Love and War

PROLOGUE: ASHES OF APRIL

The house burned an hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside onto the narrow balcony. A strong, warm wind blew, strengthening the flames and intensifying their light. Even from this height above the town named Lehigh Station, he recognized the blazing house — the only substantial one remaining in the seedy section near the canal.

He raced down to his dimly lighted bedroom and grabbed clothing with hardly more than a glance. He tried to dress quietly but inevitably woke his wife, Constance. She had fallen asleep reading Scripture — not her own Douay version but one of the Hazard family Bibles, into which she'd slipped her rosary before closing the book and kissing George good night. Since the fall of Fort Sumter and the outbreak of war, Constance had spent more than her usual time with the Bible.

"George, where are you rushing?"

"There's a fire in town. Don't you hear the alarms?"

Still sleepy, she rubbed her eyes. "But you don't chase the pump engines whenever the bell rings."

"The place belongs to Fenton, one of my best foremen. There's been trouble in his household lately. The fire may be no accident." He bent and kissed her warm cheek. "Go to sleep. I'll be back in bed in an hour."

He turned off the gas and moved swiftly downstairs and to the stable. He saddled a horse himself; it was far faster than waking a groom, and concern spurred him to haste. This acute involvement puzzled him, because, ever since Orry Main's visit two weeks ago this very night, George had been submerged in a strange, numb state. He felt at a distance from most life around him and especially from that of the nation, one part of which had seceded and attacked the other. The Union was sundered; troops were mustering. As if that somehow had no bearing on his existence, or any impact on his emotions, George had resorted to self-willed isolation.

On horseback, he raced from the rear of the mansion he'd named Belvedere and down the twisting hillside road toward the fire. The strong wind gusts blew like blasts from one of the furnaces of Hazard Iron; the foreman's house must have become an inferno. Was the volunteer company on the scene? He prayed so.

The road, high-crowned and bumpy, required tight control of his mount. The route took him by the many buildings of the ironworks, generating smoke and light and noise even at this hour. Hazard's was running continuously, rolling out rails and plate for the Union war effort just commencing. The company was also about to sign a contract to cast cannon. Just now, however, business was the farthest thing from the mind of the man riding swiftly past the terraces of the better homes, then into the flat streets of the commercial district toward the heat and glare of the fire.

The trouble in Fenton's house had been known to George for some time. Whenever a worker had a problem, he usually heard about it. He wanted it so. Occasionally discipline was required, but he preferred the remedies of discussion, understanding, and advice, wanted or no.

The previous year, Fenton had taken in his footloose cousin, a muscular, energetic chap twenty years his junior. Temporarily without funds, the young man needed a job. The foreman found him one at Hazard's, and the newcomer did well enough for a month or two.

Though married, Fenton was childless. His handsome but essentially foolish wife was nearer the cousin's age than his own. Soon George noticed the foreman losing weight. He heard talk of an atypical listlessness when Fenton was on duty. Finally George received a report of a costly mistake made by the foreman. And a week later, another.

Last week, both to prevent new errors and to help Fenton if he could, George had called him in for a talk. Usually easygoing — responsive in conversation, even with the owner — Fenton now had a cold, tight, tortured look in his eyes and would make only one statement of substance. He was experiencing domestic difficulty. He emphasized the two words several times — domestic difficulty. George expressed sympathy but quietly said the errors had to stop. Fenton promised to ensure it by remedying the difficulty. George asked how. By insisting the cousin move out of his house, the foreman said. Uneasily, George left it there, suspecting the nature of the domestic difficulty.

Now, silhouetted ahead, he saw spectators, and figures dashing to and fro in front of the blaze, and jets of water spurting ineffectually over the already collapsed residence. The red light reflected on the metalwork of the outmoded Philadelphia-style pump engine and on the black coats of the four horses that had pulled pumper and hose wagons to the site; they pawed and snorted like fearsome animals from hell. George thought of hell because the scene suggested nothing else.

