North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  “Good-bye, Captain Main.”

  “It’s a little late, but please call me Charles.”

  “Then you must call me Augusta.”

  He grinned. “That’s pretty formal. We had nicknames at West Point. How about Gus?”

  It was one of those things quickly said because it came to mind the same way and seemed clever and inconsequential. She sat up as if touched by something hot.

  “As a matter of fact, my brother always used that name. I detested it.”

  “Why? It suits you. Gus would work in her own fields, but I doubt Augusta would.”

  “Sir, I admit your gen’ral rule—”

  “How’s that?” Then he realized she must be quoting that damn Pope. Sweet and dangerous, her smile shone.

  “—that every poet is a fool. But you yourself may serve to show it, that every fool is not a poet. Good-bye, Captain.”

  “Wait, now,” he called, but the chance for apology left as fast as the buggy. She whipped up the horse, jolted out of the dooryard, and turned south. On the porch, the farmer nudged his wife. Ambrose approached with an air of mock gloom.

  “Charlie, you put both feet in your mouth clear to the ankles that time. Had a nice spark struck with that little widow, too. ’Course, I don’t think a gal’s very feminine if she hoes a potato patch or has a vinegar tongue or a name like Gus, for that mat—”

  “Shut the hell up, Ambrose. I’ll never see her again, so what difference does it make? She can’t take a joke, but she sure can hand ’em out. The hell with Mr. Pope. Her, too.”

  He saddled Sport, touched his shako to salute the farm couple, and rode like a Tatar toward the south. Ambrose had to hold his shako and spur his bay just to keep Charles in sight.

  After about five miles, Charles cooled down and slowed down. During the next hour he silently examined details of his various conversations with Mrs. Damned Highbrow Widow Augusta Barclay, whom he continued to find devilishly attractive despite the poor note on which they had parted. She shouldn’t have been so quick to pounce on an innocent gaffe. She was no more perfect than anybody else.

  He wished he could see her again, patch things up. Impossible to do that any time soon, not with a battle brewing. The actions of the Yankee lieutenant, Prevo, had restored his faith in the possibility of a gentleman’s war, conducted with gentleman’s rules. Maybe one huge affray would get it over with, and then he could look up the young widow, whom he could no longer think of, unfortunately, by any name except Gus.

  28

  THE THIRTEENTH OF JULY fell on a Saturday. Constance had one more day to finish packing for the trip to Washington.

  George had gone earlier in the week, with obvious reluctance. The night before his departure he had been restless, finally jumping up and leaving for ten minutes. He returned with several sprigs of mountain laurel from the hills behind Belvedere. He slipped the laurel into a valise without explanation, but Constance needed none.

  Brett would remain in charge of the household, Wotherspoon of the ironworks, and George’s local attorney, Jupiter Smith, would push the bank organization ahead. All three had been urged to telegraph at once in case of emergency, so Constance had no fear of leaving important matters to drift.

  Yet on this sunny Saturday, she was cross. There was too much to pack, and her two best party dresses, neither of which she had tried on for a month, fit too tightly. She hadn’t realized it, but in her contentment, and despite the war, she had enjoyed life too much lately and put on weight. Usually blunt on other subjects, George hadn’t said a word. But the despicable evidence—the small melon bulge of her stomach, the new thickness of her thighs—confronted her when she inspected herself in a mirror.

  Late in the morning, Bridgit hesitantly entered the luggage-strewn bedroom to find Constance muttering and attempting to jam folded garments into an overflowing trunk. “Mrs. Hazard? There is”—the normally outgoing girl was whispery and strangely pale—“a visitor in the kitchen asking for you.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Bridgit, don’t bother me about some tradesman when I’m busy with—”

  “Ma’am, please. It—isn’t a tradesman.”

  “Who is it? You’re acting as though you’ve seen Beelzebub himself.”

  Hushed: “It is Mr. Hazard’s sister.”

