Empire

Party to support General Miles. He’s a war hero, after all. He’s commanded all our forces. He’s deeply conservative.”

“Will the Democratic Party do as you tell them?” Caroline was now convinced that Brooks Adams was more than a little mad.

“If they want to win, of course. Wouldn’t you vote for General Miles?”

“Women do not vote, Mr. Adams.”

“Thank God. But if you could?”

“I don’t know him.”

“You don’t know who?” Mrs. Cameron was brilliant in watered blue silk.

“Mr. Adams’s candidate for president, General Miles.”

“Nelson?” Mrs. Cameron’s eyebrows contracted.

“That’s right. He’s willing. We’re willing.”

“Then that’s that, I suppose.” Don Cameron and Henry Adams entered the room together, and Brooks abandoned the ladies for the real quarry. “Poor Brooks,” said Mrs. Cameron. “But then poor Nelson, too, if he’s got the bug.”

“Is Nelson General Miles?”

“Yes. He’s also my brother-in-law. I can’t imagine him as president. But then I can’t really imagine anyone until, of course, they are. Del says you are leaving tomorrow.”

Caroline nodded. “I must talk to lawyers. In New York.”

“Our summer’s ending far too soon. You to New York, Mr. Hay to New Hampshire, Mr. Adams to Paris…”

“Mrs. Hay just told me who the Five of Hearts are.”

Mrs. Cameron smiled. “So now you know who they are. But did she tell you what they are?”

“What they are?” Caroline was puzzled. “But weren’t they just five friends, to begin with?”

“No. They were not just friends.” Mrs. Cameron was suddenly, annoyingly, mysterious. “It is what they are that most matters.” Then Mrs. Cameron turned to greet two strange ladies, who had just arrived. Could it be, wondered Caroline, much intrigued, that these five-now four-elderly people are the gods of Olympus in disguise?

TWO

1

BLAISE DELACROIX SANFORD had little appetite for food and less for drink, and so he had got into the habit of turning the lunch hour into a long walk up Fifth Avenue, starting at the Journal office and ending with a visit to the Hoffman House bar in Madison Square. Here he would drink a mug of beer and dine off the vast buffet, the only tariff, as it were, the expected twenty-five-cent tip to the waiter, which insured the solid clientele of New York’s most sumptuous bar against the hordes of hungry dangerous men who lived beneath the elevated railroad along Sixth Avenue a block away. Although there was an unwritten treaty that there be no traffic between wealthy Fifth and depraved Sixth Avenues, the idle stranger had been known to appear in the bar-rooms of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, that acropolis among hotels, and wolf down a complete meal from the celebrated “free lunch,” some sixty silver platters and chafing dishes containing everything from terrapin stew to a boiled egg.

Blaise, in his sturdy youth, preferred the boiled egg to any other food. He had been so spoiled by great cooking all his life in France that simplicity at table was a bleak joy he could now indulge in. As he stood at the bar, beer mug in hand, he looked about the glittering high-ceilinged rooms that ran the hotel’s length. Slender, fluted Corinthian columns supported an elaborately coffered ceiling. Every square inch of wall was vividly decorated: half- pilasters in elaborate stucco, painted Arcadian scenes in gilt frames, cut-crystal gas-lamps now electrified, and in the place of honor over the mahogany bar the famed nude woman, the notorious masterpiece of a Parisian unknown to the Parisian Blaise, one Adolphe William Bouguereau. The painting was still regarded by New York men as “hot stuff.” For Blaise it was simply quaint.

As Blaise studied the stout burghers who came and went, talking business, he was relieved to see none of his fellow journalists. Although he enjoyed their company, to a point, that point was often too swiftly reached whenever a bottle was produced. He had known a few heavy drinkers at Yale; had even been drunk himself; but he had never encountered anything quite like the newspapermen, as they called themselves. It seemed that the more talented they were, the more hopeless and helpless they were in the presence of a bottle.

There was a mild stir in the bar as the former Democratic president Grover Cleveland, a near-perfect cube of flesh, as broad as he was tall, made a stately entrance, shook a number of hands absently, and then took the arm of the smooth Republican Chauncey Depew and together they vanished into an alcove.

“Who’d think they were once mortal enemies?” Blaise turned and found himself looking into the handsome, if somewhat slant-eyed, face of his Yale classmate Payne Whitney. The young men shook hands. Blaise knew that although his classmates considered him somewhat scandalous for not bothering to graduate, he was thought to be highly enterprising-in a criminal sort of way-for having gone to work for William Randolph Hearst and the Morning Journal, a newspaper whose specialty, according to the newspapermen, was “crime and underwear,” an irresistible combination that had managed to bring, in two years, Pulitzer’s New York World to its knees. At thirty-five, Hearst was the most exciting figure in journalism, and Blaise, who craved excitement-American excitement-had got himself introduced to the Chief. When Blaise had said that he had left Yale, just as Hearst had left Harvard, in order to learn the newspaper business, the Chief had been noncommittal; but then, at best, he found it difficult to express himself in spoken words. Hearst preferred printed words and pictures; he was addicted to headlines, exclamation points, and nude female corpses found, preferably in exciting chunks all round the town. But when the Chief had learned that young Mr. Sanford was heir to a considerable fortune, he had smiled, boyishly, and welcomed him into the bosom of the Journal.

Blaise sold advertising; rewrote stories; did a bit of everything, including expeditions into darkest Sixth Avenue, and Stygian Hell’s Kitchen. He had been bitterly disappointed when the Chief had not taken him to Cuba to enjoy Hearst’s victory over Spain. Theodore Roosevelt may have won a small battle but everyone conceded that Hearst had himself started and won a small war. Without Hearst’s relentlessly specious attacks on Spain, the American government would never have gone to war. Of course, the sinking of the Maine in Havana harbor had been decisive. The plot had been as crude as it was lurid: a ship of a friendly nation on a friendly visit to a restive Spanish colony sinks as the result of a mysterious explosion, with the loss of many American lives. Who-or what-was responsible? Hearst had managed to convince most Americans that the Spanish had deliberately done the deed. But those who knew something of the matter were reasonably certain that the Spanish had had nothing to do with the explosion. Why should they antagonize the United States? Either the ship had exploded from a spontaneous combustion in the coal-bins, or a floating mine had accidentally hit a bulkhead, or-and this was currently being whispered up and down Printing House Square-Hearst himself had caused the Maine to be blown up so that he could increase the Journal’s circulation with his exciting, on-the-spot coverage of the war. Although Blaise rather doubted that the Chief would go so far as to blow up an American warship, he did think him perfectly capable of creating the sort of emotional climate in which an accident could trigger a war. Currently, Hearst was involved in an even more fascinating plot. At one-thirty, Blaise, a principal in the plot, was to report to the Chief at the Worth House, where Hearst lived in unlonely bachelor splendor.

Payne Whitney wanted to know what Hearst’s next move might be. Blaise said that he was not at liberty to say, which caused a degree of satisfying annoyance. But then Blaise was now in the world while Whitney and his Yale roommate, Del Hay, were still boys, on the outside.

“I heard from Del, in England. He said your sister…”