Country of the Bad Wolfes

him and dressed him in fresh nightclothes and helped him to sit in a chair so that she could change his bedding. Then fetched him a measure of whiskey and told him to sip it slowly. His eyes flooded at the burn of it.

Over the next week she several times a day gave him spoonings of various nostrums. Each morning she changed his bedding and bore away his slops, then brought a breakfast of honeyed tea and parboiled eggs and soft breads. She brought dinners of mashed and buttered vegetables, supper broths of mutton and beef. In the first low raspings of his returning voice he told her of the recent notification that his brother, the last of his living kin, had been lost at sea. Her commiseration was tearful. She well knew the pain of losing loved ones, the loneliness of being without family. She had buried her only child, a month-old daughter, twenty-three years ago, and it was eighteen years now she had been widowed.

He was physically recovered by the beginning of the academic year, though his voice had been permanently deepened to a raspy bass. His emotional recuperation took a while longer, but nothing else could have served it so well as the resumption of university life. His freshman year had been a notable triumph—he’d made the dean’s list both semesters, and his essay on the merits of Hamiltonian economics was published in a university review.

His successes continued through the rest of his student years. He studied Spanish in ancillary courses and while still a sophomore became fluent enough to read Don Quixote in the original and write a monograph on it in Spanish. He had always enjoyed numbers but in college they became a passion and he dazzled his instructors in mathematics. Accounting was child’s play. His studies came to him with such ease that he had time for extracurricular pursuits. He joined the debate club and became a redoubtable adversary, winning the annual New England competition with a rousing defense of President Polk’s war in Mexico as essential to America’s Manifest Destiny. At the urging of a professor who admired his forensic flair, he auditioned for a junior-year production of Henry the Fourth and won praise for his rendition of Hotspur, and then as a senior he played the lead in Marlowe’s Faustus. On a dare, he enrolled in a fencing class and was as surprised as everyone else by his swiftly acquired proficiency with a foil. His style was unaggressive and lacked finesse but was marked by an impenetrable defense, relying on clockwork parries that inevitably frustrated his opponents into rash moves that left them open to counterthrust hits. He was recruited for the varsity team and within a year became its ace. In his junior year he was narrowly defeated by his Princeton opponent in the interscholastic finals, and then as a senior he beat the Brown University ace for the championship.

All the while, through careful observation of his classmates, he learned the bearing of a gentleman. In emulation of his favorite professor he took up smoking a calabash pipe. He was popular among his fellows, a convivial companion who relished political argument and an occasional wager on a horse race, who enjoyed a pint and a ribald joke as well as the next man.

And yet, for all his friends, he did not truly confide in any of them. He was amiably chary in all reference to family. The adventurous sire he’d admired as a boy had become a secret to guard against the social exclusion he was sure would befall him were it known he was son to a murderer. As far as anyone at Dartmouth knew, his parents had died when he was a young child and he and his brother had been raised in Portsmouth by a maiden aunt, the aunt now also deceased. He had admitted to a living brother only because he had expected Samuel Thomas sooner or later to show up in search of him, and he would have to introduce him to friends. He had told them Sammy was a junior officer on a merchant ship, an elevation in rank he was certain Sammy would enjoy simulating, just as he would surely understand why his classmates mustn’t know the truth about their father— though Sammy would doubtless have chivvied him for his social fastidiousness. He had been sure, too, that his friends would enjoy the surprise of seeing that they were twins. When he sadly told his fellows, at the start of sophomore year, that his brother’s ship had gone down in a storm off Hispaniola that summer and the entire crew with it, he was accorded the special sympathy reserved for those who have lost the last of their family.

His only confidant during his Dartmouth years was a leatherbound ledger that served as a journal in which he made random entries with no purpose but to clarify to himself his own thoughts and reflections. Whenever he was unclear about some idea or emotion, uncertain in his perception of someone or vague about a memory, he sat to his journal and wrote as precisely as he could what he thought or felt or remembered, and thereby gave those thoughts and feelings and memories the solidity and authority of words recorded on a page. And by that simple act made of them his abiding truth.

