FIFTEEN

“I REMEMBER YOUR FATHER WELL,” Gabriel Todd said. “A giant of a man. He led us into the Mexican musketry and cannon in our first fight, at Monterrey, as if all that flying lead was no more dangerous than raindrops.”

Paul Stapleton’s eyes misted, his voice thickened. “I believe his army service was the most satisfying part of his career,” he said.

“This old soldier feels the same way about his glory days,” Janet said smiling at her father. “Maybe that’s why I’m partial to soldiers.”

“We went into action that day beside Jeff Davis and his Mississippi boys,” Gabriel Todd continued. “There was an New Jersey regiment on our other flank. It was a war that made you proud to be an American. Never did I dream that thirteen years later our sons would be killin’ each other.”

“My father spent the last ten years of his life trying to prevent the catastrophe,” Paul said.

They were in the dining room at Hopemont, surrounded by staring portraits of earlier Todds. Joseph, the gray-haired black butler, was removing the dessert plates. Throughout the meal, every time Janet’s eyes met Paul’s she felt a shiver of remembered delight from their morning in the Happy Hunting Ground. She was certain he felt it too. When they met in the upper hall on the way to dinner, he had given her a long lingering kiss.

They had been three for dinner. Letitia Todd claimed she was not well enough to join them. Privately, she warned Janet not to dawdle over coffee. She was expecting a visit from her spiritualist, Mrs. Havens, and wanted Janet and her father to join them to complete the so-called caring circle. Janet hoped Mrs. Havens’s sulky would lose a wheel or break an axle or her horse would expire from the drought

“Janet tells me she’s convinced you that our plan for a western confederacy has some merit,” Gabriel Todd said.

“She only gave me a general idea of it,” Paul said. “I’m eager to learn more details.”

“Let’s start with numbers. We now have fifty thousand men enrolled on the secret membership books of the Sons of Liberty. An early success will enroll another fifty thousand, I’m certain of it.”

“That’s impressive,” Paul said. “Are they organized into companies and regiments? Are they trained and well led?”

“They’re organized. Their colonels are mostly Democrats who fought in Mexico, like yours truly,” Gabriel Todd said. “The junior officers have been elected by their men, with their colonel’s approval. A fair number are federal veterans who declined to reenlist after the Emancipation Proclamation.”

“You think they can fight trained troops?”

“With some encouragement from trained troops on the other side, yes,” Gabriel Todd said. “This thing has been building for almost two years. Thanks to my son Andy, I was able to put my finger on the men who could inspire them to rise—John Hunt Morgan’s cavalry.”

“So that was the reason for their raid into Indiana and Ohio last year?” Paul said.

“Yes.”

“But it was—if I may use a painful word—a failure. Few if any Democrats rose to support them. Morgan’s men were mostly killed or captured. Why do you think they’ll inspire a rising this time?”

Colonel Todd’s hand shook as he gulped his coffee. “It would have succeeded the last time—if Robert E. Lee had won at Gettysburg. Morgan’s invasion was timed to coincide with Lee’s descent on Pennsylvania. When the news of Lee’s failure reached here by telegraph on July fifth, Morgan should have retreated. But that was not his style. To him, retreat was synonymous with defeat.”

“We have a cavalryman just like him in the Union Army. My classmate, George Armstrong Custer,” Paul said.

With a visible effort to control his feelings, Gabriel Todd splashed bourbon into his coffee. “Forgive my vehemence. My second son, Andy, was killed in a skirmish near Corydon, Indiana, during that raid.”

“This time a rising will succeed,” Janet said, alarmed by the drift of the conversation. “The Democrats of the Midwest are far more exasperated by the Republicans’ tyranny. President Davis has promised us as much as a million dollars to buy rifles and ample ammunition. We have the secret weapon I told you about—Greek fire.”

Gabriel Todd smiled bleakly at his daughter. “Janet tells me you love her and hope to marry her. If you do, you’ll have a wife with a warrior’s heart, Major. A Judith, a Joan of Arc. She’s been the sinew of this plan of redemption, the courier who’s carried the confidential messages that have inspired everyone with that most insubstantial yet precious commodity—hope.”

