Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

18

LITIGATION, n. – A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

At this time, in Superior Court in City Hall, what was to become the sideshow of the decade was in progress: the Rose of Sharon. In Sharon v. Sharon, Sarah Althea Hill, claiming to be Mrs. Sharon, was suing the Senator and former King of the Comstock for divorce and a settlement, with the accusation of adultery because Sharon had admitted paternity to a child delivered of one Gertrude Dietz.

Miss Hill’s supporters in the case were an Australian journalist of a shadowy past, William N. Neilson, her lawyer, George Washington Tyler and Mammy Pleasant. Judge David S. Terry was her new legal adviser.

Allie Hill had been one of Mammy Pleasant’s young women.

Central to the case were several letters in which Sharon had addressed Miss Hill as “My Dear Wife,” and a marriage contract written by the lady and signed by William Sharon. Allie Hill had been Sharon’s mistress for some years. She lived in the Grand Hotel, across New Montgomery Street from the Palace, where Sharon kept a suite, and visited her aging lover or husband by means of the “Bridge of Sighs” passageway over the street.

“It is interesting,” Bierce said, “that a gentleman can have had any number of adulterous affairs and still be considered an honest and upright man, while one lover will turn a lady disreputable in all her concerns.”

“It is unfair,” I said.

“What seems crucial in this case is the marriage contract, composed and written by the lady, and signed by Sharon. Oddly his signature appears at the top of the reverse of the page. Any idiot knows not to sign a blank sheet of paper at the bottom.”

Miss Hill claimed that Senator Sharon had desired that their marriage be kept secret because Gertie Dietz would make trouble if he and Miss Hill were openly married. The scandal might interfere with his reelection.

A striking Fats Chubb cartoon in The Hornet showed the auburn-haired Sarah Althea Hill, her male supporters and a skinny black Mammy Pleasant jauntily carrying a basket filled with babies. This was a reference to Mammy Pleasant’s reputation as a baby-farmer.

Mammy Pleasant had admitted to having furnished the “sinews of war” for the suit, its financing, and daily accompanied Miss Hill to City Hall in a fancy hired barouche.

“What we have here,” Bierce went on, “is a confounding of the theory of oppositions. Because Senator Sharon is a bloodsucking, debauched monster does not mean that his enemy is not a perjurious harlot. The devil’s horns on one side of an equation does not guarantee a halo on the opposite.”

A very different Mammy Pleasant from the one we had encountered in the Bell mansion arrived at Bierce’s office. She wore a handsome green cloak and a deep poke bonnet and greeted Bierce and me with a seemingly genuine smile on her dark face. Bierce proceeded in his courtly way to see her seated and settled. When she noticed the skull, she crossed herself. Bierce sat down facing her.

“I have been thinking of the matter with which you are concerned, Mr. Bierce,” she said.

Bierce laid the palms of his hands together and propped his chin on the fingers.

“Mrs. McNair’s marriage, the child and the child’s paternity,” she continued.

It was interesting that Mammy Pleasant should be speaking of babies when a color cartoon in the current issue of The Hornet depicted her carrying a basket full of them.

“So much talk of babies and paternity these days,” Bierce said, smiling.

Mammy Pleasant nodded. “I have recalled that Senator Sharon was in Virginia City at the time of Mrs. McNair’s conception.”

“It seems that almost everyone in the world was in Virginia City at that time,” Bierce said. “Senator Sharon, Judge Terry, Mark Twain at the Territorial Enterprise, and so on.”

“Senator Sharon was a friend and counselor to Mr. McNair,” Mammy Pleasant said. “I have heard that in Virginia City a man prospered or failed at Senator Sharon’s favor. Mr. McNair prospered.”

“Mrs. Pleasant, is this to suggest that Senator Sharon’s favor extended so far as Mrs. McNair’s womb?”

“That is for you to consider, Mr. Bierce.”

“Could this visit, and this information, have anything to do with the proceedings presently taking place in Superior Court?”

She looked sour. “We would be pleased for your good opinion, Mr. Bierce. Yours is a voice that is listened to in the City.”

“I see.”

“When you called on me the other day, I thought: what have I to gain by assisting Mr. Bierce with the information he seeks? I could think of nothing to be gained.”

“You would think it inappropriate to furnish information without some quid pro quo?”

“I do not know Latin, Mr. Bierce, but I take your meaning. Yes, that is correct. That is the way I have learned to conduct my affairs in San Francisco.”

“And the information with which you hope to enlist my good opinion is the fact that Senator Sharon was in Virginia City at the time that Mrs. McNair conceived?”

“I believe you are looking for the true father of the young Mr. McNair, and I suggest you consider Senator Sharon, who was a close friend and business associate of Mr. and Mrs. McNairs’.”

“Thank you,” Bierce said. “I believe you would also find it helpful to the proceedings in Superior Court if Senator Sharon was revealed as having taken part in even more adulterous affairs, with issue, than he is now renowned for.”

“You leap to conclusions, Mr. Bierce.”

“A rather short leap, madam.”

She smiled again from Bierce to me, gathered up her large handbag and departed.

“Time cannot wither, nor custom stale, that essential malevolence,” Bierce sighed, when the sound of her steps had disappeared down the hall.

“Jimmy Fairleigh mentioned Sharon,” I said.

“We know that Sharon fathered Gertie Dietz’s child,” Bierce said. “Although fatherhood is not uncommon, as I understand it.”

“No.”

“What that woman carries in her very large handbag is a supply of red herrings,” Bierce said.

I had attended one of the early court sessions. The courtroom was crowded because the case was a sensation, a high-ceilinged room with great windows pouring in western sunlight, and Judge Finn on the bench. Sarah Althea Hill’s lawyer, Mr. Tyler, was notable for his chestful of beard, and Sharon’s, a General Barnes, for mustaches which would cause him to have to pass through narrow doorways sideways. Sharon, a grizzled little man with a big head, sat grimly at one table. Miss Hill, in blue velvet faced with dark fur, and a blue hat with a veil that concealed her face, was a slim figure seated in a kind of galvanic stillness beside Mammy Pleasant.

The proceedings that day had to do with a document in the case, which Miss Hill stood before the court to draw from her bosom.

“Judge,” she said in a tremulous voice. “This paper is my honor. I cannot leave it out of my hands.”

“Just show it to Mr. Barnes,” the Judge said.

“If your honor will take the responsibility upon yourself and compel me to, I will deliver the document.”

“I cannot take any responsibility,” the judge said. “Is the paper inside this envelope?”

“I desire that neither Mr. Sharon nor Mr. Barnes should handle it. I consider it my honor and have regarded it as my honor for three long years. Mr. Sharon knows all about it.”

General Barnes said pompously, “I object to this lady standing there and making these statements. Mr. Sharon knows nothing about it. It is a fraud and a forgery from end to end.”

“He knows every word in this paper, so help me God. He dictated it to me.”

Mammy Pleasant was half-rising and subsiding in her chair, in anxiety or support.

Senator Sharon climbed to his feet. “I tell the Court this is the damndest lie that was ever uttered on this earth!”

“I do not like to offend Your Honor,” Miss Hill said with dignity. “But he has got his millions against me. I have been driven from my home. He has taken my money, and I have got no money to defend myself with.”

There was a good deal more wrangling before Miss Hill surrendered the paper to the clerk who was ordered to have a copy made.

I dug through files to look over Senator Sharon’s history. He had indeed been a presence in Virginia City during the ‘60s. William Ralston of the Bank of California was his benefactor, appointing him the bank’s agent on the Washoe. Sharon made his fortune there. Mineowners had exhausted capital and credit, and the quartz mills had been so hastily constructed that many of them were unworkable. So many claims were in litigation that the courts were paralyzed. Virginia City, at the time of Sharon’s arrival, was a bankrupt camp sitting on a billion-dollar orebody. With unlimited credit from the Bank of California, Sharon began purchasing shares in the most promising mines and mills by taking over their paper from the overburdened local banks, and issuing credit at reduced rates of interest. He foreclosed like a thunderclap on nonpayment. His instincts and intuition were almost perfect. With Ralston and Darius Mills he organized the Union Mill & Mining Company to take over properties foreclosed by the Bank. He built the railroad to Carson City and Reno, controlling the traffic to Mount Davidson, and thus became one of the West’s transportation magnates. He had spies to sniff out strikes that were made in competing mines, he engaged in titanic struggles for control through stock acquisitions, he boomed stocks so that their prices swooped up and down like swallows, he made secret deals between mills and mines to hide real value by spreading rumors of bonanza and borrasca. He was the most cynical manipulator of all the Comstock manipulators. At the zenith of his power and wealth he controlled the Union Mill & Mining Company and the railroad and owned seven producing silver mines, including the Ophir, which he had snatched away from Lucky Baldwin.

He was known as the “King of the Comstock,” the “California Croesus,” and the “Bonanza Senator.” The Nevada legislature sent him to the senate in 1875.

He profited hugely on the fall of his mentor, William Ralston, who drowned in a swimming accident or committed suicide when the Bank of California closed its doors in the panic of 1875. Sharon succeeded not only to the control of the reopened Bank, but to Ralston’s last great project, the Palace Hotel, and even to Ralston’s country estate at Belmont. Many blamed him for Ralston’s ruin. Ralston’s empire had collapsed, it was said, because his closest friends, Sharon and Darius Mills, had plotted his ruin.

Sharon kept an apartment at the Palace, entertained lavishly at Belmont and indulged his taste for quoting Shakespeare and Lord Byron. He was a pale, chilly little man with a big head, overly neat, always tight-fisted, generally disliked. His daughter Flora married a genuine British aristocrat, Sir Thomas George Fermor-Hesketh, in a splendid affair at Belmont.

His wife had died in 1874 after a marriage of trying to ignore her husband’s infidelities. While he was making his millions he found time for many adulterous affairs, and he was famous for his penchant for high-class prostitutes. He was often to be seen in the company of glittering young females. He kept a number of mistresses.

