Slaves of Obsession Read online

  “Good.” She passed a large bundle of money across the desk. There was no hesitation in her, as if it had not crossed her mind that he would be anything but honest.

  “I should sign a receipt for this, Mrs. Alberton,” he prompted.

  “Oh! Oh, yes, of course.” She reached for a piece of notepaper and picked up a pen. She dipped it in the inkwell and wrote, then passed the paper to him to sign.

  He did so, then gave it back.

  She blotted it and put it away in the top drawer of the desk without glancing at it. He could have written anything.

  There was a knock on the door, and a moment later it opened.

  “Yes?” she said with a frown.

  “Mr. Trace is here, ma’am,” the butler said anxiously. “He is eager to speak to Mr. Monk.”

  Her brow smoothed out. The mention of Trace’s name seemed not to displease her. “Ask him to come in,” she requested, then turned to Monk. “I trust you are agreeable?”

  “Of course.” He was curious that Trace should still be in touch with the Alberton household, since the guns were now gone and he must be aware of it.

  Trace came in a moment later, noticing Monk, but only just. His attention was entirely upon Judith. The distress in his face was too palpable to be feigned. He did not ask her how she was, or express sympathy, but it was naked to read in his face with its dark eyes and curious, sensitive asymmetry. Monk was startled by it. When Trace spoke, his words were ordinary, no more than the formalities anyone might have offered.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Alberton. I am very sorry to intrude on you, especially now. But I am most concerned not to miss Mr. Monk. Mr. Casbolt told me of your intention to employ him to go after Breeland, and I intend to go also.” This time he looked at Monk for a moment, as if to ascertain that he had accepted the task. He was apparently satisfied.

  Judith was startled. “Do you? It was not so much after Breeland, but to bring back my daughter that I wish Mr. Monk to go. But of course if he could bring him back also that would be most desirable.”

  “I will help any way I can,” Trace said intently, his voice charged with emotion. “Breeland deserves to hang, but of course that is far less important than saving Miss Alberton from him, or from further grief.” He stood, slender and very straight, a little self-conscious of his hands, as if he were not quite sure what to do with them. He sought her company, and yet he was not comfortable in it.

  It was at that moment, watching the tension in him, the earnestness in his face, hearing the edge to his voice, that Monk realized Philo Trace was in love with Judith. Possibly his offer had very little to do with the guns.

  Monk was not sure if he wanted him along or not. He would rather have had complete autonomy. He was used to working alone, or with someone who was junior to him and whom he knew.

  On the other hand, Trace was American and might still have friends in Washington. Certainly he would know the land, and would be familiar with transport by both train and ship. More important still, he would know the manners and customs of the people and be able to facilitate events where Monk might find it impossible.

  He studied the man as he stood in the sunlit room, his face turned to Judith, waiting for her decision, not Monk’s. He looked more of a poet than a soldier, but there was a self-discipline in him under the charm, and the grace of his slender body suggested a very considerable strength.

  “Thank you,” Judith accepted. “For my part I should be very grateful, but you must counsel with Mr. Monk whether you join with him or not. I have given him the freedom to do as he thinks best, and I think that is the only circumstance in which he could undertake such a task.”

  Trace looked at Monk, the question in his eyes. “I fully intend to go, sir,” he said gravely. “Whether I go with you or just behind you is a matter for your choice. But you will need me, that I swear. You think we speak the same language and so you will be able to make yourself understood. That is only partly true.” A shadow of humor crossed his face, sad and self-mocking. “I have discovered that to my cost over here. We use the same words, but we don’t always mean the same things by them. You don’t know America, the state we are in at the present. You can’t understand the issues.…”

  A sudden uncontrollable pain pulled at his lips. “No one does, least of all ourselves. We see our way of life dying. We don’t understand. Change frightens us, and because we are frightened we are angry, and we make bad judgments. A civil war is a terrible thing.”

