by John Jakes
Cooper tried to lighten the mood. “Well, you’ll just have to marry one of those ladies of your acquaintance and give her a broom and a paintbrush for a wedding present.”
“There isn’t a one of them fit to set foot on this plantation.”
The brusque reply startled Cooper and confirmed something Brett had told him. She said Orry no longer smiled, that his mind seemed to have taken a turn into somber regions familiar only to himself. Cooper believed it. He decided he had better get on to the purpose of his visit: “Well, I wish you were interested in someone. I don’t believe Brett will be coming back.”
“Because of Billy.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you trying to tell me they’re married?”
Cooper shook his head. “They’re still delaying, although Billy is upset about that. Brett continues to wait out of consideration for you.”
Orry uttered a scornful grunt and reached for the cut-glass decanter of whiskey. It had become a fixture on the table, Cooper noticed.
“She needn’t wait on my account.” Orry poured whiskey into the long-stemmed glass from which he had already drunk a large quantity of white Bordeaux. “I don’t plan to change my mind in the foreseeable future.”
Cooper leaned forward. “Don’t you think you should?”
“Did she send you up from Charleston to say that?”
“She did not. Damn it. Orry”—he thumped the table—“despite the behavior of the LaMottes and some of our other neighbors, we are not living in the Middle Ages. Women are entitled to run their own lives. Please permit Brett to run hers—regardless of the risks you see or imagine. She’s trying to keep peace in the family—which is more than I would do in her position.”
“The answer is still no.”
His resolution was wavering, though. He had thought about Brett’s situation a lot lately. He knew Cooper was right and that he should grant the permission. Yet he wasn’t quite able to do it. The news from Washington, Charleston, everywhere, was too threatening.
Cooper folded his napkin. He pinched the fold between thumb and forefinger. “Very well. Cuffey, would you kindly tell my driver to bring my carriage up immediately?”
“I thought you were spending the night,” Orry said.
“What’s the use? My view of the future is as dim as yours, but at that point we part company. Life is chiefly trouble and always has been. Brett deserves to live to the full while she can. You’re standing in the way and apparently plan to continue. I regret that, but there seems to be nothing I can do about it. I’ll look in on Mother and then go. Excuse me.”
Stiff and unsmiling, he left the room.
Orry sat listening to the rain. Now Cooper had turned against him too. A moment ago he’d been wavering on the matter of Brett’s marriage. But this latest rebuff stoked his anger and hardened his will.
He noticed there was no more whiskey in his glass. When had he drunk it? He couldn’t remember. He stretched out his arm and closed his hand around the neck of the decanter.
“Look at that fog,” Judith murmured. “I hope Cooper doesn’t stay away half the night. I think he’s getting sick.”
Brett glanced up from the knitting needles whose operation she had been demonstrating to eight-year-old Marie-Louise. “Why did he go back to the yard? Is anyone working?”
“No. He went because he’s upset. The ship’s far behind schedule. His chief architect quit and returned to Brooklyn because he couldn’t get along with the local workmen. Now the banks are hesitant about extending more credit in case commercial ties with the North are cut. Oh, it’s such a dreadful mess.”
She could have added that Cooper had also taken on the burden of Brett’s problem. She didn’t because it would only have produced guilt feelings, and Brett felt bad enough already.
Judith was desperately concerned about her husband. Last week he had come back from Mont Royal at four-thirty in the morning. Since then he had spent each day at the yard on James Island, and returned there every evening after supper. He kept a boatman on call at all hours. The man was beginning to complain.
But at least the boatman had his health. Cooper had lost eleven pounds—a substantial drop for someone of his slender build. Lately his face had a waxy look. While Brett laughed and murmured with Marie-Louise, Judith watched the fog coiling slowly past the moisture-speckled window. On a night like this what could Cooper possibly do at the yard?
She knew. He could destroy himself with worry.
