Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

27

EDUCATION, n. – That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

Sgt. Nix arrived at The Hornet with the latest news from Old City Hall.

“Bos Curtis come in the station like a wagonload of wildcats,” he said. “There was fur flying in the Captain’s office.”

“Is it a fact that Pusey has a witness to Rachel LeVigne’s murder?” Bierce asked.

“Fellow named Horswill. Showed him the photograph and he said it was Beau McNair, all right. And Mr. R. Buckle had sworn false that Beau was with him.”

“Pusey was waiting to broach that to Lady Caroline?”

Nix managed to shrug and nod at the same time.

Bierce said, “I imagine Curtis told Pusey what he would do to Edith Pruitt, and this Horswill, on the witness stand‌—‌as identifiers of photographs. Not to speak of why the Captain chose to show Beau McNair’s photograph in the first place.”

I wondered aloud if police were stationed at the McNair mansion.

“The lady don’t want anybody there,” Nix said. “I understand the place is forted up pretty good from back when those Sandlotters would mob up on Nob Hill and raise the dickens. Your pal Klosters has been there,” he added.

“Tom and I have been invited to call upon Lady Caroline after supper tonight,” Bierce said.

“Wouldn’t it be better for you to go alone?” I asked, when Nix had departed.

“I want you to observe. You will be listening, to her and to me, in order to inform me later of anything I may have missed.”

At nine o’clock we rolled up California Street in a hack, jolted when the horse’s hoofs slipped on the paving stones, the hackie cursing and using his whip. We came out among the edifices of the Big Four, passing the Crocker mansion with its scrollwork facade and its tower, and the loom of the spite-fence beyond it. A fog bank blocked out the lights of the western part of the City.

I said, “It must have been frightening for the Nobs when the Workingmen were rallying up here.”

“Denis Kearney versus Charles Crocker,” Bierce said. “Property rights versus workingman’s rights. Think of the rights that have been abused in struggles over rights! Wars are caused by rights. The rights of the Negro, the rights of slaveholders. The Fugitive Slave Law! How could our legislative chambers have given birth to such a monstrosity? I say down with rights!”

The hack clattered on. “What you come to,” Bierce said gloomily, “is finally that nothing matters. Nothing. The passing scene is to be watched, and ridiculed, but it is not to be felt, for there is nothing worth feeling. We are as flies to wanton boys, et cetera.”

It seemed to be the theory of social comedy that Amelia had enunciated, but with despair instead of irony. I felt a continuing smothering anger over what she had called her responsibility. I regarded that feeling as important, even though it made me miserable.

“I hold that there are emotions worth feeling,” I said.

“Just what moves the sleeping lion in your heart?”

I said I had been informed by Amelia Brittain that she was required to marry a wealthy man because of her father’s financial situation, and the sensations were painful but honorably felt.

“My dear fellow, what did you expect?” Bierce said kindly. “You have read too many novels. They reinforce the preposterous view of the happy ending.”

“If nothing matters, why is it important to find out who murdered three whores?” I asked.

“It is not important, it is only interesting,” Bierce said. “It is a puzzle to be solved.”

“Why is it important to confound the Railroad?”

“It is not important, it is only gratifying,” Bierce said.

“Well,” I said. “Gratification is something felt.”

Bierce laughed. “I am sorry about Miss Brittain. She is a charming young woman, and no femininny if she knows her fate.”

“Her happy ending,” I said, bitterly.

The rig rolled on among the mansions that loomed like ancient monsters frozen in an ice age. There was some traffic of buggies and other hacks with their lamps burning, an occasional spark from metal rims on paving stones. The fog bank surged up toward us, but the sensation was of the world turning slowly to deposit us in that gray, damp maw.

The McNair mansion was one of the lesser beasts, first and second floor windows alight in the fog, misty reflected gleams dancing off the fence against a dense darkness of shrubbery. The hackie turned in under the lights of the porte cochere, where we were let off.

The heavyset butler with patent-leather hair bowed us inside. He showed us up a curving flight of stairs as broad as Morton Street, which we mounted under the glowering eyes of the portrait of Nathaniel McNair, and into a room brilliant with glowing balls of light. The butler directed Bierce to a noble overstuffed chair, and me to a divan of fat pillows. Then he poured port from a cut-glass decanter. I saw that one glass had already been filled, resting on a low table beside a chaise longue across the room.

We hurried to our feet as Lady Caroline Stearns entered.