  Sitting here in this quiet, sunlit withdrawing room, bright and furnished with the proceeds of munitions, Monk was acutely aware that he had never seen war at all. At least, not as far as he remembered. He knew poverty, violence, a little of disease, a great deal about crime, but war as a madness that consumed nations, leaving nothing untouched, was unknown to him.

  He made the decision instantly. “Thank you, Mr. Trace. With the provision that it is agreed I make my own judgments, and that I am free to take your advice or to leave it, I should welcome your company and such assistance as you are willing to give.”

  Trace relaxed, a little of the weariness easing from his face. “Good,” he said succinctly. “Then we shall leave tomorrow morning. In case I do not see you at the station or on the train, we shall meet at the steamship company offices in Water Street in Liverpool. The next sailing is on the first tide Wednesday morning. I promise I shall not let you down, sir.”

  Monk and Hester set out for the Euston Square station in the morning. It was a strange feeling, and for Hester it brought back memories of leaving seven years before to go to the Crimea, also not knowing what she was facing, what the land would be like, the climate, the taste and smell of the air. Then it had also been with a mission filling her mind. She had been so much younger in a dozen ways, not just her face and her body, but immeasurably so in experience and understanding of people and of how events and circumstances can change one. She had been certain of far more, convinced she understood herself.

  Now she knew enough to have some grasp of the magnitude of what she did not know and of how easy it was to make mistakes, particularly when you were convinced you had it right.

  She had no idea what waited for them in Washington. She did not know if they had any chance of succeeding in bringing Merrit Alberton back to England. The only things she was certain of were that they could not refuse to try and, most important of all, this time she was going with Monk, not alone. She was no longer young enough to be sure about much. She had learned by experience her own fallibility. But sitting in the train as it belched steam and lurched forward out of the vast arching canopy of the station, she knew she had a sense of companionship that was different from every other journey. She and Monk might quarrel over all sorts of things, great and trifling, and frequently did. Their tastes and views differed, but she knew as deeply as she knew anything at all that he would never willfully hurt her and that his loyalty was absolute. As the steam from the engine drifted past the window and they emerged into daylight, she found she was smiling.

  “What is it?” he asked, looking across at her. They were passing gray rooftops, narrow streets with back alleys facing each other, grimy and cramped.

  She did not want to sound sentimental. It would certainly not be good for him to tell him the truth. She must say something sensible and convincing. He could read her far too well to believe any hasty evasion.

  “I think it is a good thing Mr. Trace is coming also. I am sure he will be here, even though we haven’t seen him. Do you think we should tell him about the watch?”

  “No,” he said immediately. “I would rather wait until we hear from Merrit what her account is of that night.”

  She frowned. “Do you believe Breeland could have taken it from her and dropped it deliberately? That would be a very cold and terrible thing to do.”

  “It would be effective,” he answered, his face registering his contempt. “It would be an excellent warning that he will stop at nothing, if we pursue him.”


  “Except that he did not know we were aware he had given it to her,” she argued. “The police would see only his name on it. Judith would not tell them, especially if she knew it had been found.”

  “No, but she would know,” he answered, his lips thinning bitterly. “That is all he needs. He didn’t count on her courage to send someone privately, or on her resolve to face the truth, whatever it is.”

  They were coming to the outskirts of the city now, great open stretches of field spread out in the morning light. Trees rested like billowing clouds of green over the grass. It was going to be a long day, and two nights in a strange bed before they embarked on the Atlantic crossing and landed again on an unknown shore. She wondered fleetingly how she had had the courage, or the lunacy, to do it before, and alone.

  They arrived late in Liverpool and it was as they were following the porter along the platform towards the way out that they saw Philo Trace. He came striding over to them, his face lighting up with relief. He greeted them warmly, and they went together to find a hansom, directing it to a modest hotel not very far from the waterfront where they could spend the time before sailing.

  Judith Alberton had telegraphed the shipping office as she had said, and their berths were reserved for them. It was a ship largely crowded with emigrants hoping to make a new life for themselves in America. Many were looking to travel west beyond the war into the open plains, or even to the great Rocky Mountains. There they could find refuge for their religious beliefs, or wide lands where they could hack from the wilderness farms and homesteads they could not aspire to in England.

