Oakley Hall - Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

“Tell me everything you know, saw, heard, thought‌—‌everything,” he said. “Not just tonight. Everything. There is something I’ve missed. Just keep talking.”

I began talking.

A younger Celestial in a pink silk shirt with decorative frogs down the front appeared and, squatting, kneaded a ball of dark brown gum over a flame until it began to bubble and then plunged it into the bowl of the pipe, which Bierce inhaled. The first pipe seemed to take only moments, and the young man went through the preparations for the second. I inhaled free smoke. Bierce had removed his coat and loosened his tie. It was the first time I had seen him with his collar button undone.

“Continue!” he commanded.

I pulled from my memory everything I knew about the murders, the trip to the Washoe, the tintype of the Spades, the interview with Pusey, my conversations with Amelia and her father. But not with my father, E. O. Macomber, who had written the Former-Spade letter to Bierce.

Bierce smoked the second pipe, and a third. “Does Amelia have brothers?” he asked.

She had a brother named Richard, whom I’d glimpsed at the Firemen’s Ball and who was studying at the Sheffield School at Yale.

“And she has an uncle, who is her father’s twin, and whom Beau resembles?”

“Amelia does not think he does.”

I told Bierce about seeing Beau at the Bella Union, and catching sight in Battery Street of the painting of Lady Caroline as Lady Godiva‌—‌which Mr. Brittain had described and which was apparently Senator Jennings’s property. Bierce demanded a description of the man carrying the painting to safety, which description I was unable to supply other than that the fellow had been young.

There were more questions, all with no apparent focus to them.

After what seemed hours of my increasingly dry-mouthed account, Bierce muttered in Chinese to the young man, who bowed and retired. Presently a female entered. I was shocked to see that she was an Oriental prostitute in a short white shift. She had a piquant face, slit-eyed, with high cheekbones. A gap between her front teeth gave her an attractive hoydenish appearance. She squatted to prepare what I counted as the fifth pipe and tossed her head at me with a smoldering eye.

I went out into the common room where I stood ill-at-ease and angry among the recumbent smokers, and their attendants moving the dim light. I felt trapped in the wrong place and time, breathing smoke of which I disapproved even as I felt drowsy from its fumes.

I had not told Bierce everything, so I was perhaps hindering his solutions. But I did not want those solutions to involve my father.

Presently the girl reappeared and with another toss of her head directed me back inside. It occurred to me that I had become prudish since my attachment to Amelia Brittain, but I disapproved strongly of the enslavement of young Chinese girls in Chinatown.

Bierce lay with one knee raised. He sat up, holding his hands to his cheeks, and shook his head once.

“I think I have it,” he said.

“That’s good,” I said. I wanted to get out of this place.

“I must do Captain Pusey’s work for him in order to accomplish my own ends,” Bierce said, standing unsteadily. I helped him with his coat.

“Are you going to tell me?” I asked.

“Not yet. In case I am wrong.”

28

RICH, adj. – Holding in trust and subject to an accounting the property of the indolent, the incompetent, the unthrifty, the envious and the luckless.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

When I got to Pine Street and started up my creaking outside stairs in the darkness, I could see some white object on the top step, like a large bag of laundry there. It rose, extending in height, as I climbed toward it, and it was Amelia Brittain in a white dress.

“What are you doing here?” I whispered.

“I had to see you!”

“Where’s your guard?”

“I took a hack. I’ve been waiting for hours! ”

I unlocked the door and let us in and bent to light the lamp. Amelia sat on the bed with her hands clasped under her chin. “You smell funny!” she said.

I said I’d been in an opium den with Bierce.

“Did you smoke opium?”

“I did not.”

“There are ladies that do that. Eleanor Bellingham told Momma it is so marvelously relaxing.”

She made me feel stodgy and disapproving. “You shouldn’t—” I started.

“Oh, don’t say that! I’m going to be married!”

I couldn’t get my breath. When I sat down beside her she leaned her head against my shoulder.

“He’s a friend of Poppa’s. He’s nice. He’s—”

“What’s his name?”

“He is Marshall Sloat. He’s a banker.”

I didn’t know the name.

“It is to be very soon!” She put her arms around me. “It’s a wonderful marriage! Please kiss me, Tom!”

I kissed her. The kissing progressed.

“The wedding will be at Trinity, and the reception in the Palace. Everyone will be there!” She was breathing hard. “Governor Stanford will be there. Mr. Crocker will be there, and Mr. Fair. Senator Jennings will be there.”

I said I didn’t think Senator Jennings would be there, but she paid no attention. Somehow her blouse was off, and her undergarments slipped down to her waist. I kissed her bare bosom. She had raised her arms above her head, twining there like swans’ necks while she sighed, and closed her eyes and turned her face one way and the other. I kissed her breasts and felt the perfumed down beneath her arms tickle my cheek. I kissed her belly. When I tried to go further she whispered, “No, no, no, no, no, no!” on an ascending scale. So I kissed her breasts while she sighed and sobbed and twined her arms above our heads and talked on:

“Maybe General Sherman will be there,” she panted. “And the Mackays, and the Millses and Mr. and Mrs. Reid, and Miss Newlands, and the Blairs and the Martins and the Tolands. The Thomsons and the Blakes and the Walkers and Miss Osgood and Mr. Faber.”

It was the Elite Directory of San Francisco .

Where were her ironies now?

The ache in my groin felt as though I’d been clubbed there. I kissed Amelia’s breasts while she listed the names of San Francisco’s elite who would attend her marriage to Mr. Sloat, the banker. Her nipples were like pink fingertips. I kissed her nipples while she moaned. She would not lie back on the bed or permit any other attentions. I kissed her until my lips ached.

When I took her home in a hack she was weeping. This time I mounted the steps at 913 Taylor Street with an arm supporting her. She let herself inside and was gone.

When I returned to my room a note had been slipped under the door:

Since you have ignored the rule against bringing women to your room we will require you to vacate these premises as of Monday next.

Mrs. Adeline Barnacle

In the morning the books I had lent Belinda were stacked neatly on the fourth stair: Ivanhoe , The Mill on the Floss and Great Expectations , along with three neatly penned lines of script on a page torn from a school notebook ending our engagement.

Thursday at The Hornet offices I was discussing with Bierce my piece on Crocker’s spite-fence, trying to pretend that my heart was not broken into halves of fury and grief.

I knew that when Charles Crocker was praised as a public-spirited man who had constructed many works of great and permanent value to the State, Bierce had responded: