Henry and Clara (52 page)

“You’ll want your coat,” said Henry.

“I’m fine,” said Bill.

“The coach contains blankets.”

Bill put one of them over his knees as they rode in silence over the snowy winter landscape, its brown outcroppings straining for the weak warmth of the sun. They were soon at the edge of the village graveyard, “something right out of Thomas Gray,” Bill wrote in boilerplate on his reporter’s pad. Gunther stopped the carriage in an automatic way that suggested the place was a frequent destination. He alighted from the coachman’s seat and came around to let Henry out. The old man’s frailty was evident as he stepped down. Gunther motioned to Bill for one of the blankets, which he draped over his charge’s shoulders. The three men walked no more than ten yards, past a few bordered graves, before they reached a simple headstone.

Bill’s heart pounded. He had been a poor enough student at Princeton, but even he could recognize the last two lines of “She Walks in Beauty.”

“This is where I shall lie,” said Henry, pointing to an empty
plot of snow-covered earth, already bordered, next to his wife’s. “As soon as I finish my work and cease eating.”

Bill said nothing.

“Byron was her favorite,” said Henry, “though our father disapproved of him. She had this in her pocket the day she died. Here, look,” he said, offering Curtis a folded, disintegrating paper from his own pocket. Bill opened it carefully, afraid it would rip at the creases and scatter on the winter wind. The ink remained surprisingly vivid; the hand was distinctly feminine:

Henry motioned to take the paper back from Curtis, who refolded it gently.

“She copied it out two days before she died,” Henry explained. “At a desk by a small porcelain stove in her room. It’s the last time I can remember seeing her.”

Henry and Clara
is based on a wide variety of research material: published histories of the Civil War era; diaries and correspondence of the Rathbone and Harris families; contemporary newspaper accounts; military records; pension files; census reports; alumni records; State Department documents in the National Archives. Insofar as the historical record exists, I have tried to find it and, in most cases, adhere to it. The essential facts of Ira Harris’s political life and Henry Rathbone’s army career, as well as the chronology of births, marriages, and deaths among the Harrises and Rathbones, are true to life as presented here. Nearly all the book’s principal characters, and most of its minor ones, were living persons. Nearly all the extracts from letters and journals that appear in the text are made up, but in places quotations from actual material are included. The letter from Clara Harris to “Mary,” for example, which opens Part Three of the novel, is a real letter in the possession of the New-York Historical Society. The identity of “Mary” is not certain, but my discovery of this letter led to the invention of the character of Mary Hall, who in the novel is made its recipient.

The available documentation of Henry and Clara Rathbone’s story — substantial in places, almost entirely lacking in others — amounts in the end to no more than a scaffold, and the reader should know that I have taken liberal advantage of the elbow room between that scaffold’s girders and joists. The narrative that follows is a work of inference, speculation, and outright invention. Nouns always trump adjectives, and in the phrase “historical fiction” it is important to remember which of the two words is which.

Still, the facts have been the seeds of the fiction, and I am grateful to the many people who helped me gather and make sense of them.
Chief among these are Melinda Yates of the New York State Library and Norman S. Rice, director emeritus of the Albany Institute of History and Art. During the past few years, whether guiding me through microfilmed ledgers or cemetery rows, they have been unfailingly patient and helpful, and I am deeply in their debt. Thanks also to all the librarians who helped me find elusive bits of the Rathbone story: Jean Ashton (New-York Historical Society); Lisa Browar (New York Public Library); Barbara Durniak (Vassar College); Ellen H. Fladger and Elaine Shull (Union College); Karl Kabelac (University of Rochester); Sally Marks and Dane Hartgrove (National Archives); Linda J. Long (Stanford University); Sam Streit and Jennifer Lee (Brown University). Mrs. Sumner Crosby, Jr., and Mrs. Edward Hart Green, present-day relations of the principal characters, supplied me with information, and the distinguished Civil War historian Stephen W. Sears gave me useful advice. Professor Edith Toegel of Hamilton College translated correspondence with officials in Germany, where the Rathbones’ story came to a close.

As the facts grew the fiction, I depended on good advice from Cindy Spiegel, Janet Silver, and Laurence Cooper of Ticknor & Fields / Houghton Mifflin; my agent, Mary Evans; Frances Kiernan; Lucy Kaylin; and the incomparable Sallie Motsch. Thanks to all of them.

And thanks, as always, to Bill Bodenschatz.