  The ship was scheduled to pick up more passengers from Queenstown in Ireland, half-starved men and women fleeing the poverty that followed the potato famine, willing to go anywhere, to work at anything to make a life for their families.

  It was a strange sensation to be at sea again. The smell of the closed air of a cabin brought back to Hester the troopships to the Crimea more sharply than the pitch and roll of the deck, the sounds of the sea, of erratic waves, and the wind. She heard the cries of seamen one to another, the creaking of timber. The squawking of chickens and the squeal of pigs troubled her because she knew they were kept to be eaten as they drew farther and farther away from land and provisions became stale and short. The wind was against them off the coast of Ireland. It would be a long crossing.

  They were in a first-class cabin with tiny bunks, a single small basin, a chamber pot to be emptied out of the porthole, a small desk and a chair. Clothes were to be hung on a hook behind the door. Monk said nothing, but watching his face, hearing the tension in his voice, she knew he found it almost unbearably oppressive. She was not surprised when he went up on the deck as often as he could, even when the weather was rough and the seas drove hard in their faces, and cold, in spite of it being early July.

  Thank heaven they had not had to travel steerage, where men, women and children had no more than a few square feet each and could not take a pace without bumping into someone else. If a person were sick or distressed there was no privacy. Fellowship, good temper and compassion were necessities of survival.

  The crossing took just a day under two weeks, and they landed in New York on Monday, July 15.

  Hester was fascinated. New York was unlike any city she had previously seen: raw, teeming with life, a multitude of tongues spoken, laughter, shouting, and already the hand of war shadowing it, a brittleness in the air. There were recruitment posters on the walls and soldiers in a wild array of uniforms in the streets.

  There seemed to be copies of every kind of military dress from Europe and the Near East, even French Zouaves looking like Turks with enormous baggy trousers, bright sashes around their waists and turbans or scarlet fezes with huge tassels hanging to the shoulder.

  The star-spangled banner flew from every hotel and church they passed, and was echoed in miniature on the trappings of the omnibus horses and in rosettes on private carriages.

  Business seemed poor, and the snatches of talk she overheard were of prizefights, food prices, local gossip and scandal, politics and secession. She was startled to hear suggestions that even New York itself might secede from the Union, or New Jersey.

  She, Monk and Philo Trace took the first available train south to Washington. It was crowded with soldiers in both blue and gray, the same chaos of uniform prevailing here. How they were meant to know one another on the battlefield Hester could not imagine, and the thought troubled her, but she did not speak it aloud.

  Memory crowded in on her as she saw the young faces of the men, tense, frightened and trying desperately to hide it, each in his own way. Some talked too much, voices loud and jerky, laughing at nothing, a paper-thin veneer of bravado. Others sat silently, eyes filled with thoughts of home, of an unknown battle ahead, and perhaps death. She was horrified to see how many of them had no canteens of water and carried weapons that were so old, or in such a state of disrepair, that they posed more danger to the men who fired them than to any enemy. They were of such variety that no quartermaster could be expected to obtain ammunition for all of them. They were all muzzle-loaders, but smoothbore, not rifled. Some were old flintlock muskets which misfired much more often and were far less accurate than the new precision weapons that Breeland had stolen.

  Hester found herself sick with anticipation of the blind slaughter which would follow if the war came to a pitched battle. From the snatches of desperate, youthful boasting she heard, or the passion to preserve the Union, it could not be far away.

  She overheard snatches of conversation during the times she stood up and stretched her back and legs.

  A thin, young redheaded man wearing a Highland kilt was leaning up against the partition, speaking with a fresh-faced youth in gray breeches and jacket.

  “We’ll drive those Rebels right out of it,” the kilted youth said ardently. “There’s no way on earth we’re gonna let America break up, I’m tellin’ ye. One nation under God, that’s us.”

