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  THE

  STRANGE WOMAN

  By

  BEN AMES WILLIAMS

  THIS is the story of a woman not much different from other women, except that she more frequently let the worst parts of her have their way. She was so attractive to the masculine eye that a young British naval officer who saw her for a few hours when she was four years old, eloped with her mother! Every one who knew her thought her a leader in all good works, a pillar of the church, a a fountain of virtue, a pattern of the perfect woman . . . everyone except seven men, Father, husbands, sons, and lovers,; they were the only people who really did know her.

  It is also a story of Bangor, Maine, during the boom in Maine lands and the great harvest of Maine pine. It is the story of Bangor when it was one of the wildest, toughest towns in the country; when, as someone said, ‘More fortunes were made in Bangor than in other town in the United States.’ It is Bangor form the War of 1812 until after the Civil War.

  It is a roaring, shouting, thrilling book that brings to life the story of Yankees who acted, for a while, like gold miners. It is a quiet, thoughtful, understanding book that probes the secret heart of a woman who sometimes surrendered to the evil in her. And it is a gentle, hopeful, and happy book of optimism and faith. It is a book for all tastes.

  The Strange

  Woman

  BOOKS BY BEN AMES WILLIAMS

  ALL THE BROTHERS WERE VALIANT

  EVERED

  IMMORTAL LONGINGS

  THE SILVER FOREST

  SPLENDOR

  DEATH ON SCURVY STREET

  HONEYFLOW

  SMALL TOWN GIRL

  CRUCIBLE

  THE STRUMPET SEA

  THREAD OF SCARLET

  COME SPRING

  THE STRANGE WOMAN

  COPYRIGHT, 1941, BY BEN AMES WILLIAMS

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE

  THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM

  The Riverside Press

  CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  By Way of Acknowledgment

  THE STRANGE WOMAN

  was originally projected as an attempt to present a picture of life in Bangor and the Penobscot Valley through the years immediately preceding and during the Civil War, just as Come Spring had done for the town of Union during the Revolution, and Thread of Scarlet for Nantucket during the War of 1812.

  But before the actual writing began, the central character assumed command of the book. Instead of the period 1855-1865, it was found necessary to cover fifty years of time; and the whole work became much more a study of character than a historical novel.

  Bangor and some of the people who lived there are in these pages; but Jenny, John Evered, their sons, Isaiah and Ephraim Poster, Judge Saladine and Meg and Beth, Jenny’s father and mother, Lieutenant Carruthers, and most of the minor characters in this book are completely fictitious, and are not in the slightest degree drawn from any actual individuals, whether of those days or of these.

  There seems no point in making even a partial bibliography of books, manuscripts, and newspapers which were consulted in working up the background of this novel; but grateful acknowledgments are due to Mrs. Fannie Hardy Eckstorm for many suggestions as to source material and for contributions from her own wide knowledge of the life of Bangor and of lumbering upon the river; to Olive M. Smythe of the Bangor Public Library for her generous assistance in locating material in the library; to Mrs. Marion Cobb Fuller of the Maine State Library at Augusta for her ready answers to many inquiries on points that arose while the novel was being written; to Miss Elizabeth Ring of the Maine Historical Society for helpful suggestions; to Miss Maude Goggins of Ellsworth for answering a number of questions about the family of Colonel John Black; to Harry M. Smith of Bangor for an explanation of the mechanics of the speculative boom in Bangor in the Thirties and for other useful information; and to Louis Felix Ranlett, Librarian of the Bangor Public Library, and L. T. Ibbotson, Librarian of the University of Maine, for their readiness and courtesy at all times.

  BEN AMES WILLIAMS

  CHESTNUT HILL

  MASSACHUSETTS

  The Strange Woman

  BEN AMES WILLIAMS

  (book cover)

  About the Book

  Books by Ben AMes Williams

  Title Page

  Copyright

  By Way of Acknowledgment

  I. Lieutenant Garruthers

  II. Tim Hager

  III. Isaiah Poster

  IV. Ephraim Poster

  V. John Evered

  VI. Elder Pittridge

  VII. Dan Evered

  (back cover)

  I

  Lieutenant Carruthers

  ‘For the lips of a strange woman drop honey,

  And her mouth is smoother than oil:

  But her latter end is bitter as wormwood,

  Sharp as a two-edged sword.’

