by Karleen Koen
The boy was naked. He had the long, gangling legs of a growing boy; the bones of the knee, the thigh showed. Something had eaten away flesh from fingers, from genitals and toes. His features were soft, almost formless, most of the face gone to bone. Who was this? How could she know?
“I am not certain it is he,” she said. The words came out a whisper. Her throat was closed tight. She was frozen in horror at this death, for all death, for life. Colonel Perry still had hold of her elbow, thank God. The shock of what lay at her feet held her breathless, numb.
“Is this the boy, Mademoiselle Fuseau?” Colonel Bolling said; he leaned against one of the horse stalls, arms folded, face impassive.
Thérèse was weeping too hard to answer. Words were echoing through Barbara’s mind. It was last spring, and she sat in one of London’s most beautiful churches and listened to Robert Walpole give the eulogy for Roger. “No man is an island…” Walpole had read, intoning the words of Roger’s favorite poet, Walpole’s voice echoing and stern from the pulpit of the exquisite church. “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….”
“The boy must have wandered from the plantation, become lost in the woods. Who knows how long he lived there before he fell into the river and drowned?” It was the sheriff, who had met them at this plantation, who spoke.
“Her boy was not raised to the woods. How would he survive?” Bolling said.
“What of the dog?” said Perry. “Someone shot the dog in the head. It was a deliberate act.”
“The dog’s back was broken, wasn’t it?” said Klaus, who had accompanied them on this journey. “Perhaps someone came across her, dying, and killed her. Out of mercy.”
“Why hasn’t that person stepped forward then, to tell us?” said Bolling. “Everyone in the county and two more besides knows about the boy.”
Barbara walked across the barn and pulled one of the heavy doors open, stepping out into freezing night. The darkness of it was complete, making her blind for a moment. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Then she saw a pinpoint of light, feeble, a candle in the window of what must be the plantation house in which they would stay this night. She began to walk toward that light. It is the great mix of feeling, that is why I feel so ill, so faint and weak, so out of time and place, she thought to herself as she walked. Hyacinthe. Dear one, brother, child, sweet servant, Roger’s gift.
Roger, where are you? Where is anyone? Grandmama, Tony, someone, help me. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Snow had begun to fall, the droplets of it lightly stinging, like the tiny, cold kisses at Christmas.
“Lady Devane—Barbara, my dear, sweet…”
She turned. Colonel Perry had followed her. The lantern he was holding made odd shadows dance between them, like the winged tips of angels or fairies, the fairies she and Jane had left food and ale for as girls. Upon her hands were soft leather gloves he had given her for the New Year. Appearing not long after Bolling had arrived with his dreadful news, Perry had insisted that he would accompany her to view the body—this man, her aged angel, sage, Virginia guardian. Tears coursed down her face. She was crying now, openly, hard.
“Let me accompany you back to the house. My dear, you must not be alone. What we have just seen is terrible. We are all affected by it.”
“Where is God? I’ve lost Him.”
Colonel Perry was holding out his hand. She put hers into it, like a bewildered child.
“Here, between you and me. There, in the barn. Everywhere, Barbara. He does not leave us, ever. It is we who leave Him.”
Let that be true, oh, let that be true, she thought, as she allowed him to lead her to the house.
AT THE sound of a knock on the door, Barbara looked over, but Thérèse was at last sleeping. Hours had passed. She and Thérèse had cried, together and separately. It is not he, Thérèse said. I know it, I feel it. But they had cried anyway. What they had seen was so dreadful, touching something so deep. Barbara opened the door to see Klaus standing in the dim of the hall.
“You have been upon my mind all the night. I cannot sleep. Please tell me you are all right.”
“I hear drums,” she said.