  Save for the unexpected death of George or one of the children, no more stunning blow could have fallen on Constance. As she rushed downstairs, strands of red hair flying, her customary calm crumbled. She was astonished, baffled, outraged. That Virgilia Hazard dared to return to Belvedere almost defied belief. How could it be—how—after all she had done to embarrass the family and create friction between the Hazards and the Mains?

  Virgilia’s history was one of warped independence. Involving herself in the abolition movement—as Constance had done by operating an underground railroad stop in a shed on the grounds of Hazard Iron—Virgilia had gravitated to the movement’s most extreme wing. She had appeared in public with black men who were not merely friends or associates in her work but lovers.

  On a visit to Mont Royal, she had betrayed the hospitality of the Main family by helping one of their slaves escape. She had later lived in poverty with the man, whose name was Grady, in the stews of Philadelphia; both were social outcasts because of it. She had helped her common-law husband take part in the raid on Harpers Ferry led by the infamous John Brown, who had held and expressed views as extreme and violent as her own.

  Virgilia hated all things Southern, and never was that better demonstrated than when Orry made his dangerous trip to Lehigh Station to repay part of the ship-construction loan. Virgilia had summoned the mob to Belvedere, and only George and a gun had held them off. That very night, George had ordered his sister away forever. Now, incredibly, she was back. She deserved—

  Stop, Constance thought, standing still in front of the closed kitchen door. Control. Compassion. Try. She smoothed two stray wisps of hair into place, steadied her breathing, prayed silently, then crossed herself and opened the door.

  The kitchen, where the daily bread was baking and a pink loin of pork lay half trimmed on the block, was empty except for the visitor. Through a back window Constance glimpsed William shooting at a target bale with his bow and arrows.

  The bread fragrance, the loin and cleaver, the hanging utensils and polished pots, all the homely furniture of family sustenance seemed desecrated by the creature standing near the door with a carpetbag so dirty its pattern could not be seen. Virgilia’s dress was nearly as filthy. The shawl around her shoulders had holes in it. How dare you, Constance thought, momentarily out of control again.

  Virgilia Hazard, thirty-seven, had a squarish face lightly marred by a few pox scars left from childhood. Buxom in the past, she was thin now, almost emaciated. Her skin had a yellow pallor, and her eyes were dumb lumps in the center of dark, sunken sockets. She smelled of sweat and other abominable things. Constance was glad Brett was down in Lehigh Station with cook, shopping. She might have torn Virgilia to pieces. Constance felt like it.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “May I wait for George? I must see him.”

  How small her voice sounded. It had lost the perpetual arrogance Constance remembered with such distaste. She began to see the hurt in Virgilia’s eyes. Joy ignited like a flame inside her, burning till shame and her own better nature put it out.

  “Your brother has gone to Washington to work for the government.”

  “Oh.” She squeezed her eyes shut a moment.

  “How is it possible that you’re here, Virgilia?”

  Virgilia tilted her head forward to acknowledge the accusation in the question and the anger Constance couldn’t keep out of her voice. “May I sit down on that stool? I really am not feeling well.”

  “Yes, all right, go ahead,” Constance said after hesitating. Without thinking, she moved to the great wood block and put her hand on the cleaver. Virgilia sank to the stool with the slowness of a person much older. With a sh
ock, Constance saw what she was touching and pulled her hand back. Outside, William whooped and ran to the target to pull three arrows from the bull’s-eye.

  Constance pointed at the carpetbag. “Is that the one you took in April? The one you filled with my best silver pieces? You disgraced this family in nearly every conceivable way and then you found one more. You stole.”

  Virgilia folded her hands in her lap. How much weight had she lost? Forty pounds? Fifty? “I had to live,” she said.

  “That may be a reason. It isn’t a justification. Where have you been since you left?”

  “Places I’d be ashamed to tell you about.”

  “Yet you presume to come back here—”

  Glinting tears appeared in Virgilia’s eyes. Impossible, Constance thought. She never cried for anyone but her black lover.

  “I’m sick,” Virgilia whispered. “I’m hot and so dizzy I can barely stand. Coming up the hill from the depot I thought I’d faint.” She swallowed, then gave the ultimate explanation. “I have no place else to go.”