Tears streamed down Gabriel Todd’s face. He splashed more bourbon into his coffee. “Forgive me,” he said. “It wrenches my heart to think of our lost Union. But I see no other alternative to a rule by men who are violating the very principles on which our country was founded.”

“Could you tell me a little more about that side of it—what Lincoln and his followers have done to anger the Democrats of Kentucky?”

Gabriel Todd splashed more bourbon into his coffee cup and leaned back in his chair. “That’s impossible, Major,” he said.

“Why do you say that, sir?” Paul asked.

“There’s no way for any man—at least any Democrat—to tell a little more about the outrages we’ve suffered from these miscreants who call themselves Republicans. I can only tell you a lot. A carload lot. A whole freight train of abuses and usurpations and betrayals of the Constitution of this expiring republic.”

Paul’s expression grew grave. “I’m ready to hear the whole train, sir.”

Gabriel Todd drained his cup and leaned back in his chair. “Let’s begin with Lincoln’s solemn promise to respect Kentucky’s neutrality. Within a few weeks of the great emancipator pledging his word, the federal government set up a training camp on Richard M. Robinson’s farm, in Garrard County, ideally situated at the foot of the Cumberland Mountains to recruit the poor of those benighted valleys and knobs and turn them into federal soldiers ready and eager to pillage the prosperous and wellborn. It was nothing less than a revolutionary act, as meaningful in Kentucky as the storming of the Bastille to the French of 1789 or the clash at Concord Bridge to the Americans of 1775. Dick Robinson gave his farm to the federals with the stipulation that he was guaranteed an army horseshoeing contract that’s made him rich. In command of these recruits Lincoln placed a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound, six-foot-four bully named William Nelson, son of a Maysville doctor who’d migrated from New England.

“When our Democratic newspapers cried out against this violation of the president’s promise, they were brutally suppressed, their presses wrecked, their editors beaten up, jailed, or driven into exile. No less than seventeen newspapers succumbed to this assault. The rest have been reduced to servile docility. When our leading politicians, such as my good friend Charles Morehead, former governor and federal congressman, protested, they were arrested and flung into vile military prisons, where they endured verbal abuse, semistarvation, and demoralizing isolation until their spirits or their bodies surrendered.”

Gabriel Todd’s cheeks had turned an ominous magenta. Paul exchanged an alarmed glance with Janet. There was more emotion here than an aging body could handle. But Janet could not bear to interrupt her father. More succinctly now, he told how the Republicans ruled Kentucky with troops around the polling places on Election Day, warning all who voted Democratic that their lives were in danger. “Without that kind of terror, the Democrats would have carried the state in 1862 and given our party a majority in the House of Representatives. We could have ended the war by refusing to vote another cent for it.”

Clopping, rattling sounds in the drive gave Janet the excuse she needed to interrupt her father. “There’s Mrs. Havens!” she said. “I think you’ve told Paul more than enough to understand why the Sons of Liberty are eager to fight.”

Paul’s expression was strange. He seemed almost dazed by Gabriel Todd’s narration. “Who’s Mrs. Havens?” he asked.

“She’s a spiritualist my mother has been consulting regularly,” Janet explained to Paul.

Paul remarked that spiritualism was popular everywhere. “Even my mother has tried it, hoping to contact my father and my brother Charlie,” he said.

“Would you consider volunteering as a fourth at the spirit table?” Gabriel Todd asked. “I consider it pathetic nonsense. It only worsens my grief.”

“Of course,” Paul said. “I’m sorry we’ve been interrupted. But I’ve heard enough from that freight train of yours to become an outraged Democrat of Kentucky by—by marriage.”

Gabriel Todd poured bourbon into Paul’s cup. “Let’s drink to that,” he said.

They clinked cups. Janet tossed her hair. “Really, Father. You’re making me wonder if you’re glad to get rid of me.”

