Quinn's Book

A Bazaar of Enticement Albany, Summer 1864

WE WILL NOW TALK of events that take place in fact and memory after Daniel Quinn, that orphan of life, now twenty-nine years of age, arrives by train at Albany from the mudholes of hell. Quinn, for more than two years, has been traveling with the Union Army, interviewing generals, captains, and soldiers of the line, writing about their exploits at Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Monocacy and elsewhere, describing their casualties, camp life, army food, the weather, incompetent surgeons, Southern women.

The day in Albany is intermittently sunny and overcast, and the clerk of the weather says no rain is expected, that Albany’s long drought will continue, and that passing rain clouds are merely illusory elements in a dry world. Quinn has already bought a horse and saddle, the mode of travel that has become part of his being, and is riding, at an ambling gait suited to the slowness of his mind, toward the Staats mansion of revered history. The waters of the Staatskill course toward him as he ascends the hill, arousing in him thoughts of time spent near other water. .

He was then riding with the Forty-fourth out of Albany, camped on one bank of the Rappahannock, with rebel troops camped on the other. For two days men of both camps swam in the river under an unspoken truce. Jim Lynch from Saratoga broke the silence when he swam to the rebel shore and yelled to the nearest reb, “You got a newspaper we can read?” The reb waved one at him and Lynch waded to shore, naked, took the paper and thanked the reb, swam back with one hand high, and gave the paper to Quinn. It was from Richmond, only days old.

In a day’s time the swimmers were killing each other. In three days’ time Quinn, walking the battlefield seeking survivors among the dead thousands, heard a wounded reb ask for water. Quinn gave him his canteen and let the reb drink his fill. Then he wet the reb’s leg wounds with the remaining water. Quinn considered this a fair exchange for the Richmond newspaper. The reb could not move, but he would not die of his leg wounds. The water will cool, it will loosen, it will cleanse. It will be interesting, important to the reb. But do not touch him.

The reb thanked Quinn by telling him of his optimism before battle. Such optimism was an inversion. It was based upon the vision of his wife beckoning him into the barn with their secret love gesture. The reb knew this was a temptation sent to him by the devil. He knew the barn was death and that his wife would never invite him into death’s hayloft.

The reb was of North Carolina stock, strong of face and form, and Quinn knew he had farmed all his life. He revered Longstreet and grieved over the outcome of the battle. He had not known defeat in two years of war. Quinn covered the reb’s legs with a blanket taken from a dead reb’s bedroll, then found a rebel canteen and filled it for the reb in the river. He filled his own canteen and rinsed the taste and touch of the reb from its neck. He walked across the darkening field, where the broken artillery was strewn, but found no other survivors. Six horses stood hitched to a limber, all with limp necks, all erect in harness: twenty-four legs in an upright position, dead.

Quinn patted the neck of his new horse of the Albany instant, thankful for its life, trustful of its strength. It may be that I am coming out of death, he thought, though he sensed this was untrue, or at least a confusion. Probably he was still in death’s center and losing ground. But even the possibility of leaving death behind cheered him, and always there was the banal reality: he had survived and others had not. Such a thought made him as optimistic as the wounded reb before battle. Rubbing elbows with optimism calmed Quinn and he rode on toward the mansion.

At first glimpse he knew the mansion had grown. More rooves and towers rose up from it, more porches spanned its new girth. A Chinese roof topped one new wing and on another rococo carvings spun and curled upward and around new doors and archways, new pillars and dormers. Hillegond and Dirck are manic builders. Lost in a house suited for multitudes, they create yet more space for their solitary comings and goings.

Quinn circled the mansion to see what had become of the structures and gardens of his memory. Amos’s tomb and the pump and boat houses were as he remembered. A small, elegant structure was new (this was the shooting villa), but the gazebos and trellises looked as they always had, and today were brilliant with flowers, though the lawns that surrounded them were brown from the drought. All buildings were newly painted in the uniform colors of yore — a rich brown with beige trim — and all the brickwork was that same pale, rusty red.

In replenishing his vision of it all, Quinn sought not what was new but what was not: the elusive thing that endured unchanged in spite of growth. He tethered his horse in the front carriageway and knocked at the portal of first entrance, the carved wooden door looming before him with the same majesty it owned on the night he arrived a fugitive from the wild river. He stood on the same spot where he had stood then, feeling the strength of ritual rise in him. Repetition of past gestures suddenly seemed to hold the secret of his restoration to. . to what? He could not say. He would not repeat a single day of the known past, would he? Would he willingly relive the days in which Maud was revealed to him, full knowing that the brink of that ecstasy gave onto a chasm of loss and waste? He had kissed Maud and known love, and then descended from beauty into the valley of putrefaction, where lay a generation of blasted sons: seven thousand dead in a single battle, dead in a great wedge of slaughter, their brains and bowels blown out of them, and they then left to rot on a field consecrated by national treachery and endemic madness. And the killing moved on to greener pastures.

The front door opened and Quinn recognized Capricorn, hair gone to white, skin gone to leather, eyes waning. The old man did not recognize the long, lean Quinn in his soldier’s shirt (he was not a soldier), his riding breeches and boots, and the wide-brimmed slouch hat beneath which he had lived so long. But when Quinn took off the hat to reveal dense waves of hair the color of earth, then the old man’s eyes remembered history.

“You’re Mist’ Quinn.”

“Cappy, you’ve kept your wits intact, unlike most of us.”

Quinn entered a house refurnished: gone the cherrywood sofa on which the widow Ryan and her terrified children had sat, replaced by a resplendently huge oval settee; gone the music-room portraits of Petrus and Hillegond, the walls covered now with huge tapestries; gone, too, the foyer’s Dutch colonial chandelier, and pendulous now in its place one of crystal, twice the size of the old one and exuding thrice the former elegance. This place does not shrink in memory. It waxes in breadth, and its opulence thickens.

“Is Dirck home?” Quinn asked.

“No more. He marry that singer and he move to Sweden. That’s where he live now.”

“Sweden. I remember his wife always wanted to go back there.”

“Said he didn’t wanna be here no more. Sold the house to Mr. Fitzgibbon and went away.”

“Sold the house? What about Hillegond?”

“Mist’ Quinn, Miss Hilly’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Gone. Killed. They strangle her. Wire her neck. They say she musta died right off.”

Quinn took off his hat, ran his hand through his hair, falling into the void, groping for a word.

“When?”

“Last Feb’ary sometime. Six months now. Worst thing ever happen in this house.” Capricorn sighed mightily and his voice broke. “They do my Matty too. Killin’ women like that.”

“Who did? Why? What is all this?”

“Don’t really know. Some thinks they knows. But nobody knows why they do my Matty too.”

Capricorn was near tears, and Quinn motioned the old man toward the east parlor.

“Can we sit and talk about this?”

“Capricorn don’t sit in there. New butler, he don’ allow that.”

“A new butler. Everything’s changed. What about the porch?”

“Don’ think so.”

“We won’t go to the kitchen. All right if we walk?”

“Walkin’ is fine.”

And so they walked on the road under a relentless sun, with Capricorn immediately talking of the great wealth of the new owner, Gordon Fitzgibbon, son of Lyman, and passing on then to Hillegond. Sadness smothered Quinn with each vision of her that came into his memory, and he knew he would have to turn the conversation away from her. He would find out the details of her murder from Will Canaday, read all the stories Will must have written about it. Quinn could drown in such evil but he would not. He would survive Hillegond’s death as he had others in the war: move past them; control the power of grief and anger to destroy the vessel. But he could feel the impetus for control weakening with each new death that touched him, his survival drive waning like Cappy’s eyesight. Soon there may be no drive.

And Capricorn talked on.

“This woman, she open her house to colored folks. She feed them, help them go to freedom. She save Joshua from jail, then give him money so’s he can bring other coloreds up from Carolina. Joshua’s woman stop here too. Miss Hilly a sainted lady. She in heaven for sure. She be a queen up there.”

“I was here the night Joshua came in as a prisoner, manacled to the Swede,” Quinn said.

“I recollect.”

“After that I asked you about him, but you wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“I recollect that too.”

“I saw Joshua in New York.”

“We ain’t seen him here. How that boy doin’?”

“Long time ago, but he was all right then.” Quinn the liar.

“Aw, that’s fine.”

“He was working in John McGee’s saloon. You remember John? The fighter? John the Brawn they called him.”

“Nobody forget that man once they meet him.”

“Joshua had a new name first time I caught up with him. Called himself Mick the Rat.”

“Go on. Mick the Rat?”

“That’s it. He was handling rats for John.”

“Handlin’ rats?”

“A special show to bring people into the saloon. They see the rat show free, then maybe they drink and gamble some. Joshua had a bag full of rats. He’d catch a fresh bunch every night at the slaughterhouse. Throw a light on them and while they stared at it he’d grab ’em with long pincers and drop ’em in the bag.”

Capricorn shook his head. “Joshua do that? Joshua?”

Quinn nodded. “Then he’d bring the rats into John’s place and put one into this pit in the back of the saloon. People all around the pit watching, and then somebody’d put a bull terrier in with the rat. Terrier’d kill it quick. Then Joshua’d put two rats in and the terrier’d kill them too, sometimes just one bite apiece. Then they’d put a Mexican hairless in and Joshua’d dump in four rats and the Mex’d get them all. Then five rats, then six. The rats had no chance. It was a matter of time.”

“Can’t say as I like that game.”

“No. But Joshua needed money. He was hiding two fugitive slaves and trying to move them north.”

“He always doin’ that.”

“Asked me to help him. He didn’t really know me, but he trusted me. Said that was his talent, knowing if he could trust you.”

Joshua told Quinn the bounty on one of the runaways was three hundred dollars, which made his work of hiding the pair doubly difficult. The second slave had no price on his head, being possessed of only one eye, the other destroyed by the lash of a whip from his master’s hand, marking him as an evil-eyed source of ill luck to all. Joshua had led the slaves from Philadelphia to a farmer’s cabin south of Kingston that was only marginally secure; and when he learned the slave hunters were closing in he put the problem to Quinn: We need a white man. Quinn said he was a white man.

Joshua had allies, but the known local abolitionists were of no value in this situation. Quinn, a stranger, could bring the necessary word to the inns and the grogshops where the deadliest gossip thrived and where the slave hunters had been biding their time to hear it. The slavers were also a pair, not from the South (by their accent) but Yorkers, clearly. They came equipped: ropes, manacles, rifles, pistols, money to loosen tongues. They called each other by name — Fletch and Blue — and made no secret of their ambition: “Catch niggers.”

And so when Quinn sat in the Eagle Tavern and ordered his whiskey toddies and grew garrulous, dropping the news that he’d seen niggers moving around near a cabin up the pike, then repeated his performance at the Bump Tavern at the next crossroads, well, it came as no surprise when Fletch and Blue turned up at his elbow, inquiring about particulars.

“You hunt niggers, is that it?” Quinn asked them.

“We take property back to its rightful owners,” said Fletch.

“A wonderful thing,” said Quinn. “Man owns somethin’, he shouldn’t oughta have to give it up, just on accounta the thing he owns don’t want to be owned no more. Man could lose all his cows that way.”

“Cows,” said Fletch, and he thought about that.

“You think you could show us where you seen them niggers?”

“Can’t really tell it,” said Quinn. “Don’t know the names of none of these roads, don’t know where nothin’ is, rightly.”

“You figure you could show us?” asked Fletch.

“I s’pose.” And Quinn mused on the possibility. “What’s the profit for a fella like me shows you what you’re lookin’ for?”

“You want profit, is that it?”

“Most folks do.”

“We’ll give you profit.”

“That case, we probably got us a deal.”

“Then let’s go.”

“How much profit you figure we’re talkin’ about?”

“We give you two dollars. You can buy a new horse with two dollars.”

“Not no kind of horse I’d wanna ride.” And Quinn fell silent.

“We’ll give you three,” said Blue.

“We’ll give you five, never mind three,” said Fletch.

“All you gonna give me is five? I was thinkin’ twenty ain’t a bad price for a couple of niggers.”

“Twenty; all right, twenty. Let’s go.”

“I’d like to get the feel of the twenty ’fore we go,” said Quinn.

“Give him twenty,” said Fletch. And Blue opened the flap of his shirt pocket and took out a fold of bills.

“You ready now?” Blue said when Quinn took the money.

“I’m ready,” said Quinn. “You ready?”

“We’re ready,” said Fletch. “But if’n we don’t get no niggers I’ll be lookin’ to get back that twenty.”

“Fair’s fair,” said Quinn, and he led the way out of the tavern, mounted his horse, and headed north on the turnpike.

Wrapped in blankets, the fugitive slaves squatted on the earth in a pit under the floorboards of the cabin, their retreat in times of threat. Planks covered their heads. Long slivers of light from the oil lamp in the second room of the cabin found their way down between the boards and into the soft clay cubicle of the slaves’ secret dwelling place.

Joshua added wood to the fading fire, the first time the stove had been used in the eight days the slaves had been here, for smoke is a traitor. In the second room of the cabin sat two white men with blackened faces, each with pistol and shotgun. When they heard the horses approach, the men took up prearranged positions and Joshua stood by the cabin door, carrying no weapon, and waited for the visitors to knock.

Quinn rode to the rear of Fletch and Blue when they neared the cabin and in his mind heard the music the two banjos made when the cadaverous dancer at The Museum sang his ditty:

Dere’s music in de wells,

Dere’s music in de air,

Dere’s music in a nigger’s knee

When de banjo’s dere.

And then Fletch was telling Joshua that they were working for the federal marshal to track runaway slaves. Joshua spoke in a voice foreign to Quinn, whining and mewling.

“I’s a free man,” he said. “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout no ’scaped slaves. Lived here all my days. You don’t believe that, go ask anybody here’bouts.”

“Ain’t you we’re lookin’ for,” said Fletch. “We’re after two niggers got only three eyes between ’em.”

“Don’t know nothin’ ’bout three eyes,” Joshua said. “You wanna come in and look, you can. I ain’t fightin’ no federal marshal. But ain’t nobody here but Mick the Rat, and that’s me, and that’s what is.”

“We’ll have a look,” said Fletch. He dismounted and tied his horse to a bush, and then with Blue behind him and Quinn bringing up the rear, the three entered the cabin. What Quinn saw was a long shadow of a man in the second room, and Fletch and Blue both drew their pistols and moved toward it. Joshua backed into the room ahead of them and turned toward the shadow, which was made not by a man but a coat and hat on a stick, at which Fletch and Blue pointed their guns. As they did, the shotguns of the blackfaced men rose out of the shadows to the level of their faces, and both slavers dropped their pistols.

“You lookin’ for us niggers?” said one of the blackfaces. “You wanna take us to Virginia?”

Fletch shook his head.

“Thought you did,” said blackface.

Joshua drew a knife from the scabbard on his belt and with deft strokes cut the belts and waistbands on the trousers of Fletch and Blue.

“Sit,” said Joshua, and Fletch and Blue sat.

“Take off your boots,” said Joshua, and they did.

“Stand up and drop your pants,” said Joshua, and they did.

Joshua left the room, lifted the planks, and helped the slaves up from their pit as the blackfaces led Fletch and Blue to the pit’s edge. The slaves huddled by the stove and watched as Joshua and one of the blackfaces tied the arms and ankles of the slave hunters. Fletch wore long underwear to his ankles. Blue’s went to his knees. Neither man wore stockings. When the slavers were bound, Joshua and one of the blackfaces rolled them into the pit.

“We gonna be leavin’ now,” Joshua said to them. “But thinkin’ about how you gonna be all alone down there, we got you some company.”

Then from a corner of the cabin, he dragged out a canvas bag the size of a small child. He undid its drawstring, then upended it, dropping two dozen live rats into the pit. The men yelled, the rats squealed. Fletch and Blue kicked at the rats and backed themselves into a corner together.

As Quinn raised the lamp to see what was happening, a courageous rat began climbing Fletch’s bare foot.

Fletch kicked it, and the rat flew against the wall and rolled over.

Then it righted itself, undaunted.

Quinn, at this point, let the twenty dollars he had taken from Fletch and Blue flutter back down to its rightful owners.

Capricorn was laughing so hard that tears were on their way.

“Oh, that Joshua, he wicked. That man, he know how to do it. How all that come out?”

“Joshua took the horses and they all rode north,” Quinn said. “I guess they made it. I never saw any of them again, except Joshua. Never did know those fellows in blackface.”

Quinn and Capricorn turned toward the house, walking past the pond Petrus built for the wild ducks, six of which were in residence. Quinn looked toward the house and saw Hillegond in the window fourteen years before, and he thought: Queen mother of compassion, I loved you.

But he would not weep.

He would not be diminished.

Joshua, a saint, could diminish Quinn, but not death, not even the death of queenly love. The war, wondered Quinn, astonished anew at his toughness — has it turned my soul into a lump of lead? He pictured the city of corpses where he had lived, and a fear gripped him. He was growing strong because of that city, preening with survival. One by one the corpses struggled upright, began a ragged march in his direction. He remembered his Celtic disk and he imposed its memory on this vision, raised it before his eyes like a monstrance, like a shield. Protected from corpses, he breathed deeply and walked toward the mansion.

As he approached his tethered horse he saw a coach and four coming up the carriageway from the new turnpike that now passed the Staats property, and Capricorn said, “That’s him now. Mr. Fitzgibbon.”

And so it was: Gordon Fitzgibbon, son of Lyman, a man Quinn knew by name but had not met. Beside him in the carriage Quinn saw a woman.

Then he saw it was a woman of love.

Saw Maud.

He could not have suspected or even intuited her presence here, and yet neither was this coincidence. We could call it Quinn’s will to alter existence, to negate life’s caprice and become causality itself. This was not the first time he had willed history to do his bidding, but it was the first time history had obeyed him. He’d come here seeking not Maud’s presence but the ethereal fragrance of her memory, all he could hope to find. Given that, he felt he would be able to trace her. Now here she arrives, and so begins a new confluence for these two strangers of love.

The coach halted at the mansion, and the coachman leaped to the ground, opened the door. Out first stepped Maud Fallon, dressed in black and white silks, her abundant auburn hair upswept into a crown encircled with a white ribbon, her skin exquisitely white; and upon seeing Quinn she said, “Daniel, I feared you were dead,” and gave him her hand, which he took and held.

“I seem to have survived,” he said, “but it may be an illusion.”

Maud turned then to Capricorn and said, “Cappy, will you bring in my boxes?” Then, nodding once at Quinn, she entered the mansion. Gordon Fitzgibbon approached Quinn with extended hand.

“You’re Quinn,” he said.

“That’s a fact,” said Quinn.

“I’ve heard about you and read your writing. You’re quite a famous fellow.”