  —PROVERBS

  1

  DURING her lifetime only

  seven men—and no women—really knew Jenny Hager for what she was; and Lieutenant Vincent Carruthers of His Majesty’s frigate Endymion was the first of the seven. No man of lesser qualifications could have been so quick to recognize Jenny’s essential attributes. The Lieutenant was a handsome young man of twenty-three, tall and a little lank, with a hawk nose and pink cheeks. His chin, seldom demanding the attention of a razor, was smooth; but there was a suggestion of downy beard just in front of each ear. His hawk nose was useful to him as an officer, enabling him to assume a severe and commanding demeanor simply by composing his countenance to match its bold and ruthless proportions; but in those lighter moments—which occurred as frequently as he could contrive—when he was more anxious to persuade than to command, he looked more like a shy and decidedly attractive boy than like a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. This disarming aspect, lulling all suspicions, had conquered as many feminine hearts as his more martial bearing had his country’s foes.

  He had entered the navy as a volunteer, first class, in 1804, at the age of thirteen. He did this with the blessing of his father—his mother having died of lung fever—because the elder Carruthers thought his son was sickly and that a navy life would either kill him or make a man of him. He served as midshipman and master’s mate on a succession of His Majesty’s ships, achieved his seniority as a Lieutenant while cruising in the Baltic in 1810, and was entered on the Endymion early in 1813 for service on the American station.

  After his first stay in Halifax, his feminine acquaintance there was as wide and as generous as that of any officer in the fleet, regardless of rank; but this surprised no one. The Lieutenant’s success in such matters had long been the envy of his fellow officers, and he had been a marked man since the day—or the night—when Captain Hunter of the Implacable found tire sixteen-year-old midshipman making himself at home in a bed-chamber to which the Captain had thought he himself had the only entry. The resulting unpleasantness might have been worse but for Mr. Carruthers’ pretty and precocious discretion. He tactfully pointed out to his infuriated superior that any public discussion of the matter would-since the Captain’s attachment to the lady in question was of long standing and was well known—subject the Captain himself to as many amused chuckles as though he had been presented with a pair of horns; and it was not till after Mr. Carruthers had been assigned to another ship that the tale leaked out.

  Since then the young man had been rated among the foremost swordsmen in His Majesty’s
Navy; but the British occupation of Bangor on the third and fourth of September, 1814, afforded him his first opportunity for a foray into American territory. He was to die rather unpleasantly from a bullet in the abdomen in the bloody fight between the Endymion’s boats and the Prince of Neufchatel, off Nantucket, five or six weeks later; but no premonition marred his enjoyment of the brief Bangor stay during which he met Jenny.

  He was quick to mark in her an unusual quality. His immediate impression was that she reminded him of someone, and during their first hour together he tried to clarify that memory. That Russian woman in whose bed he had supplanted the Captain of the Implacable had dark hair with hidden, warmer lights in it, as Jenny had; but also Jenny’s hair prisoned a faint delicious perfume which made him remember a young English woman, the wife of an Admiral of the Blue, with whom he had spent more than one long blissful evening in an old garden at Malta. There was a Contessa in Naples whose cheek had an ivory warmth like Jenny’s; and a lass fresh from the farm had kissed him once at Portsmouth, and the corners of her mouth were moist as Jenny’s were. When he held Jenny in his arms so many memories came trooping back to him. In one way or another she reminded him of each of the charming women he had known. She was a distillation, concentrating in her person all that had been most enticing and delicious in them. She was the essence of scores of pretty wantons, each one of whom for a moment he had loved, with all their outward beauty, with their seductive inner flame.

