"Serena" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rash Ron)

Two

THE FOLLOWING MORNING PEMBERTON INTRODUCED his bride to the camp's hundred workers. As he spoke, Serena stood beside him, dressed in black riding breeches and a blue denim shirt. Her jodphurs were different from the ones the day before, European made, the leather scuffed and worn, toes rimmed with tarnished silver. Serena held the gelding's reins, the Arabian's whiteness so intense as to appear almost translucent in the day's first light. The saddle weighting the horse's back was made of German leather with wool-flocked gusseted panels, its cost more than a logger earned in a year. Several men made soft-spoken observations about the stirrups, which weren't paired on the left side.

Wilkie and Buchanan stood on the porch, cups of coffee in their hands. Both were dressed in suits and ties, their one concession to the environment knee-high leather boots, pants cuffs tucked inside so as not to get muddied. It was clothing Pemberton, whose gray tiger cloth pants and plaid workshirts differed little from the workers' attire, found faintly ridiculous in such an environment, now even more so in light of Serena's attire.

"Mrs. Pemberton's father owned the Vulcan Lumber Company in Colorado," Pemberton said to the workers. "He taught her well. She's the equal of any man here, and you'll soon find the truth of it. Her orders are to be followed the same as you'd follow mine."

Among the gathered loggers was a thick-bearded cutting crew foreman named Bilded. He hocked loudly and spit a gob of yellow phlegm on the ground. At six-two and over two hundred pounds, Bilded was one of the few men in camp big as Pemberton.

Serena opened the saddle bag and removed a Waterman pen and a leather-bound notepad. She spoke to the horse quietly, then handed the reins to Pemberton and walked over to Bilded and stood where he'd spit. She pointed beside the office at a cane ash tree, which had been left standing for its shade.

"I'll make a wager with you," Serena said to Bilded. "We both estimate total board feet of that cane ash. Then we'll write our estimates on a piece of paper and see who's closest."

Bilded stared at Serena a few moments, then at the tree as if already measuring its height and width. He looked not at Serena but at the cane ash when he spoke.

"How we going to know who's closest?"

"I'll have it cut down and taken to the saw mill," Pemberton said. "We'll know who won by this evening."

Doctor Cheney had now come on the porch to watch as well. He raked a match head across the railing to light his after-breakfast cigar, the sound audible enough that several workers turned to find its source. Pemberton looked also, and noted how morning accentuated the doctor's unhealthy pallor, making the corpulent face appear gray and malleable, like dirty bread dough. An effect the wattled neck and pouchy cheeks further emphasized.

"How much we wagering?" Bilded asked.

"Two weeks' pay."

The amount gave Bilded pause.

"There ain't no trick to it? I win I get two weeks' extra pay."

"Yes," Serena said, "and if you lose you work two weeks free."

She offered the pad and pen to Bilded, but he didn't raise a hand to take it. A worker behind him snickered.

"Perhaps you want me to go first then?" Serena said.

"Yeah," Bilded said after a few moments.

Serena turned toward the tree and studied it a full minute before she raised the pen in her left hand and wrote a number. She tore the page from the pad and folded it.

"Your turn," she said and handed the pen and notepad to Bilded.

Bilded walked up to the cane ash to better judge its girth, then came back and examined the tree a while longer before writing his own number. Serena turned to Pemberton.

"Who's a man we and the workers both trust to hold our estimates?"

" Campbell," Pemberton said, nodding toward the overseer, who watched from the office doorway. "You all right with that, Bilded?"

"Yeah," Bilded said.