“I think you exaggerate.”

“Not at all. Everybody knows Quinn.”

“I would have thought almost nobody knows him.”

“I’m a true admirer. You’ve projected me into battles and set me alongside those wounded soldiers. I could feel the weight of their haversacks. You have a talent for creating the vivid scene. Won’t you come into the house?”

“I was just leaving. I came to see Hillegond.”

“Poor Hillegond. But at least they caught the villain.” Gordon nodded sadly and, without waiting for Quinn’s response to his invitation, strode purposefully into the mansion.

Quinn debated whether to follow, stunned by Maud’s brusqueness, then decided he had not exhausted his fate’s capacity for surprise (and that’s why they call it your fate). Also he wanted to hear more about the villain, and so he left his horse and followed Gordon into what he now was forced to think of as the Fitzgibbon mansion. In the drawing room Gordon offered him whiskey, Quinn’s first under these multiple rooves. The two men then settled into facing armchairs, a table between them, and on it a bowl of grapes and apples. Gordon positioned himself so that he was framed from behind by his own enormous portrait: a figure of abundant black hair, strong of jaw and dark of eye, wearing a cloak flared over one shoulder, holding a sheared beaver hat in his right hand, and standing in boots and breeches on the steps of his newly acquired mansion: arrived — for the ages.

“A very good likeness, that,” said Quinn, perceiving the jaw in the portrait to be stronger than the jaw beneath it. Of Gordon’s past he remembered only Yale law school, but he would come to know the man as the successor to his father in running the family foundries, a serious churchgoer who abandoned his father’s Presbyterian life for the Episcopal high church, who translated Vergil’s Aeneid from the Latin and then dramatized the story of Aeneas and Dido for the stage; a man of many interests. One too many: Maud.

“It’s only been up a week,” said Gordon of his portrait, “but I am pleased with it. The artist worked on it five months. He began it even before I took title to this place.”

“You were very sure of yourself.”

“Once I heard Dirck was selling it, I had to have it. I bought it for Maud, really. She’s mad about being here.”

“It was quite a surprise to see Maud.”

“She’s spoken of you, but then again, who hasn’t? She’s here only a few days and then we’re going to Saratoga for the racing. She has a relative up there.”

“She looks well.”

“Indeed she does. She’s dazzling. We’ll be married soon.”

“Now, that’s a surprise, Maud married,” Quinn said, reaching for the grapes.

“She’s trepidatious about it.”

“Maud is always trepidatious about relationships,” said Quinn, popping grapes into his mouth.

“We’re solving it,” said Gordon.

“You’re a sturdy fellow,” said Quinn.

Quinn popped his final grape, then stood up and drank his whiskey in a gulp. “I must be going,” he said, “but first tell me about Hillegond.”

“The killer went upstairs and found her sleeping, looped the garrote around her neck and dragged her from the bed with it. It was clear she died in a moment and did not suffer.”

“Some suffer in a moment what takes others twenty years to feel.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Gordon, and his voice was receding for Quinn, only sporadic words registering: “. . strangled Matty. . the stairs. . she fought. .” For Quinn there was only Maud’s coldness, and he silently recited the old Irish poem of warning:

Wherefore should I go to death,

for red lips, for gleaming teeth?. .

Thy pleasant mien, thy high mind,

Thy slim hand, O foam-white maid,

O blue eye, O bosom white,

I shall not die for thy sake.

Repeat it now. Repeat.

For this is your fate.

“. . the fellow was shameless. . dressed like a priest. . Hillegond’s young lover, can you imagine?. . But he shows up in no records as a priest. . Did you know him?”

“Who?” asked Quinn.

“The priest fellow. Finnerty, if that’s his name. It’s what he went by in the theater. A bad apple, to say the least.”

“What about him?”

“Aren’t you listening, Mr. Quinn? He’s in jail. They’ve charged him as her killer. He had her jade ring. He said she gave it to him.”

“Hillegond?”

“Damn it, Quinn, are you all there? I took you to be acute. Are you ill, or what ails you?”

“I’m distracted, forgive me,” and he turned to leave, turned back. “Thank you for the whiskey.”

“I hoped to hear of your war experiences.”

“Another time.”

“Perhaps tonight if you’re not busy. Join us at the Army Relief Bazaar.”

“Perhaps,” said Quinn, straining.

“It’s for the sick and wounded, you know. I’m chairman of the thing. I’ve been so involved with the war that my father considers me a practical amalgamationist. I actually recruited an entire company of army volunteers out of our two foundries. A good many were Irish.”

“That’s very patriotic,” said Quinn.

“You must come to our bazaar,” said Gordon. “We’ll lionize you if you’ll let us.”

“I doubt I could handle that.”

“We’ll be going at seven. We could pick you up. Where are you staying?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You mean you don’t have a place? Why, stay here, then.”

“That’s generous, but I think—” and Quinn, in this instant, could not think at all.

From the doorway Capricorn intruded on the hesitational moment. “Mr. Quinn, Miss Maud say she got a letter she want you to read. She be upstairs in the sittin’ room.”

Quinn turned to Gordon, who was smiling.

“It’s pleasant in Maud’s sitting room,” Gordon said.

Quinn returned Gordon’s smile, feeling the sudden urge to stuff several grapes up the man’s nose. Then he followed Capricorn out of the room and up the stairs.

As he walked, Quinn perceived that with a brusque offering of her hand, with a summons to come hither for a letter, with a decorous public invitation to chat in proper confines, Maud again proved herself a creature of quixotic ways, social fits. Quinn made the first turning on the mahogany staircase, that broad, expansive work of art that rose out of the foyer into the mystery of the mansion’s upper labyrinths, and he measured the distance from his last meeting with Maud: six years — the year 1858, when, as journeyman paragraphist and sometime essayist on sporting events, theater, crime, and judiciality for Will Canaday’s Albany Chronicle, he was present as Maud made her debut in Mazeppa.

This was a hippodramatic spectacle, an innovation within a hoary melodramatic theatrical corruption of a Lord Byron narrative poem that had been inspired by a passage in Voltaire’s history of Charles XII of Sweden; and it proved that Maud Fallon not only possessed a singular body but was willing to demonstrate said fact to the world at high risk to that very same singularity.

Lo, the poor Mazeppa. A Tatar foundling who comes to young manhood in the court of the King of Poland, he shares love with the King’s daughter, who is abruptly promised to the Count Palatine. Professing his love for the princess, Mazeppa assaults and wounds the Count in a duel and for his effrontery is strapped supine to the back of a wild horse. The horse is then lashed into madness, loosed upon the Ukrainian plains, and runs itself to death. Grievous torture is the lot of Mazeppa during this wild ride, but he survives, is discovered near death by his father (what a coincidence is here), who is the King of Tatary. And Mazeppa soon returns to Poland with the Tatar army to wreak vengeance on Poland and marry his beloved.

In early years of the play the Mazeppa ride had been accomplished onstage with a dummy athwart the live animal, the dummy role in time giving way to intrepid actors. But not until Maud’s day had the intrepidity been offered to a female, this the idea of Joseph K. Moran, Albany’s Green Street Theater manager and erstwhile tenor turned theatrical entrepreneur, who invited Maud (a horsewoman all her life, as well as a danseuse with acrobatic skills and risqué propensities — her famed Spider Dance, for example) to impersonate the male hero, ride supine and bareback upon Rare Beauty, a genuine horse, and to rise, thereon, up from the footlights and along four escalating platforms to a most high level of the stage, and to do this as well at a fair gallop while clad in a flesh-colored, skin-tight garment of no known name, which would create the illusion of being no garment at all. And so it followed that Maud, barebacked, perhaps also barebuttocked and barebusted, and looking very little like a male hero, climbed those Albany platforms to scandalously glamorous international heights.

Witnessing all this on opening night in 1858, Quinn confirmed his suspicion that he and the truest love of his life (whom he had not seen since she disappeared from Obadiah’s home in Saratoga eight years previous) were at this moment incompatible; for who could marry a woman of such antics? That raucous lasciviosity of the audience would madden Quinn in a matter of weeks. And so he called upon Maud in her dressing room, waiting for the wildness of her success to subside into a second day, to tell her as much.

“My God, Daniel, you’re my savior,” she said when she saw him, hugging him vigorously, talking as if only days and not years had elapsed since their last meeting. “You’ve come just in time to rescue me from this dementia. Can you imagine what this will do to my life?”

Quinn, nonplussed as usual, sat next to Maud, bathing in her presence and her gaze, and could say only, “You are quite spectacular. I love you incredibly. I’ll always love you.”

“I know that,” said Maud. “Never mind that now. How am I going to get out of this? They want me for as long as I’ll stay. They want a contract. They think they’ll draw capacity houses for weeks, or months. They say I’ll be rich in a trice.”

“Money is nothing,” said Quinn.

“Don’t be a nincompoop, Daniel,” said Maud. “Money is everything to me. How am I to live without money? I’ve schemed for years to accumulate wealth but it eludes me. I’m incompetent.”

“I’ll take care of you,” said Quinn.

“How much do you make?”

“Twenty dollars a week.”

“I’ll make four times that tonight,” said Maud.

“Then marry your horse,” said Quinn, and he left her.

Quinn made the second turning on the grand staircase, contemplating the nature of love and money, inquiring to an unknown authority whether there was such a thing as pure love, or was it as much an illusion as Maud’s sham nudity? If there was such, he wondered further, was it what he now felt? And if what he now felt was not love, could the real element ever be begotten by his like?

He repeated to himself:

I shall not die for thy sake,

O maid with the swan-like grace. .

And then, trepidatious, he entered the sitting room of Maud the Brusque, and encountered her in a pale pink dressing gown, her auburn hair now flowing to her shoulders, her pink chemisette visible beneath her gown, and beneath that, three visible inches of cloven line between her breasts. Never before had Quinn seen this much of Maud’s flesh. Never before had he known it to be so abundant; and the sight of it stopped his movement.

“You have a letter for me?” he asked.

“I do,” said Maud, “but that’s not why I invited you here. I thought you might like to see my breasts.”

“Ah,” said Quinn, “have I at last become the equal of a cake?”

Maud loosened the belt of her dressing gown and moved closer to Quinn.

When she saw Quinn standing tall by the door of the mansion, Maud assumed he was a spirit, so certain had she been of his death; for she had seen in her mind how he crumpled when hit by the cannonball, and how he lay still. And from then forward she received no further visions of his distant life. She thought often of him, and wept always at the memory of his face, his infectious smile of the so-white teeth. And yet there he stood, not a spirit at all, so she knew she must act quickly.

From the first landing on the staircase she watched him as he talked with Gordon, ready to call his name if he started to leave. When she saw him enter the house she knew she had gained time, and so came to her rooms, found the letter she had written him in 1858, and prepared herself to greet him in the manner she had so long imagined. With the help of her serving maid, Cecile, she stripped off her clothing, then donned the chemisette and the robe, placed the letter on the long table, lighted the candles in the two candelabra to frame the letter (and in due course, herself), drew the drapes so the room would not be visible from the upper porch, and sent Cecile away.

She sat on the green velvet sofa, thinking of how angry with her Quinn would be after his talk with Gordon. But that anger would pass and she would impose on him a geis. He would then, in due course, be hers, never again to talk of money. They would live together, or separately, it would not matter, for they would be equals in love, something they never had been since love began.

When he came into the room she saw his expression was a stone of feigned wrath, which only made him more handsome, more appealing. Maud always saw through Quinn’s masks. He threw the cake up at her when she spoke of her breasts, but she pacified him by offering herself to his eyes. He will not resist me, was her intention. But one must not dismiss Quinn’s dispositions too easily, for he is a willful man and at times must be cajoled into the behavior he most desires. With him love must be sat upon, like an egg. It will hatch with warmth, with envelopment. On its own it could rot.

She let her robe fall open, revealing the chemisette, the same order of undergarment Magdalena had worn the night of her death in the river of ice. It clung to Maud from shoulder to middle thigh. Maud imagined herself floating to the bottom of the icy river, snared by John’s hook, lifted aboard a skiff, then dragged, bitten, and bounced through the night toward this mansion, which Maud ever since had known as a place where the miracle of love rises gloriously out of death, relinquishes its scars, and moves on to the next order of fulfillment.

She opened the tie of her robe, cradled her breasts with both hands, removed them from constraint, and introduced Quinn to her matured bosom.

He stared.

He almost smiled.

He looked at her eyes.

He looked again at what was revealed.

He kissed her on the mouth.

He held her shoulders.

He stepped back from the kiss.

He touched her left nipple with his right fingertips, lightly. It was the color of cinnamon sugar.

He put his lips on her left nipple, tasted it.

He lifted her left breast in his right hand, moving it slowly from east to west, then west to east.

He attended her right breast with his left hand.

He put his lips on her right breast.

He lightly bit the nipple of her right breast.

He kissed her on the mouth, holding both her breasts in both his hands.

He stepped back from the kiss, levitating both breasts, moving them from west to east, north to south, and so on.

He kissed the cloven line between her breasts.

He licked the line and tasted her salt.

He held both her breasts with both his hands and pressed their softness against both sides of his face.

He raised his face to hers and kissed her on the mouth.

“Do you like me?” she inquired.

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard you say, and I’ve heard several.”

“Have you known a lot of women?”

“A fair number. It’s been a bazaar of enticement, you might say.”

“I’ve had six men.”

“A round number.”

“And several hundred suitors.”

“The fellow downstairs is one of the privileged half dozen, I presume.”

“He is not.”

“Has he ever put his mouth on your body?”

“Never. But even so, he is quite jealous. We must hurry. I want you to see all of me.”

“You’re very determined.”

“Only fools are otherwise.”

She picked the letter off the table and stuffed it into Quinn’s trouser pocket, then moved the candelabra farther apart and sat on the table.

“Do you remember how John came to Magdalena when she was dead, how he raised her clothing?”

“I remember it vividly.”

“I want you to do the same with me now. My breasts are blushing. Can you see?”

“I can.”

“I feel a sharp rush of blood to them when I get excited.”

“I could feel their pulse when I touched you.”

“They make the rest of me function. They’re the brains of my sex.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Now, I want you to look at me, but you must be precise in what you think. I’m accessible to the man who knows exactly how he loves me. No voyeur will ever reach me.”

She lowered herself into a supine position on the table, freeing up her robe and chemisette. Quinn, seeking precision but astonished by Maud’s behavior, could only watch with awe her reenactment of Magdalena’s posture, the array of her apparel before resurrection.

“For God’s sake, hurry up,” Maud said, and Quinn folded her robe and chemisette upward to reveal the inversely triangulated center of his dreams, more striking than he had imagined, more symmetrical, the auburn crest of it an arc, an emerging sunrise of irresistible invitation. Maud closed her eyes and let her arms fall into the same position as Magdalena’s of yore. Quinn put the palm of his hand on her sunrise and she opened her eyes.

“No,” she said. “We’re not ready.”

“Who says we’re not?”

“My blood.”

“Why are you with him?” Quinn said.

“I have to be with someone once in a while. He’s bright.”

“And he’s rich.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It used to.”

“Why are you talking about money when I’m in this position?”

“You should leave him.”

“Why don’t you take me away from him?”

“I wondered when you’d get around to kidnapping.”

“Look at me, Daniel,” she said, and she spread herself.

Quinn looked. “You are a most willful woman,” he said.

“Everyone has a right to a willful life,” said Maud. “I dare you to take me away.”

“And so I shall,” said Quinn. “But first I must know. Have you ever done this in front of a cake?”

She sat up and covered herself, moved the candelabra to where they had been before her ritual, snuffed the candles, opened the drapes to the upper porch, and sat on the velvet sofa precisely where she had been prior to Quinn’s arrival. Gordon then knocked on the door of the sitting room.

“Maud, may I come in?”

“Of course,” she said, and Gordon entered, smiling.

“I have to change for this evening,” he said, “and I wondered whether we should prepare a room for Mr. Quinn. I invited him to join us at the bazaar tonight.”

“What a good idea,” said Maud.

“I guess it would be valuable to see it,” said Quinn.

“It’s quite a spectacle for Albany,” said Gordon.

“Albany has spectacles and spectacles,” said Quinn.

“Then I’ll have them go ahead with the room.”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” said Quinn, “I wonder could I have the one I used to sleep in. Next floor up, opposite the stairs.”

“We have much grander rooms than that,” said Gordon.

“There’s grandeur also in repeating history.”

“Then you shall have it. I’ll have Cappy bring up your things and stable your horse.” Gordon looked at Maud. “You seem to be in your nightclothes.”

“I’m about to bathe,” said Maud.

“We’ll meet at a later hour, then,” said Quinn, moving toward the door.

“An excellent idea,” said Gordon, standing pat.

My dearest Daniel [Quinn read, lying in the bed he last lay in six years earlier, the careful handwriting before him composed six years earlier also], I am appalled by your unfeeling ways. You are a man of mercurial moods, and if you do not change, I shan’t promise that our love will survive, which would be lamentable. I have never ceased of loving you, but when you came into my dressing room and I hugged you as a savior, I felt something I had not felt since our kiss by the shore of Saratoga Lake (and I have known certain compelling intimacies with men in the intervening years). I conclude from this feeling that I have an enduring element in my makeup, one that, unlike most mortal characteristics of our species, resists change. Poets have talked of this but I have never credited them with propounding anything except romantic twaddle, and yet I must now confess they knew something I heretofore did not.

But you left me in such haste that I did not even gain the moment to tell you what led to our separation in Saratoga. I saw all that happened to you on the veranda that afternoon. I did not ride off on the roan stallion, as some thought, but created the ruse of my departure by convincing a stableboy to take the horse to a neighboring farm. I then hid in the hayloft with my bag and observed all events, for I was in need of time to think what I should do. Intuitively I knew you would never accept my solution to the situation in which I found myself that afternoon after our return. I was, of a suddenness, sorely pressed to provide for Magdalena in light of John McGee’s decision to leave us and pursue a career as a prizefighter.

Magdalena, headstrong of course, decided to depart Obadiah’s farm immediately and resume our life on the road. She thought of accepting an offer from a New York producer who wanted her to travel and dance and then meet with visitors curious to observe her beauty up close. She was to charge one dollar for each personal handshake. But I was fearful of her health, and knew it would worsen with travel. She was in a most sorry and withdrawn condition and I felt it my duty to bring her to a less grueling fate. This I achieved by shifting Obadiah’s obsession from Magdalena to myself. I discovered he was a man of peculiar predilections, obsessed by the backs of women’s knees, and so I agreed to make such parts as I owned available for his periodic scrutiny in exchange for his solace and support for the dwindling Magdalena, and a curb on his attentions to her.

