Pay the Devil - Jack Higgins [41]
He lay back in the grass, hands locked behind his head. “Money is the least of my worries. My father bought ships and made a fortune running the Yankee blockade from Nassau to Atlanta. He was killed just before the end of the war. He left me a million pounds sterling on deposit in the Bank of England.”
She gasped. “I feel like a pauper by comparison,” she said, with a light laugh. “He must have been a remarkable man.”
“Some men swore he had the Devil in him,” Clay said. “He was the most dangerous man I’ve ever known. My mother was a gentle, lovely creature, the only person who could ever control him. She was never very strong. She died when I was ten.”
For a moment, he brooded quietly, alone with the past. “After that, he sold the plantation and we moved away. Things had been going from bad to worse for some time. He wasn’t a notable success as a cotton planter. We never stayed anywhere for long. He was a natural gambler, and for several years he worked the Mississippi riverboats, earning a living at it. Later, he went to Virginia City and opened a saloon.”
“And what did you do?” Joanna asked.
“Hung on to his coattails,” Clay told her. “I had a remarkable education, believe me. I first saw him shoot a man dead when I was twelve. After that, we never looked back, but all good things have to come to an end. He decided it was time I had some formal schooling, and I went back East to live with my mother’s brother in New York. When I was eighteen, my father discovered my interest in medicine and sent me to London and Paris to complete my studies. He never did anything by halves.”
“And then came the war?”
“Not quite. He sold out in Virginia City and returned to Georgia, bought a great plantation and tried to live like a gentleman again. It was too late, of course. He’d been living by the twin senses of action and passion for too long. But passion is no substitute for love. Love grows, passion consumes. He was mixed up in one damned scandal after another. Other men’s wives—the usual things. The war came just in time to save him from drinking himself into the ground.”
“And yet he didn’t join the army?”
Clay nodded. “No, he left that to fools like me, as he said on the day I left to join my regiment.”
“You’d been living with him then?”
“For two years after I got back from Paris,” Clay told her.
“Didn’t your father agree with the South’s reasons for going to war?” she said.
Clay shook his head. “It wasn’t that—he knew we couldn’t win, that’s all”
“Then why did you fight?” she asked simply.
He frowned. “I don’t really know. There were so many reasons. Because I was born in Georgia. Because my friends and neighbors were going to war. Isn’t that really the only reason any man ever fights?”
“And so you rode off to your lost cause after all.”
“In the beginning, it was anything but that,” he said. “It was gallant men and horses, bugles faintly on the wind—all the mystique of soldiering. In the early days, it wasn’t too far to Richmond, pretty women in ball gowns and handsome men in magnificent uniforms.”
“And afterward?” she demanded.
He smiled grimly. “Afterward, it was the Yankee blockade and slow starvation. I thought we were going to pull it off in July ’64, when Jubal Early erupted from the Shenandoah Valley and frightened ’em to death in Washington, but it was too late. I can’t begin to describe the kind of hell those last nine months were.”
“One thing still puzzles me,” she said. “You started out as an army surgeon and ended as commander of a brigade of cavalry. How did that happen?”
“The fortunes of war,” he replied. “In the summer of ’63, I was on detachment with General Morgan when he made his famous raid into Kentucky, Indiana and Idaho. We were captured and the Yankees, not taking kindly to raiders, refused to treat us as prisoners of war. I was included with the other officers, surgeon or not. We were all imprisoned in the Illinois State Penitentiary.”
“But that was infamous,” she said indignantly. “You were only obeying orders.”
“It didn