“It isn’t right! It isn’t decent!” she cried. “Getting married in the night like this, sneaking off as if you’re ashamed!”
Denby was right behind her. His face was flushed. “Mother,” he cried sharply, “Roxanne’s going to be my wife; you might as well face it.”
Dismayed, Roxanne saw Denby’s whole family pour into the room behind him. His pale-eyed sisters lining up like spitting cats beside his sobbing mother. Behind them his older brother, looking uneasy, and his new wife, looking horrified.
“If you go with that woman, you’ll never come back!” cried his mother hysterically and burst into a storm of tears.
Traveling grip in hand, Denby stood in an agony of indecision, looking uncertainly from his mother to Roxanne. Roxanne realized then, if she had not before, that Denby, the youngest, was tied to Mama’s apron strings—and now that he wanted to break away he was finding those apron strings forged with gold and tears.
“Come on, Roxanne,” muttered Denby hoarsely, and grabbed her by the arm. Over his shoulder he called to his older brother, “Wire me the bank draft in Augusta—I’ll write where to send it. And where to send my trunk.”
Then they were out in the June night. Roxanne stopped. “Denby,” she began uncertainly, “are you sure you want to—”
“I’m sure,” he said roughly, and hurried her away.
They boarded the train, ate in the dining car, and sat up in the coach all night, talking. When the train reached Richmond in the early morning, they got off and waited for the Court House to open so they could get a marriage license. Roxanne, unsure of the law, lied about her age. She said she was twenty-one. The clerk grinned. They were married by a sleepy Justice of the Peace whose wife played the wedding march off-key on a squeaky organ.
They spent the day wandering around hilly Richmond, the old Confederate capital at the headwaters of the James. With Denby, Roxanne admired the Ionic columns of the State Capitol—a shining white temple for which Thomas Jefferson had sent a plaster model from France. When they strolled about Church Hill, Roxanne sighed over the Corinthian portico of the Church of the Confederacy, with its memories of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and a war that had cost her people all they had. They visited Chimborazo Park, named for a mountain in the Andes, which during the Civil War was the site of the world’s largest military hospital.
In the afternoon Denby took her shopping on Broad Street and over Roxanne’s protests bought her so many new clothes they had to purchase a small hand-trunk to carry them. She noticed that Denby grew increasingly edgy as the day wore on. He’s afraid to go to bed with me, thought Roxanne uneasily.
They registered in a mellow old red brick hotel, and Denby’s voice almost cracked as he fiercely asserted they were man and wife. The desk clerk hid a smile at the newlyweds and beckoned a cheerful black porter to carry their bags upstairs. Roxanne dressed carefully in the lovely new ready-made peach tea gown Denby had bought her. It was princess cut with triangular insets of matching peach lace that reached down a long bell-shaped skirt to a hem which culminated in a little train. It was a very hour-glassy dress; and Roxanne, her hair piled up luminously atop her head, her dainty chin carried as high above her white throat as any Gibson Girl’s, saw heads turn as she and Denby came down to dine in splendor in the sumptuous hotel dining room. Denby beamed around him expansively. He was enjoying the homage paid to Roxanne’s beauty.
When they were seated at the table, Roxanne wondered if she should tell Denby now that she was not a virgin. She stared at the silver bowl of roses that decorated the table and decided not to. Perhaps—perhaps he would be so inexperienced he would not know the difference. Her face burned at the thought.
“Are you too warm?” cried Denby. “Tomorrow I will buy you a fan.”
Roxanne shook her head. “It’s close in here,” she murmured.
He looked around him. “The overhead fans are going.”
Roxanne studied the menu. “This is terribly expensive,” she muttered. “Do you think we should—”
“Nonsense.” With a masterful gesture, Denby interrupted her to order Oysters Rockefeller, roast beef and wine from the white-jacketed black waiter who took their order. “We’re going to have the best, Roxanne;—nothing but the best. My brother is going to send me a bank draft for half of my share; he can’t raise it all, but he’ll send the rest next year. I’ll open a shop and you’ll wear only the finest gloves, Roxanne—all the women will envy you.”