Serena rode out behind the cutting crews as they followed the train tracks toward the south face of Noland Mountain, passing through acres of stumps that, from a distance, resembled grave markers in a recently vacated battlefield. The loggers soon left the main train line that went over the right side of the mountain and instead followed the spur, their lunches in tote sacks and paper bags, metal milk pails and metal boxes shaped like bread loaves. Some of the men wore bib overalls, others flannel shirts and pants. Most wore Chippawah boots and a few wore shoes of canvas or leather. The signal boys went barefoot. The loggers passed the Shay train engine they called a sidewinder and the two coach cars that brought and returned workers who lived in Waynesville, then the six flat cars for timber and the McGiffert loader and finally at the spur's end the hi-lead skidder already hissing and smoking, the boom's long steel cables spooling off the drums and stretching a half mile upward to where the tail block looped around a massive hickory stump. From a distance, the boom resembled a huge rod and reel, the cables like cast lines. The boom angled toward the mountain, and the cables were so taut it looked as if the whole mountain was hooked and ready to be dragged down the tracks to Waynesville. Logs cut late on Saturday yet dangled from the cables, and men passed heedfully under them as they might clouds packed with dynamite. All the while, the air grew thinner as the workers made their way up the steep incline toward tools hidden under leaves, hung on tree branches like the harps of the old Hebrews. Not just axes but eight-foot cross-cut saws and steel wedges and blocks and pike poles, the nine-pound hammers called go-devils and the six-pound hammers called grab skips. Some of these implements had initials burned in their handles, and some were given names as might be allowed a horse or rifle. All but the newest had their handles worn slick by flesh much in the manner of stones smoothed by water.

As the men made their way through the stumps and brush they called slash, their eyes considered where they stepped, for though snakes rarely stirred until the sun fell full on the slopes, the yellow jackets and hornets offered no such respite. Nor did the mountain itself, which could send a man tumbling, especially on a day such as this when recent rains made the ground slick and yielding to feet and grasping hands. Most of the loggers were still exhausted from last week's six eleven-hour shifts. Some were hung over and some were injured. As they made their way up the mountain, the men had already drunk four or five cups of coffee, and all carried with them cigarettes and chewing tobacco. Some used cocaine to keep going and stay alert, because once the cutting began a man had to watch for axe blades glancing off trees and saw teeth grabbing a knee and the tongs on the cable swinging free or the cable snapping. Most of all the sharded limbs called widow makers that waited minutes or hours or even days before falling earthward like javelins.

Pemberton stood on the porch as Serena followed the crews into the woods. Even at a distance he could see the sway of her hips and arched back. Though they'd coupled that morning as well as last night, Pemberton felt desire quicken his pulse, summon the image of the first time he'd watched her ride at the New England Hunt Club. That morning he'd sat on the clubhouse veranda and watched Serena and her horse leap the hedges and railings. He'd never been a man easily awed, but that was the only word for what he'd felt as Serena and the horse lifted and then hung aloft for what seemed seconds before falling on the barriers' far sides. He'd felt incredibly lucky they'd found one another, though Serena had already told him their meeting wasn't mere good fortune but inevitability.

That morning at the club two women had come out on the veranda and sat nearby, dressed, unlike Serena, in red swallowtail hunting blazers and black derbies, hot tea set before them to ward against the morning's chill. I suppose she imagines riding without a coat and cap de rigueur, the younger of the women had said, to which the other replied that it probably was in Colorado. My brother's wife attended Miss Porter's with her, the older woman said. She just showed up one day, an orphan from the western hinterlands. A wealthy orphan albeit, better educated than you'd imagine, but even Sarah Porter had no luck teaching her any social graces. Rather too proud, my sister-in-law claims, even for that haughty bunch. A couple of the girls pitied her enough to invite her home with them for the holidays and she not only refused but in a very ungracious manner. She stayed there with those old school marms instead. The younger woman had noticed Pemberton listening and had turned to him. Do you know her? she'd asked. Yes, he'd replied. She's my fiancée. The younger woman had blushed, but her companion had turned to Pemberton with a smile. Well, she'd said frostily, she at least deems you worthy of her company.

Except for Mrs. Lowell's brief comment about previous suitors, that morning had been the only time he'd heard Serena's past spoken of by anyone besides Serena. She'd volunteered little herself. When Pemberton asked about her time in Colorado or New England, Serena's answers were almost always cursory, telling him that she and Pemberton needed the past no more than it needed them.