As he jumped from the saddle, he heard a man screaming in the dark street to the left of the burned house. George worked quickly through the spectators. "Stay back, damn you," the volunteers' chief shouted through his fire horn as George emerged from the crowd. The chief lowered his horn and spoke an apologetic "Oh, Mr. Hazard, sir. Didn't recognize you."

The statement really meant he hadn't recognized the richest man in town, perhaps in the entire valley, until he saw him clearly; everyone knew stocky George Hazard, thirty-six this year. George's windblown hair already showed the beginnings of the sun-streaking that lightened it in the spring and summer; it showed some permanent gray, too. The ice-colored eyes, common in the Hazard family, reflected the fire without and George's anxiety within. "What happened here?"

The words brought a stammering summary from the chief while the volunteers, who years ago had named their company the Station Stalwarts and gilded its motto, Officium Pro Periculo, on every piece of equipment, continued to work the front and back pumping brakes. The water was wasted on the demolished house. All that could be done was protect the nearby hovels and shanties from the spreading effect of the wind. So the chief had time to speak to the most important man in town.

He said it looked like Fenton had discovered his wife in bed with his cousin earlier in the evening. The foreman had taken a large kitchen knife and stabbed his wife and her lover before setting fire to the house. During that time, the mortally wounded cousin managed to turn the knife back on his attacker, stabbing him four times. Tears filled George's eyes, and he scrubbed at them with hard knuckles. Fenton had been the politest of men; well read, industrious, intelligent, kind to those he supervised.

"That's him yelling," said the chief. "But he don't figure to live long. The other two was dead when we got here. We dragged them out and covered them up. They're lying over there if you want to look."

Somehow, George was compelled. He walked toward the two bodies, foul-smelling beneath a square of canvas in the middle of the street. The screaming went on. The wind fanned the fire, gave it a whooshing voice, and swirled embers and glowing debris upward. The volunteers continued to pump furiously, two rows of men on each brake, one row on the ground, the other on the platform running the width of the engine. The riveted leather hoses, brought in two coffinlike wagons, ran clear across the abandoned canal to the river for water. The matched black horses, trained for this work, continued to behave strangely, pawing, and throwing their heads, and flashing their red-reflecting flanks.

George stopped a foot short of the canvas and lifted it. He had lately been investigating the cost of a modern Latta steam pumper for the town, hence knew something of fires and their effects. That didn't prepare him for the sight of the dead lovers.

Of the two, the wife was charred worse, her blackened skin split and rolled back upon itself in many places. The cousin's burned-away clothing revealed hundreds of blisters weeping a shiny yellow fluid that mirrored light. The faces, necks, protruding tongues of both victims had swollen in the final agonies of wanting air and drawing only scorching fumes into the lungs. Ultimately, the throats had swollen, too, though in the wife's case it was hard to tell whether flames or asphyxiation had killed her. With the cousin there was less doubt; his eyes bulged, big as new apples.

George let the canvas fall and managed to suppress vomit as it reached his throat. What he had seen conjured strange specters. Not merely fire. Death. Suffering. Loss. And, in overpowering summation, war.

Shuddering, he walked back to the chief, feeling deep, unexpected things stirring within him.

"Can I be of help, Tom?"

"Mighty good of you to offer, sir, but it's too late to do anything except wet down them places next door." A fireman ran up to say Fenton had died. George shivered again; why did he still hear screaming? He shook his head. The chief went on. "It was too late when we got here." George nodded sadly and walked back to his horse.

What happened to George as he left the scene, mounting and letting the horse walk, was the result of tragedy encountered, of horror witnessed. The numbed state in which he'd lately been drifting vanished.

