With his last few dollars he took a room at the St. Charles Hotel. Nolan found it a pleasant if somewhat noisy place, and not many of the lodgers seemed to care that he was still, technically, a federal prisoner. From the St. Charles, Nolan wrote confident letters to friends and a less hopeful one to his mother, gone long ago to Vera Cruz. In each, he told the story of how he had come to be arrested. Nolan could state honestly that he did not fully know the contents of Burr’s letter, but he understood that it dealt with some sort of military combination against the Spanish. Nolan thought sincerely that any such grand machination must have been approved by President Jefferson. In this he was flatly and fatally mistaken.
Two weeks after his arrival in Richmond, Nolan was joined by Wendell Fitzgerald, a friend from university and West Point. Fitzgerald had bravely acceded to Nolan’s request to serve as his attorney, and he sweetened their reunion by escorting his wife, Alden, and her cousin Lorina Rutledge to Richmond. As spring came to the Tidewater, Fitzgerald went back and forth to the House of Delegates, collecting the particulars of Nolan’s alleged crimes, copying depositions, and conferring with the prosecutors.
Nolan had ample time to escort Mrs. Fitzgerald and Miss Rutledge about Richmond. The three were often seen about town, and more was known and said about the young officer than he could have imagined. The talk led to an unfortunate incident on Grace Street. As Nolan was passing by with Miss Rutledge, a local nabob, Randolph Creel Bell, an inbred, ill-mannered minor scion of several of the First Families, sniffed, “There goes dessert, arm and arm with disgrace.”
Nolan was inclined to let the remark pass, and had he been alone he would have, but as he was escorting Miss Rutledge he was bound to ask the man for an explanation.
There was a short, escalating exchange, and Colonel Bell, as he styled himself (he held militia rank), refused either to withdraw his comment or to clarify it. As Alden and Lorina looked on, Nolan slapped the beaver hat off the colonel’s lump-shaped head. It tumbled into the mud and Nolan crushed its crown under the heel of his boot. “My name is Philip Nolan, sir. And should you choose to resent this, I may be found any morning at the St. Charles Hotel.”
The colonel had no choice but to resent it, for there was no affront more serious than a blow. Notes were exchanged and satisfaction was demanded.
Wendell Fitzgerald first declined to serve as a second, and did so only after Nolan pointed out that should he allow the affront to pass, Bell would post him as a coward, rascal, and poltroon. Such dishonor would unquestionably prejudice his case.
Fitzgerald understood that Nolan would be tried not by expedient men, citizens, or politicians, but by fellow officers. For them all, the notion of personal honor was placed on the same pedestal as duty and love of country. Nolan had no choice but to meet Bell on the field.
On the morning of his interview with Colonel Bell, Nolan rose early, breakfasted alone, and wrote a note to Lorina Rutledge. His were plain soldier’s words, and the possibility that they might be his last gave a certain grace to his composition. He told Lorina that he regretted that she had been exposed to unpleasantness on his account, but he found it both a pleasure and an honor to discharge his duties as a gentleman. Nolan slipped the letter under the door of the house she shared with the Fitzgeralds and rode south under a humpbacked moon.
The stars were fading by the time Nolan crossed the plank bridge at Bloody Run. As he turned his mare into the clearing, the wheel marks of Colonel Bell’s carriage were still plain in the dew. Nolan might have been excused a flush of excitement or even fear, but he had previously been a party to several affairs of honor, as both a principal and a second. This morning, to his own surprise, he felt nothing beyond a dull sort of annoyance.
Bell’s carriage was parked beneath a dogwood tree, and several horses were tied to its rear wheels. With the most exacting courtesy, Nolan touched his hat as he rode past. The colonel chose rather dramatically to look away, and his several friends stopped their murmuring and followed Nolan with hard eyes. Bell kept his gaze scrupulously elsewhere, but Nolan, who had no impression to make, studied the colonel for several seconds.
Randolph Creel Bell was Nolan’s senior by at least twenty years. He was dressed in a silk waistcoat and breeches, and the thought occurred that the colonel did not wear his uniform because it could no longer be pulled across his preposterous belly. Nolan and his adversary presented two perfect opposites. Bell was visibly distracted, and Nolan calmly indifferent—but, in truth, neither man had wished the incident to go this far.
Bell had considered Nolan’s situation and projected on it his own arithmetic. He figured that Nolan could gain nothing by fighting a duel while facing a court-martial; win or lose, a duel would adversely affect his case, especially by taking the field against a nominally superior officer. Bell had expected Nolan to do the most expedient thing: endure the affront, decline the meeting, and preserve his life. Bell’s original insult had been thus calculated, and he had truly thought he could make a joke at Nolan’s expense—and make it stick.
For his part, Nolan still expected Bell to render an apology; perhaps one would come. Nolan had made inquiries, and his opponent’s reputation was not that of a fighting man. The present Colonel Bell, long ago a captain, had been attached to the staff of Revolutionary General Horatio Gates. Bell, along with his notorious principal, was at the Revolutionary War Battle of Camden, the most ignominious defeat of American arms in history. In the midst of that fight Bell had been assigned to carry a dispatch to General Baron De Kalb, then commanding the American right. Quailing behind a stone wall, Bell watched as De Kalb was shot down when the British flanked and then overwhelmed that position. In the face of a British bayonet charge, young Captain Bell consulted his own safety and was one of the first officers to bolt down the Camden Pike. As the American line collapsed, Bell rode north. Fleeing the disaster, commandeering post horses at gunpoint, Bell had outflown even the craven General Gates himself, arriving in Charlotte, sixty miles away, before dusk.
Bell’s account of his conduct at Camden improved the farther he was from the field. And though he did his best to recast himself as a hero, he was considered by his betters to be nothing more than a skedaddler and blowhard. Bell never again saw combat, and his appointment to Thomas Jefferson’s staff and a vacant colonelcy in the Virginia militia was due to a finely honed talent for self-preservation and the obsequious cultivation of an uncle in the Continental Congress.
Confident that Bell would apologize rather than face him in a duel of arms, Nolan rode to the far end of the clearing and dismounted, hanging his hat on the pommel of his saddle. Wendell Fitzgerald stepped forward to take the bridle. A head taller than his friend, Fitzgerald was a bear of man, nearly as broad as Bell but immeasurably stouter of heart. Nolan glanced around; on his side of the clearing there was only Fitzgerald. He had no other seconds or partisans.
“You seem to have sauntered down,” Fitzgerald said.
Nolan glanced at a blanket draped over a tree stump—on it were a set of pistols in a box. “Pistols for two and coffee for one.”
Fitzgerald said nothing. He was not a glib man and did not care much for dueling.
“Bell seems disappointed I have kept my appointment.”
“You both may be disappointed.” Fitzgerald picketed Nolan’s mare next to his own. He said quietly, “Where is our friend Doctor Kosinski?”
“He sends his best compliments but does not wish to come,” Nolan said. “He told me that dueling is for imbeciles and advised me to skip breakfast in the event I am shot in the belly.”
“That was sound advice.” Fitzgerald glanced at Bell’s crowd of seconds, one of whom was an old-fashioned gentleman in a grizzled physician’s wig.
“Perhaps we’ll not have need of a surgeon,” Nolan said. “I don’t think this man will fight.”
“You are ever hopeful, friend.” As Fitzgerald walked