This fast pace and wild ambition drew notice. The takings from one show just managed to fund the next, and she kept up that frantic tempo for two years. At her openings, the cramped interior of the little town house meant that people spilled out into the street, giving an urgent excitement to the works inside. She would move among the crowd, constantly pouring cheap wine into mismatched thrift-shop glasses, brainstorming how to build her mailing list, scouring names from donor acknowledgments in museum catalogues, and begging friends for their contacts. And then, when the East Sixty-Ninth Street place became available again in 1955, she could just manage to scrape up the funds to secure the lease.

  The sigh of air brakes signaled the arrival of the truck. The back ramp clanged onto the asphalt. Brawny men wrestled with the crated sculptures. Within seconds, a cacophony of horns erupted as drivers realized they’d have to edge around the truck. Martha, preoccupied with directing the men to the freight elevator, didn’t at first see Annie, waiting tentatively in the street. She was clutching a brown paper parcel. Martha waved at her to come in.

  “You’re early today,” she said.

  “Yessum. This just came up with my kin from Ohio last night. We didn’t want to trust putting it in the mail, and I had a powerful urge to bring it right here to you.”

  “Is that the picture you want me to value?”

  “Yessum.”

  Martha had almost forgotten the conversation about the painting. It had been some months, and Annie had not mentioned it. If the thing was worthless, as she expected, she hoped the girl hadn’t gone to a lot of trouble getting it from Ohio to New York.

  “Well good, then. Come on back to the office and let’s take a look.”

  As the girl struggled with the knots in the string, Martha saw that her hands were shaking. Poor kid, she thought. They must be desperate for this money. Whatever comes out of that brown paper, I’m going to have to buy it from her for at least a hundred dollars.

  Annie smoothed back the wrapping and stepped aside. Martha drew a sharp breath. Her mother’s horse. The bright bay coat, the luminous eye, the intelligent, white-blazed face. The four white feet.

  “Royal Eclipse!” she whispered. Even as she said the name, she knew it couldn’t be so. The painting was too old—certainly from the last century.

  “ ’Scuse me, ma’am, but that’s not this horse’s name. The horse named Lexington, like the city, so we always been told in the family.”

  “Lexington?”

  “Yessum.”

  “This is a painting of Lexington?” Martha’s voice had gone up in pitch. Annie looked alarmed.

  “Yessum. ’S far as we been told.”

  “Lexington was the great-grandsire of Royal Eclipse.”

  “Great-grandsire?”

  “Like a great-grandparent . . . your great-grandfather’s father.”

  “But I don’t rightly know who was my great-grandfather, much less his father. How come you know that about a horse?”

  Martha smiled. “Not just a horse, Annie. Lexington was the greatest thoroughbred stud sire in racing history. No horse has ever surpassed him. For sixteen years, his foals, when they came to race, won more prize money than any other horses that raced those years. I’m sure you’ve heard of some of them—Preakness was one. Even today, people pay thousands of dollars for horses in Lexington’s bloodline. My father paid a fortune for Royal Eclipse.”

  Martha gazed at the painting. She was so excited by the improbable association that she had barely noted the quality of the art. Now she saw it was a highly competent oil. Uneven, perhaps, in the refinement of the horse compared with the sketchily rendered background. The water trough, the stone wall, the tufts of grass—these seemed to have been dashed off, while every detail of the horse’s anatomy and expression had been finely executed. She peered at the signature. The name Scott meant nothing to her—nineteenth-century representational art had never been an interest.

  She wanted the painting. She knew the girl would be more than satisfied with what she would offer. But her conscience would not let her take advantage. She knew someone who could—who almost certainly would—pay far more.

  “I’m no specialist in nineteenth-century equestrian painting, but I know someone who is.”

  “You think it might be worth something?”

  “Oh yes, Annie. It’s worth something.”

  THOMAS J. SCOTT

  Stones River, Tennessee

  1863

  Cher Julien,

  I was most pleased to have a letter from your hand after so many months, and to learn from its direction that you are safely in New York and far from the fighting. Even so, your note carried with it the scent of linseed oil, the hush of paintbrush against canvas—memories of the long, warm afternoons at work in your studio.

  Here, the only canvas is the stained, wet stuff that provides our poor shelter; the only scents are of unbathed flesh, damp wool, and the occasional gust from a latrine that might better have been dug some way farther from this bivouac. I am serenaded by a chorus of moist coughing—many men are ill. My ears are dull, still, from the clangor of the last affray. After so many cannons, I do not think that I will hear again so well as I was used to do.

  We are a weary, footsore, ragged army taking our needed rest after fifty-six straight days of fighting. I will not write to you of battles: no doubt you read of them in the New York press. They say we are winning this war. They say it, and yet that word does not carry the same meaning to me as it once did. This does not feel like winning, even when the cannons fall silent and I stand up with my head ringing in the midst of shattered trees and shattered bodies and can count more of us alive and more of them dead. I will not write further details of this here. Instead, I will tell you something of the personalities who are become central to my present life.

  I will begin with the first in importance, another Thomas, who is our chaplain. When we met, we seemed to share no point of sympathy one with the other, save that name we held in common.