He graduated summa cum laude but was bested by a whisker for valedictorian and so delivered the salutatory address. Then went to work as a legal assistant in the Concord office of Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. He gained the position through the influence of his best friend and fencing teammate, James Davison Bartlett, son to one of the firm’s partners and himself studying toward a legal career. A rakish sort, Jimmy Bartlett had once sneaked a young prostitute into his dormitory simply to prove he could do it, then was caught as he was trying to sneak her out again. It was one of numerous pranks for which he might have been expelled but for the might of his family name. The Bartletts had landed with the Pilgrims. They were among the first families of New Hampshire—and major benefactors of Dartmouth College. In addition to the builders of the paper mills on which the Bartlett fortune was founded and had continued to expand, the bloodline included a lieutenant governor, a state Supreme Court justice, and a state’s attorney general. Jimmy’s father, Sebastian, was one of the most highly respected contract lawyers in New England, and his Uncle Elliott was an administrator in the consular service. His mother, Alexandra Davison Bartlett, belonged to a prominent New York family long acquainted with the Sullivan County Van Burens, family of the former president of the United States.

It was the most pleasant spring John Roger had known since boyhood. He fulfilled his office duties with precision and could research and annotate a point of law with utter thoroughness and dispatch. On his own initiative he devised and proposed a simpler but more efficient accounting system for the company, an innovation that earned him a handsome bonus and the partners’ unstinting praise. He kept a rented room on boisterous Center Street and gave his weekday evenings to reviewing Coke and Blackstone and other legal texts he’d been absorbing since his freshman year. But on almost every weekend he would be Jimmy’s guest at the Bartlett estate on the Merrimack. Except for Jimmy’s sister, who was away at school in Exeter, he made the acquaintance of all the Bartletts and enjoyed their company as much as they did his.

He and Jimmy liked to scull on the river, liked to saddle a pair of the thoroughbreds stabled on the grounds and race each other across the meadows. The Bartletts also owned a seaside cottage near Rockport, Massachusetts, and he sometimes went there with Jimmy for holiday stays. They would sail off rocky Cape Ann in the family ketch Hecuba. They went for long hikes in the hilly woods. They did much target-shooting with Jimmy’s Colt Dragoon. The revolver was a graduation gift from his father, who’d received it from Samuel Colt himself in appreciation for his contractual expertise in establishing the Colt factory in Hartford. It was an imposing weapon, weighing above four pounds and firing a .44-caliber ball that would make hash of a man’s heart. “Picture yourself a hundred years ago in command of a militia company armed with the only ones of these in existence,” Jimmy said. “You would’ve been the lords of the earth.”

Once a week they practiced their swordsmanship, usually with the foils they had competed with at Dartmouth, but sometimes with the cavalry sabers Jimmy’s great-grandfather had acquired in the Revolutionary War. The first time John Roger hefted a saber he at once felt its difference from a fencing foil. This was no instrument of sport but a weapon of war. Its very heft evoked mortal menace. It was made for slashing as well as thrusting and its blade was grooved to allow for easier passage through a torso, for the run of blood. A saber contest called for greater strength and stamina than did rapier fencing, and its proper art entailed fighting with a two-handed grip when necessary. It was easy to get caught up in the flailing zeal of a saber match, and during one heated exchange John Roger inadvertently nicked Jimmy’s arm. For a week after, his friend bore the bandaged wound as proudly as a war veteran.

SISTER OF FORTUNA

In mid-summer they passed their bar examinations, John Roger with ease, Jimmy by the skin of his teeth—a fact in which he seemed to take perverse pride—and they were hired as junior members at Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. To mark the occasion, Sebastian Bartlett invited a host of friends to a Saturday picnic on his