“Pay no attention to her, Major,” Gabriel Todd said, with a smile that took the sting out of his words. “Todd women tend to be difficult. I’ll have the invitations engraved and ready to send out the day peace is declared.”

In a few minutes, Joseph led fat red-haired Mrs. Virginia Havens into the dining room. Summer and winter she dressed in white, an affectation that annoyed Janet. From Lexington to the Ohio River, the woman had become a visitor to plantation mansions and to humbler houses where parents, wives, sisters and brothers mourned loved ones killed in the war.

“How are you, Colonel Todd? And Miss Todd?” Mrs. Havens said in her breathless way. She always spoke as if she had sensational news on the tip of her tongue.

“We’re fine, Mrs. Havens. This is Major Paul Stapleton,” Janet said.

Mrs. Havens acknowledged Paul with a rather frosty nod. She was a devout Confederate. His blue uniform was not a welcome sight. “And how is Mrs. Todd?”

“Not well. We were tempted to tell you not to come,” Janet said. “I hope the session won’t last too long.”

“I wish I could promise you that, Miss Todd,” Mrs. Havens said. “But the spirits, not I, are in control of such matters.”

Janet offered Mrs. Havens some supper. She declined. She preferred to dine after a session. Sometimes turbulent spirits invaded her body and caused “commotions” in her digestive system.

Gabriel Todd announced that he was going to bed. Mrs. Havens expressed alarm at the lack of a caring circle until Paul volunteered to replace Colonel Todd. They mounted the stairs to Letitia Todd’s bedroom. Janet’s mother was dressed in black, as usual, but her mood was almost cheerful. Mrs. Havens’s visits had become her only diversion.

“How are you, dear Mrs. Todd?” Mrs. Havens burbled as they kissed.

“I’ve been in perpetual agony since I saw you. My hip torments me day and night. The doctors forbid me to use more than a third of the laudanum I need.”

“We’ll see if we can find a healing spirit this time.” Mrs. Havens believed that spirits were eager to assist the living in many ways.

Janet and Paul sat down at the small octagonal table on which her mother ate her meals. All the candles in the room were extinguished, except for one in an upright silver holder in the center of the table. In obedience to Mrs. Haven’s instructions, they placed their hands on the table’s carved edge.

Janet noticed that Paul seemed troubled by this impending encounter with the dead. His eyes were almost reproachful—as if he resented having this experience inflicted on him. Surely he did not believe they were going to contact living spirits.

Mrs. Havens began with an incantation. “O Lord God, master of the world of the dead, we gather here in humble petition to seek an audience with those whom we love. If we can do anything to increase their happiness or remove a care that is burdening them, let them tell us in their own words. For thine is the power and the glory, amen.”

After a long pause, Mrs. Havens said, “Let each of us now summon in our souls the name or names of the spirits we desire to reach. We have no assurance that they can reach us. But without our cooperation their efforts will be doubly difficult and even fruitless. Remember with special concentration the power of your love for them and their love for you. Love is the spiritual telegraph down which messages travel. Reflect, pray, but above all love!”

Janet found it impossible to either reflect or pray. She was not a believer in spiritualism. Her brothers were dead. Again she was assailed by the almost bewildering totality of their annihilation.

As the war raged and the casualty lists grew, Janet found it harder and harder to believe that the spirit retreated to another place—heaven, purgatory, hell. There was no sense of divine presence in the soldiers’ deaths. A transcendental indifference, a God whose eyes were averted from His creatures and His creation, was the only being she could imagine now.

Once this idea of an indifferent God would have shocked Janet. At St. Mary-of the-Woods, the academy founded by French nuns outside Vincennes, she had been devout to the brink of mysticism. The idea of giving one’s soul, one’s life, to God, of vowing poverty, chastity and obedience in Jesus’ name, had moved Janet profoundly. For a while she had considered becoming a black-robed Sister of Providence. When she mentioned this idea to her father, Gabriel Todd had abruptly ended his daughter’s Roman Catholic education.

