The Touch of Fire Read online

  Mr. Davis examined Rafe’s face carefully, before Atwater could introduce him, and then held out his hand. “Ah, yes, Captain McCay. How have you been, sir? It has been several years since last I saw you, I believe early in ’65.”

  The phenomenal memory didn’t take Rafe by surprise. He forced himself to shake the ex-president’s hand. “I am well, sir.” He introduced Annie, who also shook hands with Mr. Davis. The ex-president’s hand was thin and dry, and she held it a moment longer than necessary. Mr. Davis’s extraordinarily fine eyes looked thoughtful, and he glanced at their clasped hands.

  Rafe’s eyelids lowered as he felt a surge of ridiculous jealousy. Had Annie been sending a message with her touch? Mr. Davis’s expression had visibly softened.

  “Marshal Atwater didn’t give me your name when he requested this meeting. Please, won’t you sit down? Would you care for something to drink before dinner?”

  “No, thank you,” Rafe said. “Marshal Atwater didn’t tell you who I am because of the chance that my name might have been overheard. I’m wanted for murder, sir, and the reason is these papers.”

  Annie watched the thin, ascetic face of the ex-president as Rafe told him everything that had happened in the past four years. It was the most intelligent face she had ever seen, with a high, wide forehead and a certain nobility that transcended the flesh. He had been labeled a traitor to the nation by northern newspapers and she supposed she had to consider him so, but she could also see how he had been chosen to lead the government of the breakaway states. There was a certain frailty about him, no doubt caused by two years of imprisonment, and a sadness deep in those fine eyes.

  When Rafe had finished Mr. Davis didn’t speak, but held out his thin hand. Rafe gave him the documents. He leafed through them in silence for several minutes, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He looked unutterably weary.

  “I had thought these destroyed,” he said after a moment. “Would that they had been; Mr. Tilghman would still be alive, and your own life wouldn’t have been ruined.”

  “Disclosure wouldn’t make Vanderbilt’s life very comfortable, either.”

  “No, I can see that it wouldn’t.”

  “Vanderbilt was stupid,” Rafe said. “Surely he foresaw that these documents could be used against him, to obtain money.”

  “I would not have done so,” Mr. Davis said. “They must be used, however, to obtain justice for you.”

  “Why did you do it?” Rafe suddenly asked, bitterness apparent in his tone. “Why did you take the money, knowing it was useless? Why prolong the war?”

  “I had wondered if you’d read my private notes.” Mr. Davis sighed. “My job, sir, was to keep the Confederacy alive. The thoughts I put down in my private notes were my deepest fears, yet there was always the chance that the North would have grown tired of war and demanded an end to it. So long as the Confederacy existed, I served it. It was not a complicated decision, though it is one I bitterly regret. If foresight were as sharp as hindsight, think what tragedies could have been avoided. Hindsight is, unfortunately, a useless commodity, good only for regrets.”

  “My father and brother died the last year of the war,” Rafe said.

  “Ah.” Mr. Davis’s eyes darkened with sorrow. “You have just cause for your anger. I apologize to you, sir, and offer you my sincere condolences, though I am certain you don’t desire them. If I may make amends to you in any way, I will do so.”

  Atwater broke in. “You can help us think of a way to get those murder charges dropped. Just revealing Vanderbilt as a traitor won’t do it.”

  “No, I can see that it wouldn’t,” Mr. Davis said. “Let me think on it.”

  “You must go back to New York,” he said the next day. “Contact Mr. J. P. Morgan; he’s a banker. I have written a letter to him.” He passed the folded letter to Rafe. “Take the relevant documents pertaining to Mr. Vanderbilt’s donations to the Confederacy to the meeting with you. I would like to keep the remaining documents, if you don’t mind.”

  Rafe glanced down at the letter. “What’s in it?” he asked bluntly.

  “Mr. Vanderbilt has a great deal of money, Captain McCay. The only way to fight him is with more money. Mr. Morgan can do this. He is a young man of rather stringent morals, but an extremely astute businessman. He is building a banking empire that can, I believe, contain Mr. Vanderbilt’s influence. I have outlined the situation to Mr. Morgan and asked for his assistance, which I have reason to believe he will give.”

  Annie sighed when Rafe told her they had to go to New York. “Do you think the baby will be born on a train somewhere?” she asked whimsically. “Or perhaps on a steamboat?”

  He kissed her and stroked her stomach. He hadn’t been a very good husband so far, dragging her all over the country just at the time when she most needed peace and quiet. “I love you,” he said.

  She jerked back to stare at him, her dark eyes widening with shock. Her heart leaped and she put a hand to her chest. “What?” she whispered.

  Rafe cleared his throat. He hadn’t planned to say what he had, the words had come out all by themselves. He hadn’t realized how naked and vulnerable that short sentence would make him feel, or how uncertain of himself. She had married him, but she hadn’t had a lot of choice, since she was having a baby. “I love you,” he said again, and held his breath.

  She was pale, but a radiant smile broke over her face. “I—I didn’t know,” she whispered. She flung herself into his arms, clinging as if she would never let go.

  The constriction in his chest eased, and he could breathe again. He carried her to the bed and placed her on it, then stretched out beside her. “You can say the words, too, you know,” he prompted. “You never have.”

  The smile grew even more radiant. “I love you.”

  There were no extravagant declarations, no analysis, just the simple words, and they were the right ones for both of them. They lay together for a long time, absorbing each other’s nearness. He smiled as his chin rested on top of her head. He should have known, that very first time when he had forced her to lie down on the blanket and share her body heat with him on a cold night, and he had wanted her then despite his illness, that she would come to mean more to him than anything else in his life ever had or ever would.

  A week later the three of them sat in J. P. Morgan’s richly paneled office in New York City, the place where it all had started for Rafe, four years before. Morgan tapped the letter from Jefferson Davis in his hand, thinking how curiosity could motivate men to do unusual things. It had been obvious to Morgan from the start that these people wanted a favor from him and he usually refused to see such people, but his secretary had said they had a letter from Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, and sheer curiosity had led him to grant an interview. Why would Mr. Davis write to him? He had never met the man, had strongly disapproved of Southern politics, but Mr. Davis’s reputation was intriguing. J. P. Morgan was a man who held integrity to be the most important virtue.

  The banker listened to Marshal Atwater outline the circumstances, and only then did he open the letter from Jefferson Davis. He was thirty-four years old, Rafe’s age, but already laying the groundwork for a banking empire that he fully intended to control. He was the son of a banker, and understood the subtleties of the business from top to bottom. He even looked like a banker, his form already showing signs of a prosperous stoutness. His intensity shown in his eyes.

  “This is incredible,” he finally said, laying the letter aside and picking up the documents to study them. He looked at Rafe with the sort of wary respect one gives a dangerous animal. “You’ve managed to elude what amounts to an army for four years. I think you must be a formidable man in your own right, Mr. McCay.”

  “We all have our special battlegrounds, Mr. Morgan. Yours are in boardrooms.”

  “Mr. Davis thinks the boardroom is the way to control Mr. Vanderbilt. I think he is right; money is the one thing Mr. Vanderbilt understands, the