The great keelson of the Star of Carolina bulked in the fog like the backbone of some prehistoric beast that had perished and rotted, leaving only this. Cooper turned away from it. The ship was a dying dream. He had at last admitted that to himself. But the dream had left tangible wreckage. What should he do now?
He plucked out a handkerchief, blew his dripping nose, and wiped it several times. He was getting sick. He didn’t care.
Distantly, in the main ship channel, a steamer horn sounded at short intervals. The fog hung thick over James Island. Cooper would have been lost in it had it not been for the light of two lanterns hanging under the eaves of the shedlike office building. The lantern light diffused in great fan-shaped rays.
I might have pulled it off if Van Roon hadn’t quit, he thought as he trudged through deep mud that seeped over his shoe tops and soaked his stockings. Van Roon, the architect, was the linchpin of the project. He had gotten into a fistfight with a poor clod hired to carry buckets of rivets.
A man of education and restraint, Van Roon had punched and cursed like a dockhand. Over what? The question of who would own the Federal property in Charleston—the armory, the forts—if the state declared its independence. Half a dozen of the workers had been taking turns at Van Roon before Cooper rushed in to break up the brawl.
Hopeless.
He reached the water’s edge and peered toward the ship channel, imagining the pentagonal fort standing on its shoal out there. Sumter had been started during the winter of eighteen-twenty-eight—twenty-nine and never finished. To this day it remained unoccupied. But its proximity to the channel and the harbor mouth made it strategically important—perhaps more important than any other Charleston fort. What if old Gardner moved to fortify it? The sparks would fly then.
Fools were in control of the state Cooper loved so much. Fools and opportunists like Ashton’s husband. They shouted their slogans, spouted their gaseous oratory, and forgot or ignored the manufactories of the North, the great industrial installations such as Hazard’s. In all the South there was but a single ironworks of size, the Tredegar in Richmond. If war came, how would the South fight it? With gallant pronouncements and a barrage of cotton bolls?
What would happen in the next few months? Staring into the fog, Cooper felt he knew the answer.
“Apocalypse,” he said half aloud, and then sneezed so hard his hat fell off.
The hat plopped into the water and floated out of reach. He waded in after it, but it kept bobbing away from him. He gave up the chase when the water rose to his thighs.
How marvelous, he thought with a chuckle. The Almighty pricks your pretensions by blowing your hat away.
Or was it a kind of warning? A warning that in the almost certain apocalypse, survival would be first and foremost a matter of small things? Practical things: Food. Shelter. A hat for the storm.
He sloshed back to shore and hurried to the office, caught by an inspiration: since no respectable naval architect could be lured to Charleston in these times, he would become the architect.
He pulled down engineering drawings hanging in wall racks. Flung the drawings on the big worktable. Turned the hanging lamp up to full.
He studied the drawings, then pulled down more, until the table was heaped with them. He scribbled calculations and questions. But he was finally forced to admit the truth. He knew a little about many aspects of the project, but not enough. His decision to do the architect’s job represented the only means of saving the Star of Carolina. But it was,
at the same time, hopeless.
At dawn the yawning boatman found Cooper slumped over the table unconscious and afire with fever.
“Bring that barrow over here. You people will have to step aside.”
Billy’s first command was directed to a civilian workman, his second to sightseers wandering on the dune near Fort Moultrie. The repair work was always hampered by local residents or vacationers who came to gawk. Billy frequently lost his temper with them.
Today was no exception. He ordered a family to pick up its picnic hampers and move off the dune his men were reducing so that snipers couldn’t occupy it. The weather had turned hot again, unusual for November. Sweat ran so freely that he’d tied a red bandanna around his head to keep it out of his eyes.
He saw Captain Foster coming from the fort, motioning. He left the workmen and walked quickly toward his superior. Foster noticed that Billy was once again working barefoot. He disapproved but said nothing this morning; he had something else on his mind.
“Gardner’s been relieved. We’re getting a new commander.”