“The slaves tell one another about your boy. By the morning, every slave for miles will know the news of it.” There were tears in Klaus’s eyes. “I am so very sorry. Let me bring you another boy. I will select him myself. The slave markets of the Caribbean are full of boys—”
She turned away and closed the door, gently, and went back to her chair. Everything changes, and nothing does. Who was he, this man with his Gypsy cheekbones? Had she ever really desired him? When? That seemed like another time, another world. There had been a Barbara who had arrived on these shores, and there was a Barbara now, who had seen the body in the barn. The shock of it still vibrated through her, like a fingertip against a violin’s tautest string. She remembered this feeling, of glass breaking. She’d felt it that morning she saw Roger kissing his lover. The Barbara in her broke, and another stepped out of the broken shards.
Downstairs, Colonel Perry sat in a chair, his eyes upon the fire. Around him, upon the floor, rolled up in blankets, slept the sheriff and Bolling. Something nagged and pulled at Perry, but he could not put his finger upon what it was. Von Rothbach, who had gone upstairs to see about Barbara, came back into the parlor. He put his hands on the mantel and leaned toward the fire.
Like us all, thought Perry, he is touched by that body in the barn.
A dream, thought Klaus. I will pretend it is a dream I dreamed on the second creek.
It was here, wasn’t it, that which I’ve dreaded, thought Perry. The roll and surge within him was so strong that he shook with it. They had covered his shoulders with two blankets. If you fall ill, Valentine had said, your daughter will have my head on a platter.
He had known the moment he had walked into the barn.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” he kept repeating, trying to find comfort against the fear, the roll and surge within him.
IN THE morning, Barbara stood outside with Colonel Perry, waiting for the saddled horses to be brought to them.
“When you get to First Curle”—he watched her carefully, as if he could read her mind by doing so—“what are you going to do?”
“Bury this boy.”
And more. He knew what, as well as if she had spoken the words. He shivered. On the way, as they all rode silently, each of them aware of the body across the saddle, words echoed through his mind, words that seared his soul: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
BLACKSTONE AND all the slaves were waiting at the boundary of Barbara’s land. Glancing at Thérèse, Blackstone put his hand against the neck of Barbara’s horse, who was restive, hooves pawing at the snow.
“Was it your boy?”
“We don’t know.”
“No,” said Thérèse.
“Where is the body, ma’am?”
“On that horse, there.”
“Well, it’s right that you bury him, anyway…Letters have come for you, from your home, and some New Year’s gifts from Williamsburg. Captain Randolph brought them.”
Letters, thought Barbara, closing her eyes. Somewhere in all the frozen brokenness was joy at that, but it was muted. Let her do the difficult things, first, and then she would take the pleasure of her letters.
Home, she thought, looking past Blackstone to the fields, the trees all around them. Yet, this place, too, even with the horror strapped there across the saddle of a horse, was home. Everything changes and nothing does. She said good-bye to Colonel Bolling and Klaus, to Colonel Perry.
“Where do we bury him?” said Thérèse.
There was a small slave graveyard, set far back in the woods, where the sun came through the thick tre
es fitfully. Slaves had left their own monuments there—not stone monuments and wide table tombs such as those in the graveyard of the church in Williamsburg, but a log set upright with a series of figures carved upon it, or bits of broken rum bottles and broken gourds sprinkled upon the sunken earth of the graves—a custom, said Blackstone, meant to protect the living from the buried dead: Their lives revolve around their ancestors, said Blackstone, those who have gone on from life, but must be remembered and appeased. It frightens them, the way we ignore the dead. The dead are not dead, they say.
Barbara rode to it on horseback. “It is too lonely.”
She and Blackstone and Thérèse walked along the river.
“Where you buried the little dog,” said Blackstone, “it might be good to put Hy—the boy—there.” They walked to the spot, overlooking the river, under tall trees, their trunks wide, old, their limbs spreading out to make a canopy of shade and coolness in the summer. “Yes,” said Barbara.
They went to the barn. The body must be somehow washed and dressed. What will I do? thought Barbara. I can’t see it again.
