Empire: A Novel Read online

  “As a general greeting, I prefer good-morning.” Caroline was cool. “So far, today, everyone’s told me that we’ve won the war, and no one’s mentioned the weather. Besides, I haven’t won the war. You and your father have.”

  “You, too. You’re an American. Oh, it’s a great day for all of us.”

  “A very hot day. I’m writing your former classmate. Any message?”

  “Tell him he should be happy. At least his employer should be. The New York Journal must be frothing at the mouth, like some rabid …”

  “Eagle. May I write him on your father’s stationery?”

  “Why not? This is the summer embassy.” A young man with hair parted neatly in the middle looked into the room. “Have you seen the Ambassador?”

  “He’s in the library, Mr. Eddy. Did you just come down from London?”

  “I was here last night for dinner.” Mr. Eddy was reproachful. “Of course, there were so many people.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Del. “But there were so many. What’s the latest news?”

  “I don’t know. The telegraph office in the village has either broken down or just shut down. They’ve never had so much work, they say. But Mr. White’s on his way from London. He’ll have the latest news.” Mr. Eddy left the room to Caroline and Del, who left the room altogether. Caroline held on to Del’s arm as they stepped out onto the stone terrace with its long view of the Weald of Kent. Although Caroline did not know just what a weald was, she assumed that it must contain green woods and distant hills—the vista before them, in fact. They moved toward the one end of the terrace that was in shade, from a giant gnarled diseased oak. The soft green English countryside was beginning to shimmer as the before-noon sun burned a hole in a sky that ought to have been pale blue but instead was white from heat.

  “You should be more interested in our war.” Del teased her as they sauntered decorously in the shade, gravel crunching beneath their feet. Below them, on a grassy terrace, a somber peacock glared, and unfurled a far too brilliant tail. Everywhere, the bright, if dusty, overblown roses grew in remarkably ill-tended plots. But then Caroline had spent her life seeing to gardens and houses. “She will make some fine lord a splendid hostess,” said her father’s last but one “translator,” a Miss Verlop from The Hague. “Or,” said Blaise maliciously, “some fine capitalist a good factory boss.” But Caroline had no intention of being either a hostess or a wife, though a factory boss sounded interesting. Of course, she had had no desire to be a daughter or a half-sister, either. But she had dutifully served her time as the first—and duly matriculated; as for the second, Blaise was good company; and she quite liked him, so long as he did not steal her share of the estate.

  “Why should he?” Del stopped beneath a vast—again dusty—rhododendron.

  Del looked as surprised as Caroline felt: she had not realized that she had spoken aloud. Was this madness? she wondered. The Sanford family was full of eccentricity, to put the matter politely, which is how they put it to one another, quite aware that a number of them, including her father, enjoyed the homely modifier “mad as a hatter.”

  “What did I say just now?” Caroline was determined to be scientific; if she was to be like the other Sanfords, she wanted to know every phase of her descent. She would be like M. Charcot, clinical.

  “You said you didn’t care if anyone were ever to remember the Maine again …”

  “True. Then?”

  “You said you thought Mr. Hearst and Blaise probably sank it together.”

  “Oh, dear. But at least I tell the truth in my delirium.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “No. No. Not yet, anyway. Not that I know of. How did I get from the Maine to my father’s will?”

  “You said … Are you making fun of me?” The small gray eyes in the large face were kind, with a tendency to absorb rather than reflect the now intense August light.

