by Mary Mackey
He is always most eloquent when he speaks against slavery. His commitment to the abolishment of the trade is not only absolute, it is passionate. Once, while speaking of the horrors of the slave ships that ply the Middle Passage, he breaks into tears, and Carrie finds herself comforting him.
The most amazing thing she discovers about Deacon is that she can say anything to him. One afternoon she confesses that she thinks he looks like William. Yes, he says, he and William also noticed the resemblance. In Salvador they were taken for brothers, which, Deacon says, flattered him, since he knew he was not nearly as handsome as William.
Carrie agrees and tells him so, and he laughs. “You’re an honest woman,” he said. “I like that, Carrie.” By now, they are calling each other by their first names, which seems reasonable since Deacon is, after all, a relative of sorts. And if he ever feels jealous when Carrie talks about William, he never shows it.
Carrie is never sure exactly how it happens, but gradually she comes to believe marrying him might not be a bad idea. Sometimes after he leaves, she feels agitated and filled with desire. Deacon may not be as good-looking as William, but he is a handsome man with a way of sitting and talking and moving that reminds her of a caged tiger. There is a passion in him that is hard for him to conceal and hard for her to overlook, and often when they are talking about ordinary things, she senses it and responds. Sometimes she even feels as if he has reached out and stroked her when all he has really done is pass her a plate of tea cakes or made a remark about the weather.
She finds this confusing and does not know what, if anything, she should do about it. Is she responding to Deacon because he looks like William or is she attracted to him in his own right? Should she tell him or does he already know? Is she feeling lust, loneliness, or something more real? In the end, she gives up trying to decide. Her emotions are so tangled during this period, she cannot sort out one kind of longing from another.
She may not be sure how she feels about Deacon, but she has no doubt how he feels toward her. Those green eyes of his stare at her in a way that is hard to ignore, and although he is polite, discreet, and gentlemanly almost to a fault, she would have to be blind not to see how much he desires her. As the days pass, this becomes increasingly important since she knows she could never consider marrying a man who was only interested in talking to her, and by now she is beginning to seriously consider his proposal. Then, too, she is flattered. How could she not be? When a man sits in your parlor speaking to you with the utmost respect and looking at you as if you are the most desirable woman he has ever met, you are not likely to feel he is making a mistake.
In December, he proposes again, and again she refuses him. She is only twenty-three and not inclined to spend the rest of her life as a nun, but even though he has become a good friend, she does not love him.
That night after he leaves, she goes upstairs and looks in the mirror and sees the lines grief is putting on her face. She still loves William, only William, but at that moment she knows that if she keeps on loving him and refuses all offers of marriage, she will end up a bitter, unhappy old woman. She will have the child, of course, but the child will grow up as all children do and leave her, and then what will she do with her life? Devote herself to good works? Take in stray cats? Become a pillar of the church? Bake cookies for the neighbors’ children?
She thinks of all the years that lay ahead of her, all the hours she will spend sleeping alone, all the nights she will wake up longing for an embrace; the solitary meals she will eat; the poverty of a life lived in the past instead of the present. Staring at her own reflection, she realizes she is on the verge of turning her love for William into a religion. No matter how much I love him, she thinks, I can’t go on worshipping his memory. William was a man of flesh and blood, not an idol, and he would not have wanted me to stop living just because he did.
As if he senses she is thinking of accepting his proposal, Deacon becomes more intimate. He does not try to kiss her, but the look of desire in his eyes becomes more intense, and gradually he begins to confide in her. One afternoon when she is talking about how hard it has been to lose both William and her father in such a brief space of time, she notices he is not responding as usual. Instead he sits silently, looking at her with intense sadness.
She stops talking and lets the silence gather. At last, he sighs and says: “I also lost two people I loved within a few weeks of each other: my mother and a young lady I was very fond of. My mother had shown me nothing but kindness, and I loved her dearly.”
“And the young lady?”