Roxanne gave him a wistful smile. Denby was so enthusiastic. She hoped it would work out as he said and that he would succeed, whether other women envied her or not.
They lingered long at their dinner, and afterward, drinking champagne. Roxanne guessed that Denby was getting up his nerve. At last, he paid the check and rose, squaring his shoulders and swaggering a little. Meekly Roxanne accompanied him. When they reached the door of their third floor room, he unlocked it and then swung her up in his arms, carrying her over the threshold with a flourish.
As he kicked the door shut behind them, Roxanne closed her eyes. That closing door had shut out Rhodes forever, she told herself. She was Denby’s now; she belonged to him.
Denby stood her on her feet and gave her an uncertain look. With their backs to each other they undressed: Denby donning a nightshirt that reached to his knees, Roxanne slipping on a soft batiste nightgown with a white satin drawstring at the top that ran through embroidered holes about the round low neck.
Denby still had his back turned when Roxanne slipped into bed. Although it was a hot night, she instinctively pulled up the sheet around her neck. Denby turned and looked relieved to see her covered up. He drew back the sheet on his side and got in gingerly.
Roxanne turned toward him, her wide sapphire eyes regarding him solemnly. “Aren’t you going to turn out the light?” she asked.
Embarrassed, Denby leaped out of bed and put out the light. In total darkness he got back into bed. The heat was stifling.
“If you raise the shades,” suggested Roxanne, “the moonlight will come in.”
Again he rose with alacrity, and in a moment the oppressive heat was relieved by a cool breeze through the screen. The room was now flooded with moonlight—a soft caressing light that turned Roxanne’s dark-blond hair, spread out on the pillow, to gleaming silver, and made her eyes dark silvered pools. A man could drown in those eyes.
Roxanne saw Denby needed help. She gave him a tender smile and brushed away the sheet. With delicate fingers she pulled the satin drawstring that held up the top of her batiste gown. As the loosened material slid away from her shoulders and exposed the pearly hills of her breasts and the white valley between them, she heard Denby draw in his breath sharply.
“Roxanne . . he murmured and bent down to kiss her lips. She found it a sweet virginal kiss, and twining her slender hands around his neck, she drew him slowly to her. As their bodies met, a little sob of joy escaped him and he clasped her fervently to him.
Roxanne’s cheeks were wet with tears. It was wonderful to know she meant so much to Denby.
Wonderingly, his hands explored this vision that had come into his bed, and Roxanne felt her body respond to him as she held him fast and he murmured incoherent endearments into her hair.
And then he was clutching her with clumsy boyish passion, straining fiercely until, his passion quickly spent, he flung away from her and lay panting beside her, staring up at the ceiling. Roxanne, aroused but unfulfilled, stirred restlessly and gave him a troubled look; He sighed and turned his back. Moments later she heard his breathing grow shallow, rhythmic.
Denby was asleep.
Roxanne gave him a fond look, and told the tumult in her passionate woman’s body to be still. Turning over on her side, she tried to sleep. But aroused as she was, sleep did not come till morning. When she woke, sleepily opening her eyes, she saw that Denby was already dressed in the clothes he had worn yesterday and was standing with his back to her, feet wide apart, hands clasped behind him, st
aring out of the window.
As she moved, the bedsprings creaked and he turned. She saw that his face was crimson and upset.
“Roxanne, you aren’t—” He swallowed. “You weren’t—”
“A virgin,” she finished for him.
“Yes!” He said it loudly, giving her an accusing look. Roxanne stared at him in consternation. She sat up in bed and the covers fell away to reveal her soft rounded form. The top of her gown, with the satin drawstring opened, revealed one pink-tipped pearly breast. She was oblivious to her state of undress. Pushing back her shining disheveled hair, she regarded Denby with large serious blue eyes. “I thought—I thought you loved me enough for it not to make any difference,” she said finally.
An agony of doubt and torment crossed Denby’s face. “You should’ve told me,” he muttered, turning away. And then, as if the question were wrenched from him. “Who was it?”