Yet Serena's bad dreams continued. She never spoke of them, even when Pemberton asked, even in those moments he pulled her thrashing body out of them as if pulling her from a treacherous surf. Something to do with what had happened to her family back in Colorado, he was sure of that. Sure also that others who knew her would have been astonished at how childlike Serena appeared in those moments, the way she clung so fiercely to him until she whimpered back into sleep.

The kitchen door slammed as a worker came out and hurled a washtub of gray dishwater into a ditch reeking of grease and food scraps. The last logger had disappeared into the woods. Soon Pemberton heard the axes as the lead choppers began notching trees, a sound like rifle shots ricocheting across the valley as workers sawed and chopped another few acres of wilderness out of Haywood County.

By this time the crew chosen to fell the cane ash had returned to camp with their tools. The three men squatted before the tree as they would a campfire, talking among themselves about how best to commence. Campbell joined them, answering the loggers' questions with words arranged to sound more like suggestions than orders. After a few minutes Campbell rose. He turned toward the porch, giving Pemberton a nod, allowing his gaze to linger long enough to confirm nothing more was required of him. Campbell 's hazel eyes were almond-shaped, like a cat's. Pemberton had found their wideness appropriate for a man so aware of things on the periphery, aware and also cautious, reasons Campbell had lasted into his late thirties in an occupation where inattentiveness was rarely forgiven. Pemberton nodded and Campbell walked up the track to talk to the train's engineer. Pemberton watched him go, noting that even a man cautious as Campbell had a missing ring finger. If you could gather up all the severed body parts and sew them together, you'd gain an extra worker every month, Doctor Cheney had once joked.

The cutting crew quickly showed why Campbell picked them. The lead chopper took up his ax and with two expert strokes made an undercut a foot from the ground. The two sawyers got down on one knee and gripped the hickory handles with both hands and began, wedges of bark crackling and breaking against the steel teeth. The men gained their rhythm, and soon sawdust mounded at their feet like time sieving through an hourglass. Pemberton knew the workers who used them called the cross-cut saws "misery whips" because of the effort demanded, but watching these men it appeared effortless, as if they slid the blade between two smooth-sanded planks. When the saw began to pinch, the lead chopper used the go devil to drive in a wedge. In fifteen minutes the tree lay on the ground.

Pemberton went inside and worked on invoices, occasionally looking out the window toward Noland Mountain. He and Serena hadn't been apart for more than a few minutes since the marriage ceremony. Her absence made the paperwork more tedious, the room emptier. Pemberton remembered how she'd waked him that morning with a kiss on his eyelids, a hand settled lightly on his shoulder. Serena had been drowsy as well, and when she'd brought Pemberton ever so languidly into her arms, it was as if he'd left his own dream and together they'd entered a better richer one.

Serena was gone all morning, getting familiar with the landscape, learning the names of workers, ridges and creeks.

The Franklin clock on the credenza chimed noon when Harris' Studebaker pulled up beside the office. Pemberton set the in voices on the desk and walked out to meet him. Like Pemberton, Harris dressed little better than his workers, the only sign of his wealth a thick gold ring on his right hand, in the setting a sapphire sharp and bright-blue as its owner's eyes. Seventy years old, Pemberton knew, but the vigorous silver hair and shiny gold tooth fillings were congruent for a man anything but rusty.

"So where is she?" Harris asked as he stepped onto the office porch. "A woman as impressive as you claim shouldn't be hidden away."

Harris paused and smiled as he turned his head slightly, his right eye focused on Pemberton as if to better sight a target.

"Though on second thought, maybe you should hide her away. If she is all you say."

"You'll see," Pemberton said. "She's over on Noland. We can get horses and ride up there."

"I don't have time for that," Harris said. "Much as I'd enjoy meeting your bride, this park nonsense takes precedent. Our esteemed Secretary of the Interior got Rockefeller to donate five million. Now Albright is sure he can buy out Champion."

"Do you think they'll sell?"