In short order Magdalena grew easeful and serene, and in time I hired a woman companion, a French immigrant girl named Cecile, and began my life as the sojourning spiritualist, which afforded me small income and much danger from malevolent Catholic Irishmen. During one visit at Troy a group of them sought my destruction, thinking me an apostle of Satan. I eluded them and struck out from those shores soon enough to become the successor of Mother and Auntie, which is to say, I became the daring danseuse, which I remained until you saw me in my triumph as Mazeppa. This, I fear, will be the bane of my days, as well as my financial salvation. A new life opens before me now, with bookings everywhere. I do loathe these particulars, but I am comforted by the memory of our last embrace, and I send you my fondest caresses.

Until we meet again, I remain, your truest love, Maud Fallon.

In the carriage Maud asked Quinn’s permission to practice aloud what she would be reading later in the evening: excerpts from Scott and Keats; and from her handbag she took a slim volume, Marmion and The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The reading, she explained, was her contribution to the Army Relief Bazaar. Tonight she would take no fee for her work, which, of late, she had been doing in salons and temples where the arts flourished.

“Elocution in the salon has replaced horses in the hippodrome for Maud,” Gordon said.

“Elocution in the salon. Exotic in the extreme,” said Quinn.

“I needed something less convulsive than an upside-down horseback adventure every night of my life,” said Maud. “I crave tranquillity.”

“We seem to crave that as we wind down,” said Quinn.

“Winding down has nothing to do with it,” said Maud in miffed tones. “I’m winding neither down nor up. The problem was boredom and physical torture. I’m sure my body has suffered more than Mazeppa’s.”

“She was a tapestry of black and blue,” said Gordon.

“A tapestry,” said Quinn.

“I had to wear long sleeves and high collars,” said Maud.

“What a shame,” said Quinn.

“It was punishment without sin,” said Gordon.

“I hope you were well paid,” said Quinn.

“I loathe money,” said Maud.

“My romance with money is enough for both of us,” said Gordon. “That’s why I took her over.”

“I hardly think I’ve been taken over,” said Maud.

“You shall be,” Gordon said with a smile.

Maud then decided not to practice her reading and said nothing for the rest of the ride.

When he entered the bazaar Quinn experienced a rush of black wisdom and felt himself moving toward the crags of a new nightmare. This was irrational and he knew it. Tension rose in his throat and chest. He followed Gordon’s lead, walking beside Maud, threading himself through handsomely dressed crowds, breathing in the bright and busy oddness of this peculiar building: a sudden upthrust built in two weeks and designed in the shape of a double Grecian cross.

They walked beneath the elevated orchestra stand, from where a waltz by Strauss energized the evening. Arches festooned with flowers and evergreens led Quinn’s eye to booths celebrating England, Ireland, Russia, Schenectady, Troy, Saratoga. Hundreds of flaming gas jets imposed brilliance on the bodies below, which exuded in their finery a light and power that for Quinn paralleled the luminous battlefield dead. Irrational. Quinn knew it.

“It’s a veritable palace of Aladdin,” said Gordon. “And all these fair ladies, why, they seem like the nymphs and graces of mythology.”

“By and large, dumpy and frowzy,” said Maud, who explained that one of the graces was really doing public penance by working here since her husband was in jail for selling horseshoes to the rebel army.

Gordon ignored Maud’s remark and led the way to the Curiosity Shop, explaining that they would see Myles Standish’s pistol, carried by Myles on the Mayflower and purchased by Lyman Fitzgibbon after his genealogist discovered a link between Myles and the Fitzgibbons.

“It’s merely on loan from Father,” said Gordon. “Not for sale, by a long shot. A curiosity of history, as they say.”

Quinn looked at the pistol, wondered how many savage breasts its power had pierced, then moved along to the writing bureau owned by George Washington, upon which George had signed Major André’s death warrant. He saw Madison’s cane, Lafayette’s pistol, Grant’s autograph, and the Bastille model (made from the Bastille’s own stone) that Lafayette had presented to George Washington. Such lovely revolutions. Such a grand Civil War. We must not forget how they are done. He noted a pair of leather shoes that had been made for Union troops by prisoners at the Albany penitentiary. Five hundred and six prisoners were busy making the shoes. Half of their number were Negroes.

Then Quinn saw and quickly found focus on handwritten words in a locked cabinet, under glass, difficult to read: “. . gradual abolishment of slavery within their respective limits. . the effort to colonize persons of African descent. . upon this continent. . all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state. . shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free. .”

Quinn read the related sign explaining that one might, for one dollar, purchase a ticket and perhaps win, and thereby own forever, this document donated by the President to the Albany Bazaar, and described as the

ORIGINAL DRAFT

of the

PRESIDENT’S FIRST

EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

dated September 22,1862

Whereupon Quinn fumbled in his pocket for a dollar and purchased a ticket from one of the nymphs.

Maud took Quinn’s arm and said, “I must show you something at the Saratoga booth,” and Gordon, noting this, followed in their wake. Crossing the transept Quinn sensed an easing of his tension at the touch of Maud the cynosure. Then he saw Will Canaday standing by the Irish booth and he felt a surge of joy at the convergence of the two people he valued most in this life, and he moved Maud toward the Irish booth. When Will saw them he grasped Maud’s hand and kissed her cheek; then he embraced Quinn, neither of them speaking.

“You didn’t say you were coming home,” Will finally said.

“I wasn’t sure until I actually got on the train,” said Quinn.

Six years had passed since Quinn last saw Will, who was more stooped than Quinn had ever seen him, and walking with a limp. He had always carried a handsome walking stick but now a stout cane supported his steps.

“What happened to your leg?” Quinn asked.

“Aaah, they knocked me around one night and shattered a bone.”

“Who did?”

“A few of the boyos. I didn’t know them.”

“The Society?”

“It could have been. I’ve all sorts of new enemies as well, and they didn’t identify themselves.”

Will’s reputation for being the scourge of the city had not abated since Quinn left Albany in 1858 to test out New York and expose his soul to other than clement weather. He left with an invitation from Will to write anything he pleased, and so he had, until he hired on at Greeley’s Tribune. Even then, Will reprinted all that he recognized as coming from Quinn’s pen.

“And yourself,” said Will. “Are you well?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Quinn.

“I’ll introduce you here tonight. You’ll say something about the war, I understand.”

“I don’t think so,” said Quinn. “I have nothing to say.”

“Then no one else on earth does, either. It can be brief. Everybody here knows your name.”

“I’m not up to it, Will.”

“You’ll do it. People need the war’s reality.”

“They do? You can’t mean it.”

“I mean it.”

“I’m the wrong choice. I wouldn’t know reality if it knocked me down. And it did.”

“Just a few minutes will do,” said Will. “And how are you, Maudie? You look thunderously beautiful.”

“I wanted to show Daniel the Saratoga booth, and our old friend.”

“Oh yes,” said Will, “our friend.” He looked at his pocket watch. “We’ll be ready for your reading in about five minutes. Are you doing the Keats?”

“Yes, and I may also do Scott,” said Maud.

“Scott is always a pleasure.”

“Perhaps ‘Lochinvar.’ ”

“Splendid,” said Will, and he winked at Maud.

Will left them then, and Quinn saw what had been shielded from view by Will’s presence: a photograph of General McClellan framed in marble, and beside that a huge morocco-bound Bible donated to the booth by Mr. R. Dwyer, superintendent of the County Idiot Asylum. Quinn moved closer to a large framed photo of a military unit and saw it was the Irish brigade, led by Bart Connors from Wexford. Quinn had ridden with them for two days and told a bit of their story: wild men all, daredevil heroes their superiors thrust into lost or impossible causes. Using a steady supply of replacements off the boat, the brigade recapitulated the fate of ancient Celtic warriors: they went forth to battle but they always fell.

At the Saratoga booth Quinn found the usual antiques and art objects, as well as photographs and sketches of the great hotels, the ballrooms, the long porches, the ladies in promenade, the parks, the springs, the pines. What was new to him was a sketch of jockeys on racehorses, and an excited throng rising in the grandstand of the new racecourse that was opening this week.

“This is what I wanted to show you,” Maud said to Quinn. “Do you see who owns it?”

Quinn then saw a photo of a man standing beside a chestnut filly called Blue Grass Warrior. The man was well dressed, with a full black beard.

“That’s my horse,” said Maud.

“Really? Well, you always loved horses.”

“It was a gift from a suitor. Not one of the six, to anticipate your question. He’s from Kentucky. I met him at Saratoga just before the war, and he gave me a horse and a slave girl as gifts.”

“I hope you kept the slave girl too.”

“Of course. And I sent her to Canada in case he changed his mind about her.”

Quinn read the printed matter explaining the photo.

“Why that’s John,” he said. “John McGee.”

“It took you a while to notice.”

“It’s his beard. I never saw him with a beard.”

He studied the most recent incarnation of John the Brawn, handsome figure of substance and money, as wealthy as he is hairy. The last Quinn had seen of him was in 1863, when, as always, John was leaping into a new future, linking his fistic notoriety to the politicians who ran New York City, using his name as a draw for gambling parlors: John the Brawn becoming John the Grand and John the Mighty, his power and his fortune as expansive as his chest.

“He owns the track?” Quinn asked.

“He’s one of the principals. A handful of millionaires.”

“Our John has truly risen.”

“He’s wonderful to Magdalena,” said Maud.

“Isn’t she living with Obadiah?”

“She married Obadiah five years ago. But you know Magdalena. She was never content with one man.”

“That seems to be a family trait.”

“It’s stupid that you’re jealous,” said Maud.

As Quinn smiled his skepticism, it became evident to him that his possessiveness stemmed not only from desire and love but also from seeing Maud as the instrument by which he would rid himself of death and war, put life once again on horseback. He had felt such rumblings of possibility for himself on Obadiah’s veranda, anticipating Maud’s arrival after his first shave. He’d reveled merely in waiting for her there amid the architecture of dynamic serenity, that vast, sculpted lawn sloping to the lake, leading him to the edge of all that was new, centering him in a web of escalating significance. And in such privileged moments his life became a great canvas of the imagination, large enough to suggest the true magnitude of the unknown. What he saw on the canvas was a boundless freedom to do and to think and to feel all things offered to the living. In Maud’s presence, or even in waiting for her to arrive, the canvas became unbearably valuable and utterly mysterious, and he knew if he lost Maud he would explode into simplicity.

“Ah, there you are, cousin,” came a female voice, and here toward Gordon, with hand outstretched, came a handsome woman in her thirties, artfully coiffed, regal in maroon silk dress, its hoop skirt bouncing as she came.

Gordon took her hand, kissed her cheek. “Phoebe,” he said.

“We expected you for tea,” Phoebe told Gordon. “But here you are, all bound up with an entourage.”

“Two friends,” said Gordon. “Miss Maud Fallon and the war journalist Daniel Quinn.”

“A pleasure indeed, Mr. Quinn,” said Phoebe. “You’ve educated us all on the terrible battles you’ve seen. And how quaint to meet you with clothes on, Miss Fallon. You’re usually naked on horseback, aren’t you?”

“I was born naked,” said Maud.

“How charming,” said Phoebe. “We’ll look for you at tea tomorrow, Gordon. Please come alone.”

“Excuse me, madam,” Quinn said to her, “but you have the manners of a sow,” and he took Maud’s arm and walked her away.

Will Canaday found them browsing at the Shaker booth and led Maud to the elevated platform in front of the booth of Military Trophies. This, the focal point for the bazaar’s public moments, was crowned by Washington’s portrait, crowded with cannon, bristling with crossed rifles and muskets, and grimly but passionately brilliant with the regimental flags and the colors of the nation from before the Revolution to the present Civil War. Many of these proud silks had been reduced to gallant rags, the most notable being the flag of Albany’s Forty-fourth Regiment, shredded with eighty bullet holes, and for whose constant elevation in battle twelve standard-bearers had died and eighteen more had been wounded.

“A peculiar place for a poetry reading,” said Quinn.

“A perfect place for it,” said Maud.

“Why are you doing these readings?”

Maud cocked her head and considered a reply before ascending the stairs ahead of Will. “I suppose,” she said, “that one’s brain also craves distinction.”

Will addressed the crowd then, explaining Maud’s international renown as an actress and how in recent years she had been a popularizer of the great poets as well as a woman asserting an intellectual stance on behalf of all womanhood. “And,” he added, “if any of you have had the pleasure of talking with our Maud, you know the keenness and originality of that mind of hers,” which, he concluded, was tonight a gift to the bazaar, and that after her reading a basket would be passed for donations.

Maud smiled and stared out at the crowd, found men’s faces beaming at her, many women scowling. At what did they scowl? At the dancing spiritualist? The sensual horsewoman? The actress who reads poetry? The woman of fame who represents the power of the intuitive life? Well, whatever it is, Maud, they are scowling at you: you who merely by breathing in, breathing out, grow ever more singular.

Maud looked down at Quinn and saw neither the boy nor the young man (however briefly met) that she once knew. She saw a pacific smile and knew she was the cause of it, but saw, too, the trouble that lay behind it, had noted that trouble the instant she saw him in front of the mansion. It was the war, of course, and so she would begin with Keats, telling Quinn that he was perhaps half in love with easeful death.

“Thou wast not born for death,” she read, and eyed Quinn secretly, finding his smile gone, his face at full attention. Her geis was functioning. He was in the spell of her suggestion about the kidnapping. When they talked later she would invite him to Saratoga as her and Gordon’s guest. And once there. . and once there. .?

She opened her second book and told the audience she had not publicly read this poem before this moment, and then began:

O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west

Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;

And save his good broadsword, he weapons had none,

He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone.

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,

There never was knight like the young Lochinvar. .

But ere he alighted at Netherby gate,

The bride had consented, the gallant came late:

For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war,

Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.

Maud read with great verve and sensitivity the next four stanzas, banishing male beamings and female scowls and replacing both with rapt attentiveness to the narrative, wherein Lochinvar avows to the bride’s father that he has come only to drink one cup of wine with the bride denied him and, when it is drunk, to have but a single dance with fair Ellen. And they do dance, as parents and bridegroom fume, and as bridemaidens watch approvingly. Then does Lochinvar assert himself:

One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear,

When they reached the hall-door, and the charger stood near;

So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung,

So light to the saddle before her he sprung!

“She is won! we are gone, over bank, bush, and scaur;

They’ll have fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar.

There was mounting ’mong Graemes of the Netherby clan;

Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran;

There was racing and chasing, on Cannobie Lee,

But the lost bride of Netherby ne’er did they see.

So daring in love, and so dauntless in war.

Have ye e’er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?

Maud descended the stairs to stout applause, perceiving with pleasure that Quinn’s was the stoutest of all.

“Will Canaday has suggested I talk of the war’s reality,” Quinn said to the audience. “These cannon here look like reality to me. . and these flags all full of holes. And those things over there in the Curiosity Shop made by rebel prisoners at Point Lookout: rubber buttons turned into rings, and carved with the word ‘Dixie.’ You could walk right over there now and buy a rebel button and that might qualify as reality. Albany boys in rebel prisons down in Carolina and Alabama are making things too, carving pictures of Abe Lincoln and the flag out of kindling so the rebs can buy them and pitch them in the fire.

“Reality in this war is not always what you think it is. Take the fight at Round Top, when the Forty-fourth from Albany was part of the brigade trying to take that hill. Just a hill like a lot of others in this world, but ten thousand of our men went after it, and only twelve hundred came out alive. A pile of dead people, that’s the reality I’m talking about. The bigger the pile, the bigger the reality. We did get that hill before the rebs, and that’s reality too. A lot of hand-to-hand fighting. When it looked like our boys might get their tails whipped, our batteries opened up and dropped a whole lot of cannon shot on top of everybody — the point, of course, being to stop the rebs. Fact that our boys were mixin’ it up with the rebs wasn’t all that important, and so they got themselves killed by their own cannons. Reality.

“Then there was the major that the general wanted to see but nobody could find him. This major, he was from Buffalo. He was one nice fella, and I knew just how good a soldier he was. The best. We didn’t want him to get into trouble, so we all went out looking for him. I found him under a bridge, having what some folks like to call carnal relations — with a brown chicken. That may not seem like it, but that’s reality.”

Several women exchanged glances at this remark, rose instantly from their seats, and left the gathering. Men snickered at one another and some squirmed. Quinn fell into a natural pacing up and down the platform as he talked, unintimidated by the task for which he claimed to be so ill suited.

“This reb from Texas,” he went on, “when our boys got him in their sights at Round Top he called out to them, ‘Don’t shoot me,’ and threw down his rifle. Soon as he did, one of his fellow Texans shot him in the back. Reality coming up from behind.

“And the attack at Cold Harbor, where seven thousand of our boys died in eight minutes trying to break through Lee’s line. Couldn’t do it. Our dead boys were spread shoulder-to-shoulder over about five acres. You could hardly find any grass wasn’t covered by a dead soldier. That was unnatural reality down at Cold Harbor.

“I remember a letter I helped a young boy from the Forty-fourth write. He wrote what an awful mistake other boys back home had made by not joining up with the glory of the Forty-fourth. He died of inflammation of the brain, somewhere in Virginia. There was also a measles epidemic that killed a bunch of our lads before they ever had a chance to get themselves killed by reb muskets. Sort of a reductive reality, you might call that.

“Then there was this close friend of mine from Albany who was a captain, and we used to talk about things that were real and things that weren’t, though we never put it quite that way, and one day I heard he got shot three times in less than a minute. Shot sitting down and so he stood up, and before he could fall over he got shot again, and then on the way down they got him again, and he didn’t die. Still kickin’ after twenty-three battles, and that’s one of the nicer realities I ever heard of in this war.

“I got my own reality the day I was hit by a spent reb cannonball. Just touched by it, really, and it wasn’t moving very fast. But it knocked me down, broke my leg and made me bleed, and I thought maybe I’d die alone there on the battlefield. I couldn’t even give a good explanation of why I was hit. The battle was long over and I wasn’t a soldier. I was just out there looking for survivors and some reb cannoneer maybe figured, why not wipe out that Yankee bastard? He let one go I never paid any attention to, and it got me. I might be out there yet, but then along came this grayback doctor and I see him working on hurt rebs. I called out, ‘Hey, doc, can you stop my bleeding and set my leg?’ And he said, ‘I cain’t set no laigs. I got soldiers of my own dyin’ here.’ And he went on helping rebs. So I called out and said, ‘Hey, doc, I got money I can pay you if you stop my bleeding and set my leg.’ And the doc looks me over and says, ‘How much you got, son?’ and I say, ‘I got twenty-five dollars in gold I been savin’ for my retirement,’ and he says, ‘Okay, I can help you retire.’ And he comes over and looks me up and down and says, ‘Where’s the gold?’ And I fished in my money belt and showed it to him, and he smiled nice as peach pie at me and went ahead and stitched me up and put a splint on me, and then he wrapped that leg so fine I got right up and started to walk. I gave him the gold and says to him, ‘Thanks a lot, doc,’ just like he was a human being. And he says, ‘Don’t mention it, son, but don’t put too much pressure on that leg,’ just like I was a goddamned reb.”

