by John Jakes
“Darling, that’s wonderful. Of course you are.”
“Then I’ll put the horse up. He’s been fed. It will take me a few minutes.”
While he drove around to the small outbuilding behind the cottage, she warmed the duckling, the yams and snap beans. He came tramping across the backyard, knocking dust from the sleeves of his black frock coat.
“The traffic near the depot was unbelievable. It’s the same downtown. I think half the country’s here for the inauguration. At Willard’s this noon, my waiter said they’re putting cots and mattresses in the hall for the overflow.” He bussed her cheek. “If you offer tent space in the yard, you might get rich.”
Laughing, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him. He liked her tongue in his mouth and elsewhere. At the end of the long embrace, she asked, “Shall we eat now or later? I’m afraid the duckling is nearly black—”
“Let’s have some anyway. Then we’ll have the entire evening to do whatever we please.”
She gave him a warm, slightly bawdy smile before he went down to the cellar for one of the several dozen bottles of wine with which he kept the place furnished. He was expert with a waiter’s corkscrew; while she prepared the serving platters, he opened and decanted the wine.
Seated, they toasted each other. As Virgilia admired him over the rim of her goblet, she reflected that in many ways she was more fortunate than a wife. The illicit nature of their relationship lent all their times together a spice surely absent from most marriages. She had experienced the same kind of wicked and defiant excitement living with a black man.
The wine was a heavy-bodied Bordeaux; superb and not cheap. After he savored a sip, he said, “Damn big fuss over the inaugural ball—have you heard?”
She shook her head. “What’s wrong? It sounds grand—just ten dollars for supper and dancing at the Patent Office, the Star said.”
“But a number of our darker brethren expressed a desire to attend. Some of the congressional wives, mine included, were nearly prostrated by the news. Emily raved for an hour about the possibility of being asked to waltz by Fred Douglass or some other baboon. The ball committee had to rush out a statement of reassurance. The phrasing was polite, but the message was clear. No ticket sales to niggers.”
“I find that disgraceful.”
“Don’t confuse liberty with equality, Virgilia. The former’s all right. It’s a tool for gathering votes. The latter will never be tolerated. At least not in our lifetime.”
They talked on more pleasant subjects for a few minutes. The wine relaxed Virgilia and induced a playful mood not typical of her. “May I ask about the seat for the inaugural ceremony?”
“I have it for you. Reserved section near the platform for dignitaries in front of the east portico.”
“Oh, that’s grand, Sam. Thank you.”
“But that’s not all. I also managed to get you into the Senate gallery at noon, when that clod Johnson will be sworn in. Lincoln will be seated on the floor of the chamber, and his wife in a special section near your seat. You’ll get to see the whole lot close up. When everyone moves outside for the swearing-in and the President’s address, Emily and I will have places on the platform.”
The giddiness brought words she herself didn’t expect. “Perhaps when I see you and your wife, I’ll wave.”
He had been fondling her hand on the table. He let go, surprising her with his severity.
“I don’t appreciate that kind of remark.”
“Sam, I was only teasing—”
“I’m not.”
Frightened and sobered, she hastily said, “I’m sorry, darling.” The apology didn’t come easy for her, but it was mandatory if she meant to keep him, which she did. “I know that in public we can’t acknowledge that we’re acquainted. I would never do the slightest thing to jeopardize your name or career. They’ve become as important to me as they are to you.” She squeezed his hand. “You do believe me?”
An alarming silence. When he decided she had been punished sufficiently, he let his face soften. “Yes.”
Virgilia was anxious to redirect the conversation. “I don’t care a snap for hearing the Gorilla deliver a speech, but I am anxious to see him at close range. Does he look as bad as they say?”
“The man looks embalmed. He’s thirty pounds underweight, and I’ve heard he suffers from almost constant chills. People are whispering that he’s mortally ill. Unfortunately, his ailments have done nothing to reduce his mulish dedication to pushing his own opinions and programs. If the rumors of impending death were true, we’d be lucky.” He sliced into the crackly duck and tasted a morsel. “Very good, this.”
