All Those Vanished Engines (3 page)

Then came a pause, and some whispering in the corridor. The door slammed open and some men were trooping in, four members of the Petropolitan Police with their high hats and brass badges and mustachios. Paulina crossed her hands over the lapels of her dressing gown. Adolphus Claiborne put his gun down on the floor. Gram was there: “I was afraid he'd hurt the child!” The colonel stood with his neck bent, his face hidden in his hair, while one of the policemen held his arm. But at the last instant he wrestled free and was gone out the window while the police shouted and cursed.

Paulina sat down on the edge of the bed where he had been. She closed her eyes. In her imagination she could see him slithering down the wisteria and then jumping the last distance. She could see him running up the mews, his boots striking sparks from the cobblestones in the steaming night. When she opened them again, her grandmother was standing beside her, a small, thin-lipped woman whose face was scarcely higher than her own.

She hugged her doll and wondered if what the colonel said was true or even partly true. How had she found herself here in this terrible place? Mrs. McKenney at that moment looked like what she was, one of the first citizens of the town, relict of a judge and congressman who had given his house for a public library. She took off her platinum spectacles with the carved floral pattern. She polished them with a monogrammed handkerchief she took out of her sleeve. The temple bows ended in sharp points. She thanked the officers for their prompt response. She showed no sign of explaining, or needing to explain, the shattered door panel, or even what had happened in the room. But after a moment she took some money from her reticule and then the men marched out again, and the corridor was empty.

Paulina glanced down at the floor beside the bed. Her cousin's revolver had disappeared. Perhaps he was a madman after all. “Child,” Gram said, “that was unfortunate. Did he hurt you in any way, or give you anything? You have Andrew to thank. Because of him we were forewarned.”

“You might have been forewarned. I wasn't.”

“Child, don't argue—”

“You used me as bait.”

“Child, he is a dangerous criminal, wanted by the police. We gave him too much credit, because he was with Mahone at the Crater's Mouth. Let us not think about it anymore. Tonight is a special night. There is a celebration in your honor at the library. These clothes are not suitable. It is time to put away your doll.”

Paulina stared at her. As always, under her gaze the old lady seemed to wilt, and soften, and resume her doddering old self. Blinking, she bowed her head and then scuttled sideways out the door, holding her skirts as if there were some puddle of something on the floor. Andrew came in, his face so full of blandness that Paulina doubted her own memory even of something not thirty minutes old. She had to look back and forth between him and the smashed door, recasting in her mind his staring eyes and shining teeth, the axe in his hand.

She rose to her feet, stood beside the bed. “Miss,” he said, bowing slightly. “Your grandmother has asked you to come downstairs. She has chosen some clothes for you.” He laid something wrapped in paper on the end of the bed.

Paulina studied his familiar face, trying to figure out how she should feel—relieved? Betrayed?

“Andrew,” she said, “my cousin gave you a letter.”

His smile, intended to be reassuring, already showed some strain, some underlying grimness.

He moved to the window and shut it, at the same time examining the broken lock at the top of the sash. His hair, straightened and brilliantined, shone like a solid surface in the candlelight. Paulina watched him give a quick signal through the glass, a flick of his gloved fingers. “Miss,” he said, “I'll be outside in the hall.”

“Please wait for me downstairs.”

“I'll be outside in case that fellow returns. Mrs. McKenney is awful concerned.”

“Please wait downstairs. That fellow is Colonel Adolphus Claiborne, my father's cousin, whom I've known my entire life. You had a letter from him. What did it say? Where did he intend to take me … in such haste?”

“Miss, he's no kin to you. Just so's you know.”

When he was gone, when she was left alone, Paulina saw her diary and her doll, also, had disappeared, though she had not seen him pick them up. Bewildered, she sat for a moment in silence. That night familiar things had turned unfamiliar and then back again. She got up to close the broken door and then stood behind it, trying to maintain a sense of privacy as she took off her robe.

