All Bedlam Courses Past (part thirty-four)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Two

Avarice Creeping On

(part thirty-four)

“Have we actually met?”

“In the way of things,” Thacker answered.

A blunt thing needed saying. “Manfred is coming along with us.”

“On Rutherford’s car?”

“I can’t see Mr. Rutherford minding. Mr. Ryan-Neville is Mr. Ebrach’s secretary.”

Her stately public manner brought a wink from Thacker. “Company welcome. Ebrach’s got you doing some errand in Nashville, sir? Trusts you.”

“Actually, not, to the first. Or in probability, the second. However, Mr. Ebrach does not wholly despise my humble recreations.”

Thacker replied as a bumpkin. “Polite gent, every way accommodating, so I hear from all the folks. Now I’ll just nose in. What sort of errand?”

“The object is wooing.” He laughed at Thacker’s unsubtle glance. “I do not woo Miss Gremot, sir. There is a Sisyphean task for you. I’ve got a newspaper baron’s widow on the hook, as I hope.”

“Let me get a thing or two down,” Thacker murmured.

“Oh, don’t scribble yet. I guarantee an exclusive for the town that made me.”

“Nope, Vanguard business. So Mrs. Buckley’s pretty far up in society. Not what you’d call a clubwoman.”

“I have merely corresponded with Regina up to now. She never writes about clubs. She reads, though, that low sort of bavardage we call the daily paper. I believe it was an article that put her on the scent. She would like her husband’s advice as to spending the spoils. That is to say, she would like Ebrach from the spirit world to find this out for her.”

Thacker ambled, in dismissal, to study the station map.

Rump half-settled, he had tried, “Sit with you.”

“No. Go about your business. I can move to the Ladies’.”

Then she’d said, looking up from the concourse bench: “I’ll just nose in.”

He was flattered. He saw the Gremot smile…and guessed he understood her, too. “Our honorable competitor hails from this city. Must be a little money. Nothing I don’t suppose up in Buckley territory.”

He decided that if LeBeau lived far, a horsecar would do. Always someone aboard with an awkward bag or baby, a tiny bond of gratitude waiting, to right a stranger’s poor grasp of affairs.

Suggestive, that Buckley connection. Why had Rowan left Nashville, crossed into Yankee territory, set himself up to publish in Cookesville? Up, with a Democrat rag that depreciated union and temperance, depreciated the war’s great aim, to abolish slavery from the land—

That was the word, depreciate. Harm the value of. Nibble at, chip away at, pour water under the foundation of. Rowan was a man for the general good, fellow Cookesvillians. He advocated waiting and seeing. The nation’s ills might yet sort themselves; and would we not all prefer this, than to sink—though he would not name this administration despotic—under the weight of a mailed fist, militating against the very Sovereignty of the State which made our country a federation in the first place?

There you had young Rowan of the ’60s. A soother, a sly talker-down-to, a do-nothing.

38

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part thirty-five)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)