by John Jakes
She drew back. “How has the day been?”
“Good. War or no war, these past weeks have been the happiest I’ve ever known.”
She sighed a murmurous agreement, twining her fingers in his as they stood with foreheads touching. Madeline was a full-bosomed woman with lustrous dark eyes and hair and a richly contrasting pale complexion. “Justin has the means to make me a tiny bit happier, I confess.”
“I’m sure we’ll overcome that obstacle.” The truth was, he wasn’t sure, but he never admitted it. Over her shoulder he studied the parcel. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know. It’s addressed to you. It came up from the dock an hour ago.”
“That’s right, the river sloop was due today—”
“Captain Asnip sent a note with the package. He said it arrived on the last vessel into Charleston before the blockade began. I did notice it carries the name of a transshipping firm in Nassau. Do you know what’s in it?”
“I might.”
“You ordered it, then. Let’s unwrap it.”
Unexpected panic banished his smile. What if the sight of the contents upset her? He tucked the package under his right arm. “Later. I’ll show you while we have supper. I want to display it properly.”
“Mystery, mystery.” She laughed as he strode away upstairs.
For the evening, he replaced his bedraggled outfit with a similar but clean one. His dark hair, over which he had poured two pitchers of water before he toweled it, had a soft, loose look. It was dusk as they sat down to dine. Blurry candles, upside-down images of the real ones, glowed in the highly buffed plane of the table. A small black boy amiably stirred the air and whisked flies off with an ostrich fan. Clarissa had eaten in her room, as she usually did, and retired.
“This smells grand,” Orry said, touching a fork to the golden crust of the delicacy cooked in half of a big oyster shell. “Blue crab?”
“Netted in the Atlantic yesterday. I ordered two barrels in ice. They came on the packet boat. So much for gastronomy, Mr. Main. I want to see the package.” It lay on the floor near him, the outer wrapping gone; oiled cloth was visible.
Studiously digging into the freshly picked and baked crab, he teased her with his straight face and low-voiced “Delicious.”
“Orry Main, you’re intolerable! Will you show me if I tell you some news about Justin?”
Sober suddenly, he laid his fork aside. “Good news?”
“Oh, nothing concerning the divorce, I’m afraid. Just something funny and a little sad.” She relayed what she’d heard from one of the kitchen girls who had done an errand to Resolute earlier that day.
“In the rear,” Orry mused. “A direct hit on the seat of the LaMotte family’s prestige, eh?”
She laughed. “Your turn now.” He broke two red wax seals and unwrapped the package. When she saw what the oiled cloth contained, she gasped.
“It’s beautiful. Where is it from?”
“Germany. I ordered it for Charles and hoped it would get through.”
He handed her the scabbarded weapon. With great care, she grasped the leather grip wound with brass wire. She drew out the curved blade; the fan boy’s eyes grew round as he watched the candlelight reflect on the filligreed steel. Orry explained that it was a light cavalry saber, the approved 1856 design: forty-one inches overall.
Madeline tilted the blade to read the engraved inscription on the obverse: To Charles Main, beloved of his family, 1861. She gave him a long, affectionate look, then examined the other side. “I can’t read this. Is it Cluberg?”
“Clauberg of Solingen. The maker. One of the finest in Europe.”
“There are many tiny engraved flowers and curves—even medallions with the letters C. S. in them.”
“On certain versions of this model, the letters are U.S.,” he said with a dry smile.
Still treating the sword as if it were glass, she returned it to the gilt-banded scabbard of blue iron. Then, avoiding his eyes, she said, “Perhaps you should have ordered one for yourself.”
“In case I accept the commission?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, but that’s a cavalry sword. I couldn’t wear it even if I decided to—”
“Orry,” she interrupted, “you’re evading. You’re evading me and evading a decision.”
“I plead guilty to the latter,” he admitted with an expression swift to come and go but revealing all the same. He was hiding something from her—behavior not typical of him. “I can’t go to Richmond yet. There are too many things standing in the way. Foremost is your situation here.”
“I can look after myself splendidly—as you well know.”
“Now don’t get tart with me. Of course I know it. But there’s also Mother to consider.”
“I can look after her, too.”
“Well, you can’t run this plantation without an overseer. The Mercury printed my advertisement again. Did the packet boat bring any replies?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then I must keep searching. I’ve got to raise a good crop this year if I’m to contribute anything to the government—which I agreed to do by signing those papers today. I won’t even think of Richmond till I find the right man to take over.”
Later they went to the library. From the shelves Tillet Main had furnished with works of quality, they chose a finely bound Paradise Lost. During the years when they had met in secret, they had frequently read poetry aloud; the verse rhythms sometimes became a poor substitute for those of love-making. Living together, they discovered such reading still brought pleasure.
They took places on a settee Orry had moved in just for this purpose. He was always on Madeline’s left so that he could hold that side of the book. A dim corner of the room contained the stand on which he had hung one of his army uniforms after he came home from Mexico. The coat had both sleeves intact. Orry seldom glanced at the coat any longer, for which she was thankful.
