The Radical Element

by Jessica Spotswood

  “If he is indeed a rogue Englishman,” Edith continued, “then he’s terribly misinformed. The British, like the Northerners, don’t understand the realities of plantation life. They only read sensationalist slander in the newspapers. It’s a regrettable truth that some mistreat their slaves, but we don’t. Why, our slaves are like family to us.”

  The young slave in livery shifted uncomfortably while pouring her wine, his jaw clenching tighter. Rose curled her fingers around the hilt of her butter knife, wishing she could stab it into something — or someone. Across from her, Captain Austin’s gaze shifted to the young man, and for a moment, her hopes lifted. His sinewy hands were squeezed around his butter knife, too. Just because he was a Confederate soldier didn’t mean he personally condoned slavery. Any reasonable person wouldn’t. . . .

  He gave a tight smile. “Family. Exactly.”

  Edith beamed, and Rose stabbed her dinner roll. She glanced toward Pauline, whose blank expression had slipped, showing weary eyes and a hard set to her mouth. Pauline nodded toward the window. Nearly sundown.

  They needed to get out of there.

  “What do you think, Miss Rose?” Captain Austin said. “You must have a strong opinion on the relationship between slave and master.”

  Rose nearly dropped her knife. “Me?”

  “Your uncle told me your father is a clergyman,” he explained. “In my experience, the clergy always has a strong opinion, regardless of the subject at hand. And I believe Scripture can be particularly difficult to interpret when it comes to matters of slavery.”

  She eyed him closely, trying to see past his devilishly calm smile. What else had her uncle told him? It was Cornelius’s secret shame that his brother, Rose’s father, had been linked to abolitionists decades ago. And living in Boston, a sinful Northern city where free people of color mixed with whites, made Rose and her father pariahs as far as their Charleston family was concerned. But as she watched, Captain Austin’s expression remained open and the slightest bit bored. He was just making conversation.

  John 3:18, she wanted to tell him. Let us love not in word or talk but in deed and in truth.

  Captain Austin was still looking at her expectantly, so Rose forced a giggle. “I only know what dear Uncle Cornelius tells me about such matters. I find the war so unsettling to discuss. Though” — she leaned forward and gave an impish grin — “if I’m honest, I’ve always fancied dashing rebels. In literature, that is. The only character more romantic is a young man in uniform.” She waved her butter knife suggestively in the direction of his epaulettes, and he went very red for a man who must be used to female attention.

  Aunt Edith tittered. “Forgive her, Captain. She’s young, and men are so scarce these days. All the Fillion boys are serving in the military, isn’t that so? It’s practically a nunnery around here. Except for you, dear.”

  Uncle Cornelius grunted as he wiped a napkin over his red nose.

  “And you can hardly blame the poor girl,” Edith continued. “Living in Boston, surrounded by all those hotheaded abolitionist fools. When she wrote asking to stay with us for the summer, we felt it was our duty to bring her to the South, where life is still civilized.” She took a long drink from her chipped wineglass. “Of course, the neighbors were shocked we’d let a Northerner in our home, even our own niece. But how could we have said no? After all she’s been through, the poor thing.”

  She looked pointedly at Rose’s lap.

  Rose felt her stomach twist. The last thing she wanted was their pity — though it had its uses. But this time her aunt had gone too far.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” she said tightly, “I’ve lost my appetite.”

  She gripped the round wooden rims of her wheelchair, rolling herself away from the table.

  Captain Austin stared at her.

  She felt her face warm. Well, let him stare. Charleston was full of wounded soldiers — surely he’d seen a wheelchair before. If he hadn’t noticed that her seat wasn’t the same as the others at the dining table, then that was his own lapse in observation.

  Pauline was behind her in an instant, the soft smell of her lavender soap comforting to Rose as she took the wheelchair’s handles and helped guide Rose out of the dining room and into the hall. When Rose had first shown up at Drexel Hall with Pauline, Aunt Edith and Uncle Cornelius had refused to have Pauline under their roof. They worried that a free colored woman’s presence might incite their slaves to revolt. But Rose had mustered tears and pointed to her legs and insisted that she needed Pauline, who had been specially trained to help those in wheelchairs. They’d given in eventually. Tears always did the job.