“Who is it?”
“Major Robert Anderson.”
“My brother knew a Robert Anderson in Mexico. An artillerist. He graduated from the Academy a few years ahead of Lee.”
“That’s the man. He’s a Kentuckian. He’s owned slaves. I suppose the secretary picked him to appease the local folk.”
The decision was understandable. Gardner’s attempt to transfer arms and ammunition from the arsenal had produced a statewide storm of criticism.
But a slave owner in charge of the Charleston forts? Billy didn’t think it a very good omen.
He changed his mind when the major arrived.
Robert Anderson was fifty-five, tall, white-haired, impeccably polite. He peppered his speech with references to God and professed complete loyalty to his flag and his uniform. He had fought bravely in Mexico and been wounded at Molino del Rey, which tended to enhance his reputation with his men. Billy found him austere but clearly conscientious and, he decided, worthy of trust.
A few days after reporting for duty, Anderson ordered a boat for a trip over to Sumter. Billy and Foster manned the oars, with Doubleday at the bow. Anderson said he didn’t want enlisted men along to gossip and speculate about the significance of the inspection.
They made a complete circuit of the five-sided fort. Then Anderson directed them to rest their oars. His eyes roved over the brick and masonry of the left flank wall. Five feet thick, it rose fifty feet above the low-water line and looked toward the northwest. The fort had been designed with two tiers of gun rooms, but only the embrasures on the lower tier had been finished. On the tier above, the openings were six or eight feet square.
“Row around to the esplanade, please,” Anderson said when he had completed his inspection.
The stone esplanade was situated at the foot of the gorge, the rear wall of the fortification. More than three hundred feet long and about twenty-five feet deep, the gorge faced the southwest. The rowers tied the boat near the sally port and scrambled up onto the esplanade, which Anderson paced from end to end before speaking.
“I’ve been reading some of the original engineering memoranda on this fort, gentlemen. She’s solidly built. Ten thousand tons of granite in the foundations, plus sixty or seventy thousand tons of rock and seashells. If provisioned well enough, she could be held indefinitely. Even by a force as small as ours.”
“But, sir,” Captain Doubleday said, “if we fortified Sumter, it would undoubtedly be interpreted as a hostile act.”
The captain was testing his Kentucky-born superior, Billy thought. For the first time there was sharpness in Anderson’s voice.
“Indeed so, Captain. I have no plans to fortify Sumter immediately. But make no mistake. These forts belong to the duly constituted government in Washington and to none other. With divine help I will do whatever is necessary, consistent with my orders, to protect them. I have seen enough for the moment. Shall we go?”
“He sounds tougher than old Gardner,” Billy whispered to Foster as they returned to the boat. Foster replied with an approving nod.
The next afternoon Brett was walking down Meeting Street carrying several parcels. Someone hailed her. Startled, she recognized Forbes LaMotte.
“Afternoon, Miss Brett.” He tipped his hat. “May I walk with you? Take some of those packages for you, perhaps?”
“No, Forbes, I can’t stop.”
It was a lame excuse, but she didn’t want to encourage him. His cheeks looked red as apples, and he was squinting. No doubt he had been whiling his time away in the saloon bar of the Mills House. He did a lot of that, she had heard.
Rebuffed, Forbes stepped aside. In a moment, all he saw of Brett was her back.
“Bitch,” he muttered, retreating to the shade of the hotel entrance.
He didn’t mean the angry word. Well, not completely. He hated Brett Main for preferring that Pennsylvania soldier, but he was still in love with her. She was the sort of girl you married, whereas Ashton—well, Ashton was solely for amusement. They saw each other every week or so, whenever they could arrange a safe rendezvous.
He recalled their most recent hour together. Afterward, he had bled and ruined a fine linen shirt because she had clawed his back so hard.
Badges of conquest, those marks. But he couldn’t brag about them, and he’d have readily exchanged them and all the illicit meetings for just one word of encouragement from Ashton’s sister.
