Love and War nas-2 Read online

  Bent's mood was one of resentment rather than grief. Even in death, his father prevented closeness. He wanted to stand with the other mourners but didn't dare.

  Laborers waited at the head and foot of the heavily ornamented coffin, ready to lift and lower it. The minister was speaking, but Bent couldn't hear him because of the splatter of rain on summer leaves. The cemetery was heavily wooded; dark as a grotto. Dark as he felt.

  Late in the morning, so the papers said, his father had been memorialized at a church service in downtown Washington. Bent couldn't go to that either. All arrangements had undoubtedly been handled by Dills, the little old lawyer who stood nearest the grave, flanked by three bland, jowly civilians with the look of moneyed men.

  Bent hunched close to the cross, half again as tall as he was. He despised Dills but didn't want to antagonize him by inadvertently showing himself. It was through Dills that Heyward Starkwether had communicated with his illegitimate son and provided him with money. It was Dills to whom Bent appealed in times of emergency. Never in person after their first interview; only in writing.

  The solemn minister raised his hand. The coffin went down into the earth, and down, on canvas sling straps. Bent had been invited to meet his father twice in his adult life. At each meeting the conversation was inconsequential and awkward, with many lengthy silences. He remembered Starkwether as a handsome, reserved man, obviously intelligent. He had never seen his father smile.

  Rain seemed to get into Bent's eyes as the coffin disappeared. The mourners prepared to leave. Why hadn't Starkwether cared enough about him to acknowledge him? Bastardy wasn't such a great sin in these modern times. Why, then? He hated his father, for whom he cried now, for leaving that and so many other questions unanswered.

  Foremost, who was Bent's mother? Not Starkwether's long-dead wife; that much Dills had told him, going on to warn him never to ask a second time. How dare the lawyer treat him that way? How dare Starkwether hide the truth?

  During Bent's only talk with Dills, the lawyer had purported to explain why a close relationship with Starkwether was impossible. Those who paid Starkwether wanted him to live in perfect rectitude and never by word or deed draw public attention to himself. Bent didn't believe the smooth story. He suspected Starkwether had a simpler and crueler reason for abandoning him. Starkwether had fathered no legitimate children. He was probably one of those selfish careerists too busy for parenthood.

  Bent inhaled sharply. Dills seemed to be watching the stone cross while he conversed with the three moneyed men. Bent began a retreat, careful to keep the monument between himself and the grave. He failed to see a pedestal supporting a looming granite angel. He stumbled against the pedestal and cried out. He kept himself from falling by catching hold of the wet stone drapery.

  Had anyone heard him? Dills?

  No one came, and the rattle of departing carriages continued. When he got his breath, he lumbered on to the tree where he'd tied his horse. The horse side-stepped when Bent's full weight settled on him.

  Soon he was safely away, cantering on a muddy road at the edge of the Georgetown College campus, where forlorn pickets stood guard around the tents of the Sixty-ninth New York militia. His loss continued to hurt, though less and less as his rage intensified. Goddamn the man for dying just now. Someone had to intervene to prevent him from being shipped to Kentucky.

  Although Bent had eaten a full breakfast, his desperation drove him back to Willard's for a huge dinner in the middle of the afternoon. He stuffed a fork laden with mashed potatoes into his mouth, sopped up chicken gravy with a wad of bread, and stuffed that in, too. Eating had been his narcotic since childhood.

  It did little to soothe him today. He kept picturing Starkwether resentfully. He had even refused Bent his own name, insisting the boy take the name of the family with whom he'd been placed for his upbringing.

  The Bents were tired, barely literate people who farmed near the Godforsaken hamlet of Felicity in Clermont County, Ohio. Fulmer Bent had been forty-seven when Starkwether's son was delivered to him. Bent had been quite small and didn't remember it. Or maybe he had blotted it from memory; only a very few of the most hurtful scenes from those years remained with him.