  The tick-tick-tick of the mantel clock followed them down the long hallways, past her uncle’s locked library, to the first-floor parlor that Aunt Edith had made up as a bedroom for her.

  Pauline closed the door, pressed her ear to the crack, then turned and let out a frustrated sigh. “Lord Jesus, slaves are like kin? I could have strangled them.” She paced around the room. “You did a good job throwing off that captain’s questions. His face was red as a beet.”

  Rose fanned her own still-warm face. “It was a rather nice face to look at, wasn’t it?”

  Pauline tossed a pillow at her. “Rose, he’s a Confederate!”

  Rose ducked the pillow. “I didn’t say I approved of his politics. I don’t like cigars, either, but that doesn’t mean they can’t come in a pretty package.”

  “Oh, never mind him.” Pauline knelt to drag the carpetbag out from under Rose’s bed. “He won’t be a problem as long as we run this mission while they’re still at supper. We have enough black powder, don’t we?”

  “Half a pound, in the last stall in the stables.” The military had conscripted all but one of her relatives’ horses, making the nearly empty stables the perfect place to hide their supplies. Rose wheeled herself to her dressing table, trying to put the attractive enemy officer out of her mind. She opened the drawer and sorted through the glass bottles for a small vial that she’d hidden among her beauty tonics. She held it up to the light. Nitroglycerin — exceedingly hard to come by. They’d stolen it from the assistant to an Italian chemist who’d been invited by the Boston Society of Natural History to give a public lecture. One flirtatious wink from Rose and the apprentice had bounded after her into the coatroom, while Pauline rifled through the collection of rare chemicals he was supposed to be guarding.

  Pauline opened the carpetbag and took out a man’s shirt and pair of breeches that they had stolen from neighbors’ clotheslines. She started to unbutton her dress. “Did you hear what your aunt said about Lord Firebrand being a real English lord? Did you start those rumors?”

  Rose picked innocently at her fingernails. “I might have sent an anonymous note to the newspaper. We had to have some reason for why he covers his entire face and body.” She wrapped the vial of nitroglycerin in a handkerchief, thinking back over Uncle Cornelius and Mr. Fillion’s dinner conversation. “Mayfair Plantation is disguising its cotton shipment as war rations bound for the hospital. The boxes are marked with a blue crest. Try to blow them up with black powder first. Use the nitroglycerin only if you must — we’re running low.”

  Pauline pulled the man’s shirt over her head, then tucked it into the black breeches and pulled on gloves. She reached for the vial.

  Rose handed it to her, then grasped Pauline’s other hand and squeezed tightly. “Be careful, Pauline.”

  Since coming to Drexel Hall, Pauline had risked her life four times to commit acts of sabotage, sneaking out under the cover of night, finding the cotton shipments, and laying the explosives that Rose had prepared. Each time, Rose had stayed home with her dreaded family, praying for Pauline’s safety. That Pauline wouldn’t be harmed by the explosions. That she wouldn’t be attacked by a stranger or raped on the five-mile walk to Charleston. And of course, Rose’s greatest fear, for which she prayed especially hard: that Pauline wouldn’t be caught by soldiers. A free colored woman in possession of d
angerous chemicals, committing criminal acts . . . It made Rose sick to think of what could happen. They wouldn’t just arrest Pauline. She could be sold into slavery. There could even be a noose. And Rose wouldn’t be able to help her.

  She squeezed her useless knees. “You shouldn’t have to do this on your own.”

  Pauline gave Rose a hug. “I know the risk,” she whispered, though her voice was shaking. “Don’t worry. Lord Firebrand will never be caught.”

  The first time Rose met Pauline had been in a graveyard when they were seven years old. Rose’s father had told her that they were going to a church outside Boston for a secret meeting with colored pastors, and it had sounded like an adventure. But the men’s droning talk of abolition wasn’t nearly as interesting as the butterflies outside. She wandered through the cemetery, chasing them, vaguely aware of the honey-brown girl her same age on the other side of the cemetery, the daughter of one of the colored preachers, Reverend Jacobs, a man born free and educated by Quakers. The other girl’s long braids swung as she also chased the butterflies. But Rose was white and Pauline was colored, and they were too shy to speak to each other until a trio of rowdy farm boys scared a rabbit into the cemetery, beating it with sticks. Rose had gasped. Pauline had jumped up. Their eyes had met and the two of them had rushed at the boys, screaming and wailing like ghosts, startling them so that the rabbit got away. Rose and Pauline had been friends ever since.