“A friend of my sister’s. I loved her and thought to marry her someday, but it was not to be.” He gives Carrie a sad smile. “She looked nothing like you, but she was pretty in her own way: small and full-figured with dark hair and a little mole right there.” He reaches out as if to touch Carrie’s upper lip, coming so close that she can feel the heat of his finger, then draws back and lets his hand fall into his lap.
“How did you lose her?” Carrie asks. The question feels awkward, but Deacon does not seem to mind.
“Consumption.”
“And do you still love her?”
“No. I will always treasure her memory, of course. She was a sweet, gentle girl, but my heart is elsewhere now.”
Later Carrie plays back this conversation and sees what she should have seen at the time: how unlikely it was that a young woman dying of consumption would be “full-figured.” But on that Saturday afternoon, all she feels is sympathy for Deacon and a sense of comradeship in loss.
Two days after he tells her about his late fiancée, Deacon proposes again, and again she refuses him. This time, she does not go upstairs afterwards and look in the mirror because she knows what she will see. Instead, she goes to her writing desk, takes out the piece of paper that contains William’s hair, drops it into a saucer, strikes a match, and sets it on fire. As the paper burns, she says a final good-bye to him.
“Dearest William,” she whispers, “I will never stop loving you, but somehow I must find the strength to go on without you. If you can hear me, my love, give me that strength.”
As the paper turns to ashes and the flames die down, she feels a sense of release. She won’t forget William, but she vows that from this moment on she will never again allow herself to be frozen in the past.
The next day she begins to check Deacon’s references. Everyone speaks well of him: his banker, his business associates, even Mrs. Wiggins, the wife of the military attaché to the American Diplomatic Mission, who knew Deacon in Washington.
“A wonderful man,” Mrs. Wiggins says. “I’d trust him with my life, Miss Vinton.” Her eyes wander to Carrie’s midsection, which is hidden under layers of petticoats. “Such a warm day,” she observes with a bright smile, “and yet you dress so stylishly.”
Five days later, Deacon makes a fourth proposal of marriage. This time Carrie tells him the truth: That she esteems him, feels friendly affection for him, and finds him attractive, but does not love him and is not sure she ever will. If he’s content with this, she’s willing to become his wife; if not they should stop seeing one another.
Deacon does not hesitate. Seizing her hands, he covers them with kisses. “Carrie, dearest Carrie,” he says, “I can imagine no happiness greater than becoming your husband. I love you more than words can express, beyond everything I value, beyond all riches, beyond life and health and beauty and honor itself, so much so that I can hardly breathe or speak.”
Carrie is touched by his words. When he leans forward to kiss her, she is even moved to tears. For a few seconds she feels the warm pressure of his lips on hers, then she feels dampness on his cheek and realizes he is crying, too. It’s a touching scene, one she remembers for the rest of her life, but there is more to it than she suspects.
Months later, she discovers Deacon cobbled together a few of Goneril’s lines from King Lear, twisted them to serve his purpose, and presented them to her that afternoon as if they were sweets on a
tray, and she wonders how long he spent selecting them, and if he ever saw the irony of using the speech of a liar as he reeled her in ever so sweetly inch by inch.
Safado! she writes in her journal on the day she understands what a fool she’s been. It is a fine Portuguese word for which there is no English equivalent. Con man, Don Juan, liar, libertine, gigolo, philanderer, womanizer, rake, cad: all fall short.
PART 2
Betrayals
Carrie
The Kansas Territory, September 1856
The night is passing swiftly and dawn is almost upon us. Already the east is tinged with red and choked with huge thunderheads that are turning purple and gold. The violence of the sunrise makes me think of blood and slaughter. I am not a violent person by nature, but I will fight Henry Clark and his band of border ruffians with every ounce of strength, cunning, and courage God gives me.
