by John Jakes
Orry stared at his sister, finally understanding how Huntoon had happened to come to Mont Royal. Ashton had summoned him, her suspicion fortified by a couple of scraps of information. He was shocked by that kind of behavior, but not surprised. Ashton’s dislike of Virgilia had been evident for a long time.
Orry was experiencing some of the same dislike. Virgilia’s expression remained smug, even arrogant. He cleared his throat. “It might be helpful if you’d respond to what James just said, Virgilia.”
“Respond? How?”
It was George who erupted. “By denying it.”
“Why should I do that?”
“Goddamn it, Virgilia, stop smiling.” George paid no attention to his wife’s sharp intake of breath. “Don’t ruin everything. Deny it!”
“I will not.” She stamped on the floor. “I refuse to be hectored and intimidated by this man when his own hands are unclean. How dare he prate about guilt when he keeps human beings as chattels?”
With a touch of desperation, Constance said, “No one wants to compromise your principles. But be reasonable. Don’t repay the kindness of the Mains with hostility and bad manners.”
“I’m sorry, Constance, but I am following the dictates of my conscience.”
She’s as crazy as Huntoon, Orry thought. The lawyer thrust his jowlly face close to Virgilia’s.
“You did it, didn’t you? That’s why you won’t deny it.”
Her sweet smile returned. “You will never know, Mr. Huntoon.”
“What else did you give my nigger? Your favors? Did you rut with him to demonstrate your egalitarian spirit? I’d expect that of an abolitionist whore.”
Billy and his sister had never been close. But the last word, forbidden in polite conversation, was too much for him. With a yell, he lunged for Huntoon.
Ashton screamed and tried to push Billy away. He was too strong. But Huntoon jerked backward, so instead of catching him by the throat, Billy only managed to rip his glasses off. They clacked on the floor and glittered in the wedge of sunshine. George powdered both lenses when he jumped in to seize Billy’s arm.
“Stop it. Get hold of yourself! Leave him alone!”
“He can’t call Virgilia names,” Billy panted.
George stepped in front of his brother and raised his left arm like a barrier. Tillet snatched Huntoon’s ruined spectacles off the floor and held them out by one earpiece.
“Please leave, James,” he said. “Now.”
Huntoon waved the bent spectacles at Virgilia. “She conspired to rob me of my property. That young ruffian assaulted me. I demand satisfaction. My second will call.”
“There’ll be no dueling,” Orry said. Cousin Charles, who had been standing silently at the back of the group, looked disappointed.
Billy pushed against his brother’s arm. “Why not? I want to fight him. I’ll kill the custard-faced son of a bitch.”
Huntoon swallowed audibly. Ashton gave Billy a surprised, almost admiring look, then whirled and began urging her suitor toward the door. He blustered and fumed, but in a few moments he was inside his carriage. The wide-eyed driver whipped up the team.
Dust clouded through the open front door, the motes distinct in the sunbeams from the fanlight. Orry didn’t let embarrassment stand in the way of what had to be said to the Hazards:
“When Huntoon’s accusations get out, they’ll arouse strong feelings in the neighborhood. It might be wise if you left for Charleston today.”
“We’ll be ready in an hour,” George said.
He shoved Billy toward the stairs. Virgilia glided after her brothers, still maintaining that queenly arrogance. What disturbed Orry most was his friend’s reaction to the warning. George seemed angered by it, angry at him. Orry shook his head, swore under his breath, and went outside for some air.
Calmer, George went searching for his friend forty-five minutes later. He found Orry occupying a wicker chair at one end of the downstairs piazza. The family carriage stood in the drive. House men were lashing trunks and valises to the brass guardrails on top.
Orry sat with one boot resting on a second chair and his right hand shielding his eyes. Somehow the pose suggested defeat. George twisted the brim of his hat in his hands.