He leafed through the poem’s first book until he found a bit of paper between pages. “Here’s the place.” He cleared his throat and began in the middle of line 594:
“… As when the sun new ris’n
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams …”
Madeline took it up, her voice murmurous in the near-dark:
“… or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.”
“Lesser folk, too,” he said. She laid the book in her lap as he continued, “Cooper claims we got into this war because the South refused to accept the changes taking place in the country. I remember in particular his saying that we couldn’t deal with either the necessity for change or its inevitability.” He patted the book. “It seems John Milton understood.”
“Will the war really change anything, though? When it’s over, won’t things be pretty much as they were?”
“Some of our leaders would like to believe so. I don’t.”
But he didn’t want to spoil the evening with melancholy speculation; he kissed her cheek and suggested they continue reading. She surprised him by taking his face between her cool palms and gazing at him with eyes that shone with happy tears.
“Nothing will change this. I love you beyond life itself.”
Her mouth pressed his, opening slightly; the kiss was long and full of sweet sharing. He brought his hand up and tangled it in her hair. She leaned on his shoulder, whispering, “I’ve lost interest in British poets. Blow out the lights and let’s go upstairs.”
Next day, while Orry was in the fields, Madeline went hunting for a shawl she needed to mend. She and Orry shared a large walk-in wardrobe adjoining his bedroom; she searched for the shawl there.
Behind a row of hanging frock coats he never wore she spied a familiar package. She had last seen the presentation saber downstairs in the library. Why on earth had he brought it up here and hidden�
��?
She caught her breath, then reached behind the coats and lifted the package out. Its red wax seals were unbroken. No wonder he hadn’t been amused when she teased him about a second sword.
She replaced the package and carefully shifted the coats in front of it again. She would keep her discovery to herself and let him speak to her in his own good time. But there was no longer any doubt about his intentions.
And with fear of change perplexes monarchs. Remembering the line, she stood near the room’s single oval window, rubbing her forearms as if to warm them.
18
A SINKING SUN BLED red light through the office windows next evening. Orry sweated at the desk, tired but needing to finish the purchase list for his factor in Charleston. He had been forced to move his business back to the Fraser company, which had served his father, because Cooper had transferred the assets of the family shipping firm to the Navy Department. Cooper held all the CSC stock, and so had a perfect right to do it. But it was damn inconvenient, requiring another adjustment on Orry’s part.
There would be more to come, if he could judge from the last letter from Fraser’s. It had been stamped with a crude wood-block indicia reading PAID 5¢. It was a splendid example of the annoying little matters of nationhood left over once the shouting stopped. The regular federal service had gone on handling Southern mail right through June first. But now a new Confederate postmaster was scrambling to create an organization and, presumably, print stamps. Till some showed up, states and municipalities produced their own.
Fraser’s had owed him a refund from a past transaction. They had sent partial payment in the form of new Confederate bills, all very pretty and bucolic with their engravings of a goddess of agriculture and cheerful Negroes working a cotton field. The bills bore a line of tiny type reading Southern Bank Note Co. The letter from Fraser’s commented, “The bills are printed in N.Y.—don’t ask us how.” A clever man could have deduced it from the one-thousand-dollar note enclosed. It carried portraits of John Calhoun and Andrew Jackson. Obviously the damnfool Yankees who designed the bill hadn’t read history or heard of nullification.
Cities were printing paper money, too. Orry’s representative at Fraser’s had enclosed a sample—a bizarre Corporation of Richmond bill bearing a heroic portrait of the governor on pink paper in the denomination of fifty cents. Few secessionists had bothered their addled heads about practical consequences of the deed.
“Orry—oh, Orry—such news!”
Madeline burst into the office, picked up her crinoline-stiffened skirt, and did a wholly uncharacteristic dance around the room while he recovered from his surprise. She was giggling—giggling—while she jigged. Tears ran down her face and caught the dark red light.
“I shouldn’t be happy—God will strike me dead—but I am. I am!”
“Madeline, what—?”
“Maybe He’ll forgive me this once.” She pressed an index finger beneath her nose but still couldn’t stop giggling. More tears flowed. “I’ll—ask Him—if I ever—get over this—”
“Have you lost your senses?”
“Yes!” She seized his hand, pulled him up, waltzed him around. “He’s dead!”
“Who?”
“Justin! I know it’s—shameful—to feel like this. He—” she gripped her sides, rocking back and forth—“was a human being—”
Only by the broadest definition, Orry thought. “You’re not mistaken?”
“No, no—one of the housemen saw Dr. Lonzo Sapp on the river road. Dr. Sapp had just come from Resolute. My husband—” calming, she wiped away tears, gulped, and spoke more coherently—“drew his last breath this morning. The gunshot wound somehow spread an infection that poisoned his whole system. I’m free of him.” She flung her arms around Orry’s neck, leaning back in a great arch of joy. “We’re free. I am so unbearably happy, and so ashamed of it.”
