet Bierce, with a welcoming motion of her hand to me. Her hair was brushed up into a burnished knot at the back of her head above a slender neck. Her complexion was pale, no doubt with powders, her mouth tinted, her eyes a calm blue surveying us. She was no longer young, but she was very beautiful.
“Please sit down, Mr. Bierce, Mr. Redmond.” She swept on across the parquet to recline on the chaise longue. I felt in her presence a queer diminution of Bierce’s force, almost a shyness.
There was a moment of silence, each of us with a glass of port raised as though in a toast.
“It is time to talk about Virginia City,” Bierce said.
She inclined her neat chin in what must be assent.
“You were greatly loved there, madam.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Yet there has been a continuing hatred. I assume that is because of the manipulations of ownership of the Jack of Spades Mine.”
“There were investors who had cause to feel they had been cheated,” Lady Caroline said. The elegant folds of her heavy gown made me conscious of her reclining body and reminded me of Annie Dunker in her shift.
“Adolphus Jackson, Albert Gorton, and a man named Macomber,” Bierce said. “Of these, E. O. Macomber seems to have disappeared. Detective Sergeant Nix has made some efforts to find him, with no result. Albert Gorton is apparently dead. The latter, who was an accessory to the Jack of Spades ‘shuffle,’ may have been murdered because he became an embarrassment to your late husband.”
“That is an unfounded assumption, Mr. Bierce.”
“It is not even an assumption.”
“Mr. Bierce, I cannot believe that any of these men are so consumed with old wrongs that they would begin the conspiracy of revenge against me of which you seem convinced.”
“Will you accept the fact that there has indeed been a conspiracy?”
“I suppose I must.”
“That you are in danger?”
She inclined her coiffed head silently.
“There is another matter than the Jack of Spades Mine, madam,” Bierce said. “It is the paternity of your son.”
She lifted a hand to a bell that hung from a braided rope. The butler appeared. “Cigars, if you please, Marvins.”
The butler brought a silver-chased humidor from a sideboard and offered it to Bierce and to me. Bierce took one, I declined. Marvins returned the humidor and carried to Lady Caroline a small box of Egyptian cigarettes. She chose one, and he lighted it for her with a flourish, then came to light Bierce’s cigar. The smoke from the cigarette was a paler hue than that of the cigar, coiling upward from the tan tube between her fingers.
I thought the distribution of smokes had given Lady Caroline time to prepare herself.
“Mr. Brittain is convinced that he was the father,” Bierce said. “But I have had a communication to the effect that that may not be the case.”
“May I ask from whom this communication was received?” Lady Caroline asked. She braced an elbow on the chaise in order to raise her hand to hold the cigarette six inches from her lips.
“That is unimportant,” Bierce said. “But I hope you will be forthcoming in the matter.”
I could see her gown move with her breathing. “There was a murder,” she said. “A friend of mine was horribly murdered—not slashed, in case you should leap to a conclusion. It was a violent time, a violent place. All at once that violence quite overwhelmed me. I had had proposals of marriage. It seemed that a signal had been given that I had better accept one of them and end the life I had been leading before that life ended me.
“James Brittain was the first choice,” she said. “Nat McNair the last.”
I wondered who had been in between.
“But I believe neither of them was actually the father of your child,” Bierce said.
“Mr. Bierce, will you embarrass me into revealing the fact that I am uncertain?”
“This determination may be essential to the solution of these murders, madam.”
“I admit I informed James Brittain that he was the father. That was because I had decided to accept his proposal. He was a gentleman, a cultivated man. He proved to be a four-flusher, however.” She laughed lightly.
I thought her ease and calm were pretense.
“Was Senator Sharon one of the possibilities of fatherhood?”
“In one regard I may be uncertain, but in the other I am very certain. No, he was not.”
“Was he one of those offering proposals?”
“Only a proposition,” she said. “It would have resulted in a relation very like the one in which the valiant Miss Sarah Althea Hill became dissatisfied. My inclination was for marriage.
“Mr. Bierce, allow me to say this,” she continued. “It may be an excess of pride on my part, but I do not believe I am to blame for the Jack of Spades contrivances. It was Nat’s doing. It was the kind of proceeding that he became famous for. No doubt he learned it from William Sharon. I believe my role must be described as passive. Can it be that you should extend your researches beyond this little circle of five people?”
“It is possible,” Bierce said, without, I thought, meaning it. “Is it possible that Macomber changed his name, as Jackson changed his?”
I felt an invisible weight press on my shoulders. Lady Caroline sighed and shrugged in her gilt and silver casing.
“What was Macomber like, Lady Caroline?” I asked.
Her blue eyes shifted toward me, blinking as though she had difficulty changing their focus. “He was a pleasant young man, rather talkative. I don’t remember much more about him, Mr. Redmond.”
“How did the five of you, who joined together to purchase the Jack of Spades, know each other?”
She blew smoke before addressing my question. “We were friends.”
Clients? Customers? “The woman who was murdered was Julia Bulette?”
She looked suddenly wary. “Yes. She was a friend also, a business friend but a good friend, a good woman, a good, good friend.”