Iron Ships, Iron Men

by Christopher Nicole

  ‘Those Goddamned abolitionists are out to do us down, my friends. Well, I say, let them try.’ Now he paused because there was a burst of applause from amongst the Creoles. ‘We will not be done down. Let them run Abraham Lincoln for president. I say we will not be governed by some bumpkin who knows nothing of what is good for this country, and for Louisiana most of all. I say that if these United States ever come to be governed by a man who has no feeling for us, as he has no knowledge of our history and institutions, then we in Louisiana will have to look to our past, and seek our future, in our own way.’

  He paused both to take breath, and because of the enormous cheering and clapping from the main part of his audience. Stephen McGann took a sip of wine. Jerry was now also frowning, and Buchanan was looking acutely embarrassed; if he came from Maryland, which was a slave-holding state, few people doubted where his sympathies really lay.

  ‘So I will give you a toast,’ Wilbur Grahame continued when the noise had subsided, apparently oblivious of the consternation he was causing amongst some of his guests. ‘I will ask you all to rise and drink to the great state of Louisiana, and all those who think like her, and at the same time drink damnation to the moneygrabbing Yankees and their rabble-rousing leaders. And death to Abraham Lincoln.’ The male members of the assembly rose with a shout, glasses held high, with the exception of the naval officers present. Stephen McGann indeed rose, but only as his host sank back into his seat. ‘That, sir,’ he remarked, his quiet voice piercing the huge room, ‘was an ill-timed toast. A wedding is no place for political speeches. But as you have raised the matter, sir, and regrettably, as we are now by way of being related, and especially on such a happy occasion, I must reply by saying that such a toast can only be uttered by a scoundrel.’ He paused to allow his words to sink in, while a gasp ran round the room, and Wilbur Grahame goggled at him. ‘And in addition, by a would-be traitor to this great country of ours. If Mr Lincoln were to be nominated for the presidency, and then elected, he will be the president of this country for a period of at least four years, and it will be the duty of every American to acknowledge that fact and act upon it. As,’ he went on, slightly raising his voice as the hubbub increased, ‘it will be the duty of every American to honour and respect the election of Stephen Douglas or John Breckenridge, whatever his, or her, personal feelings. To advocate otherwise is to advocate rebellion, and has little to do with that democracy of which we are so proud. So, sir, I will ask you to withdraw those words, and let this company proceed with its celebration.’

  He sat down, and the room buzzed. Until Grahame stood up again. ‘I have never withdrawn a word in my life,’ he declared. ‘I will not commence doing so now, on so important a question.’

  ‘Then, sir,’ Stephen retorted, ‘I and my family will take our leave. Caroline. Grandmother.’

  ‘I would not remain in this house a moment longer,’ Felicity McGann remarked, also rising, and followed instantly by George Dewey, Jerry’s best man, and then most of the naval officers present. ‘Jerry?’

  Every head turned to look at the bridegroom, who had sat absolutely still during the altercation. But his frown had cleared. Jerry McGann had never had a doubt in his life. ‘I shall accompany my parents,’ he announced at large. Then he looked at Marguerite. ‘I would expect my wife to accompany me.’

  Marguerite’s face was quite pale. She licked her lips, looked at her own father — Antoinette Grahame appeared to have fainted along with several other women — then at Rod. He also had sat quite still during the exchange, but he had drunk the toast. He had elected to make his home amongst these people, and he knew that involved thinking as they did, and acting as they did. Even at the cost of a friendship? That he might have lesser motives as well was not to be considered at this moment.

  But he knew what Marguerite was going to do, perhaps before she had even decided for herself. She was not yet fully married; were she to renounce her husband here and now, before all of these friends and sympathisers, there would be no question ofher not being granted an annulment. Nor would she, still a virgin, find it difficult to obtain another husband. And not to do so, to side with the McGanns, would mean an estrangement from her family.

  Yet he knew she would go with Jerry. Because of her confidence in the future, and in herself, and because of her pride, which would not allow her to admit that she had made a mistake, and leave her a husbandless bride, therefore however temporarily, the object of gossip and derision. And because, he knew, she cared little for her family, felt contemptuous pity for her mother and only an almost equally contemptuous affection for her father. She cared only for Martine’s, and she would reckon that given time, she could achieve a reconciliation which would leave her in possession of all she sought.

  Marguerite flushed and looked away, then glanced at her father, and stood up. ‘I will accompany my husband,’ she said.

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ bawled Wilbur Grahame.

  Marguerite faced him. ‘I think I am more in my mind than you, Papa,’ she retorted. ‘I think Captain McGann is quite right, and that was an unforgivable toast to make, on such an occasion. However, when you have come to your senses and apologised, I am sure it will be possible for Jerry and I to visit Martine’s again. You will please send my heavy trunks to Long Island. They are all packed and waiting, in any event.’ She swept from the room, her gown rustling, her hair fluttering with the vigour of her movements. The McGanns followed her.

  The remainder of the assembly stared behind them in dumbfounded silence for several seconds. Then Claudine Bascom began to laugh.