“Before we left Pennsylvania, Virgilia promised that she would do nothing to antagonize you and your family. Obviously she broke that promise. Perhaps she intended to from the beginning. The point is, I don’t know what to do about it. I spoke to her just now, and she isn’t the least contrite. Seems rather proud of the whole business, in fact. I consider that unforgivable.”
“So do I.”
The blunt statement produced a shamefaced look from George. Orry rose abruptly, the air of defeat vanishing. “See here, I know you had nothing to do with it. Grady will no doubt be caught before he gets very far. I’m sorry it happened, but it’s over, and there’s nothing more to be done.”
“Except keep my sister out of South Carolina in the future.”
“Yes, that would be a good idea.”
Still uncomfortable, George and Orry stared at each other. Gradually, then, the past and the friendship it had created overcame mutual awkwardness.
George spoke for both when he said: “These are angry times. The anger deepens every day. We keep bumping into hard questions that seemingly have no answers. But I don’t want those questions to drive a wedge between our families.”
Orry sighed. “Nor do I. And I really don’t hold you responsible for your sister’s behavior.” Yet a small, festering part of him did.
“Will you bring your family to Newport next summer? I’ll arrange to send Virgilia somewhere else.”
Orry hesitated before replying. “All things being equal—yes, I’ll try.”
“Good!”
The friends embraced. George clapped his hat onto his head. “We’d better go before Huntoon rides up the lane with a posse carrying lynch ropes.”
“We don’t do that sort of thing down here!”
“Orry, calm down. I was only joking.”
Orry reddened. “I’m sorry. Guess I’m a little too sensitive. That seems to be the nature of the Southern temperament these days.”
Maude and Constance emerged from the house, followed by the nurse with the children. “All ready?” George asked his wife.
“Not quite,” she said. “We can’t find Billy.”
At that moment Billy was walking rapidly along the breezeway connecting the great house with the kitchen building. One of the housemaids had told him Brett was helping with the day’s baking.
“Billy?” For an instant he thought the voice was the one he wanted to hear. Then he realized the speaker was Ashton. She came rushing from a corner of the great house. “I’ve been searching for you everywhere.”
She dropped the hooped skirt she had lifted in order to run. She scrutinized him. “All dressed for traveling. My, how handsome you look.”
“I’m sorry we have to leave under these circumstances.” He stumbled over the words, monumentally uncomfortable in her presence. “I know Virgilia betrayed your trust, but I still couldn’t let your friend call her names.”
He expected Ashton to challenge that, but she didn’t. Instead, she surprised him by nodding. “I lost my temper, too. I shouldn’t have—I really can’t explain why I did. I don’t care a snap for old James Huntoon.”
Relaxing slightly, Billy managed a smile. “Then you’re a good actress.” But of course he’d figured that out long ago. “? wish your brother and George had let me meet Huntoon. I’m a pretty fair pistol shot.”
“Oh, James is too yellow to go through with a duel. He’s all brag and bluster—just like most of those politicians he runs with. You’re different—”
She fingered his wrist below the velvet trim of his cuff. “Brave. I admire bravery in a gentleman. Bravery and strength—”
The tip of her index finger slid back and forth through the fine hairs on his wrist. She wanted him, and with her eyes, the tilt of her
chin, the caressing movement of her finger, she tried to tell him so. Tried to draw him back to her. Tried and failed.
“I appreciate the sentiment, Ashton. But I must go now. There’s something I must do in the kitchen.”
“Oh, are you hungry?” she asked with a brittle smile. “They say growing boys are always hungry.” She emphasized boys.
The insult made him redden. “Please excuse me.” He turned and hurried off along the breezeway. He was through with her. If she had harbored the slightest doubt before, the quick good-bye had done away with it. Her eyes filled with tears she struggled to hold back and could not.
Billy felt something of a fool, dashing away from one sister in pursuit of another. But he was determined to find Brett. How would she react? Angrily? Or with scorn? He believed it would be one or the other. Yet he rushed straight ahead, into the heat and clamor of the kitchen, which was crowded with black servants and awash with the odors of biscuits baking and thick slabs of red ham frying on the immense claw-footed stove. Kettles of soup stock simmered on the hearth. Occasional puffs of wind down the chimney sent acrid wood smoke billowing across the room. Through one such cloud he saw Brett kneading dough.