  Now, two weeks after the interminable dinner with Captain Austin, Rose sat on Drexel Hall’s wide back porch, her wheelchair settled amid the row of empty white rocking chairs, watching a rabbit munch on Aunt Edith’s rosebushes. Tall white columns extended the length of the porch, creating a haven away from the bustle of the slave quarters on the other side of the house. From here she couldn’t see the cotton fields, half of which had been torn up and replanted with potatoes and peas, being worked by most of the plantation’s forty slaves. But she could hear them. Sharp, distant yells from the white overseer, cracks of his whip, a child crying until the whip snapped again. She’d peeked out her window night after night to see the slaves trudging back to their cabins clutching sore backs, clad in sweat-soaked dresses and pants, some still bleeding from the lashes. That was plantation life: tradition masking something uglier. If Rose had her way, it would have ended long ago.

  Before she came to Drexel Hall, she had only met her aunt and uncle once. They’d come to visit her father’s church in Boston when she was just a little girl. Her uncle’s whiskers had been black then, but his voice had been just as booming. He’d made Drexel Hall sound like something out of a fairy tale: cotton like small wisps of clouds, the salty breeze from the coast, monstrous alligators stalking the swamps. Rose had dreamed of coming to Drexel. But now that she was here, it turned her stomach. It was beautiful, yes, but no fairy tale.

  Pauline came onto the porch with a picnic basket. “Your family went to Mayfair Plantation for the afternoon; your aunt told May in the kitchen that you’d rather stay here and that she should make you lunch. I, ah, slipped something in there for you.” She opened the basket to show that beneath the sandwiches were crisp bundles of money. Rose glanced around the porch. Even with her family gone, there were still the slaves and the overseers, but fortunately she and Pauline were alone.

  “Goodness! All this from your mission last night?” Rose whispered. The previous evening, Pauline, dressed as Lord Firebrand, had held up a stagecoach carrying Confederate funds.

  Pauline nodded. “Enough, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll say.” For the past two months, Rose had been anonymously paying off the occasional guard or soldier to look the other way, and the Charleston newspapers to spread the rumor about the masked vigilante. “With this much money, Lord Firebrand could even —”

  The rosebushes suddenly rustled and a round face popped out of the leaves with even rounder eyes. Rose’s red-cheeked little cousin, Stella. “Did you say Lord Firebrand?”

  “Stella!” Rose gasped, slamming the basket closed. “Shouldn’t . . . shouldn’t you be at Mayfair?”

  “Lord Jesus!” Pauline grabbed the basket, breathing hard.

  Stella scrambled up onto the porch and pointed to the basket. “Where’d your colored girl get all that money, Rose? Did she steal it?”

  “Hush!” Rose cried. Heat was spreading up her neck. What had Stella heard? Who would she tell? Blast! She glanced at Pauline, who met her gaze and then quickly disappeared into the house. Stella tried to follow her inside, but Rose grabbed the girl. “Stella, wait. Let’s play a game!”

  “But she’s a thief!”

  The screen door slammed. Pauline was probably hiding the money, and, Rose hoped, hiding herself, too. Rose’s hands were shaking. She had to think fast. Pauline was in enough danger already; Rose had to keep her cousin quiet. She heard the rattle of wheels and, with an increasing sense of dread, looked up to see a Confederate army carriage bouncing along the oak-lined path beyond the gardens.

  “She didn’t steal it,” Rose said in a rush. “It’s . . . mine. Brought with me from Boston.”

  Stella scrunched up her face. “Do you really know Lord Firebrand?” Her eyes suddenly went wide. “Are you secretly in love with him? Is the money so you can run away together?”

  The carriage stopped on the far side of the house. A man’s deep voice spoke with the house slaves. Her pulse thundered. A Confederate soldier here, now, and her cousin blabbing enough to cause them all sorts of trouble!