The squirmers in the audience, spellbound since the mention of bestiality, were at last roused to indignation by the profanity, and a dozen or more men and women rose from their seats, a few shouting out to take Quinn off the platform. But as they left, Quinn moved to the platform’s edge, pointed after them and shouted, “Do you know the reality of Eli Plum of Albany?”

He stopped some in their exit and riveted the hardy remainder. Then he genuflected in front of them all and blessed himself with the sign of the cross.

“We called him Peaches Plum,” said Quinn, “and he was never worth much in any context you might want to discuss. He was one of your neighbors, and he and I went to school together here fifteen, twenty years ago. We were in Virginia, and we heard the drum corps beating a muffled Dead March in the woods near us and we all knew what was coming. Before long, orders came down to form with the whole First Division, and the Forty-fourth moved out onto elevated ground, facing an open field. The men formed a line, division front, facing five fresh graves.

“That, my friends, was a fearful sight. Also very rousing somehow, with all those brass buttons and rifles shining in the sun, and kids watching from trees, and older men alone on horses, or on top of rooves, and everybody’s eye on Peaches and four other boys as they came walking: two, two, and one. Peaches was the one, walking behind the drum corps, and followed by the provost guard, fifty of them with bayonets fixed. Five clergymen walked along, too, reading scriptures, and thirty pallbearers carried five new coffins. The procession went up and back the length of the whole line of battle and then the pallbearers stopped at the fresh graves. The five prisoners stopped, too, and stood there with their hands tied, a guard alongside each one of them. Then those five young men sat down on their coffins.

“I never got to talk privately with Peaches, but I dug up his story, once I saw it was him. Never wrote it, though, and I’m only telling it now because Will Canaday says you folks are hounds for reality.

“Peaches was a bounty jumper who joined the army eighteen times. You only got a fifty-dollar bounty for joining up when Peaches started his jumping career. Used to be there was enough henpecked husbands, and third sons, and boys who got girls in trouble, who were glad to go to war and improve their outlook. But the war kept on going and volunteers fell away to a trickle, and so the price of bounties went up, all the way to a thousand dollars, which is what they’re paying right now. Peaches, he made lots of money enlisting but he never got to keep it. When he’d light out he’d always bring the cash back home to his pa, like he was supposed to. Then one day after the draft came in, Peaches’s pa told him, ‘Go join up the army again, Peaches, only this time don’t come back because you’re going in place of your brother.’ This brother was a lawyer, a son the father couldn’t do without, the way he could do without Peaches.

“All those times Peaches joined up he never got close to a battle. He’d just disappear during the night off a train, or on a march toward some regiment, then head back home to Pa. But this time Peaches finally went to war. He saw a lot of corpses and didn’t want to become one of those, so he drew on his talents and his instincts, and he took out for points north. And he ran right into another unit and got court-martialed for desertion along with the four other boys who ran with him. They were all found guilty and the President approved they be shot as a warning to cowards and mercenary men in the army. I guess we all know how many good soldiers have the impulse to run, but somehow don’t, either out of fear, or good sense, or because they want to kill rebs. One youngster told me, ‘I’m stickin’ because we got justice on our side.’ Lot of rebs think the same way, but that doesn’t matter. Death’s all that matters, and I know you all want the reality of that, just like the folks back home in the real olden days who wanted to know how their war was going. And their soldiers would collect the heads and genitals of the enemy and bring ’em back home for inspection to prove the army was doing its job. Peaches never got into any of that kind of fun. He was just one of those poor souls who fumble their way through life, never quite knowing the rules, never playing by them even if they think they know them, always fated to be a pawn of other folks.

“Poor Peaches. Grizzled men around me were crying as the provost guard took up its position, ten guardsmen for each of the five prisoners, rifles ready, standing about fifteen yards away, while the captain of the guard read the five orders of execution out loud. The clergy came by and talked to each of the prisoners for a few minutes, and then the officers started putting those white blindfolds on the chosen five.

“I could see Peaches really clear, see him crying and quaking, and before I knew what I was doing I’d called out, ‘So long, Peaches, and good luck,’ which wasn’t very appropriate, I admit, but that’s what I said. Peaches looked toward my voice and nodded his head. ‘Okay,’ he yelled. Then his blindfold was on, the black cap was placed over his face, and it was ready, aim, fire. Four of the prisoners fell backward onto their coffins. Peaches took the bullets and didn’t let them knock him over. He crumpled in place and I never felt more an outsider in this life. All that pomp and panoply in service of five more corpses. It’s a question, I’ll tell you. But that’s all that’s left in me — a kind of fatal quizzicality, you might call it. I hope my sharing it with you has been of some value.”

And Quinn left the platform.

QUINN, THAT FORMIDABLE FOLKLORIST, walked along amid throngs of other souls like himself and he took sight of a picture photograph that revealed how a man will sometimes stand alongside of a horse. Quinn then said to himself, “I have a horse, but not so fine a horse.” This was a truth that served no purpose for Quinn, and yet he felt a goad. He went to his friend the editor, who wrote wisely about the great warps and goiters people must bear in this life, and his friend said to him, “I think it is time you took up with your platter.”

Quinn then went with his friend to a place where they met a man with chinwhiskers who opened a great door and took out from it The Great Platter of the Unknown that Quinn had long ago found at the bottom of a birdcage.

“This is a great thing,” Quinn said when he felt the heft of it. “I wish I knew what it was.”

“Well, you’ll never know that,” said his friend, “for you’re not smart enough.”

“I’m smarter than many,” said Quinn.

“We’ll not dispute that. Just carry it with you and it won’t bother anyone at all that you don’t know what it is.”

And so Quinn went to the slaughterhouse and bought a pig’s bladder and blew it up like a balloon and then soaked it in whiskey until it was strong and put the platter inside it and slung it over his back with a thong.

“You’re on your way,” said his friend.

“I am,” said Quinn.

“Do you know where you’re going?” said his friend.

“I do not.”

“Will you know when you get there?”

“I might,” said Quinn, “or I might not.”

“Then I’ll go with you,” said his friend. “I’m going in that direction myself.”

And so the two rode their horses, one each, and found themselves at the house where the woman known as The Great Mother had lived until she was done in severely. As they entered they heard the voice of an archangel in the music room. They stopped where they stood and Quinn said, “It is a man’s duty to sing.”

“And when one man sings,” said his friend, “it is another man’s duty to listen.”

So listen they did until the song came to a full stop. Quinn knew then that the archangel was a fellow named Moran.

Quinn and Will Canaday walked into the music room and saw that Maud was sitting at the pianoforte, looking into the smiling eye of the Moran fellow, and Quinn saw more in her eye than a beam of light. He resolved to tell her of this.

“I’m so glad you came,” Maud said. “We’ve been waiting for you both.”

“We didn’t know we were coming until we got here,” said Will.

“That’s true,” said Maud. “But don’t let it bother you.”

“You’re dressed in mourning,” Quinn said to her, and she was: hair upswept and bound with a black ribbon, wearing a severe black bombazine dress with long skirt and half sleeves, the severity relieved by a descending bodice line designed for provocation.

“We’re having a wake,” said Maud.

“Who died?” Quinn asked.

“Hillegond.”

“Again?”

“Six months to the day. We’re remembering her, aren’t we, Joseph?”

“We are,” said Moran, “and I remember this fellow as well. He can’t sing a note.”

“You’ve a good memory,” said Quinn, and the two shook hands even though Quinn was of a mind to knock him down. He had not seen Moran in six years, which was also the last time he’d seen Maud. The man’s face was prematurely ravaged, probably by drink, which was what had done him in as a performer. In his cups he mocked his audiences and drove them away, making himself a pariah with theater managers. And so he gave up the drink and became a manager himself, of the Green Street Theater, establishing a reputation for recognizing talent by casting Maud as Mazeppa.

“Joseph was just singing to Hillegond’s memory,” said Maud, and she gestured toward the Ruggiero mural of Hillegond seated at the same pianoforte at which Maud now sat, Hilly in the obvious midst of supernal music. Quinn looked at the opposite wall, to find the matching mural of Petrus Staats totally covered with a tapestry of a brilliantly white unicorn on a field of golden flowers.

“I’m glad to see Hilly out in the open again,” said Quinn. “But why is Petrus still out of sight?”

“Gordon covered them both so they wouldn’t haunt him,” said Maud, “but I had him uncover Hillegond. I couldn’t stand her being completely gone.”

“You did well,” said Quinn. “And where is the master of the house today?”

“At the foundry,” said Maud.

“I thought you were down south dodging musket balls,” Moran said to Quinn.

Quinn regarded Moran’s large, flashing, and breakable teeth, then put his sack on the table in front of his chair.

“I gave that up,” said Quinn.

“You’re right to come back here,” said Moran. “I love this place.”

“We all love this place and we love one another, don’t we, Joseph?” said Maud.

“Love lasts forever,” said Moran, staring at the portrait. “I loved Hilly.”

“Who didn’t love Hilly?” said Quinn.

“The fiend who murdered her,” said Maud.

“Ah now, that’s a truth,” said Moran. “Bad enough to kill one woman. An act of passion, perhaps. But to turn on Matty.”

“Murderers have their logic,” said Maud.

“Who is the killer?” asked Quinn.

“Ah,” said Will Canaday. “There’s a question.”

“Finnerty,” said Moran. “Ambrose Finnerty.”

“Joseph brought him to Albany,” said Maud.

“I saw him in Boston,” said Moran. “I never heard a more stirring orator.”

“He’s in the penitentiary,” said Will. “He claims innocence and says he’s an ex-priest, but nobody can find the truth of that yet. He traveled with a woman and babe, his wife and child, oh yes. But she’s a known cyprian who says she’s a nun and that Finnerty, her confessor, plugged her up with child in the convent. She loved him all the same, and he her, and they knew the world was good and the church wasn’t. So they went into theater with their peculiar love of God, and their hatred of all true priests and Catholics. And may the rightful Jesus and all his saints stand strong between us and the likes of such faith.”

“The Catholics have a lot to answer for,” said Moran.

“As do the heathens and Hottentots,” said Will.

“Finnerty could sing, too,” said Moran.

“Bawdy songs about religion,” said Maud.

“He kissed and fondled his wife onstage,” said Will. “In their nun’s and priest’s costumes.”

“It was very effective,” said Moran. “We filled the house twice a night for three weeks at thirty-five cents a ticket. Think of it.”

“Hillegond was in bed,” said Maud, “reading Gordon’s play about Dido. Joseph was going to produce that at his theater, too, with some help from Hillegond, weren’t you, Joseph?”

“I had hopes,” said Moran.

“She was wearing her rose-colored nightdress,” said Maud, “and her worsted stockings, too, because there was a chill in the air. And her silver earrings. She would never be caught without her earrings, even in sleep. It was near midnight when she looked up from her book and heard the step outside her door.”

“How do you know she looked up from her book?” Quinn asked.

“I have my ways.”

Quinn nodded and opened his satchel. He took out his bronze disk with the angry face. Was it a fat man with a round tongue? Was it a walrus? Was it a bespectacled woman screaming? Quinn put the disk on the table in front of him.

“What is that?” Moran asked him.

“It’s a thing of a kind. A round sort of thing,” said Quinn.

“I can see that.”

“Quinn puts tubers on it,” said Will.

“Hillegond,” said Maud, “had come to the part of the play where Dido pleads with Aeneas to stay in Carthage with her, but he says he cannot. I’m so sick of self-sacrificing women, immolated by love.”

“How do you know where she was in the play?” Moran asked.

“There are things one knows,” said Maud.

She stood up from the pianoforte bench, walked across the room with regal poise, and sat in a cushioned chair that gave her a vision of both Hillegond’s portrait and her own listeners. Quinn rotated his disk so that its face had proper perspective on Maud. He did not know why he did this but he did it. Why should I have to know why I do what I do? he said to himself.

“Finnerty was intriguing to Hillegond,” said Will from his own plush bench. “She invited him to dinner one night to hear his full story and he admits they had a dalliance.”

“More than a dalliance, I’d say,” said Moran.

“They found her jade ring in Finnerty’s rooms,” said Will. “That’s what did him in.”

“He said she gave it to him,” said Moran. “But there’s no proof. His wife said he was with her that night, but that’s a wife talking.”

“Hillegond took fright at the footstep,” said Maud, “for it was heavier than it should have been. But when the door opened and she saw him she gave him a smile. ‘Ah love,’ she said to him. ‘Look at you, sneakin’ around like a nighthawk.’ ” “You even know the words she used,” said Moran.

“It’s quite remarkable what I know,” said Maud.

“You used to do that sort of thing all the time,” said Moran.

“She made her living at it,” said Quinn.

“She moved sideways on the bed to let him sit beside her,” said Maud. “He kissed her gently on the forehead, then on the lips — not a real kiss, which she expected — and then he took off her spectacles and kissed her on the eyes. When he had closed both her eyes with his kisses he put the garrote around her neck and tightened it. She flailed but she wasn’t strong. She was big, but age had drained her and she soon stopped her struggle. He continued twisting the garrote and pulled her off the bed with it. Her feet knocked over the ewer pitcher with the tulips on it.”

“A pair of owls are roosting in Hillegond’s room,” said Will.

“I would like to see that,” said Quinn.

“They’d be asleep now,” said Moran. “Owls sleep in the daytime.”

“Even so,” said Quinn.

“I see no reason not to see them, even if they’re asleep,” said Maud, who stood up from her bench and led the way out of the music room. Quinn put his disk into his sack.

“Are you coming, Joseph?” Maud asked at the foot of the stairs.

“What is the point of looking at owls?”

“Indeed there is none,” said Will.

“But they must be a sight to see,” said Quinn.

“They’re quite beautiful,” said Maud.

“I have no objection,” said Moran.

And so up the great staircase they went to Hillegond’s room, whose six windows offered a view of the river and the sunrise, and where the pair of owls were asleep on the valance above the glass doors to Hillegond’s balcony. The room was a vista of peace and order. Murder was nowhere to be seen, though the aroma of villainy hung in a vapor alongside the lushly canopied bed, and all four visitors to the room walked ’round it.

They stood by the glass doors and stared up at the sleeping owls, which were two feet tall, one a bit taller, being female. The birds were both solidly pale gray, great soft puffs of matching and matchless beauty, both feathered to their talons and sleeping side by side, facing into the room with closed eyes.

“They’ll die in here,” Quinn said.

“They go out to eat,” said Maud. “The servants open the doors for them at dusk and again at dawn. They know no one lives in this room anymore, and we all welcome their presence.”

“An owl can turn its head completely around and look backward,” said Moran. “I once made a study of birds.”

“The room isn’t quite like it was,” said Maud. “The Delft vase and the double-globed lamp with the lilacs were both broken when Matty came in and fought for Hillegond’s life.”

“I thought they found Matty on the stairs,” said Quinn.

“The struggle carried out of the room. Matty fought fiercely. She was a strong woman and she loved Hilly.”

“She heard the fighting going on?” asked Quinn.

“She only heard the pitcher fall and break,” said Maud.

“You know it all, don’t you?” said Moran.

“Yes,” said Maud. “I also know it wasn’t Finnerty.”

“You can hold these owls when they’re asleep, and they won’t wake up,” said Moran. He carried Hillegond’s baroque silver dresser bench to the glass doors and stood on it. He reached up and grasped the sleeping female owl with both hands and stepped down from the bench. The owl slept on.

“That’s quite a trick, Joseph,” said Will.

“Not a trick at all if you know anything about owls,” said Moran.

Maud opened the double doors to the balcony and the breeze of summer afternoon came rushing into the room. Quinn studied the behavior of the owl held by Moran and observed that owl sleep is comparable to coma, a step away from death. He studied the behavior of Moran and marveled at the man’s concentration on the bird: eyes as hard as iron spikes. Quinn felt his old resentment at Moran’s ability to differentiate himself from the normal run of men.

“Joseph and I became lovers during my time here as Mazeppa,” said Maud. “Everybody knew, didn’t they, Will?”

“Joseph tends to boast about his conquests,” said Will.

“He was very attentive in those months,” said Maud, “but I don’t think I made him happy. As soon as I left the city he began to court Hillegond.”

“Assiduously,” said Will. “It was peculiar.”

“Which of your six was he?” Quinn asked.

“Number three,” said Maud, “and the only one in theater.”

“Joseph wanted to marry Hillegond,” said Will, “and she considered it for a time. But finally she wouldn’t have him.”

“We remained great friends,” said Moran. “May we change the subject?”

“He loved this mansion,” said Maud, “and all that went with it. And all that went with Hillegond.”

“Then he saw he couldn’t have it,” said Will.

“Hillegond came to think it was ridiculous, the idea of them marrying,” said Maud.

“It was not ridiculous,” said Moran. “Profound aspirations must not be mocked.”

“How lofty of you, Joseph,” Maud said.

“I admit error.”

“The news will thrill Hillegond in her grave.”

“It’s a great pity,” said Moran, “all this plangency so close to the heart.”

“Closer to the throat,” said Maud.

Quinn pondered these remarks and concluded that for some men a fatal error is the logical conclusion of life, and may not really be an error at all but the inevitable finale to an evolutionary evil. He watched as Moran the covetous sat on the bench, holding the owl aloft above his lap. Suddenly the bird was awake and staring, and Moran instantly released her upward. Perversely, she settled downward and sank her talons through his trousers and into the tops of his thighs. He screamed pitifully as he fell backward, and at the sound of flowing blood the male owl’s eyes snapped open. Soundlessly he flew down from the valance and, in an act of providential justice, drove his talons into Moran’s face and neck.

Tambo & Paddy Go to Town Saratoga, August 1864

HORSELESS NOW, I, Daniel Quinn, that relentless shedder of history, stepped aboard the horsecar, the first of three conveyances that would take me to Saratoga Springs and Maud and the others who had gone before me, and I sat beside a Negro man in whose face I read the anguish of uncertainty, an affliction I understand but not in Negro terms. The man was bound for a distant place, his bundles and baggage revealing this fact, and I began to think of Joshua. I then tried to put Joshua out of my mind and opened the satchel containing my disk. I studied the disk rather than people who would take me where I did not want to go again. I discovered the disk looked Arabic with all that cursiveness in its design. Were the Celts really Arabs? Perhaps they were Jews: the lost tribe of Tipperary. The lost tribe of Ethiopia, some say. Go away, Joshua. I will remember you when I am stronger. I concentrated on my disk and it changed: convexity into concavity — a fat tongue into a hollow mouth; and in this willful ambiguity by the Celtic artist I read the wisdom of multiple meanings. Avoid gratuitous absolutes, warned Will Canaday. Yes, agrees Quinn, for they can lead to violence.