“Yes, sir, what can I do for you?” asked a buxom cook with a cocked eye; she clearly resented a stranger’s entering her domain.
“I’d like to speak with Miss Main.”
Brett glanced up, saw him, and grew flustered. She used her apron to scrub at the flour on her cheeks. As she hurried around the big plank chopping table, the cooks and helpers exchanged cautious glances of amusement.
“I wanted a chance to say good-bye to you,” Billy told her.
She lifted strands of loose hair from her forehead and smoothed them back. “I thought you’d be saying good-bye to Ashton.”
“She’s Mr. Huntoon’s friend.” The smoke made him cough. Brett took his hand impulsively.
“Let’s go outdoors. It’s hot as Hades in here.” Her use of the word Hades suggested she was either bold or nervous. Billy guessed the latter.
Outside, the fall breeze was cooling. The redness slowly left Brett’s face. “I must be a sight. I didn’t expect anyone to come looking for me.”
“I had to see you before I left. Virgilia ruined this visit, but I don’t want that to spoil the friendship of our families. Not when we’re just getting to know each other.”
“Are we? That is—”
She wanted to die on the spot. Mortified by what she perceived as a total lack of feminine grace, she could barely speak two words coherently. How ugly she must look to him, all daubed with flour and flecked with yeast dough. But what she had told him was true; she was completely unprepared for this encounter. She had dreamed of his noticing her—but not, dear God, when she was sweating in the kitchen.
“I hope we are—will—” Billy too got lost in his own embarrassment. He gave up and just laughed, and that broke the tension for both of them.
“No one blames you for what your sister did,” Brett said.
He studied her eyes. How pretty they were. How free of guile. She wasn’t as flamboyantly attractive as Ashton, and she never would be. Yet she did possess beauty, he thought; beauty of a simpler, more substantial sort, compounded in part of the shy gentleness of her gaze and the kindness of her smile. It was a beauty that time could never erode, as it could her sister’s. It ran like a rich, pure vein, all the way to the center of Brett’s being.
Or so his romantic eye told him.
“It’s kind of you to say that, Brett. Virgilia made an awful mess. But all the rest of us want your family to come back to Newport next summer. What I wondered—”
The rear door of the great house opened. Out poked the bonneted head of the nurse.
“Master Billy? We’ve been searching for you. We’re ready to go.”
“Coming.”
The door closed. He abandoned caution. “If Orry does come to Newport, will you be with him?”
“I hope so.”
“Meantime—though I’m not much with words—could I send you a short letter now and then?”
“I wish you would.”
The smile on her face kindled joy in his soul. Dare he kiss her? Instead of yielding to impulse and giving her a regular kiss, he bent from the waist, seized her hand, and pressed his lips to it, like some lovelorn nobleman. Then he ran like the devil—chiefly to hide his beet-colored face. Brett clasped her hands at her bosom and gazed after him, her face shining with happiness. After a long moment she turned toward the house.
The angle of the sunlight at that moment created glittering reflections in every window. It was impossible to see whether anyone was watching. Ashton didn’t know that, however. Fearing discovery by her sister, she quickly stepped back from the upper window from which she had observed the entire, sickening encounter between her sister and Billy Hazard.
Brett was soon gone from her line of vision, but Ashton continued to stand motionless with her gaze fixed on the window. Pale sunlight fell through the lace curtain, casting a pattern like a spider’s web onto her face. Only the compressed line of her mouth and the slitted look of her eyes revealed her fury.
“Papa, what did the man with the whiskers want?”
Little William Hazard asked the question while leaning against his father’s legs. Patricia sat on George’s lap, her arms around his neck and her cheek pressed drowsily to his. Both youngsters wore flannel nightgowns.