“I know it isn’t, but it’s kind of you to lie.”
That got him smiling again. “I do it well, don’t I? I practice every time I write or speak to constituents. Did you read the draft?” She nodded. “What do you think?”
Virgilia laid down her fork. “You told me you thought Lincoln’s inaugural address would be conciliatory toward the South—”
“So far as I can find out, that’s the tone, yes.”
“ I’m afraid the draft sounds much the same.”
“Really? Too mild?”
“Not only that, too indefinite in terms of what you stand for.” Here was one area in which she felt totally confident. So she pressed:
“The text wanders away from its purpose. The President has one approach to reconstruction, you and your friends quite another. You must do more than just establish the difference and identify your wing of the party. You must promote yourself more clearly and forcefully as a member of an elite group that should and will dominate reconstruction and rebuff the President’s plan as the maundering of a moral coward. The public must know your name, Sam. They must identify it with absolute commitment to a hard peace. No forgiveness for traitors. You mustn’t merely march in the right parade—you must show yourself leading it.”
“I thought my draft did that.”
“You want me to be honest, don’t you? It’s much too generalized and polite. For instance, it contains nothing remotely resembling Sherman’s remark that he would make Georgia howl. The public needs to perceive you as the man who will make the whole South howl for years to pay for its crimes. It’s that kind of simple, vivid concept you must put into the speech, then repeat at every opportunity. If you do, when people think of congressmen, yours will be the first name to come to mind.”
He chuckled. “That’s an ambitious goal.”
“It’s what you want, isn’t it?’ He sobered. “Of course it is. But you won’t get it unless you go after it. What if you fall short? All right, yours will be the second name people think of. But if you try for anything less than first, you’ll be nothing.”
Low laughter again. He took her right hand in his left, began stroking her palm with his thumb. “You are a remarkable woman. I’m lucky to have you for a friend.”
“For as long as you want, darling. Shall we look at the draft?”
His thumb pressed and stroked, pressed and stroked. “Not just yet.”
“More food, then?”
“No.”
“The dinner will be cold if—”
“It may be, but we shan’t.” He nearly overturned the table in his haste to stand and embrace her from behind her chair. She remained seated, pressed against the stiff bulge.
She reached around and squeezed the great strong thickness of it, moaning a little. His hand came over and down to grope her breasts. They stumbled toward the bedroom, pulling frantically at each other’s clothing. Hair undone, Virgilia sprawled on the bed’s edge and let him work at untying the side laces on her corset with one hand while he teased her lace-covered nipples with the other. Her breasts came free and sagged. He knelt at the bedside, kissing them. Then he kissed other places while she clasped her arms around his head.
She would never let him go. She would help him, comfort him, guide him—be a wife in every way but legally.
He flung her on her
back, still with her petticoats around her ankles. She was yelling for him, arms extended. His sex felt huge as a Parrott rifle when he thrust it inside her. He was a potent, potent man, and not just physically. With him—through him—she would take revenge for poor Grady and the millions like him. She would exorcise her deepest hate. She would make the South howl.
In the lassitude afterward, a curious new thought occurred to her. The war had worked a change in much more than her appearance and the way she regarded herself. Her loathing for the South was as deep as ever, punishment of Southerners her abiding cause.
Yet there, too, she had changed. She now coveted the means as well as the end; the raw power to prosecute her cause or any other. Because of a chain of events, seemingly disconnected but which were not—they had a pattern, an inevitability she could clearly follow—the power was within her grasp. It was as near as the body of her lover slumbering beside her.
If this change in her prospects was the result of war, then war wasn’t hell, as someone said Sherman had remarked, but one of God’s greatest miracles. For perhaps the first time in her adult life, Virgilia fell asleep content.
127
NEXT MORNING, AS CLOCK hands at Mont Royal reached the final minute before six, a fiery light described a high arc out in the darkness, then descended, trailing sparks. “They’ve come,” Philemon Meek exclaimed.