“Does it matter?” she asked wearily. “I was attacked, Denby. It wasn’t my fault.”
He turned to gape at her. “Who?” he whispered.
“I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “It was long ago. In Kansas.”
“What happened?”
She thought about that. How could she explain? The tornado making death seem near and close . . . Buck’s tortured need to hold a woman in his arms . . . her own loneliness that cried out for a lover . . . Julie Smith’s emaciated face with its steady candid gray eyes swam before her accusingly. “I can’t talk about it,” she said, muffled. And then after a while, when he remained silent, “If you think I’ve cheated you, Denby, we can call it off.”
“Call it off!” he cried. “How can we call it off? We’re married, Roxanne!”
“We can be unmarried!” she snapped. “Oh, Denby, what does it matter? The only question is, do you still want me?”
When he was still silent, she got up in her thin nightgown and walked to the window to stand beside him letting the cool breeze blow the flimsy material about her waist and thighs. She sighed and, turning, brushed his arm with the tip of her soft breast. Denby jumped as if stung.
“Yes,” he said hoarsely. “I still want you.”
She looked up at him, and her expression was very solemn. “I was wrong not to tell you, Denby. I suppose I thought—I thought you loved me enough so that it wouldn’t matter.”
He gripped her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter!” His voice rang.
“Oh, Denby.” She moved forward into his arms and wrapped her arms about his neck. Her voice was husky. “I promise to be such a good wife to you. I promise to be faithful, Denby.”
Now thoroughly aroused, his eyes burned down into hers. “I believe you, Roxanne,” he said simply, and swept her up against him. He walked with her to the big bed and fell upon her hungrily, tasting the sweetness of her body as if he were starving. As he clung to her, she felt his tears fall on her cheek.
Roxanne, dry eyed and shaken that she should mean so much to Denby, held him fiercely. / will be faithful, she promised him silently. You were the only man I could turn to when everything went wrong. You stood with me against your family, and now you have forgiven me for this. Whatever happens, Denby, her heart swore, I will never betray you.
She caressed Denby with a new tenderness, rubbed her soft cheek against his to dry the tears born of his emotional struggle, murmured endearments against his ear, molded her body willingly to his, pressed her hips upward, straining toward him sweetly, and felt the breath expel from his lungs in a moment of bliss.
Denby, who had been so shy and hesitant last night, was now suddenly a wolfish lover, demanding, almost overbearing in asserting his marital rights. He held her in a grip that hurt—but she forgave him for it, and even smiled later when she looked down at the dark places that marred her white arms and shoulders, remembering the fierce passion that had driven him.
He loves me, she told herself. He is inexperienced in these matters. He was carried away and forgot that I am not made of leather like the gloves in which he takes such pride, but that I am made of flesh and bruise beneath rough fingers.
She did not know then that they were but the first of many bruises, to her flesh—and to her heart.
They lingered no longer in Richmond, but dressed and hurried to the train. And all the way south on the train, Denby—now exuding self confidence—chattered excitedly about what a wonderful place Augusta was. He’d never been there of course, but he’d heard all about it from a friend who’d been in the brickmaking industry. Clay products were very big in Augusta, he informed her importantly. And textiles.
He didn’t have to tell her that textiles were important. She knew that Augusta had been one of the capitals not only of Georgia but of the old cotton kingdom. But it was not Augusta’s mills or its railroads or its prosperity that quickened her heartbeat.
She was going home to Georgia. Back to the lovely, leisurely town of her birth, a town that sprawled along the river that flowed down to Savannah and the sea, a river down which she’d traveled as a little child, holding fast to her mother’s hand.
Denby was taking her home.
She was so grateful to him she lavished affection on him, and he swelled up with pride at these attentions, believing them a tribute to his prowess as a lover.
In that he was mistaken. Roxanne found him sadly lacking as a lover. He did not stir in her the white-hot passion which she had vaguely expected to find in marriage. Although she would not admit it to herself, she was not enamored of him, and his clumsy love-making only served to emphasize that fact.