Belvedere smelled sweet with the greens of the Christmas season. The scent here in the parlor was augmented by the tang of apple wood burning in the fireplace and by the not unpleasant scent of soap on the children.
“He wanted me to be a soldier again,” George answered.
William grew excited. “Are you going to be a soldier?”
“No. Once is enough. Off to bed, both of you.”
He kissed each child soundly and patted their bottoms to speed them along. Constance was waiting for them in the hall. She blew George a kiss, then raised her index fingers to her forehead and bleated like a billy goat. The children squealed and ran. They loved the nightly game of pursuit. Sometimes Constance was an elephant, sometimes a lion, sometimes a frog. Her invention delighted them. George wasn’t surprised. She thoroughly pleased and delighted him, too.
This evening, despite his time with the children, George felt out of sorts. The visitor had come representing the adjutant general of the Pennsylvania militia. He had begun by saying the militia needed qualified officers in order to expand and prepare for the war that was a certainty within the next few years.
“What war?” George wanted to know.
“The war to silence the treasonous utterances being heard in the South. The war to guarantee personal liberty throughout the nation’s new territories.” Thus the caller revealed himself an advocate of free soil. He went on to explain that if George joined the state militia, he was virtually certain of being elected to a captaincy. “My contacts in Lehigh Station tell me you’re a popular man. I’m sure that would overcome the handicap of a West Point background.”
He said it so condescendingly that George nearly threw him out into the snow. Memories of the Mexican War were fading. The public was reverting to its old suspicion of the military—and its dislike of the institution that trained professional officers.
The visitor was stubborn. George had to decline to join the militia three times. The third time, growing annoyed, he said he would hate to see slavery ended by any means except a peaceful one.
George had disliked the discipline of soldiering and hoped he never again would have to put up with it. His dislike was even stronger for the visitor and his sneering intimation that George somehow lacked patriotism because he didn’t care to kill other Americans. At that point George became rude. The man left in a huff.
The visit brought back the nagging questions George had thought about so often. How could the South’s peculiar institution be dismantled if force were rejected as a means? He didn’t know. No one knew. In mo
st discussions that might lead to an answer, passion usually supplanted reason. The quarrel was too deep-rooted, too old. It was as old as the Missouri Compromise line of 1820. As old as the first boatload of black men brought to the continent.
He remembered the letter he had been meaning to write for several days. Perhaps he hadn’t written it because he disliked withholding some of the truth. Yet he knew that was necessary. He passed the gaily decorated Christmas tree, nine feet high. The sight failed to cheer him. He sat with pen in hand for about ten minutes before he put down the first lines.
My dear Orry—
Perhaps it will help ease the memories of last autumn if I report that my sister has moved away, at my request. Virgilia’s behavior in her various abolitionist groups became too outrageous to be borne.
He told no more than that. He said nothing about Grady’s having reached Philadelphia safely; nothing about Virgilia’s going everywhere with the escaped slave. She had ordered new artificial teeth for him, teeth to replace those removed by his former masters. The matter of the teeth had provoked her final quarrel with George.
She had asked him for a loan to pay for the new teeth. He had agreed—provided she accept one condition: she must stop flaunting herself on Grady’s arm. The fight that followed was brief, loud, and bitter. It ended with his ordering her to leave Lehigh Station. For once Stanley endorsed his brother’s decision.
Virgilia and her lover were now living in Philadelphia. In squalor, George presumed. A few landlords with decent quarters to rent might be willing to give them to a man and woman who weren’t married, but that would never be the case if the woman was white and the man was black.
Grady had thus far been secretive about his past; as far as most people knew, he was Pennsylvania-born. But his background couldn’t be kept completely quiet for long, especially when Virgilia was pulled by conflicting desires to protect her lover and to use him to forward her cause. So there had been one or two requests for public speeches, which Grady had declined. Speeches were reported in newspapers, and Northern newspapers might be read by Southern slave catchers in the employ of James Huntoon.