Late in November a dispatch in the Mercury caught Orry’s eye. Cadet Henry Farley of South Carolina had resigned and left the Military Academy on the nineteenth of the month. The paper crowed that Farley’s action was a protest against Lincoln’s election and preparation for service to the state.
Orry found the news depressing. He was certain other resignations would follow. Perhaps they would even spread from the Academy to the regular service.
That same day a letter from Judith arrived. She said Cooper had finally begun to recover from his influenza. He had been perilously ill for over a week. The tidings from his sister-in-law were welcome but did little to offset the gloom caused by the West Point story.
He blew out the library lamp and sat in the dark. Darkness seemed appropriate to the disintegration taking place all around him. Was there light in the land any longer?
He sat for hours, imagining the warlike sound of ghostly drums.
“Our boys are leaving the Academy right and left,” Justin LaMotte exclaimed. “Capital!” He tossed the newspaper on a wicker table and ladled mint punch from a silver bowl. He passed the cup to Francis, then filled one for himself.
The brothers had just returned from a muster of the Ashley Guards. They resembled a pair of male birds in their cream-colored trousers and dark yellow coats with blue facings. Neither man was as yet equipped with a sword, but each had ordered one from a military armorer in New York City; fine Solingen blades were unobtainable in South Carolina.
“Do you think we’ll be at war soon?” Francis asked, taking a chair. The veranda was pleasant in the December twilight.
Justin beamed. “Within a year, I’d guess. In the event of hostilities, I plan to raise a personal regiment and then offer it—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. A frown creased his forehead as he watched the figure come gliding down the veranda.
“My dear, good evening. Would you care for punch?”
Madeline’s gown was as black as her hair. Her skin was dead white. Her eyes showed extreme dilation. “No.” She smiled in a tentative way. “Thank you.” She passed into the house.
Francis clucked approvingly. “Handsome woman. She’s looking a bit peaked, but she certainly has been calmer the past year or so. The change in her disposition never fails to astonish me. Remarkable.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” Justin sighed. “What a providential blessing. More punch?”
Madeline could no longer recall a time when her world had not had soft edges. She drifted t
hrough days that were little more than a series of blurs. She was unconcerned about people or events. Occasionally she remembered Orry with a vague sense of yearning, but she had long ago abandoned hope of encountering him again.
Once in a while, and with little or no warning, she enjoyed short periods of seeming normality. Her head was clearer, her senses sharper, her will stronger. At those times she was angry with herself because she no longer discussed public issues with her husband, nor did she dispute any of his statements, no matter how offensive or outrageous. She had surrendered. When she occasionally realized it, despair overwhelmed her.
She hadn’t the energy to struggle against that despair or even wonder about its source. What good was struggle? What good was hope? The world was dominated by cruel madmen. Two of them sat chuckling over mint punch in her own house this very moment.
After she left the veranda, one of her periods of lucidity came on. She wandered to and fro in her dusky sitting room, reciting snatches of poetry that came to mind from heaven knew where and recalling Orry’s gentle dark eyes, the sound of his voice reading to her.
She must see him again. The moment she decided that, she smiled for the first time in days.
She uncovered the dishes on the tray brought to her room as usual. How delicious the thick, syrupy dressing on the plate of greens tasted. She loved it, now ordered it every day. She ate with relish, finishing everything, and hummed as she began to imagine her forthcoming reunion at the chapel called—
Called—
She couldn’t remember its name. Gradually exhaustion claimed her again. Sinking back into cloudy indifference, she groped her way to the bed. Tears brimmed in her eyes—why, she didn’t know. She murmured Orry’s name once as she lowered herself to the bed. Fully clothed, she slept through the night.
In the morning she discovered that the tray had been cleared away and her sitting room brightened with a bouquet of hothouse flowers. She mused and fussed over them like a child with a toy, never once thinking of Orry.