"I don't know," Harris said, "but just the fact that Champion's listening to offers encourages not only Secretary Albright but the rest of them, here and in Washington. They're already starting to run farmers off their land in Tennessee."

"This needs to be settled once and for all," Pemberton said.

"Goddamn right it needs to be settled. I'm tired as you are of lining the pockets of those Raleigh pettifoggers."

Harris pulled a watch from his pocket and checked the time.

"Later than I thought," he said.

"Have you had a chance to look at the Glencoe Ridge tract?" Pemberton asked.

"Come by the office Saturday morning and we'll go see it together. Bring your bride along too," Harris said, and paused to nod approvingly at the valley's stumps and slash. "You've done well here, even with those two fops you have for partners."

Pemberton did not go back into the office after Harris left but instead rode out to Noland Mountain. He found Serena eating lunch with two foremen. Between bites of sandwiches, they discussed whether buying a second hi-lead skidder would be worth the extra cost. Pemberton got off his horse and joined them.

"The cane ash is at the saw mill," Pemberton said as he sat down beside her, "so Campbell will have the board feet by five-thirty."

"Any of the other men make side bets with you?"

"No."

"Would either of you care to wager?" Serena said to the foremen.

"No ma'am," the older worker replied. "I don't have a hankering to bet against you on anything concerning lumber. I might have before this morning, but not now, especially after you showed us that trick with the choker."

The younger worker merely shook his head.

The two men finished eating and gathered their crews. Soon the sounds of axes and cross-cut saws filled the nearby woods. The Arabian snorted and Serena walked over and placed her hand on the horse's mane. She spoke to the horse softly and the gelding calmed.

"Harris came by," Pemberton said. "He wants the three of us to go look at the Glencoe Ridge tract Saturday."

"Will he be looking for anything other than kaolin and copper?"

"I doubt it," Pemberton said, "though some gold has been panned from creeks in the county. There are ruby and sapphire mines near Franklin, but that's forty miles from here."

"I hope he finds something," Serena said, stepping closer to take Pemberton's hand. "It will be another beginning for us, our first real partnership."

Pemberton smiled. "Plus Harris."

"For now," Serena said.

As Pemberton rode back to camp, he thought of an afternoon back in Boston when he and Serena were lying in bed, the sheets damp and tangled. The third, maybe the fourth day he'd been with her. Serena's head had lain on his shoulder, her left hand on his chest.

"After Carolina, where to next?"

"I haven't thought that far ahead," Pemberton had replied.

"'I'?" she'd said. "Why not 'we'?"

"Well since it's 'we', Pemberton had replied playfully, "I'll defer to you."

Serena had lifted her head and met his eyes.

" Brazil. I've researched it. Virgin forests of mahogany and no law but nature's law."

"Very well," Pemberton had said. "Now the only decision 'we' have to worry about is where to have dinner. Since you've decided everything else for us, am I allowed to choose?"

She had not answered his question. Instead, she'd pressed her hand more firmly against his chest, let her palm stay there as she measured the beat of his blood.

"I'd heard you had a strong heart, fearless," she'd said, "and so it is."

"So you research men as well as potential logging sights?" Pemberton had asked.

"Of course," Serena had said.

AT six, every worker in camp gathered in front of the office. Though most cutting crews consisted of three men, a crew that lost a man often attached to another, an arrangement that wasn't always temporary. A man named Snipes acted as leader for such a crew since the other foreman, Stewart, was a diligent worker but of dubious intelligence. Stewart was relieved as anyone by this arrangement.

Among Snipes' crew was an illiterate lay preacher named McIntyre, who was much given to vigorous pronouncements on the imminent apocalypse. McIntyre sought any opportunity to espouse his views, especially to Reverend Bolick, a Presbyterian cleric who held services at the camp on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. Reverend Bolick considered his fellow theologian not only obnoxious but demented and went out of his way to avoid McIntyre, as did most men at the camp. McIntyre had been absent all morning with a bout of the flux but had come to work at noon. When he saw Serena standing on the office porch in pants, he choked on the peppermint he sucked to ease his stomach.