She wore a long gown embroidered in gilt and silver, high necked, long sleeved. Within the stiff fabric there was a sense of her body in motion independent of the material that covered her. She crossed to us to greet Bierce, with a welcoming motion of her hand to me. Her hair was brushed up into a burnished knot at the back of her head above a slender neck. Her complexion was pale, no doubt with powders, her mouth tinted, her eyes a calm blue surveying us. She was no longer young, but she was very beautiful.

“Please sit down, Mr. Bierce, Mr. Redmond.” She swept on across the parquet to recline on the chaise longue. I felt in her presence a queer diminution of Bierce’s force, almost a shyness.

There was a moment of silence, each of us with a glass of port raised as though in a toast.

“It is time to talk about Virginia City,” Bierce said.

She inclined her neat chin in what must be assent.

“You were greatly loved there, madam.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Yet there has been a continuing hatred. I assume that is because of the manipulations of ownership of the Jack of Spades Mine.”

“There were investors who had cause to feel they had been cheated,” Lady Caroline said. The elegant folds of her heavy gown made me conscious of her reclining body and reminded me of Annie Dunker in her shift.

“Adolphus Jackson, Albert Gorton, and a man named Macomber,” Bierce said. “Of these, E. O. Macomber seems to have disappeared. Detective Sergeant Nix has made some efforts to find him, with no result. Albert Gorton is apparently dead. The latter, who was an accessory to the Jack of Spades ‘shuffle,’ may have been murdered because he became an embarrassment to your late husband.”

“That is an unfounded assumption, Mr. Bierce.”

“It is not even an assumption.”

“Mr. Bierce, I cannot believe that any of these men are so consumed with old wrongs that they would begin the conspiracy of revenge against me of which you seem convinced.”

“Will you accept the fact that there has indeed been a conspiracy?”

“I suppose I must.”

“That you are in danger?”

She inclined her coiffed head silently.

“There is another matter than the Jack of Spades Mine, madam,” Bierce said. “It is the paternity of your son.”

She lifted a hand to a bell that hung from a braided rope. The butler appeared. “Cigars, if you please, Marvins.”

The butler brought a silver-chased humidor from a sideboard and offered it to Bierce and to me. Bierce took one, I declined. Marvins returned the humidor and carried to Lady Caroline a small box of Egyptian cigarettes. She chose one, and he lighted it for her with a flourish, then came to light Bierce’s cigar. The smoke from the cigarette was a paler hue than that of the cigar, coiling upward from the tan tube between her fingers.

I thought the distribution of smokes had given Lady Caroline time to prepare herself.

“Mr. Brittain is convinced that he was the father,” Bierce said. “But I have had a communication to the effect that that may not be the case.”

“May I ask from whom this communication was received?” Lady Caroline asked. She braced an elbow on the chaise in order to raise her hand to hold the cigarette six inches from her lips.

“That is unimportant,” Bierce said. “But I hope you will be forthcoming in the matter.”

I could see her gown move with her breathing. “There was a murder,” she said. “A friend of mine was horribly murdered‌—‌not slashed, in case you should leap to a conclusion. It was a violent time, a violent place. All at once that violence quite overwhelmed me. I had had proposals of marriage. It seemed that a signal had been given that I had better accept one of them and end the life I had been leading before that life ended me.

“James Brittain was the first choice,” she said. “Nat McNair the last.”

I wondered who had been in between.

“But I believe neither of them was actually the father of your child,” Bierce said.

“Mr. Bierce, will you embarrass me into revealing the fact that I am uncertain?”

“This determination may be essential to the solution of these murders, madam.”

“I admit I informed James Brittain that he was the father. That was because I had decided to accept his proposal. He was a gentleman, a cultivated man. He proved to be a four-flusher, however.” She laughed lightly.

I thought her ease and calm were pretense.

“Was Senator Sharon one of the possibilities of fatherhood?”

“In one regard I may be uncertain, but in the other I am very certain. No, he was not.”

“Was he one of those offering proposals?”

“Only a proposition,” she said. “It would have resulted in a relation very like the one in which the valiant Miss Sarah Althea Hill became dissatisfied. My inclination was for marriage.

“Mr. Bierce, allow me to say this,” she continued. “It may be an excess of pride on my part, but I do not believe I am to blame for the Jack of Spades contrivances. It was Nat’s doing. It was the kind of proceeding that he became famous for. No doubt he learned it from William Sharon. I believe my role must be described as passive. Can it be that you should extend your researches beyond this little circle of five people?”

“It is possible,” Bierce said, without, I thought, meaning it. “Is it possible that Macomber changed his name, as Jackson changed his?”

