The Flaming Corsage Read Online Free PDF Page B

Maginn,” Edward said.

E DWARD MOUNTED THE stoop of Katrina’s home on Elk Street, a quiet shaded thoroughfare on Capitol Hill that because of its monied residents was known as Quality Row. This
was his first visit to this house since his proposal to Katrina. He’d seen her often, exchanged letters with her daily, but was persona non grata until her insistence wore down her
parents. She had written Edward this morning that her determination had triumphed, that they would talk to him about the future; and so now, at afternoon, when he rang the pullbell of the
Taylors’ Gothic Revival town house, Fletcher, the family butler these ten years, opened the door to him. As Edward entered the foyer, Fletcher took his hat, put it on the hall hat rack.
    “Miss Katrina will meet you in the library, Mr. Daugherty.”
    “Thank you, Fletcher. How goes the horseshoe season?”
    Fletcher, a precise and florid man of some wit, and with
a day laborer’s constitution, was horseshoe champion of Elk Street servants. A summer-long competition ran in the court alongside the Taylor stables, and Edward, being of neither master nor
servant class, occasionally joined the games.
    “Somewhat predictably, sir,” Fletcher said.
    “You mean you’re ahead.”
    “Yes, sir, I do mean that.”
    “I almost beat you last time,” Edward said.
    “You did, indeed. But, alas, you did not.”
    “My turn will come, Fletcher.”
    “It’s always good to believe that, Mr. Daugherty.”
    Fletcher led him to the empty library and lighted the gas in the six globes of the chandelier. The library was part sitting room with tea table and cane-bottomed straight-backed chairs, walnut
bookcases with glass doors and perhaps two hundred books, blue velvet drapes on the windows, and Jacob Taylor’s orderly walnut desk, with two leather armchairs facing it. Edward sat in one of
these chairs, staring at the books. He waited, listened to the silence of the vast house, stood and searched for two particular books he’d read when he came here with Lyman years ago. He
scanned the English and Dutch history books, such a burden when he first opened them, and now they weighed on him again: all that confirmation of ancestry. But where are the books of my lineage, my ancient history? My history has not yet been written.
    He found books on Albany’s Dutch origins, volumes in the Dutch language, studies of the first Dutch and Episcopal churches of seventeenth-century Albany, lives of the Van Rensselaers,
Albany’s founding family and its dynasty of patroons, lives of the Staatses, Jacob’s family, and shelves of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray (which Katrina read avidly before she was
allowed to have them), Washington’s memoirs, The Federalist Papers , and books on the English in Ireland, yes: what Edward was seeking.
    He took two volumes from the shelf and sat and skimmed them: “The Irish are abominable, false, cunning and perfidious people . . . The worst means of governing them is to give them their
own way. In concession they see only fear, and those that fear them they hate and despise. Coercion succeeds better . . . they respect a master hand, though it be a hard and cruel one . . .
Cromwell alone understood this . . .”
    The same Cromwell, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, writing of his 1649 attack on Drogheda: “. . . the enemy were about 3,000 strong in the town . . . I believe we put to the sword the whole
number . . . I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the Town . . . about 200 of them possessed St. Peter’s Church-steeple . . . I ordered the steeple . . . to be fired, when one of
them was heard to say in the midst of the flames: ‘God damn me, God confound me; I burn, I burn.’ . . . I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone . .
.”
    And then to Wexford to slaughter 2,000 more: “I thought it not right or good to restrain off the soldiers from their right of pillage, or from doing execution on the