  *

  Marguerite McGann stood at the window of the New Orleans hotel, and looked out at a rain and windswept Canal Street. The hotel was where she had been coming on the first night of her honeymoon, and the second of her marriage, in any event; she was only a day early, and the proprietor had been pleased to find accommodation for the rest of the family and their friends. Nor would she have expected the weather to be any better, at this time of year; where she was going it would be far worse. But that also would have happened anyway. Yet she was aware of feeling that she was floating on the surface of a restless and unfathomable sea.

  She was utterly alone with people she hardly knew; that could even be said of her husband. Polly, her personal maid, had been aghast when her mistress had told her she must stay behind, and had then left, carrying only a single carpet bag, containing a nightdress, some toilet articles, and a change of clothing. That she would purchase what she required along the way was neither here nor there, to Polly: a Grahame, even if she had changed her name, could not possibly travel in such inferior style, and as for doing without a personal maid ... but Marguerite had been adamant. She knew the McGanns would never stand for taking a slave north with them, nor could they, since the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court a few years before — which had laid down that a slave could not achieve freedom merely by being taken into a free state, but only through manumission by his owner — look forward to giving the girl her liberty without the cooperation of Wilbur Grahame, and that was hardly to be expected at this moment.

  She had been adamant too as she had descended the great staircase for a last time, and looked at all the waiting faces. At her father, stepping forward to remonstrate; her mother had by then been put to bed. She had not even stopped to say goodbye, to either of them, had walked straight past Wilbur Grahame and Claudine and Rod as if they had not been there; the slightest hint of weakness or indecision would have been disastrous.

  So now it was done. What had been done was only slowly sinking in as the day had passed; no one had talked much during the journey to New Orleans, or over dinner.

  ‘I wish Rod had come with us,’ Stephen McGann had muttered. ‘And Frank Buchanan.’

  ‘I would have expected neither of them to do so, Father,’ Jerry had replied. ‘They have made their homes in the South, in the slave states. A man cannot abandon his home that lightly.’

  ‘And what of a
woman?’ Felicity McGann had asked, more aware of what Marguerite had sacrificed than her menfolk.

  Their heads had turned to look at Marguerite, and she had been unable to stop a tear from escaping her eye. Yet her resolve had not weakened. She had no sympathy with the abolitionist point of view — like her father and all her friends, she regarded it as based on ignorance and jealousy — and here she was married into a family which, if not actively abolitionist, as far as she knew, still was strongly against slavery. Yet she felt that had to be a political and economic matter. Political crises came and went; financial crises rose and fell. But people went on forever, throughout the course of their lives. Like her sister, and her father, she had never been attracted to the Creoles, to whom she was related and amongst whom she had grown up. They were fine people, no doubt, but the men, with their snobbish pride in ancestry, their interminable gamblings and mistresses, which in turn meant interminable debts, with their quickness to issue challenges and their slowness to forgive an injury, and above all, with their certainty of male dominance which required a wife to be grateful for the slightest attention — while her honour was protected with the utmost rigidity — indicated too stifling a future for any woman who felt she had a brain and ambition and even strength to match them. While the acceptance of their passive role by the Creole womenfolk she found nauseating. Her mother had undoubtedly felt the same in her own youth, which was why she had so easily fallen in love with the then handsome and dashing and forceful young Yankee overseer, to the horror of her parents. Mother had lived to regret that liaison, but for more complex reasons than Wilbur Grahame’s different background, and in doing so she had withdrawn from life itself into the comfort of alcoholism. Marguerite knew she had no such weakness.

  Thus she had been powerfully attracted to Rod Bascom, and remained so, even as her anger with him for allowing himself to be ensnared by Claudine had not abated; had he not been able to seeher attraction? That he was now miserable, as she had prophesied, and would remain so, as far as she could see, for Claudine was showing every sign of copying her mother in everything, save that she was not even able to bear children, apparently, had been little solace — until the coming of Jerry McGann. Jerry had attracted her even more strongly, in his size, his confidence — which in Rod was so strangely tarnished by self doubts — and above all in the feeling that he would live life according to his own rules, and not those laid down by some dying society — as he had just illustrated. And by the certainty that he would always treat her as an equal. So, was he worth abandoning Martine’s for? Only time would tell that. But was she abandoning Martine’s? She was only twenty-three years old. There was a lot of time in front of her, and Rod and Jerry were the closest of friends. She had no doubt of a reconciliation, in the near future, and with Rod’s marriage a childless disaster, once she had her first ... she had no doubt of that happening, either. Then the world would be at her feet again, she was equally certain.

  Even if there were apparently aspects of the relationship between a man and his wife of which she, like Claudine, knew nothing. Things which had terrified Claudine, and apparently Mama as well. That knowledge had completed the estrangement between Marguerite and her mother. To have allowed Claudine to go to the marriage bed so totally unprepared, and then to have refused her sympathy, had been unforgiveable. But at least it had enabled her to prepare herself, mentally, for what lay ahead. If she did not know what would be involved, she was determined she would be neither frightened nor horrified — especially as it all seemed part of a natural order of things. Things which would now have to be endured. She faced the door at her husband’s gentle knock. ‘Please come in,’ she invited.

