My Theodosia

by Anya Seton

  'Father saved my life, Joseph——' she began, watching his scowl.

  He made an impatient gesture, but he knew she was right. He could say nothing.

  Theo felt new tenderness for him as the days went by; tenderness not unmixed with guilt. For Doctor Ramsay had made it very clear that she could fulfill no more wifely duties for some time.

  'I cannot answer for your life, madam, if you should be brought to bed with another baby before the system has re gained its full health. It shall be my painful duty to tell Mr. Alston so.'

  She was shamed at the uprush of relief and joy this gave her. Oh, to be free—free—free! Protected from those painful, revolting moments in the dark when only her pity and sense of duty could sustain her. Free to show her husband the affection she truly felt for him, without the fear of kindling by her touch a passion which she loathed, and could not even remotely share.

  So Theo was happy, doubly happy because this time there loomed no immediate separation from her father. He had booked passage for the middle of June, and she and the baby were to go with him. The annual epidemic of fever was getting under way in Charleston, and it was manifestly dangerous to stay there a day longer than was necessary. As for Sullivan's Island, which Joseph presented as alternative, there was fever there too. Charlotte even now was suffering from ague and chills.

  'The whole of your Carolina low country is unhealthy in summer,' said Aaron, and Joseph could not deny it.

  'I suppose you and the baby must go, then,' he agreed grudgingly, 'since your father has made the arrangements, but I shall not be able to join you this year. It will be a long separation.'

  'I shall miss you,' she said softly, squeezing his hand. 'But I am so proud of your political interests, Joseph. It is fitting that one of the wealthiest and most consequential men in the State should have a voice in that State's government.'

  'Quite so,' agreed Joseph. He had recently decided to run for the state legislature, and had embarked on his campaign with the seriousness which characterized all his actions. The final impetus had come during the weeks of Theodosia's lying-in. With the passing of the anxiety and tension, Aaron had had time for social matters in Charleston. There had been many dinners and banquets, much speechmaking. The town had exerted itself to honor the Vice-President. Joseph basked in reflected glory.

  He did not think in so many words, 'I too can be a statesman. She shall see that to be wife to Joseph Alston is as important as to be daughter to Aaron Burr'. Yet some such thought was in his mind and at last conquered his native indolence. He was temperamentally unsuited to politics—domineering, tactless, and unperceptive. Moreover, now and for some years to come public speaking was torture for him. Self-consciousness swamped him, his tongue thickened into a ludicrous stutter, he tugged at his side whiskers and shuffled his feet until the audiences squirmed in unconscious imitation. Nevertheless, in this summer of 1801, when he was not yet twenty-three, he decided that neither furthering his father-in-law's career nor leading the life of a typical rice planter gave sufficient scope to a man of his abilities, and the seeds of ambition which Aaron had planted at Richmond Hill at last germinated.

  On June sixteenth, the brig Enterprise, being full-laden and finding gentle southerly breezes, set sail from Adger's Wharf.

  At the moment of parting from Joseph, Theo was filled with unexpected emotion. It would be many months before she saw him again. Still weak and shaky, she sat on the forward hatch with the baby in her arms and her eyes misted as she looked up at her husband.

  'I'll miss you very much,' she whispered. 'Write me often, won't you?'

  'Certainly.'

  'You speak so coldly. You're not vexed with me, are you?'

  Joseph did not reply. Around them rose the many sounds of the waterfront—the shouts of sailors, the creaking of windlasses. Next to the Enterprise a ship from the West Indies was discharging its cargo of bananas and coconuts, and the latter, escaping from their wicker baskets, rolled and bounced merrily along the wharf, while the sweating negro porters pursued them, cursing and laughing. Farther along the wharf stacked bales of sea-island cotton crowded a hundred rice tierces which awaited shipment to England. Beside the rice stood a factor in tall hat and blue frock coat arguing violently with a sea captain. The factor—invaluable middleman—attended to all business details for the planters, receiving, dispatching, and financing the plantation crops.