  This young man of the cloth had decided he disliked me from the first moment we mustered. I could tell he thought I didn’t belong in his company of well-to-do Lexington lads. They had most of them been schoolfellows together. To him, I was an unwelcome stranger who uttered oaths and had made my living from what he considered the disreputable trade of horse racing. It was all too evident he didn’t want me in his mess.

  Well, as you know of me, I do enjoy a challenge. I decided I would make an ally of young Parson Gunn before our 21st Kentucky Volunteers struck camp. That night, I waited until he had placed his bedroll, and then unfurled my own exactly next to it. When he saw this, he shot me a disgusted look, turned on his side, stuck a candle stub in his bayonet, and set it in the ground. I perceived he intended to read from his Testament. There I saw my first chance.

  I rose on my elbow. “Parson Gunn,” I said, loud enough for all sixteen men in the tent to hear me. “Read that Testament aloud, would you? There’s not one of us in here but needs to hear it more than you.”

  I could see his callow face flush in the candlelight. “Certainly,” he said, “if the rest are agreed.”

  “Of course they are, well-bred, God-fearing sons of Lexington!” I exclaimed. “Are you not, gentlemen?”

  There were murmured ayes of small conviction. So the chaplain read for some while from the Gospel of John. When he closed the book at last and turned to douse the light, I asked: “Are you meaning to pray now? If so, might I ask that you do so aloud, as we all of us need prayers more than you do.”

  At this I heard some muffled sighs as men shifted on the hard earth. But the young chaplain intoned the Lord’s Prayer for us and then some words of entreaty for our safety in the coming fight. The next day, I saw him watching me with a speculative eye. My cause was helped when our regiment commander, the noted surgeon Ethelbert Dudley, said that on account of my pharmacy training and my brief time as a medical student, I was to be steward of the field hospital. I took this news to Gunn and begged for his prayers for the men who would be our joint charge—he to salve the spirits of those whose bodies I could not save.

  That night, I again prevailed on the chaplain to read his Testament aloud, then I asked if he would enlighten us as to his own journey to the Gospel. I have observed that there is nothing a man is more pleased to do than speak of his own life, and this turned out to be the case for the chaplain, who related his journey south to Clarksville, Texas. Not yet twenty-one and directly from college, he had won an appointment as vice president at a school there. The pupils were some two hundred rascals, as he described them, who had been sent to be “broken in and learn discipline” through what he called “a wise combination of prayer and the rod.”

  The whole school gave over one hour every day to visit a large and shady grove in which the boys were instructed to read their Scripture aloud. It was in that place, he said, that the conviction grew in him that it was his duty to become an ambassador of the Lord Jesus Christ. Alas, his heavenly musings were interrupted by the rude mutterings of war. On the day of Mr. Lincoln’s election, the Stars and Stripes was pulled down without proper ceremony at his school and up in place went the Lone Star and the Rattlesnake flags.

  Evidently, this line of talk held more interest for my tentmates than his waxing on the Gospel, for they began to stir and question Gunn as to how it had gone on for him in that nest of Texas traitors. He was happy to oblige their curiosity. It had rapidly became clear to Gunn that his Union sympathies might put him at some risk there.

  Nevertheless, for a time he remained open in his opinions. But then a preacher in a nearby town was hanged simply for being an ardent Union man. Others of like mind were marched to jail. Gunn began to keep his loyalties more private, only worrying that he might betray himself to his bedfellow by talking in his sleep.

  In February, Texas seceded and Gunn’s school was ordered to become a military academy and prepare troops for the rebel army. Before the weapons arrived for these new cadets he fled, arriving home just in time to rush to arms. His mother, instead of gainsaying him, quite pushed him out the door: “If God has a mission for you on earth,” she told him, “he will preserve you to fulfil it.”

  Our mission, in those early days of war, did not seem especially God-given. We did little all day but drill: marching, wheeling, marking time, and complaining bitterly that we had none of us enlisted in order to be trotted to death.

  Kentucky, as you must know, was supposed to be neutral at that time. But secesh sympathy was strong and all over the state irregular guerrilla bands were forming to fight for Jeff Davis. The news of this emboldened that fool to dispatch his troops to seize the bluffs at Columbus. This galvanized those of uncertain opinion. There was rage at the violation of our supposed neutrality. As you will know, Kentucky voted then to join the Union cause and our orders came to march south.

  The ladies of the Lexington Bible Society presented us with a Testament each, and a band played us on our way along the Nicholasville Pike. Some of the men had to bear the sight of wives, mothers, lady friends, and young children, in carriages or on foot, all bathed in tears. At that moment, I was glad that you were not in Lexington, and that I had no ties of affection to be so publicly displayed.

  We expected to go all the way into Tennessee but got no farther than Green River Bridge, which we were charged to guard. We spent the winter there, in hand-to-hand combat with measles, scarlet fever, diarrhea, and much discontent from men eager for a proper fight.

  They might not have been so eager had they known what lay ahead. I will not revisit it here, except to confess to you that no matter how dreadful the experience of battle, there was always in me, before a fight, that same deep excitement as I felt at a race when waiting for that drum tap.