“Don’t be. Francis will mourn him, but no one else.” He began to feel a mounting elation, an urge to laugh. “God will have to forgive me, too. It’s funny in a grim way. The little peacock fatally shot in the ass—excuse me—by one of his own men—”
“There was nothing funny about Justin.” Her back was toward the window and the burst of red light, making it hard to see her face. But he had no trouble imagining it as her voice dropped. “He was a vile man. They can fling me into hell, but I won’t attend his funeral.”
“Nor I.” Orry leaned his right palm on the list for Fraser’s; it no longer seemed important. “How soon can we be married?”
“It must be soon. I refuse to wait and play the grieving widow. After the wedding we can organize matters so you can accept that commission.”
“I’m still determined to find an overseer before I decide.” She glanced away as he went on. “Things are too unsettled around here. Geoffrey Bull came over from his place this afternoon very upset. Two nigras he considered to be his most loyal and trustworthy ran away yesterday.”
“Did they go north?”
“He presumes they did. Read the Mercury and you’ll see it’s happening all the time. Fortunately, not to us.”
“But we don’t lack for problems. I can think of at least one—the young man you chose for head driver when Rambo died of influenza last winter.”
“Cuffey?”
She nodded. “I’ve only been here a short time, but I’ve noticed a change. He’s not merely cocky; he’s angry. He doesn’t bother to hide it.”
“All the more reason to put off any decision till I locate an overseer.” He drew her against his side. “Let’s go to the house, pour some claret, and discuss a wedding.”
Long after Madeline went to sleep that night, Orry lay awake. He had minimized the problems with the slaves because he hated to admit a plantation as humanely run as Mont Royal could be experiencing difficulties. Of course Cooper would have scoffed at his naïveté, arguing that no practitioner of slavery could rightly think of himself as kind, just, or morally clean.
Be that as it may, Orry felt a change in the atmosphere on the plantation. It had begun a few days after the start of hostilities. Supervising field work from horseback, Orry heard a name muttered and later decided he was meant to hear it. The name was Linkum.
Serious trouble had struck not long after Madeline’s arrival. The trouble had roots in an earlier tragedy. Last November, Cuffey, in his middle twenties and not yet promoted to head driver, had become the father of twin girls. Cuffey’s wife, Anne, had a hard confinement; one of the twins lived thirty minutes.
The other, a frail, dark little thing named Clarissa after Orry’s mother, had been buried on the third of May this year. Orry had learned of it when he and Madeline returned from a two-night stay in Charleston, where shops and restaurants were thriving and spirits were high in the wake of the fall of the fort in the harbor. Orry drove their carriage back to Mont Royal in a thunderstorm, along a river road almost impassably muddy. They arrived at nightfall to find candles and lamps lit throughout the great house and Orry’s mother wandering the rooms with a lost look.
“I believe there has been a death,” she said.
Learning some of the details from the house help, he set off to walk the three-quarters of a mile to the slave community. The whitewashed cottages showed lights in the rain, but there was a noticeable absence of activity. Soaked, he climbed to the porch of Cuffey’s cabin and knocked.
The door opened. Orry was shocked by the silence of the handsome young slave and by his sullen stare. He heard a woman crying softly.
“Cuffey, I just learned about your daughter. I am terribly sorry. May I come in?”
Unbelievably, Cuffey shook his head. “My Anne don’t feel good right now.”
Angered, Orry wondered whether it was because of her loss or something else. He had heard rumors that Cuffey mistreated his wife. Exercising restraint, he said, “I’m sorry about that, too. In any case, I did want to express—”
“Rissa died ’cause you weren’t here.”
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�What?”
“None of them uppity house niggers would fetch the doctor, an’ your momma couldn’t understand I needed her to write a pass so’s I could go get him. I argued and begged her most part of an hour, but she just shook her head like a crazy person. I took a chance and ran for the doctor myself, no pass or nothing. But when we got back it was too late; Rissa was gone. The doc took one look an’ said typhoid fever and went away lickety-split. I had to bury her by myself. Little Rissa. Gone just like her sister. You’d been here, my baby would be alive.”
“Damn it, Cuffey, you can’t blame me for—”
Cuffey slammed the door. The rain dripped from the porch roof. The night pressed close, sticky and full of a sense of watching eyes.
Somewhere a contralto voice began a hymn, barely heard. Orry regretted what he must do but couldn’t let the defiance pass, not with so many observing him. He knocked hard the second time.
No answer.
He pounded the door. “Cuffey, open up.”
The door creaked back an inch. With his mud-slopped boot, Orry kicked it. Cuffey had to jump to avoid being struck.
“You listen to me,” Orry said. “I am deeply sorry your daughter died, but I refuse to have you defy me because of it. Yes, if I’d been here, I would have written the pass instantly or gone for the doctor myself. But I was not here, and I had no way of knowing about the emergency. So unless you want to be replaced as head driver, curb your tongue and don’t ever slam a door on me again.”
Still silence, filled with rain sounds. Orry grabbed the door frame. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Two lifeless words. By the pale gleam of an interior lamp, Orry saw Cuffey’s raging eyes. He suspected his warning had been wasted; he only hoped Cuffey would come to his senses quickly. If he didn’t, his bad example could cause more trouble. That was why Orry had taken such pains to warn him loudly.