  Jerry closed the door behind him. He had changed, and wore both nightshirt and undressing robe, as the hotel was not very adequately heated. ‘I do not know whether you wish to sleep alone tonight,’ he said.

  ‘To give me time to change my mind?’ she asked. She could never resist throwing provocative questions.

  But he remained seriously considerate. ‘That, certainly. You have also had a trying day, in every way. I shall not take it amiss.’

  ‘I am your wife,’ she said. ‘Almost. I would like to know that I am your wife, completely.’

  He came across the room. She wanted to meet him half way, but was quite unable to move, gripped by a sudden terror: he was so huge. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Oh, how I love you. And I understand what you have done, even if I’ve not been able to say so, very convincingly. I can only promise that you will never regret it.’

  ‘Never,’ she said, and was in his arms. She closed her eyes, instinctively, as he lifted her from the floor and carried her to the bed, and then made herself open them again. She had to see, and know, what was happening to her, what was involved, where Claudine had failed, and where she would triumph. She did not suppose men acted in very different ways when making love to their wives, thus Rod would have done the same things to Claudine. Only she would be different. She moved her body to allow him to undress her, gazed at him as he removed his own clothing, hugged him as he kissed and caressed her breasts, felt the stirrings of a passion she had never known long before he made his entry, so carefully holding his weight from crushing her. The pain was extreme, but she uttered no sound, and was surprised when, his passion spent, he used his finger to stroke the tears from her cheeks. ‘Oh, how I love you,’ he said.

  ‘As I love you,’ she assured him, and held him tight again. Because she did, now.

  *

  But only him. She stared out of the carriage window at the endless stretches of snow as they drove up the Long Island turnpike. It had been growing steadily colder as they had travelled north; now it was just below freezing — she had never experienced such temperatures before. Then she was gazing at the ramshackle wooden farmhouse; Felicity McGann had proudly said, half an hour before, ‘Now we are on McGann land, my dear.’ And when she had asked, ‘And the far boundary?’ and had been told, ‘Why, at that stand of trees in the distance,’ she felt her heart constrict: the McGann land would all have fitted into one tiny corner of the Martine Plantation.

  The Palmer cousins were out in force to greet her, and she gazed at the plump, apple-cheeked young women — not one of whom, she was certain, had ever seen a corset in her life — and the tongue-tied young men, with increasing dismay. Their hands, men and women, were calloused from hard physical labour, and there was not a servant, slave or free, to be seen.

  ‘I suppose, living on a plantation, you know all about milking cows,’ said Janet Palmer.

  Marguerite looked at Jerry, who smiled at her. ‘Meg has a great deal to learn,’ he said.

  ‘And I will show her,’ Margaret McGann declared. ‘As we are at once sisters and namesakes.’

  ‘You’ll have a warming drink, Meg,’ Stephen McGann suggested, handing her the whisky jar. She had no idea how to take it, and had to be shown by Jerry, while when the liquid finally found its way down her throat, and a good deal also went down her neck to soak her bodice, she felt as if she had swallowed a handful of red peppers, and nearly choked.

  ‘Something else to learn about,’ she gasped, as she wiped her eyes.

  ‘It’s a different world,’ Jerry said, as he escorted her to bed. ‘But a happy one.’

  ‘Because everyone is free?’ she asked, and wondered if even she would have grasped at this freedom had she known what was involved.

  ‘That, certainly,’ he agreed. ‘But there is more even than freedom. You wait till spring, and then summer, up here. It is the most beautiful place on earth. When I return from this commission, I will take you sailing on the Sound. Have you ever sailed in a small boat?’

  She shook her head, eyes enormous.

  ‘Well, you will love it. And there are apples to be picked, and the hay to be stacked ... and the cows to be milked.’ He grinned. ‘It really is a splendid life.’ He held her hands. ‘I know you will enjoy it, Meg.’

  She gazed at him. I am being asked to enjo
y living like a savage, she thought. My God, to have left so much comfort, for so much hardship ... and these people consider themselves happy. And even prosperous.

  And now she was one of them. ‘I will enjoy it,’ she promised. ‘With you at my side.’

  Chapter Six: New Orleans and New England — 1860-61

  BUT he was not going to remain at her side very much longer. After only a fortnight he was making preparations to travel down to Norfolk, Virginia, to join his ship.

  It had been, despite all her misgivings, a happy fortnight. Because Jerry had been there. If she had had to be shown how to handle a broom, she could take refuge behind his happy smile and the knowledge that he too was out performing some menial labour such as shoeing a horse or shovelling snow. At least there had been none of the back-breaking labour he had promised her once the spring arrived. And every night, when they retired to the old tester bed, she renewed her love, indeed her adoration, for his body and for the man himself. He was so big, in everything he did, and yet so gentle, in everything he did, at least as regards her. He was gently humorous as well, at the same time as his passion, like everything else he owned, was firmly controlled by his own will. She, who had never submitted to anything in her life, not even the rule of her father, willingly submitted to her husband night after night, and became almost a wanton as the early pain of their intercourse was replaced by a mounting passion. When, three weeks after their marriage, she missed her period, she was ecstatic.