  “Home by harvest, I reckon,” the other youth said with a slow, shy smile. He saw Hester and straightened up. “Pardon me, ma’am.” He made room for her to pass and she thanked him, her heart lurching to think what he was going into so innocently. From his lean body, work-hardened hands and threadbare clothes, he clearly knew poverty and labor well, but he had no conception of the carnage of battle. It was something no sane person could create in the imagination.

  She smiled back at him, looking into his blue eyes for a moment, then moved on.

  “You all right, ma’am?” he called after her. Perhaps he had seen the shadow of what she knew, and recognized its hurt.

  She forced herself to sound cheerful. “Yes, thank you. Just stiff.”

  On the way back she passed an older man chewing on the stem of an unlit clay pipe.

  “Got to go,” he said gravely to the bearded man opposite him. “Way I see it, there’s no choice. If you believe in America, you’ve got to believe in it for everyone, not just white men. In’t right to buy an’ sell human beings. That’s the long an’ the short of it.”

  The other man shook his head doubtfully. “Got cousins in the South. They in’t bad people. If all the Negroes suddenly got free, where are they gonna go? Who’s gonna look after ’em? Anybody thought o’ that?”

  “Then what are you doin’ here?” The first man took the pipe out of his mouth.

  “It’s war,” the other said simply. “If they’re gonna fight us, we gotta fight them. Besides, I believe in the Union. That’s what America is, isn’t it … a Union?”

  Hester continued back to her seat, oppressed by the sense of confusion and conflict in the air.

  They stopped in Baltimore and more people got on board. As they pulled out she was sitting by the window, having changed places with Monk for a while. They both looked out at the passing countryside. Opposite them, Philo Trace sat growing more and more tense, the lines in his face etched more deeply and his hands clenched together, one moment moving as if to do something, then knit
ting around each other again.

  Looking through the window, Hester saw for the first time pickets guarding the railroad tracks. Occasionally to begin with, then more and more frequently. She saw beyond them the pale spread of army camps. They increased in both size and density as the train moved south.

  It had been hot in New York. As they approached Washington the heat became suffocating. Clothes stuck to the skin. The air seemed thick and damp, heavy to breathe.

  As they pulled into Washington itself the wasteland around the outskirts was covered with tents, groups of men marching and drilling, white-covered wagons and all manner of guns and carts drawn up. The fever of war was only too bitterly apparent.

  They drew into the depot and at last it was time to alight, unload cases and begin to look for accommodation for such time as they would be in the city.

  “Breeland will be here all right,” Trace said with assurance. “The Confederate armies are only about two days’ march away to the south. We should stay at the Willard if we can, or at least go there to dine. It’s the best place to pick up the news and hear all the gossip.” He smiled with painful amusement. “I think you’ll hate the noise. Most English people do. But we haven’t time to indulge in dislikes. Senators, diplomats, traders, adventurers all meet there—and their wives. The place is usually full of women and even children too. An evening there, and I’ll know where Breeland is, I promise you.”

  Hester was fascinated with the city. Even more than New York had been it was unlike any she had seen before. It was apparently designed with a grand vision, one day to cover the whole of the land from the Bladensburg River to the Potomac, but at present there were huge tracts of bare grass and scrub between outlying shanty villages before they reached the wide unpaved main thoroughfares.

  “This is Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trace said, sitting in the trap beside Hester, watching her face. Monk rode with his back towards them, his expression a curious mixture of thought and suspense, as if he were trying to plan for their mission here but his attention was constantly being taken by what he saw around him. And indeed it was highly distracting. On one side, the buildings were truly magnificent, great marble structures that would have graced any capital in the world. On the other were huddled lodging houses, cheap markets and workshops, and now and then bare spaces, unoccupied altogether. Geese and hogs wandered around with total disregard for the traffic, and every so often one of the hogs would get down and roll in the deep ruts left by carriage wheels after rain had turned the street into mire. There was no rain or mud now, and their movement caused clouds of thick dust that choked the lungs and settled on everything.