  Mrs. Bent, who had numerous relatives across the river in Kentucky, was a peculiar woman with a wall eye. When she wasn't dragging him to visit her relations, she forced him to listen while she read the Bible aloud or lectured him in a whisper about the filth of the human body, the human mind, and a majority of human actions and desires. In his thirteenth year she caught him with his hand on himself and whipped him with a rope until he screamed and bled all over the bed sheets. No wonder Fulmer Bent spent more hours out of the house than in it. He was a secretive man whose only source of amusement seemed to be the mating activities of his livestock.

  The Felicity years were the darkest of Bent's entire life, not only because he loathed his foster parents but also because he learned at age fifteen that his real father was alive in Washington and unable to acknowledge him. Before, he had presumed his father to be some dead relative of the Bents who had perhaps disgraced the family; they were evasive whenever the boy asked questions.

  It was Dills who made the long coach and riverboat journey to Ohio to check on Bent's welfare and tell him the truth, at a time Dills had chosen because he believed the boy capable of receiving and accepting the facts. Dills spoke about Starkwether at length one sunny afternoon on the farm, careful that he and the boy were alone in shade near the well. The lawyer's phrases were tactful, even gentle, but he never guessed how deeply they wounded his listener. Ever afterward, no matter how much Starkwether helped with influence or money, there was submerged outrage in Bent's love for his father.

  In Bent's sixteenth year, just before Starkwether secured the boy's appointment to the Military Academy, Fulmer Bent took pigs to market in Cincinnati and died in a shooting incident in a house of ill repute. That same autumn a sweet-voiced young clerk at the Felicity general store had initiated Bent sexually. Bent didn't have his first woman until two years later.

  Long before Starkwether secured the Academy appointment, however, Elkanah Bent had begun to dream of a military career. The dream had its genesis in a cluttered Cincinnati bookshop to which the boy wandered one day while Fulmer Bent transacted business elsewhere. For five cents he bought a badly torn, water-stained life of Bonaparte. That was the start.

  He saved little bits of the allowance money Dills sent twice a year. He bought, read, and reread lives of Alexander, Caesar, Scipio Africanus. But it was Bony whose heir and American counterpart he came to be in his florid imaginings —

  Become a Bonaparte in Kentucky? He was more likely to become a corpse. The state was contested ground; half of its men had joined the Union, half the Confederacy. Lincoln kept hands off the slaveowners so they wouldn't foment secession. He absolutely would not go to a place like that.

  Nervous sweat slicking his cheeks, he waved to the waiter. "Bring me another helping of pie." He gobbled it and leaned back, a drip of the sugary filling hanging from his lower lip like a moist icicle. Swollen with food — aching — he felt better, able to think and plan again. One thing he would never deny about Fulmer Bent's wife: she was a splendid cook.

  He had attended a country school with a lot of farmers' sons who teased him and conspired to make him the target of pranks. Once, they had filled his lunch pail with fresh cow dung. He had run home and found his foster mother pulling six of her yeasty, yellow-crusted loaves from the iron stove. He had devoured one and begged for another. From that day, she kept him stuffed. When he pleaded for second and third helpings or treats between meals, she was flattered and always gave in.

  All the eating made him fatter and fatter. And unattractive to girls. But he learned to use the weight to fend off and punish bullies. He would cringe and cower, and when they thought they had him, he'd push them down and fall on them. Once he did that, they left him alone.

  A third piece of pie tempted him now. But
his belly hurt, so he concentrated on his problem. He still believed a great military future could be his, but not if he died in Kentucky.

  He knew only one man who could intercede now. Bent had been warned against contacting him in person, but a desperate plight required desperate measures.

  The office of Jasper Dills, Esquire, overlooked Seventh Street, the city's commercial center. The book-lined room was small, cramped, suggestive of a failing practice. It gave no hint of the wealth and status of its occupant.

  Nervous, Bent lowered his buttocks into the visitor's chair to which the clerk had ushered him. He had to squeeze; the fit was tight. He had put on his dress uniform, but Dills's expression said it was a wasted effort.