  “Won’t your fine abolitionist friends take you in?”

  The disfiguring sneer came unconsciously, and in its wake, more shame. You must stop. This time the warning served. There was no humanity in venting such feelings and nothing to be gained. Virgilia was a beaten creature.

  Answering at last, she said, “No. Not any longer.”

  “What do you want here?”

  “A place to stay. Time to rest. Recover. I was going to beg George—”

  “I told you, he’s taken an army commission in Washington.”

  “Then I’ll beg you, if that’s what you want, Constance.”

  “Be quiet!” Constance spun and covered her eyes. She was stern but composed when she again faced Virgilia after a minute. “You can stay only a short time.”

  “All right.”

  “A few months at most.”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  “And George mustn’t know. Did William see you arrive?”

  “I don’t think so. I was careful, and he was busy with his archery—”

  “I’m leaving to join George tomorrow and taking the children. They mustn’t see you. So you’ll stay in one of the servants’ rooms until we go. That way, I’ll be the only person required to lie.”

  Virgilia shuddered; it was cuttingly said. Try as she would, Constance couldn’t dam everything inside. She added, “If George were to discover you’re here, I know he’d order you out again.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Brett is staying here, too. While Billy’s in the army.”

  “I remember. I’m glad Billy’s fighting. I’m glad George is doing his part, too. The South must be utterly—”

  Constance snatched the cleaver and slammed the flat of it on the block. “Virgilia, if you utter so much as one word of that ideological garbage you’ve heaped on us for years, I will turn you out myself, instantly. Others may have a moral right to speak against slavery and slaveowners, but you don’t. You aren’t fit to sit in judgment of a single human soul.”

  “I’m sorry. I spoke without thinking. I’m sorry. I won’t—”

  “That’s right, you won’t. I’ll have trouble enough persuading Brett to let you stay at Belvedere while I’m gone and she’s in charge. If she weren’t a decent person, I’d have no chance of doing it. But you mustn’t question my terms—”

  “No.”

  She struck the block with her palm. “You must accept every one.”

  “Yes.”

  “—or you’ll go out the same way you came. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes. Yes.” Virgilia bowed her head, and the word blurred as she repeated it. “Yes.”

  Constance covered her eyes again, still confused, still wrathful. Virgilia’s shoulders started to shake. She cried, almost without sound at first, then more loudly. It was a kind of whimpering; animal. Constance, too, felt dizzy as she hurried to the back door and made certain it was shut tightly so her son wouldn’t hear.

  29

  “I REQUIRE AND CHARGE you both, as ye will answer at the day of judgment—”

  Other voices suddenly rose to compete with that of the Reverend Mr. Saxton, rector of the Episcopal parish. Standing beside Madeline in the finest, and hottest, suit he owned, Orry looked swiftly toward the open windows.

  Madeline wore a simple but elegant summer dress of white lawn. The slaves had been given a free day and invited to listen to the ceremony from the piazza. About forty bucks and wenches had gathered in the sunshine. The house men and women, being, and expecting to be treated as, members of a higher caste, were permitted in the parlor, though only one person was seated there now: Clarissa.

  “—that if either of you know any impediment why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony—”

  The quarrel outside grew noisier. Two men, with others commenting. Someone yelled.

  “—ye do now confess it. For be ye well assured—”

  The rector faltered, lost his place in the prayer book, coughed twice, exhaling a whiff of the sherry taken beforehand in company with the nervous bride and groom. Before bringing Madeline to the parlor, Orry had jokingly said that Francis LaMotte might show up to object to their marrying so soon after Justin’s funeral.

  “Be ye well assured—” the Reverend Mr. Saxton resumed as the volume of the shouting increased. A man started to curse. Orry recognized the voice. His face dark red, he bent toward the rector.

  “Excuse me for a moment.”

  His mother gave him a bright smile as he strode past and out into the hot sunshine. A semicircle of blacks faced the combatants in the drive. Orry heard Andy.

  “Leave him be, Cuffey. He did nothing to—”

  “Hands off me, nigger. He pushed me.”