I have no military training. I am only leading the men into Missouri because I know the way to Beau Rivage. My father taught me to track anything that doesn’t fly, and even though my skills were honed in the jungles of Brazil, I can easily see the signs of men passing over the prairie. The long grasses bend and break, campfires leave indelible traces, horses rub themselves against trees more gently than buffalo, and there are fewer trees to inspect. As for foot and hoofprints: in the Amazon it rains constantly, but here the land can go for days without being thoroughly soaked. When rain does come, the result is a muddy gumbo that catches prints and dries like unfired pottery, so reading a trail isn’t much harder than reading a book of nursery rhymes.
It takes skill for a band of men on horseback to leave no trace, and Henry Clark and his band of border ruffians not only know nothing about hiding their tracks, they have no interest in doing so. After they massacred my friends and took those I love best captive, they rode toward the Missouri border drunk on arrogance and cheap whiskey. I tracked them to Beau Rivage like an invisible ghost and killed three before they reached the river.
Yet although I spread terror through their ranks, there were too many for one woman to defeat, so I had to return to Kansas for reinforcements. Clark’s Raiders are afraid of me now, but they still have their hostages. My greatest worry is that they will kill me, take the prisoners to a slave market, and sell them South. If they do, Ni has sworn to follow them to hell and back if necessary.
Ni is a better scout than I will ever be. His slave name was Toby, but after he escaped from his master, he went to live with the Kaw Indians, whose name, he tells me means People of the South Wind. The Kaw treated him well, and before they were driven off their lands onto the reservation, they sent him on a vision quest. Now he calls himself Ni, which means water in Kaw.
Like me, he has a special reason for risking his life: His wife, Jane, and his two little daughters are Clark’s prisoners. I say “wife” even though slaves are not legally permitted to marry. Jane is more Ni’s wife than I was ever Deacon’s even though I was fool enough to marry Deacon in church in a white dress, surrounded by flowers and witnesses.
The courage of Ni and his companions humbles me. Even if I am captured, the slavers probably will not hang me, although the penalty for helping slaves escape is death. It would cause too great a scandal to execute a white woman, particularly the daughter-in-law of Senator Bennett Presgrove. So provided no one can prove I killed three of Clark’s men, I have a chance to survive. But the men who ride with me can expect nothing but execution or re-enslavement. At best they will be sold back into bondage, and they have all sworn to die rather than become slaves again.
They are fifteen in number, all ages, some nearly as white as their masters, some dark as Africans. Two, Andrew and Charles, are actually African-born “saltwater slaves,” smuggled into South Carolina twelve years ago, although the United States government has outlawed the importation of slaves since 1808.
John Brown secretly trained them to ride and shoot, and he trained them well. They were going to be the cavalry of his secret army, and he planned to have them lead the slave insurrection that he believes will ignite a second American Revolution. If they make it back from Beau Rivage alive, they may indeed help end slavery in the United States, but in the next few days their aim and mine is to end it on a much smaller scale.
The oldest of my companions is forty-two; the youngest not more than fifteen. The fifteen-year-old’s name is Spartacus, by which you may deduce he was not named by his master. My friend Elizabeth Newberry named all three of her sons after the leaders of great slave rebellions: Prosser, Toussaint, and Spartacus. Nine days ago, Clark killed Prosser and Toussaint, so although I have pleaded with Spartacus not to ride with us, arguing that he is not old enough, he tells me defiantly that he is not too young to die if it means evening up the score.
Spartacus and the others are armed with Beecher’s Bibles, those fine rifled muskets that New England minister Henry Beecher supplies to anti-slavery immigrants heading to Kansas. I doubt Reverend Beecher ever imagined his guns would fall into the hands of a guerilla band composed of escaped slaves, but having met him personally, I believe he would approve. None of us have uniforms, because the federal government has not yet recognized it is involved in a war with the slaveholding South. We wear what we can. I have put on one of my lover’s old flannel shirts and a pair of his trousers, Ni wears buckskin leggings, the others wear the clothes they were wearing when they escaped from their masters or clothes that have been given to them since. One is dressed in an old jacket of John Brown’s, out at the elbows but still serviceable.