Thoughtlessly, he lifted the low-trimmed lamp from the dining table and rushed to one of the tall windows. Charles pushed his chair back. The scabbarded Solingen sword lay on the tablecloth. “Get away from there with that light!”
Frightened and excited, the overseer either didn’t hear or ignored the warning. He lifted the swagged drapery for a better view. “They’ve torched the kitchen building. I can see them moving toward—” A gun blast broke the window, scattered glass, and hurled Meek backward over some chairs. The shattered lamp spilled oil that ignited instantly. Charles jumped up, swearing.
Shouts and taunts drifted from the darkness. Charles ran to the overseer, a pointless effort. The entire front of Meek’s shirt bore oozing red spots left by the shotgun charge that had killed him.
Charles tore down a large section of drape and flung it over the oil fire eating the gleaming wood floor. Then he stamped on the drape, quenching the flames. A shot; the unseen bullet buried in the wall opposite the broken window.
The scorched drapes exuded a foul smell. Crouching down, he saw capering figures silhouetted by the fire consuming the kitchen building. Andy rushed in, then Cooper with one of the old Hawkens in hand. The other, Meek’s, still lay on the table. Charles pointed to it.
“That’s yours now, Andy. Take it upstairs, find a good vantage point, and start shooting. But make sure it’s a place you can get out of quickly if they torch the house.”
“Yes, Major,” Andy said, snatching the old rifle and two of the small flannel bags Judith had sewn for powder and ball. Charles wasted no time pondering how remarkable it was to be arming a slave on a Carolina rice plantation. He had other things on his mind, chief among them survival.
“One more thing, Andy. You know what Cuffey looks like. Watch for him. He’s the one we want taken out of action.”
“’Deed I do know him. They say he’s all gone to fat and got himself a mule. Should make him easy to spot. I hope I’m the one who gets him.”
He left. Charles crept to the window. A second fire was burning. The office.
“We’d better post ourselves in the hall,” he said to Cooper. “You watch the door on the river side; I’ll take the one by the drive.” From these locations they would also be able to cover the locked doors of the parlor, where they had put all the women and children about five o’clock.
His face showing fear and strain, Cooper followed his younger cousin into the broad foyer that crossed the ground floor from front to back. “We had no warning, Charles. What happened to all those bucks you sent out as pickets?”
“Who the hell knows? They either got killed, ran off, or joined Cuffey’s army.” As any competent commander would have in a similar situation, he had spent most of the night outdoors, roaming from man to man, encouraging alertness in the pickets, jacking up their spirits. He had come inside the house half an hour ago to rest and collect himself, and this was the result. No warning.
“One side,” he whispered suddenly, crouching again. A shadow passed a narrow vertical panel of glass at the left side of the driveway door. He drew his army Colt. A fire-limned figure appeared in the matching panel on the right side. Charles put a bullet into it. The figure sank down amid the tinkling of glass.
“That’s one.”
Behind him, a bolt rattled. He heard a child crying as the parlor door opened. Judith called, “Cooper? How many are—”
“Too many,” Charles shouted. “Stay in there, goddamn it.” The door slammed. The bolt shot home again.
In a flat, unemotional voice, Cooper said, “I don’t think we’ll live through this.”
“Shut up with that kind of talk.” Charles ran to the door on his side; he had seen a mounted figure fly past the narrow window lights. Smoke was drifting into the house. A defiant voice startled him.
“Hey, Charles Main, you in there? This here’s one of your niggers come back to get you. Gonna burn you out, Mist’ Charles Main. Roast you alive an’ fuck your womenfolk.”
“Cuffey, you son of a bitch—” Charles rammed his right arm through the broken window and fired. “Come in here and try.”
Winged by the bullet, someone yelped. Charles heard the mule’s hoofs rattling out there in the smoke and glare.
Then Cuffey’s voice: “Pretty soon now. Pretty soon—”
Someone else had taken the bullet meant for him. Damn. It was a shot Charles could ill afford to waste.