On the bed, inside the tissue paper, carefully folded, lay a white lace and chiffon princess gown, embroidered with rhinestones and seed pearls. There was a tiara and even a scepter, and as she unwrapped it Paulina realized what she was holding. This was a Mardi Gras dress. Tonight was the night of the UDC Mardi Gras ball, which Gram gave each year in memory of her own father and mother, both long deceased, Addison Pickerel, the “handsome captain of the Crescent City rifles,” and Justine Lockett-Pickerel, the spy.

What had Gram said? A celebration in her honor? In previous years, Paulina had never been allowed to attend. Now she was sixteen, maybe that was going to change.

Not knowing what else to do, she made herself ready. As she slipped the dress over her head, as she pulled it down over her narrow hips, she sensed tiny intimations of disaster. But they were interspersed with other feelings: excitement, even anticipation. She picked up the scepter.

At that moment a distant orchestra commenced their program as if they had been waiting for her signal, not in Marshall Street, but somewhere in the big house around the corner on Sycamore, the William R. McKenney Library, which her grandmother reclaimed once a year for this event. Over the strains of the waltz, Paulina heard the first explosions of squibs and bottle rockets. And it occurred to her that everything so far that evening had been part of a performance, choreographed and rehearsed, the onset of a festival of chaos and reversal in honor of the lords of misrule. All her life she'd had to wear black whenever she went out in public, but not tonight. She was a tall, skinny girl, too tall for most of the clothes Gram got for her. But this gown fitted her as if it had been made especially, with a tight bodice and a row of rhinestones up her back.

When she came into the hall, she saw Andrew had wore a striped waistcoat under his jacket, and was waiting to escort her away from the wrecked door. He followed at a discreet distance as she stepped downstairs, then moved ahead of her to unlock and thrust open the door onto the street. “You look very pretty, miss,” he murmured as she walked past him onto the porch.

“Thank you.” This was not an impression she was used to. Touched, despite herself, with a sense of gratitude that almost felt like happiness, Paulina stepped into the street. Behind Gram's motorcar, pulled up at the curb, horses had stood under her window. A houseboy was sweeping the evidence into the gutter.

She looked up at the sky. For many weeks she had been observing the progress of the red planet, which that spring was closer to Earth than any time in memory. Sometimes it was so bright in the early evening, before the lamps were lit, that she saw it from her bedroom window.

Tonight the sky was low and close. Paulina followed the lanterns that hung from hooks in the brick wall, glowing spheres in the sweltering mist, each surrounded by a cloud of bugs. Already she could feel the sweat along her arms. In her dancing shoes, she stumbled on the cobblestones. With Andrew behind her, she made her way around the corner to the library, where, in serried ranks under the porte cochere, she saw the leadership of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and not just the Virginia branch. Some of these ladies, identifiable by their bright cockades, were from Georgia or the Carolinas, some even from faraway New Orleans, where Gram's mother had died of tuberculosis in the Ursuline Convent on Chartres Street, a martyr to the cause, whatever cause it might have been.

The orchestra, stashed somewhere out of sight, ended their rendition of “Mardi Gras Mambo,” and swept immediately into “If Ever I Cease to Love.” Gram—Mrs. McKenney—stood with the guests of honor. She wore a headdress of ostrich and egret plumes with an enormous paste-and-marcasite medallion in the front. She looked ridiculous, an impression furthered by her fumbling hands and doddering gait, her expression of soft senescence so at odds with the platinum-pointed sharpness she had shown earlier in Paulina's bedroom. Perhaps for that reason, the girl found herself comforted by what ordinarily exasperated her. Later on, when she tried to reconstruct how it was possible that she should so quickly forget the colonel's warnings, she thought it was not only because of the dress. But it was also the way Gram wagged her chin as she spoke to Miss Lavinia Bragg and Miss Annette Jackson, and the surreptitious way those two ladies caught each other's eye and tried both to suppress and reveal their condescending smiles. Paulina knew how they felt. In any case, there was no danger here. Cousin Adolphus must have been wrong to think so.