"There she is," McIntyre sputtered, "the whore of Babylon in the very flesh."

Dunbar, the youngest member of the crew at nineteen, looked toward the porch incomprehensively. He turned to McIntyre, who was dressed in his black preacher's hat and frayed black dress coat he wore even on the hottest days as a sign of his true calling.

"Where?" Dunbar asked.

"Right there on that porch, standing there brazen as Jezebel."

Stewart, who along with McIntyre's wife and sister comprised the whole of the lay preacher's congregation, turned to his minister and spoke.

"Why are you of a mind to say such a thing as that, Preacher?"

"Them pants," McIntyre proclaimed. "It's in the Revelations. Says the whore of Babylon will come forth in the last days wearing pants."

Ross, a dour man not kindly disposed to McIntyre's rants, stared at the lay preacher as he might a chimpanzee that had wandered into camp and begun chattering.

"I've read Revelation many a time, McIntyre," Ross said, "and somehow missed that verse."

"It ain't in the King James," McIntyre said. "It's in the original Greek."

"Read Greek, do you?" Ross said. "That's ever amazing for a man who can't even read English."

"Well, no," McIntyre said slowly. "I don't read Greek, but I've heard from them what does."

"Them what does," Ross said, and shook his head.

The crew foreman, Snipes, removed a briar pipe from his mouth to speak. His overalls were so worn and patched that the original denim seemed an afterthought, but there'd been no attempt to blend new colors with old. Instead, the crew foreman's overalls were mended with a conflagration of yellow, green, red, and orange cloth. Snipes considered himself a learned man and argued that, since colors bright and various were known in nature to warn other creatures of danger, such patches would deter not only varmints both large and small but might in the same manner also deter falling limbs and lightning strikes. Snipes held the pipe out before him, contemplated it a moment, then raised his head and spoke.

"They's differences in every language in the world," Snipes said sagely, and appeared ready to expound on this point when Ross raised an open palm.

"Here comes the tally," Ross said. "Get ready to have your pockets lightened, Dunbar."

Campbell stood on the ash tree's stump and took a pad from his coat pocket. The men grew silent. Campbell looked at neither the men nor the owners. His gaze remained on the pad as he spoke, as if to belie any favoritism even as he rendered the verdict.

"Mrs. Pemberton the winner by thirty board feet," Campbell said, and he stepped down without further comment.

The men began to disperse, those who had bet and won, such as Ross, stepping more lightly than the losers. Soon only those who'd watched from the porch remained.

"Cause for a celebratory drink of our best scotch," Buchanan announced.

He and Wilkie followed Doctor Cheney and the Pembertons into the office. They passed through the front room and entered a smaller room with a bar on one wall and a fourteen-foot dining table in the center, around it a dozen well-padded captain's chairs. The room had a creek-stone fireplace and a single window. Buchanan stepped behind the bar and set a bottle of Glenlivet and soda water on the lacquered wood. He lifted five Steuben tumblers from under the bar and filled a silver canister with chips from the ice box.

"I call this the Recovery Room," Doctor Cheney said to Serena. "You see it is well stocked with all manner of alcohol. I find it quite sufficient for my own medicinal needs."

"Doctor Cheney has no need for a recovery room elsewhere, because the good doctor's patients rarely recover," Buchanan said from behind the bar. "I know these rogues' preferences, but what is yours, Mrs. Pemberton?"

"The same."

Everyone sat except Buchanan. Serena studied the table, let the fingers of her left hand trail across its surface.

"A single piece of chestnut," Serena said appreciatively. "Was the tree cut nearby?"

"In this very valley," Buchanan said. "It measured one-hundred-and-twelve feet. We've yet to find a bigger one."

Serena raised her eyes from the table and looked around the room.

"I'm afraid this room is quite austere, Mrs. Pemberton," Wilkie said, "but comfortable, even cozy in its way, especially during winter. We hope you'll take your evening meals here, as the four of us have done before the pleasure of your arrival."

