Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

25

BIRTH, n. – The first and direst of all disasters.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

When I had reported my conversation with Amelia Brittain to Bierce, keeping my feelings to myself, he came out of his chair, clapping his hat on his head and beckoning me along with him. Mr. Brittain’s rejection of Beau McNair had caught his interest.

We hailed a hack to take us to Taylor Street. I had sworn I would never return there, but at least Amelia and Mrs. Brittain were not in evidence. The butler ushered us into Mr. Brittain’s study where his roll-topped desk was strewn with documents, and the glass-topped cases of gold nuggets gleamed in the afternoon light. I gritted my teeth to think of him selling his daughter into slavery because of the falling funds.

However, he wrung my hand as his daughter’s savior and greeted Bierce amiably, a tall, thin man with a Virginia City limp and financial difficulties.

When we were settled in chairs, Bierce said, “Mr. Brittain, we are trying to get to the bottom of these murderous slashings of prostitutes. Apparently the same fellow attacked your daughter.”

“Young Redmond was the hero in that encounter!” Mr. Brittain had not seated himself but moved among his cases with his hands clasped behind his back, his lined face solemn. He wore pince-nez spectacles that glinted in the sunlight through the window.

“There is a connection of playing cards to events in Virginia City twenty some years ago,” Bierce said.

Brittain halted to stare at him. ‘The Jack of Spades Mine.”

“Ah!”

“Had William Sharon any connection to the Jack of Spades, or Caroline LaPlante?”

Mr. Brittain’s features contracted into a startlingly ugly expression. “She detested him! She was not often treated as a low woman, but Sharon had done so. He engineered an enterprise she felt was below her, and he enjoyed her discomfiture.”

I saw Bierce digesting that. Mr. Brittain must mean the Lady Godiva ride through Virginia City. Or something else?

“You were a mining engineer there, sir,” Bierce said.

Brittain dipped his head in acknowledgment. There was no point of sitting in his chair hating him. These people were different from other people. Money made them different.

“You were employed by the late Nathaniel McNair?” Bierce asked.

“That is correct.”

“A pile-driver of a man, I should imagine.”

“A difficult man,” Brittain said. He paced, hands clasped behind his back. “It was his practice to make his associates feel small. He had an ability to estrange his friends while still binding them to him by various means.”

“Such as the invention of belittling nicknames,” Bierce said smoothly. “ ‘The Englishman’ in your case. And ‘English.’ ”

Mr. Brittain looked startled. “Now how would you know that, Mr. Bierce?”

“Tom, relate to Mr. Brittain the use of that name you encountered in the Washoe.”

I said, “It had to do with a scandal that took place at the Consolidated-Ohio. There was a complication of a claim being salted that was called ‘the English shuffle.’ Devers told me the term referred to someone of that name who devised a particular practice.”

Brittain backed away to seat himself in a leather chair. He removed his glasses from his nose with a good deal of process, folded them and slipped them into his breast pocket. His cheeks had reddened in unhealthy-looking stripes.

“It was a practice I had nothing to do with. It was a joke of Nat’s. A cruel joke. My reputation—” he started and stopped.

“Your good reputation is well known, sir,” Bierce said.

“Nat McNair was not an honest man,” Brittain said. “He was a true disciple of Will Sharon’s. He put out a great deal of rumor about drifting into a high-grade orebody. Then the rumor that the assay had been salted. These were cynical maneuvers, a dishonest, conniving business, and very effective. Mining stocks were extraordinarily volatile just then. The stock bottomed out and Nat was able to buy it up very cheaply.”

“There was a Bonanza after all?”

“Yes,” Brittain said.

“And your part?”

“I had been able to advise him that it looked like a considerable orebody.” He held his hands to his cheeks for a moment. “May I ask the purpose of these questions, Mr. Bierce?”

“Mr. Brittain, these murders seem to be the result of a vast degree of hatred and old rage. There is a plan and purpose to them we are as yet unable to discern.”