  Joseph's eyes lingered on the familiar scene without seeing it. Even when the factor shook his knobbed cane in the captain's face, and the latter dancing with rage brandished 'cutlass, Joseph's attention was not caught. The disputed cargo was not Waccamaw rice, and that was not his factor. Joseph, in fact, was engaged in an uncomfortable attempt at self-analysis. For he was vexed with Theo, vexed with her for leaving him, vexed with her determination to name the baby Aaron Burr Alston, when he had confidently expected that it would be Joseph, or perhaps William. Vexed at her indifference to the shocking fact that his son had not yet been baptized. There was no time, she argued, and the ceremony could very well be deferred to the fall, when it could be performed in the parish church on the Waccamaw; nor did this concession soften the fact that she held the rites of the Church very lightly. 'Agnostic, free-thinker,' whispered the horrified Alstons, and Joseph had not been able to refute them convincingly.

  'Joseph, please, don't be angry now,' pleaded Theo, seeing that his face remained black and that he showed no disposition to speak. 'You know that it is only for our health's sake, mine and the baby's, that I leave you.'

  Her soft voice touched him as it always did. He turned slowly and looked down at her. Under the brim of her gray satin bonnet her small face smiled beseechingly. She had regained all her beauty, and her magnificent eyes under the curly auburn bangs on her white forehead shone bright and dark as dewberries. Except for the fullness of her bosom and an indefinable maternal bloom, she might have been thirteen and the baby on her lap an oversized china doll.

  Joseph's stocky body relaxed; and he sat down beside her on the hatch. She moved the baby so that his head rested partly on his father's lap, and she leaned against Joseph's shoulder.

  For a moment they were quiet, oblivious to the barefooted sailors who padded past them on the narrow deck. Aaron had gone aft and stood near the helm talking with Captain Tombs.

  'You look pale, Joseph,' she said at last anxiously. 'You will be careful of your health, won't you? If you must go into town, do not do so before or after the middle of the day. I have somewhere heard that persons are less apt to catch infectious disorders at that time than any other, because sunshine acts to dissipate the noxious vapors. And pray smoke all the time you remain in the city; it creates an atmosphere and prevents impure air from reaching you.'

  'I will be prudent,' said Joseph, smiling.

  'I can scarcely yet realize that we are to be so long separated. The month of October appears to me a century off,' she added sadly.

  This sadness continued to oppress her during the hurried farewells while the captain bellowed orders, sailors swarmed up the masts unfurling the courses, hawsers creaked straining to be loose; and Theodosia, leaning against the taffrail, waved to Joseph's diminishing figure as the brig slipped away from the wharf, until he merged into the blur of pink and yellow houses behind.

  On the seven-day journey up the coast Theo thought about Joseph a great deal oftener than she had ever done before. It was easier to see him in a romantic light when at a distance from him, yet it was more than that. At this period her love for the baby extended itself to the father. It was, after all, the same sort of love, deepened by a year and a half of companionship, and sharpened when she reached Richmond Hill by Aaron's absence. For after he had established her in New York, his affairs took him to Washington and Philadelphia. She was much alone, her activities restricted by the demands of her son's hungry little mouth.

  So she wrote to Joseph, tender, affectionate letters, partly the product of her own feelings and partly from a desire to reassure
him and make him content. 'You do not know how constantly my whole mind is employed in thinking of you. Do you, my husband, think as frequently of your Theo and wish for her? Do you really feel a vacuum in your pleasures?' And later she wrote: 'How docs your election advance? I am anxious to know something of it. But not from patriotism, however. It little concerns me which party succeeds. Where you are there is my country and in you are centered all my wishes.'

  Joseph, when he received this, was gladdened, and yet in another letter she had not been able to refrain from enthusiastic praise of her own home place. 'Never did I behold this island so beautiful. With the beauty of the country it is impossible not to be delighted whether that delight is expressed or not, and every woman cannot fail to prefer the style of society.'

  Will she never learn to appreciate the Carolinas too? thought Joseph, and his heart was sore.