He had known there was — would be for many weeks, possibly months — a civil war. But knowing was not the same as understanding. He had known and not understood, and that was true even though he'd fought in Mexico. But the Mexican campaign was a long time in the past. As he rode slowly back up the hillside with wind-driven ash blowing overhead, he at last came to grips with reality. The nation was at war. His younger brother, Billy, an officer in the Corps of Engineers, was at war. His dearest friend in all the world, West Point classmate, comrade in Mexico, sometime financial partner, was at war. He didn't remember the writer, but he remembered the passage: No man is an island —

He cast his thoughts back over the past two weeks, attempting to discover in the national mood an explanation of his own. To many, perhaps most, citizens in the North, the final relieving of three decades of tension by the bombardment of Fort Sumter on the twelfth of this month of April, 1861, had been a welcome, if not a joyous, event. George's principal reaction had been sadness; the guns said that men of good will had failed to solve a grievous human problem conceived the first day white traders sold black men and women on the coast of the American wilderness.

Sadness because the problem had been so long deemed insoluble — and, toward the last, not even capable of examination, so thick were the barbicans of rhetoric surrounding the opposing camps. For others, the forever self-occupied and self-serving, the issues were not threatening, or even serious, merely nuisances to be stepped around — treated as invisible, as one would treat beggars sleeping in some gutter.

But in the years in which the war cauldron came to the boil, America had not consisted of two classes only — the fanatical and the indifferent. There were men and women of decent intention. George thought of himself as one of them. Might they have kicked the cauldron over and soaked the coals and called a council of the reasonable? Or were the divisions so deep, so pervasive, that the hotheads on both sides would never have permitted that? Whatever the answer, the men of good will had not prevailed, had let the rest take charge, and the cloven nation was at war.

Sadness. Orry Main had shared it when he visited Lehigh Station. Just two weeks ago, it was. His courageous journey from South Carolina to Pennsylvania was laced with menace, and the visit itself had become a night of desperate danger when George's sister, Virgilia — extreme abolitionist, obsessive hater of all persons and things Southern — had betrayed Orry's presence to a mob that George held off at gunpoint until he could get his dear and honorable friend out of town.

After that had come — what? Not lassitude, not quite. He had coped with daily problems: contract proposals; uneasiness about Fenton's plight at home; a hundred things, small and large, with one excepted. Until tonight, he had somehow walled out understanding of the meaning of the war. The fire and the knife had destroyed that wall and retaught a basic lesson. The hell with fools who blithely predicted "only" a ninety-day conflict. You needed nothing but brief moments for death and ruin.

His head pounded. His stomach felt vile. Beyond the leveled wall he saw the threat from which he'd been trying to hide these past two weeks. It was a threat to the lives of those for whom he cared most in the world, a threat to the slowly forged bond between his family and that of the Mains of South Carolina. He'd been hiding from the truth about those lives, that bond. The fire had shown him they were perilously fragile. Fragile as Fenton, and the other two, and the house that had held them with all their passions, imperfections, dreams. Of them, that house, those emotions, nothing remained but that which followed George on the wind, spotting his collar, flicking his ear — ashes; blowing, blowing all around him.

Riding up the Pennsylvania hillside after midnight on the first of May, he could turn his back on the glow of a small, soon-to-be-forgotten domestic tragedy—a cliche in its commonness; so god­damn horrifying and heartbreaking in its specifics. He could turn his back but not his mind. His inward vision swept beyond the past two weeks to embrace two decades.

The Hazards, ironmasters of Pennsylvania, and the Mains, rice planters of South Carolina, had formed their first ties when a son from each house met by chance on a New York City pier on a summer afternoon in 1842. George Hazard and Orry Main became acquaintances on a northbound Hudson River boat that day. As soon as they left the boat, they became new cadets at West Point.

There they survived much together, much that strengthened their natural affinity for one another. There was the skull work — easy for George, who had no great desire for a military career; hard for Orry, who wanted nothing else. They managed to endure the hazing of a deceitful, some said lunatic, upperclassman named Elkanah Bent, even conspired to get him dismissed after a series of particularly heinous acts on his part. But influence in Washington had returned Bent to the Military Academy, and he had graduated promising George and Orry a long memory and full accounting for their sins against him.