  “Oh, Del!” Caroline seldom used a young man’s first name. After all, her first language was French, with its elaborately gauged and deployed second person. On the subtle shift from intimate “you” to formal “you” an entire civilization had been built. Although Caroline had never been in love (if one did not count a fourteen-year-old’s crush on one of her teachers at Allenswood), she knew from the theater and books and the conversation of old ladies what love must be like and she fancied herself best as Phaedra, consumed with lust for an indifferent stepson; worst, as a loving wife to a good man like Adelbert Hay, whose father, the celebrated John Hay, was once private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, and now ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. John Hay was himself not only civilized to the extent that any native American could be (Caroline was never quite sure just how deep the veneer could ever be of any of her countrymen) but wealthy as a result of his marriage to one Clara Stone, an heiress of Cleveland, who had borne him two sons and two daughters. As luck insisted on having it, the eldest son had been at Yale with Caroline’s half-brother, Blaise Delacroix Sanford; and Caroline had met young Mr. Hay twice in New Haven and once in Paris; and now they were houseguests in Kent, contemplating the question she had allowed herself to ask, quite unaware that she was literally speaking her mind, something not encouraged outside the bluestocking academy of the grand Mlle. Souvestre: “Will Blaise try to take all my money now that he’s sunk the Maine?”

  Caroline did her best to pretend that she had been joking—about the money if not the Maine; and so she managed to convince Del that she was not joking. He shut his eyes a moment. Two tiny lines formed a sort of steeple between his brows, filial imitation of the Ambassador’s deep lines. “Blaise is very—fierce,” said Del. The peacock shouted harsh agreement beneath them. “But he is also a gentleman.” Del opened his eyes: the matter was, for him, satisfactorily resolved.

  “You mean he went to Yale?” Caroline had a truly French distaste for the Anglo-American word—not to mention romantic concept—“gentleman.”

  “Of course, he didn’t graduate. But even so …”

  “He is half a gentleman. And, of course, he’s only half my brother. I wish I were a man. A man,” Caroline repeated, “not a gentleman.”

  “But you would be both. Anyway, why be either?” Del sat on a bench carved from dull local stone. Caroline arranged herself, at an angle, beside him. How pleased, she thought, Sanfords and Hays would be to see so inevitable a young couple merging like fragments of mercury into the silvery whole of marriage. Del would one day be as huge—no other word—as his mother, Clara. But then Caroline knew that she could very well become as huge as the Colonel, who, at the end, gave up going to the theater because he could no longer fit in any seat, and refused to arrange for a special chair to be placed in a box as his one-time friend the even more enormous Prince of Wales did.

  “We could be fat together,” murmured Caroline, wondering if she had revealed herself in a murmured aside about Blaise, or had the voice been normal? Normal, she decided, when the puzzled Del asked her to repeat herself. She asked, “What is your impression of his character?”

  “I don’t know any more. I haven’t seen him since he quit Yale and went to work for the Morning Journal.”

  “Even so, you were his classmate. You know him better than I do. I’m just the half-sister, back home in France. You’re the—contemporary in America.”

  “I think Blaise wanted to get his life started earlier than most of us do. That’s all. He was—he is—in a hurry.”

  “To do what?” Caroline was genuinely curious about her brother.

  “To live it all, I suppose.”

  “And you’re not?”

  Del smiled; the teeth were like a child’s first set, small irregular pearls; he also had dimples and a turned-up nose. “I’m lazy. Like my father says he is, but isn’t. I don’t know what I shall do with myself. But Blaise knows just what he wants.”

  Caroline was surprised. “Last year he wanted to study law. Then he quit Yale and went to work for a newspaper, of all things. And what a newspap
er!” Caroline had yet to hear anything good of the Journal or its proprietor, the wealthy young Californian William Randolph Hearst, whose mother had recently inherited a fortune from his near-illiterate father, Senator George Hearst, a crude discoverer of gold and silver mines in the West. It was the Senator who had set up his cherished only son as a newspaper proprietor, first with the Daily Examiner in San Francisco and then with the Morning Journal in New York, where young Hearst had spectacularly succeeded, through a form of sensational journalism known as “yellow” (fires, alarums, scandals), in surpassing Mr. Pulitzer’s original “yellow” New York World. The Journal was now, in its own words, “the most popular newspaper on EARTH.” “And Blaise delights in Mr. Hearst,” said Caroline. “And I delight in hearing about Mr. Hearst.”

  “But you’ve never met him?”

  “No. No. He is not to be met, I gather. He goes to Rector’s with actresses. Two very young actresses, I am told. Sisters.”

  “He is a cad.” Del said the final word; there would be no appeal.