I could hear Mr. Brittain’s harsh breathing. “Why my daughter, Mr. Bierce?”

“I think it is not a connection with you, sir. But with Beau McNair and ultimately his mother.”

Brittain took his glasses from his pocket and began polishing the lenses with a bit of yellow cloth. “I am not proud of my connection with Nat McNair,” he said.

“What of your connection with Mrs. McNair?”

I watched Brittain’s hands halt in their employment.

“What connection can you mean, Mr. Bierce?”

“You have compelled your daughter to dissolve her engagement to Beau McNair.”

Brittain’s eyes swung toward me. He moistened his lips. “I believe the match would not be a happy one.”

Bierce’s voice was gentle. “I think your objection is because your daughter and Beau McNair are half brother and sister.”

Brittain closed his eyes.

“Am I correct in this assumption, sir?”

Brittain nodded tiredly. “Can this revelation go no further, gentlemen?”

“If that proves possible,” Bierce said.

Brittain looked at me and I nodded, dazed, thinking of Beau engaged to Amelia.

“She was pregnant by you, but she married Nat McNair.”

“She wished to be married, but I was not prepared to marry her,” Brittain said. “My family is a very proud and prominent one in New Hampshire, Mr. Bierce. It would not have done. I was tortured upon a rack.”

I thought of my offer to Amelia, which she had rejected knowing it was meaningless and impossible.

“She had been frightened by the murder of another woman in Virginia City,” I said.

Brittain nodded. “Julia Bulette. Yes.”

“But she thought you would marry her,” Bierce said.

“Yes, she thought that.”

“What did she do?”

Brittain replaced his glasses again. “She was determined to have the child, but it would not have done for her to appear pregnant, you see. Her position in Virginia City was such... she disappeared. I believe she went to Sacramento where there was a relative. I don’t know how Nat came into the picture. No doubt he had declared himself to her. She could have had any man she wished to choose, except for the one who failed her. It must have been that in her mood she chose the man of her acquaintance who seemed most likely to make a fortune, and one could foresee that Nat would be successful. He was lucky, he was clever, he was ruthless, and he was utterly determined.”

“And he took your son as his own.”

“Yes.”

Brittain’s face convulsed as though he were weeping without tears. His expression reminded me of Amelia; her father who would sacrifice her to the falling funds, but not to her half brother. Who remembered so passionately the painting of Highgrade Carrie as Lady Godiva.

Bierce sat thinking, the filtered sunlight silvering the curls of his graying fair hair. I could follow him so far. An English shuffle meant falsification of assay samples in conjunction with spreading dishonest rumors for the purpose of devaluing mining shares. Such a shuffle had given Nathaniel McNair control of the Consolidated-Ohio. I wondered how involved Mr. Brittain had actually been in the procedure.

He and Highgrade Carrie had been good friends, Amelia had said, but were friends no longer. He was uncomfortable with her return to San Francisco. A woman who had been the mother of his child.

“Lady Caroline Stearns is in danger,” Bierce said.

Brittain stared at Bierce. His face was graven with deep lines.

“And my daughter?”

“I think her danger is past. Now that she is no longer engaged to be married to young McNair, she is of no more interest to the Slasher.”

“So I have unwittingly removed Amelia from danger.”

“I think so,” Bierce said. He questioned Brittain about the mechanics by which Jennings and Macomber‌—‌my father‌—‌had been cheated of their interest in the Jack of Spades, but Brittain became monosyllabic and off the point, as though he was genuinely forgetful, or maybe merely distressed. It was as though he could not wait for us to be gone, and so we departed.

“He was in a panic,” Bierce said. “I wonder just how innocent this well regarded mining engineer was in the original shuffle, and I wonder if that could be a part of his disaffection with Carrie, that his daughter mentioned to you.”

“He refused to marry her,” I said. “And she made a better match.”

“A more lucrative slavery,” Bierce said.

Saturday evening when I came home my father was lounging in the Barnacles’ parlor in discussion with Jonas Barnacle. Belinda was seated primly in a straight chair beside the door, her polished shoes set side by side and her hands folded in her lap. She watched me enter with solemn eyes. Mrs. B., aproned, a blue scarf tied over her hair, glanced in from the next room.

My father wore a dark suit, boots and a florid tie with a diamond pin. Still jawing at Jonas Barnacle, he rose and put a possessive hand on my shoulder. The hand felt heavy as a sad-iron. He marched me outside.

“Tommy,” he said. “We are heading for the Bella Union Saturday night parade. I have tickets!”

We entered the Bella Union through a large barroom packed with men and were seated at a table on the lower level of the pretty little theater, below a stage with a garishly painted drop curtain. Behind and above us were curtained stalls like a receding wall of pigeonholes. We ordered Piscos and watched a madam enter leading her bevy of handsome girls in their finery, with bright mouths and bold eyes glancing right and left while the men clapped and catcalled. The madam herself was stout, with an imperial manner of directing her flock into their stall. These were not the middle-class young ladies of “the line” who had so impressed Amelia, but they were striking women with perfect toilettes also.

It was the regular Saturday night parade where the madams showed off their girls.

“I do fancy these flaunting doves,” my father confessed. “There is nothing like them in Sacramento. Women will simply not show bare arms in Sacramento.”

There was whistling from the barroom as a second madam led in her charges, this one tall with feathers nodding from her hat. Her girls were indeed bare-armed, and proud in their paint and vivid fabrics, their boots crackling on the wooden floor. They were accompanied by more whistling from the barroom. The second group disappeared into their stall as a third group appeared. My father clapped for the feather-boaed madam with her blazing smile for the men appreciating her girls.

I thought of Caroline LaPlante as a madam in Virginia City, whose beauty and style had captured the town, and whose own heart had been captured by a man whose station would not allow him to marry a low woman.

And Amelia’s responsibility was to marry a wealthy man. Aristocrats!

More whores passed in a cloud of perfumery, giggling, rustling fabrics, noisy boots. The gaslights gleamed on the flesh of their necks and arms.

“Other places,” the Gent said, “the fancy women dress like the society women. In San Francisco it’s the other way round.”

Including Sibyl Sanderson, who preferred to dress like a Parisian demimondaine. I could inform Amelia that I was aware of the ironies of my father’s views compared to her own, if I were ever to see her again.

Another bouquet of women made its entrance.

“I believe it does a man good to watch pretty women in their little boots,” my father said.

The curtain was raised to reveal a half-circle of male and female performers. The women’s outfits were as skimpy as those of the whores were lush. There was laughter and applause.

I could feel the heat from the gaslamps that illuminated the stage. A fat comedian told jokes with gestures I found distasteful.

The Gent leaned toward me. His expression was one of more sorrow than anger. “I heard you had some trouble, Son,” he said.

“I would be sorry to learn you sent those ruffians after me, Pa.”

He leaned toward me with a hand cupped to his ear, for the band had struck up a din of music, “What were you doing at a meeting like that anyhow? True Blue Democrats! The Boss and Sam Rainey are common malefactors, my boy!”

“Well, you work for uncommon ones.”

“Tommy, those fine gents make our livings along with theirs. They make the state a better place! The railroad is like a mess of arteries that brings the blood to the organs and members, to the fingers and the head and the John Thomas. Without it you have just got nothing at all!

“Look at these folks you think you like! They have got their fingers in every till. Look at this business with the school board! Your Chris Buckley, the Blind Boss! He is not so blind as not to know the color of greenback dollars. How much do those dummies pay Buckley to be on the school board and pick the public’s pocket? The Water Board? The mayor!”

“How much does the Railroad pay Senator Jennings to front up the Girtcrest Corridor Bill?”

“But that is to the benefit of this great state!”

