“This is what I wanted to show you,” Maud said to Quinn. “Do you see who owns it?”
Quinn then saw a photo of a man standing beside a chestnut filly called Blue Grass Warrior. The man was well dressed, with a full black beard.
“That’s my horse,” said Maud.
“Really? Well, you always loved horses.”
“It was a gift from a suitor. Not one of the six, to anticipate your question. He’s from Kentucky. I met him at Saratoga just before the war, and he gave me a horse and a slave girl as gifts.”
“I hope you kept the slave girl too.”
“Of course. And I sent her to Canada in case he changed his mind about her.”
Quinn read the printed matter explaining the photo.
“Why that’s John,” he said. “John McGee.”
“It took you a while to notice.”
“It’s his beard. I never saw him with a beard.”
He studied the most recent incarnation of John the Brawn, handsome figure of substance and money, as wealthy as he is hairy. The last Quinn had seen of him was in 1863, when, as always, John was leaping into a new future, linking his fistic notoriety to the politicians who ran New York City, using his name as a draw for gambling parlors: John the Brawn becoming John the Grand and John the Mighty, his power and his fortune as expansive as his chest.
“He owns the track?” Quinn asked.
“He’s one of the principals. A handful of millionaires.”
“Our John has truly risen.”
“He’s wonderful to Magdalena,” said Maud.
“Isn’t she living with Obadiah?”
“She married Obadiah five years ago. But you know Magdalena. She was never content with one man.”
“That seems to be a family trait.”
“It’s stupid that you’re jealous,” said Maud.
As Quinn smiled his skepticism, it became evident to him that his possessiveness stemmed not only from desire and love but also from seeing Maud as the instrument by which he would rid himself of death and war, put life once again on horseback. He had felt such rumblings of possibility for himself on Obadiah’s veranda, anticipating Maud’s arrival after his first shave. He’d reveled merely in waiting for her there amid the architecture of dynamic serenity, that vast, sculpted lawn sloping to the lake, leading him to the edge of all that was new, centering him in a web of escalating significance. And in such privileged moments his life became a great canvas of the imagination, large enough to suggest the true magnitude of the unknown. What he saw on the canvas was a boundless freedom to do and to think and to feel all things offered to the living. In Maud’s presence, or even in waiting for her to arrive, the canvas became unbearably valuable and utterly mysterious, and he knew if he lost Maud he would explode into simplicity.
“Ah, there you are, cousin,” came a female voice, and here toward Gordon, with hand outstretched, came a handsome woman in her thirties, artfully coiffed, regal in maroon silk dress, its hoop skirt bouncing as she came.
Gordon took her hand, kissed her cheek. “Phoebe,” he said.
“We expected you for tea,” Phoebe told Gordon. “But here you are, all bound up with an entourage.”
“Two friends,” said Gordon. “Miss Maud Fallon and the war journalist Daniel Quinn.”
“A pleasure indeed, Mr. Quinn,” said Phoebe. “You’ve educated us all on the terrible battles you’ve seen. And how quaint to meet you with clothes on, Miss Fallon. You’re usually naked on horseback, aren’t you?”
“I was born naked,” said Maud.
“How charming,” said Phoebe. “We’ll look for you at tea tomorrow, Gordon. Please come alone.”
“Excuse me, madam,” Quinn said to her, “but you have the manners of a sow,” and he took Maud’s arm and walked her away.
Will Canaday found them browsing at the Shaker booth and led Maud to the elevated platform in front of the booth of Military Trophies. This, the focal point for the bazaar’s public moments, was crowned by Washington’s portrait, crowded with cannon, bristling with crossed rifles and muskets, and grimly but passionately brilliant with the regimental flags and the colors of the nation from before the Revolution to the present Civil War. Many of these proud silks had been reduced to gallant rags, the most notable being the flag of Albany’s Forty-fourth Regiment, shredded with eighty bullet holes, and for whose constant elevation in battle twelve standard-bearers had died and eighteen more had been wounded.
“A peculiar place for a poetry reading,” said Quinn.
“A perfect place for it,” said Maud.
“Why are you doing these readings?”
Maud cocked her head and considered a reply before ascending the stairs ahead of Will. “I suppose,” she said, “that one’s brain also craves distinction.”
Will addressed the crowd then, explaining Maud’s international renown as an actress and how in recent years she had been a popularizer of the great poets as well as a woman asserting an intellectual stance on behalf of all womanhood. “And,” he added, “if any of you have had the pleasure of talking with our Maud, you know the keenness and originality of that mind of hers,” which, he concluded, was tonight a gift to the bazaar, and that after her reading a basket would be passed for donations.
Maud smiled and stared out at the crowd, found men’s faces beaming at her, many women scowling. At what did they scowl? At the dancing spiritualist? The sensual horsewoman? The actress who reads poetry? The woman of fame who represents the power of the intuitive life? Well, whatever it is, Maud, they are scowling at you: you who merely by breathing in, breathing out, grow ever more singular.
Maud looked down at Quinn and saw neither the boy nor the young man (however briefly met) that she once knew. She saw a pacific smile and knew she was the cause of it, but saw, too, the trouble that lay behind it, had noted that trouble the instant she saw him in front of the mansion. It was the war, of course, and so she would begin with Keats, telling Quinn that he was perhaps half in love with easeful death.
“Thou wast not born for death,” she read, and eyed Quinn secretly, finding his smile gone, his face at full attention. Her geis was functioning. He was in the spell of her suggestion about the kidnapping. When they talked later she would invite him to Saratoga as her and Gordon’s guest. And once there. . and once there. .?
She opened her second book and told the audience she had not publicly read this poem before this moment, and then began:
O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;
And save his good broadsword, he weapons had none,
He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone.
So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,
There never was knight like the young Lochinvar. .
But ere he alighted at Netherby gate,
The bride had consented, the gallant came late:
For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war,
Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.
Maud read with great verve and sensitivity the next four stanzas, banishing male beamings and female scowls and replacing both with rapt attentiveness to the narrative, wherein Lochinvar avows to the bride’s father that he has come only to drink one cup of wine with the bride denied him and, when it is drunk, to have but a single dance with fair Ellen. And they do dance, as parents and bridegroom fume, and as bridemaidens watch approvingly. Then does Lochinvar assert himself: