The U.S. legation occupied a large house
on Prytania Street, in the neighborhood most called New Town. St George New Town was part of what was
called the British City, the newer suburbs up-river—which was to say, more or
less south—of the original settlement.
The old quarter was usually called the French City, in spite of the fact
that it had been as much Spanish as French.
Grant liked walking in New Town. The air was better here than in his rooms; he
lived above a warehouse at the foot of Julia Street, much too close to the
river. He occasionally wondered if his
soul was punishing him by choosing to live on a street that bore his dead
wife’s name. Certainly he hadn’t set out
to live on that street, much less deliberately chosen a place just on the
landward side of the levee, which was what everyone called the broad,
straggling earthen dike that protected New Orleans from the river.
Here in New Town he could smell flowers above
the river’s stink. The streets
were—comparatively—clean, some of them even paved, with just the ripe tang of
horse-shit occasionally getting in the way of the scent of magnolia, roses, or
orange-blossom. And he’d never minded
any smell associated with horses. To him
horses were synonymous with the army life, the only life now that he really
cared about. He liked horses better than
just about any people he knew.
After a quarter-hour or so he found himself
on the edge of Wellesley Place, a wide, circular park where Nyades Street ended
and St Charles Avenue began. The park
was dominated by a statue of the man who'd defeated the United States in
Jefferson's War. This was only one of
several statues of Wellesley that Grant had seen in the British City; Wellesley
and Nelson had become, it seemed, the British patron saints of New Orleans. Wellesley hadn't had the impact on military
theory of his colleague, the Holy Roman Emperor Karl, but he'd always been
Grant's favorite of the generals who'd defeated Revolutionary France.
Wellesley had used spies in his wars against
the Maharajahs and the French. What
would he think of what Brown and Connell were doing, skulking around with
criminals? For that matter, what exactly
were Brown and Connell doing? Brown's willingness to “offer” someone
Canadian and British heads was repulsive in the least, and possibly far, far
worse.
Whatever Brown and his companion were up to,
it couldn’t be right, superior officer though Brown might be. Did he have a duty to try to stop them? Hell, if I could stop them I wouldn’t
just be doing my duty: I'd be doing the Union a favor. He paused on that thought, some residual
sense of caution holding him back. He
stared past the statue in the centre of the park. Once, he thought, I
was more careful to think before I acted.
All right, then: it was time to think. Grant looked up at Wellesley’s bronze visage,
staring past him and out over the city and the Mississippi. Always do as much staff-work as
possible before setting out on campaign, he said silently to the
bronze duke. If I’d
had time for that before Harper’s Ferry… Well, there was nothing to be gained by dwelling
on that.
Grant’s first impulse was to head for one of
the grog-shops riverward from Wellesley Place.
Then he realized that he wasn’t actually interested in whiskey. Whiskey was what he drank when he was bored,
and suddenly he wasn’t bored anymore.
An omnibus approached from uptown on
Nyades. Pausing only a moment to wonder
if he’d be missed at the legation—he wouldn’t, he concluded—Grant stepped on
board as it stopped at the entrance to the circle. When one of the horses neighed at him,
shaking its head, Grant smiled. The
horse had a job to do, and seemed to take pleasure in that. Now he had a job as well.
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three
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