“It is to the benefit of Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Collis Huntington. Will you tell me Senator Jennings is trying to make the Nation great?”

“Son, son,” my father said and swung around to guffaw at the latest sally from the jokester on the stage. This one wore a hat too small for him and a long necktie, the end of which hung out of his trouser cuff. There was laughter also from the stalls where the madams had arrayed their girls.

The show of prostitutes at the Bella Union was not what I wanted to be watching when my heart was broken.

When the Gent turned back, he said, “Jennings had this painting in his office at the legislature. Lady didn’t just have bare arms, she was bare all over. Horseback lady. My, she was a pure vision!”

I felt the hairs at the back of my neck prickle. “Lady Godiva,” I said.

“Lady Godiva was what she was outfitted as! He had so many complaints from his constituents he had to take her down.”

Constituents who didn’t object to Jennings in the pay of the Railroad but did object to bare female flesh in his offices.

“What did he do with the painting?”

“Got rid of it, I guess,” the Gent said, frowning. “He’d bought it from the Bucket of Blood there in Virginia City that had commissioned it.”

“It was Highgrade Carrie, wasn’t it?”

I thought he hadn’t heard me, in another burst of laughter around us. But after a moment he looked back at me solemnly. “Yes, it was, Son.”

I had not yet presented the information on the painting of High-grade Carrie as Lady Godiva to Bierce.

“Set up by Senator Sharon, as I understand it.”

“It seems you have learned a good deal about Virginia City twenty years ago, Son.”

“I’ve learned that Senator Jennings is a murderer,” I said. “Bierce is going to prove it.”

The Gent did not respond to that, looking troubled. The slashes of white in his whiskers caught the light. I swigged the sour Pisco Punch.

A troupe of dancers had come onstage, waving flags in a flurry of red and white stripes, and prancing with plump legs in tights to the beat and horns of the overly enthusiastic band of music. There was a great deal of whistling.

I said, looking my father straight in the face, “Maybe when you are young you are more concerned with right and wrong. Do you still think about right and wrong?”

“Maybe I have got a more comprehensive view of what it is, Son. Mr. Bierce has got it screwed up so tight it strictures him bad, it seems to me.”

“Do you think it is right for Senator Jennings to murder Judge Hamon’s widow?”

His face slumped. After a long moment, he said, “No, I don’t.”

I thought I had spoiled his evening at the Bella Union, and I was not enjoying the show either. Amelia admitting she was for sale like any one of these painted women had screwed my insides so tight as to stricture me badly.

“Pa,” I said. “Why did men change their names on the Washoe?”

“Same reason they changed their name when they came West. Forty-niners changed their names too. Change their life. Change their luck. Trouble with the law. Trouble at home. Complications with women.”

I couldn’t bring myself to ask which had been his reason.

“Did you know Highgrade Carrie well?”

“Not so well,” he said. “Admired her till she and Nat and Will got together for the euchre. But I expect that was Nat’s doing. I will admit there’ve been some hard feelings.” He chuckled unhappily. “Well, she brought some mementoes of the Washoe to that wedding.”

The word snapped in my head like a cap pistol.

“Momentoes,” I said shakily. “How would you spell that?”

“How would you spell it, Son? You are the educated fellow here.”

I spelled m-o-m-e-n-t-o.

“That’d be it,” he said. “Why?”

“No reason,” I said.

We stuck it through to the flag-waving end. When we left through the barroom I saw a familiar face. It was Beau with his fair-bearded cheeks and a gray muffler around his neck. I thought he had seen me, but he made no sign of recognition. The muffler and the ill-fitting jacket must be his disguise for the “researches” Amelia had mentioned.

“Who was that fellow?” the Gent wanted to know, when we had come out onto the street.

“That is the British gentleman Beaumont McNair,” I said. “The son of Lady Caroline Stearns.”

I thought for a moment he was going to insist on going back to introduce himself.