How had Maud known about the violence to Hillegond? Well, she knew. Psychometry is the most probable. How did she make the chandelier fall? Psychomagnetic pulsation, most likely. Quinn has neither of these gifts. Quinn is a psychic idiot. Quinn experiences everything and concludes nothing. Tabula rasa ad infinitum. Still, when the owl tore out Moran’s throat there was a purgation of sorts. Quinn perceived that he himself had wanted the mansion as much as Moran did, but so hopelessly that he did not even know that he wanted it. What good is your brain, Quinn, if you can’t even read your own notes? Yet, once free of secret covetousness, Quinn moved outward: another leaving off of false roles, false needs. In beginnings there is all for Quinn, a creature of onset. Will Quinn ever become a creature of finalities?

For this newest onset I was, as usual, unprepared except financially. I’d used less than a thousand dollars of what Dirck had given me over the past fifteen years and had allowed the rest to mount up in Lyman Fitzgibbon’s bank; and so for a reporter I was a modestly wealthy man, without need of work for hire.

Freed from the history and the penury of war, at least for the moment, Quinn was about to embark on a life of thought, or so he thought. And there he went, west on the train to Schenectady and north on another to Saratoga, crowding his brain with unanswerable questions and banishing unwanted memories that would not stay banished, especially since he was about to enter the gilded and velvet parlors of John McGee, the gambler who could fight, and would, and did, and whose life is not separable from Joshua’s anymore.

John never gambled when I first knew him, preferring to store up his savings for drink. But we find new targets for our vices as we move, and when he knocked down Hennessey, the champion of the world entirely, John’s life entered an upward spiral that took him into bare-knuckle battles in Watervliet, Troy, the Boston Corner, White Plains, Toronto, and home again to Albany I wrote John’s ongoing story for the Albany Chronicle until the Toronto bout, Will Canaday then deciding not to finance expeditions quite so distant. I grew audacious enough to tell Will he was erring in news judgment, for John McGee and his fists had excited the people of Albany and environs like no sportsman in modern memory.

“Sportsman? Nonsense,” said Will. “The man is loutish. No good can come of celebrating such brutes.”

It is true that John’s brawling was legendary by this time, his right hand a dangerous weapon. He knocked over one after the other in his early battles and in between times decided to open a saloon in Albany to stabilize his income. He set it up in the Lumber District, an Irish entrenchment along the canal, and called the place Blue Heaven. Over the bar he hung a sign that read: “All the fighting done in this place I do. . [signed]. . John McGee.”

A brute of a kind John was. Nevertheless, he was a presence to be understood, as even Will Canaday perceived when John fought at Toronto. In that fight, ballyhooed as Englishman against Irishman, John knocked down, and out, in the twenty-eighth round, a British navvy who was Canada’s pride. John escaped an angry crowd, bent on stomping his arrogance into the turf, only with the help of the fists, power, and guile of the man who had been his sparring mate, and whose talent for escaping hostile pursuants was also legendary. I speak of Joshua.

And so it thereafter came to pass that John the Brawn was, at the age of thirty years, polarized as the heroic Irish champion of the United States, and matched against Arthur (Yankee) Barker, the pride of native Americans. The fight took place on a summer afternoon in 1854 at the Bull’s Head Tavern on the Troy road out of Albany, a hostel for wayward predilections of all manner and scope, where, as they say, cocks, dogs, rats, badgers, women, and niggers were baited in blood, and where Butter McCall, panjandrum of life at the Bull’s Head, held the purse of ten thousand dollars, five from each combatant, and employed a line of battlers of his own to keep excitable partisans in the crowd from joining the fight, and whose wife, Sugar, kept the scrapbook in which one might, even today, read an account of the historic fight taken from the Albany Telescope, a sporting newspaper, and written by none other than Butter himself, an impresario first, perhaps, but also a bare-knuckle bard, a fistic philosopher, a poet of the poke.

Wasn’t it a grand day [Butter wrote], when we all twenty thousand of us gathered in the Bull’s Head pasture to witness the greatest fight boxiana has ever known? It was a regular apocalypse of steam and stew, blood and brew that twinned John (the Brawn) McGee, also known as John of the Skiff and John of the Water (from his days on the river), and Arthur (Yankee) Barker, also known as the Pet of Poughkeepsie and The True American — twinned and twined the pair in mortalizing conflict over who was to be bare-knuckle champion of this godly land.

John came to the pasture like Zeus on a wheel, tossed his hat with the Kelly-green plume into the ring, and then bounded in after it like a deer diving into the lakes of Killarney. His second bounced in after him, Mick the Rat, a stout Ethiopian who, they say, all but broke the nozzle of the God of Water in a sparring meet. The Mick tied the Water’s colors to the post as the Yank trundled in, no hat on this one, just the flag itself, Old Glory over his shoulders.

Peeling commenced and the seconds took their stations while the flag was wrapped around the Patriot’s stake. Referees and umpires were appointed, the titans shook hands, and yo-ho-ho, off they went. The odds were even at first salvo, but the grand bank of Erin was offering three-to-two on the Water.

ROUND ONE

Both stood up well but the Pet in decidedly the handsomest position. Hi-ho with the left, he cocks the Skiffman amidships and crosses fast with a right to his knowledge box, but oh, now, didn’t he get one back full in the domino case and down.

ROUND TWO

The Pet didn’t like it a bit. He charged with his right brigade and hooked his man over the listener, which the Brawn threw off like a cat’s sneeze and countered with a tremendous smasher to the Patriot’s frontispiece, reducing him to his honkies. Said Mick the Rat from the corner, “Dat flag am comin’ unfurled.”

ROUND THREE

The Patriot came to his work this time with anger at the Mick’s funny saying, rushed like a hornet on ice at the Waterman, firing pell-mell, lefts, rights, and whizzers at the Water’s nasal organ. Water comes back bing-bing, and we see the claret running free from the Brawn’s nostrilations. First blood has been declared for the Pet, which raised the clamor of three-to-one on Patriotism and plenty of takers, including Brawny Boy himself, who ordered the Rat to take a cud of the old green from his jacket and off play the action. The Water let his bottleman second him while the Rat did his duty at the bank.

ROUND FOUR

The boys came up to scratch, the Pet again for business with vigor from Yankee heaven, pinning the Water boy on the ropes and hitting him at will. What happened to yer brawn, Johnny boy? Oh, it was fearful, and the claret thick as pea soup. Was he gone from us? Hardly. The skiffer outs with an ungodly roger up from the decks of Satan’s scow; evil was that punch and it hit the True One in his breadbasket, loosing the crumbs it did, for a great noise came out of the Patriot’s bung and he went flat as Dutch strudel.

ROUND FIVE

The Brawn lost blood, all right, but he’s a game one. Up for mischief again, he leveled a terrible cob on the Pet’s left ogle, leaving Pet’s daylights anything but mates, and the blood of the Patriot gushed out like the spout on a he-goat. The Skiffer grabbed the Pet’s head of cabbage around the throttle and used every exertion to destroy the Patriot’s vocal talent, which we thought a pity, for the Patriot loves to sing duets with his sweetpea, that lovely tune, “I won’t be a nun, I shan’t be a nun, I’m too fond of Arthur to be a nun.” The seconds separated the battlers and it was called a round.

ROUND SIX

Oh, the punishment. The Yankee Pet came up to scratch, erect on his pins, and lit out at the Skitter’s cabbage bag, but an uppercut sent him sliding like a chicken in a blizzard. The Brawn follows with the lefties and righties to the ogles, the smeller, and the domino case, but the Pet won’t go down. Tough he was and tough he stayed, but dear God the blood. No quarter now from the God of Water, who goes after the Pet’s chinchopper and schnotzblauer, which is a bleeding picture, and one of Erin’s poets in the crowd observes, “Don’t our John do lovely sculpture?”

ROUND SEVEN

The Patriot came to the scratch in a wobble of gore, both eyes swollen and all but closed, his cheek slit as if by a cutlass, the blood of life dripping down his chest and he spitting up from his good innards. Was ever a man bloodier in battle? I think not. Yet the Pet of Patriotism, a flag himself now — red, white, and blue, and seeing the stars and stripes — moved at the Skiffman, who had contusions of his own, but none the worse for them. And the Skiff let go with a snobber to the conk that put the Pet to patriotic sleep. Old Gory went down like a duck and laid there like a side of blue mutton. A sad day for the Natives, and Green rises to the top like the cream of Purgatory.

We would judge the victory a popular one in this pasture, city, state, nation, and hemisphere, opinions to the contrary notwithstanding. John McGee proved himself a man of grain and grit, and the True Yankee now knows the measure of his own head. For those who wanted more fight, well, more there was — and plenty, too, which the Yankees found to their liking, loving punishment as they do.

A good time was had by all, nobody got killed that we know of, and the nigger carried off John the King on his shoulders.

John McGee, the black man’s burden, retired after this fight, claiming the American championship, and rightly so. He left his Blue Heaven only for occasional trips to Boston, New York, and other centers of manly vice to box with Joshua and a few select sparring mates in exhibitions for the sporting crowd. He was heroized everywhere and he approved of such. But in New York (he once told Joshua) he felt kin to all that he saw: the antlike mob of Irish, the Irish political radicals, the city politicians, the gamblers, the brawlers, the drinkers, and oh, those lovely women.

John always said he retired from fighting for the sake of his nose. “No sensible woman,” he said, “wants a man whose nose is twice as wide as itself, or that travels down his face in two or three assorted directions.”

The power that our hero manifested in galvanizing the attention and loyalty of other men, the magic of his name and fists, generated wisdom of the moment in Manhattan’s Democratic politicians. And so they hired John to round up a few lads and fend off the gangs hired by politicians of the Native American stripe, the most vicious and fearsome of these headed by Bill (The Butcher) Platt, whose method was directness itself: invade the polling places in Democratic strongholds and destroy the ballot boxes. But the presence of the newly fearsome John McGee was a countervailing influence, which by dint of bludgeons, brickbats, and bloody knuckles proved the superiority of several Democratic candidates for public office in the great city.

For his accomplishments John was rewarded with the right to open an illegal gambling house, and assured he need never fear the law as long as there were honest Democratic judges in the world. He began his career with humbleness: three faro tables that catered to gamblers with no money. Perceiving limitations in this arrangement, John persuaded men of foresight to back his expansion, and in a few years owned sixteen gambling hells, including the most luxurious in the city, a Twenty-fourth Street brownstone furnished in high elegance (a taste John had acquired in the mansions of Hillegond and Obadiah), replete with sumptuous dining and endless drink, and featuring a dozen faro tables, two roulette wheels, and private poker salons where John on occasion, or by challenge, played for the house.

I never heard John utter a word on behalf of slaves or against slavery, but as he rose in the world, so did Joshua, working for John as Mick the Rat, as sparring mate, as doorman in the gambling house, and eventually as the most adept of faro dealers, nimble-fingered fleecer of rich men in John’s lush parlors. Joshua did this work when he could, but more than half of his time was spent conducting on the Underground Railroad. By the time the war began he had shunted more than four hundred fugitive slaves toward the North Star. He also owned his own policy house a block away from John’s faro palace on Barclay Street and had four freed slaves working for him, running numbers.

I spent a fair amount of time with Joshua when I moved to New York. After I broke with Maud on that unpleasant night in her dressing room, I suddenly felt stifled by Albany. The year was 1858 and I had sharpened my writing skills to the point that I felt I could function as an independent. Will Canaday promised to print anything I wrote, I made contact with other editors, and so began a life in New York City. My aim was to work at the Tribune for Horace Greeley, a man whose principles seemed as worthy as Will’s, and in time I summoned the courage to present myself and my clippings at his office.

“Your dudgeon is admirable,” he told me, and so I went to work on the greatest newspaper in the metropolis. I wrote first of what I knew well: an interview and reminiscence with John McGee about his great boxing days. I also used John’s connection to gain access to the dominantly Irish gangs of the Five Points section (the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies) and write of their ongoing feud with nativist gangs (the American Guards, the Bowery Boys). This warfare was a constant in the city, as many as eight hundred to a thousand young men in deadly battle in the streets at a given time, and the police helpless to curb it.

I also wrote of Joshua and his former slaves, revealing none of their identities. I printed slave stories as they came out of Joshua’s mouth:

“Slave named Bandy tried to run away and master slit his feet.

“Slave named Mandy lost a plow hook plowin’ and master tied her to a tree and whipped her till blood ran down her toes.

“Slave named Julius was flogged bad for callin’ his master ‘mister.’

“Slave named Pompey worked for a man had a wife wanted a nigger whipped every time she see one.

“Slave named George had a master got hisself into a rage in town, came home drunk and shot George in the foot.

“Slave named Abram got old and useless but master wouldn’t send for no doctor. ‘Let him die,’ said master, and old Abram died with creepers in his legs.

“Slave named Hanson had a master so mean that two hundred lashes was only a promise.

“Slave named Darius, all he lived on for a year was Indian-meal bread and pot liquor off boiled pork.

“Slave named Adam ran away and they caught him and tied him to the ground and whipped him to death.

“Slave named Caroline runnin’ stuff up a hill fell down, got up, kept runnin’, and master whipped her, sayin’, ‘How come you can’t get up that hill faster?’

“Slave named Tucker got punished for goin’ to a church meetin’ at night. Next mornin’ master called Tucker in and whipped him on the head with the butt of the cowhide, got his gun and hit Tucker on the head with the breech, got the fire tongs and hit Tucker on the head with it, got the parlor shovel and beat Tucker on the head with it; then when Tucker went to leave, master got his knife and sliced Tucker across the stomach and hit him on the head with the knife. But Tucker got away holdin’ his guts in, ran and walked sixteen miles and found a doctor, and almost died for five days but didn’t.”

So wrote Quinn.

QUINN, LOOKING STARCHED and fresh in a new shirt and dark-blue dress suit, the only one he owned, wearing also his slouch hat over his day-old haircut, sat in one of the hundred or more rocking chairs on the busy two-hundred-and-fifty-foot porch of the United States Hotel, holding in his lap the Saratoga morning newspaper for today, August 3, 1864, reading a story reprinted from the Tribune about the recent battle at Atlanta, the most disastrous of the war for the rebels: immense slaughter by Sherman’s army. Quinn also read a letter found on a Confederate soldier captured by Grant. The letter was from the man’s brother, a rebel officer, and he wrote: “The capture of Vicksburg and our army last year has proven to be fatal to our cause. We have played a big game and lost. As soon as I am exchanged for a Yankee prisoner I shall leave the Confederacy and the cause for Europe.” And under the headline “Democratic Patriotism” Quinn read: “The Democratic leaders opposed the use of Negro troops as an admission that white men of the North could not vanquish white men of the South. This prevented the raising of many thousand Negro troops. But when the government calls up white men through conscription, the same Democrats strive to defeat it, even inaugurating mobs against it. They won’t let the Negro go, they won’t go themselves, and they claim to be patriotic!”

Feeling the fear and anger rise in him again, Quinn put the paper aside to watch the arrival of three people, affluent parents with two grown daughters, a pair of petted beauties, or so it looked. Their carriage stopped at the hotel stairs and four young Negro men descended to them instantly, one assisting the women, two attending the abundant luggage, the fourth, with whisk broom, sweeping travel dust from the shoulders of all.

Quinn, as usual superimposing Joshua’s valiant face on other Negroes, could not complete this picture. He could not imagine Joshua allowing himself even an instant of overt servility, though he’d often worked as a servant. How had the man avoided it? There is a painting of him done by an artist-gambler who frequented John’s gaming house, which, thought the artist, captured Joshua from life: standing against a wall in his white doorman’s jacket, listening to music being played for John’s dinner guests in the next room. There is a smile on Joshua’s face, a benign and folksy response to the music, excavating the simplicity of the Negro soul that is so lulled by, so in harmony with, the sweet melodies of the oboe and the violin.

But if anything, Joshua’s smile in that painting is a mask of dissimulation, a private recognition that all that exists in this music is the opposite of himself, and that he understands the racial enemy better for having this privileged audience to his pleasures. I have never presumed to truly understand Joshua, but certain things are so self-evident that even the abjectly ignorant are entitled to an opinion, and I therefore aver that Joshua did not aspire to this veranda on which I was sitting, did not aspire to the glut of wardrobe trunks that were being hauled down from the roof of the carriage, did not aspire to join the parade of strutters and predators marching up and down the posh hallways, salons, and drawing rooms of this cavernous hotel, or along the preening streets of the old village, not only did not aspire to own or be owned by such ostentation but despised it for its distance from the reality to which Joshua did aspire: that landless, penurious freedom that was the newborn, elementary glory that followed after slavery.

I saw Joshua in New York not long after John McGee discovered that Limerick, his purebred Irish setter, for which he had paid eight thousand dollars in a public gesture of contempt for the poverty of his early days, had disappeared. The dog was widely known in the city, trumpeted in the gossipist newspapers as the luckiest dog in town, not because it was owned by an affluent world-champion fighter but because a rub of its head had propelled more than a few gamblers into great winnings as they fought the tiger at John’s faro tables. John, of course, had invented this story.

When John discovered Limerick’s absence from the house, the bedrock of Manhattan trembled with crisis. John sent emissaries into the streets to find him, dispatched Joshua to the police lockup for animals, this being the priority, for stray, unmuzzled dogs were poisoned daily at sunrise and carted to the dump by noon, and owners, if traceable, were fined five dollars for letting a cur run loose in the rabid months of summer. And we were in July. I caught up with Joshua on the street and learned of the impending tragedy as we walked.

“Damn dog don’t know when he’s well off,” Joshua said.

“He run away before?”

“He try. Seem like he need the street, that dog. He ain’t no house dog.”

“Maybe they already poisoned him.”

“May be,” said Joshua. “Then look out. John gonna desecrate any cop kill his dog.”

We found the dog poisoners taking their leisure, somewhat removed from the doomed bayings that erupted beyond a wooden partition in a warehouse built of failing brick, crude slatwork, and chicken wire. We confronted the sergeant in charge, presented our case, and were led by a rankless lackey to the wire pen where two dozen dogs, most of them mangy mongrels, but among them a fox terrier, a bull, a husky, and a collie, were all leaping and barking their frenzy at us. Limerick was among them, suddenly beside himself with joy at recognizing Joshua.