But he had forgiven her the loss of her virginity and now he was taking her home to Georgia!
She could forgive him a deal for that.
Chapter 20
With his choice of Augusta, Denby was well content. Its mild climate, its ten-month growing season, its mills and manufactories and railroads all pleased him. And while he busied himself looking for a shop, Roxanne set out to explore a city of which she had only the vaguest memories.
On wide gracious streets she found the graceful Georgian and neoclassic homes of the “Old Money,” lovely homes that had been here when “Lighthorse Harry” Lee retook the city from the British in 1781, houses that had been brilliantly lit with candles and aswish with crinolines and satin knee breeches to greet visiting George Washington in 1791.
She passed the mansard-roofed, turreted and gingerbread-bedecked Victorian mansions of the “New Money” that Denby worshipped. Out of the Confederate debacle, Augusta had survived as an industrial city, a trading and railroad center where the soot of industry and puffing locomotives blackened the creamy magnolias. Here the clamor and bustle ruffled the leisurely ways of the Old South. Roxanne would have preferred the old ways; Denby, she knew, preferred the new.
Later she found herself passing a house she vaguely remembered, and paused to read a small sign of polished brass set into a mossy brick wall: Mrs. Barton’s Academy for Young Ladies.
Roxanne smiled. Here was the school where her mother had taught when they lived in Augusta so long ago. Roxanne had never believed Aunt Ada’s story that her mother had been dismissed by the headmistress because the woman’s husband took a fancy to her. Impulsively, she went through the iron archway opening in the high brick wall and rang the bell. To a black manservant in a white coat who answered, she identified herself and asked for Mrs. Barton.
As she waited she looked around her. The reception room with its regal fireplace and white wainscoting, both of which she remembered, were just the same. But . . . something was missing: the sound of girlish laughter, the light footsteps of the young. The school seemed to have shut down.
When an autocratic-looking woman leaning on a cane came into the room, Roxanne realized that she had made a mistake in coming. The woman took a long keen look at her visitor and an expression of intense dislike crossed her face. “You wanted to see me?” she snapped.
“My mother taught here,” explained Roxanne. “I remembered the school as I was passing
by and . . .” Her voice trailed off under that almost menacing stare. “And I thought I would call,” she added bravely.
Her hostess remained standing. She did not give an inch. “I closed the school this year,” she said coldly. “I should have taken down the sign.”
Roxanne flushed. Looking past the imposing woman standing before her, she saw a framed photograph on a marble-topped walnut table. A photograph of a man with a wicked smile and the eyes of a rogue. He would have been considerably older than her mother, had she lived, about the age of the woman before her. Mr.Barton, she guessed—the man with the roving eye. Now, looking into the headmistress’s face, she knew Aunt Ada’s story was true. She could almost feel animosity seething in the elderly woman. And although she realized that animosity was not really for her, but was because she looked so like her mother, it still made her very uncomfortable. Quickly Roxanne took her leave, her cheeks burning, and made her way rapidly down the street. In the future, she determined, she would give Mrs. Barton's residence a wide berth.
In her walks about the city, Roxanne also tried to avoid the busy port facilities on the Savannah River, for the river steamships and the tall white sailing ships reminded her too much of Baltimore . . . and Rhodes. He and Gavin had been cut out of the same bolt of cloth, she told herself savagely, and the devil with them both. But her mind unbidden conjured up pictures of Rhodes as she remembered him—strong and lighthearted and laughing. Rhodes, looking down at her with kind keen eyes, making her thrill to his touch. Rhodes the way he had been before . . . before he had lain in wait for her on a dark stairway and scarred her life. Somehow’ remembering Gavin did not hurt so much, although she had been willing to marry him, had indeed intended to marry him. But Rhodes . . . ah. the memory of him hurt.
Resolutely she put Baltimore behind her, that town that had broken her heart.
She called on her mother’s friends, all the names she could remember. She found few of them left. Some had died, some had moved away, some were unaccountably cool.
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