“Over here,” Cooper cried, an instant before the bolted door on the river side split apart, pounded by the butt ends of garden implements the raiders had found. As Charles waited for the door to give completely, brighter light outside the dining room drew his attention. There, beyond the trees, the whole sky glared.
He uttered a low, despairing syllable. They had fired the slave cabins. The sick house and probably the little chapel, too. They were warring on their own; the color of their victims no longer mattered. They were scum. Before they finished him, he would send some more down to tell Old Nick he was coming.
The river door burst apart. Four men crowded in, one with a fatwood torch that lit two white faces and two black ones. Cooper was struggling to aim the Hawken. Charles shot and hit no one. Three of the men leaped to one side, but one of the whites, a dumpy fellow with a pitchfork, lost his balance and lurched on toward the center of the foyer. The fatwood torch, thrown down, revealed the intruder’s face, with a deserter’s brand on the right cheek. Charles thought his mind had snapped.
“Salem Jones?”
“Paying a call long overdue, you arrogant—” The rest was lost as Jones rushed him with the pitchfork.
Cooper fired. So did Charles, simultaneously throwing himself sideways to avoid the stabbing tines. Both shots missed. The momentum of Salem Jones’s lunge carried him all the way to the other side of the foyer. The pitchfork tore through the fine flocked wallpaper, buried to a depth of two inches.
Charles ran at the former overseer, confused impressions assaulting him as they did in every battle. In the dining room, torches sailed through smashed windows, spreading fire again. In the parlor, breaking glass, frightened screams. The women had kitchen knives and cleavers for defense. Two of the men who had destroyed the river door beat at the doors of the parlor and yanked the knobs. All of this and a general background of gunfire, yelling, celebration registered during the seconds in which Charles dashed at Jones, who ranted incoherently while trying to free the pitchfork from the wall.
Charles knew he should shoot Jones in the back but couldn’t. The men at the parlor doors succeeded in separating one door from the hardware of the bolt on the inside. Cooper’s Hawken boomed. One
man fell as Charles looped his free hand around Jones’s waist and dragged him from the wall and the pitchfork. He saw a small, stout figure in the parlor doorway.
“Mother—Jesus Christ, get back in there,” Cooper cried at Clarissa, who was smiling in a puzzled way. Still pulling Jones, Charles failed to see the knife the panting man snatched from his belt. But he felt it when Jones slashed downward and back, stabbing his thigh.
Charles uttered a low cry, tears of pain momentarily blinding him. Without thinking, he pushed the former overseer away. Jones tore the pitchfork from the wall, and with his reach thus extended, ran back at Charles, who had shifted his Colt to his left hand so he could grip his bleeding leg.
The firelit tines flashed toward Charles’s eyes. “You first, then your high and mighty cousin,” Jones screamed. Charles had to try a shot with his left hand, though he had never been able to fire effectively that way. He was done—
A roar. Jones rose as if huge invisible hands had seized his middle. Legs and chest folded toward each other; then the vee reopened, and he came down, dead but still bleeding. The skittering of the pitchfork behind Charles told him it had sailed past his head.
As he turned to verify that, he saw several things: Cooper with the smoking Hawken, with which he had shot Jones after managing to reload; Jane at the open parlor door, urging Clarissa back into the room; one of the door-breakers fallen on his side, holding his face, which bled from a stroke of the red cleaver in Jane’s hand. The fourth man had fled.
With a nod toward the light and heat filling the dining room, Cooper gasped, “Got to get everyone out before the whole place goes.” Remembering, Charles yelped and dashed in there. He snatched the scabbarded sword from the smoldering tablecloth with his red-smeared right hand.
Back in the foyer, he leaned against the wall. Blood ran down his leg into his boot. He supposed he should have expected something this bad. He really hadn’t believed that all the Negroes he had armed with lengths of lumber or implements and posted around the house would stay and fight for Mont Royal. He wouldn’t have, in their position.