“How much it cost to take that red dog outa here?” Joshua asked the lackey.

“One dollar, but you can’t take him out without a muzzle.”

“You got a muzzle I can buy?”

“Yep.”

“How much it cost?”

“One dollar.”

Joshua counted the dogs in the pen.

“You got twenty-six muzzles?”

“Yeah. Got a hundred.”

“Then we gonna muzzle up these dogs and take ’em all.”

“Take ’em all?”

“That all right with you?”

“Whatayou gonna do with twenty-six dogs?”

“Gonna make me a dog house.”

Joshua pulled a roll of bills from his pocket to prove his seriousness. Then we muzzled the dogs and turned them loose. With luck they’d find a way to get rid of the muzzles before they starved to death. But poison at sunrise was no longer their fate.

Gordon and Maud arrived at the hotel porch precisely at eleven, the hour of rendezvous, Maud ebullient in a pink frock with matching silk shawl, wide skirt with sweeping train, and her burnished red hair in large, loose curls. Gordon, striding purposefully beside her, looked so brilliantly fresh in his starched cravat, tan linen shirt, claw-tailed coat, and new brown boots that Quinn felt he should return to his own room and find dandier clothes. Having none, he loathed the thought and vowed to become unkempt by midafternoon.

“Ah, you have the newspaper,” said Gordon. “I just heard it has an item that must be read.”

Quinn handed him the newspaper, and Gordon sat in a rocker and busied himself with print.

“You look like a bouquet of roses,” Quinn told Maud.

“How poetic of you, Daniel.”

“What do you have in store for me today?”

“Something beyond your imagination.”

“Nothing is beyond my imagination,” said Quinn.

“Opening day at a brand-new racetrack, you can’t know what to expect.”

“I thought you might have something more exotic in mind.”

“Your old friends John McGee and Magdalena will be on hand. They’re quite exotic in their way, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“Perhaps later,” said Maud. “Do you find Saratoga changed?”

“More crowded, more money, more hotels, more women.”

“You’ve kept busy watching the women, then.”

“It seems like the thing to do when you sit on this veranda. Clearly they come here to be looked at.”

“Do you like my new dress? It’s the same color as the one I was wearing when we met.”

“Very nostalgic of you, my dear.”

“Nostalgia is not my purpose,” said Maud.

“This is vile,” said Gordon, rustling the newspaper angrily. “It’s a letter. They’re referring to your aunt.”

“What could they say about her that hasn’t already been said a hundred times?” Maud asked.

“It’s clearly a threat because of her party tonight,” said Gordon. He thrust the paper at Quinn and Maud, and together they read the letter:

Mr. Editor — I would advise a certain aging ex-theatrical performer to keep a sharp eye out today for revelations of what she and her kind mean to this community. We who try to elevate the life of Saratoga are appalled at the degradation she is imposing on our society with her ridiculous social ambitions. We suggest she depart across our borders as soon as possible and rid us of the repugnant memories of her scandalous life. Courtesans are of the lowest order of mammal, and performing courtesans who kick up their legs for the edification of the rabble are a pox on our community.

PURITY KNICKERBOCKER

(Who speaks for a multitude.)

Quinn, deciding the letter and Gordon’s response to it were fatuous and depressing, let his eye roam over the rest of the page, found an advertisement for hashish candy, exhilarant confectionized: produces the most perfect mental cheerfulness. Also (remembering Magdalena’s five abortions) a medical salute to the Ladies of America: “Lyon’s Periodical Drops! The Great Female Remedy! But Caution!!! Dr. Lyon guarantees his drops to cure suppression of the menses, but if pregnancy be the cause, these drops would surely produce miscarriage and he does not then hold himself responsible. BE WISE IN TIME.”

“That kind of letter is commonplace, just ordinary jealousy,” Quinn said. “You can’t let it bother you. It carries no more weight than these frivolous advertisements.”

“Easy to say,” said Gordon, “but they warn of something coming. They’ll try to spoil her birthday party, I’ll wager.”

“I’m sure Magdalena can take care of herself,” said Maud. “She’s as invulnerable as the Monitor on things like this.”

“But her heart is weak. You know that,” said Gordon.

“What’s wrong with her heart?” Quinn asked.

“She’s had trouble for six months or so. She’s collapsed twice now, but she’s doctoring,” said Maud.

“I worry she’ll be harmed by this business, whatever it is,” said Gordon.

“Is she joining us here?” Quinn asked.

“She and Obadiah will meet us at the track,” said Gordon.

“Has she kept her looks?” Quinn asked.

“And her figure,” said Maud.

“Splendid. She’s one of our national physical treasures.”

“I agree,” said Gordon.

“You do?” said Quinn. “I wouldn’t have expected that of you.”

“I don’t know why not. I’m fond of the whole family.”

“As am I,” said Quinn, and he leaned over and kissed Maud on the mouth.

“That’s a bit familiar, I’d say,” said Gordon.

“With reason,” said Quinn. “I’m deeply and forever beyond familiar, and beyond that, I’m irrevocably in love with Maud, and I intend to kidnap her.”

Gordon broke into laughter and his tall hat fell off.

“How wonderful,” he said. “You speak as well as you write. Wasn’t that wonderful, Maud?”

“It was wonderful,” said Maud.

“Of course you know I mean it,” said Quinn.

“Of course you do,” said Maud.

“Did Maud ever ask you to kidnap her?” Quinn asked.

“Not that I can remember,” said Gordon.

“Good. She asked me, but I was never quite equal to it, and she was a vacillating kidnappee. But now I’ve decided to carry her off into the night, out of bondage to money, power, and fame, and do arousing things to her soul. Would you like that, Maud?”

“I don’t think you should answer that question,” said Gordon.

“I have no intention of answering it,” said Maud.

“I think it’s rather insulting,” said Gordon.

“Love is never an insult,” said Maud. “Let it pass.”

“I’m not sure I like your attitude,” said Gordon.

“Oh, you like it, you like it,” said Maud.

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Are we going to the track or not?” said Quinn.

“We’re going,” said Maud.

“Having professed love for you, am I still welcome or should I engage my own carriage?”

“Oh, Daniel, don’t be twice a boor,” said Maud.

Our triumvirate at this point descends the porch stairs and, settling into Gordon’s handsome landau drawn by a pair of matched grays, recedes now, necessarily, into the moving mosaic that Saratoga has become at this hour. The landau moves into a line half a mile long, extending from the front of the hotel on Broadway out past the elms on Union Avenue and onto the grounds of the new Saratoga track. The carriages are a study in aspiration, achievement, failed dreams, industrial art, social excess, tastemaking, advance and retrograde design, cherished fantasy, inept pretension, and more. They are the American motley and they carry the motley-minded denizens of a nation at war and at play. Quinn, aware the Union Army uses up five hundred horses each day of the war, is uncomfortably gleeful to be a part of this many-horsed motley. In his woeful solitude he embraces the crowd, famished for significance that has not been sanctified by blood. Before the day and the night are over, Quinn will observe, speak with, or become friend of, among others en route to the track:

Price McGrady, John’s gambling partner in New York City, a faro dealer of such renown that John pays him forty-five hundred dollars per month plus fifteen percent of the house winnings at all faro tables, and who is now in a fringe-topped surrey alongside his lady for today, ready for his horse, Tipperary Birdcatcher, to win the principal race of the day, or, failing that, ready for it to lose, either outcome an exercise in ecstasy;

The Wilmot Bayards of Fifth Avenue, he a horseman and yachtsman, investor in the racetrack with John McGee, and owner of Barrister, a horse that will run in the feature race, Bayard today among the most effulgent presences in the parade, riding in a barouche made in France, drawn by eight horses, and monitored by a pair of outriders who are wearing the silks of the Bayard Stable, gold and green, the colors of money;

Lord Cecil Glastonbury of Ottawa, the iron magnate (and sympathizer with the Confederacy), in a wine-colored four-passenger brougham, he the owner of Royal Traveler, the horse favored in today’s feature race;

Jim Fisk, the stock speculator and financial brigand, in a six-passenger closed coach, the largest vehicle in the line apart from certain omnibuses owned by the hotels, in which the brigand carries five cuddlesome women, all six drawn by six horses that follow behind the German marching band Fisk has hired to travel with him for the week;

Colonel Wally Standish of the 104th Regulars, who rides alone in his two-wheeled cabriolet, proving that the wound he earned in the Second Manassas campaign may have left him with a malfunctional left arm, but that his right is still powerful enough to control his spirited sorrel mare;

Magdalena Colón and Obadiah Griswold, he the carriage maker and principal partner of John McGee in establishing the racetrack, and for whom the feature race of the day, the Griswold Stakes, has been named — this notable pair riding in Magdalena’s demi-landau with its leather top folded down, she holding the reins of what is known to be the most expensive two-passenger vehicle in Saratoga: Obadiah’s masterpiece, gilded rococo in decor, doors of polished ebony, with Magdalena’s initials inlaid in white Italian marble on each door; she and Obadiah both eminently visible to all whom they now pass, he entirely in white including white cane and white straw boater, she in a summer dress of gray foulard silk with blue velvet buttons, the dress created in the postillon body design with tripartite tail, the new fashion favored by young women with slender figures; and rising from the right side of her straw bonnet the feathered plume of changeable color — gray today — that plume her vaunted symbol of resurrection ever since her time at the bottom of the wild river and which has made her the most instantly recognizable woman in Saratoga, in or out of season.

Along with these, in assorted buggies, phaetons, chaises, coupes, and chariots, come bankers, soldiers, politicians, Kansas farmers and Boston lawyers, litterateurs from Philadelphia and actors from Albany, reprobates with dyed locks and widows so tightly laced that breathing does not come easy, young women with tapering arms and pouting lips, full of anxiety over the adequacy of their botteries and chausseries, gouty sinners and flirtatious deacons, portly women with matching daughters who are starting their day, as usual, full of high hope that they will today meet the significant stranger with whom the hymeneal sacrifice may at last be offered up — these and five thousand more of their uncategorizable kind all move forward at inch-pace progress into the brightest of bright noondays beneath the sunswept heavenly promise of life at Saratoga.

A quarter of a mile from the track the carriage line intersected with a moving crowd of Negroes singing a song to the music of their own marching musicians, the singing spirited and full, the music rousing, the crowd en route to a celebration (to be marked by song, speeches, and prayer, I would discover in tomorrow’s newspaper) of the emancipation of slaves in the rebellious states of the American union, as well as a commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. The marchers were singing this:

No more peck of corn for me, no more, no more;

No more peck of corn for me, many t’ousand go.

No more driver’s lash for me, no more, no more,

No more driver’s lash for me, many t’ousand go.

I observed that the faces of all the marching Negro men brought back, as always, the face of Joshua and his myriad masks of power.

I saw John McGee as soon as we came within sight of the track’s entrance, where all carriages were discharging their passengers. Here, looking more prosperous and fit than I’d ever seen him, handsomely garbed in starched white linen, black broadcloth, and patent-leather boots, and with a full and perfectly trimmed beard as black as coal tar, stood the redoubtable God of Water and Horses, guarding the portal like the three-headed dog of Hades. He truly did seem to own three heads, so busy was he greeting and weeding the crowd. Up to a half-dozen people sought to pass through the gate and into the track proper at any given time and John knew many by name. He kept up a steady monologue:

“Ah, there you are, Mrs. Woolsey, lovely day for the races. . Mr. Travers, your uncle is upstairs. . Hold it there, Dimpy, we’ll have no blacklegs among us today [and with a rough pluck of Dimpy’s sleeve, John sent the man back whence he came]. . And none of yours either, darling [gently turning back a painted doll]. . Ah, we’ll all enjoy ourselves this afternoon, won’t we, Henry?. . And welcome, Mrs. Fitz, how’s your mother?. . You’ve an escort, do ye, Margie, well, so be it, but if I find you with your hands in anybody’s pocket, I’ll whip your hide and put you in rags. . Your cousin’s horse had a splendid workout this morning, Mrs. Riley, and I’d play him in the pool if I was you. . Throw that hoodlum off the premises. .” Etc.

John left the weeding of undesirables in the hands of two burly associates and came to greet us, shook my hand vigorously, gripped Gordon by both shoulders, then kissed Maud’s hand with tender affection.

“Ah, Maudie girl, there’s devilish news.”

“Magdalena?”

“There’s no news of her except she’s a year older. It’s the Warrior. They poisoned him.”

“Noooooo,” groaned Maud, and she collapsed into herself so quickly that I grabbed her arm, fearing a fall.

“They cored an apple, filled it with opium, and fed it to him. But he had the good taste to spit it out, and we don’t think he was hurt.”

“Who did it?”

“Ah, now,” said John, “I wouldn’t accuse anyone. But I have my notions.”

“I want to see him,” said Maud.

“I thought you would.”

And so John took Maud’s hand and led us to his carriage and then across the street to the workout track, where we found Blue Grass Warrior coming off a final lap. The jockey, a Negro lad of about sixteen years, rode him toward us, and when John grabbed the reins the jock dismounted. Maud stroked the horse, which was lathered with sweat.

“Are you all right, baby?” Maud asked the horse, and he dipped his head.

“He’s doin’ fine,” said the jockey.

“I’d horsewhip anybody who’d harm such a beautiful animal,” said Maud.

“It’s dastardly,” said Gordon.

Maud felt easeful after a time, and so we walked toward the stables with the Warrior and watched other horses being readied for performance. The jockeys were about, and the Negro grooms and handlers, and we had close looks at two of the Warrior’s competitors: Tipperary Birdcatcher, newly purchased by Price McGrady after a particularly fruitful month at the faro tables, the Catcher being a gray colt bred in Pennsylvania by the Dwyer brothers, the noted gamblers and horsebreeders; and Comfort, a bay filly owned by Brad and Phoebe Strong of Slingerlands, an Albany suburb, she a former Fitzgibbon (cousin to Gordon) and an enduring shrew.

Both animals looked splendid to my uncritical eye, for I had knowledge of horseflesh only at its most general and practical level, and was wanting in the specifics of Thoroughbreds, this an evaluation that could have applied to my entire life: he knew things in general; his specifics lacked direction.

We bade farewell to the Warrior and, for luck, I stroked the centered white rhomboid above his eyes. John led us then on a brief tour of his racetrack, orienting us to the betting enclosure, where we might make bid on the auction pools, past the several reception rooms and saloons where beverages, viands, and oysters might be had, along the colonnade with its thickening growth of crowds, and up the stairs to the covered galleries, where Obadiah and Magdalena awaited us in their front-row seat at the finish line.

My first response upon seeing Magdalena after a hiatus of fourteen years was that she was an evolutionary figure. Age had wrinkled her, of course, and comfort had broadened her, her posterior in particular. Her bosom remained handsome, a somewhat amplified garden of promise and romp, but there was an organic pursing to her mouth line, and her hands were birdlike in their animation. Yes. A bird was what she had become. Had she always been a bird? Possibly. Once a ravenously sensuous Bird of Paradise; now, with that upward cascade of throat, an aging swan with fluttering eye.

“Oh, good,” she said when we neared her. “Daniel is here. He’s smart about these things. On which horse should we wager, Daniel? Maud’s silly animal or the Canadian?”

“My horse is not silly,” said Maud.

“I know that,” said Magdalena.

“You look splendid,” I said to her. “But I’m sorry to say I can’t counsel you on this.”

“Of course you can’t,” said Magdalena. “You just got here. You haven’t even looked at the program.”

“He certainly ought to look at the program,” Obadiah said.

“That’s none of your business,” said Magdalena. “Let the boy alone. You’ve grown up to be beautiful, Daniel.”

“You’re very kind,” I said.

“One doesn’t say beautiful to a grown man,” said Obadiah.

“Will you shut your mouth and let me talk? Sit down here by me, Daniel,” and I did.

“If you don’t bet on Maud’s horse,” said John, “you’ll be wasting your money.”

“I heard you tell a woman to bet on another horse, down by the gate,” I said.

“Well, you can’t have everybody betting on the same horse,” said John, and he excused himself to attend to the pool betting, pledging to return and inviting us to join him if we felt inclined to gamble, which I did, believing only in Maud’s horse, believing Maud could not lose at anything in the world. John moved off into the crowd, which by the day’s peak moment would number five thousand. Bodies filled every seat, seemingly every square inch of space under the covered and roofless galleries. In the open area within the tall fence the crowd was equally dense, the movement to own space on the rail already having begun, the men’s tall hats a liability for those to their rear. Women in clusters of finery their vertical hats also a bountiful obstruction, and women with opera glasses observing the judge, the grooms, the horses, and other women, elevated the day into a vision of royalty and its court of ladies and their courtiers enthusing at races run solely for their relentless amusement. What exquisite privilege! What exaltation, that these animals exist to give us pleasure!

“Where do you keep your horse?” I asked Maud.

“She keeps it at my stables,” said Obadiah.

“He didn’t ask you,” said Magdalena. “You must learn to keep your mouth shut.”

“I keep him at Obadiah’s stables,” Maud said.

“You see?” said Obadiah.

“It’s very peculiar,” I said.

“Keeping a horse in a stable?” asked Obadiah.

“Will you shut up?” said Magdalena.

“Peculiar that we are all here, and how and why it happened,” I said. “It’s Magdalena’s doing. If you hadn’t died at the bottom of the river, and if you hadn’t accepted Obadiah’s invitation to come to Saratoga, we’d all be somewhere else. Of course it’s possible, even if you’d never crossed the river, that we’d all be here anyway. But that’s a fated way of looking at things.”

“Daniel is so smart,” said Magdalena. “If I were younger I’d steal his heart away.”

“Well, you’re not younger,” Obadiah said.

“Shut up, I know I’m not young. I’m sick and I’m dying and nobody cares.”

“Who said you were dying?” I asked.

“It’s my heart. It’s always fluttering and giving me sharp pains. But we all have to die sometime.”

“Don’t be morbid, Auntie,” said Maud.

“Especially don’t be morbid on your birthday,” said Gordon. “How old are you?”

“Older than Methuselah.”

“You look wonderful,” said Gordon.

“That’s what I tell her,” said Obadiah.

“Shut up. I look like a chicken with its neck wrung.”

“Why are you having a party and calling attention to your age if you feel that way?” I asked.

“When one is ill,” said Magdalena, “one feels it incumbent upon oneself to say proper farewells to one’s friends.”

“But what if you don’t die after this farewell?” I asked.

“She can do another party next year,” said Maud. “It’s all very silly. You’re in excellent health.”

“She’s strong as an ox,” said Obadiah.

“You shut up about how strong I am. I’m weak as a kitten.”