  "I thought you understood you were not to call here, Colonel."

  "There are extenuating circumstances."

  Dills raised one eyebrow, which nearly devastated his distraught visitor.

  "I need your help urgently."

  Dills kept a clean desk. In the center lay some sheets of legal foolscap. He inked a pen and began to draw, concentrating on the series of stars that emerged.

  "You know your father can't help you any longer." The nib rasped; another star appeared. "I saw you skulking at the cemetery yesterday — come, don't deny it. The lapse is forgivable."

  Rasp; scrape. Done with stars, the lawyer inked a blocky B. Then he shot a look at his caller. "This one is not."

  Bent turned red, frightened and furious at the same time. How could this man daunt him so? Jasper Dills was no less than seventy and no more than five feet one. He had a child's hands and feet. Yet neither size nor age diminished the force he could put into his voice or the intimidating way he could eye a man, as he eyed Bent now.

  "I beg —" swallow — "I beg to differ, sir. I'm desperate." In a few jumbled sentences, he described the reason. Throughout, Dills kept drawing: more B's, then a series of finely detailed epaulettes, each smaller than the last. In the hazy yellow light falling through the dirty windowpanes, the attorney looked jaundiced.

  At the end of Bent's recital, Dills kept him dangling in silence for ten seconds. "But I still can't understand why you came to see me, Colonel. I have no power to help you and no reason. My sole obligation as your father's executor is to follow his verbal instruction and see that you continue to receive your generous annual stipend."

  "The money doesn't mean a goddamn thing if I'm shipped off to die in Kentucky!"

  "But what can I do about it?"

  "Get my orders changed. You've done it before — you or my father. Or was it those men who employed him?" That scored, all right; Dills stiffened noticeably. Here was the crucial bluff. "Oh, yes, I know something about them. I heard a few names. I saw my father twice, remember. For several hours each time. I heard names," he repeated.

  "Colonel, you're lying."

  "Am I? Then test me. Refuse to help. I shall very quickly talk to certain people who will be interested in the names of my father's employers. Or my parentage."

  Silence. Bent breathed noisily. He'd won. He felt confident of it.

  Dills sighed. "Colonel Bent, you have made a mistake. Two, in fact. As I've already indicated, the first was your decision to come here. The second is your ultimatum." He laid his pen on the scrawled stars. "Let me not resort to melodrama, only make this point as clearly as I can. The moment word reaches me that you have attempted to regularize or publicize your connection with my late client — or the moment I hear anything else detrimental to his reputation, including certain names I really doubt that you know — you will be dead within twenty-four hours." Dills smiled. "Good day, sir."

  He rose and walked to his bookshelves. Bent burst from the chair, started around the desk. "Damn you, how dare you say such a thing to Starkwether's own —"

  Dills pivoted, closing a book with a gunshot sound. "I said good day."

  As Bent blundered down the long flight to the street, an inner voice screamed: He meant it. The man meant it. What shall I do now?

  In the office, Dills replaced the book and returned to his desk. Seated, he noticed his speckled hands. Shaking. The reaction angered and shamed him. Furthermore, it was unnecessary.

  Certainly his former client's employers would want their names guarded. But Dills was confident Bent didn't know their identities. Further, Bent was patently a coward, hence could be bluffed. Of course, through certain of Starkwether's connections, Dills could easily have arranged for Bent to take a fatal musket ball. In Kentucky, it could even be made to appear that his killer was a reb. Such a scheme would only work to the lawyer's financial disadvantage, but Bent didn't know that.

  That two parents with such positive character traits could have produced a son as weak and warped as Elkanah Bent confounded Dills's sense of order. Born in the meanest poverty in the Western woodlands, Starkwether had been gifted with guile and ambition. Bent's mother had possessed breeding and a background of wealth and eminence. And look at the sorry result. Perhaps force majeure was more than a legal conceit. Perhaps some illicit relationships and their fruit were condemned in heaven from the moment the seed fell.