I felt an invisible weight press on my shoulders. Lady Caroline sighed and shrugged in her gilt and silver casing.

“What was Macomber like, Lady Caroline?” I asked.

Her blue eyes shifted toward me, blinking as though she had difficulty changing their focus. “He was a pleasant young man, rather talkative. I don’t remember much more about him, Mr. Redmond.”

“How did the five of you, who joined together to purchase the Jack of Spades, know each other?”

She blew smoke before addressing my question. “We were friends.”

Clients? Customers? “The woman who was murdered was Julia Bulette?”

She looked suddenly wary. “Yes. She was a friend also, a business friend but a good friend, a good woman, a good, good friend.”

“Might she have been included among the Spades?”

“There was a blackball system. She had been blackballed.”

“May I ask by whom?”

She considered, her eyes slitted against the smoke. “It would have been my husband.”

“Why would it have been, madam?” Bierce said.

“Mr. Bierce, I will confess something to you. I wonder if it will even surprise you. Nat McNair was a cruel, dishonest, coldhearted, ungrateful monster who never forgave a slight or forgot to remember a favor.”

“Why did you marry him, madam?”

“I thought he would become the richest man in California.” She uttered a small laugh. “He did not quite achieve that goal, but his achievement was impressive. I earned my share of it.”

I thought she did not mean by her part in the Jack of Spades contrivances.

“Why was Will Sharon not an investor in the Jack of Spades?”

“Why does this name continue to come up in our conversation? Senator Sharon was and is a detestable man. I hope Miss Hill wins her case and takes half of his millions away from him.”

She leaned back in the chaise as though satisfied with her denunciation. Bierce inquired what her son might be blamed for.

“As I have learned, he was adopted by Mr. McNair some months after he was born. He lived in San Francisco in circumstances of increasing wealth until he was ten or eleven‌—‌when he and James Brittain’s daughter were sweethearts.”

Lady Caroline nodded, leaking smoke through her nostrils.

“Did you approve of that connection?” Bierce asked.

“Not particularly, Mr. Bierce. Not at all, in fact.”

“Her father did not approve of it because he thought them brother and sister.”

Lady Caroline sipped her port, her cigarette smoking between the fingers of her other hand. They seemed to me defensive devices, as her embroidered gown was a kind of cage of armor.

“I know of your son’s troubles in London, by the way,” Bierce said.

“He was victimized by false friends. I do not excuse him, mind you.” Even when she spoke with force there was a serenity to her words that seemed to me the product of a considerable will. She addressed herself to me:

“Mr. Redmond, I would prefer that any further confidences be revealed only to Mr. Bierce.”

“Certainly,” I said, rising. “Lady Caroline, I bring a message from Jimmy Fairleigh in Virginia City. He asked me to tell you that he will never forget you.”

The beautiful mask suddenly became an unhappy human face. Her lips parted, her eyes flared at me, lines showed in her throat.

“That sweet unfortunate boy! What is he doing, please?”

“He is a waiter at the International Hotel there.”

“And the mines are closing down. The town must be dying. I must do something for him!” she whispered, and the mask reformed itself. I bade her good night.

Marvins showed me into another sitting room downstairs and busied himself lighting lamps and bringing me another glass of port. I had difficulty sitting still, and the wine seemed an overly heavy and sweet appurtenance of aristocracy. After twenty minutes I asked Marvins to tell Bierce I was taking the air and went outside into the brisk damp, to walk along the McNair brass fence toward the top of Taylor Street hill, where a single streetlamp shed a circle of pale illumination in the fog, as though its flame burned under water.

I stopped before I reached a point where I could look down on the Brittain house and retraced my steps toward the porte cochere. I turned again just in time to see a figure detach itself from the shrubbery, straddle the fence and hurry away from me. As he passed under the streetlight he glanced back and I thought I caught a glimpse of a glint of fair beard.

When Bierce joined me I told him I had seen Beau leave the house.

“I believe it could not have been Beau you saw,” he said. “He was playing chess with Rudolph Buckle in the Billiard Room.”

“Did you see him?” I asked.

“No,” he said thoughtfully.

“But Beau was the subject of our conversation,” he went on. “You said once that Miss Brittain had spoken of his researches. He is obsessed with prostitutes. Lady Caroline is disturbed by this and fears he may get himself into trouble again as he did in London. The fact is, he is in trouble! And how can I discuss with her the probability that his obsession stems from his knowledge of his mother’s former profession? Now he is infatuated with a young Chinese woman, no doubt a prostitute.”