“Did that letter in the paper this morning disturb you?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t bother with such tripe,” said Magdalena.

“Good for you,” said Gordon.

“What did it say?”

“It was just tripe, as you say,” said Gordon.

“I thought so. Did they mention me by name?”

“No names were used. Even the signature was a pseudonym. Purity Knickerbocker.”

“They’re all cowards,” said Magdalena.

“Precisely,” said Gordon.

“They said I should watch out for something.”

“They implied that,” said Gordon.

“Extremely silly. What do you suppose they meant?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Maud.

“It’s totally ridiculous,” said Obadiah.

“It’s ridiculous when you open your mouth,” said Magdalena.

At this point I decided to maintain my sanity by separating myself from Magdalena’s quixotry. I stood up and suggested to Gordon, who was beginning to take on the appearance of a loathsome animal of indeterminate species, that we should go to bid on the race.

“I want to go, too,” said Maud.

“No,” I said. “You stay and keep your aunt company.”

“I want to bid. I want to buy a pool on the Warrior.”

“I’ll buy one for you,” said I.

“I’ll buy one for you, never mind him,” said Gordon.

“I’ll buy it myself,” said Maud.

“Then go by yourself,” I said and I sat back down.

“You’re a mule, Daniel,” Maud said.

“If I were a mule I’d be in battle at Atlanta,” I said.

Maud chose to stay, at end, and Gordon and I walked off like school chums.

“Is it true you’re going to run for Congress?” I asked him. I had no need to be sociable with him, but Will Canaday had told me he truly was a man of decent principle, a Unionist, staunchly (though belatedly) for Lincoln — unlike his father, Lyman, who thought Lincoln a tyrant and usurper — and good with the workers at the Fitzgibbon foundries. I thought him a bit too full of himself, but he did have the good taste to pursue Maud.

“I probably will,” he said. “The party offered it to me.”

“The Republicans?”

“Of course.”

“You may find yourself running against John. The Democrats are talking of him as a candidate, too.”

“I’ve heard that. I’m afraid I can’t worry about the Irish.”

The idea of a man entering into a new career at midlife was strange to me, and appealing. I had thought only of continuity since I began educating myself, and so the idea of a mind change — industry into politics, in Gordon’s case — seemed like a mutation of the species; and I date to this moment my change of mind on the word.

All that I had written for Will and for the Tribune seemed true enough, but a shallow sort of truth, insufficiently reflective of what lay below. Joshua’s life, or John’s, or my own could only be hinted at by the use of the word as I had been practicing it. The magnificent, which is to say the tragic or comic crosscurrents and complexities of such lives, lay somewhere beyond the limits of my calling. My thinking process itself was inhibited by form, by the arguments and rules of tradition. How was I ever to convey to another soul, even in speech, what I felt for and about Maud, what grand churnings she set off in my inner regions? How could I know those workings, even for myself alone, without a proper language to convey them? I was in need of freedom from inhibition, from dead language, from the repetitions of convention.

If I had not left my disk at the hotel, I would have taken it out of its sack and studied its mystery. And with that thought I knew that what was wrong with my life and work was that I was so busy accumulating and organizing facts and experience that I had failed to perceive that only in the contemplation of mystery was revelation possible; only in confronting the incomprehensible and arcane could there be any synthesis. My wretched inadequacy in achieving integrity of either mind or spirit after having witnessed so much death, deviltry, and treachery was attributable to this. I had become a creature of rote and method at a time when only intuitions culled from an anarchic faith in unlikely gods could offer me an answer. How could I ever come to know anything if I didn’t know what I didn’t know?

“Well,” I said to Gordon as we neared the betting enclosure, “I hope you’re getting used to my plan to kidnap Maud.”

“You haven’t gone soft in the brain, have you, Quinn? Kidnapping is a serious affair.”

“They have to catch you, and I can’t conceive of that.”

“You’re unorthodox, all right. I can say that after hearing you talk at the bazaar. But you know I intend to marry the girl.”

“Does she intend that as well?”

“We’ve talked of it often.”

“I don’t think Maud is very taken with marriage,” I said. “I think she much prefers to live in sin.”

“You’d best watch your language, fellow.”

“You’re totally correct. I was just telling myself the same thing.”

We were by then at the center of the exquisite vice of gambling on Thoroughbreds, the auctioneer standing on an elevated platform with a pair of spotters watching the crowd of about three hundred for their bids. Bidding on the pools had been frenzied since early morning at John McGee’s local gambling house on Matilda Street in the Spa, but now it was reaching an apex of zeal at the track. As post time neared, a chalkboard gave the bids on each horse in the first pool. And now each horse was being auctioned separately, yet again, the folks with the fat bankrolls raising the bid on their favorites to levels beyond the reach of everyday gamblers. John held all bets, giving the winning bidder a ticket on the horse of his choice, with which he might claim all the money bet on his particular pool if his horse won. John took three percent of all bets, and so stood to win perpetually and lose never a whit — odds that pleased him quitesome.

There would be two races today, the first and most important being the Griswold Stakes, named for Obadiah: best two out of three heats, each heat one mile, carry ninety pounds, $50 entrance, purse $1,000 added, for all ages. These were the entries:

Lord Cecil Glastonbury’s ROYAL TRAVELER, four-year-old, highest pool price thus far $1,200

Maud Fallon’s BLUE GRASS WARRIOR, five-year-old, pool price $950

Wilmot Bayard’s BARRISTER, four-year-old, pool price $600

Bradford and Phoebe Strong’s COMFORT, five-year-old, pool price $255

Price McGrady’s TIPPERARY BIRDCATCHER, three-year-old, pool price $180

Abner Swett’s ZIGZAG MASTER, four-year-old, pool price $60

By the time Quinn and Gordon focused on the betting the Warrior was up to $1,100. Quinn bid $1,150 and was topped by a Negro woman with a fistful of money who bid $1,175. Quinn went to $1,200, the Negro woman to $1,225, Quinn to $1,250 and quiet. And so Quinn took the ticket, knowing it was madness to spend so much money. But spending it on behalf of Maud reduced the madness substantially. Also, the total for his pool was $3,805. So if he won, as he intuited, he would triple his money.

“I’m glad you didn’t fight me,” he told Gordon.

“I wasn’t tempted.”

“There’ll be other chances,” said Quinn.

They observed the presence of five-hundredand thousand-dollar bills in hands of newcomers bidding feverishly on the next pool. The two men observed the selling of this last pool before the first heat and noted Maud’s Warrior moving into favored position, the pool now bringing $ 1,050 on the Warrior, and only $990 on Royal Traveler, the other horses standing more or less the same; and then the pair walked back toward their party, observing the jockeys sitting in wire baskets to be weighed, the horses in the paddock circle waiting to enter the track, and on to the gallery to see the first horse already on the track with jockey up and stewards leading the parade past all connoisseurs and ignoramuses in residency on the subject of horseflesh. The buzz of the crowd was growing in volume, the judges alert in their elevated viewing stands on either side of the finish line, the track a mix of sandy loam and clay, sere and pale now from the long drought. It was blazing noon on this inaugural racing morning of August third, and the five thousand all looked out from their privileged galleries, out from the less-privileged standing area below, and still more looked on from perches in trees or atop tall wagons parked on the periphery of the mile-long track, sandy scrub pines visible in all directions beyond the sea of grass planted in the center of the track’s oval.

Looking down from his perch between Maud and Magdalena, Quinn saw the Negro woman he had outbid standing with a group of Negro men and women in their own preserve along the rail’s final edge, the woman with an unobstructed view of the race. She and her male companion had been the lone Negroes in the betting enclosure, and Quinn now sought to define her from a distance. Her ample self was singular, to begin with; her aggressive presence here a fact that set her apart from the four million slaves and the half-million free Negroes in this divided Union. How does she come to be here when war rages around the heads of her enslaved kith and kin? Why are any of us here, for that matter? Quinn would take bets that the prevailing evaluation would be that she was a madam. She well may be. Quinn knew such madams in New York, drank in their establishments, knew their girls. But Quinn knew also that the woman could be a gambler on the order of Joshua, an entrepreneur who saw her chances and understood them. She could be the inheritor of a fortune left by a guilty white man, or a queen of industry in the great Negro netherworld so little understood by white entrepreneurs. Or was she a mathematical wizard who had discovered the investment market? Well, Quinn had a good time trying to place her in the cosmos, and knew he’d be wrong no matter what he decided, just as no man alive looking at Joshua could imagine his achievement in money and survival skills. Was the woman a sculptress from the Caribbees? A sorceress from Sierra Leone?

Joshua’s father, known as Cinque, had been stolen by slavers from Sierra Leone, but offshore from Puerto Rico he led a revolt of slaves on board the ship, killed the captain and mate as other crewmen fled in small boats, then with one sailor’s help sailed eight weeks toward America and freedom, landing in starving condition at Virginia, where the sailor had vengefully steered them, and there Cinque and other surviving slaves were charged with murder. But instead of trial, and because of his physical value, Cinque was sold to a planter with a reputation for curbing arrogance. In time Cinque found a woman, sired Joshua, and after an escape attempt was hanged by his feet and whipped until he bled to death through his face, leaving a legacy of rebellion and unavengeable suffering for the three-year-old Joshua to discover.

When his own time came for rebellion, Joshua, who had educated himself in stealth, had no need of murder. He fled from master in the night and made his way north to New York, where he gravitated to the first cluster of Negroes he found, that being at the Five Points, the pestilential neighborhood dominated by the Irish, but where Negroes and Italians, in smaller numbers, also lived and worked in the underworld that that neighborhood was, where every stranger was a mark, and where no human life was safe from the ravagements of the street and river gangs: the Daybreak Boys, the Short Tails, the Patsy Conroys.

Joshua learned rat baiting at the Five Points, learned how to draw blood from bare-knuckle wounds with his mouth, this taught to him by an expert named Suckface, a member of the Slaughterhouse gang, who for ten cents would bite the head off a live mouse, and for a quarter off a live rat. Joshua learned to deal cards in a Five Points dive owned by a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound Negro woman called The Purple Turtle. She, like Joshua, lived on a street called Double Alley, and when Joshua told all this to John McGee in a later year, an enduring bond was forged between them; for John knew the Five Points intimately, had cousins there from Connacht (considered by some the lowliest place in Ireland, although not by the people from Connacht), had been in The Turtle’s place often, and for years sang the song of Double Alley and its poetic alias, Paradise Alley.

Now Double Alley’s our Paradise Alley,

For that’s where we learned how to die.

We suckled on trouble and fightin’ and gin,

And we loved every girl who was ready to sin.

Old Double Alley’s our Paradise Alley

For nobody ever got old.

We fought for a nickel and died for a dime,

We knew there was nothin’ but havin’ a time.

Oh, I’d sure love to see the old place in its prime,

Double old Paradise Alley.

The Five Points harmony, though quitesuch it never was between the Negroes and the Irish, waned perceptibly when the war fever came on. The fight to free the niggers was all idiot stuff to the Five Points paddies, whose principal interest was freeing themselves from the woes that ailed them. And so it happened that many Negroes wisely moved out of Paradise to less hostile quarters. Joshua, by then, was long gone from Double Alley, and by the time the war erupted he’d been conducting on the Railroad for more than a decade.

At a brisk tap of the drum the Griswold Stakes got off with as even a start as ever was. Blue Grass Warrior and Tipperary Birdcatcher led a tight pack by a pair of noses, Barrister and Royal Traveler neck and neck behind the leaders, Zigzag Master two lengths off, and Comfort trailing. So it went until the half mile, when Zigzag made his move and challenged the leading duo, his nose at the Warrior’s saddle girths, Barrister falling back after a spent burst of speed, and Comfort trailing. At the top of the stretch the Catcher lost wind, and Zigzag took the lead by a head, but the Warrior on the outside, attentive to the Negro jockey’s whip and whisper, moved alongside Zigzag, and then with a surge of power moved in front by a full length, then two, and in the stretch was going away to win the heat. The results:

Blue Grass Warrior

1

Zigzag Master

2

Tipperary Birdcatcher

3

Royal Traveler

4

Barrister

5

Comfort

6

The betting was scrambled for the second heat, Comfort and Barrister withdrawn by their owners. Grooms started their rubdowns of the horses as soon as they left the track, and a keen-eyed steward, by chance and nothing more, noted that a long white marking in Zigzag’s nose had taken a shape different from what it had been at the start of the race; whereupon the overheated animal was examined and found to have been dyed. Under interrogation, owner Abner Swett professed ignorance. But it was quickly learned he was the brother-in-law of Jeremiah Plum, the patriarch of the notorious Plum family, which was famed throughout northeast Christendom for dyeing stolen horses to prevent them from being identified and reclaimed. Before the day was out we would all learn that Zigzag’s record had been fabricated as well, that his true name was Wild Pilgrim, and that he was a four-year-old with so many victories that he would have been at least a co-favorite (at much lower and less profitable odds) with the Traveler or the Warrior had his true history been known. The Pilgrim had beaten the Traveler twice, and so only Maud’s Warrior was feared as his competitor on this sunbright noonday, which was why John’s investigation into the doping of the Warrior focused on Abner Swett of Watervliet, a man of irregular values.

As the horses were about to enter the track for the second heat, a carriage drawn by a single horse, and another horse and rider behind it, came onto the track from a gate at the top of the stretch, and at moderately high speed they approached the finish line, there slowing enough for the crowd to view them in full detail. In the carriage, an old demi-landau gilded like Obadiah’s masterwork, and with the letters M.C. painted on the door, rode a Negro wearing women’s clothing, including an unmistakable copy of Magdalena’s hat with a scarlet plume rising from it, the plume and the Negro waving to the crowd as they passed. Behind him, clad only in long white underwear and a woman’s red wig, and riding backward and belly-up in the pose well known to multitudes from newspaper advertisements and theater posters-Maud as Mazeppa — rode another Negro, who also waved at the crowd and showed them his backside, to which was pinned a large green shamrock. Then, with a trick rider’s expertise, he righted himself, and the two Negroes galloped down the track and out the gate by the far turn before anyone had the wit to stop them.

In the upper gallery, while the crowd exploded with laughter, Magdalena fell unconscious in Quinn’s arms.

Soon after the mockery of Maud and Magdalena, the second heat of the Griswold Stakes was run. Three horses were entered: Blue Grass Warrior, Tipperary Birdcatcher, and Royal Traveler. They finished in that order, the Warrior winning by a length, the Traveler a far third. After crossing the finish line, Maud’s horse stepped into a hole in what seemed like a perfectly smooth section of the track, twisted its left foreleg, and broke it. The jockey pulled him up and the Warrior stood with his leg bent and dangling. Track handlers went to him and wrestled him down onto his side atop a tarpaulin; then they strapped him into the tarp and dragged him away. After discussing the matter with Maud, John McGee went to the barn where they had taken the Warrior and personally fired two bullets into the animal’s brain.

QUINN AGAIN PERCEIVED inevitable death in the dangling leg of Blue Grass Warrior, just as he had seen it in 1863 during the second day of a week of violence now known as the New York Draft Riots. Rioting was entering into a crescendo on that day as Quinn and John McGee turned a corner onto Ninth Avenue, heading for the house where Joshua was waiting out the riots with another man, a newly arrived fugitive slave.

Quinn himself had arrived only a week earlier, back from the battle of Vicksburg to write his personal tale of that ordeal, and having done that, he rested, sipping lager and communing with other ink-stained wretches at Charlie Pfaff’s Cave at Printing House Square about the nuances of war correspondency, literature, and Charlie’s German pancakes. Quinn’s time spent with the lower orders at the Five Points worked against his need for rest, and a doughty Tribune editor tracked him down and assigned him to roam the Five and assess the rampant resentment to the draft, the first list of conscripts having just been released by the federal government.

In the Five Points and other like slums of the metropolis there was all but solid opposition to the war and to the race of people whose plight had brought it about. Also in the Five Points, Quinn found that the Copperhead politicians, great friends all of John McGee, were viewed as heroic figures. Denizens of the Five, “outscourings of humanity, the dregs of Europe” commonly called, abided in harmonious squalor with the city’s criminal element, and numbered, in all, perhaps eighty thousand in a city of eight hundred thousand, a statistic with wicked potential.

Given the normal antisocial elements of such a group, its antipathy to the war and to the government waging it, given its natural thirst for vengeance, the balance of social madness, in retrospect, can be viewed as easily tippable with the imposition of a hateful law. Such was the conscription law, drafting men for the first time (volunteers and bounty seekers had heretofore sustained the army’s needs), but exempting from service anyone able to pay the government three hundred dollars. We need not elaborate on the crystalline injustice of this to the poor man in general, and in particular to the poor Irishman (a quarter of the entire city was Irish), mired in generational denial and humiliation as he was, and for whom free Negroes meant a swarm of competitors for the already insufficient jobs at the bottom of the world.

And so in the heat of a midsummer weekend in July 1863, while Lee was licking his wounds from Gettysburg, the first polymorphic mob, estimated at ten thousand, drank itself into a frenzy in the greengroceries, the dance halls, and the dives of its choice, then took to the streets with baleful intent: Burn the draft office, burn the Tribune, that abolitionist rag, and pillage and destroy all that is not of us.

John and I found that mob as we turned the corner onto Ninth Avenue. The screaming that greeted us was horrendous, a battle already engaged between fifty policemen and the uncountable rioters who, in this moment, were led by a gigantic bare-chested, one-armed man, and at his side a young man I’d seen haranguing a crowd at the Five Points two days earlier. I remembered him at that time screaming anti-Negro invective at a crowd, urging rebellion, riot, revolution, no draft, and concluding with huzzahs for Jefferson Davis.

This younger man now fought like a pit bull, felling policemen with his club and with the force of his rage; and beside him the giant flailed outward with his enormous bludgeon, an extension of his Herculean right arm, cracking heads and backs with a vehemence, his own head and body remarkably invulnerable to clubbings by police truncheons.

The mob moved relentlessly forward, the police valiant but unequal, routed and forced to flee for their lives as we watched. I do not know how they found Joshua’s house. Perhaps they saw a Negro face in a window, or perhaps a neighbor was aware that Joshua had been there in recent days. But they singled out the house, beat open its doors, and swarmed inside.

“If he’s still in there, he’s dead,” said John.

The howling of the mob grew fiercer, more shrill, a wordless yawp of animal frenzy, the mob hearts all linked now in a single feral pulsebeat as they sensed a quarry and a kill. And then, from a second-story window in the house, a man screamed in triumph words I could not understand, but the mob could, and it responded with a roar. The man gave a signal and the mob obeyed. It moved backward into the street and was rewarded with a Negro (not Joshua) being pitched headfirst out the window, whereupon the mob closed in over him and I saw no more of what was done.