  “It’s true,” Rose said quickly. “I am passionately in love with the dashing Lord Firebrand. We are going to elope. But it’s a secret. You mustn’t tell anyone.”

  Footsteps sounded on the porch.

  Rose shook Stella, whispering low. “Our secret, right?”

  Captain Austin appeared at the far end of the porch, smiling. “Good day, Miss Rose. Miss Stella.” He paused. “Am I interrupting something?”

  Rose’s fingers dug into Stella’s arms. She gave Stella a long look, and Stella nodded.

  “We were just playing a game!” Stella said, a little too loud. Then she giggled and scampered off.

  Rose slumped back into her chair in relief.

  Captain Austin, oblivious, motioned to the empty rocking chair beside her. “May I join you, Miss Rose?”

  She nodded, barely hearing him, blood still throbbing in her ears.

  “What . . . what brings you back to Drexel, Captain?” she asked, trying to keep the shaking from her voice.

  He held up a book. “Returning a volume your uncle lent me when I was here for dinner.” Something on the ground caught his eye, and he reached down and removed a piece of straw from the spokes of her wheelchair. “You’ve been in the stables?”

  “Yes. I, ah, I like to visit my uncle’s horse. I used to be fond of riding.” She squeezed her knees hard, but as always, felt nothing. She swallowed a bitter pang, thinking of the accident: her mare Hurricane spooked by a snake, the fall that broke her spine. She drew a deep breath. “You can leave the book with me. I’m afraid the family’s gone to Mayfair.”

  For a few moments, he said nothing, only rocked slowly. And then he cleared his throat. “In fact, it was you I wished to speak to, Miss Rose.”

  Her pulse still hadn’t slowed from nearly getting caught; now it thumped even harder. Had he heard Stella yelling about Lord Firebrand? Or was this some sort of declaration of affection? Goodness, he was nice to look at, but the last thing on her mind now was romance.

  “At our dinner,” he continued in a quiet voice, “you mentioned you attended Prestley School for Girls in Boston. Later that night, I remembered that I had a friend who went there. Belle Stafford. She’s in Wilmington now. I wrote her and got her response this morning. She said she knew you. That you were brilliant at chemistry. You even blew up a tree stump one summer.” He paused, and Rose squeezed her armrests. Why was this captain so interested in her schooling? And in explosions? “And then I ran into an officer who had spent some years in Boston and aske
d about your family. He said your father was rumored to be involved with abolitionists in the eighteen thirties. That he might even have been responsible for an explosion last year in Virginia that took out an important tactical bridge for the Confederacy.”

  Alarm shot through Rose. But she’d gotten Stella under control and she could manage this captain, too. “That’s . . . that’s ridiculous!” She tried for a laugh. “He’s a man of God, not of explosives.”

  “Is he?” He wasn’t laughing.

  Rose’s face drained of blood. “What exactly are you saying, Captain?”

  Captain Austin took a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I found this in the stables. It’s the label for a container of black powder. Someone had hidden it in the straw.” He toyed with the piece of straw that had been caught in her wheels.

  Rose gripped the chair’s armrests, feeling dizzy. How could she warn Pauline? What could they do if the captain arrested them? Bash him over the head and flee? They wouldn’t get far, not in her chair. Perhaps she could force some tears and beg his mercy. It had worked before, with a Confederate spy in Boston who had caught her riffling through his letters. She’d sobbed and claimed she fancied him and she’d only been reading the letters to see if he had a sweetheart, and he’d let her go.

  She leaned in, trying to hide how her heart was walloping. “It almost sounds like you’re trying to suggest that I am that masked rebel, which is ridiculous. Lord Firebrand walks.”

  His gaze fell to her knees. “You must have a partner. If I had to guess, I’d say your maid is the one in the black costume, and you’re the one preparing the explosives and sending anonymous letters to the newspapers. Together, the two of you are Lord Firebrand.”

  She sucked in a quick breath, masking panic with indignation. “Have you gone mad?”

  He rubbed his chin. “Deny it all you like, Miss Blake, but I know it’s true. And I know how dangerous it is for you, and especially for your associate. She’d be in far more trouble than you if you two were caught. A well-heeled, pretty white victim of a tragic accident might escape the hangman’s noose. But not a colored girl.”