The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie MAnsfield: A Tragedy of the Gilded Age by H. W. Brands Read Free Book Online Page B

a sum might make her independent of Fisk.
    Josie knows how to entice a man; she also knows how to dispense with him. She picks a fight through the notes they exchange when his business takes him away from her. “I never expected so severe a letter from you,” she writes after a mild reproof. “I, of course, feel it was unmerited; but as it is your opinion of me, I accept it with all the sting. You have struck home , and I may say turned the knife around.” She escalates, suddenly and dramatically. “I am anxious to adjust our affairs. I certainly do not wish to annoy you, and that I may be able to do so I write you this last letter.”
    The adjustment she refers to involves money. “You have told me very often that you held some twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars of mine in your keeping,” she says. “I do not know if it is so, but that I may be able to shape my affairs permanently for the future, a part of the amount would place me in a position where I would never have to appeal to you for aught.” She asserts her faithfulness, by her own lights. “I have never had one dollar from any one else. ” She seeks simple justice. “I do not ask for anything I have not been led to suppose was mine, and do not ask you to settle what is not entirely convenient for you.”
    Fisk responds as she intends. He recognizes that she is throwing him over. “The mist has fallen,” he replies, “and you appear in your true light.” She wants him to leave, and so he will. “Have no fears that I will again come near you.” He encloses a ring she has given him—a ring purchased with his money. “Take it back. Its memory is indecent.” He will pay her outstanding bills. “If there are any unsettled business matters that it is proper for me to arrange, send them to me, and make the explanation as brief as possible. I fain would reach the point where not even the slightest necessity will exist for any intercourse between us. I am in hopes this will end it.”
    He signs and sends the letter, only to realize he hasn’t rebutted her claim for the money. He writes a second letter. He reminds her of how much he has spent on her, even after she stopped reciprocating his affections. “You will, therefore, excuse me if I decline your modest request for a still further disbursement of $25,000.” He lets her know he is aware of her relationship with Stokes; the gossips have twittered it for months. A gentleman’s pride and a hope that she would change her mind kept him from mentioning it, but now that it is in the open he relates something else the gossips have said: that Stokes has had to pawn personal possessions to cover debts. Fisk does not intend to redeem Stokes’s goods for him. “I very naturally feel that some part of this amount might be used to release from the pound the property of others, in whose welfare the writer of this does not feel unbounded interest.”
    His tone remains distant and proper almost till the end of this missive, when his emotions pour out. “You say that you hope I will take the sense of your letter. There is but one sense to be taken out of it, and that is an epitaph to be cut on the stone at the head of the grave in which Miss Helen Josephine Mansfield has buried her pride. Had she been the same proud-spirited girl that she was when she stood side by side with me … she would not have humbled herself to ask a permanency of one whom she had so deeply wronged, nor would she stoop to be indebted to him for a home which would have furnished a haven of rest, pleasure and debauchery, without cost, to those who had crossed his path and robbed him of the friendship he once felt.…
    “Now, pin this letter with the other—the front of this is the back of that—and you will have a telescopic view of yourself, and your character, as you appear to me today; and then, I ask you, turn back from pages of your life’s history, counting each page one week of your life, and see how I looked to thee then,