“She is in danger from the Slasher, then,” I said.

We started back down California Street toward the lights of Chinatown beneath us.

“There was a general obsession with Chinese prostitutes in the old days,” Bierce went on. “It is still the case! Every yokel who comes to the City must see for himself. The burning question is not What is man? or Why are we here? but Does the Chinese female possess a different arrangement of sexual apparatus than her white sister? Imagine it! Ah Toy is reputed to have made her fortune by this quest for the essential knowledge. Her price list read ‘Two bits lookee, four bits feelee, six bits doee.’ And I believe the bulk of her fortune came in the satisfaction of the lookees.” He laughed, striding along at his military gait. He seemed pleased with himself.

He announced that he wished to smoke a few pipes of opium, and he commanded me to accompany him. He needed my counsel.

We descended into Chinatown, where he seemed familiar with an odoriferous alley off Kearny Street. This was not one of the tourist opium dens. We descended four brick steps and passed along a mossy wall in a play of shadows as dense as black velvet. I could smell the opium before we got to the door of the parlor, that pervasive odor that reminds you of something you can’t quite recall. An old Chinese bowed us inside. In an outer room six men, not all Chinese, lay on wooden bunks alcoved into the wall, jackets hanging beside their heads, which rested on leather-covered bricks. Smoke massed gray against the painted ceiling. On the wall was a price list in English and Chinese, for small pipes and large. In an inner chamber was a cot with a taboret beside it, a lamp burning on the table. The old Chinaman indicated this. Bierce, in turn, pointed me to a straight chair, which I pulled over.

“Tell me everything you know, saw, heard, thought‌—‌everything,” he said. “Not just tonight. Everything. There is something I’ve missed. Just keep talking.”

I began talking.

A younger Celestial in a pink silk shirt with decorative frogs down the front appeared and, squatting, kneaded a ball of dark brown gum over a flame until it began to bubble and then plunged it into the bowl of the pipe, which Bierce inhaled. The first pipe seemed to take only moments, and the young man went through the preparations for the second. I inhaled free smoke. Bierce had removed his coat and loosened his tie. It was the first time I had seen him with his collar button undone.

“Continue!” he commanded.

I pulled from my memory everything I knew about the murders, the trip to the Washoe, the tintype of the Spades, the interview with Pusey, my conversations with Amelia and her father. But not with my father, E. O. Macomber, who had written the Former-Spade letter to Bierce.

Bierce smoked the second pipe, and a third. “Does Amelia have brothers?” he asked.

She had a brother named Richard, whom I’d glimpsed at the Firemen’s Ball and who was studying at the Sheffield School at Yale.

“And she has an uncle, who is her father’s twin, and whom Beau resembles?”

“Amelia does not think he does.”

I told Bierce about seeing Beau at the Bella Union, and catching sight in Battery Street of the painting of Lady Caroline as Lady Godiva‌—‌which Mr. Brittain had described and which was apparently Senator Jennings’s property. Bierce demanded a description of the man carrying the painting to safety, which description I was unable to supply other than that the fellow had been young.

There were more questions, all with no apparent focus to them.

After what seemed hours of my increasingly dry-mouthed account, Bierce muttered in Chinese to the young man, who bowed and retired. Presently a female entered. I was shocked to see that she was an Oriental prostitute in a short white shift. She had a piquant face, slit-eyed, with high cheekbones. A gap between her front teeth gave her an attractive hoydenish appearance. She squatted to prepare what I counted as the fifth pipe and tossed her head at me with a smoldering eye.

I went out into the common room where I stood ill-at-ease and angry among the recumbent smokers, and their attendants moving the dim light. I felt trapped in the wrong place and time, breathing smoke of which I disapproved even as I felt drowsy from its fumes.

I had not told Bierce everything, so I was perhaps hindering his solutions. But I did not want those solutions to involve my father.

Presently the girl reappeared and with another toss of her head directed me back inside. It occurred to me that I had become prudish since my attachment to Amelia Brittain, but I disapproved strongly of the enslavement of young Chinese girls in Chinatown.

Bierce lay with one knee raised. He sat up, holding his hands to his cheeks, and shook his head once.

“I think I have it,” he said.

“That’s good,” I said. I wanted to get out of this place.

“I must do Captain Pusey’s work for him in order to accomplish my own ends,” Bierce said, standing unsteadily. I helped him with his coat.

“Are you going to tell me?” I asked.

“Not yet. In case I am wrong.”