“I’ll tend the body,” said Blackstone. “You and Mademoiselle Fuseau go on to the house and leave it be.”
In the house, Thérèse came downstairs with one of Hyacinthe’s suits of clothes, one of his hats with a feather. He had been very vain about his clothes, his hats.
“Hyacinthe would want this boy to have these,” Thérèse said.
“I’m going to ride to the vicar,” said Barbara, but when she got to his plantation, which bordered hers, his wife told her that he was across the river and that she did not expect him until the morrow. Barbara scribbled a note and left it. By the time she returned to First Curle, the sun was setting. In her parlor, she found Margaret Cox, Captain and Mrs. Randolph, Beth and Colonel Perry.
“You have letters from England,” Perry told her.
He looks ill, thought Barbara. He ought not to have come here tonight. “The vicar wasn’t there,” she said to Thérèse.
“It isn’t Hyacinthe,” said Thérèse, her pretty face as white, as still, as pinched in and grieving, as Barbara had ever seen it. “It doesn’t matter.”
Barbara saw Beth and Mrs. Randolph look at each other. They think Thérèse and I are mad, candidates for Bedlam, thought Barbara. Perhaps we are. You have no idea how mad we are. But you will.
“We’ve brought supper,” said Margaret Cox. “Sit yourself down and let us wait upon you. Here, read your letters from home.” She put them in Barbara’s hands, and Barbara, noticing for the first time the packages upon her table, remembered Blackstone telling her that gifts had come for her. She sifted through the letters—from her grandmother, from her mother and Jane, and one from someone whose handwriting she did not recognize. She put her grandmother’s letter against her forehead, as if it would make her well again.
“One of my slaves is making a coffin,” Perry said. “It will be ready tomorrow.”
“Why do we have it?” Barbara said.
The roll and surge within Perry crested.
“What, my dear?”
He knew. He had known on the slave ship last fall that this moment would come, hadn’t he? This was what the dreams portended.
“Slavery.”
He tried to speak calmly, over the sound of his heartbeat, so loud, so insistent, like the drums the other night.
“We have learned a lesson from the sugar islands to the south of us. It is more gainful to raise tobacco using slaves. One does not have to give one’s slave a portion of harvest for labor. A slave has no claim upon the land upon which he toils. As master, I have only to feed and clothe him. Whatever children he has are mine.
“I never thought to own the slaves I do. In the prosperity since the French war ended, more and more of us have bought slaves. The Dutch, the Spanish, the French, the English in the colonies to the north, they bring them in from the Ivory Coast, where, I am told, they are sold by their own brothers for guns and copper. If I do not buy them, my neighbor will. My neighbor does. I cannot be behind my neighbor.”
Perry felt events, dates, scenes tumble in his mind so that he felt dizzy: the trial of Frances Wilson, who had killed her slave woman, the trial splitting the colony up and down, reverberating among them, one side arguing that no subject had the power of life and death, while the other said that she should not be tried because the slave was property. She had been acquitted.
Law after law, he and his fellow slave owners had passed, each one more restrictive, more binding, more convenient to themselves, a law that slaves did not have the right of headright, which was fifty acres of land, given to anyone who came over as servant. A law that if a runaway slave was killed in capture, no harm came to the killers, and the owner was compensated. A law that children born were slave or free, according to the mother who bore them. Year after year, this or that law passed, each one making those who were masters less than Christian.
We are not Christian enough to set ourselves up over others, he thought now. We fool ourselves to think so; we corrupt ourselves and blame those whom we hold in bondage.
“The house I live in now was the best my father could build,” he said to Barbara. “I will build a better house on the backs of my slaves. We have patented much land in the last twenty years. It is our law that land must be improved within a certain time, must be planted or pastured, or we lose it. We need slaves to take that land from pasture to tobacco. We need slaves to grow and harvest all the tobacco we will plant.”
