Malcolm lost his cordiality. "Mr. Stanton? I have no information, sir. I can't comment on that allegation."
George had seen enough bureaucrats to recognize the self-protective mode. Bitterly, he said, "Of course. Is that everything in the file?"
"Almost. Bent was seen last at Port Tobacco, where it's presumed he was arranging illegal entry into the Confederacy. There the trail runs out."
"Thank you, Captain. I'll convey the information to Pinkerton's." He added a polite lie. "You've been very helpful."
He shook Malcolm's hand and left. He felt his gut boiling, and barely reached Willard's Hotel before he was again stricken with violent intestinal trouble.
Virgilia found a doctor for him. The man sent to a chemist's for an opium compound that tightened up his gut but did nothing to stem the sudden fits of weeping that struck him at highly inopportune moments. One such attack took place when he was escorting Virgilia to Willard's dining room for a farewell supper.
With an exertion of will, he recovered his composure. His sister talked throughout the meal, trying to divert him with information about her work at Scipio Brown's home for black waifs, and the mounting Radical frenzy to remove the President by impeachment. George heard little of it, then nothing when he put his face in his hands and wept again. He was mortally ashamed, but he couldn't stop.
In his suite, Virgilia held him close before they parted. Her arms felt strong, while he felt weak, sick, worthless. She kissed his cheek gently. "Let us know where you are, George. And please take care of yourself."
He held the door open, pale in the feeble light of low-trimmed gas.
"Why?" he said.
She went away without answering.
In New York he booked a first-class stateroom on the Grand Turk for Southampton. He was carrying the name of a London estate agent with good contacts in Europe, particularly Switzerland. The estate agent recommended Lausanne, on the north shore of Lake Geneva, saying that any number of American millionaires suffering from ill health had found benefit there. George had indicated that he needed a restful haven.
In cold and damp January twilight, he stood at the rail among first-class passengers who were waving, chattering, and celebrating. A steward handed him a glass of champagne. He muttered something but didn't drink. Soul-numbing despair still gripped him. He had lost twenty pounds, and, because he was a short man, the loss seemed severe, lending him a wasted look.
Trailing smoke, her whistle blasting, the great steamer left the dock and moved down the Hudson past the Jersey piers and the shanties surrounding them. George's hand hung over the rail. A slight pitch of the vessel spilled the champagne. It dispersed in the air, the droplets not visible by the time they reached the oily black water.
How like the life of poor Constance, and that of his dead friend Orry, was the spilled champagne. A moment's sparkle, an accident, and nothing.
He walked to the stern, the fur collar of his overcoat turned up against the chill. With dead eyes he watched America vanish behind him. He expected he would never see it again.
MADELINE'S JOURNAL
January, 1868. Back from Lehigh Station. A sorrowful trip. George not himself. Virgilia, reunited with the family after long estrangement — she is much softened in temperament — said privately that she fears for G.'s mental stability. G.'s lawyer, Smith, warned us that the murderer, Bent, might strike any one of us. It is too monstrous to be believed. Yet the fate of poor Constance warns us not to dismiss it.
Surprised to find that the C'ston Courier carried a paragraph about the murder — Judith sent it to Prudence in my absence. I assume the story traveled widely because of its sensational nature. Bent is named as the culprit.
Also found a letter from a Beaufort attorney who proposes to visit soon. The discovery at Lambs, still creating furor, will prove our salvation, he claims. ...
Written on the 12th. Andy leaves tomorrow to walk to C'ston for the "Great Convention of the People of South Carolina" — the same gathering Gettys's wretched sheet calls "the black and tan meeting." Though I can ill afford it, I spent a dollar at the new Summerton junk shop for trousers and a worn but serviceable frock coat, dusty orange, that was once the pride of some white gentlemen. These I gave to A. Jane has sewn other garments for her husband, so he needn't be ashamed of his clothes.
Prudence found and presented Andy with an old four-volume set of Kent's Commentaries on American Law, which law students now use in place of Blackstone's. A. longs to study and understand the law. He reveres its power to protect his race. He will study solely for personal satisfaction, since he knows that even under the most liberal of regimes, it is likely that no man of his color would be able to practice profitably in Carolina. Indeed, his very presence at the convention with others of his race is an affront to men like Gettys.
After midnight on January thirteenth, Judith carried a taper to her husband's study at Tradd Street. She found him amid a litter of newspapers, his reading spectacles on his nose and a book in his lap. It was a book she hadn't seen him open for years.
"The Bible, Cooper?"
His long white fingers tapped the rice-paper page. "Exodus. I was reading about the plagues. An appropriate study for these times, don't you think? After the plague of frogs and the plague of lice, the swarms of flies and the boils and the killing hail, Moses brandished his rod again, an east wind rose and blew all night, and in the morning it brought a plague of locusts."
Dismayed and alarmed by his fervency, Judith put down the taper and crossed her arms over her bed gown. Cooper picked up the Bible and read in a low voice. "Very grievous they were. Before them there were no such locusts as they ... they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt."
He took off his spectacles. "We have a north wind instead. Blowing in a plague of Carolina turncoats, Yankee adventurers, illiterate colored men — and they're all going to sit down in that convention tomorrow. What a prospect! Ethiopian minstrelsy. Ham Radicalism in all its glory!"
"Cooper, the convention must meet. A new constitution's the price for readmission to the Union."
"And a new social order — is that another price we must pay?" He picked up a Daily News and read, "The demagogue is to rule the mass, and vice and ignorance control the vast interests at stake. The delegates may well create a Negro bedlam." He tossed the paper down. "I concur."
"But if I remember my Bible, soon after the locusts came, there was a west wind to cast them back in the Red Sea."
"And you remember what followed next, don't you? The plague of darkness. Then the plague of death."
Judith wanted to weep. She couldn't believe that this spent, embittered man was the same person she'd married. Only by immense will did she keep emotion from her face. "Are you planning to observe any of the proceedings?" she asked.
"I'd sooner watch wild animals. I'd sooner be hung."
In the morning, he left early for the offices of the Carolina Shipping Company. Judith felt sad and helpless. Cooper was indeed becoming a stranger to her. He no longer had anything at all to do with Madeline.
Marie-Louise wasn't much better company for her, though the reasons were different. Judith found her daughter at the sunny dining table, her chin on her hands, her breakfast untouched, her eyes fixed dreamily on some far unseen vista. She was neglecting her studies and she talked of scarcely anything but boys. Marie-Louise especially admired some of General Canby's occupying soldiers. Whatever the other consequences of military Reconstruction, it was quite literally robbing Judith of a family.