No one else carried a scepter. Andrew led her up the library steps, up into the atrium, and up the grand staircase to the ballroom on the second floor, which was usually kept locked. Ordinarily colored people weren't allowed inside the main library building, though there was a room in the basement with a separate entrance, specifically established in Judge McKenney's will. But Andrew, in his striped waistcoat, seemed to have a ceremonial role in these proceedings; he led Paulina to a dais in the middle of the floor, and then left her to escort the others to predetermined places on the raised benches lining the walls.

Standing on the dais, observed by so many eyes, in her mind Paulina moved as if through alternating currents of reassurance and unease. But even so: perhaps this was the night, she thought, when she would learn something new about herself, something real. Maybe she would learn who her parents were, or maybe something else that was all her own. Surely that was worth a risk. Now, finally, Andrew was closing the doors as, smiling and nodding, her grandmother moved toward her up the center aisle.

For the second or third time that evening, as she moved she seemed to change. Inside the hall the gas chandelier gave off a new, hard light, different from the soft luminescence of the fog-bound lamps in the porte cochere. The gas jets were like little tongues, and the light reflected from the surface of her grandmother's metallic gown as if she were encased in mirrored armor. At the same moment her ostrich-feathered headdress, ludicrous outside, appeared suddenly menacing, like the device on a medieval helmet, or the horsehair plumes of the ancient Greeks.

In a moment, as she looked around, Paulina found herself surrounded by a host of soldiers—the other ladies in their sham finery, similarly transformed. The raised dais on which she stood, scepter in hand, no longer seemed a place of cynosure and rapt display, but instead, suddenly, a prisoner's dock. The doors, as Andrew slammed them closed, snapped the sound of the orchestra in half.

Gram drew her platinum spectacles from her reticule and slipped them on. She spoke into the sudden silence: “Delegates. I have summoned you here from each state chapter of our great confederation, which is—tonight—in urgent danger. As we stand here, our enemies are on the march, threatening all we have built during the past sixteen years since the day of their surrender. As some of you know, according to the terms of our agreement, the leading families of our defeated foes gave us their firstborn daughters, future leaders whom we took into our homes, raised as our own. Since I telegrammed the news, forwarded from our intelligence services, that the Yankees have repudiated the obligations of their treaty, have reneged on their reparations, and are once more determined to attack, I learn that some of you have already taken matters into your own hands. While I understand your frustration, I, as your president, can by no means approve of any actions you might have pursued in a spirit of vengeance, which is liable to reflect unpleasantly on our organization, and also the ideals of Southern womanhood we have sworn to uphold. I refer especially to the virtues listed in the preamble to our charter, among which are chastity, graciousness, and prudence. Anything in the nature of what the Spaniards call an auto-da-fé, or else a ritual disembowelment, is therefore contrary to our founding principles. Blinding, maiming, or removal of the tongue are all likewise anathema, unless preceded by a public inquisition, as now.”

There were no windows in the hall. The air was humid and stale. Many of the ladies had taken out their fans, which glinted in the light.

“As your president,” continued Mrs. McKenney, “it was my duty to raise up the eldest daughter of the Yankee empress almost as a member of my own family. I had thought that even if the peace were preserved, I would provide a service, and send her back to her mother inculcated with the virtues most precious to us. That, obviously, is not to be, though it is impossible for me to avoid shedding at least a metaphorical tear at this lost opportunity. In fact, my wish was probably a vain one born of my own sentimentality. This very evening I found the girl conspiring with a well-known apostate. It was only due to the vigilance of my manservant…”

So her cousin had been right all along. Paulina let her scepter droop. Now others claimed the right to speak. They raised their armored fans and Mrs. McKenney recognized them: delegates from the sovereign states of Alabama, Georgia, and even the Texarkana Republic. But it was soon clear that they did not intend to protest or intervene, or make an argument for leniency, based, perhaps, on youth or innocence. Instead they asked for clarification, or else suggested methods and locations. Mrs. Meribel Lewis, whose father had been hit by an exploding shell at Second Manassas, suggested something involving dynamite, a substance patented by a Swedish chemist thirteen years before. Others disagreed. Rejecting this newfangled technology, they debated the merits of a firing squad.