He saw how Barbara held her hands together in her lap in fists. She is furious, he thought, with our arguments. They pale against that which lies in her barn. So she should be furious.
“Please go home, go to bed,” she said.
She didn’t like the color of his face. They had done hard traveling these last days, through cold and frost, snow, full days on horseback. She herself was exhausted. He was far older. He must take better care of himself. Looking up, she caught a glance from Beth. She doesn’t like it that I have brought him out again, thought Barbara.
“You don’t look well, Edward,” said Margaret Cox, fixing a dark, round eye on him.
“I’m going to ride back to my plantation and have the carriage brought,” said Captain Randolph. “You’re going home in my carriage, Edward, with blankets over you and hot bricks to put your feet upon.”
“The carriage won’t make it through the snow.” It was Margaret Cox, always practical.
“My sleigh, then.”
“You make too much bother,” said Perry, but Captain Randolph was already pulling on his cloak.
“Open your gifts,” Mrs. Cox said to Barbara.
She tore past the brown paper of the smaller one. Set among dozens of dried rose petals were bulbs: lilies, she saw from the note, for her garden, from Major Custis.
In the other, larger package was an Iroquois cloak, much like the one she’d had sent to the King’s mistress, the Duchess of Kendall. Softest leather and hundreds of beads were on one side, and upon the other was dark, beautiful, lustrous fur. There were feathers all along the bottom. It was from the Governor, who wished her compliments of the New Year. Everyone touched the leather, traced the design of the beads with their fingers.
“That is the fur of beavers.” Perry could not suppress a shiver. “This cloak cost the Governor more than a few pence.”
Barbara swirled her hand through the fur. She wished she could feel something other than anger. This was lovely. She could see that, but she couldn’t feel the beauty. She had seen a beaver’s dam on a creek at Captain Randolph’s, seen the wonderful, odd, flat-tailed creature who had made it. She’d sketched a picture of him for her grandmother.
She picked up the letter from her grandmother, loosed its wax seal, and spread it open, and scanned it quickly, but at the end she came to news so surprising that she could read no further. She looked up blankly, not seeing her guests here, the small chamber, the elaborate Iroquois cloak, but instead England, Tamworth
, Saylor House. She’d thought of all of them at home remaining precisely as they were. The world had tipped to one side. When will it right itself again? I am not the same, she thought. Why would they be?
Colonel Perry reached across and took her hand in his. “Shall I stay the night?”
“No, you are not well. I saw you shivering.”
But she did not read another letter, or let loose of his hand, until they heard the bells on Captain Randolph’s sleigh.
“Tomorrow,” Perry said to her, as they tucked blankets around him; and across the light of a lantern, Barbara met Beth’s eyes.
“I think not,” said Barbara. “Tomorrow, I will come and see you.”
“You will need someone with you at the funeral.”
“I’ll be there,” said Captain Randolph. “You are not the only justice of this county, Edward, though you try to act it.”
Upstairs, Barbara spread the letters out before the fire and began to read. Her grandmother missed her, was sending her geese, a cheese press, other things. She wanted to send bees—there was a whole page on bees, on how her beemaster was quarrelsome and thick-headed, had no imagination. The Duchess quoted him: “‘How would one keep them gentle? How would one keep them from leaving the hive? How would they forage on the long journey over?’ How do I know?” wrote her grandmother. “He is the beemaster, not I.”
Barbara smiled and would have kissed the signature another time, if there hadn’t been a body in her barn. She was to keep careful account of the plantation. She was to think about making wine. Her grandmother was having old clothing sent from London for the slaves. She was to take care of herself and come back home to visit as soon as she could, sooner, for Tamworth was too quiet without her. And by the way, Tony was to marry Harriet Holles, a maid of honor in the Princess of Wales’s court.
Tony’s to marry, thought Barbara. It was proper. He must do so, as duke, just as she had done as the granddaughter of a duke, rectifying her mother’s mistakes by her marriage to Roger.