  But oh, after. All was a blur as we tended the injured, amputating limbs, dressing wounds, writing last letters, washing and burying the dead. Gunn was my inseparable companion in this labor. The first time I asked him to give the chloroform, the poor man fairly swooned. I shook him and told him to have a good nerve. It didn’t help that the patient, as the chloroform took hold, kept crying to his new bride: “Oh Lamira, Samuel is coming back to you with one arm—this hand has done its last ploughing.” He was right in that. The arm was fully flayed as if it were an anatomy lesson, and the bones cracked into wandering shards. Later, when he awoke, he insisted we bring the severed member so that he might see it one last time. Since he would not settle until we did so, Gunn retrieved the grisly thing from the bin. Samuel took hold of his own now-stiffening fingers and cried: “Farewell until the Resurrection.”

  I saw tears in Gunn’s eyes at that, and he took the arm away and gave it a proper burial. He was full of such small kindnesses. I would sigh to him of some poor boy gone past help and urge him: “If you’ve a word to say to him, say it now.” For my part, all I could give was my small store of skill, and when that ran dry, some measure of tenderness. It breaks me when I see a man a second time, having saved his life by some drastic measure after one battle, to find him some months later back in my care again. If the second wound proves mortal, I try to stay at that soldier’s side until death claims him.

  Julien, I am sick and tired of carnage. I must set down this pen now as my hand aches from the effort of writing so much. My nails have gone soft, my fingers are tender from constant steeping in the blood of others. I would fain set down my surgeon’s saw and pick up, once again, my painter’s brushes.

  They say that day will come soon, that the South is like a man who has received his mortal blow and only staggers feebly toward an inevitable extinction. I will join my friend, Chaplain Tom, in praying that it not be long.

  Yours, etc . . .

  MARTHA JACKSON

  125 East Seventieth Street, New York, New York

  1956

  Martha Jackson was annoyed with herself. As the butler ushered her into Paul Mellon’s library, she felt a flutter of nerves. Her grandfather’s mansion had been grand enough. But this was a different kind of rich.

  The five-story edifice felt more like a French château than a Manhattan town house. Morning light spilled through three French doors that opened onto the courtyard. Outside, a team of gardeners snipped the topiaries edging the reflecting pool. The stone pavers had been chosen for their patina; the mature boxwoods looked like they had been in place for years. Only the modest circumference of the young tree trunks gave any sign that this expansive garden was new.

  Martha felt as if someone were looking at her. When she turned, a portrait of a young girl gazed down with confident amusement, her terrier balanced casually on a cocked, red-sashed hip. Martha gazed back at the painting, her brow creased. She felt she had seen it before.

  “It’s John Singer Sargent,” said Paul Mellon, crossing the hall from his study. “The one painting my father ever gave me. They were packing it up with all the masterpieces he was giving to the National Gallery. He turned to me and said, ‘You like terriers, you ought to have that one.’ He never let me have an actual dog, you see.”

  Well, thought Martha, that was an odd introduction. She had never met the bookish billionaire, who had started his own art collection only recently, under the influence of his second wife. His first, Mary, had been more enthusiastic about his equestrian interests, and the couple had stayed mostly on their estate in Virginia. Even after Mary’s physician warned her that horses exacerbated her asthma, she refused to give up riding at Paul’s side in the hunts. It was an attack at the end of one such ride that killed her. Bunny, Mary’s friend, quickly jettisoned her own husband to console her bereaved neighbor, and now was happily spending his money on her favored French painters: Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and Monet.

  The Mellon taste did not run to edgy contemporary art and had not brought them to either of Martha Jackson’s galleries. Bunny favored Impressionist landscapes; Paul’s interest was equestrian art. Martha’s research had disclosed that the first painting he bought was a racehorse portrait—George Stubbs’s Pumpkin with a Stable-Lad. Martha knew he’d also recently bought Degas and Lautrec racing scenes.

  The modest picture she’d carried uptown was not in that league, or that price range. It would normally have been beneath his interest. But Martha knew that this work would have an attraction for him that might cause him to look beyond the relative obscurity of the artist.

  Mellon gestured toward a highly polished library table. Martha set the painting down and began to unwrap it. Once again, she was vexed with herself. Her hands were shaking, just as Annie’s had been, a week earlier. Really, why should she be so invested in whether this man liked the work or not? She was just doing her maid a favor, after all. Mellon would likely never be her client. Still, she fumbled with the string until Mellon drew a mother of pearl letter opener from his desk and severed the twine.

  “I’ve done some research into this artist, since you called. Not of the first rank. Troye, perhaps, would be of some interest to me, but—”

  And then he stopped and drew a breath.

  He stepped back.

  “Well. I see.”

  “Exactly,” said Martha, in equal parts gratified and relieved by his reaction.

  Paul Mellon loved his racehorses, especially his two big winners, Mill Reef and Arts and Letters. Mill Reef was an English thoroughbred, but his pedigree traced back to Lexington three ways. Lexington’s blood also coursed through the veins of Arts and Letters. Martha had guessed that Paul Mellon would be tempted by a portrait of their great progenitor.