The Mains and Hazards got to know one another, as Northern and Southern families often did in those years while the long fuse of sectionalism burned down to the powder of secession. There had been visits exchanged, alliances formed — hatreds, too. Even George and Orry had seriously quarreled. George was visiting at the Main plantation, Mont Royal, when a slave ran away, was caught, then cruelly punished on orders from Orry's father. The argument of the two young men afterward was the closest they ever came to seeing their friendship destroyed by the divisiveness dripping into the country's bloodstream like a slow poison.

The Mexican War, which found the two friends serving as lieutenants in the same infantry regiment, finally separated them in unexpected ways. An encounter with Captain "Butcher" Bent sent George and Orry into action on the Churubusco Road, where a shell fragment destroyed Orry's left arm and his dreams of a career. Not long after, news of the death of the senior Hazard called George home, because his mother, with sound instincts, could not trust George's older brother, Stanley, to be a wise steward of the immense family business. Soon after taking charge of Hazard's, George wrested control of the ironworks from his ambitious, irresponsible brother.

Amputation of Orry's left arm put him in a brooding, reclusive mood for a time. But as he trained himself to run the plantation and perform two-handed tasks with one, his outlook revived and the friendship with George renewed itself. Orry stood up as best man when George married Constance Flynn, the Roman Catholic girl he'd met in Texas while en route to Mexico. Then George's younger brother, Billy, decided he wanted to attend the Academy, while Orry, desperately seeking some way to save his orphaned young cousin Charles from a wastrel's life, persuaded him to seek an Academy appointment. The friendship of Charles Main and Billy Hazard, already acquainted, soon replicated that of the two old grads.

In the last decade of peace, many Northerners and Southerners, despite ever fiercer rhetoric, ever sharper threats from political leaders and public figures on both sides, remained personal friends. It was so with these two families. Mains came North, Hazards traveled South — though not without difficulties in each case.

George's sister, Virgilia, who had carried her passionate abolitionism across an invisible line into extremism, had nearly undone the friendship. During a Hazard family visit to the Main plantation, she'd met a slave belonging to the man who later married Orry's sister, Ashton. Virgilia encouraged the slave to run away. When he did, he succeeded.

Ashton Main, beautiful and unprincipled, had fancied Billy for a while, but he soon saw the fine and genuine qualities of Ashton's younger sister, Brett. As headstrong and crazed as Virgilia in some ways, the rejected Ashton had waited for her moment of vengeance; she conspired to have Billy murdered in a trumped-up duel not two hours after he married Brett at Mont Royal. Cousin Charles had dealt with that plot in his direct cavalry officer's way — rather violent, it was — and Orry banished Ashton and her fire-eater husband, James Huntoon, from Main land forever.

Virgilia's black lover, the slave whose escape she'd assisted, had been slain with others of John Brown's murderous gang at Harpers Ferry. Virgilia, at the scene and panic-stricken, had fled back home and was thus at Belvedere the night Orry made his perilous visit. It was this visit and the circumstances leading to it that a grieved and thoughtful George pondered as he rode up the last bit of steep road to Belvedere.

Orry's iconoclastic older brother, Cooper, had usually disagreed with most Southerners regarding their peculiar institution. In contrast to an economy based on the land, and the working of it by human property, he pointed to the example of the North — not perfect by any means, but in step with the new world-wide age of industrialism. In the North, free workers were speeding into a prosperous future to the hum of machines, not dragging a load of rusty methods and ideologies as heavy as wrist cuffs and leg manacles, and fully as hampering. As for the traditional apology of Cooper's state and region — that slaves were more secure, therefore happier, than Northern factory workers fastened by invisible chains to huge, hammering machines — he laughed that off. A factory worker might indeed starve to death on what the owners paid him. But he could not be bought or sold like mere chattel. He could always walk away, and no posse would ride in pursuit; no laborer would be recaptured, flogged, and hung from the flywheel of his great engine.