  “Was you that pushed me,” a weaker voice replied, a slave named Percival.

  Unnoticed behind the spectators, Orry shouted: “Stop it.”

  A pigtailed girl screamed and jumped. The crowd shifted back, and he saw Cuffey, ragged and sullen, standing astraddle Percival’s legs. The frail slave had fallen or been pushed to a sitting position against the wheel of a cart. In the cart, beneath a tarpaulin, were eight pairs of candlesticks and two sets of hearth irons, all brass; Orry was sending them to a Columbia foundry in answer to the Confederacy’s appeal for metal.

  Andy stood a yard behind Cuffey. He wore clean clothes, as did all the others. It was a special day at Mont Royal. Orry strode straight to Cuffey.

  “This is my wedding day, and I don’t take kindly to an interruption. What happened here?”

  “It’s this nigger’s fault,” Percival declared, indicating Cuffey. Andy gave him a hand up. “He came struttin’ in after the preacher had already started and the rest of us was listenin’. He got here late, but he wanted to see better so he pushed and shoved me.

  Cuffey was caught, which made him all the madder. Hate shone before he averted his eyes, trying to soften or prevent punishment by mumbling, “I din’t push him. Haven’t been feelin’ good—kind of dizzy, like. I just stumbled an’ knocked him down. Haven’t been feelin’ good,” he repeated in a lame way.

  Over derisive groans from some of the others, Percival said, “He’s been feelin’ snake-mean, like every other day. Nothin’ else wrong with him.” As protocol demanded, Orry glanced at his head driver for a verdict.

  “Percival’s telling it right,” Andy said.

  “Cuffey, look at me.” When he did, Orry continued. “Two tasks each day for a week. A task and a half every day for a week after that. See that he does them, Andy.”

  “I will, Mr. Orry.”

  Cuffey fumed but didn’t dare speak. Orry wheeled and stomped back to the house.

  Soon after, he and Madeline joined right hands while the rector said, “That ye may so live together in this life that in the world to come ye may have life everlasting. Amen.”

  In their bedroom that night, Madeline reached through the dark to find him. �
��My goodness, you’d think the bridegroom had never been with the bride before.”

  “Not as a husband he hasn’t,” Orry said, sitting beside her; his hair-matted thigh touched the smoothness of hers. A bright, cloudless night filled the room with light that spilled softly over them while they sat kissing and touching. The tips of her breasts were as dark as her hair and eyes; the rest of her was marble.

  She laid both arms over his shoulders and clasped her hands. Kissed him. “Lord, but I do love you.”

  “I love you, Mrs. Main.”

  “It is real, isn’t it? I never thought it would be—” She laughed low. “Mrs. Main. How grand it sounds.”

  Another long, ardent kiss, his hand on her breast.

  “I’m sorry that muss happened during the ceremony. I ought to sell Cuffey. I don’t want him causing trouble when I go to Richmond.”

  “Mr. Meek will be here to handle him then.”

  “Hope so.” No reply had arrived from North Carolina as yet. “I trust Meek won’t live up to his name. Cuffey needs a strong hand.”

  Madeline caressed his cheek. “As soon as you’re settled in Virginia, I’ll join you. Till then, everything will be fine here. Andy’s a good, trustworthy man.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Darling, don’t worry so.” Saying that, she turned herself. The bed creaked as she brought the white of belly and breast into the pale glow from outdoors. They lay back gently; she touched him with her hip. Mouth against his face, she murmured, “Not tonight. A husband must attend to certain duties, you know.”

  Drowsing afterward, both woke to a wild, raw sound out in the night.

  “Dear God, what’s that?” She started up, bracing her hands on the sheet.

  The cry came again, then went echoing away. They heard birds roused in the night thickets. Downstairs a house woman called an anxious question. The sound wasn’t repeated.

  Madeline shuddered. “It sounded like some wild animal.”

  “It’s a panther cry. That is, an imitation of one. Now and again the nigras will use it to frighten white people.”

  “There’s no one here who would want to do such a—”