  And also he thought he discovered in her that thin wire of heartless cruelty which each of them had possessed. He had found that a woman was sometimes kind to a man, not because she wished to please him, but because she wished to wound and to betray some other man. In her lover’s arms, outwardly enraptured and abandoned, she was as apt as not to be thinking in the innermost chambers of her malicious soul of that other who would suffer if he could see her thus. The caresses she gave the one were whiplashes for the other. He thought there was this mocking cruclty in Jenny, too.

  The profound impression which Jenny made on the Lieutenant was the more remarkable because of the fact that she was at the time only four years old.

  II

  The Endymion, to which the Lieutenant was attached, was one of the British fleet consisting of three seventy-fours, two or three frigates, three or four smaller fighting ships and ten transports, which made into Castine Harbor at sunrise on the morning of September 1 and demanded a surrender. The American fort there was held by Lieutenant Lewis with twenty-eight regulars, while ninety-two militiamen from Bucksport, commanded by Lieutenant Little, were quartered in the Court House. The militiamen, at the first sight of the British fleet, started eagerly home to Bucksport; but Lieutenant Lewis and his regulars waited till the enemy began to land troops before blowing up the magazine and taking the same road.

  The British after this quick success pushed their advantage. The United States corvette Adams was just then laid up at Hampden for repairs. General Gosselin went to occupy Belfast and prevent any possible interference by militia from Lincolnville or other towns to the westward, while a flotilla of shallow-draft vessels, barges and guard boats, presided over by the Dragon, 74, started up the Penobscot with a force of five hundred soldiers and a lesser number of sailors and marines to seize or destroy the Adams and to sweep the river clean of American craft.

  Lieutenant Carruthers, commanding on this expedition a division of boats from the Endymion, watched with a lively pleasure the unfolding beauty of the upper Bay. The boats entered the wide river and the shores came near, the forests of spruce and pine often descending unbroken to the water’s edge. An occasional tract of land had been cleared and put under cultivation, and now and then at lonely farms men and women and children were visible, watching from a distance as the flotilla passed. Twice or thrice the Lieutenant saw a mounted man galloping in haste up the river road, presumably to give warning of their progress.

  The flotilla anchored that first night in Marsh Bay, and in the late afternoon of September 2, the British made their landing at Bald Hill Cove. They spent a rainy and uncomfortable night, and next morning, soon after dawn, in a thin river fog, the land forces advanced to attack with a punctilious formality the American militiamen and the sailors off the Adams who were waiting to receive them.

  Lieutenant Carruthers and his division of boats with the rest of the British flotilla kept pace with the soldiers on shore till they drew the fire of the great guns off the Adams, some of which had been mounted on the wharf at Hampden. At the first fire, the flotilla halted and lay on their oars just out of range until the American militia, after a few harmless shots had been fired, flatly turned tail and ran. Captain Morris of the Adams, his flank thus exposed, spiked his guns, set the Adams on fire, and led his men across Sowadabscook Stream and away toward Bangor.

  The flotilla then came on and the men landed below the village almost as soon as the soldiers marched into it. Having had little opportunity to discharge their weapons at an enemy, since the militiamen fled before the range was closed, the soldiers let off their pieces without discrimination at the houses of the village and at the swine of all ages and degrees which ran at large in the streets. Some bullets found their mark, and it was not long before bayonets had done a rough dissection on the tenderest pigs, and gobbets of meat spitted on ramrods were cooking over many little fires. For fuel the soldiers—scorning the firewood convenient in every shed—dragged out of the houses highboys and lowboys, chairs and tables, and knocked them to pieces. The morning air was soon laden with an appetizing odor of roast pork. The easy victory had left the men rather hilarious than bloodthirsty, and after hunger and thirst had been satisfied, they looked for sport. A dozen of them took possession of Crosby’s mill and fed feather beds into the first run of stones to see whether it was possible to make flour out of feathers; and the air around the mill was so full of white down that the Lieutenant as he passed was reminded of a light fall of snow. He paused to watch half a dozen men tearing up books and stuffing the torn paper into a martin house atop its pole. They set it on fire as a small but lofty beacon to celebrate their recent victory.