The first salvo of the senator’s problems with his most troublesome mistress, Sarah Althea Hill, came at his daughter Flora’s wedding, when Miss Hill was physically barred from the grand event. Sarah Althea claimed she had a right to attend as a member of the family.

In September of 1883 Sharon was arrested for adultery, out of which came two current court cases, Sharon v. Sharon in State Superior Court, in which Sarah Althea Hill sued for divorce, a division of property and alimony, and Sharon v. Hill in Federal Circuit Court, which had jurisdiction because Sharon was a citizen of Nevada, in which the senator sued to have the marriage contract declared false and fraudulent and to enjoin Miss Hill from claiming to be his wife. There were to be peripheral suits for perjury, forgery, slander, libel, conspiracy and embezzlement. Sharon v. Sharon and Sharon v. Hill would be fought in California courts for almost ten years.

Bierce wrote in Tattle, “The testimony this week in the Sharon trial must be of intense interest to the readers of dime-novels. The colossal nastiness of the events divulged is the most impressive feature. The thought of a delectable young person such as Miss Hill falling into the arms of a noxious old debauchee like Senator Sharon is as revolting as is the Christian religion in the hands of Washington Street evangelists.”

Pusey approached along the hallway at his stately gait and turned into Bierce’s office to greet Bierce and me. He seated himself, his cap under his arm, and announced that that was a pretty scene in Superior Court. I was not summoned to join this conversation but observed it from my end of the office. I tried to set my face so as not to glower at Pusey across the office, though I didn’t mind touching my head where I had been whacked certainly on his order.

“Never heard so many lies told quite so fast in all my life,” Pusey said.

Bierce clicked his tongue. He wore the expression of extreme politeness that he assumed when there was a danger his feelings would show. He did not like Captain Pusey.

“Whose lies, Captain?”

“That Hill woman is one fast-talker. And temper! She’s telling lies and she’s got another young lady telling lies, and a young fellow, and two colored girls, all telling lies. I hear the Senator is paying a thousand dollars a day defending himself against those lies.”

“No lies on his side?” Bierce said.

“Too busy brushing them off himself to tell any lies.”

“Seems to me there was a young fellow that got caught in some lies saying he had had a relation with Miss Hill.”

Pusey clucked and patted his white mane. “The Senator is paying out good money trying to nail down those lies that woman’s suborned those people to tell about him.”

“Paying money, is he?” Bierce said.

Pusey nodded. “He’s got his lines out, he has. He didn’t make himself twenty millions laying down and letting people walk over him.”

I thought Pusey might be one of the lines Senator Sharon had out.

“He don’t like people calling him names the way some have done,” he said.

“As I have done?” Bierce said.

“That’s right,” Pusey said, displaying his splendid teeth. “Mr. Bierce, you get so many people stamping mad at you I can’t be responsible for what happens.”

“I understand that Miss Hill has charged him with adultery with nine women,” Bierce said.

“Now, you know that is lies. He is a little old chap, he is sixty-four years old!”

“Five or six would be more accurate, you mean.”

Pusey blew his breath out in irritation.

“Mr. Bierce, she is going to lose this case and end up in the hoosegow for perjury. The Senator is going to win it, and he is going to remember who was a help to him and who wasn’t.”

“Memory like an elephant, I understand,” Bierce said.

Pusey scowled at him.

“Now, Captain Pusey,” Bierce said. “Don’t I recollect that Senator Sharon has been one of the most active adulterers in this sinful city?”

“Where it comes to nookie, I always say all bets are off,” Pusey said. He showed his teeth again. “You have done pretty well along those lines yourself, Mr. Bierce.”

Bierce composed his face.

“Now what do you know about the senator in Virginia City, Captain?” he said. “Wasn’t he scampering after loose women there also?”

“Not my jurisdiction, Mr. Bierce, if you know what I mean.” Pusey brought his fat watch out of his pocket and scowled at it.

“I understand Mammy Pleasant has been to call,” he said, switching the subject.

“That is correct,” Bierce said.

“You know this is all her put in. She has laid out the money, she has furnished her lawyer to represent the young woman. George Washington Tyler, that old shyster! And Judge Terry too! Senator Sharon is not going to forget that.”

“He had better be careful.”

“Now why is that, Mr. Bierce?”

“I understand Mrs. Pleasant is a voodoo person. Charms, potions, sticking needles in dolls, tricks like that.”

Pusey harrumphed at that, not knowing whether Bierce was serious or not.

“You have been employed by the Senator, is that so?” Bierce asked.

“I’m an employee of the City of San Francisco!” Pusey said indignantly.

When he had gone, Bierce said, “That is a pair I would not like to give aid and comfort to.”

“Senator Sharon and Captain Pusey.”

“We may still gain some information from Mammy Pleasant,” he said. “But we can be certain we will have nothing from Pusey.”

“What will we do about finding out if there is a connection between Sharon and Carrie LaPlante?”

“We will just have to ask her,” Bierce said.