  On Monday, July fifth, the whole country burst forth into riotous celebration of Independence Day, because the Sunday had naturally precluded festivity. Richmond Hill and all the other estates were thrown wide open, guests streaming through the house drinking joyfully of brandy punch in the dining-room or Madeira in the library. Outside on the lawns there was a din of gunpowder explosions, and later fireworks. Parades marched by on the Greenwich Road, and the air continually jigged with the strains of 'Yankee Doodle.'

  In the midst of the hubbub, Theo heard her baby's plaintive wail and, excusing herself, she disappeared upstairs to perform her pleasurable duty.

  She looked up astonished as Aaron, after a hasty knock, walked in.

  'News from Paris, Madame,' he said, holding out a letter. 'News about one of whom we talked only this morning.'

  'Natalie?' she asked anxiously. 'There's nothing wrong, is there?'

  'On the contrary. Natalie, it seems, is married, and to whom, think you?'

  Theo digested the first part of his sentence in silence for a moment. Amazing somehow to think of Natalie married, amazing and dismaying. She would then perhaps never again see the kind little elder sister. She had missed her, appreciated her far more after she had sailed, and often longed for her return. There were so few people to whom she was deeply attached.

  'I suppose she has married some French nobleman,' she answered at last. 'It is what her mother always wished.'

  'Quite so, her mother always wished it, and is apparently angry that Natalie has not obeyed. Natalie has married young Thomas Sumter of South Carolina.'

  'A Carolinian!' cried Theo, astounded. 'But she's in France.'

  Aaron laughed. 'So is Mr. Sumter. He is secretary to the American Legation. They met on the trip over. Judging from this ecstatic letter, they are very much in love.—Look'. He handed the paper to her.

  A paragraph caught her eye. 'Dear Papa Burr: I never dreamed that there could be such happiness; all day long I sing and laugh. He is so handsome, so kind, and yet so much the master—my Tom. You will not think me foolish to tell you that I love him more than anything in life, or life itself'. Theo folded the page quickly. How could the quiet, self-contained little Natalie write with such abandon! She angrily denied to herself a stab of envy, and moved by an unreasoned impulse she hugged her baby so close that he stopped feeding and emitted a reproachful squeak.

  She kissed him apologetically and said, 'How strange that we should both marry Carolinians! She will live there some day, I suppose.'

  'Yes, at Statesburgh. She will return home next year, she writes, and how delightful for you all will be the reunion'. Theo sighed. 'Yes, but Statesburgh is two days' journey from the Waccamaw. I wish she had married an Alston; it would be heavenly to have her on the next plantation. There would be someon: to talk to.'

  Aaron gave his daughter a keen look. 'I know that you do not find your Southern life congenial, but you should rule circumstances, not allow them to master you. A little more spirit, my dear, a little more initiative, and you will be able to create about you whatever atmosphere you desire.'

  She shifted the baby to her other arm, and nodded slowly. 'I know, Papa. And when I go back again in October I mean to try very hard.'

  She did not, however, return in October because in the late summer her strength declined alarmingly, and Aaron sent her to Ballston Springs to take the waters.

  On September the eighth Aaron wrote to Joseph

  Doctors Bard, Hosack, and Brown join me in opinion that she ought immediately to wean her child. This she peremptorily refused, and the bare proposition occasioned so many tears and so much distress that I abandoned it. Within the last three days, however, she has such a loss of appetite and prostration of strength, that she is satisfied of the necessity of the measure for the sake of the child, if not for herself; and I have this day sent off a man to the country to find a suitable nurse.

  Aaron found a nurse, a stalwart French peasant girl of twenty-three. He did not find her in the country, but huddled, miserably homesick, in a frowzy little boarding-house by the waterfront. Sophie du Pont dc Nemours, who interested herself in all her immigrating countrymen, had told Aaron about her, and he engaged her the minute he saw her. Her applecheeked healthiness, her shrewdness and air of quiet capability were her references, and Theodosia, who had been prepared to dislike any woman who usurped her own place with the baby, lost all resentment at the first sight of Eleanore in her starched white headdress. Its streamers whisked through the air as the red work-scarred hands reached out to the baby with brisk, reassuring tenderness. 'O, e'est un petit amour, Madame,' she crooned, dandling the baby. 'We will make heem gros et fort, nous deux'. Nous deux! We two! From that moment it was always that for Eleanore, she and her mistress. Her loyalty and affection never wavered during the ten years of life which remained to them both.