  But Lieutenant Carruthers, with that fine fragrance of roast pork in his nostrils, was hungry; so he called two of his men, directed them to cut a few chops off a convenient carcass and follow him, and turned into Marm Grant’s house where he found the good dame cooking breakfast for some of the regimental officers. A pretty girl, badly frightened and with tear- stained cheeks, was serving them. When Lieutenant Carruthers entered, Captain Ward of the rifle company of the Sixtieth was saying:

  ‘. . . so we caught a farmer named Oakman, or Oakes, or some such name, to guide us to the bridge—with a bayonet nudging him between the shoulder blades; but when we met their skirmishers he tried to run, and we shot him.’ He laughed. ‘He rolled over and over down the hill, like a rabbit caught in mid-leap!’

  The girl who was serving them at that began to cry again, with cascading sobs, and Lieutenant Carruthers put his arm around her shaking shoulders. ‘There, my dear, you’ve nought to fear now,’ he said. ‘Be sure we’ll treat a girl as pretty as you with the nicest tenderness. Dry your tears.’

  She clung to him as to a rescuer, and the other officers protested in shouting laughter at the Lieutenant’s quick success, but Marm Grant said harshly:

  ‘Stop that cackling, the lot of you, or I’ll douse this hot grease in your faces! She has a right to cry. She’s Beth Oakman and that was her pa you killed that you think’s so funny!’

  The officers stopped laughing, and the Lieutenant patted the girl’s bowed head. ‘There, my dear!’ he said. ‘They did not know who he was. Come sit with me till you’re yourself again.’ He led her to the high-backed settle, and Captain Ward rose, objecting:

  ‘What’s the justice in that? We kill the old bull and you get the heifer! Share and share, I say!’

  But Marm Grant turned on him with a spider full of frying chops and glared at him so ominously that he sat down again. So Lieuten
ant Carruthers, with pretty Beth Oakman weeping on his shoulder, thought his stay in Hampden promised well; but he had scarce begun to endear himself to her when he received orders to move on to Bangor, and reluctantly the Lieutenant took himself away.

  III

  When Lieutenant Carruthers and his forces proceeded up the river, the fog had blown off. A little before noon, his boats rounded High Head and he had his first sight of Bangor town. The village of seven or eight hundred people sprawled pleasantly across low hills on either side of Kenduskeag Stream, with scattering farms, bordered by the black masses of the forest, strung along the roads to Hampden and to Old Town, and to Levant and Six-Mile Falls. Some of the houses in town were no more than cabins, but most of them were more substantial, and there were a few larger buildings—stores, the Court House and Jacob Chick’s Hotel. A number of vessels—sloops, and a brig, and a ship recently launched and not yet rigged—were at anchor in the river; and others were tied up at wharves, or in various stages of construction in the shipyards on the stream which flowed through the town. Piles of fresh-sawed lumber, gleaming yellow, suggested the principal industry of the place.

  The Lieutenant proposed to land where a tall pine marked the ferry; but as he veered in toward the shore there he saw a white flag flying from the window of John Barker’s store on the Point opposite, so he turned that way. Himself the first ashore, he surveyed his surroundings with a curious eye. From the landing a muddy road led up to the store. The river was behind him, the tributary stream on his left. Across the stream he could look up Water Street and see the British soldiers just arriving, men and women moving sullenly to stand and watch them pass.

  Then John Barker himself and Captain Greene Sanborn and Robert Lapish came down to the landing to assure the Lieutenant of the complete submission of the town, and to invite him to enter Mr. Barker’s store and refresh himself. The young man looked down his hawk nose at them as sternly as possible, warned them that the least hint of opposition would let loose the severest retribution, and then left his subordinates to form the men and bring them after him while he picked his way fastidiously through the mud up to the store. There he shared a glass or two of grog with the three Bangor men while his sailors were paraded outside to wait his pleasure there.