All Bedlam Courses Past (part twenty-six)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Two

Avarice Creeping On

(part twenty-six)

Gilbert had counted out twenty dollars in coin, surely a mad sum, but his hope for Lecomte (in truth, for Honoré’s sake), was that he make his way north, the treasured protégé of someone…

Lecomte was a willing assistant. He was, if anything, enterprising. But American chins showed a bent towards canting, American thumbs towards hooking into trouser bands, American noggins shaking that telling once. Lecomte’s English (it seemed possible) might lead a time-strapped reporter astray.

Gilbert must telegraph to Amédée what was no disgrace: the general appearance of the jail’s outer walls, the number of his fellows keeping vigil, a scrap from the chatter of Montrose. The axiomatic trio of facts gave importance; his editor could craft wonders from the string of rhetorical questions—

Then why not try? His luck could be no worse than the others’.

They made for a river feeding the Potomac, a river prettily called the Anacostia. Gilbert jotted names on the fly, of avenues…Kentucky, Georgia…fitting these to a hasty map, that shaped itself as a dovetailed joint.

Lecomte commented: “Do you see those markers all in rows like the pawns of a chessboard, those with the stone caps?”

They were passing a cemetery hedged in evergreens, the coniferous and the shining-leaved magnolia. Gilbert rose from his seat and stared. The capitol building, two or three miles distant, struck him like the Sacré-Coeur, in that it was unfinished, and could be seen in its changing faces while circling the streets below.

“The dead officers of the American war, you know. And there are one or two graves of importance.”

Gilbert tried tentatively a field glass, lent by Montrose. [“Never give a thought to returning this. Leave it with Miss Brent, be on time for your train, and carry my best regards to Monsieur Amédée!”] He found the posture dizzying, and fell to a sit. “Of importance?”

“Yes…the general Washington, I think. And…”

Lecomte, Gilbert thought, was making this up.

“…the famous hero.” A gesture to say, of course the name is known.

“But is there a place, there in the cemetery, where with the glass I might see…though a window, perhaps…?”

“No. That is not at all what I have in mind.”

The street descended to a low spot, encroached by the waters of the Anacostia. Flat-fronted houses shadowed a lane, stalked, at its abrupt end—a low hump of brickwork that must on the river side stand as a floodwall—by men with notebooks…

Smoking, drawing watches, clustering the door of a tavern.

Lecomte lit off at once. The cabby, with meaning vigor, directed his whip-butt earthwards. “All the further she goes, mister!”

31

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part twenty-seven)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)