If the medium’s theories were true, Janet was an obstruction on the spiritual telegraph. Yet there was no diminution of Mrs. Havens’s performance. Deep sighs followed by theatrical shudders shook her ample frame. “I feel the spirits all around us, but none are familiar,” she whispered. “The message I’ve sent into the void often attracts wandering souls who have no other hope of solace, creatures who have died unrepentant or unloved.”

She gasped and clutched her stomach with both hands. “Oh! I feel an entry. I feel—”

Mrs. Havens went rigid in her chair. Expression drained from her face. She leaned forward and blew out the candle. In the darkened room Janet heard a burst of boyish laughter. “Momma! Momma!” said a voice that was very different from Mrs. Havens’s normal voice.

“Oh, who is it? Who is it?” Letitia Todd cried.

“Andy—wants—candy,” said the childish voice.

“Oh, the dear sweet boy remembers that little joke,” Letitia Todd said. “It’s him, reminding me of the perfect love we shared in his babyhood. Ask him if he sees Jack. Are they together?”

“Let us first make certain it’s Andy,” Mrs. Havens said. “Give us the signal we agreed on, dear boy.”

Six sharp raps echoed around the room. They came from the vicinity of the table. But as far as Janet could see in the semidarkness, Mrs. Havens remained immobile.

“It’s Andy,” Letitia Todd said. “Ask him about Jack.”

“Do you see Jack? Are you together?”

“Sometimes,” the childish voice said from Mrs. Havens’s lips.

“Is he—happy? Are you both—still happy?”

“Yes—Momma,” said the childish voice. “Completely … happy.”

Janet knew Letitia Todd feared her wild son Andy had gone to hell for his drinking and gambling and whoring. “Why are you speaking in your little boy’s voice?” her mother asked.

“We—are—still—angels—Momma. Baby—angels.”

“As long as you’re happy, that’s all I care about.”

“Your—pain—Momma. Offer—up—your—pain. For—our—souls. Offer—it—to—Jesus.”

“I will! I will!” Letitia Todd cried.

Silence. Mrs. Havens shifted in her chair. “He’s leaving us,” she whispered.

“He’s told me all I wanted to hear,” Letitia Todd said.

Silence until Mrs. Havens spoke in her sepulchral whisper. “Are there any other familiar spirits here who wish to speak?”

A terrific gust of wind swept through the bedroom, making the white curtains dance. Janet heard glass break as pictures fell off the walls or toppled from side tables.

“Oh my God,” gasped Mrs. Havens. “Who are you?”

The wind whirled around them. It felt clammy on Janet’s hands and face. “Who are you?” Mrs. Havens quavered.

Silence for sixty seconds. Then another voice took command of Mrs. Haven’s lips. “Death!” it said in a guttural growl. “I am Death. I’ve come to warn all of you. Especially Paul. Don’t—do—it—Paul! Don’t!”

“That’s enough!” Paul Stapleton leaped to his feet. “That’s enough of this—this torture! Who is this woman? Is this some sort of test?”

Janet lit the candle. Mrs. Havens was slumped in her chair, saliva drooling from her lips. “Don’t—do—it,” she croaked in the same voice, dwindling now. If some sort of evil spirit was not possessing her, she was giving a very good imitation of it.

“Get her some brandy, for God’s sake,” Letitia Todd said. “I fear she’s having a stroke.”

Janet rushed downstairs to the brandy decanter. By the time she returned to the bedroom, Mrs. Havens had regained consciousness. But she was a very frightened woman. She gulped the brandy and said, “Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. I dealt only with benign spirits. That being seemed about to tear the flesh from my bones.”

“Was it a demon?” Letitia Todd asked.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Havens said.

“It wasn’t a demon,” Paul said.

Janet was bewildered to see tears on his cheeks. “It was someone who had recently died—without accepting death. I think I know his name,” Paul said.

“One of your classmates?

“Yes. One of my classmates,” Paul said. “Will you excuse me?”

He bowed to Letitia Todd. He seized Janet’s hand and pressed it to his lips. She listened to the thud of his footsteps in the carpeted hall, the slam of his bedroom door. A nameless fear swept her. What an awful ending to a glorious day.