  Unable to compose himself or banish the memory of his visitor, Dills took a small brass key from his waistcoat. He unlocked a lower desk drawer, reached in for a ring of nine larger keys, and used one to enter the office closet. In the dusty dark, another key opened an iron strongbox. He drew out its contents. One thin file.

  He examined the old letter which he had first read fourteen years ago. Starkwether, ailing, had given it to him permanently last December. The letter filled both sides of the sheet. His eyes dropped to the signature. The effect of reading that instantly recognizable name was always the same. Dills was stunned, astonished, impressed. The letter said in part:

  You used me, Heyward. Then you left me. But I admit I shared a certain pleasure and cannot bring myself to abandon altogether the result of my mistake. Knowing the sort of man you are and what matters most to you, I am prepared to begin paying you a substantial yearly stipend, provided you accept parental responsibility for the child — care for him (although not necessarily in a lavish manner), help him in whatever way you deem reasonable — but most important, diligently monitor his whereabouts in order to prevent any circumstance or action on his part or the part of others which might lead to discovery of his parentage. Need I add that he must never learn my identity from you? Should that happen, whatever the reason, payment of the stipend will cease.

  Dills wet his lips with his tongue. How he wished he had met the woman, even for an hour. A bastard would have smirched her name and spoiled her possibilities, and she had been clever and worldly enough to know that at eighteen. She had married splendidly. Again he turned the sheet over to gaze at the signature. Poor vengeful Bent would more than likely crack apart if he saw that last name.

  The paragraph above it was the one of most direct interest to him:

  Finally, in the event of your death, the same, stipend will be paid to any representative you designate, so long as the boy lives and the above conditions are met.

  At his desk, Dills inked his pen again, pondering. Alive, Starkwether's son was worth a good deal of money to him; dead, he was worth nothing. Without interfering too directly, perhaps he should see that Bent was spared hazardous duty out West.

  Yes, definitely a good idea. Tomorrow he would speak to a contact in the War Department. He jotted a reminder on the foolscap, tore it off, and poked it well down into his waistcoat pocket. So much for Bent. Other duties pressed.

  Starkwether's employers had become his, and they were interested in the possibility of New York City seceding from the Union. It was a breathtaking concept: a separate city-state, trading freely with both sides in a war whose length the gentlemen could to some extent control. Powerful politicians, including Mayor Fernando Wood, had already endorsed secession publicly. Dills was researching precedents and preparing a report on potential consequences. He returned the letter to the strongbox and after three turns of three keys
in three locks resumed work.

  14

  "What the hell did we do wrong?" George said, flinging away the stub of his cigar. It landed in front of the small, plain office building in the heart of the huge Hazard Iron complex.

  "I honestly don't know, George," Christopher Wotherspoon replied with a glum look.

  George's expression conveyed his fury to the hundreds of men streaming along the dirt street in both directions; the early shift was leaving, the next arriving. George didn't care if they saw his anger. Most would have heard the detonation when the prototype columbiad exploded on the test ground chopped out of the mountainside in a high, remote corner of the property. The big eight-inch smoothbore, cast around a water-cooled core by Rodman's method, had destroyed its crude wooden carriage and driven iron fragments big as daggers into the thick plank barrier protecting the test observers.

  "I simply do not know," George's superintendent of works repeated. It was the second failure this week.

  "All right, we'll adjust the temperature and try again. We'll try till hell freezes. They're screaming for artillery to protect the East Coast, and one of the oldest ironworks in America can't turn out a single working gun. It's unbelievable."

  Wotherspoon cleared his throat. "No, George, you misapprehend. It is war production. So far as I know, this works has never manufactured cannon before."

  "But, by God, we should be able to master —"

  "We will master it, George." Wotherspoon weighted the second word. "We will meet the delivery date specified in the contract and do so with pieces that perform satisfactorily." He risked a smile. "I guarantee it because Mr. Stanley helped us win the bid, and I am not anxious to displease him."