Before we set out, I want to list the men by name because if any fall in the coming battle, I am determined to build a memorial to them in Lawrence, just as we have built memorials to honor the soldiers who fell in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War.
They are: Abel, Andrew, Bilander, Caesar, Cush, Charles, Ebenezer, Ishmael, Jack, Jordan, Marcellus, Ni, Peet, Samuel, and Spartacus. Only Spartacus has a last name because, unlike the others, he was born free. The rest have no desire to adopt the names of their former masters, although several are considering taking the name “Brown” in honor of the man who trained them in the art of warfare.
I suspect that we are all afraid of what may happen once we cross into Missouri—I know I am—but we don’t discuss our fears. We have food, shoes, horses, and guns. We have a righteous cause and the will to succeed. We have each other.
Chapter Eight
Rio de Janeiro, March 1854
As The Frances Scott sails out of Guanabara Bay, Carrie stands at the stern and inhales for the last time the familiar, earthy scent of wet jungles, perfumed flowers, and wood smoke. She sees the jagged heights of the coastal mountains, their slopes covered with coffee plantations, and the city, which has taken the drunken heaving of the shoreline and marshaled it into a bank of low white houses, factories, warehouses, and church spires. By the docks, hundreds of tall-masted ships rock in unison as slow swells move under them and speed on to crash against beaches the color of unrefined sugar.
Carrie watches until she can no longer make out the faces of the friends who came down to the docks to see her off. Then she turns and walks toward the bow of the ship. For the first time in many days she finds herself alone. Deacon is down in their cabin tending to the luggage, her fellow passengers are nowhere in sight, and the crew is too busy to pay attention to her.
She stands in the bow until the ship has sailed out of the bay into the open sea. When she walks back to the stern for one more look at Rio, all she can see is a low, dark smear on the horizon. She is just preparing to go below and join Deacon when something moves inside her. Clapping her hand over her belly, she feels a light tapping sensation like the soft beating of butterfly wings. For a moment she stands there puzzled. Then, suddenly, she understands.
“Hello, my darling,” she whispers to her unborn child, and all at once, she feels a rush of joy and grief so tangled together that she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Chapter Nine
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The sun sinks into a bank of clouds, night descends on the ocean, and everywhere Carrie looks, water and sky meet in seamless blackness. Propping the porthole open so the sea breezes can enter the cabin, she goes back to the table and sits down. To her left, a small glass inkwell dances on brass gimbals. To her right lies a pile of blank paper weighted down by an opalescent, spiraled shell.
Picking up the shell, she examines it. It’s as intricate as the cross section of seed pod. Where did it come from? Not from Brazil. Perhaps it washed up on a beach on the other side of the world. If she holds it to her ear, will she hear the ocean roar? She puts the shell to her ear and is rewarded with a pulsing sound, but the sound of the real ocean is much louder.
Putting the shell aside, she picks up the flowered shawl William intended as a wedding present and throws it around her shoulders. The touch of the silk against her skin makes her sad. Perhaps she should put the shawl away, yet every time she wears it, she feels as if William is holding her. Will she remember him less often and be happier if she gives up the only gift he left her besides their baby? Running the hem of the shawl between her fingers, she decides the price of happiness is too high.
There are three pens in the penholder. The nib of the first one she selects is so badly splayed it must have been used to tighten screws, but the next is brand-new. Taking a sheet of paper from the top of the pile, she dips the tip of the pen into the inkwell, and begins to write the first of eight letters:March 17, 1854
Dearest Mama,
I am writing to you because I need someone to confide in, and there is no one on this ship I can trust not to judge me. I lack the talent so many women have of working by indirection. I have always been too plainspoken for my own good. You and Papa always taught me to say what was on my mind and damn the consequences, but as I grow older I find this is a trait more suitable for a man than a woman.