  On November the twelfth, Theodosia sailed back to the Carolinas, and again on the Enterprise. Besides Eleanore and the flourishing baby, she had with her a French chef whose reputed culinary prowess would surely inaugurate a new era on the Waccamaw.

  This time, thought Theo, with renewed optimism, everything will be different. The Oaks had been refurbished, and would be infinitely more comfortable with the addition of the two French servants. She would be insulated from the slaves and from Venus. Surely Joseph would no longer refuse to send the girl away. He would understand how Theo felt, because their letters had brought them close. They would begin together a new and sweeter relationship.

  She sat on deck, well bundled up against the November wind, and thought happily how well she would now manage her life. No more morbid fancies or childish fear of the moss-hung landscape. No more lying on couches, or neglecting plantation duties. She would be the paragon of wives—and mothers. The darling baby—the thought of him melted her heart with love. He should be the most brilliant and famous man in the world. As a first step, Joseph must build a library at the Oaks. Even now in the hold were stacked a dozen books which Aaron had bought as a nucleus. Already at six months the baby was precocious, and though she did not quite share her father's opinion that the child should recite his letters at a year, yet it would not be long before she could begin teaching him. She smiled to herself, trying to picture him at two—at five.

  The brig plowed steadily southward, rocking easily over the smooth Atlantic combers. A single yellow star sparkled in the eastern sky, hung trembling against the dark. How pretty it is, she thought idly, and then suddenly, as though it had been a bolt of lightning from out that gentle sky, her mind twisted with sharp pain.

  Why? She asked it half aloud, and, bewildered, stared around the empty decks. How could one feel poignant sorrow and not know its source! The recognition lagged behind the fact, but it came gradually. In the fo'castle some sailor was playing on his flute. She had been hearing the music for some time without noticing it. The sailor had just now changed his tune, and it was this new soft strain that hurt her. Yet why? She still did not recognize it. It was something she had heard long ago, but where——

  And then the words slipped quietly within the melody, and she heard aga
in the rustling leaves in an enchanted garden, felt intolerable sweetness and yearning.

  Water, parted from the sea, may increase the river's tide——

  That song—but she had not heard it since, nor thought of the captain in many months. Why, then, should there be pain?

  Heart of mine, away from thee, sever'd from its only rest,

  Tosses as a troubled sea, bound within my aching breast.

  Thou alone canst give release, sprayed my burning eyes with brine.

  Swelling e'er with love's increase, let my heart find rest in thine.

  She flung off the rug which wrapped her.

  'Eleanore!' she called sharply.

  The French nursemaid came running, her broad peasant face anxious, 'Oui, Madame?'

  'I'm cold. I wish to go to my cabin. And tell that sailor who is playing the flute to stop it. He makes a hideous noise, it vexes me.'

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JOSEPH stood on the wharf at Georgetown, awaiting the brig, and he was surrounded by Alstons. Theo counted them ruefully while the vessel slid up to the dock: Colonel William, John Ashe and Sally, William Algernon, Lady Nisbett, Charlotte, a collection of milling children, and black servants.

  Her heart sank. She had pictured their reunion otherwise, this reunion that was to start for them a new and closer married life.

  And Joseph had altered; for a moment she had scarcely recognized him. He had always been swarthy, but now in his new indigo-blue suit his skin had a greenish tinge. He had grown fatter. And why, she thought impatiently, had he had his hair cut so short as to stand up like a fan from its own wiry coarseness?

  They greeted each other with constraint, exchanged a brief kiss, before all the relatives crowded around to exclaim over the baby. Theo was once more swamped in Alstons. Fifteen minutes after she had landed, Colonel Alston was talking rice again. 'We have had a most unusual fall freshet, my dear. We thought for a few hours that the fields at Rose Hill would be quite ruined, but fortunately it subsided in time. How, by the way, is the price holding in New York?'