  “So why does Blaise want to work for him?”

  This time Del’s smile was more grown-up and knowing: the baby teeth unrevealed by smooth lips. “Oh, Miss Sanford, has no one told you yet about power?”

  “I read Julius Caesar’s handbook in school. I know all about it. You start at first light and then, by forced marches, you surprise the enemy and kill them. Then you write a book about what you’ve done.”

  “Well, the newspapers are now the book you write. Blaise has simply taken a shortcut. He has gone straight to the end-result.”

  “But isn’t it better—if that’s what you want—to win a war first?”

  “But that’s exactly what Mr. Hearst has done, or thinks he’s done. All those stories of his about how the Spanish blew up our battleship.”

  “Didn’t they?”

  “Probably not, according to Father. But it’s the way that things are made to look that matters now. Anyway, Blaise is in the midst of it. He wants to be powerful. We all noticed that.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’m far too easy-going. I’d rather marry, and be happy, like my father.”

  “But the Ambassador has always been at the center of—forced marches at first light.”

  Del laughed. “It was the others who got up early to do the marching. Father just wrote the book.”

  “Ten volumes, in fact.” Caroline had yet to meet anyone who had been able to read all the way through the ten-volume life of Abraham Lincoln by John Hay and his fellow secretary to the President, J. G. Nicolay. Caroline had not even made the attempt. The Civil War had no interest for her, while Lincoln himself seemed as remote as Queen Elizabeth, and rather less interesting. But then she had been brought up on Saint-Simon, in whose bright pages there were no saints with stovepipe hats making sententious appeals to the Almighty, only a king who was compared, quite rightly, to the sun, in bed and out.

  Mrs. Cameron appeared on the terrace. “Del!” she called. “Your father wants you. He’s in the library.” She went inside.

  “What,” asked Caroline, as they returned to the house, “are the Five of Hearts?”

  “Where did you hear about that?”

  “I saw some letter-paper. I asked Mrs. Cameron. She was mysterious.”

  “Well, don’t mention the subject to Mr. Adams, ever.”

  “Then he must be a Heart?”

  “It was long ago,” was all that Del said.

  Caroline returned to her room; and dressed for lunch. She had come to Kent without a maid; old Marguerite had gone to Vichy to take the waters. In the past, Caroline had always travelled with a mademoiselle, who was half governess and half maid. But now, in her twenty-first year, Caroline was an orphan; and she could do as she pleased. The problem was that she was not certain where pleasure for her might ultimately lie. In any case, until the Sanford estate was settled, she was in limbo. And so she had chosen to spend August with Del and his family at the “summer embassy,” presided over by the Camerons and the Porcupinus Angelicus, their name for Henry Adams, who was indeed prickly as a porcupine if not always much like an angel.

  But, happily, Adams was now in a celestial mood, at least with Caroline, who found him alone in the yellow drawing room, so called because, with age, the frayed green damask on the walls had turned a sickly yellow, made even sicklier by the contrast with the heavily gilded—and dusty—furniture. Was dusty to be emblematic of the state of an English August, or merely her own state of mind?

  Henry Adams was shorter than Caroline; and she was less than Amazonian. At sixty, Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, as he was inexorably identified, possessed a full white beard, carefully barbered to a point, a full moustache, a high, pink, shining bald head—the Adams birthright, he liked to say—and a full paunch held ever so slightly forward in order to balance properly the small round figure that existed only to support the large round brain-crammed head of America’s great historian, wit, dispenser of gloom—not to mention lover of Lizzie Cameron. But were they, actually, lovers? wondered Caroline, realizing that the country of her father was not that of her own birth and education, and as the chronicler, Adams, was no Saint-Simon, there were no rogue bastards to occupy his pen, though such things did exist in American history, but hidden from view, like the old story that her own grandfather, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, was the bastard son of that dark son of the American republic Aaron Burr, who had, so tremendously, like Lucifer, fallen.