Still apprising the room, Serena nodded.

"Excellent," Doctor Cheney said. "A woman's beauty would do much to brighten these drab surroundings."

Buchanan spoke as he handed Serena her drink.

"Pemberton has told me of your parents' unfortunate demise in the 1918 flu epidemic, but do you have siblings?"

"I had a brother and two sisters. They died as well."

"All in the epidemic?" Wilkie asked.

"Yes."

Wilkie's moustache quivered slightly, and his rheumy eyes saddened.

"How old were you, my dear?"

"Sixteen."

"I lost a sibling as well in that epidemic, my youngest sister," Wilkie said to Serena, "but to lose your whole family, and at such a young age. I just can't imagine."

"I too am sorry for your losses, but your good fortune is now our good fortune," Doctor Cheney quipped.

"It was more than good fortune," Serena replied. "The doctor said so himself."

"What then did my fellow healer ascribe your survival to?"

Serena looked steadily at Cheney, her eyes as inexpressive as her tone.

"He said I simply refused to die."

Doctor Cheney slowly tilted his head, as if peering around a corner. The physician stared at Serena curiously, his thick eyebrows raised a few moments, then relaxed. Buchanan brought the other drinks to the table and sat down. Pemberton raised his drink, offered a smile as well to lighten the moment.

"A toast to another victory for management over labor," he said.

"I toast you as well, Mrs. Pemberton," Doctor Cheney said. "The nature of the fairer sex is to lack the male's analytical skills, but, at least in this instance, you have somehow compensated for that weakness."

Serena's features tightened, but the irritation vanished as quickly as it had appeared, swept clear from her face like a lock of unruly hair.

"My husband tells me that you are from these very mountains, a place called Wild Hog Gap," Serena said to Cheney. "Obviously, your views on my sex were formed by the slatterns you grew up with, but I assure you the natures of women are more various than your limited experience allows."

As if tugged upward by fishhooks, the sides of Doctor Cheney's mouth creased into a mirthless smile.

"By God you married a saucy one," Wilkie chortled, raising his tumbler to Pemberton. "This camp is going to be lively now."

Buchanan retrieved the bottle of scotch and placed it on the table.

"Have you ever been to these parts before, Mrs. Pemberton?" he asked.

"No, I haven't."

"As you've seen, we are somewhat isolated here."

"Somewhat?" Wilkie exclaimed. "At times I feel I've been banished to the moon."

" Asheville is only fifty miles away," Buchanan said. "It has its village charms."

"Indeed," Doctor Cheney interjected, "including several T.B. sanatoriums."

"Yet you've no doubt heard of George Vanderbilt's estate," Buchanan continued, "which is there as well."

"Biltmore is indeed impressive," Wilkie conceded, "an actual French castle, Mrs. Pemberton. Olmsted himself came down from Brookline to design the grounds. Vanderbilt's daughter Cornelia lives there now, with her husband, a Brit named Cecil. I've been their guest on occasion. Very gracious people."

Wilkie paused to empty his tumbler and set it on the table. His cheeks were rosy from the alcohol, but Pemberton knew it was Serena's presence that made him even more loquacious than usual.

"I heard a phrase today worthy of your journal, Buchanan," Wilkie continued. "Two workers at the splash pond were discussing a fight and spoke of how one combatant 'feathered into' the other. It apparently means to inflict great damage."

Buchanan retrieved a fountain pen and black leather notebook from his coat's inner pocket. Buchanan placed the pen on the notebook's rag paper and wrote feathered into, behind it a question mark. He blew on the ink and closed the notebook.

"I doubt that it goes back to the British Isles," Buchanan said. "Perhaps instead a colloquialism to do with cockfighting."

"Kephart would no doubt know," Wilkie said. "Have you heard of him, Mrs. Pemberton, our local Thoreau? Buchanan here is quite an admirer of his work, despite Kephart's being behind this national park nonsense."

"I've seen his books in the window at Grolier's," Serena said. "As you may imagine, they were quite taken with a Harvard man turned Natty Bumpo."

"As well as being a former librarian in Saint Louis," Wilkie noted.

"A librarian and an author," Serena said, "yet he'd stop us from harvesting the very thing books are made of."

Pemberton drained his second dram of scotch, felt the alcohol's smooth slide down his throat, its warm glow deepening his contentment. He felt an overwhelming wonder that this woman, whom he'd not even known existed when he'd left this valley three months earlier, was now his wife. Pemberton settled his right hand on Serena's knee, unsurprised when her left hand settled on his knee as well. She leaned toward him and for a few seconds let her head nestle in the space between his neck and shoulder. Pemberton tried to imagine how this moment could be better. He could think of nothing other than that he and Serena were alone.

At seven o'clock, two kitchen workers set the table with Spode bone china and silver cutlery and linen napkins. They left and returned pushing a cart laden with wicker baskets of buttered biscuits and a silver platter draping with beef, large bowls of Steuben crystal brimmed with potatoes and carrots and squash, various jams and relishes.

They were midway through their meal when Campbell, who'd been bent over the adding machine in the front room, appeared at the door.

"I need to know if you and Mrs. Pemberton are holding Bilded to the bet," Campbell said. "For the payroll."

"Is there a reason we shouldn't?" Pemberton asked.

"He has a wife and three children."

The words were delivered with no inflection, and Campbell 's face was an absolute blank. Pemberton wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to play poker against this man.

"All for the better," Serena said. "It will make a more effective lesson for the other workers."

"Will he still be a foreman?" Campbell asked.

"Yes, for the next two weeks," Serena said, looking not at Campbell but Pemberton.

"And then?"

"He'll be fired," Pemberton told the overseer. "Another lesson for the men."

Campbell nodded and stepped back into the office, closing the door behind him. The clacking, ratchet and pause of the adding machine resumed.

Buchanan appeared about to speak, but didn't.

"A problem, Buchanan?" Pemberton asked.

"No," Buchanan said after a few moments. "The wager did not involve me."

"Did you note how Campbell attempted to sway you, Pemberton," Doctor Cheney said, "yet without doing so outright. He's quite intelligent that way, don't you think?"

"Yes," Pemberton agreed. "Had his circumstances been such, he could have matriculated at Harvard. Perhaps, unlike me, he would have graduated."

"Yet without your experiences in the taverns of Boston," Wilkie said, "you might have fallen prey to Abe Harmon and his bowie knife.

"True enough," said Pemberton, "but my year of fencing at Harvard contributed to that education as well."

Serena raised her hand to Pemberton's face and let her index finger trace the thin white scar on his cheek.

"A Fechtwunde is more impressive than a piece of sheepskin," she said.

The kitchen workers came in with raspberries and cream. Beside Wilkie's bowl, one of the women placed a water glass and bottles containing bitters and iron tonics, a tin of sulpher lozenges, potions for Wilkie's contrary stomach and tired blood. The workers poured the cups of coffee and departed.

"Yet you are a woman of obvious learning, Mrs. Pemberton," Wilkie said. "Your husband says you are exceedingly well read in the arts and philosophy."

"My father brought tutors to the camp. They were all British, Oxford educated."

"Which explains the British inflection and cadence of your speech," Wilkie noted approvingly.

"And no doubt also explains a certain coldness in the tone," Doctor Cheney added as he stirred cream in his coffee, "which only the unenlightened would view as a lack of feeling towards others, even your own family."

Wilkie's nose twitched in annoyance.

"Worse than unenlightened to think such a thing," Wilkie said, "cruel as well."

"Surely," Doctor Cheney said, his plump lips rounding contemplatively. "I speak only as one who hasn't had the advantages of British tutors."

"Your father sounds like a most remarkable man," Wilkie said, returning his gaze to Serena. "I would enjoy hearing more about him."

"Why?" Serena said, as if puzzled. "He's dead now and of no use to any of us."