Cooper sought to establish a shipbuilding industry in Charleston and had envisioned, even started to construct, a huge iron vessel patterned after one designed by the British engineering genius Brunei. George had put capital into the venture, as much for the sake of friendship and belief in Cooper's principles as for the possibility of quick profit, which was slim.

In the final days of Sumter's survival as a Union bastion, with war no longer a doubtful question, Orry had gathered up as much cash as he could by mortgaging family property. It amounted to six hundred fifty thousand dollars of the original one million nine hundred thousand George had invested. Despite Orry's pronounced Southern accent, he had undertaken to carry the money to Lehigh Station in a small, plain satchel, by train. The risk was enormous, yet he came. Because of his friendship and because of a debt of honor.

The night the two friends met, Virgilia furtively summoned the mob — most certainly to lynch the visitor. But the attempt failed, and Orry had gotten safely on a late train and now was — where? South Carolina? If he had reached home safely, he had at least one chance for happiness. Madeline LaMotte, the woman whom Orry had loved, as she had loved him despite her imprisonment in a disastrous marriage, had rushed to Mont Royal to warn of the conspiracy against Billy's life. Once there, in defiance of the husband who had deliberately and systematically mistreated her for years, she stayed.

The aftermath of Sumter forced other decisions, however uncertain or emotional. Charles had enlisted in a South Carolina legion of cavalry after resigning from the United States Army. His best friend, Billy, remained with the Union engineers. And Billy's Southern-born wife, Brett, was living in Lehigh Station. The personal world of the Mains and the Hazards hung in a precarious balance as massive, threatening, unpredictable forces gathered.

It was that fact which George had been shunning these past fourteen days. Life was fragile. Friendship the same. Before parting, he and Orry had pledged that the war would never sunder the bonds between them. In this night's remembered ugliness, shrieks of pain, geysers of fire, George wondered whether they were naive. He felt, almost wildly, that he must do something to reaffirm his dedication to defending the ties.

He stabled his horse and went directly to Belvedere's library, a vast room with smells of leather and fine book papers. It was as silent as the night house.

When he crossed toward his desk, he spied a memento always kept on an otherwise bare refectory table. It was a conical object, rough-textured, measuring six inches from apex to base. The dark brown color indicated heavy iron content.

He realized why it had attracted his eye. Someone — a maid, probably — had moved the object from its customary position. He picked up the meteorite and continued to hold it while he envisioned the place in the past where he'd found it — the hills around West Point during his cadet days.

What lay in his hand was a piece of a much larger meteorite that had traveled through starry dark, and distances beyond his power to comprehend. Star-iron, the old men of the trade — his ancestors — called it. Known since the pharaohs ruled the Nile kingdoms.

Iron. The most potent stuff in the universe. The raw material for building civilization, or leveling it. From iron came the immense death weapons George planned to cast for a whole battery of reasons: patriotism, hatred of slavery, profit, a paternal responsibility for those who worked for him.

What lay in his hand was, in its way, war. He replaced it on the table precisely where it belonged, but he did so quickly.

He lit the gas mantle above the desk. Opened the lower drawer in which he had put the small, plain satchel — for remembrance. He looked at the satchel a while. Then, out of profound emotion, he inked a pen and wrote with great speed.

He started to inscribe the initial letter of his first name but then, with a swift, sad smile, wrote instead his West Point nickname. Stump.

He slowly folded the sheets; slowly placed them in the satchel and latched it; slowly closed the drawer and arose to the accompaniment of several irritating noises from his joints. Windows were open throughout Belvedere because of the warm night. He smelled the diminishing fetor of burning carried by the high wind. He felt cold and old as he put out the gas and wearily climbed the stairs.