  “Dear Miss Sanford.” Henry Adams’s old bright eyes were very alert; but the smile was curiously tentative for one so venerable. “You do illuminate at least one sexagenarian’s summer.” The accent was British. But then Adams had matured in England, as his father’s secretary when that dour and gelid statesman had been President Lincoln’s minister at London during the Civil War. Like so many entirely Anglicized Americans, Adams affected to despise the British. “They are impenetrably stupid,” he would say, with quiet delight when confronted with some new demonstration of British dimness.

  “Mr. Adams.” Caroline mocked a reverent curtsey. “Is the war concluded to your satisfaction?”

  “Well, it is all over, which satisfies me. But then for two years the Cuban business drove me so wild that there was a movement to confine me to the Washington Zoo. At the mention of ‘Cuba Libre,’ I would howl—like a wolf at the full moon.” Adams bared his teeth; looked to Caroline not unlike a wolf at noon. “But then I always lose my head when others are calm. The moment they get off their heads, I am calm. Once the war began, I was serene. I knew we had our man of destiny securely in place.”

  “Commodore Dewey?”

  “Oh, infant! Commodores are simply playthings in war-time.”

  “But he took Manila, and defeated the Spanish fleet, and now everyone wants us to stay, at least the English do.”

  Adams tugged the tip of his pointed beard with, she noted, a small rosy hand that was more like a baby’s than that of an old man. He cocked his head to one side. “We students of history—no matter how dull—like to know just who it was who put an admiral, like a chess piece, in Far Eastern waters—soon to be called Far Western, as what’s west to us is what’s true west.”

  “My brother Blaise says it was Mr. Roosevelt, when he was at the Navy Department. Blaise says he did it without telling his superiors.”

  Adams nodded approvingly. “You are getting closer. Our young bumptious friend Theodore—a student of my young bumptious brother Brooks—deserves more credit, certainly, than the knight—admiral, that is—I think in chess terms—that checkmated Spain. But whose hand directed our castle Theodore?”

  A flight of children, led by Martha, filled up the room. All the girls surrounded Uncle Dordie, a name Martha had invented for Mr. Adams, whose pockets turned out to be filled with hard candies, that were promptly and ruthlessly suppressed by Mrs. Cameron. “Not before mealtimes, Dor!” she announced, confiscating whatever she could pry loose from clenched fists.
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br />   Other houseguests were now entering the drawing room, without announcement, to the butler’s sorrow. But Mrs. Cameron’s word was final at the summer embassy. Only officialdom was proclaimed. The rest came pell-mell.

  To Caroline’s surprise, Adams turned back to her and resumed their conversation where it had broken off. “In those affairs where the balance of power in the world suddenly shifts, there must be a consummate player, who calculates his moves. This player puts Theodore at the Navy Department so that he will put the Admiral at Manila; he then responds to the sinking of the Maine with a series of moves that lead to a near-bloodless war, and the end of Spain as a world-player, and the beginning of the United States as an Asiatic power …”

  “I am in suspense, Mr. Adams! Who is the consummate player?”

  “Our first man of destiny since Mr. Lincoln—the President, who else? The Major himself. Mr. McKinley. Don’t laugh!” Adams frowned severely. “I know he is supposed to be a creature of Mark Hanna and all the other bosses, but it’s plain to me that they are his creatures. They find him money—a useful art—so that he can deliver us an empire, which he has! The timing is exquisite, too. Just as weak England begins to loosen her grip on the world, just as Germany and Russia and Japan are jostling one another to take England’s place, the Major preempts them all, and the Pacific Ocean is ours! Or soon will be, and the new poles of power will be Russia on the eastern landmass and the United States on the west, with England, ours at last, in between! Oh, to be your age, Miss Sanford, and to see the coming wonders of our Augustan age!”

  “In Paris, Mr. Adams, you once told me that you were a lifelong pessimist.”

  “That was on earth. I am now in Heaven, dear Miss Sanford, and so my pessimism ended with my earthly life. Up here, I am not even a porcupine.” The moustache twitched at the corners as he looked up at her—how small he was, she thought, angelic and diabolic.