Joshua they brought out the door, his head bloodied but he still able to walk, and at the sight of him John broke into a run and pushed his way toward the center yelling, “Don’t kill him!” only to be met by the one-armed giant and his cudgel and dealt such a blow as would have killed two normal men. John fell unconscious, bloodied, dead I thought, and death might have been his lot had not the mob’s focus been on the preferred quarry: Joshua. The swarm turned its attention from the dissenter, and I pulled John off the street and toward the basement of the nearest house, found it doorless, black, and empty. I propped John in a corner, and as best I could, tried stanching the flow of his blood. He was breathing, but I dared not move him toward help now, for the sight of that bloody head was too likely to whet the mob’s appetite for another kill. And so I was fated to guard the wounded John and watch from my darkness as the mob took its pleasure with Joshua. Here is what they did to him:

They beat him with their cudgels

And they stabbed him with their knives

and he did not die

They dropped stones onto his chest

They dropped stones onto his head

and he did not die

They poked holes in him with sticks

They roped his legs and dragged him

and he did not die

They gave him to the harpies

And they opened up his flesh

and he did not die

Then the harpies oiled his wounds

And they lit him with a match

and he did not die

Then they hanged him from a lamppost

Lit a fire underneath him

and he died

The mob moved on, and so I was able to get help from a family on the block to carry John to a bed; and a woman bandaged his head. Two samaritans cut down Joshua but a fragment of the mob came back and found him on the ground and hanged him a second time. When quiet came upon the street I shinnied up the lamppost and cut him down again. His left hand had been severed. I could not find it. I dragged him into my cellar and left him, then explored the neighborhood until I found a peddler with a pushcart. I rented him for two dollars, but when I told him my purpose he reneged. I threatened him and he went with me. When we got to the cellar, Joshua was gone.

WHEN MAGDALENA COLÓN DECIDED she was about to die for the second time, she announced from her bed that the only way she could die properly was lying by the water under a tree. Her intuition about death came at home at midafternoon, two hours after she collapsed in the gallery in my arms. She summoned Obadiah, Maud, her doctor, and her servants to her bedroom and insisted that someone find John McGee and bring him to her to reorganize the evening. Instead of a birthday party to celebrate her being alive for fifty-five years, what she now wanted was a wake to acknowledge her passing over into lovely death, but held while she was still alive and able to enjoy both sides of existence at the same time.

“You can’t have a wake if you’re not dead,” said Obadiah by her bedside.

“I won’t even let you come to the wake if you don’t mind your mouth,” said Magdalena.

The doctor had diagnosed her condition as palpitation, arrhythmia, and syncope, and ordered her to sip brandy, lie with her head below the level of her ankles, with her clothing loosened at neck and waist, with smelling salts on hand for revival in the event of further fainting, a coffee enema if necessary, and with the utmost ventilation to her room.

Maud entered into a weeping rage at Magdalena’s plight, but Magdalena delighted in the attention, ordered her maid to find her a loose-fitting blouse, strip her of all undergarments, daub her face with powder, etch with pale crimson the lines of her lips and the hollows of her cheeks, brush her hair forty strokes, impose upon her throat the pendant emerald Obadiah gave her for her fiftieth birthday, heighten her eyebrows and eyelashes with charcoal, push her feet into her silver slippers, and find a pair of strong men to carry her out onto the lawn beneath a tree, where she might freely breathe her anticipated last. She then sent for me to ask my advice in publicizing her wake, since she wanted all her friends and enemies to come. I suggested a handbill.

“Fine,” said Magdalena, “and I also want you to write something about me and how I changed the world.”

“How did you change the world?” I asked.

“I have no idea. That’s why I want you to write it.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said.

“Splendid. And you can read it tonight at the wake instead of some poopy old prayer.”

I was alone at this point in the day, John off in places unknown, and Oba, as people called him, having donned his at-home costume of dressing gown and thigh-length kid boots, puttering around the servants’ quarters. Maud closeted herself in her private reverie, emerging only to check on Magdalena’s condition, which was improving. When she collapsed in my arms her face was ashen, but by now she had become sanguine and relaxed and was moving toward death with all her summonable beauty.

I took myself to the library, where Oba’s butler brought me Magdalena’s half-dozen scrapbooks, thick with newspaper cuttings in Spanish and English. I browsed through them and saw an outline of her life, the topography of a notorious career, the mockery of her first death, and on forward into the social notices of her life with Obadiah. What she wanted me to write, I supposed, was an obituary that would heap glory upon her achievements as performer, as mystic, as hostess; but the very thought of that bored me. If I was to do justice to the woman, I needed to move beyond the barricade of empty facts into some grander sphere — charting, for instance, what I myself found significant: her ability to survive as a solitary woman in a hostile world; her love affair with death; and, most important of all (to me), her nurturing of the incredible Maud, and then imposing that hallowed creature on my life.

The decision I had made so long ago, to live my life according to the word, reached its apogee in the war and then descended into the bathetic dumps of faceless slaughter. Yet in writing about what was worst in this world an unconscionable pang of pleasure dogged my every line. Mine was clearly a life fulfilled by language, and I was coming to see that through that, and only that, could I perhaps in some unknown way gild the eccentric life of Magdalena, or the tragedy of Joshua, or my own thrumming symphony of mysteries. By devising a set of images that did not rot on me overnight, I might confront what was worth confronting, with no expectation of solving the mysteries, but content merely to stare at them until they became as beautiful and valuable as Magdalena had always been, and as Maud now was.

It was in this elated frame of mind that I picked up a pen and set down a handful of words that I hoped would begin the recovery not only of what had been lost but also of what I did not know had been lost, yet surely must have been. I was persuading myself that if I used the words well, the harmony that lurked beneath all contraries and cacophonies must be revealed. This was an act of faith, not reason.

And so, rather than writing Magdalena’s obituary, I began to write her story, taking the facts not from her cuttings but from my imagination, where, like a jungle flower, she had long since taken root.

I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns (of this I was hopeful), would, with the courage false or real that comes with an acute onset of hubris, create a world before which I could kneel with awe and reverence as I waited to be carried off into flights of tragic laughter.

I did not write Magdalena’s obituary but I did compose the notice of her death and carried it to town to have it printed as a handbill for distribution throughout the city. It read:

NOTICE OF PROXIMATE DEATH

The social leader and former international theater star Magdalena Colón Griswold, with all sincerity and affection, invites the visiting and resident citizenry of Saratoga to a viewing of her last remains, so to speak, this evening at her home, Griswold Gardens, on the eastern shore of Saratoga Lake. Her passing will take place on the Griswold lawn, and so, to facilitate the viewing, it is suggested that visitors carry with them either candle or lamp. Dinner and libations will be served, and dancing on the lawn will begin sharply at eight o’clock.

Magdalena had not anticipated anything more than a solemn parade of mourners filing past her, uttering condolences, shaking her mortal paw. But when John McGee arrived he put an end to such thinking.

“We’re having a party,” he said. “You can’t spoil everybody’s evening just because you’ve decided to die.” And so the final sentence was added to the handbill’s invitation.

The guests began to arrive by seven. Those invited to the birthday were received in the mansion; those invited to the wake were directed to the lawn. John, when present at the mansion, clearly became the man of the house, Obadiah no more than a potty little wisp in the cosmos. John took up the welcoming position at the front gate, just as he had at the track, but now he turned away no one, including known thieves.

“Just stay outside the house,” he told the thieves he recognized, “or I’ll eat your gizzard for lunch.”

Champagne, Bordeaux wines, squab, and lobster were served to the birthday guests; beer, oyster stew, and crackers to the mourners on the lawn. John had ordered a stage built at the edge of the reflecting pool and at seven sharp Adolph Bernstein’s orchestra from the United States Hotel began the music of the evening with a Chopin medley. John also asked Jim Fisk to bring his German band to the party, Fisk said he would, and did, and so music was continuous for Magdalena’s presumably farewell performance. Milo, the Master of Magic from Albany, performed hat and animal tricks at an intermission, and when the music resumed Milo waltzed with a dancing bear, who was actually Cornelius Gómez, an idiot-savant Mexican dwarf, who told fortunes for a quarter afterward on the veranda.

Magdalena watched it all from her vantage point at the cusp of the lawn’s principal slope, Maud beside her dotingly, responding to all her whims, which grew fewer as the line of strangers who came to wish her a pleasant passing grew longer.

“What a lovely idea inviting people to your wake. . Are you dead yet, Magdalena?. . When do you die?. . Will we see it happen?. . Have a good time in heaven, Magdalena. . We’ll miss you. . Will there be a party for the funeral, too?”

“You’re all such dears to come,” said Magdalena. “I hope we don’t run out of food. Maud, will we run out of food?”

“No, Auntie.”

“That’s nice, dear. Keep them moving.”

No one mentioned the mockery of the afternoon to Magdalena, this warning passed on to all in line by order of John McGee, who said that if anyone talked of the thing to Magdalena he would break both their legs. Of the mockery, John discovered through informers that the two Negroes were both transient stable hands who had no knowledge of what they were doing and earned three dollars apiece for what they thought was entertainment for the crowd.

Gordon Fitzgibbon grew so pensive and melancholy over the mockery that Maud could not bear his presence and sent him away to elevate her own spirits. She told Gordon to cure himself of gloom and come back to the party in jubilation or else she would have nothing to do with him for the entire evening. Gordon went off and drank gin at the United States bar and returned at sunset with a rakish angle to his tall hat and a crooked smile on his face, the first time Quinn ever noted anything likable in the man.

Gordon arrived on the arm of his cousin Phoebe Strong, whose horse had also suffered humiliation during the afternoon, finishing a ridiculous number of lengths behind the winner. What Gordon did not know, nor did Quinn, was that Phoebe had been the architect and executrix of the mockery, and of the letter penned by Purity Knickerbocker — these facts unearthed by John McGee and his Hawkshaw network of social spies. John told only Maud of his discovery, and so Phoebe arrived at the wake with the serenity of a criminal who has committed the perfect crime.

Humanity arrived in great droves to mourn for Magdalena and grieve in its free beer. The lawn was asprawl with a vast multitude, the night a wash of flickering brilliance from a thousand lamps, lighting up the lawn more brightly than a full moon. John took it upon himself to summon a Presbyterian cleric, who was part of Magdalena’s social set, to utter a prayer on behalf of the imminent decedent’s soul, but the uniqueness of the occasion thwarted the man and instead he uttered a homily on the therapeutic quality of night breezes. Magdalena lost patience and shooed him away.

“Daniel,” she said, “you say a prayer for me.”

“No,” I said, “I can’t do that sort of thing anymore. But I shall write about you as one of the great philanthropists in the entire history of sensuality.”

“He’s so brilliant,” said Magdalena. And then she pulled me to her and kissed me on the lips.

“I envy Maud,” she whispered.

“You are the queen of the night,” I told her, and she feigned a swoon.

The mourners’ line undulated across the entire lawn, and at the level area atop the slope the dancing began.

“I should like to dance,” said Magdalena. “It may help me die. I should like to dance with John McGee.”

“And so you shall,” I said, and we organized the bearers, who carried Magdalena and her chaise longue across the lawn to the dancing area. I summoned John and told him he was wanted. He had never stopped being Magdalena’s lover, even after her marriage to Obadiah — their assignations, whenever John was in range, being an open secret, and always conducted on Wednesday afternoons, Magdalena’s preferred day of the week ever since a young lover told her Wednesday had been named for the god of poetic frenzy.

And so we danced: Magdalena and John, Gordon and Phoebe, Maud and I, and several hundred others, all waltzing to the music of “Beautiful Dreamer,” so very popular at this moment. Seeing her dance I did not believe Magdalena would die. She looked irrepressibly radiant. How could such a vivid creature cease to be?

“I think we should change partners,” Maud said, and she broke from me and went to Gordon. “I would like to dance with Phoebe,” she said.

“With Phoebe?” said Gordon, stunned.

“With Phoebe,” said Maud, and she grasped a reluctant Phoebe in a waltzing position and moved her forcefully away from Gordon, all of us suddenly turned into spectators. But dancing was not Maud’s intention, as she proved by spinning Phoebe around and ripping her dress down the back. Phoebe tried to turn and strike Maud but Maud was far stronger and quite ready for the countering. She then flung Phoebe onto the floor, face down, and sat on her back. Gordon and another man started to intervene but John stopped them.

“Let them be,” said John. “History needs elbow room tonight.”

Maud continued ripping Phoebe’s dress, and then her petticoat and fluffy netherings, Phoebe squirming and screaming to the death, of course, howling for help. I thought Maud must have lost her reason, and yet her method exuded such control that a purpose was obvious.

“For heaven’s sake, what are you doing, Maudie?” Magdalena asked, hovering over the struggling women.

“This is Phoebe Strong, Auntie, Gordon’s first cousin.”

“I know it’s Phoebe,” said Magdalena. “Of course I know Phoebe. What are you doing to her?”

“I’m ripping her clothing.”

“Yes, but whatever for?”

“She’s the hateful bitch who planned the mockery of you and me this afternoon.”

“Phoebe did that? Did you do that, Phoebe?”

“I did and I’m glad I did,” said Phoebe between screams.

By this time Maud had ripped the full length of every garment Phoebe was wearing and as the circle around us grew dense with interrupted dancers Maud fully uncovered the screeching Phoebe’s buttocks for all to see.

“I thought of asking her to apologize,” said Maud, “but this seemed a superior solution. Do you agree, Auntie?”

“Oh, quite,” said Magdalena. “Quite indeed. But you know that is a most unpleasant sight. All full of pimples and dimples. Oh, do cover them.”

At the roar of laughter Maud stood up, and the humbled Phoebe, screaming and crying, clutched her rags about her and ran off toward the mansion. The orchestra took up the music again and the beautiful dreamers of Saratoga resumed their dancing under the stars.

As the evening moved on, four whores who had been the recipients of Magdalena’s charities (she supported cyprians, waifs, and actresses) turned up, crying helplessly as they bent to say farewell to their benefactress. Their spirits improved when they saw how well she looked, and after several beers they were all in chorus singing “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead,” which took the evening into a new phase.

The crowd was thinning and the light dimming. Many couples moved through various stages of romance by the shore of the lake, or in the shadowed woods, or in the sanctuary of Obadiah’s shrub gardens. Gordon could not stop apologizing for his cousin’s behavior, he assuming the guilt himself. But Maud wanted to hear no more of it and she left him to dance with me.

“I think it’s getting time now to kidnap you,” I said.

“A perfect ending to a perfect day,” said Maud.

“I would like to sit under that arch,” I said, pointing to the trellis where we had watched Magdalena reveal herself to Obadiah at John’s urging. We sat on the benches where they’d sat, the roses on the trellises around us all colored a vivid blue by the dark light of the night sky and the dancing flames of a thousand lamps and candles. And then, for the first time since our rendezvous at Hillegond’s house, I kissed Maud. I had felt estranged from her after our meeting on the hotel piazza at morning, but I reclaimed our intimacy with the kiss, my brimming passion organizing my mind in a most salutary way. What flooded back to me was not just every memory, every loving response I’d had to her, but the opening also of an entire emotional landscape that I truly knew must exist somewhere but had never been able to find: the discovery of a new place in which to live. It vanished as quickly as it appeared, a trompe l’oeil of the imagination, but I knew as long as I had Maud with me I could reconstitute it. I took her by the hand just as Gordon arrived.

“You’re monopolizing Maud,” he said to me.

“I was about to take her somewhere and make love to her,” I said.

“You had better quit that sort of talk, fellow.”

“It’s more than talk, Gordon.”

“I’m going to marry this woman,” he said.

“I’ve loved her for fifteen years,” I said. “Do you think now that I’ve found her I’ll just walk away from her?”

“Maud,” he said, “I want you out of this situation.”

“She has a will of her own, Gordon. Why do you suppose she’s with me?”

“You’re an arrogant bastard,” he said.

“And you’re an insufferable prig,” I said.

I stood up and he rose to come at me, but I merely pushed and he went backward onto the bench. He stayed sitting.

“I’ll have satisfaction for this,” he said.

“You will,” I said.

“Oh, no,” said Maud. “Never.”

I took her hand and pulled her away and across the lawn, seeing Magdalena in the cradle of John’s arms, he walking down toward the shore. We stopped and watched and saw her bearers following with her chaise longue, which they placed at the water’s edge along with two large candelabra. John put Magdalena on the chaise in a position that allowed her to look out over the great expanse of water, then sat down on the grass beside her.

A storm was developing on the lake, and in an hour the wind would rise and extinguish most of the candles and the party would end. Tomorrow would be a day of fast and humiliation, called for by the President to rekindle the nation’s attention to ending the war. Quinn would contemplate a duel with Gordon and remember Joshua’s duel with life and his conclusion about it: “If you lose it’s fate,” Joshua said. “If you win it’s a trick.” Quinn would dwell on this and perceive that he himself had changed, that he was forever isolated into the minority, a paddynigger and an obsessive fool whose disgust was greater than its object, who was trying to justify in this world what was justifiable only in another cosmic sphere. There were no explanations that satisfied Quinn, only a growing awareness of dark omissions in his life and a resolute will to struggle with the power the past seemed to have over him: power to imprison him in dead agonies and divine riddles. He would wake dreaming of his disk and its faces, a savage dream of a new order: faces as old as the dead Celts, forces in the shape of a severed hand and a severed tongue that would bring Quinn great power over life.

“You will go to war,” the Mexican dwarf had told him on the veranda. “You will live a long life, raise sons, and have a happy death.” Quinn believed none of it, believed it all.

Maud did not want to go to her room, or to the hotel, but led the way to an upper floor of the mansion on the side that gave a full view of the lawn and the lake. She tried one door and they were greeted with a privileged vision: Obadiah on his knees, holding aloft the skirt of Adelaide, a parlormaid, and licking the back of her right knee. They moved on and found a room and locked themselves in, and then kissed at such a pitch of passion that Quinn thought his chest would explode, so acutely aware was he that at last he had stolen Maud.

“Slow,” he said, and he loosened the dark ribbon that held Maud’s dress at the bodice. She removed the ribbon from the dress and tied it around her neck as a choker, and he took her dress from her, then the rest of her garments, and she did the same for him. The ribbon was long and uneven and fell the length of her torso to obscure part of her private hair. Quinn’s eyes studied her with a wondrous lust and a love that was as limitless as the universe. Maud rolled backward onto the simple iron bed, her legs rising, the ribbon falling naturally between her open thighs, leaving her gift mostly secret. Quinn moved between her legs and gently lifted the ribbon to one side. And then Maud and Quinn were at last ready for love.